and their odd tendency to get off and inspect the train when they think something may be wrong.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/1...

Solution: get rid of the drivers!

For those labouring under the assumption that these counts are inflated with crappy games, I collected some stats on the 4500 best games on Steam. These are the ones that Steam flags as "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" based on aggregated reviews. Of those, 1500 are supported natively on Linux and another 1500 are playable without much trouble in Proton. It's also become clear that most of the reports being submitted to ProtonDB are for the better, well-known games. Hardly anyone is submitting reports on the crappy shovelware games.

You say VAG, BMW etc have tens of gigafactories. They don't even have one. Are you referring instead to their automobile manufacturing plants?

The Tesla Gigafactory is a battery manufacturing facility in Nevada, it's separate from the Tesla Factory in California that builds the cars. VAG, BMW etc have yet to announce any battery factories and are still purchasing them from suppliers.

iPhone XS Max 256GB is $2049 AUD. Oneplus 6 256GB is $1049 AUD.

Whoops Tim. Only a few weeks ago you told Forbes:

Avoiding the 30% “store tax” is a part of Epic’s motivation. It’s a high cost in a world where game developers’ 70% must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. And it’s disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service. We’re intimately familiar with these costs from our experience operating Fortnite as a direct-to-customer service on PC and Mac.

You forgot about some other services performed by the Play Store. Automated analysis of your code for security issues. Automated roll-out of your updates to users. And in some cases - for very serious bugs - even forcing your updates onto users.

And now you're crying foul because you got greedy, forced your users to bypass Android's security mechanisms and now you don't have a way to get a fix to them within seven days. LOL.

Some Linux diehards will say this is a backwards step because they think developers should make native games, and they worry that this will cause developers to get lazy and not bother building for anything but Windows.

But this is actually a good move by Valve. I've been tracking Linux games for a long time, and the rate of Linux game releases has flat-lined over the last two years. Initially Linux was gaining ground on Windows, in fact by mid-2016 Linux as a % of all games on Steam had reached the giddy height of 25.5% - there were 9000 Windows games and 2300 Linux games. Since then Linux has been losing ground again. The rate of new Linux games has been a virtually flat linear growth of ~100 new games a month. My conclusion from this is that the developers willing to make Linux releases are already doing so, and the rest aren't likely to. In contrast, Windows (and Mac) continued to show accelerating growth, pulling away again from Linux's linear growth. Some attribute this to the explosion of Windows gaming in China, and others attribute this to a boom in Windows shovelware. Regardless of the reason, only 20% of all games on Steam nowadays have a Linux version - next month we'll see the milestones of 5000 Linux games and 25,000 Windows games respectively

I believe Valve also noticed this trend two years ago and drew the same conclusion. I don't think it's a coincidence that all the Vulkan / Wine / DXVK work started then. It's a chicken-and-egg dilemma. They had already reached saturation in winning over developers to support Linux, and now they need to win more users. With more users will come another opportunity to win over more developers.

So yes, this is a good thing for Linux gaming.

I'm a little worried that an emergency container of sand appears to be standard equipment in an Apple store.

You're right that the Chromecast is LAN/WLAN only. However it still uses the internet connection to download updates. What Google is trying to avoid mentioning is that the Chromecast downloaded an update that caused it to stop working on LAN/WLAN. It was running fine but the Chromecast-enabled apps (Youtube, Plex, etc) could not detect it on the network and therefore would not show the "Cast" button. Yes, it happened to me last night.

I'm curious - do you have separate bins for these at home as well? In Australia we already have 3 large bins per household; green for organics, yellow for recycling and red for waste. From your post it seems like we'd need 5 bins as the yellow would have to split further into Plastic, Glass and Paper.

Australian Customs already requires you to declare cash over $10,000. This just extends that principle so they can interrogate you about your cash anywhere in the country. For law-abiding Aussies it's no big deal. Visa Paywave has absolutely dominated the market here and virtually all merchants absorb the transaction costs. If you pay the card off monthly it costs you nothing except an annual fee if you opt into a rewards scheme. For big purchases, bank cheques cost $10. I withdraw less than $500 in cash each year.

That would defeat the purpose of training the AI on genuine human conversations. If the recipient knew it was an AI calling they would be likely to change their behaviour such as talking in shorter, simpler sentences with overly exaggerated pronunciation.

Disney may have already seen the writing on the wall. Rather than try to protect old material they've been frantically re-making everything in live-action:

• 2014 - Maleficient (Sleeping Beauty)
• 2015 - Cinderella
• 2016 - The Jungle Book
• 2017 - Beauty and the Beast
• 2018 - Christopher Robin (Winnie the Pooh)
• 2019 - Dumbo
• 2019 - Aladdin
• 2019 - Lion King
• 2020 - Mulan

And more to come.

Of course it's not a proper portmanteau.

It's a Facebook portmanteau. A Fartmanteau.

I'm gonna go with cloud database. The article links to a FAQ that indicates you can turn this new feature off by changing a "Network Rating Provider" option from "Google" to "none". From what I can tell this option was actually introduced in the Android 8.0 preview back in May 2017, so they've had some time to build up a backend.

Not exactly. You can't buy or sell gum in Singapore - but you can bring it in for personal use. You can chew the gum - just don't spit it out.