The point is that people are investing vast sums of money to create elaborately-packaged boxed sets that are simply too vast to be actually enjoyed (apparently, the new boxed set Thunderbirds will include heavily restored footage that simply wasn't capable of being included in earlier releases), and upscaling a puppet show to 4K and still have it watchable is far from trivial -- those puppets were never made to be seen on such large screens at such high resolution. The scale of investment into making this publicity stunt and boxed set is incredible, the cost of the set isn't low, and the value of the material that's in the set - even to die-hard fans - isn't nearly as great.

Goblin/Guardian: The Lonely and Great God is an even more extreme example and includes 270 minutes of backstage footage, a large pack of publicity photos, scripts, and a tacky plastic sword. It's an extremely limited edition special collector's edition and the resale market is pricing it as though it includes a couple of solid gold ingots. People will certainly binge-watch the episodes once or twice, which will undoubtedly be in much higher resolution than the rare streamed versions, but not even the afficados will be watching all the making-of footage and the scripts will doubtless be on the Internet somewhere. Unlike high-end sci-fi, though, the storyline is simple so the difference between the scripts and fan-produced transcripts won't be vast. (It was a very good storyline, I was impressed, but it was hardly a case where the tiny nuances matter.) But K-Drama is milled in unimaginable quantities, so much so that many series just can't pick up any kind of audience and are abandoned. It's not produced for repeated watching and the odds of any show, however good, being repeatedly watched (the way fans repeatedly watch LoTR or SW) is essentially zero. But someone had to trawl through all the footage to put together the set, make the booklets, etc, and that wasn't cheap. The boxing is elaborate.

The importance of storytelling is high, but none of these are sophisticated stories. They're all pretty much on-par with Smith of Wooton Major - a great little read, but not one I'd pay £500 for, even if they did throw in a plastic sword. I'm not convinced anyone is buying these sets for the content, even though the content is enjoyable.

The degree of investment is phenomenal, the sophistication of presentation is exceptional, and the fans are buying in quantity. I'm just not sure what the benefit is, on either side.

It's not worth it. For every time it costs you money to replace the whole unit, another 9 times you saved money.

Especially in cars where electronics need to be highly resistant to vibration and moisture. You don't want sockets or rework on the boards.

I estimate no more than 5 seconds from launch to the first complaint that Copilot showed someone's kid porn.

It's only 5 seconds because Microsoft's bloated code won't be able to do it any faster than that.

The idea of relying on commercial providers to develop this stuff at their own expense is okay if you aren't in any hurry to get back to the moon, but if you are... Their commercial timelines are probably not going to line up with your political ones.

Still, it would be interesting if Chinese and Americans could meet up on the moon in the next decade, Apollo-Soyuz style.

Well the keyless entry can be useful. For example my car lets you open the boot by kicking under the bumper, if you have the key on you. Useful when your hands are full.

Anything less than 100% security negates that occasional benefit though.

With Arabic they use a different pen nib that makes pushing easier, so they can rest their hand further down. That doesn't help with top to bottom languages though, and for them as they first adopted European stationary and were influenced by European languages, it made more sense to go left to right.

Brexit and the fact that LR vehicles are very easy to steal due to a botched keyless entry system probably did more harm. COVID too of course.

Some keywords can get your video demonetized or hidden from searches. The rules keep changing and are not clear. At the moment mentioning Epstein in the first 10 minutes seems guaranteed to get your video hidden.

Right. You are at the border. Tired from your long flight. Agent asks for a cheek swab. Your choices are to refuse and at best get turned away and have to go back to where you came from, at worst they arrest and detain you for weeks or months, steal your stuff, trying to break into your phone and computer, and eventually deport you.

From the sound of it they are having issues with under-performance causing lag, and/or bad wireless interfaces. The CPU and the wireless chip are probably soldered to the PCB and not replaceable, so easiest thing will be to just replace the whole computer.

They may also have run into component reliability or software premature ageing issues. Tesla had that with early model computers, where excessive logging would wear the flash memory out in a few years and brick the car. They were very difficult about out-of-warranty replacements, but in the UK if it's a design flaw like that they can't really avoid it.

Geely is fine. Their other brands have decent reliability records, like Zeekr, Polestar, other Volvo models, even Lotus (as far as luxury sports cars go). They aren't on the level of BYD or SAIC, but they are also not the reason why Volvo is having issues. Volvo is mostly antonymous, they just use Geely parts where possible, and the computer doesn't seem to have anything to do with them.

BYD just set a record for the fastest production car ever. In the video the driver lets go of the steering wheel at 350kph. Must seem slow when you were doing 500kph a few moments earlier.

I don't mind short seasons if that's what the story needs, like with Andor or Chernobyl. But they also can't really expect me to subscribe for more than a month or two when there is so little decent content. Often they remove the only reasons I have to come back, e.g. Star Trek Prodigy is gone now, luckily I have it on disc and cracked the DRM.

It sounds like the normal kind of politeness that most cultures have. In the UK we often do thinks like thank the cashier when they take our money, or apologize when making a request that is really a complaint.

In Japan it's customary to ask questions in the negative, so that the person answering can avoid outright refusing or saying no. Like if you were asking about someone doing you a favour, you would probably say "can you NOT do this for me?" And if they wanted to refuse, instead of saying "no" they would probably reply "it's very difficult", by which they mean impossible.

Most cultures are not so abrupt and direct.

The left to right writing thing is more to do with the introduction of pencils and pens. Japan had the same thing.

With a brush you can write top to bottom, right to left, because your hand doesn't rest on the page. With a pen, you are going to smudge what you just wrote. With a pencil, you will get the lead on your hands.

Interestingly one of the reasons why Japanese computers were often more powerful than Western ones was that they needed to have better graphics to show complex characters, and so the standard design was to have separate CPU and video memories. Western machines usually had a unified architecture where CPU and video shared a single bank of RAM, limiting the bandwidth available to both.