I keep reading this 'the old' stuff. Are people aware that these same 'old' will be the people who voted into it in the 1970s? And will, in fact, be the only people who have seen the evolution of the whole situation?

Dogecoin was, and is, a joke. People taking part in it know this and do it for fun - I have a handful of coins worth...err....hmm. Well, I'm sure I'll find enough decimal places somewhere.

That doesn't mean it hasn't done real things though: Josh Wise and the Dogecar being one of the more notable. It has also provided clean water in Kenya and sent the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics (source). So yeah - it's a joke. It's a good one though, and has done some good things.

Partially agreed, but whether the game is designed to require more than 50 hours or not you personally would be able to tell whether you were enjoying it by that point. I have hundreds of Skyrim hours logged, but would have stopped playing after only a few hours if I didn't like it. Conversely I tried The Witcher (first one) recently and just didn't get alone with it at all - about two hours in total. Elite:Dangerous, a very direct comparison to No Mans Sky, I've not really got along with either despite being a massive original Elite fan and a passably high-tier Kickstarter backer of this one. I'm glad the new one exists, but it's not for me. Logged time - 9 hours.

You get the idea. The game may well require more than 50 hours, but if you're not enjoying it you'll know well before those 50 hours are played.

50 hours of gameplay is a long time. As an example, I started playing Tomb Raider (2013) a few days ago - got it in a sale literally years ago and never played, finally got round to playing it. I've completed the story, and am just going back to polish off the areas I didn't get 100% completion on. Only two of those to go, and I'm done.

I have 56 hours of gameplay logged. Just to recap - I've done damned near everything, thoroughly enjoyed myself, and have 56 hours logged. 50 gameplay hours at a game I hate? That would be insane.

My god - Veronica servers. I had completely forgotten them. WAIS also made it into academic courses and there were text/exam questions on what it was.

The reason the Greek bank thing is notable is because it's a once in a generation thing, likely longer in fact. The reason this isn't is because Bitcoin appears to be a twice weekly thing...

That's it's problem too - it is too focus group-style data driven. A lot of the shows are either reboots or just very, very similar to each other. Less licensed content, more clones of series. I'm considerably less interested than I was.

Thank you - I was amazed not to read this anywhere else. Yes, if the time you start work includes 2008 -> now, then you have been working in a recession.

I started work in 1992. There was a mini recession then too (UK), and my unrealistic hopes of high starting salaries were quickly driven home when it transpired I was one of only two people graduating to actually get a job, let alone a vast salary. That also has a knock-on when you start looking at percentage rises as well of course - you may well get similar percentages in future years, but you started from a different base.

I was 'lucky'. I had a job when most didn't, and these days I've more than overcome the started-with-a-low-base problem. But 'these days' are quite a way away from 1992...people who started work near 2008 will have a more exaggerated manifestation of the same problem, and will likely have to wait until later in their working life to correct it.

Years back, there was an interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. It was by one of the tech mags and they were asking him what makes a great game. 3D instead of 2D? Immersive? Should the player have cinematic elements? Does the player need to be emotionally involved?

Miyamoto's answer was "well, I like moving things around the screen.". That's it. That, bluntly, is why he is a genius level game designer and the interviewers were not. Every element above is just that - an element. It can help or hinder the particular game, and Miyamoto just saw them as things that could be combined to form a game.

The point? Don't discount Flappy Bird. Just because it didn't take three years and a research team to develop, does not mean it wasn't talented.

although, and I'm fairly sure we'll find common ground here, 'anyone with a brain' can't have been running the commercial side of PARC at the time...

I'm not American so all the Obama stuff is lost on me. The site was the clearest I found - there were others too. Here's Stanford making reference to the investment. There's quite a few more.

Here you go.

If by stolen you mean bought, then yes. He recognised the people and paid for it. MS copied it.

All history now of course and I actually quite like Win 10. Just the Xerox myth keeps getting trotted out without any recognition of the fact Jobs paid and brought on the actual engineers to carry on working with it. More here, amongst other places.

You disable it at the router's MAC level, if it's anything like Virgin's. You got to a site, register the MAC...and you're done. I don't want filtering so turned it off - and we're done. No fuss, no bother. Virgin were very upfront about it, and provide an easy opt-out.

I personally would prefer opt-in but it was extremely clear and easy to turn off, so I'm simply not very exercised by this.

Or in a city. There's an awful lot of London that this would apply to, even the most expensive areas. Mirrors can get clipped in narrow streets, doesn't have to be intentional or vandalism.