Yep, Australia went fully card mental in the 2000s and wonders why everything became so expensive. Sadly they'll never put two and two together because the answer really is 5, 2+2 is 4 but the extra is made up by merchant service fees that the merchant is legally obliged to hide in their prices.

What about the brave soldiers on the Floating Fortress Winston Smith.

It's only criminal if you get caught.

That being said, why do you think so many companies are trying to demonise laws like the GDPR... because they have real teeth to protect ordinary people.

You're thinking too smart... cars need a mobile connection because they're mobile, TVs are stationary so all they need to do is look for an open Wifi network. WPS can allow access easily enough these days and then all you carefully slurped data can be uploaded to the mothership.

Never forget it's easier and faster to use a $5 wrench to beat the password out of someone than to spend hours cracking it.

This, they're banking on not being caught and even if they are, get a slap on the wrist and keep doing it.

Yep, however I'll expand on the last point.

It's not that Trek isn't "woke" (or whatever word bigots use for "something I don't like" in the future) it's that Discovery tried to draw too much attention to it. Trek was always about presenting a world where being different or having a disability didn't matter, not that it didn't exist. TOS was aired in the 1960s where some states still acted like Jim Crow was the law, there was a black woman on the bridge of a military starship, out ranking two of the male crew on the bridge and everyone just acted like she belonged there.

I've been meaning to go back and watch the later seasons of Discovery but haven't really felt compelled to. I think they might have jumped the shark in S1. The older series (TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT) were slow burners, they didn't really get going until the 3rd seasons. The alternate universe thing in the latter half of S1 might have gotten too exciting too quick.

I also watched the first few eps of SNW on a plane and felt it was way too dark... I mean literally not dramatically, the sets were far too dark to see what was happening. Surely by the 23rd century we could make reliable lighting.

You mean to say car dealership run by car dealer.

In the UK this would never fly as it wouldn’t stand up in court as being a reasonable charge and that would even be if this made it to court as such suprious charges usually get laughed at and thrown in the bin, especially if it were not clearly signposted in advance. OTOH, British people are generally polite enough not to assume that anything that isn't nailed shut is available for their use. OTOH this is EVWs we're talking about (the W stands for Wanker).

I should be grateful to EVWs for some things, I can finally get an Audi S5 all the wankers have sold their Audis and bought Teslas.

This is what a lot of people who can navigate by themselves already do, I call it a long cut (as in the opposite of a short cut) and even though it's a longer drive than the direct route because it travels through faster roads with less traffic it takes less time (and less stress/annoyance). There's a small motorway near where I live where people line up for ages at an off ramp where as I go up to the next exit, do a U turn on the roundabout and come back beating the queue... I thank all the gods, old and the new for people being too dumb to figure out how to do the same thing.

Yep... People are still drinking, they're just not going out to drink. Why would you? Just 10 years ago I could go to a Pub in suburban London with £20 in my pocket, have a good night and walk home with change. Now you can barely get 4 pints at a spoons in a commuter town for that. Forget about food.

So it's cheaper to get a bottle of spirits and drink at home.

If anything, turning Miami into Vice City may actually make traffic safer.

But as we don't navigate sailing ships using 17th century tech any more it's well past its use by date.

We only really use it for flat maps for consumers. If you work with mapping data you're already using a modern geodetic system like WGS84, GDA2020 or ETR89.

How we look at a flat map probably should be modernised as for the most part, we're now using them to reference points, lines and polygons on land rather than lines at sea.

Also it's not like the Mercator projection will just go away... you'll still be able to buy a tea towel with the Mercator projection on it.

That doesn't make sense, the average gamer will play more than 15 hours a month, that's a tiny bit over 3 hours a week. At that point, you'd just not bother with a console that costs hundreds at all.

So Microsoft is misleading, obsfucating or just flat out lying that only 4% will be impacted. Plus it makes terrible business sense for your cheapest product to meet the needs of your 96% of your customers, its the "2nd cheapest bottle of wine" effect, if you know nothing about wine you buy the second cheapest bottle as it's usually a fair bit better than the cheapest for a fraction of the price extra. So effectively your cheapest product is there just to be shit and drive people to slightly more expensive options. You want most customers buying the 2nd tier (or 2nd and 3rd if you've got a 4 tier system) which isn't much more than the bottom tier whilst your top tier is expensive.

Consoles were always money sinks, however I suspect Microsoft has gotten sick of subsidising them.

PCGMR here, steam quadrupled the price of my subscription this month, as they do every month... let me run the maths... 4 x £0 is still £0.

Don't think I'll be cancelling, even though I still get to keep all my games.

Time to admit the XBox and PS are both effectively dead. And nothing of value was lost.

Remember ladies and gentlemen, you're sharing the footpath with drivers who think a car without an instrument binnacle is a good idea.

Wealthy people don't physically protest, that's just for the proles.

Wealthy people protest by calling their bought and paid for politicians (or merely rented if they're not wealthy enough) which is far more effective.

The rich would love to have everyone tracked except for them. What Nineteen-Eighty Four didn't mention is that the inner party members were not subject to the same rules as normal party members (or proles).