AnyOldName3

Returns and refunds happened because the EU warned them that if they didn’t, they’d create legislation so they’d have to, as they were already in a grey area under EU law. EA had a similar refund policy for games bought through Origin before Steam did.

Other than that, nearly everything you listed was done because it made business sense and would lead to more profit. Decoupling PC gaming from Windows by working on Linux means they’re not at the mercy of Microsoft’s whims, and was started at a time where it looked like Microsoft might make a version of Windows that could only install third-party software through the Windows Store. Discouraging kernel-level anti cheat discourages one of the last hurdles to Linux being able to play all Windows games. Supporting VR lets them still VR games through Steam.

Not being publicly traded lets them be concerned about their long-term profits above their short-term ones, so they won’t do things that tarnish their reputation nearly as often as their competitors, and can do multi-year projects. They look good because their competitors are bad rather than because what they do is altruistic.

Edit: I just did some maths. The Steam Deck has sold somewhere around 5 million units and a Windows licence costs somewhere around $50 to an OEM with a volume licensing deal. Both these figures are approximate as I couldn’t find precise numbers, but they’re enough for a ballpark figure. This means that Valve have saved around $250 million by shipping the Deck with SteamOS instead of Windows. Even if my figures are way off, it’s still a huge amount of money and goes a long way towards making all their work on Linux pay for itself.

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

What are you insinuating? It was perfectly justifiable to put our own soldiers right next to every single nuclear test we did, including flying aircraft and sailing ships through mushroom clouds, then withholding the soldiers’ medical records so they couldn’t prove radiation exposure and still to this day aren’t eligible for compensation.

It’s pretty plausible that Epstein would be suicidal after being locked up and would have killed himself if left unattended in his own jail cell with some rope, especially as giving him some rope would signal that he wasn’t going to get saved. The more sensible conspiracy theory is that he was taken off suicide watch intentionally to give him the opportunity.

You can jam the Windows UI by spawning loads of processes with equivalent or higher priority to explorer.exe, which runs the desktop as they’ll compete for CPU time. The same will happen if you do the equivalent under Linux. However if you have one process that does lots of small allocations, under Windows, once the memory and page file are exhausted, eventually an allocation will fail, and if the application’s not set up to handle that, it’ll die and you’ll have free memory again. Doing the same under every desktop Linux distro I’ve tried (which have mostly been Ubuntu-based, so others may handle it better) will just freeze the whole machine. I don’t know the details, but I’d guess it’s that the process gets suspended until its request can be fulfilled, so as long as there’s memory, it gets it eventually, but it never gets told to stop or murdered, so there’s no memory for things like the desktop environment to use.

The documentation was totally clear that calling squeeb would do that, and the official sample code only called squeebWithACondom for that exact reason except for one sample specifically illustrating the remote impregnation feature. It’s not Squeeb4J’s fault that third parties made tutorials with security holes, and it was irresponsible of the tech press to blame them. It wasn’t Dennis Ritchie’s fault when people demoed exploits in software that passed user-provided format strings to printf in C, everyone accepted it was the application’s fault for using printf irresponsibly.

Someone’s clearly confused GNU Scrimble, and Scrimble for Windows, a fork of GNU Scrimble which makes no changes to the program itself, but has an overcomplicated installer that provides a stripped-down MSYS2 environment which only includes GNU Scrimble’s direct dependencies (which turn out to be about 90% of a full MSYS2 install, excluding only the package manager, update system, and a few key Unix tools you’ll only realise aren’t present if you start using Scrimble Bash as your daily Bash shell and run a script that uses a POSIX-mandated but rarely used utility, and also awk for some reason, which causes problems squeebing certain file formats until you download an awk binary from the upstream MSYS2 project).

As a true Unix Philosophy application, GNU Scrimble itself wouldn’t integrate extra features that should clearly be standalone applications like a Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, or wide file support. Instead, it calls the existing Lisp interpreter, Pong implementation, and various tools to convert file formats into intermediate text representations that can be parsed through an unholy mix of grep, sed and awk that all GNU-based operating systems must always provide. After all, it’s better somehow to call a bash script that runs some awk snippets so your dependencies are only expressed at runtime than it is to link with libjson-glib.so.

You’re not throttling between 0% output and 100% output, as that takes weeks or months, and instead throttling within a limited range at the upper end of the output power. Because a nuclear reactor puts out so much power compared to a combined cycle gas turbine, going down to 80% power has a comparable impact to totally shutting down a gas turbine. It doesn’t need to be instant to be used for dynamic load - throttling a gas turbine isn’t as it takes time for the heat exchanger to warm up or cool down after increasing or decreasing the fuel flow, and time for the first turbine to speed up or slow down after the flow of the Brayton-cycle coolant changes, and then more time for the second heat exchanger to heat up/cool down and more time for the Rankin-cycle turbine to speed up or slow down as the flow of steam changes, and only then is the new desired output power achieved.

Wikipedia puts the average emission time for delayed neutrons at fifteen seconds, which while ludicrously slow compared to a bomb, is really fast compared to the day-night cycle that represents most dynamic load variance in a country with plenty of renewables or heavy industry that doesn’t operate at night time, so there’s plenty of time for the power output to respond as long as you’re restricting the range that it’s operating in.

It’s likely that my data’s out of date, and that graph does include it. If it didn’t, it’s hard to see how photovoltaics could kill enough people to have such a similar death rate to nuclear if accidents like Chornobyl are included.

The ones in service right now are mostly/all designed that way, but that’s a design decision rather than an inherent limitation. They cost basically the same to run whether they’re at maximum output or minimum, so they’re most cost-effective as base load and if you need responsive output, you can probably build something else for less money. If you ignore that and build one anyway, you only need fast motors on the control rods and the output can be changed as quickly as throttling gas turbines, but there’s no need for that if you know you’re just building for base load.

Lots of people die mining the materials for photovoltaics, even with emerging technologies that reduce rare earth usage, especially because the countries with a lot of rare earth mineral wealth mostly have terrible human rights, slavery and worker safety records. In principle, this could be reduced without technological changes, e.g. by refusing to buy rare earth metals unless they’re extracted in line with best practice and that can be proven (it’s typically cheaper to fake the evidence that your workers are happy, healthy and alive than keep them happy, healthy and alive), but then things get more expensive and photovoltaics are already not the cheapest.

Even when disasters like Chernobyl are included, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt than any of the alternatives. E.g. dams burst and people like building towns downstream of hydro plants. Even with wind where it’s basically only deadly due to accidents when installing and repairing turbines (e.g. people falling off, fires breaking out too abruptly to climb down), it happens often enough that it ends up more dangerous than nuclear. Burning gas, coal and biomass all work out much deadlier than renewables and nuclear, but if your risk tolerance doesn’t permit nuclear, it doesn’t permit electricity in any form.

It doesn’t help when all the senior employees from last time you built a reactor have retired and anyone who hasn’t retired was pretty junior the last time around. For projects where you have to get everything right the first time, so can’t just try things to see what works, it’s devastating to stop doing them if you ever might need to start again.

Sometimes people write their reasons for doing things down and other people read them and they don’t need to read anyone’s mind to know why they said they did something.

It doesn’t really even need an exception. Working means disconnecting when more than 20 A are drawn, and this doesn’t do that. The rule works just fine, and counterexamples always boil down to someone misunderstanding the design goals and using a bad definition of works.

They used that TLD because it had the same letters as Marxist-Leninist, not because they’re from Mali. They’re not from Mali.

It’s not even early modern English. Shakespeare is Early Modern English, and takes more effort to understand than this does. This just uses words and phrases that have been unfashionable for one or two hundred years, and were generally posher than most people used even when they were in vogue.

It’s not Kessler Syndrome until it’s so bad that we can’t feasibly launch anything new. A single cascading collision chain might calm down again after breaking a lot of stuff without any catastrophic long term impact if all the debris ends up either in a stable orbit that can be predicted and avoided by other objects, or unstable orbits that decay until the debris falls out of orbit.

It makes sense, but it also makes sense to design society so that situations where it’s helpful happen as rarely as possible. If some people are predisposed to being a good firefighter, it doesn’t negate the fact that you don’t want buildings to catch fire in the first place, so you still want to teach children not to play with matches, teach adults not to keep lighter fuel near their heater, and ban companies from selling combustible cladding to insulate tower blocks. Prevention is better than cure. You just then have a load of people who aren’t great at being anything except a firefighter, ready for fires that never happen, and under the current system, forced either into jobs they’re bad at, or into chronic stress to get consistent productivity.

As a counterpoint, I’ve had Ubuntu’s installer and grub’s updater overwrite and break Windows’ boot files several times, but never had the opposite happen (I’ve had both destroy themselves, though). Thankfully, I know how to rebuild the necessary parts of a Windows install, so it’s never been a catastrophe, but it’s irritating to see what’s always been the source of the problems I’ve had be held up as infallible. Possibly this is a problem unique to Ubuntu - I’m happy to blame Canonical - so maybe it could be entirely sidestepped with other distros.