They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.
Meat and Dairy aren't being overproduced or overconsumed, even if they have risks, they are standing against the biggest problems facing world health. Dieticians might be asking people to replace meat and dairy with asparagus and quinoa but people are fat and malnourished because they're eating too much corn and other low nutrition density, high calorie foods.
This stands as a good reminder that if your assumption is that everyone else is wrong there's a good chance it's actually you.
It gets a lot worse when you realize that state propaganda operations can greatly maximize on this.
You are quite correct that this is very old news (Cambridge Analytica was how many years ago now?) and that state propagandists have been using this for years now (I seem to recall the last TWO presidential elections being heavily influenced by a FUCKING RAFT of state misinformation campaigns by multiple foreign nations, and even some domestic thinktank operations).
I agree that the technology itself is not directly harmful. If it was kept inside word processors as advanced text prediction, or advanced grammar checking or something, it would be a fine, safe, and legitimate use of what it really is-- however, Money Talks, and if the empowered-and-unscrupulous demographic out there can further increase their grifting, *THEY FUCKING WILL*.
Sometimes it's important to understand and appreciate why we cannot have nice things.
Usually, those reasons revolve around the existence and activities of such people, and how cozy they are with government.
The baloney detection kit has never been more essential to install in children.
Unfortunately, this has been actively stymied by certain political groups (on both sides of the aisle, for different reasons), and almost nobody comes equipped with one, "Because its easier!"
Humanity is doomed.
It COULD (in theory, at least) get directly cabbaged up by something like ReactOS though.
MIT allows re-licensing under new terms (GPL Primacy), IIRC.
Whether or not ReactOS is
Still, Gift horses and mouths, and all that.
Unless, of course, you're giving $400,000,000 of airplane as a bribe to Trump.
If you want a start-menu interface, though, you dont really want steamOS.
You want normal linux with LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, or KDE.
That, and Heroic Game Launcher, and Proton Tricks. (So you can set up D3DVK on the containers in question. Heroic does not use VKD3D by default, because it wants to be able to run on devices without vulkan. DXVK support is fail-safeable behind wineD3D modes, but D3DVK is not. The latter *ONLY* does DX12 libraries, but shares the same infra/backend as DXVK.)
DX12 only games work very well with VKD3D, and Vulkan.
Proton supports this out of the gate on SteamOS. DX12-only is a nothingburger, on hardware that has suitable vulkan drivers.
In a surprising number of cases, they work *Better* than native DX12 on the same hardware.
Unlike other game launchers/stores, Steam (even in handheld mode) is very easy-going on setting up and using alternatives.
See for instance, Heroic Game Launcher, which can very painlessly integrate games from Amazon, Epic, and GOG into a steamdeck's library.
Steam in Handheld mode (which is basically what SteamOS is) already supports native mode for games that have it.
For everything else, there is Proton.
SteamOS and Bazzite are "Functionally the same thing".
They are not exactly the same thing, but close enough that Steam itself does not give 2 shits about the difference.
(SteamOS is a customized Arch distro, and Bazzite is a customized Fedora distro. Both are set up with a read only binary filesystem, both use btrfs by default, and both use KDE for the desktop mode.)
I run Bazzite on my GPDWin 4 (2024 version), and it works just fine.
Valve does not officially support GPD handhelds with SteamOS at this time, and is focusing on the ROG Ally instead.
Other than a somewhat screwy accelerometer, the Win4 is actually a better offering than the official steamdeck. (More RAM, better processor, hardware keyboard, etc.)
I am able to run modern and retro titles on it just fine.
The *ISSUE* is going to be the tinkering steps needed for some very retro titles, which may need things like DGVoodoo2 (Old DirectDraw based games that dont play well without extra love and care, or that need Glide emulation), or Joy2Key (Keyboard+Mouse only titles being hamfisted to work on a gamepad, like STALKER), or need a DINPUT filter in the pipeline to work right (Heretic II / Quake for windows, Need4Speed titles, etc, but also modern things that are officially "broken" on steamdeck, like Dragon Age: Inquisition, which work absolutely fine with the filter DLL present.)
This is in addition to the dreaded "But OUR WONDERFUL ANTICHEAT software wants to make indecent liberties that only windows lets us doooooooooo!" many modern game developers are so high on. (Which SteamOS/Proton has problems with. SteamOS has a native version of EasyAntiCheat, but a lot of publishers want to do bespoke dumbassery instead, and brick/ban people that do the "Unforgivable Sin!" of playing on *DREADED LINUX*.)
This is because SteamOS, in its attempt to be Safe_For_Idiots (and please, I am not trying to be elitist or rude, just pointing out that "Highly curated, to the point where all control is removed, because it's scary for users, and they 'get easily confused' and 'set the wrong things'" results in a systemic lack of understanding, coupled with a platform that does everything possible to slap your hands even when you DO understand, and NEED to do something) makes it much more difficult to set up such things to make them work. Bazzite tries to cut both ways, in that it too wants the root filesystem to be a curated read-only thing, with any and all linux userspace things being handled by flatpak, but it *DOES* let you override that and make local patches to it as well (So that you can create a symlink for
In both cases, this kind of lockdown stops you from installing useful system functionality, like NFS, or from changing the default compression level options (Both use BTRFS with zst compression, at level 2. Changing this to something tighter, requires editing
Again, Bazzite lets you local-patch this, if you jump through all the right byzantine hoops. Actual SteamOS is less forgiving, and just says no.
If Valve goes ahead with this, I hope they offer 2 channels. The first one for the fully curated experience, and the other for "Tinkerer" mode.
Sadly, I feel that the "But our sacred and special anticheat!!!!!" hysterionics will result in any such split channel distro having the latter completely blacklisted by everything, even though the people using it just want to set some quality of life settings. (like the compression level)
The "Users are easily confused and dont understand!" philosophy precludes making these things into easily set GUI options.
To get around this "We applied mittens with duct tape!" curation, and actually manage the system library registrations, and individually tailor proton container instances so that such things as DGVoodoo2 and pals can work, you need to use things like ProtonTricks. This *IS* available as a Flatpak, but it will go against the "Users are easily confused!" mantra.
SHOULD have pointed them to 'suzyqable' adapters on ebay, and mrchromebox.
Then we'd have kids posting fun videos of chromebooks playing videogames instead.
But alas, we get to point out that 'maybe its not smart to skimp on short isolation circuitry on the usb port', and that 'maybe regulations are needed' instead.
The message nobody in power wants to have!
What a shame.
Which is why you use solar-powered mirrors for energy. Do take a look at the SPS designs, basically using solar sails to reflect the energy to a generator which can transmit the power to a smelting plant, or keep it focused for smelting, or transmit the energy to Earth as a low density microwave beam. The mining equipment is a bootstrap operation. The first loads of iron smelted from the satellite are used to build the next generation of mining equipment. There is an initial startup cost a "priming of the pump"., but as much as possible you use space based resources.
Energy is _outrageously_ available once the first solar power mirror based plants are working. NASA's last estimates guessed about 20 years to provide return-on-investment for the first few built. They don't have to be in close proximity to the smelting, they can in theory beam the energy as microwaves across empty space.
There are many reasons. The start-up costs are high, and the risks of regulatory issues or unexpected technical issues are high. It's why it's been the province of governments, and business deeply allied with governments.
I said _nothing_ about it being easy, but this is exactly the sort of project NASA and their consultants look at regularly. SpaceX would be in a good position to start it with space-based solar power, if Elon nMusk had not gotten fixated on reaching Mars.
"Decarbonize the rocket fuel".... What rocket fuel? Use solar sails to guide asteroids, slowly to a feasible orbit. Use solar sails as well to mine Saturn's rings for ice, and solar power mirrors to electrolyze the ice for hydrogen and oxygen rocket fuel. Where is there carbon in the fuel?
The following statement is not true. The previous statement is true.
