I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

ZFS :-)

typo, more decentralisation not centralisation

Ok, but propaganda is basically the problem and has been for over a hundred years. And it's everyone. Not just far right or Russia or today's bogeyman. It's everyone doing it.

The antidote can't really be "curated information" because all the propagandists want to then be the curators. And that's what they do.

The only real antidote is more dissemination, more distribution, more centralisation, more alternatives, and people just being exposed to all this stuff having to get smarter about integrating and comparing and contrasting what they read.

Yes, makes sense.

What I mean about the floor level is that, if you look at the outside of the door on the central module, and you take that door's floor height line and follow it right the way through the craft, then when you get to the front, inside the command module, in order for the pilots to be able to see out the top window, their chairs would have to be higher not lower. I gather it's the only place where the inside doesn't match the outside.

There were the four pods, two at the front and two at the rear, above the landing struts, though. But in any case, whatever fuel source they were using must have been extremely compact. Something nuclear-based, perhaps.

I love the design. I just wish they'd worked out the floor level in the interior into the command module, because it doesn't line up.

Thanks, yes I enjoyed The Expanse tv show. I'll look at the books.

Yes, by all means, identify myths and blind beliefs and wishful thinking where that occurs.

On the point of reason, though, humans have had our advanced technology for, say, a couple of hundred years.

The universe is billions of years old. We've basically just learnt enough to realise that technology can do things we can't imagine, and we've only just started. Say a civilization started out a billion years ago. How would we even begin to comprehend what they're capable of? In fact, the human mind, our brains, may be simply too limited to form the concepts to understand reality at a deeper level. And as a species, we might always be like that. So, anything is possible.

I think it's just a question, in practice, of what's the outcome. If alien intelligences revealed themselves tomorrow to the world in a way that was undeniable to most people, and the message was simply, hey guys, you're like small children to us. We don't interfere, but generally, try not to fuck it up. What would we be doing different?

By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!

The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.

Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.

But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.

Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)

Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.

It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.

Duke 3D's soundtrack was not exclusively the work of Bobby Prince; Lee Jackson, Apogee's go-to music guy, also did some of the tracks, including the title theme, Grabbag.

Prince used not only his MIDI skills but also his experience as a lawyer to ensure his 'inspired' derivatives were as close as legally possible to the originals. The relationship between individual tracks is often very clear and sometimes even hinted in the metadata of the source files.

We will never truly know how many dimensions the Chess game has.