Wait until you learn about the Toyota 1FE-GZ, a 5L V12 used in a Japanese Limousine (Toyota Century) that puts out a whopping 220 KW... Not every engine is designed the same, something the GGP seems to be unaware of. The 1FE-GZ was designed to be smooth and quiet because it was meant for a limo, compared to the Aston Martin "AM" V12 which can produce up to 750 KW but usually is tuned to about 500 or so in most Astons. Same with inline 4s, some are proper loud, the Honda K20 sounds like a 4 cylinder Ferrari with it's 9K redline.

To be fair, drinking yourself to death takes decades of systemic abuse... Meth, PCP and Heroin are pretty destructive in the short term.

That being said, I'm broadly in favour of decriminalisation because it makes it easier to both offer services to help people off these drugs and for the users to seek help to get off the drugs. Keeping them illegal doesn't remove the harm, it just hides it out of sight of the "drugs are baaaaad m'kay" crowd, makes it harder for addicts to deal with their addiction and helps criminals get more money.

Decriminalising drugs will not result in millions rushing out to take heroin and meth. Quite the contrary, in countries where drugs have been decriminalised there's been a reduction in the use of highly destructive drugs... Even if there'd been an uptick in recreational drug use. Turns out there are no "gateway drugs" and people will be quite happy limiting themselves to established recreational substances. If anything, forcing marijuana, MDMA and cocaine underground makes the likes of heroin and meth more appealing.

BSODs are mostly the domain of hardware faults these days, which are pretty rare unless you're managing an estate of hundreds or more physical boxen. As such PSODs are more common (ESXi's Purple Screen of Death). ECC errors or disk faults usually. Every now and then a failing Mobo or CPU. Same with kernel panics.

Most OSs these days have a pretty graceful failure mode, but there isn't much you can do about bad or failing HW although MS has always handled it better than *nix.

You've got that backwards, Sony are more desperate than Microsoft as MS's golden goose was never the console market. They can continue to support the losses of the games and entertainment division by a fraction of a percent of the OS or Applications division. SQL licensing alone will make it look like a drop in a swimming pool. Sony on the other hand is seeing margins drop on almost everything they make, Playstation was their flagship product and sold at a loss hoping that ancillaries will make the profit.

Microsoft can afford to 2nd rate it's own console, Sony cant.

Sony's only saving grace is that the Japanese government won't let it fail.

Even exclusives are becoming a thing of the past. Most of the PS/XB exclusives are now available on PC (Steam, if not GOG and possibly others as well) and we're wondering why these games were considered great by any measure. Sports games, once the exclusive domain of consoles are being heavily advertised on PC.

The golden age of PC wannabe consoles is long gone, Sony had it with the PS2 and MS with the XB360, more and more people are waking up to the expense they are and the inferior experience they offer.

And there in lies the rub.

Consoles are all about getting money from suckers one dollar/euro/pound at a time.

Playstation Plus subscriptions are already required for online play for most games, the free games were originally just meant to sweeten the pot and make it seem like you weren't paying a subscription fee for basic functionality. Now that budgets are being squeezed and every console owner is looking for the cheapest way to get the basic functionality hidden behind a paywall, the product is being enshitified so that they can sell you something else to keep profits up.

As they will also have bottles from Argentina and Australia or any of the worlds other great wine producing regions. Jokes aside, a French wine shop that only stocked French products would be quite niche as would most French wine shops as the French tend to buy their wine from the same supermarket they get their fromage. Supermarkets selling liquor is quite common here in Europe (most countries really) meaning liquor stores need to have a USP in order to survive.

Even in Australia where supermarkets are not permitted to sell liquor, most of the liquor stores are owned by the supermarket chains.

And here I was thinking that we were talking about mobile telephony services. I forgot the US has data caps on land line services, for context, Australia, land of the fee, did away with data caps on land line connections well over 15 years ago. The only reason my £7 pay monthly mobile connection has a data cap is because if it didn't there'd be no reason to ever spend more, as it stands I'm pretty sure I'm getting nowhere near the minuscule 12 GB cap I've been lumped with.

The UK needs to work on having more of it's domestic energy needs met by domestic production. We've an absolute wealth of renewable with wind alone, backed up by biomass (not CO2 neutral but quite renewable) solar and hydro. With base loads being supported by nuclear we can work on reducing our dependence on oil and gas..

Morocco is 2,200 miles from the UK, running a cable from Cancun, Mexico to Portland, Maine would be shorter.

It would be utterly daft to choose to do this.

However, even accounting for statistical outliers, people with higher IQs do tend to make better decisions.

The study in question wasn't trying to dispute that, the question they were trying to answer is why. If anything the small cohort of 50 is far too small for a meaningful answer, however it may be a consideration in funding larger experiments and research.

Yep, it's not perfect in Oz either but serves to decentralise the money (and the power) so that political parties become dependent on local members campaigning and being noticed rather than headlines being commanded out of Canberra, Westminster, Washington, , et al. In a country as large and diverse as the UK, Westminster can easily get too disconnected from people, let alone in somewhere as physically as large as Australia or the US.

This.

Until banks are made liable and laws regarding due diligence are enforced then banks are enabling this behaviour.

From the TFS:

My first thought was "what the juddering fuck", which was also my second and third thoughts. A major bank is allowing people to open accounts without knowing who those people are? Without even verifying that they're a legal resident or have a residential address? Basic checks gone by the wayside.

Why?

That's simple, banks are making huge profits from people using their services (in particular credit cards) and the cost of fraud is less than what they'd lose by implementing security measures because some people will find security to be onerous and just start using cash again... Yes, they make that much off of credit card transactions. Same with people who fall victim to pig butchering scams, fake investment and crypto scams, as long as it's not the banks money they don't care. Until fraud starts to affect the bottom line _AND_ banks can't pass that onto you, the end user, as additional fees nothing will change.

One reason European banks are so hot on fraud is that the EU limits merchant service fees (fees banks and credit networks charge merchants for accepting cards... you didn't think they did it for free did you) so the cost of fraud presents a bigger risk.

It's almost as if laws are in place to prevent it.

One of the best things any democracy can do to safeguard it's democracy is to limit the amount of money that can be given to politicians with strict punishments for attempting to circumvent them. Say 1,000 Dollars/Euros/Pounds per organisation and 10,000 Dollars/Euros/Pounds per individual/family to any one political party. Penaties will be multiple times that in fines for the first offence and increasing in severity from there on in.

This is the US we're talking about, good ideas do not survive there. If this gets through it'll either be so watered down that Budweiser will start selling it as beer or completely co-opted by the companies it's meant to be protecting people against that it will be doing the exact opposite.

The opposite would be far worse, the situation they have in the US with home owners associations (HOA) is that the neighbourhood Karen gets to dictate where you park your car, how your garden must look, what pets you're permitted to have, the maximum length of your grass, so on and so forth. Imagine if your local curtain twitcher got power over you.

I prefer the freedom of the UK, a man's home is his castle (or woman's, why be sexist), having to put up with the small risk of a bad neighbour is much preferred to having someone dictate what your castle must look like.

The 1960s called, they want their complaints back.

One of my neighbours has a EV SUV, you hear that 2.5 tonne monster rattling down the road at 5 AM every morning, it's louder than my other neighbours diesel van (who goes to work at 7:30 like a normal person). Engines have been quiet for decades now. My first car was a mid 90's Honda Civic (VTI with the 1.6L Honda D engine) and I remember having to check whether the thing was on at traffic lights because I was worried that I'd stalled it, the thing was so quiet and calm.

The majority of road noise get caused by weight these days, specifically the noise of the tyres impacting the road, especially with the harder tyres they put on EVs to reduce rolling resistance. EV drivers think they're cars are silent for the same reason Diesel drivers think their cars are silent, because the cabin has been insulated from any kind of outside noise or feedback.