They're within the European Broadcasting Area like all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea (plus some adjacent ones). Bring in the EBA is more important here than being in Europe is. There's no reason why Egypt or Iraq can't participate.
Okay, there is one – most Arab countries refuse to participate while Israel does. But if Israel didn't participate they'd be perfectly fine with showing up.
Oh, and there's one big exemption: Australia can participate because they've been such big ESC fans for so long that we invited them for the 60th one as a one-off and then decided to keep them in because they're cool. It's pretty wholesome, which is very much in tune with the spirit of the ESC.
Small gadget? An angled high-CRI pocket flashlight with a magnetic base. I like the Manker E02 series but it's just one option of several.
It's small enough to fit in the tiny pocket on my jeans, gives good light, can be used right from the pocket if I need my hands free, and runs on AAAs (or a 10440 lithium battery for brighter light but worse endurance).
The magnetic base is super useful because I can often just plop the flashlight down while working on something. When I'm upgrading my desktop PC I can just stick the light to some part of the chassis and get light right where I need it.
That's pretty damn good for something that cost me thirty bucks with the 10440 included. And the battery even has a built-in USB-C charging port.
Well, yeah, if the car makers can add exceptions to the law and turn it upside down then the law becomes useless.
I explicitly wouldn't allow that exception. If larger cars are less efficient then disincentivizing their use by means of higher taxes is clearly beneficial to society. If you want to drive that three-ton gas guzzler then you can surely afford that 30% higher vehicle tax. If you can't, might I interest you in this comparatively efficient and tax-reduced Subaru Sambar?
Mind you, I would apply different rules to things like semi trucks that (at least in my part of the world) you can't drive without a special license. But if you can drive it with a regular European class B license then the tax should scale progressively with size and mass because making larger and less efficient cars unattractive is specifically the point.
Get the city to install chicanes with trees planted in them. You can't just roll over those and a landship like that is going to have to slow down a lot to maneuver through them.
But yeah, I'd love tax brackets depending on car size. Huge trucks pay more, kei cars pay less. That would make a lot of sense for city liveability and road maintenance.
Of course, the effect is not at all as intense as alcohol or other drugs, but there are effects. There are also, to my knowledge, some indications, that a lot of people with ADHD use it to self-medicate, since it seems to affect them differently, like other drugs do, too.
Sounds plausible; nicotine is a stimulant by means of triggering the release of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. That is pretty much what an ADHD brain lacks.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I fully agree. Undefined behavior is terrible UX and a huge security risk.
Undefined behavior was kind of okay when RAM and storage were measured in kilobytes and adding checks for this stuff was noticeably expensive. That time has passed, though, and modern developers have no business thinking like that, even ones working on low-level languages.
My girlfriend has this when she plays Palworld. She switches between two of my computers to do so and on both Palworld will start thinking it has the full screen while the menu bar is still present.
Usually, alt-tabbing out and back in helps, as does using alt + enter twice.
Oddly enough, I don't get this behavior on either computer so it seems to be connected to something user-specific.
Yeah, that's basically the kind of logic you use when designing a low-level programming language: If we didn't define what happens here then anything that happens is correct behavior and it's up to the user to avoid it.
Of course applying that logic to a GUI application intended for a comparatively nontechnical audience is utter madness.
Ever since the BE200 debacle I don't know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that's already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?
Yes, I've literally seen baked goods advertised like that. One bakery in my town is proud of its bigger-than-average pretzels and puts the weight right there on the ad posters.
The idea was to have some kind of urgency but only once the players were far enough to understand the basics of what was going on. To that end, the date was supposed to be vague so that the GM was free to say "you figured out that the ritual will happen right after summer ends – which is in less than a week".
Then he forgot that the timeframe was vague when I wrote the letter and told me to pick a date.
Unfortunately, this cut out a side plot where our party would've hired another party to hunt down some artifact. That artifact retroactively got downgraded to a red herring for time reasons.
On the other hand, we got an absolutely precious scene where the one party member who wasn't magic-affine and didn't want to be involved with any supernatural stuff had to ride an unnaturally fast six-legged half-demon horse in order to catch up with the bad guys.
Also, it cut down on all the "three wizards and a vintner have breakfast and discuss the state of the investigation" episodes. We had a lot of those.
I once fast-forwarded a complex plot through a GM-sanctioned bit of fluff.
The party had been invited by their uncle who turned out to be recently murdered when they arrived. Of course they investigated. At one point I had my character wrote a letter to the rest of the family to inform them of what was going on. I actually produced the letter as a handout. Since I had no idea about the date I asked the GM and he told me to pick anything in summer.
The GM s happy with the handout and it was deemed canonical.
A few sessions later he noticed that I had picked something ahead the end of the summer and the bad guys' plot was about to kick off at a specific date right after summer ends. So suddenly the adventure went from "careful slow-burn investigation" to "mad rush to the location of the finale".
They're within the European Broadcasting Area like all countries adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea (plus some adjacent ones). Bring in the EBA is more important here than being in Europe is. There's no reason why Egypt or Iraq can't participate.
Okay, there is one – most Arab countries refuse to participate while Israel does. But if Israel didn't participate they'd be perfectly fine with showing up.
Oh, and there's one big exemption: Australia can participate because they've been such big ESC fans for so long that we invited them for the 60th one as a one-off and then decided to keep them in because they're cool. It's pretty wholesome, which is very much in tune with the spirit of the ESC.