Thing is, PC gaming has been diskless for ages. The last game I bought on disk was in 2015 and that was because I lived in Australia and internet speeds were shit back then.

PC gaming has never really been cheaper, even with the ridiculous price of RAM and SSDs at the moment. A gaming PC I built 5 years ago is still more powerful than a PS pro (to start with, it's a Zen 3 CPU, the PS pro is still Zen 2).

PC gaming is cheaper than console gaming if you actually play games. Consoles are a false economy, the initial hardware is sold at a loss to get you in the door then they pile on charge after charge after charge, pay for access to online services, pay more for games, so on and so forth. PC gaming is the opposite, higher cost of entry as no-one is subsidising the hardware but no-one is expecting to make that back in additional fees and charges afterwards so once you've paid the inital cost for the hardware, savings start immediately. Games are cheaper and go on sale more often and Steam, GoG, et al. could triple their access fee tomorrow and no one would care because 3 x $0 is still $0.

People are realising the console price is a false economy and it's not helping (or is helping, depending on if you're a console fanboy or not) that a PS pro is only £80 more than a PS pro. Because people are looking to reduce their ongoing spend with consoles, Sony and MS are having to raise hardware prices. This, to digital only is one way Sony is trying to shore that up, by making sure that they get a cut of every single sale. Also the breaking of backwards compatibility is a feature, not a bug, as that means all your older games need to be re-purchased through the rip off store.

Which brings me to another point... I've 30+ year old games that still work on my current gaming PC. Of course I've got the installers on a hard drive now as no-one's seen a floppy drive in years and the original disks have probably melted in my sisters garage back in Oz. Games older than the original playstation.

Yet console fanboys keep lining up for more. Doesn't matter how much abuse they get, the only response is "yes master, may I have some more".

The Concorde's engines were adapted from military engines, the Rolls Royce Olympus which powered the Avro Vulcan bomber, so yeah, they were F-ing loud.

Question is, can we develop quieter engines these days? Modern high bypass turbofans (like the RR Trent) are way quieter than their older counterparts. Especially the older low bypass turbofans (I.E. on the 727s)

The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.

You misspelled "privacy".

This just "virtue signalling" for those with absolutely no virtues. Equal and opposite, instead of standing up for good causes they're letting everyone know they only support bad ones, I guess we can call it vice signalling but that still sounds too kind as most people with vices are generally still nice and well rounded, sin signalling then... Being British and Australian I'm going with "cunt signalling" as that's what they're trying to tell us they are and who they're trying to appeal to, however that's not really a BBC Two word.

That really isn't true as certain airlines (Singapore, QANTAS, Emirates, Qatar, et al.) are still flying them as they fill a niche that no other airliner in production can. They're very good at transporting large numbers of people from hub to hub over long distances, London to Singapore for example. Singapore airlines runs 6 flights a day between LHR and SIN (and another two out of LGW) and half of those are A380s, the A350s they fly to and from Gatwick have half the capacity of the A380, the A350 in the long haul configuration holds 253 pax, the A380 holds 471, 343 in Economy alone... And I'm using Singapore as an example because they're the most spacious of the carriers, Qatar operates A380s with 460 economy class seats (and another 46 in higher classes).

This is not to mention the flagship suite products this airliner hosts.

The B747 is dead, the 8i never took off and it looks like the next generation 777 is dead in the water too. So airlines running the A380 are interested in keeping it running.

I took "sophisticated" to mean "needlessly complex" and it's deliberately kept so to keep out competition. Such complexity is also why it's primitive in comparison to all other developed economies and many developing ones.

Also, isn't "facilitating interstate trade" the purview of the US federal government? If so, they seem completely unwilling to do anything.

Complexity is the problem with the US banking system, it's being deliberately kept that way to keep outsiders out. There aren't any US based challenger banks and the big bois have been killing off the old local banks and building societies.

The US government isn't powerless, but gormless to stop it and do what other countries have done and create a seamless system for interbank transfers. They're quite happy to turn a blind eye to it to keep the donations from the big banks coming through.

I can send money between Australia and the UK or even to someone with no bank account in Colombia easier than Americans can send money to each other.

Conversely, if a Mac costs you 1 hour per week because it doesn't do something you need it to it costs $5200 in productivity and the cost of the Mac.

And it does cost in productivity as one of my illustrious duties has been to maintain a Windows Server RDS farm solely for Mac users to be able to log on and use the same applications as everyone else in the business. So not only was it lost productivity, it also cost my time (which is worth more than theirs, I get billed at £180 per hour) and a Windows RDS license. All this because the special little sales people didn't want to use a Dell like everyone else.

Apple, the product that keeps on costing.

Yep, this is blatant protectionism, which is the 'Murican way. This is why Japanese diesel pickups have been banned using a variety of increasingly complex and convoluted rules designed to not prevent US pickups from being banned under the same rule. This is done because the Toyota Hilux would decimate Ford F-series sales, not just immediately but over the long term because you don't have to replace a Toyota Hilux every year as they don't fall apart.

National security is the sledgehammer approach. They're not even bothering with convoluted rules so they can pretend it's not blatant protectionism.

If anything, the data of American drivers is safer in Sweden as they're subject to EU laws like GDPR. I'm certain Ford, GM and Tesla are selling that data to all and sundry.

GTA V, out of the box on PC came on 6 (possibly 7, I can't remember and can't be arsed to check) DVDs and took ages to install. I only bought the physical disks because at the time I lived in Australia and it would have taken even longer to download.

Yep, we do need to address the disinformation crisis before we become as bad as the US where people blindly believe the most obvious of lies from Fox, Trump, et al. However this isn't really the way to go about it.

I'm not concerned about the current government, I'm more concerned if someone authoritarian like Farage gets in, laws like this are tailor made to be abused by people like him.

Oh goodie... another person who thinks their credit card is "free".

Clue by four, it's not, you are paying for it but you just don't know it (and will refuse to accept that fact even after learning it).

First things first, when you use your card the merchant has to pay a percentage of that transaction in fees to the banks and payment processors, the EU capped this at 1%, it can easily exceed 5% outside the EU and routinely goes to 3%. 3 cents out of every dollar goes to paying for your card, at least. It's not free and the banks and payment processors are making serious money off it. There are a minimum of 5 parties for every card transaction You -> Your bank -> Payment processor -> Merchant bank -> Merchant. Every middleman is taking a cut for themselves.

You can argue that banning credit card fees is bad because it forces merchants to hide the cost from the consumer (which is how the banks and payment processors like it) but the EU at least capped the fees and this move would further reduce the burden on both merchants and consumers.

Payment processors like Visa, Mastercard and Amex don't want digital currencies for the same reason they're trying to kill cash. They don't get a cut of that transaction and that's wrong to them.