Thats the thing, people are buying consoles thinking it'll be cheaper... well at least they think they are.

With Consoles, you pay less for the hardware initially but then pay through the nose for everything else. Pay for multiplayer and online access, pay for replacement controllers (Sony can fix the stick drift, they just don't want to lose the extra revenue from £60 controllers), you pay more for games.

PC is the opposite, you pay full price for the hardware as no-one is subsidising it, then your savings start immediately, games are cheaper and go on sale more often, hardware actually lasts (I've a £30 mouse that's approaching it's 10th birthday and still going), you don't pay for online access and what's better is that we have actual competition, not one gatekeeping corporation.

If you play games, the price difference between a PS5 and a mid range gaming PC is made up in less than 2 years... and it's only that long if you don't play a lot of games.

However people are stupid, so they get suckered in by the low sticker price. Even when they're outright told this will be more expensive in the long run (years ago, UK stores had to put "per unit" pricing on the shelves, so £ per 100ml or similar, people still buy the more expensive option).

This, sometimes I am looking for cheap, no-name products. I really don't care who made my bin bags as long as they fit in the bin and aren't a total PITA to open. It's going to be the same terrible quality as you get from the supermarket but saves me a trip.

What I'm concerned about is, is that Panaphonics TV I'm buying a genuine Panaphonics TV? That's when you have to check it's not being sold by Dongfeng or XSFCDWS.

Yep, could easily be a count of users running some kind of privacy extension like Privacy Badger or NoScript.

Also I certainly hope they're not basing this on the user agent string, that can be made to say anything. Also Android seems conspicuously absent.

However any decrease from the 99% Microsoft used to have is a huge improvement and any increase in Linux adoption is also worth celebrating. With Steam running Windows games on Linux I suspect I'm not the only gamer looking to move full time to Linux.

Germany (and the Netherlands) are bad examples as they teach English to kids to be competitive on the world stage. They also didn't have large colonial empires so few other countries speak German or Dutch (nothing against the Germans or Dutch mind you, both great people). Spanish and French are more useful as there are more people who use these languages exclusively and a few former colonies that use the languages exclusively. Whilst in Spain you can get buy with little to no Spanish without a problem but try Colombia, Argentina or even Mexico where English is less widely learned and used.

Even if you're not fluent it is still useful as you can pick up on things said to you (or around you), read signs, menus so on and so forth. I used to be able to count up to 999 in Thai (I never learned the word for 1000) I did it mainly for shits and giggles whilst drinking but found it came in handy as I could walk around the markets and listen to what the Thais were negotiating and then realise how much I got ripped off for being Farang.

Are you joking?

Merchants would love to lower their prices, they do it all the freaking time. Even if they only reduce the price by half the amount they save, it's still a win for you (in fact it's a win/win for everyone except Mr Bankster).

Which is why most civilised countries have a deposit guarantee scheme. So if your bank account is compromised you don't lose your money as the bank is supposed to guarantee it's security up to a given amount. In the UK that's £120,000 for individual accounts and double that for joint accounts. That is per account, so if you have £90,000 in one account and £110,000 in another account all £200,000 are covered (of course if I had that much just lying around I'd invest it but that is a different set of risks so I digress).

Banks want to keep you using credit as it makes you beholden to them. They want you to spend your entire wage paying off a credit card so you have to put all of next month on the card and repeat the cycle ad infinitum. Yes, a hell of a lot of people are in this trap because they thought like you that "the bank is my friend and will magically protect me if I use credit". That is blatantly false, there are a load of outs (the most common is blaming you for the problem so you then have to prove it's not your fault). When I was a lad (which was only a scant 25 years ago) doing my first proper job the phrase "I'm living payday to payday" was a sign you're doing it tough, now it's a sign you're doing well as many people are living debt payment to debt payment.

Put simply, we have better things to do now. No longer do we need to waste time by just hanging out because we don't have anything else to do. Yes, that's what we had to do, we spent time with friends because we literally had no other form of entertainment and what little entertainment their was usually required going somewhere which would be boring on your own.

Now we don't have that problem and the places we used to go (theatres, pubs, clubs, sporting venues, et al.) have responded to this by becoming even more expensive which means we spend even less time planning to go out because it's so unaffordable.

The world has changed and the relics of the past appear to have chosen slow death over adaption.

I get you're making a joke but the British never transported the hardend criminals to colonies (the whole reason they started Australia is that they couldn't send them to the American colonies any more), the reason for this is because Britain didn't want the people back after they finished their sentence so convicts when finishing their time would be given a parcel of land and permitted to work it, good land in the colonies seemed so abundant that there appeared to be no end of it.

For this reason, only petty and lesser criminals were sent, crimes such as theft, burglary and larceny, fraud, being in debt, or sedition. This was to reduce the population the ruling class didn't like hence debts and sedition were being used to transport the poor and Irish/Welsh/Scottish as displaying an Irish flag was considered sedition. Hence there is an abundance of Irish surnames in Australia. A lot of the English came over in the interbellum period (See: the land of milk and honey), some 70+ years since transportation stopped (1856 for those who wish to know).

Hardened criminals like rapists, murderers, politicians and the like were kept in ol' Blighty.

The overwhelming majority of Australia's population came from colonists rather than convicts and most of the colonists arrived in the 20th century (notably the interwar and post war migration booms).

There is, it involves parents doing *audible gasp* actual parenting and ensuring that kids are prepared to deal with things that they find difficult and/or uncomfortable. Seeing as the parent vote is a twofer (two votes for one policy) blaming parents for not parenting is a sure-fire way to get unelected.

So politicians of all stripes take the easy answer which inevitably doesn't work so they take the next easy answer which is to double down on the failed solution with even more failure.

I knew a kid back at high school (what Americans would call junior high) and his parents tightly controlled everything he saw and heard, because they were religious fundies and didn't want any of that blasphemy getting to their kid. So much so that he was shuffled off to churchie boarding school and never seen again, not even on school holidays, years later in adulthood I learned that, as was tradition in Australia he was pushed out the door at age 18 to make his own way in the world and quickly fell into hard drugs and subsequent suicide before his 19th birthday. Rumour had it that he fell into the obvious traps that those of us who experimented with drugs during our teens knew well to avoid. The parents being good, church going folk started to pretend they never had a son, expunged all evidence of him from their lives.

Pretty much the only solution is for parents to, well, parent. Kids are always going to find a way around any restriction parents put in, doubly so if it's one the government puts in. That's all part of growing up.

You mean the systems that are cheaper and provide better results that the privatised systems of the US?

Unlike Americans, Europeans know exactly who pays for them, they do. What Americans don't get is that it's the same situation in the US, you pay, you just pay more for a worse product.

Yep, did some tests with Steam on Linux Mint a few months back with very good results, There was little to no discernable differences I could tell on Steam games, didn't get to try GOG but the one old game I installed via Lutris worked just fine.

Biggest problem was that Steam didn't support sharing drives between Windows and Linux (or NTFS under Linux) which means I need to reformat my games storage for Linux, which means I'll have to redo my mods (OK. Bethesda forced this with another pointless FO4 update) so I'm planning to go Linux on my new gaming box which I'll build as soon as I can find a decent video card that doesn't cost the earth.

OTOH, when it's not in a Linux repo installation can be a right PITA. Windows at least has that bit down to a tee when installing software that isn't in the abominable Windows store (I mean, who uses the Windows store anyway).

I'm struggling to find a replacement for Notepad++ on Linux, specifically to deal with large single line JSON files, most things either choke or refuse to open them, the closest I've got is Geany which will at least open the files but editing it is still a crapshoot.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of the average idiot.

Add greed to naivety and you've got a winning combination if you're a scammer.

I think a lot of the problem is that many people who grew up in nice, middle class burbs never had to encounter the kinds of scammers that I did growing up in poor neighbourhoods. You had fuck all as a 15 year old in a working class neighbourhood but you could guarantee that there was someone around every corner trying to relieve you of the fuck all you did have.

Because we've got all the low hanging fruit like preventable diseases in childhood, dangerous products, toxic pesticides, et al. But don't worry, Trump and the Anti-Vaxxers are working tirelessly to bring back such wonderful easily preventable diseases as Polio, Measles, Rubella and if they can manage it, Smallpox.

It should be noted this is a record for the US... which is still lower than almost all other developed nations.

For those who aren't idiots, I'm sure I don't need to explain that the biggest factor is the reduction in infant, child and young adult mortality as people under 25 dying in larger numbers skew the statistics downwards.

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.