You think that because they *chose* not to shoot him down with a stinger, they're *incapable* of doing so?

Yeah, I remember. However, a) it still worked on NVidia, and b) it doesn't seem to have helped AMD's marketshare.

Witcher 3 is included with all sorts of NVidia cards, I noticed today. It's still going to work on AMD. It doesn't mean CD Projeckt thinks AMD needs better Linux drivers.

Steam Manager 1: Ok, lets tell NVidia what's what. Make HL3 AMD only. Somehow.

Steam Manager 2: Sir, I'm just looking at the Hardware Survey that we run, and just over half of our customers use NVidia.

Steam Manager 1: Oh. Ok, lets not throw away half of our potential sales.

Steam Manager 2: Good call.

Would that really help?

I'd think steam users fall into two main camps; the casual 'whatever came with my PC' camp, and the 'hardcore gamers' camp. Hardcore gamers are either going to blindly go with their favorite platform, or they're going to go by benchmark numbers.

How, exactly, would Valve influce NVidia? "Do better in open source, or we'll...." what, exactly?

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Who do you think MAKES those M.2 SSDs in Apples? Hint: Samsung

Charitable work makes you a religion? Is that codified somewhere? Is charitable work sufficient to make you a religion? Or just a subset of things which in some squishy way will?

No, charitable work is part of what gets you tax-exempt status, is the idea. Either way, you're contributing to the community, is how it was intended.

Except, churches aren't busy doing business and earning profits.

Go look up the filings for various churges, including the CoS, the Catholic Church, and so on. Go ahead. Then tell me they're not for-profit.

If you do an image search, nearly half of the artist renderings still depict Pluto as blue-grey in color. I think the reasoning was that the planet was thought to be largely covered in methane ice, which has that color. And they were right about the ice, but UV radiation can initiate reactions in methane and diatomic nitrogen to produce a mix of simple hydrocarbons and nitriles, similar to the orange-brown haze that shrouds Titan, just on a much less dramatic scale.

Good posting.

What most ppl miss is that the 5-eyes and others actually do not spy on many at all.
I suspect that they have unique capabilities to listen in, but not with humans, but with computers. As it is, there was far too many connections just in the cell world, let alone land lines, voip, etc. And that does not include all of the e-mail, IM, etc.
Most likely NSA and others check things with computers, but only items which have a high probability of terrorism, criminal connections to ppl outside of America, etc. will be flagged.

Now, with that said, I am shocked that we actually spied on Germany's gov. I certainly never expected that. And it sounds like we were up to other actions that I am NOT happy about, but it was legal for the NSA to do.

who do you want spying on you? If you buy a commercial product that was produced in China, I guarantee that it has a backdoor. That is why the DOD insists that Cisco manufacture their network equipment here in America (and they do).

Our best bet for staying off radars is to not trust ANY commercial product, and go with OSS. FreeBSD is good. So is Linux. Using Commercial OSs from any nation will get you spied on, simple as that.

But in the end, for those of us in the west, it is better to have European govs, or the 5-eyes (now bigger, though I am not certain how big), spy on us, rather than Chinese and Russian.

So, what exactly was 9/11 if not a terrorist act?
And I did not say that NSA had to ask for backdoors. They are everywhere. BUT, when data is encrypted, it makes it harder for ANY government to get around.

Oh, yes, ALL of the european govs are involved in spying on their citizens as well.

No, NSA passes information up the ladder and then ppl inside of DOJ, along with president and others decide what filters down to the FBI.
You will find that no information about citizens is making it to FBI, unless it involves acts of terrorism, or criminal issues from outside of America.

In 2005-2006, the GOP pretty much removed the oversight of NSA. I know. I was working on PAT act then and was very aware of what was going on.

As bad as Mozilla? It's at version 42, Mozilla is at 37. Who do you think started this cadence in the first place?