If you read the article - it's a $100k/year fee, not a one time fee

Liquid Metal thermal compounds are a newer design of a gallium-indium-tin alloy that is liquid at room temperature, so it is easy to apply. It is entirely metal (100% metal), so it is slightly more thermally conductive than traditional thermal paste materials.

The reality here is though, we don't want these. We've got plenty of contracts for Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J vaccines that are safer and more efficacious than the AZ vaccine. The FDA is dragging their feet on approving it because they don't want to approve an obviously worse vaccine.

They should just sell them to the highest bidder now while other people want it and give our population the much more effective vaccines that we have a large supply of already, and orders for plenty of doses in the next couple months. If it delays the vaccine rollout by a week or two, in the long run, I think that's still superior to giving our population a less effective vaccine.

The Quest is a standalone console with its own embedded cpu and graphics card, so it's just as "Linux compatible" as a Nintendo Switch or other game console.

I'd suggest checking out FF14, actually! I just picked it up a few weeks ago and have been having a blast. Since they redesigned and relaunched it in August, it's actually probably the most fun MMO on the market (at least for me, YMMV)

10, 40, and 100gbps are the ethernet standards generally used in datacenters today. 400gbps would be a reasonable next step for high speed data over copper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Gigabit_Ethernet

Mine runs Ubuntu quite well, actually. I use it hooked up to triple monitors at work, and can unhook it and take it on the go to have all my documents with me. Pretty useful.

What they're talking about here is the use of Steam as a copy-protection system, which is completely integrated into a game, including the retail "disk" version. When one installs it from a disk, it first prompts you to either log into steam or make a steam account, and then it installs the purchased game into the Steam folder and activates it on your steam account. The first games to do this were official retail release of Valve games, but since then, many other games have implemented it due to the various advantages of using Steam in your game (good copy protection, Achievements/stats tracking integration, ease of updating, multiplayer server browser, etc). What they're trying to say, essentially, is that these "other" retail games are promoting their competitors, and they don't like it.

In recent years, this restriction has been relaxed. The Forza Motorsport series in particular has been putting a lot of pressure on companies to allow realistic damage modelling. In Forza Motorsport 2, one could turn on simulation damage to the vehicles that modeled performance problems that would be created by, say, bumping into a wall, even though the visual damage was limited.

In Forza 3, they're also introducing rollover for the cars, which was previously prohibited by licensors, and are introducing even more realistic damage modeling (comes out this fall)

From this article: http://kotaku.com/5284706/forza-3-car-porn-in-motion

So I think car manufacturers are getting somewhat more lenient with these things because they know that fans want to play a racing simulation. And with Forza, at least, if some manufacturer really insists on not having the damage modeling, they just get to not be in the game, and I think most know that would be terrible publicity with all their competitors in there.

I agree as well. I bought an older edition of that four or five years ago, and it has lots of interesting information about all kinds of subjects.