I'm not defending the regime. What's demeaning about the original comment is how it dismisses unequivocally that there could be any human value whatsoever in the performance of talented children, merely because they are performing while a terrible regime is in place. By stripping these children of their humanity in…

I watched it years ago.

It's a good documentary overall, but my one gripe is how Shane Smith always tries to find "telling" stuff about the regime in even the most mundane of activities. The critique becomes a bit strained as a result.

So you denigrate the kids? How does that help them or anybody else in North Korea? Nobody is saying "Oh look how cute they are, let's forget that they live in a brutally repressive dictatorship!" But the way people assume that every single piece of North Korean culture they see is some "telling" artifact of the…

Making demeaning online comments about a group of talented children doesn't serve, in even the remotest fashion, the interests of the people whom I'm sure the original poster would claim to care deeply about.

Yeah, check out these automatons too.

Boy, that's not offensive or demeaning at all.

Nothing's "up" with them. That's the size of a guitar. There are different scale lengths, of course, but the tonality will obviously differ between them. A 1/4 scale length guitar is simply not going to produce the sort of sound you'll get from a full scale length one.

Well Microsoft isn't exactly crazy about disc drives, so maybe they told the factory workers to save their energy on that part and focus more on other bits of the installation.

No, Sony didn't have to send a check. Microsoft-related flubs are worth quite a bit of click-thru dosh all on their own.

Yep, it pretty much does. Also, sort of a sociopath.

Or we could, you know, deal with the underlying social issues that lead people to "escape" into 50-hour gaming binges in the first place. It's worth noting that while you're more likely to hear about a person gaming himself to death in Korea than in the US, you're more likely to hear about a person OD'ing on heroin in…

Ah, Royal Assassin. One of my favorite creatures, along with Will-o'-the-Wisp.

I have to admit, from time to time, I actually find myself reminiscing about the days when I played Magic. It was a lot of fun, and just a nice thing for friends to be into, like if you have a core group that does D&D or something. A lot of times I wish I could get back into it, but then I look at all the new sets…

I remember I was all excited when I got a Shivan Dragon (must have been Revised Edition at that time).

Yeah, before I even saw the picture I was like "BLACK LOTUS." Can't believe I even remember this shit. How much do Alpha Moxes go for these days?

The point I'm trying to make is that I think people kind of jump the gun on the degree to which they're entitled to extra stuff whenever anything bad happens with a product launch these days. If the problem were catastrophic, I'd see the point, but it doesn't appear that the failure rate is inordinately high, so…

Exactly! I'm always blown away when I hear these sorts of stories because I almost never suffer product malfunctions. That goes for computers, consoles, and so on. One gets the distinct feeling that the people who allegedly went through 8 PS2s must have been doing something to them (at least inadvertently) to make…

I think it's to give a sense of perspective which, let's admit, can easily be lost in the tidal wave of internet fury, driven by relatively few claims of device failures. One way to temper that a bit is to offer a comparison to another instance.

Exchanging the units is all that's necessary at this point, as long as they're expediting the process as much as possible.