Typically a brick can control who can enter the building. Security man the doors for a few days until the new system is in.

I’m sure there’s a good reason (or at least a believable reason) but I’m curious now, why can’t copies be made of the binary/data and start trying to get it running on a VM or another box?

Can I say the entire Discworld series? Sure they’re funny fantasy stories, but I reckon Pterry’s view on humanity formed a lot of how I think about the world.

Also Dark Money by Jane Mayer.

Why does he have rights to use sudo in the first place?

I doubt it’s a recent thought, knowing civil engineers, they’re absolute perverts when it comes to concrete.

It might, but correct me if I’m wrong here (not a USer) but isn’t the military/GI bill a huge tool for social mobility in the US?

Just to add a point - if the farmers do end up folding and selling off, who’s going to buy the land? My money would be on large corpos.

It’s utterly bizarre, I’m looking to replace a Mondeo estate some time in the next couple of years. Frankly, SUVs are not a viable alternative - they have no boot space, they are less functional by a long chalk in that regard.

No you won’t.

London and Paris can probably handle European financial services. My guess would be tech, we have no comparable chip design houses.

Neither of these companies design or sell the CPUs or GPUs we rely on. China has been trying to build a comparable CPU for years and is still years behind the curve.

What do we do for CPUs/GPUs?

Evan?

Chinese curry, however, is a British invention, bizarrely.

You can reduce anything like that if you want.

Italian food is tomatoes, meat and pasta or tomatoes, meat and bread.

Seagate have never once secretly changed the underlying disk technology on a NAS grade drive to one utterly unsuited for use in a NAS drive and then sold it as a NAS grade drive at a premium price because it’s a NAS grade drive. So there’s that.

This is a surprisingly divisive topic every time I see it or suggest it. I reckon the divisor is “people who use and work across timezones a lot” and “people who don’t”. Fuck I hate timezones.

In Europe? Also the UK.

Old post of mine, I need to get round to making a comm for this stuff - in terms of European BlueBrixx and Cobi are all that I’m aware of, BlueBrixx use Chinese bricks too though, there’s not much avoiding it. As for a particular set, I’ve got a tallneck in the backlog that’s largely technic, is huge and is well under £200 delivered ~7k parts if I remember right.

So, as far as I’m aware BlueBrixx use a brick manufacturer called gobricks in China - these are generally considered top tier. Mould King also use gobricks - they do some good start wars/space/car stuff (not clone kits, Mould King are pretty legit, as far as I’m aware they license/pay MOC designers for plans for the most part as well).

Other brands I don’t have experience with (but have a really good rep) are CaDa, Pantasy and Rastar. CaDa and Rastar both license IPs.

IMO JieStar are also a pretty good brand, they are a brick manufacturer and a set manufacturer. I’ve never had an issue with a JieStar set, their bricks/clutch is a little tighter than Lego which is sometimes beneficial, sometimes a little annoying, but it’s never caused an issue. (I’ve build a couple of 5k+ brick sets from JieStar - worst I had was a single malformed brick that I just hid). They make clone kits and original IP. (Some cool little 50 pc sets you can pick up for £1-2.

Reobrix is the other brand I like, they use JieStar bricks but make their own sets and license MOC designer work. Have some interesting aircraft/vehicles. Their cars are good, their B2 bomber was a bigger set, some of it was a little fiddly, but it holds together - it had 1-2 bricks missing, but I picked up replacements on bricklink for pennies.

I also pick up the odd no-name brand from AliExpress, tbh they’ve mostly been fine too, a couple were mediocre (I didn’t have high expectations £15 for 1000pc sets, they were fine for the price tbh, the bricks were fine for one set, a bit too little clutch on the other - but honestly both look fine when they’re assembled. I wasn’t disappointed considering the price).

In terms of ordering -

YOURWOBB

Youmko/Barweer

Marstoy

I’ve ordered from all 3, they’ve all delivered what they said they would. YOURWOBB doesn’t do clone sets, all original IP (and you can sort by brand) youmko are a mix, though mostly original stuff. Marstoy officially don’t sell clone sets, however they do sell “Brick kits”. If you go on the site you’ll see a lot of stuff with names like M12345 - take M off the name and reverse the number, this is the corresponding Lego set (eg. M12345 would be Lego set 54321)

There’s loads on AliExpress too - usual rules apply here, but choice, buy an item that has a lot of buyers with good reviews. If you buy a MOC off AliExpress chances are the original designer isn’t being compensated - many people will go and buy the design off rebrickable to compensate the designer, but no obligation.

For minifigs there’s:

RebuildVenus

This is the same company as Marstoy, free shipping over $17.

I’ve paid for the year, so I’ll do my damnedest to run up their gippity bill.