RTÉ (Ireland’s national broadcaster) has a 404 page with a nostalgic touch for anyone who grew up here in the 1980s: https://www.rte.ie/404

I recall watching, some years ago, a documentary about the making of Tetris in which one of the contributors noted how much less colourful public spaces were in the advertising-free Soviet Union compared to the West.

Which isn't to say that a better balance couldn't be struck (in the West and elsewhere) now, but 'cancer' is the sort of thing you want to eradicate rather than moderate.

I would imagine the authoritarian nature of the Soviet Union would suppress other displays of colour also. Much of the colour in my city is street art

https://www.christchurchnz.com/christchurch/arts-and-culture...

So you think the reason the Soviet union was less colourful was because there wasn't ads?

You realize that advertising isn't what created coloured paints or what allows us to plant flowers right?

> So you think the reason the Soviet union was less colourful was because there wasn't ads?

I think it can have been a contributory but not a determinative factor. Mainly, I was just relaying an interesting observation, about the impact of advertising on public spaces, that I hadn't heard elsewhere, or previously, which prompted me to think that eradicating advertising probably isn't an optimum solution.

Last Train Home: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1512201/

ys1010 is (accurately) describing the marginal rate which effectively applies to all income above a threshold (although the different taxes/charges have different thresholds). It’s quite the thing when it kicks in.

As such, the software which makes up "Android" resembles OS X to me: open source in parts (even large parts), but the bit which most people (including developers) use is closed source and restricted to running only on sanctioned hardware.

I wonder whether, after he returns to Earth, Cmdr Hadfield will expect things to hang in the air for him; looks habit-forming.

That, and I wonder if he will get bummed out looking at something on a really high shelf, or a cobweb up in an unreachable corner. The old muscle memory quickly telling him how much force to kick off from the floor with to get there. And then his higher brain realizing that he is stuck to the floor. Like a 3-d prisoner forever trapped in Flatland.

Just be careful if he hands you a beer...

It would have been better for aspirant attendees to have been able to put the price of the tickets into an escrow attached to Google Wallet and/or pre-authorise the transaction with their payment provider.

It's a quasi-random lottery. If the client-side code is similar to last year's, then the Javascript on the holding page polls the server at random intervals for an "available" ticket, which are released at random intervals and/or as orders fail to go through (e.g. payment times out, etc).

I had this as well, but the payment was ultimately declined.

Same here, using a Mastercard.