That was my first reaction, but the post actually says "Sequels and remakes". So given that there was a previous Dune film in 1984,it still fits in the list.

Yeah, but living expenses are fixed costs, so even percentages are tricky. A flat 50% tax on someone hypothetically earning 15000 a month is survivable, on someone who is earning 1500 it isn't.

I don't fly, and the last concert I've been to was before Corona hit, so, no. As for the internet, most of the stores that I've bought stuff from require no login and my browser is relatively well warded so I'm more certain than not that no discriminatory pricing is being offered.

You're mostly right, with one exception - there's no way there could be anything fair about the practice, since it exploits both an information asymmetry (store collecting data about you) and a negotiation asymmetry (store changes offer but you can adhere or get out, there's no counter-proposal from you) to royally screw you over. All this is is rentseeking on crack.

There's multiple differences here - one is that progressive taxation is based on the idea that if you're rich, you're using the commons and the services society provides to a greater extent, thus you should contribute more. On the other hand, there's nothing such that Wal-mart or Kroger is providing for you, they're simply taking a bet that you'll not walk away in disgust at seeing the price they toss at you.
Furthermore, you're overly optimistic in that financial dispositions are the only factor entering this - you could pull off tricks like noticing a customer really seems to like one brand of say, mayo and start cranking up the price, or even more atrociously, identify things which look like a necessity and amp up their price... or ,for instance, amp up the prices for people with full baskets because they're less likely to leave if they've already picked up a ton of wares.
The whole practice smells sky-high of bullshit, and I'm certainly not going to visit any store that has electronic price tags.

That can work for audio - Frank Zappa did this to archive 1" 12-track tapes - but in this case, it's probably a C-Format helical scan videotape. You would need an Ampex VPR or Sony BVH machine to play it back.

For 1982 I would assume C-Format, though you never can tell.

Star Wars through Return of the Jedi were available as CED discs, which is basically what you're describing.

There is an animated version of this, using the original soundtrack from the episodes. IMHO they did a really good job of it and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Several reasons. The early devices (CE3 and earlier) did this thing where the whole filesystem was stored in RAM. So if the handheld was left to go flat, or the application crashed hard enough to bring down the kernel too, the device would be factory reset and you'd have to reinstall everything.

The UI was, for the most part, Windows stuck on a phone screen. Start menu and all. PocketPC/Windows Mobile made some concessions to being a mobile device, Windows CE without the PocketPC shell just looked like a slightly scrunched up version of Windows 95. The touchscreens were almost all resistive ones so that you used a pen (or fingernail) to push the screen. I don't think they ever did multitouch even when the capacitive screens started to appear.

For a long time, the platform had memory constraints, in that each application could access up to about 16MB before the allocations started to fail. You had to perform a lot of gymnastics with memory mapping to get past that and that memory was a lot, lot slower to access than what you get via calloc or something. (I cheekily referred to it as 'XMS memory' in our application). I believe CE6 removed that limit - but it wasn't backwards compatible IIRC and you'd have to rebuild the app specifically for that platform. I don't think I ever saw CE6 hardware.

CE and even the Windows Mobile/PocketPC did quite well in industrial settings, and I think they're still using those on my local supermarket for, e.g. printing barcodes for reduced items. I had a run of about a decade programming these things before they became largely obsolete and the company switched focus.

The iPhone was rather disruptive, but more in a dog-in-the-manger way than as a viable replacement. Around this period - 2000-2012 - the industrial handheld market in Europe was largely a cottage industry serviced by small mobile development firms of say, 20 people each, maybe less. So. What did Apple do? They released a device where you had to sell your application through their own marketplace - bespoke applications which were supposed to be solely used by a government authority or a supermarket. I don't know what they were thinking. In order to distribute the application yourself, you had to have 500 employees and a Bradstreet number or somesuch - a US-centric requirement that basically made the iPhone unusable for commercial purposes. To my mind, at least, it displayed a staggering lack of understanding of how mobile devices were used industrially.

The other interesting thing was that the apps on the iPhone were basically fart apps sold for 99p each - and so some of our customers started to expect that a RAD development platform which had taken 8 years to make, should also be sold for 99p, economics be damned. This was not helpful for the industrial market.

Finally, Windows Phone 7 came along. And while that was built around CE7 or something, it only exposed a javascript API. This was back in the days when javascript was still a toy language. Imagine if someone put a phone on the market and only allowed it to be programmed in BASH. That was the way this announcement went down. Microsoft honestly expected that everyone would rewrite their C++ application stacks - with 10 years of sunk costs - in a language that was basically useless. It was easier to port to Android - since you could salvage large chunks of the C++ code and call them via JNI. Most developers did so, and having stabbed their developer base in the back, Microsoft made the shocked pikachu face when nobody developed for WP7.

CE kept ticking along in the pure industrial market but around the time of WP7 we were exiting it and moving on to other things.

Well... if you want to wait for the ideal champion with a flaming sword and white shining armour, be my guest. For the rest of us, Alexandra Elbakyan is enough.

This problem has become a lot worse very recently. Basically, the UK was beholden to EU standards until late 2019.

There were concerns that leaving the EU would make it more difficult to obtain the chemistry needed to run the water treatment plants. True to their promise to slash red tape, one of the governments last year made it legal to dump untreated sewage in the rivers. I think this was supposed to be to absolve them if the necessary treatment chemicals were unavailable, but of course since it was cheaper not to treat the water properly, all the water companies started to skip the treatment process with happy abandon just to cut costs.

The eight years of shelling of Doneck and Luhansk was sure peaceful.

We're in a story about an unelected group with long history of malfeasance towards poorer countries talks about setting up the exchange protocol for CBDCs, thus both proving CBDCs are in the putting and revealing plans of making the system even more intractable and inter-linked. There's absolutely nothing to worry about here, much like for the countries that took on "cheap" loans from IMF in the 60s, then turned into impoverished colonies when the interest rates sharply rose.

Combining every disadvantage of state fiat currency with every disadvantage of crypto.

Stuff 'em where the sun don't shine.