The high end PC part market, especially GPUs, is heavily controlled by scalpers as well, similar to brand new consoles.

Even worse? Senior devs that are confidently incorrect but are trusted completely because they created an “amazing” VBA macro for Excel 97 once.

Just a minor correction: the 100$ one time deposit cannot be reclaimed manually. Instead, it gets automatically returned once your game hits 1000$ in sales.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/appfee

The purpose of this fee is to block low effort automated scam games from misusing the shop.

Many successful indie devs have voiced that the 30% is actually impossible to beat for them if they tried other distribution approaches. Some even closed down their existing alternatives including self hosted shops which would grant them 100%, simply because the overhead costs ruin the percentage for them, plus a whole lot of time and effort that have to go into maintaining that.

Yes, steam has a very strong monopoly position on the games distribution market. That is problematic for all the usual reasons with monopolies. What makes steam unique is that the company behind it, Valve, has demonstrated in all their efforts that maximizing short term profits is not necessarily their prime directive. This can obviously change at any time, so being wary is always good, but convenience is simply extremely attractive to everyone involved, devs and customers alike.

The Germans never got even close to where the sphinx is located in WW2. The Allied stopped the Axis advance in North Africa hundreds of kilometres west of there.

I stand corrected. But I think any “odd” angles such as in this case, where the rotation seems to be somewhat at 20 degrees, would be even more uncommon.

Oddly, this also seems like a very weird Nazi token. Hitler’s name is misspelled: he never was called “Adolph”, ever.

Also, the Nazi swastika is always supposed to be tilted at 45°, also not the case here.

Almost if it’s not authentic at all.

The device needing more power won’t get it, simple. Depending on what device it is, it will automatically throttle down so it needs less power, but obviously it will also deliver less performance while so throttled. And if the power is missing during a very sensitive part of a process so there’s no time to throttle down, your PC could blue screen or restart.

It’s very unlikely to suffer any long-term damage from this.

Japan had a lot more wood-only city buildings back then compared to the colder climate in Europe, where more massive stone architecture was common. In Europe, cellars are also common/default, unlike in Japan.

During high heat firestorms, most of the wooden material burns up and the ash gets carried away. The photo definitely shows cleanup and very likely was not taken the day after the bombing, but a single firestorm definitely can produce these results, much like other examples in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Würzburg,… Except those had much more stone rubble standing afterwards.

Game passes exist for PC as well, and offer even more variety there.

Boot time should never take 30sec on PC as well. But most consoles are actually not much faster in boot and loading times. People tend to compare a PC booting from cold with a console just booting from sleep/hibernation mode.

Boot times on PC however can easily be further optimized, especially when not using Windows for gaming. A gaming Linux distro will be faster by leagues, even in a cold start.

It was announced that they all committed “schwere Verbrechen”. That means it’s all felonies and capital crimes. I do characterize people who commit capital crimes as scum, because those are by definition never small misconducts or accidents. Felony convictions for capital crimes need proof of malicious intent. So there really is incredibly little room left to feel bad for the criminals.

Why do people fall for these stupid populistic statements?

We in Germany value human rights. We have some of the most pro-asylum laws and culture in the world. Which is part of the reason right wing parties like the AfD get popular.

The problem is, not every human is a saint, not even asylum seekers. Some come here without having a valid reason for asylum, because they are not actually persecuted. Others come here with the express intent to criminally exploit our welfare system. There’s lots of reasons to come here, but not all of them warrant asylum. These people should seek to immigrate properly like anybody else and not exploit our hospitality offered to people in need.

Now, under our previous Merkel government, we welcomed hundreds of thousands of refugees in an unusually short timeframe. Our chronically overworked and slow bureaucracy became even easier to exploit, many could simply wait out time limits on their asylum requests, making them automatically accepted without any check for validity.

I was an active volunteer helping arriving refugees get accommodated in their assigned first quarters (often old empty barracks, I helped with trips to all kinds of bureaucratic necessities, but also got a central free Wi-Fi set up for everyone to use and stuff like that), and funnily enough the most vivid calls for stricter handling of asylum requests and punishments for rule-breakers came from all the legitimate refugees: those were some of the most decent people, and they hated being associated by their status with any criminal refugees. The assigned building security and police quickly learned that they actually had to be swift in picking up fresh offenders, before street justice would be applied by their “fellow” refugees.

In short: We have laws and we try to follow, them. It’s not always easy.

Also, asylum is different from immigration, I feel many people forget that. If conditions in your place of origin have improved, you are expected to leave. Asylum is inherently temporary, contrary to migration. And if you violate the trust and resources your host nation has given you, you should suffer legal consequences, just like any regular citizen. Committing hard felony crimes is obviously not a nice way to repay that trust, and as consequence we ask you to leave. If you refuse to do so in a (very) sufficient timeframe, we can use it executive power (police) to force you.

Last but not least… Each of these criminals even got 1000€ cash upon exiting the plane in their home country, just to ensure they have zero risk of having to live in inhuman conditions while they get reacquainted in their home society ( e.g. get an apartment and a job). Because that risk alone would be reason enough to make even the worst terrorist ineligible for deportation. Because it’s a basic human right to not have to live in extreme poverty and/or hunger.

I think that’s pretty much the opposite of “shitting on human rights” and definitely not what I expect many other nations would do with such foreign felons.

I find it amusing that you believe German bureaucracy to be versatile and efficient enough to be able to be steered so quickly by spontaneous political will.

No, deportations are rare because we take asylum rights as a basic human right extremely seriously and there are an unbelievable amount of reasons a deportation can be called off. Each of these deportations takes months, if not years of preparation by the interior ministry ( executive), leading to lots of legal consultations and usually legal battles in court due to appeals, intense diplomatic talks with the recipient country ( especially in this case, because Germany refuses direct diplomatic ties with the Taliban and Qatar had to play middle -man) and only then the actual forced deportation itself can be tactically planned and organized. And there’s tons of very specific rules, even for how and when police may or may not pick up a deportee during the night and if/what charter flights can be used.

So definitely no spontaneous politicking. The change in policy to start enforcing existing extradition orders more rigorously started years ago when the current government got elected. It’s a very slow and arduous process still.

Just a small correction: the involved German states did not “make it a point to hide” the individual crimes from being published. Instead this happens because we in Germany place a comparably very high value on privacy. And yes, even criminal scum gets theirs protected by neither naming them nor their crimes. Even convicted criminals’ names are never published on principle unless they have become public figures through other means anyway.

And the crimes were not detailed because knowing the specific combinations of crimes and sentences would make it too easy to identify them, given there’s only 28 of them.

The idea of protecting privacy so much is that by having completed their sentences, they should have the same opportunity as anyone else in life and not be “tarnished” forever.

Why do you consider telegram private? It’s a pretty bad option for that. They are only using true end-to-end encryption when using the explicit “secret chat” feature, which is limited to one-on-one still, afaik.

“Normal”/default encryption gets resolved on telegram servers, so your clear text messages are sitting there for them to do whatever they want. Given that telegram is based in UAE and has knownRussian management influence,I’d be extra hesitant.

It also is for-profit and closed-source for the servers ( only clients are open source), so nobody knows what the servers really do.

If you care about privacy, go use Signal or any Matrix-based messenger such as Element. Especially because they lack zero of the comfort and usability that Telegram offer, but are much more secure.

You actually have gotten a bad explanation. There’s no such thing as being “a little too fast” which would cause this effect, and there definitely is no “spiraling out” due to inherent speed/momentum.

An object in orbit of another remains in orbit as long as its horizontal velocity is high enough to not be pulled into a collision with the parent, but low enough to not escape the gravitational pull altogether. The closer to the parent, the stronger gravity affects the object, so you have to go faster horizontally to keep “missing” the parent, making gravity only pull you into a circle around it instead. That’s why it’s also called orbital speed: the object is not going straight in a line, it travels at speed in an orbit.

If you want to change an orbit, you need to accelerate or decelerate. This energy has to come from somewhere. And obviously, the direction you accelerate in matters. If you speed up horizontally, increasing your orbital speed, you’ll get further away from the parent, but by moving further away, your orbital speed will decrease and be lowest at your furthest point. Then, if you don’t keep accelerating, you’ll start to get closer to the parent again, which makes you go faster. This is an elliptic orbit.

If you go fast enough horizontally, you eventually can get so far away that the parent’s gravity influence becomes negligible, and the gravitational influence of another parent matters more. This is called reaching escape velocity. If you leave earth orbit, this is usually the sun.

If you were to simply slow down the object in its orbital speed, the object would get closer to its parent until it collides.

If instead of accelerating the object “forward”/horizontal to human observer on earth, you’d accelerate “up”/away from the earth, you interestingly would not cause the object to get further away from its parent. Yes, you’d move higher up, but that would also mean that you equally slow down along the “forward” axis. So as explained before, if you stop accelerating, the object will start being pulled by gravity again until it reaches its now even closer than before proximity to its parent, half an orbit later on the other side. Because it’s now closer to the parent, it has sped up and will then start moving away again, another elliptic orbit has been achieved.

And if you accelerate “sideways”, so neither away from the surface nor forward along the orbital path, you actually change very little: you only affect the inclination of the orbit. Usually we think of objects going around the equator, but they don’t have to. An orbit can go any which angle, even rotating around the poles, going South to North or vice versa.

So long story short, how does the moon speed up? It doesn’t have and rocket engines or similar. The reason is the vast difference the earth and the moon rotate around themselves. The earth takes 24h to rotate. The moon takes roughly 27.3 days to rotate a single time. This causes the Earth to “push” the global tidal waves around its oceans much faster than the Moon gets pushed. This actually causes the moon to get “dragged along” a tiny little bit on every tidal rotation. This not only speeds up the rotation of the moon itself: the moon is so slow that it doesn’t have time to transfer all that rotational energy before the tidal wave on Earth has moved on the surface to be a bit on front of the Moon. This is the moment where the Earth’s center of gravity is a tiny bit “forward” of the middle of the Earth. This in turn pulls the moon forward along its orbital path, speeding it up horizontally. Obviously, this also means that Earth’s rotation gets actually slowed down by the same amount.

All these effects are incredibly tiny! The moon moves “away” at 3.8 cm per year, whereas it will take 50 years for an earth day to be a single millisecond longer.

Inherited a Hilti Hammer drill from my dad that was used for basically everything in construction and demolition he ever did since before I was born - around 4 decades ago. It was and is the tool he and now me always go to when cheaper drills can’t deal with the problem. Be it hammering through super massive concrete walls or enduring hours-long destruction sessions, it just does the job.

Nowadays it looks like a utter piece of junk that got tumble dried with rocks, but it’s as reliable as on day one.

A mesh surface is not automatically longer lasting. Quite the contrary, actually:

Mesh is “less material per surface”. This means more stress is put on the strands than for a full cover upholstery.

Mesh is open, which over time means that dirt and grime will start gathering in the cushion beneath the mesh. This can end up pretty nasty over the years of heavy usage.

In the end, it’s always about proper materials: good quality foam exists and are used by some, but obviously it’s usually more expensive. Same for the surface material: there’s super cheap PVC leather that will start flaking off in weeks, and there’s high quality PVC leather that will last a decade. Or just go for real leather if you got the money. All of the closed surfaces have the advantage of being incredibly easy to clean and maintain: simply wipe them with a wet towel. For real leather, only a tiny bit of extra care is needed ( waxing ).

Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it’s fair to call them that.

Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.

*rogue Roguelike

Though rougelike certainly sounds like an interesting genre too 😉

Regarding the profit incentive: providing free school lunches or medical/ hygiene supplies does not hurt profits. As the meals/supplies will still have to be sourced from the market, it probably will now be a few big contacts with big suppliers that will cover entire school districts.

The costs of these contracts will be a public burden unless they implemented a specific focus tax to pay for it, so it will come out of various broad tax pools. This means everyone pays a little bit so every kid has something to eat. Even if you don’t have any kids or if your kid gets homemade lunch packs. This is where the “social” aspect comes in.

Other countries, many of them European, actually go a step in the other direction: if you do not have kids, you actually pay a premium on your income tax. And that is generally accepted, because for society to live on, obviously kids are necessary. And if you don’t support society by raising kids, you at least help cover some of the associated costs. These premiums are explicitly used to fund kindergartens, schools etc…

An often valid capitalist criticism of public large contracts on infrastructure such as this is that the public offices tend to be notoriously bad negotiators, accepting worse deals than private companies would. This is because there’s little to no incentive for them to reach good terms. It also makes the process more vulnerable to corruption and politicking on a grander scale. These are not guaranteed to happen, good governance can definitely avoid this. But public governance simply isn’t that great to begin with in many areas.