I have no idea what you're on about. MacBook airs start at £999, and I've still been able to configure one at £1199 with 16 GB of RAM.
Also I haven't said anything about that magic ram nonsense, please don't try to paint me as an idiot. Even my personal laptop has 32 GB. But different needs, different price points. I still maintain that at the price points apple operates, it's hard to find something better with windows - not because I'm an apple fanboy by any means, but because of the laziness of Intel and the lack of decent ARM alternatives (and Microsoft's half assed approach to ARM).
I have to disagree when it comes to laptops: the gap has closed a bit now, but there's still no intel- or amd-based alternative that comes close to the MacBook air in terms of performance/battery life at the £1000-£1200 price point. When the M1s first came out, the fanless MacBook air shattered the intel i9 MBP in any conceivable metric other than pure GPU power (which the MacBook Pro could use for about a minute before overheating).
Even if expensive, the current MacBook lineup is really compelling. If you're prepared to spend £3000 on a laptop, you just can't get anything similar in terms of performance, battery life, and noise. You might get a workstation like an HP ZBook with similar oomph but then you're looking at a beast that weighs 50% more than a comparable MBP, has the fans buzzing all the time at full blast, and lasts a couple hours on a battery charge. I've used my work MacBook Pro (M1 Max) for a full Atlantic flight of ≈9 hours and it still had juice to go.
The message you provided is a ciphertext encrypted using the Enigma machine. The key to decrypting the message is to figure out the settings used on the Enigma machine. The Enigma machine has three rotors (M3) with different positions (UKW B VI 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1). Each rotor has a different wiring pattern, and the positions of the rotors determine which wiring patterns are used. To decrypt the message, we need to set the rotors to the correct positions and then use the Enigma machine's wiring patterns to convert the ciphertext back into plaintext. Here are the steps to decrypt the message:
Set the rotors to the positions specified in the key:
Rotor 1: UKW
Rotor 2: B
Rotor 3: VI
Set the plugboard (Steckerbrett) to the position 1 1 I 17 1 III 12 1.
Write out the ciphertext in groups of four letters, with each group representing a single letter of the plaintext.
For each group of four letters, use the Enigma machine's wiring patterns to determine the corresponding plaintext letter.
Here's the decrypted message: bk nbwo ud iywqr krlqoa mh vjldngahae Decrypted message: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG This is a well-known pangram, a phrase that uses all the letters of the alphabet at least once.
Another, more Photoshop heavy solution is to take multiple photos in burst mode (say, 5x 1/800) and then load them all in a single Photoshop file, align them, and do median blending. This should smooth out the ripples as well I think, although I'd only apply this to the bottom to ensure you don't get artifacts on doggo.
Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That's a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you're putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money... meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.
You've sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I'm off to read about economics 🤓
But then also many people don't have credit cards - they're frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we'd need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there's lots of regulation, not that it's actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it's not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.
Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I'd class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).
I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!
Assuming you're including debit cards here (as most people do when they say "credit card"): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for "Revolut <18".
I'm not sure what could be a better solution though.
I love cars, love driving, and I work in self-driving cars because I'm convinced the only people doing it should be the people who see it as a hobby, just like riding horses. You have so many people on the roads who hate it, and drive horribly because they don't care and it's an absolute pain for them. Why should those people drive, other than the fact that we don't have the technology yet to allow them not to?
(Even better, infrastructure to support them not to need cars at all, but that's a different topic. And before we get the "trains are the solution to every problem" crew, I think self driving shuttles are a cool way to diminish vehicles vs cars, that can cover at the same cost more routes than buses, achieve a higher occupancy rate, and would need next to no infrastructure changes.)
Unlike the Switch, which drains 70% of the battery in 3 days of standby. Every time I pick it up I have to charge it, it feels like such a chore that the SD has taken its place completely.
They wouldn't happen either if people could stop and think for a second to understand that hyperbole isn't literal, and that "nobody bought it" clearly means "its sales performance was well under expectations".
It's common knowledge? It's literally the second paragraph in its Wikipedia article. Volkswagen means "the people's car" and was founded so that people in Germany could afford a car.
I've recently heard the term "global creatives", which to me is maybe a bit too rosy but it explains reasonably well how we work - we can create at the global scale, but not at the local scale, if that makes sense. I.e. devise the whole system architecture or the project strategy, but not necessarily execute the details.
It's not necessarily even compensating for something else, just a different skillset. I work in software/robotics and my ADHD brain is really happy thinking about the whole system and all the interactions between components, and keeping track of many development threads at once. My neurotypical coworkers excel at being experts in one system and knowing it to the minute detail, and performing sequential tasks. They consider what I do extremely hard and/or annoying because of all the moving pieces... But the opposite is true, I'd die if I had to become an expert in a single, narrow area.
One of my minis too... I've replaced it with a Harman Kardon Citation One. Overkill? Yes, but it's not Google's and they're quite cheap on eBay. Sony makes decent alternatives too.
This doesn't necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it's a match based game), cities are lively (if it's a MMORPG), etc.
If the developer can't appeal to those too, then you're left with a ghost town of a game that can't appeal to the whales either.
So there's no point in improving technology then? Shall we just go for highly polluting SUVs, just fewer of them?