again, hydrogen and oxygen. There's nothing remotely barring the development of these rockets without hydrocarbons preceeding them and there are zero hydrocarbons in that rocket. wind, water, PV all can do electrolisis without any hydrocarbons. You're putting the cart before the horse here, we had these other technologies at least in basic form before we were utterly dependant on coal and oil. Even PV predates mass use of coal for power by 50 years.

As the next poster says, we can't say that there aren't other or easier ways because we took the path with coal and oil .

To reiterate, hydrocarbons were a jackpot and *almost* without any doubt accellerated advancements, but they are in no way a pre-requisite to them. Most of the inventions pre-date industrialization of coal and oil. And I'll reiterate that easy access to hydrocarbon's *almost* certainly delayed advancement in other tech like PV and batteries.

uh, excuse me? Did you miss the whole era of liquid hydrogen/oxgygen propulsion? Solid rocket fuels are also not typically hydrocarbons.

Not only that, but we can make hydrocarbon fuels, it's just more expensive than refined oil products.

Coal and oil are not neccessary, they're just 'cheap' and available fuels. And that cheap alternative pushed other advancements asside as unnessary or expensive. It's probably not even a good prediction to say we'd take longer without coal/oil/fossil fuels because we don't know what advancements might have been made when there was a pressure to make them, we had fossil fuels as a crutch. We might be in a ~1900's state right now without or we might have leaped over 50 years of oil reliance.

These two opinions in relation to the industrial revolution are just wrong. Coal power came at the end of that period. The industrial revolution was primarily powered by water wheels, wind, and celulose products like wood and peat for steam power. Coal is not fundamental to industrialization or the modern economy, it accellerated it. I'm not downplaying what coal provides, there's a good chance America wouldn't be a serious power in the world without coal, it's a big deal, but industrialization came without coal and the abilility to harvest coal at scale is the result of the machinery that could be made once there were factories powered by wind, water, and wood/peat steam already existed.

PV doesn't have any pre-requisite of coal. You could argue very strongly that coal has held back advancements in PV and other tech because coal was so cheap. Without coal there would almost certainly have been pressure to advance PV.

I personally doubt that an energy deficite is a serious part of the 'great filter'. nukes. AI. environmentals ie meteors and a misbehaving star etc all dramatically more likely in my opinion. heck, i'd place alien invasion higher, one super advanced race that doesn't use RF to communicate (and so SETI hasn't seen them) that wipes out would be competition is more likely in my opinion than lack of energy.

The problem isn't restricting kids under 14, many people are likely for that in concept. The problem is rather requiring an adult to prove that they are an adult (or over 13) and doing that in an inherently trackable way.

Yes, restrictions exist for other things, but most of those are in-person purchases where the verification is human eye visual and not stored in some database so your purchases can be tracked. Plus other apparent filters made by a person, is this bearded man under 14? unlikely.

The other angle here is that why is the state of Florida setting this standard for children and not parents? It's not only state enforced morality, it's state designed morality. That's super crazy.

Apple has some of the best lawyers money can buy. While the EU is not to be triffled with, neither is Apple. I think that Apple has a clear path for compliance here and they know exactly how to proceed. I suspect Epic is the shortest sighted one here and there are some private notes being passed here... I suspect that the next time Epic makes a derogatory comment about Apple the account will go down again and be down longer. The EU will open an inquirey and Apple will deliver their reasoning in an EU palletable format.

I think it's important to keep in mind that the EU isn't on team Epic and that Epic has just benefitted from the EU's position. The EU has other positions such as license compliance which very often includes behavoir requirements in Europe. It's not uncommon for an EU company to require 'partners' to behave positively towards the company in public.

Time will tell.

The cabin is full people, when's the last time you took a flight that you didn't have to find some remote overhead bit to shove your items. I see people with a rolly case, a backpack on top, a laptop bag hanging, and a couple of shopping bags, and then something in their 'free' hand as well.

I don't want to side with the airlines and say it's ok to monetize or penalize every little thing, but the 'one carry on and a personal item' is PLENTY for the cabin of the plane. maybe talk to your congress person(s) about better regulations in the airline industry or something but 'cheating' your way into having a full compliment of baggage as a 'personal' item makes air travel worse for everyone.

well so would I. The full conversion laptops are generally really mediocre for drawing. These devices are 'master of none' sort of devices. Not so great of a laptop or tablet, kinda does either 'ok'. granted, the price on a lower end convertible is quite a bit less than a macbook + ipad, heck some are cheaper than just the ipad. I would argue that an ipad with a keyboard case/kit may be a better 'laptop' than the convertibles considering how much software is browser based and/or has solid apps.

I agree, lack of a touch screen is a feature for me. Keep your greasy fingerprints off my screen!

I've never been a fan of the devices that can't figure out what they are, laptop or tablet. They never seem to be very good at either thing.

I actually switched from a Lenovo ultrabook to my currently daily driver MBP M2 16" and 'lost' the touch screen and it's been a far far better experience. I'd rather carry my MBP and an ipad (they'll double up in the bag) than a convertable because I get 2 best-in-class devices AND I can use the ipad as an extra display. So much better user experience for me.

agreed. This is also why I said 'culture', not rules. Germans and really most Europeans and even most countries have more vigorous driver training than the US. But 'we' and I'm mostly describing big metro areas in the US have tons of drivers that are resentful of people driving at the speed limit or '5 over'. It's an aggressive driving culture and I don't just mean speed.

My son and I were recently driving from Stuttgard to Munich and he really wanted to open it up so we were going 200-225kph whenever traffic allowed. That's about the functional limit on the 2 lane highways because drivers going 125kph that need to pass slower drivers can't really accomodate much faster coming up behind them and you as the fast driver have to keep your heavy breaking at a reasonble limit. So they merge over and back very reasonably and we are doing our best to 'fit in'. Occasionally someone with a legitimate sports car comes up behind going 250kph+ and we merge over without complaint. They DO NOT pass on the right (unless they are Americans in a rental...). We then see them have to slow down for the slower drivers ahead... which they do without any road rage. It's all very well understood to do your best and let the fast car behind you pass on the left and not get upset or even stressed out and also if you're the fast driver you don't lay on your horn and get grumpy. It's all culture.

As Americans that are in that area a lot ( visiting family ), I've trained my son to drive there. He's widely consider to be like a 'pro driver' amoung his friends at home because he's driven the autobahn and looks like he belongs. He got some Nurburgring laps on him for a birthday present. He's been trained to be a good driver not just good at driving. His friends have 4 hours with an old man trying to convince them to use a blinker....

Dramatically improving driver training would be a really obvious step in my mind. I'd like to say that my son is especially tallented but really, he's just been taught/trained a skill and he's unique among his peers which is really sad.

Back to California.... passing a 10 minute driving test and 25 questions to get a license is a pretty straight forward cause and effect for terrible driving culture in my view.

more cops is rarely the answer. And pulling people over in a traffic jam... that's just crazy talk.

I don't know what this 'rigorous encorcement' on German authbahn is you say, as a frequent driver there I've never seen such an activity. It's a cultural norm to only pass in the left lane. I barely ever see police on the autobahn. I think you'll have quite a struggle importing that driving culture.

Also, California freeways are a different beast with tons of lanes and seeming random splits and frequent exits which makes it so that aggressive drivers are essentially forced to cut lanes to navigate. Then the traffic jams are so much worse you get less aggressive drivers desperately cutting lanes trying to make forward progress.

I don't think there is a really great solution because re-planning the roads isn't an option. Using tech to catch bad drivers, basically cameras and automated fines, is likely the only real solution. Tolls and speed tolls is another solution but is reviled by commuters. Pick your poison here, nothing will be well received.

reboots have a huge range of annoyance. An occasional reboot for an update isn't so bad, but Windows on a laptop that isn't online for a day or two can force an update within minutes of bootup. When you opened the laptop because you needed it and then are stuck in a 10 minute update it's infuriating. macbooks or linux laptops don't do this to you.

A similar argument to those running a mainstreak linux as well. far far far fewer distruptive reboots and wasted time. macos as well. Windows always seems to want to force a reboot and update when you can tollerate it lease and somehow they haven't fugured out how much users hate that. Sure, you can alter that in an enterprise environment or if your a nerd, but most people just suffer through it.

I'm quite happy with macos or a linux desktop myself, I just want it to work, I don't want to have to fight with it.

I think basically everything you said is incorrect. Apple breaks compatability far less than Windows and when Apple does it, it's a big advertised thing dressed up as a possitive while Microsoft just reworks the backend so gamers are stuck on older versions of windows until support is almost up and everyone has finally got their stuff to play on the newest version. Windows 11 is just 1/4 of all windows installs. Why don't gamers update? too much doesn't work well or performance regressions. Tons of gamers wont upgrade until their GPU vendor stops making new builds. Why did gamers move off Windows 7? Because nvidia stopped making drivers for it. Don't believe me? Windows 7 market share drop in half the quarter after nvidia stopped releasing drivers for it.

Consoles are their own thing, but backwards compatability takes ages to get in a functional way. We're now 4 years into Xbox Series X and only recently has it really handled most previous titles remotely well. The argument totally falls down with the 'keep an old moded console around'.... so keep your old PC or Mac around. Same thing. and how many people mod their consoles? a small percent.

On emulation, Mac has all those same emulators and essentially all M1/2/3 Macs can do decent jobs of it while ONLY gaming PCs can do it. The typical PC with integrated graphics (99% of PC/laptop shipments) cannot. Mac might night hold the performance crown here, but essentially every Mac sold can do this and almost no PCs can per volume. For instance, the mac mini m1 16GB I'm typing this on runs switch games like a boss.

With the exception of 'what is Apple's commitment and how big is the *gamers that own (or would buy) macs market', applie silicon is a more attractive platform in basically every other way than PC with all PC's complications and mixed vendors and dramatically varying performance characteristic. Mac is more like the fixed consoles. Game just detects from a limited set of options like Xbox S or X and sets the tune for that. QA is dramatically simpler as a result. Support is absultely minimal as a result.

You completely lost it leading with $1000 every 5 years for gaming PC. it's so non-sense that nothing else you said has any credibility.

not really, you dont have to code in low-level metal because it's well integrated into a few development environments. It's literally a build target on Unity and Unreal so it's relatively low effort. Game porting kit offers a pretty smooth path across, and while Mac and iOS are different, the effort to support metal works for both. I have a customer that uses Unity for development of their product and they ported it to metal in a day and had it running on Apple TV. They aren't a AAA game studio but they do graphically intensive stuff on GPUs.

From what I've read, the AAA studios that aren't owned by microsoft are more concerned with how big the platform actually is for gaming sales and if Apple actually continues to improve their GPU to keep up. Nvidia and AMD are proven, any platform they are on is an obvious money making target for studios. Apple is an unknown and with an unknown level of commitment.

I agree with you that Apple basically needs to throw down some money. Buy a studio or guarantee some longevity or something. Heck, go to the studios and pay the the salary of the porting team and the support staff for the product to prove it out.