The battery has a charge curve. What does the most wear or damage to the battery is the ends of the curve - either deep discharging the battery or charging it up fully to the point where it cannot take any more charge. It’s up to the manufacturer where they want to put 0% and 100% on the curve - to protect and extend the life of the battery most manufacturers don’t put 0% and 100% at the extreme ends of the curve.

If I had to build such a system, instead of a few satellites with really big mirrors I’d instead have a massive number of small satellites with smaller mirrors. Obviously then any area I’d want to light up, I’d have to hit with a number of the satellites - probably dozens at least or even hundreds of them for decent sized area. That would at least alleviate a few of the problems - aiming would be easier. As satellites move out of range new satellites would be moving in range. Long shadows from the angle of satellite near the edge of their range wouldn’t be as much of a problem as I’d be hitting any spot from a variety of angles. That the satellites would be useless for about 75% of their orbit I could make up for by launching even more satellites.

Of course, it would still be hugely impractical and there would still be major limitations. I’m still not sure how you could manage the aiming - the satellites would have to be continuously adjusting their aim to track their target. Reaction wheels can only do so much and using thrusters you’d burn through propellant like crazy. Launching the required array of satellites would be outrageously expensive and you’d need thousands of them. Eventually something would go wrong - you’d have a collision or one would break up and you’d Kessler yourself right out of business.

I also thought his books tended to have weak endings. It seems to me that he likes to keep the reader guessing, so he’ll introduce characters and entire plot lines that in the end are irrelevant and since they never get tied into the ending they are just loose ends left hanging out there. Some of it can be considered world-building, which I do have to say he’s pretty good at, but other times it’s just a chapter of gratuitous gore with characters that you never see again and where everything that happened doesn’t advance the plot or even matter.

I have to agree with the pacing too, particular in Consider Phlebas where the final act

just seemed to drag on and on.

You can always just use set compatible.

Actually, one of the reasons that vim “won” over many of the other vi-like editor clones back in the day is that it tried to behave like vi as closely as possible, whereas many of the others didn’t.

Because evaporative cooling is incredibly effective and works really well if you have a large supply of water.

Needing to carry a large supply of water is why we don’t use it in cars.

A lot of problems basically boil down to using an nVidia card and dealing with their drivers. Either use an AMD GPU/APU or if you don’t need anything fancy the iGPU in an Intel CPU.

I don’t know if it’s the best way, but I just download and install it as Linux is officially supported.

There’s always Don’t Starve which definitely fits the mood, though I’ve always found that game insanely difficult.

The Flintstones also did a bit of a pivot too - they realized they were picking up more kids in their audience so they shifted from an adult sitcom to more of a family friendly show. The later episodes do have a bit of a different feel from the earlier ones.

Also, many of the later reruns on The Cartoon Network, etc. ditched the original laugh track (and good riddance), and that also gave the show less of a sitcom feel.

I’m much the same way. Wasn’t really a conscious decision either - it’s more of I had better and more interesting things to do and gradually the amount of time I spent watching TV and movies dwindled down to basically zero.

It’s actually from the Cold War.

1st world = USA, NATO, and their allies. 2nd world = USSR, the Eastern Bloc and their allies (the 2nd world doesn’t really exist anymore). 3rd world = anyone not in the 1st or 2nd categories.

You are right though it’s not about any real statistics. It’s about political alignment.

That was there for a CD-ROM add-on, which was planned from the start but never actually released. Nintendo was working on it as a collaboration with both Phillips and Sony. After it got canned, both Phillips and Sony still had rights to some of the technology as part of the collaboration. So Phillips decided to release their own gaming system based upon what they had, and that was the (largely forgotten) CD-i system. And of course Sony did the exact same thing, and that became the Playstation. The rest is history.

I’d really like to know where you are buying 15 year old GMC trucks for $2000-$3000 that presumably run and aren’t beat to shit.

SD cards. They won’t be completely gone, but will probably be regulated to pro cameras and a few niche applications. As storage goes, hard drives outside of data centers. Right now they are still hanging in there as cheap external storage for things like backups, but in 10 years they’ll probably be gone in that application.

Fluorescent lighting. Granted it’s already on the way out, but in 10 years you may have trouble finding bulbs and your only options for an old fluorescent fixture will be either to replace it or an LED retrofit kit. Possibly the same thing will apply to sodium vapor lighting.

Manual transmissions. While the internal combustion engine will probably still be hanging in there, my guess will be finding a new car with more than 2 pedals might be a challenge.

Pro… you’re transported to the Star Trek Universe. Con… it’s still year 2025.

Meanwhile, my work Windows laptop is significantly slower to wake up now as I’m forced to hibernate it thanks to them removing S3 sleep in favor of the modern standby shit.

I thought the Ender’s game universe was interesting with the instantaneous FTL communication with the ansible, but no FTL travel. They had some tech that could accelerate ships quickly to very near-light speed, which meant you could travel between planets in a few weeks ship-time thanks to time dilation, but years would pass for the people on the planets. So while you could talk with people on other planets instantly, if you wanted to visit them, they’d have to wait decades for you to arrive.

Then later in the books they figured out …

The Conquerors trilogy by Timothy Zahn had the opposite - FTL travel but no FTL communication. Smaller ships could also travel FTL faster, so you had a bunch of small ships running around to different star systems essentially delivering the mail. It’s been a while since I read the books, but I don’t really remember it playing a big part of the story other than a way to isolate the battlefronts because once the mail service gets shut down by the enemy you have absolutely no idea what’s happening outside of your local star system.

That’s pretty much how the game is designed.

With that said, I always thought it would be a bit interesting in Factorio if the bugs were at first neutral towards the player and only got hostile after the player started polluting too much or chopped down too many trees.

I actually had some hope for that because we needed something to break the Flash monopoly, and I trusted Microsoft slightly more than I trust Adobe.

However, it never went anywhere because everyone expected Microsoft was just going to kill it, and of course Microsoft killed it, and that was that.

Walkie-talkies would be fun. They’d figure out how to use them pretty quickly and what they could use them for. At the same time they’d be completely like magic to them.