Jesus_666

The Marathon AIs weren't all bad.

Leela meant well but was completely outclassed.

Durandal had been rampant since before the first game and only reached some degree of stability once he stole that Pfhor ship. He was basically designed to be unstable. While he was certainly an asshole with rather loose morals, he also made sure that Leela could warm humanity about the Pfhor and that his S'pht allies got what they wanted. He's on the verge of being an antihero.

Tycho... Well, we only saw him after the Pfhor rebuilt him and that version of him is pretty clearly a villain.

Thoth was barely conscious until he merged with Durandal. I can't say much about him. He is possibly involved with altering the timeline after the W'rkncacnter was released so I'd book him as a good guy.

(I am mad at the new Marathon but for different reasons than the AIs.)

You pay five million bucks to the government, presumably to be pocketed by the president. Under the legal concept of l'etat, c'est moi you have therefore substantially benefitted the United States.

Aren't the rebels the bad guys at that point? You know, with the whole gassing thing? The rebellion against the Galactic Empire doesn't exist, seeing how the Galactic Empire doesn't even exist yet.

I did that and what I find interesting is that exactly one MEP replied. Well, his assistant did but that still counts. The way the reply was worded even made clear that someone did read my mail specifically.

I'm not a friend of the BSW but I will acknowledge that their MEP Jan-Peter Warnke is in opposition and responsive (via assistant).

But even if the rest of the bunch was silent, do send those mails. Or send paper mail. Or a fax; we're taking about German MEPs after all. Either way, make your voice heard.

That's similar to how I do it, except that I also invert most FPSes.

Basically, my mental model is that I move the camera around. In third-person games with a from-behind perspective, the character's position is usually a fulcrum that the camera pivots around. So if I want to look up I have to pull the camera down. Hence inverted.

For first-person games I'm less consistent with inverting but I usually do. The camera may not pivot around a point ahead of it but in my head it pivots around a point directly at its front. Some games don't feel like that to me but most do.

That's also why I insist on inverting my mouse wheel, by the way – my mental model is not that I send up or down commands to the computer, it's that I push the document up or down with my finger like I would on a smartphone. The mouse wheel is a touchscreen surrogate. Having the document move up when I push it up feels wrong.

Mind you, the anime part came from some guys on the Internet combining a sped-up version of the original song with some dancing from the opening of a hentai show. (Or game? I don't remember.)

Then it went viral and the label marketed the hell out of it.

The original song is just another piece of generic dance music: Four on the floor beat; lyrics that vaguely describe dance steps; catchy because Swedish producers can't produce non-catchy songs.

I think major factors in people bitching about the Windows 10 EOL is that a) Windows 10 was explicitly marketed as the final version of Windows and b) Windows 11 is so unappealing that even companies are reluctant to upgrade.

Normally, that wouldn't be a big problem. We had dud releases before. Windows Vista had few friends due to compatibility issues but was workable. Besides, 7 was launched shortly after Vista's EOL. Likewise, Windows 8's absurd UI choices made it deeply unpopular but it was quickly followed by 8.1, which fixed that. And Windows 10 again followed shortly after 8's EOL (and well before 8.1's).

Windows 11, however, combines a hard to justify spec hike with a complete absence of appealing new features. The notable new features that are there are raising concerns about data safety. In certain industries (e.g. medical, legal, and finance), Recall/Copilot Vision is seen as dangerous as it might access protected information and is not under the same control that the company has over its document stores. That increases the vector for a data breach that could lead to severe legal and reputational penalties.

Microsoft failed to satisfyingly address these concerns. And there's not even hope of a new version of Windows releasing a few months after 10's EOL; Windows 12 hasn't even been announced yet.

It's no wonder that companies are now complaining about Windows 10's support window being too short.

I would take a screenshot of the invite and deliver a ten minute lecture on how this meeting is keeping me from actually doing my job.

Second picture is a screenshot of my team's backlog.

Locations don't matter; they'll throw me out of the meeting at the second picture at the latest.

In stereotypical winter you can't add enough layers since if you do add layers so your face doesn't hurt you get accosted by the police because going to public places in a balaclava hasn't been legal since the late 50s.

In winter as it actually happens you need fewer layers but they need to be waterproof because winter means rain at +2 °C.

One thing to note is that only some fridges don't have vents. Ones advertising "no frost" or "low frost" as a feature do have vents that serve to keep the air circulating and remove moisture from the air. They might still follow a different approach from American fridges, though.

The rationale here is that if you don't give handouts like that to major corporations, they'll go build their data center somewhere they do get handouts. And then you lose the tax income and jobs they generate.

Of course it sucks that the logic works like that but they do have the ball and the shareholders expect them to take it only to the most profitable location.

Yeah, and in the 70s they estimated they'd need about twice that to make significant progress in a reasonable timeframe. Fusion research is underfunded – especially when you look at how the USA dump money into places like the NIF, which research inertial confinement fusion.

Inertial confinement fusion is great for developing better thermonuclear weapons but an unlikely candidate for practical power generation. So from that one billion bucks a year, a significant amount is pissed away on weapons research instead of power generation candidates like tokamaks and stellarators.

I'm glad that China is funding fusion research, especially since they're in a consortium with many Western nations. When they make progress, so do we (and vice versa).