I get that the leap forward here is that it's battery-powered. Still, I can't help feeling underwhelmed.

"Acid Tracks" came out in 1987 and I genuinely feel like I've been reading endlessly about the 303 ever since.

As usual with the Greens, perfection was the enemy of the good.

I did work my way through it a second time to see the "proper ending", and what's interesting is that I remember nothing about it. There's a moral in there, somewhere.

I'll be working my way through your Timeline over the next while!

I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."

As the author of the article notes, the NES was not popular in the UK or Europe as a whole, and indeed, I've still never seen one in the flesh, so to speak.

But we did have arcades in the town I grew up in, and when Ghosts n' Goblins was current, I can remember discussing it with another kid in our schoolyard. He told me that someone he knew had made it all the way to the end of the game. Totally agog, I asked what happened when you completed it, and he told me, "There's a message that says, "This was all an illusion created by Satan." And then you have to do it all over again."

I was privately skeptical that this could be true, because I couldn't believe that the programmers would be that mean, but also because the game was so bloody difficult. I didn't believe that anyone actually could make it all the way through, unless they had a six foot-high pile of ten pence pieces.

But about fifteen years later, I discovered MAME and ROM repositories, and with the aid of its cheat system, I pushed through to the bitter end of Ghosts n' Goblins. And damned if I wasn't rewarded with the message, "This was all an illusion created by Satan."

Tokuro Fujiwara, j'accuse.

Actually, they demonstrably have. The Cybertruck is a technical and commercial disaster.

You're correct that most people don’t want to buy from someone like Elon Musk. A huge additional problem for Tesla, though, is that instead of focusing on the business that he's paid to run, its CEO has busied himself with far-right demagoguery for the last couple of years. While that was going on, a variety of Far Eastern companies quietly brought a bunch of EVs to market, that are mostly at least as well-made as Tesla's vehicles, while also being cheaper.

On the roads where I live, I now see about ten of these competitors' cars for every Tesla.

According to LinkedIn, they have over 2,000 employees in Dublin alone.

If a large percentage of jobs have not been eliminated in two years' time, it will be because AI has largely failed to deliver on its boosters' predictions. In this eventuality, the venture capitalists who funded the rise of AI will lose their money.

What's the end game for these people?

You know what would have been a worthwhile use of that €114 MM? Improving the pay and conditions of our naval personnel. That way, the nation might now be able to put more than one patrol boat out to sea at a time.

Is the system perfect? No, of course not. But the Us vs Them polemics are unfair.

What's that supposed to mean?

Define "really susceptible"? I've bought hundreds of albums on CD over the last four decades, and only one of them has ever gone bad on me.

The first CD I ever purchased, manufactured in 1990, still sounds as good as the day I bought it.

In California, there certainly was. The US economy had already started its decline, but from such a high that well-to-do Americans hadn't noticed. By contrast, because Europe had had to be rebuilt after WWII, the general populace had benefitted far less from the postwar boom.

In 1982, my family had a relatively comfortable middle class existence, but buying a home computer that cost (at the time) about half as much as a one-bedroom apartment would have been absolutely unimaginable to my parents. The ZX81 they bought for me cost £99.