Paul_S

Yes, I have but I haven't visited them yet. I find that those communities have too much political and ethical baggage and sacrifice pragmatic solutions because of that. There's some communities where you're not allowed a ICE car and I really don't like that.

Why would I do any of that? I'd like to emphasize the word "modern" in my post. I don't want to live apart from society or modern technology. I embrace modern technology (I guess to a point, don't own anything smart or use clouds). I'm a woodworker and only use hand tools where they are genuinely better, otherwise it's machines all the way. I don't want to cosplay as a British Amish.

I want to stop writing software, build a low impact house and become a modern day peasant. No, really, I have given this years of thought. Unfortunately, this is impossible in England (legally), unless you have 1M pounds in cash.

Please share if you have some useful resources on how to do it, although I'd rather not buy land in Portugal, Spain or other country with friendlier laws - this is common advice.

Zenimax has more money

The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. You will not see the world the same way. You can then read Industrial Society by Ted Kaczynski and understand his desperation.

When I retired from photography a decade ago I dumped Nikon in favour Olympus (for its smaller size, 4/3 system). I wasn't fully happy and wanted to switch and buy Pentax but I only did that when I was robbed and lost my Olympus gear.

I find it interesting how vendor lock in of camera brands can keep a brand going. If you have a set of lenses for a system you're unlikely to switch, even if it was rational to do so. Even though lenses keep their resale value and you wouldn't lose much money in the process.

I never really fully understood the reasons behind it but it's clear to see that it creates stickyness that any company outside of photography would envy.

I worked for a couple corps in my life and the security theatre in here is ridiculous. At the same time things like this happen all the freaking time. And none of the company spyware can catch that. Funny how this never happened in small companies I worked for, although maybe that's just a function of number of people? Or maybe because small companies rely on fewer platforms and frameworks so fewer chances of such leaks?

That just moves the bubble - what explains income?

Most of those knitters still use punch cards, even new ones. Appears there's not much benefit for them to switch to electronic control.

The only people who win are the lawyers who pocket money from both sides. And then money the state has to pay also come from your pocket in the end. Brilliant system, isn't it?

No one had to pause reviews for Top Gun.

I must be more jaded than all of you, I see it as a simple money grab at no cost that could be done by anyone applying a B&W filter to previous releases. Even if they really changed the colour sliders for each scene as they claim there have been more ambitious fan edits than this.

Also, of all the problems with the film, the colour palette was not very high on the list.

Does that actually work? Just because well-off people shop in Waitrose, does that also mean that houses around Waitrose don't include old council estates?

Must be convergent evolution because these exist everywhere.

That's my point. I think my mistake was not defining what a good and bad driver means. I don't mean safe, cautious, polite - I simply mean competent in moving the car where you want it to go. Drivers in America and even more so in China are aggressive, but they also can control their cars better because they have to! No one will let them in, they have to force their way. If someone in my country of origin drives at the speed limit, everyone will overtake him, even if it's dangerous and if it's physically impossible they will beep at him. In the UK if someone is driving 40 in a 60 zone there will be a long line of cars behind him. It used to boil my blood first couple of years. Now I'm patient like the rest.

People don't trust signals, because the drivers are bad, not the other way around. I drove in most European countries, I drove in America, I even drove in China and I live in the UK. By far the worst drivers. Also the most polite, will always let you in, give way, dip lights, wave etc..

I find the car signalling problem interesting.

Where I was born people trust the turn signalling and drive early. When I moved to the UK I (luckily) quickly realised you cannot do this here. Everyone waits until the car actually starts turning before driving. Even if it's signalling, no one trusts that, possibly creating less pressure for correct signalling. It makes traffic slightly slower but avoids the possibility of (this type of) accidents.

Counter-intuitively, worse drivers leads to fewer accidents.

Let me pass on to you some ancient Chinese... er, German engineering wisdom: He who understands wireless communication uses cables.

Bluetooth poor audio quality is not a myth. The bandwidth is just not there for high quality audio. Even with aptx. That's why companies roll their own with BLE and the 2M phy. And even with that it's still flaky because it's wireless and can and will drop packets.

Yes, BLE audio is an improvement but those devices are still in the future. What you have currently, you're better off using your smartphone DAC.

You're not. When something in bt doesn't work it's caused by two things: a regular bug in the stack, or a feature of the spec that was implemented incorrectly which comes from ambiguous wording in the spec or simply the fact that it's several thousand pages long. This is usually not a problem if you have two devices using the same stack talking to each other but normally that's not the case.

Make average human lifespan 150 by solving aging and we'll solve the climate problem tomorrow. Otherwise there is no incentive for people to conserve anything.

I just get a blank page on firefox.

That's no different than saying I believe we need world peace. It's not a very interesting thing to say. If you have an idea how to bring this about then that would interesting to read - a probable process of creating a world government.

Well, send some down south then. Never seen any at any timber merchants. Maybe should've said England instead of UK.

Does that self sufficiency translate to lower prices?

We import all our timber. Mostly from Scandinavia and baltics. Some hardwoods from Brazil. But the whole timber global wholesale market is very centralised. Maybe not as bad as Intel/AMD/ARM but same order of magnitude.

I'm still waiting here in the UK. I think the recent 2 years was half pandemic and half price fixing by the lumber Mafia.

Bad pixel art is a pet peeve of mine. This is really advanced advice compared the problem most games have:

- pixels of different sizes

- rotating (!) pixels

- scaling pixels

- smooth gradients with millions of colours

- dynamic lighting overlayed on top

... I could go on :(

When do you plan to release the final (non early access) version?

What is Ultima 8.5? Do you mean Lost Vale? Did someone find a copy?