Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

I’m not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Don’t toss the Technics reciever either.

Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.

The first time I saw a No Frills (Yank visiting Toronto), I misread a cursive version of the slogan as “Won’t be best.” I thought there’s a remarkable example of truth in marketing.

I guess I was startled when I went for my go-to desktop (fvwm) and it wasn’t in the main repo, but the AUR.

It feels like it means they’re not actually maintaining a lot of their package pool, just tossing it off on third parties.

I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.

Perhaps a lottery scheme would work, like hunting permits. That seems to manage a constrained resource.

I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.

No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It’s good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.

I’m surprised nobody makes an affordable PCI or maybe even USB GPIO box.

To me, the RasPi served two purposes:

• if you wanted GPIOs and the associated ecosystem of hats/shields/capes/straightjackets but a less barebones experience than a bare metal MCU
• RiscOS, because an Archimedes is far rarer than even an Amiga or ST in the Rogue Colonies

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.

I’d expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn’t pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.

In North America, 2-6-4T types were very uncommon, mostly used for commuter passenger service. Not sure if any were preserved; I know of only a 4-6-4T on display in Montreal. This made them very exotic to this colonial.

They’re also an ideal size for models-- big enough for all the motion and complex design features, small enough to traverse 50cm radius curves. :)

Perhaps one of the heavy 2-6-4 tanks; took way more shots of LMS 2500 than Mallard when I visited the NRM.

OTOH, it is a very effective product distinguisher. They don’t have to deal with the “Apple makes the best touchpad” meme by offering something else.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)

Aluminium coins, like the Japanese 1-yen, can float on the surface tension of water.

If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

Curious what the longest streaks of all time are. The PRI in Mexico had like a 75 year streak until the 2000s or so…

I like how organized the future is. All the chaos is in the conveniently signposted Chaos District.

Right next to the Hammock District, I suppose.