I love bikes, and don’t own a car. But, this is misleading.

Bikes are terrible off road where there are no paths. They’re decent if there’s a well worn path, as long as there are no exposed roots or big rocks, but if the path isn’t well maintained walking is probably better.

Where bikes excel is very flat surfaces. The modern world is filled with those. The problem is that in most places the assumption is that those flat surfaces belong to either cars or pedestrians. Theoretically, in many places, bikes are allowed in the same places as cars most of the time. But, if a biker shares the space with cars, it’s just a matter of time before that biker collides with a car. When that happens, the person in the car won’t be injured. The biker may be dead.

When a driver hits a car, normally the driver gets off easy. Even if there’s evidence of malicious intent, it’s almost never treated as manslaughter or even murder. If there’s no evidence of malice, it’s treated as an “oopsie daisy” and there’s virtually no chance that the driver will spend any time in jail or prison.

Finally, bikes aren’t treated as important property that the law should protect the way that cars are. Even in places like Amsterdam where biking is one of the most common ways to get around, the canals are filled with bikes that have been stolen and thrown in. If you steal a car and get caught, you’re in serious trouble. If you steal a bike, the odds of getting caught are tiny, and if it happens it’s not treated as a very serious issue.

Sure, laws can be changed. But, drivers tend to be older and richer. The older they are, the more dependent they are on their cars. So, they almost always manage to defeat any potential changes to the law.

Bikes do give you a lot of freedom, but in a world designed around cars first, it’s not as much freedom as you get with a car. Maybe in 50 years it will be different. I hope so.

IMO there should be a lot more bikes in Zombie movies / books, or anything else post-apocalyptic.

If civilization collapses, you’re not going to be able to get gas for your internal combustion engine. Gas has a pretty short shelf life, so even if you stocked up you’d be running out soon. If you have something electric you’re better off, but charging those to full without a working grid will take multiple days on home solar panels.

Chances are the streets will also be filled with vehicles. A big vehicle like a car is going to have trouble getting through. A bike will squeeze through much smaller gaps. And, if necessary you can lift it up and over something.

True Names (1981), Software (1982), Neuromancer (1984), Hardwired (1986), Wetware (1988)

Cyberpunk is lowlife and high tech. It’s completely dystopian. The early 1980s was the height of the Cold War with Reagan in power. People were not optimistic about the future in the 1980s, they were just hoping that it wouldn’t end in a nuclear war.

$11b worth of goods and services sounds like a lot, except that there are at least 1 million people locked up. Even if they don’t have to pay the prisoners for their labour, the cost of keeping them locked up is much, much higher than the value of any labour they perform.

Yeah… what kind of retailer sells horses?

I’d guess 99.9% of Android users have only ever used the Google Play store.

Just because a day one patch is standard doesn’t mean it’s good for the game developer. Also, just because the game can be released in a buggy state doesn’t mean that’s good either. There are a lot of games that received massively negative reviews because they were released in a buggy state.

It gives you a chance to save your reputation if your QA processes are shit, but if they are that will bite you in the ass at some point.

Games had a higher quality to them before being released.

The quality was definitely higher, but there were also definitely still bugs in the released version.

Why do you say that the ability (and requirement) to patch the game after release is a benefit to the company that released the game?

How to think of games has changed over the years.

Arguably the first real computer game game “Spacewar!” followed the “the “hacker ethic”, whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright”.

After a while, copyright came into play, and people were expected to “buy” a copy of the game, but “piracy” was common.

Meanwhile, the consoles pretended the game was a physical object, and that you needed that physical object to play, and that you could give that physical object to someone else, or sell it back to the store.

And then there was the shareware model, used for games like Doom. It kept the idea that games were copyrightable stuff, but it didn’t try to stop people from copying, and allowed them to share the games around. People were just asked to pay for extra levels, or sometimes just to send in some money if they liked the game.

On PC, Steam became the dominant platform because it’s less of a headache than piracy. Steam doesn’t pretend you own a physical object, you’re buying a license.

Fundamentally, gamers want the games to be free. If possible, they want to avoid paying for them at all. They want to be able to give them to friends, and have no restrictions on how or where they can run them: online, offline, on a phone, on a toaster, whatever. Once they have access to the game, they don’t ever want to have to give up access for any reason. They want the companies that make the games to release patches for any bugs that are discovered, and ideally, they’d like free additional content post-release.

Game companies want gamers to pay as much as possible for games. They want people to buy their games, they want an additional purpose for every additional machine the game is installed on. In addition, if they can manage it, they want people to pay continuously for playing the game, so it’s not just a one-time payment. They also want to be able to revoke access to the game at any time, and not have to pay the players when they do that. They don’t want to have to keep maintaining the game after it has been released, though they might be willing to do that if it’s profitable because it means more people will buy the game.

Neither extreme position makes much sense. If people aren’t going to give money to the developers, there will still be people making games as a hobby, but there won’t be high-budget AAA games made as a business. On the other extreme, if a game is too expensive, can’t be refunded, might be revoked at any time, and requires that you continuously pay while playing it, most people won’t bother.

So, what’s left is a negotiation, what will people put up with? Gamers typically hate paying for live service games, but if they do that there’s a reasonable business case for the game company to keep releasing content for the game. Gamers would like to be able to re-sell their game (really their licenses to those games), but that means a significant loss of revenue for the game companies, so they’re unlikely to accept that. The additional revenue means they can either keep the price lower, or can make a better, more polished game. Gamers would love to be able to play games forever without additional payment, even online games requiring servers. Game companies don’t want to have to support that based on a single sale that might have happened a decade ago. Game companies would love it if old games stopped working, so people have to buy new ones. That’s unlikely to be a fight they win in the long term though, because unless there is a required online component, it seems absurd to cut off access to the game just because it’s old.

In the end, there will probably be compromises. For a lot of people, the compromises will be unfair. Maybe they’ll play more indie games or even free software games. For other people, they’ll grudgingly accept, but in exchange will get games that have 100,000x the budget of something like “Spacewar!”

• and a pony

We didn’t descend from either chimps or bonobos. Chimps, bonobos and humans all descended from a common ancestor.

In addition, bonobos do engage in violent conflicts. Much less often than chimps, but it does happen.

Pleasure? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I’m talking politics.

He’s right, in politics the top just pounds the bottom, over and over again. In civil society, unions sometimes change the dynamic. The bottom is more confident and learns to wield their power, sometimes that even gives them the power to control the top. The top might never stop trying to fuck the bottom, but with the right rules in place, it can still be a happy ending for the bottom.

I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.

What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.

That reminds me of this awesome video

Apparently Dortmund did their own version more recently, and they did it with a whole stadium full of Dortmund supporters present.

Considering that we know that chimps engage in “war”, and war has been part of recorded history since as long as there has been recorded history, it’s pretty easy to assume that there has always been “war”.

Tennis games aren’t perfectly flat. Wimbledon is famous for being played on grass, which isn’t flat even before the wear and tear sets in. And that’s in a sport where judging the bounce of the ball is critically important.

Yes, but they can get away with a tiny amount of it

Not really. Developers have forgotten how to write small, efficient code. Everything is a web page these days, and so the bare minimum app is a web browser, and a web browser is huge.

Wrangled would be more hogtied. That’s more mangled.

What about the Toyota Water Cruiser?

Or the Honda Bucolic:

(it’s surprisingly hard to find an antonym for “civic”)