You can already theoretically do this with the doors on a Jeep, but it hasn’t exactly turned into an epidemic.

Low towing capacity and an outrageously miserable bed size. Less than five feet? The powertrain of this should have been put in a station wagon, not a “truck.”

All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)

Hell, most of the major labels post tracks themselves to sponge up that sweet ad revenue. You can just use the tool of your choice to download the audio straight out of it if you decide you want to keep it for later.

I also haven’t forgiven them for trying to sue people for simply watching the Geohot video, or removing alternative OS functionality from the PS3, or for trying to reinvent MMC/SD memory cards in a different shape and charge more for for them. Hell, I still haven’t forgiven them for SonicStage.

I won’t buy anything from Sony for any reason. I don’t care what it is. I made damn sure my most recent camera purchase wasn’t a Sony, no matter what the reviews said. That’s because they pissed me off 20 years ago and haven’t demonstrated any improvement in behavior since. Nerds have long memories.

Yes, but OnShape is only “free.” FreeCAD explicitly allows you to retain ownership of your own work, without requiring it to be percolated through someone else’s cloud servers.

I will go back to carving things by hand out of stone before I rely on cloud based design tools.

FreeCAD all the way.

The commercial CAD packages are all subscription schemes at this point which are designed around the dual purpose of extracting as much money as possible from businesses and nickel-and-diming hobbyists to death. The megacorporations that own them are actively evil and doing business with them should be avoided at all times.

Blender is not a CAD tool. You can bully it into kinda-sorta doing something that resembles CAD work with plugins, but that’s not what it’s for.

Sketchup is about the same caliber as TinkerCAD and LibraCAD is 2D only.

That leaves FreeCAD.

It’s a great trio of games (Legends 1 and 2, and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne) with quite a bit of depth and if you ask me a fantastic art direction for their time. The one thing I will say is that the controls did not age very well. You get used to it after a while. These games predate modern dual-stick movement and aiming and use the shoulder buttons for strafing. I think the Playstation versions are superior due to the increased number of buttons available on the controller.

It is now. It wasn’t at first.

It was part of the Valve Orange Box and that was a big deal at the time. There was also a huge deal of whining from people who paid for it when Valve announced they were changing it to a free to play model.

To be fair, they haven’t managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that’s actually compelling in the intervening years that weren’t rereleases. “Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!”

Megaman Legends 3.

“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”

I think a sizable fraction of the world’s population is still salty about that, and it’s been 14 years.

Definitely not. Test Drive Unlimited 2 leaps to mind, which while it certainly had racing events and racing related content in it, you could also just drive around doing nothing in particular as much as you wanted.

There are several other racing oriented games that nevertheless had open worlds and you’re never actually forced to race anybody in any of them, albeit usually at the expense of sacrificing any game progression and thus having a rather limited vehicle selection. Need For Speed Underground 2 and Forza Horizon, for instance.

when a calculator from the 80s can do the same thing.

1970’s! The little blighters are even older than most people think.

Which is why I find it extra hilarious / extra infuriating that we’ve gone through all of these contortions and huge wastes of computing power and electricity to ultimately just make a computer worse at math.

Math is the one thing that computers are inherently good at. It’s what they’re for. Trying to use LLM’s to perform it halfassedly is a completely braindead endeavor.

I already do. Flip a coin: Heads, the car is operating itself and is therefore being operated by a moron. Tails, the owner is driving it manually and therefore it is being operated by a moron.

Just be sure to carefully watch your six when you’re sitting at a stoplight. I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting right in the center of the lane, because the odds are getting ever higher that I’ll have to scoot out of the way of some imbecile who’s coming in hot. That’s hard to do when your front tire is 24" away from the license plate of the car in front of you.

Um, well the other elephant in the room is that if you cap off the port and never use it, it’s also irrelevant what its service lifetime is since you’re never going to use it.

I have absolutely no idea what I’d do with this but I want one.

There you go.

And the Greeks were reportedly setting ships on fire with sunlight and mirrors millennia ago.

I’m positive competent nerds make up none of their earnings, because we’ve all been pirating Microsoft software ever since we were tall enough to reach the keyboard.

He did what?

Nature really is out of balance lately.

Photovalic solar was invented in 1954 and has been readily available since the 1960’s. In 1963 Japan was powering a lighthouse with it. And Solar One was operational in 1982.

If we gave a rat’s ass about solar at the time we easily could have done it also.