> but his method was eventually adopted to the tuning system we have today.

The tuning system that is common today. However vocal harmonies and unfretted string instruments enable other scale temperaments and the difference in the sound of the harmonies is clear when you hear them back to back. I'm not a keyboardist, but I assume any modern synth can be tweaked for closer fifths for a chosen key. I play guitar and pulling a string a little bit to improve the sound of a dog not interval (one where the interval is sufficiently off that it sounds bad) is common practice that comes naturally after a while.
 

I drove an F150 recently. It drove like a boat and was crappy in many ways. Half the dash controls were defective.
I drove an old Toyota Tacoma recently. It was pleasant to drive and had remained reliable for many years.

I don't think current day Ford has caught up with latter day Japan on vehicle quality. At least not from my very recent experience of 2 vehicles.

And yet it kept running in too low a gear for the hill I was climbing. I sold that car.
It's a dumb machine doing dumb things. Neither a manual nor an EV have this problem.

>I really feel like we've taken the complexity of computer systems and networks past the point where it's possible to engineer any of it without it all containing serious flaws/bugs/vulnerabilities.

I disagree in the context of this sort of vulnerability.

It is entirely possible to build on-silicon cryptographic hardware with resistance to side channels both remote and local, fault injection, cryptanalysis and many other classes of attack. In know this because it's my job. It takes a combination of overlapping defenses and a serious willingness to spend gates on defense in depth. The business of loading keys into cache with side channels is a rookie mistake and Apple should not have made it.

I don't think there are a lot of people around with the skills to do this, but there are a few and Apple should have hired one or more of them and it's not magic. Someone with hardware and crypto knowledge can learn the advanced defense methods. I'm thinking about what my third book might be and this is a candidate topic (how to build secure hardware).

Good luck with that. If it seems to make things easier, it's coming at a hidden cost.

So you want a time machine?

>A good traditional automatic is super duper smooth

I've never owned a car with a good one.
It decides which gear to be in and gets it wrong by choosing to be in a different gear to the one I would choose if I were driving a manual with the same ratios.
If it's ICE I want a manual.

In the EVs I've owned, 1 gear, all day.
 

>Just curious what is such a major difference in the operation / driving of ICE vs EV?

It's a few things that add up to it mattering.

1) The driving. EVs are nicer to drive. Not just Teslas. They are all nicer to drive. The power curve feels good. This intersects a bit with your mention of manual transmission - in ICE cars I preferred manual transmission, maybe because it's what I started with but it feel more because there isn't something else switching up the gear ratios. In EVs there's nothing interfering with the torque curve, just like in manual transmission.
2) Getting in and out, starting the car, locking/unlocking. You get used to not doing things. The car unlocks as you get close. The car locks when you leave. the car starts when you press the pedal. ICE cars could be like this, but in my experience they are not.
3) Petrol Stations/Gas Stations - I do not miss those shitholes. I've traveled the world and there is nowhere that they are good places to be.

The other stuff, like you say, is not specific to EVs.

> I really don't know what extra difficulty you have driving a modern ICE vehicle.
It's not a difficulty. It's a preference or a 1st world problem. I still have an ICE minivan which we keep for moving bigger things around but otherwise use rarely. I could buy a cybertruck or rivian or electric F150, but that's a bit pricey compared to not selling the van and not dropping a large fraction of $100,000.

I've owned many ICE vehicles. Amongst them I've owner 3 two seater convertible roadsters and Mazda better hurry up with an electric MX5, because I'll be first in line to get one.

It was baked into the up front fee. It wasn't significantly different to normal car rental insurance. This was in the UK, where the insurance rules are somewhat different to where I live in the US.

I have two EVs and have owned three. The Tesla insurance is in the same ballpark or a bit lower as any similarly priced car. The crash rates with Teslas are a bit lower than the averages, so that figures. The 2015 Nissan Leaf insurance is cheap. It's a cheap, old car.

The only reason I've rented from Hert (twice in the last year) is because they had Teslas rentable whereas others did not. Once you're used to EVs, you don't really want to faff around with ICE cars.

Hertz's problems go deeper than EVs. They have had well publicized episodes of getting honest customers arrested and they excel at adding on hidden fees that 10X the price compared to the advertised price. Given an alternative, I would use anybody else.
 

Any new subscription demand presented to me gets closed down right away. I and I assume most people have become allergic to subscriptions.

Two examples:
Passmore - A place to buy caviar online for an occasional treat. They stopped selling it like a normal product and switched to a subscription model. Fuck that.
Rocksmith - A good guitar playing game - pay for tunes you like, it detects your accuracy as you play along. They switched to a subscription model, Disabled all the music you had already purchased and added music no one has heard of from the bargain bin. Fuck that.

OK grandpa. Voice controls are excellent when you want to fiddle with settings while you also want to keep your eyes on the road. Press the right hand button, tell it what you want with no looking away from the road.

>Epic has always reacted with righteous indignation.

And yet the Epic store on the PC is a steaming pile.

I carry a laptop bag and a carry on suitcase.

If I have my DSLR and drone for photography, then it occupies a lot of the carry-on suitcase. Depending on the length of the trip, I might need to check a bag in order to carry enough clothing.