Yup yup.The Rebel Flag is a modern invention of racists, it was never officially flown in battle or otherwise. The one it was based on was square, making it a different flag, and only flew over one company in the Confederacy. Most Confederate soldiers wouldn't have even recognized it. Didn't have to, there were many Confederate flags but only one union flag. They only needed to recognize the one.
He was hired, performed the task he was hired for, and left, sounds like it to me.
Executives have used this for decades. Governments with armies hire mercenaries for the same reason, has gone on for centuries. Romans did it, it's so old. It's not a far off speculation here ... it's a well known, well practiced pattern of authoritarian behavior.
Why do you guys think bad cops who resign over and over keep getting hired the next city over?
It's actually a really old practice, "the first DRM". You'd place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you'd pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the "die if you didn't have the manual", but those let you go on ... just knowing you'd lose every single time.
It's this. It's a business decision. You don't spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there's contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.
Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.
But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.
So when 3 was announced? I haven't even looked at it.
This sounds like a joke but this is the explicit problem: doctors won't be the ones to do it.
You guys all knew that right? Doctors don't administer those chemicals for lethal injection. And they won't be administering gas either. Some po'dunk cop will.
Because doctors take an oath that begins "first, do no harm". This has forever been the problem of the very notion of "humane execution", there are no physicians involved. None. At any step.
Know what's just as effective? Bullets. But we can't call a firing squad humane with a straight face, and the witnesses remaining are traumatized, including the shooters. That truth exposes the truth of the death penalty. It's not about justice, but retribution - for the living. They're lynchings. Violent theatrics. That's the point.
They shouldn't be legal, it's barbaric. But you already said you weren't for them, so I'm just preaching to the ether.
And even those wouldn't be affected by a shutdown. When the government shuts down, it's not like the justice department grinds to a halt. Federal trials continue.
He's a fascist troll. Block him. Check his history. Classic "rack up reputation in game subs and then spam right wing hate speech everywhere else". Dude is a total fash troll, again, block him. Fedi works best when we block those guys because just responding to them is spreading their messages through your network.
Microsoft doesn't want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that's fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.
Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would've costed more to be able to run less.
As to being reliant on Windows, that's been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There's no good reason they shouldn't. The whole verified question goes out the window. That's huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They're still reliant on MS in major ways.
Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.
He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It's literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.
I really don't get why people think he's all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn't sell, theft and litigation.
This is important for managing heat on a human level in cities. So I'm not saying this is stupid.
But don't get this twisted: This is useless for addressing the climate change problem. It's not even a bandaid on a stab wound, this is equivalent to offering someone bleeding out a glass of warm water and fanning them with a brochure about new plastic doodads. A trillion trees planted tomorrow wouldn't even be a pebble on the pavement to that SUV flying down the fiery freeway.
I detect sarcasm. Y'all think those same minds weren't participating in any shit? Great minds led to climate change after all. Great minds are behind average rich chumps like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Great minds enable horrific things throughout history. It wasn't stupid people developing plastics and chemicals through the last century. So let's remove the idea that any of these people are inherently good.
Beyond that, compartmentalized knowledge is kind of the whole schtick of military intelligence. They're good at it. Arguably that's the whole core framework all military hierarchy is built on, otherwise it's just militia. We've built cities in secret before, military bases exist in secret all over the place. And many of those secrets involved quite literally the greatest minds of the century. Hard to keep quiet about bombs though, right? That was going to come to light. What if it weren't a bomb though? What if it could stay quiet?
Over and over and over history shows us great minds faced with the ethical problems of developing weapons of war and what do they do? Arrive at the nearly universally the same conclusions. Bigger weapons mean fewer wars, so they develop them. Archimedes to Oppenheimer, Da Vinci to Einstein. Tesla. Von Braun. Seriously all of them were weapons makers for the same idyllic reasons, "ending war".
But were they wrong? Isn't war much less than it ever was?
I'm a fan of looking to history for answers about our future because human beings - despite all the technological and social changes - really haven't had the time to truly change in even five thousand years. The brains still work largely the same as always, we're just given more tools to work with.
If a private, but not secret agency has access to the physics and can't engineer it, there's a question of why. As much as we'd like to disassociate engineering from discovery, they're linked together. Engineering leads to further observation leads to discovery and vice versa back the other direction. It's entirely possible there's "new physics" at play even if they're only theoretical to the Discovery Channel right now. Who's to say, really?
So while I'm not gonna disagree with you, and you're right there's a difference between engineering technology and physics itself, I still don't really see the distinction as that important to the discussion here.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, after all. We're talking about exactly that level of technology, commonly being called physics-defying by many engineers today. That's magic to common understanding, for all intents and purposes, even if it's possible that we could all eventually understand and demystify it given the education to do so.
Until then? Hard to close doors other than just "do we need this for the story". And aliens don't need to be there, hence my whole line of thinking above. That's just another example of "any secret is the exact secret I want it to be" kind of thinking. See also "everything I don't understand is a communist" or more recently, "everything I don't like is woke". I like to make reference to dinosaurs, because no one ever does. Why not? It could be dinosaurs in those crafts too! There's more evidence for that than aliens, right? We know 100% dinosaurs existed, here. They would've had much much more time to develop technology than we did, eons longer. So again why not? "Because it's absurd." Yep. It is. Every argument against it counts against aliens too.