a browser and a long-running podcast.

I feel like there should be an easy and common file transfer protocol, like a more straightforward bittorrent,FTP,MTP to exchange with these devices.

That's great! I've been looking for something for a while. Great features from my point of view:

- email newsletters, especially with offline mails (no remote images) since theya can go easily through workplace gateyways for those of us who work in secure areas. Didn't see yet if yours were.

- sync and integrate with everything, e-readers, nextcloud, browsers...

- PWA

Good luck!

I just spent 10 minutes in the Grimm dictionary checking if there was ever a case where wegen would be followed by accusative....

Interestingly, they tend to say wegen comes from "von wegen" with the meaning of "by ways of" making genitive more evident.

To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).

Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).

Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.

In the medieval era in Europe few were generally professional, in the sense that it was their full time job even in peacetime. Like you said the Kings retinue would be one of the few exceptions. Since the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire there just wasn’t the concentration of resources in Europe for maintaining standing armies. Most were effectively a reserve force, somewhat akin to the. National Guard in the US hat could be “called up” in the event of a war.

Military mercenary companies were absolutely a thing (probably as early as 10th century, although they were also definitely a thing during the Roman empire), but they were very different from your typical peasant.

Conscription and Mercenary companies became more prevalent as the scale of warfare increased, and the early gunfire which necessitated coordinated volley fire.

There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.

Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.

It's unlikely they were muzzle loading lying down. They could maybe kneel at times, but the barrel had to be vertical for reloading.

At some point they offered a free Cygnet if you bought one of their other models.

The first gear that Bell made was clearly a copy of Eurocopter's, though they claimed otherwise, and because of this they couldn't / didn't want to move on with certification and production. A lot of this can be considered as not being patent infrigement (development and experimentation, prior art claims...).

They slightly modified the gear on the production models. Eurocopter claimed the slightly modified gear is essentially the same (likely true) and thus still infringes on the patent (the court ruled otherwise).

The judge said the new modified gear is okay but ordered the old ones to be destroyed.

A Pyrrhic tactical victory for Eurocopter (kept their patent at great cost) and a strategic defeat (as Bell is essentially still selling their tech).

And it will come back to hunt bell, as there ip can no be invalidated in europe and get a tactical defeat in the tit for tat that the ip-laws have decayed into.