Firstly, you cannot refund DLC if you've played the base game for more than 2 hours, this is stated up front in Steam's T&Cs. You only mention reading FAQs; did you actually try contacting Steam support to fix the DLC entitlement? They have 14 days after being notified of the problem to respond. It'll be complicated by the fact that BF6 is actually delivered via EA Play so they may indeed redirect you to EA's own support.
Secondly, you're incorrect about refunds within 30 days. Under UK law that applies to physical goods only, not digital content. If digital content doesn't work you can ask for a repair or replacement, but they are not obligated to provide a refund. If the repair or replacement doesn't work, or isn't possible, you can then ask for a reduction in price instead. The law says that a full refund may be given "where appropriate", but - of course - doesn't specify what those circumstances are. In general the most you're likely to get is a partial refund.
Finally, if you Google "BF6 dlc not working" you'll see quite a number of articles addressing missing content in BF6 and possible ways to address it. Good luck.
The thing is (monthly patch fuckups notwithstanding) the Windows kernel, driver model, and maybe 50% of Windows userland is all perfectly fine. Under all the bloat and services nobody asked for is a genuinely good OS.
It's the other 50% of absolute garbage they're dumping in userland that's killing Windows; every supposedly local search redirecting to Bing, Copilot stuffed into every nook and cranny, forced UWP app installs, ads everywhere, etc. Debloating Windows 11 is a never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole.
If you run Windows 11 IoT LTSC it's probably, technically, the best version of Windows yet because it contains none of that stuff. Unfortunately, acquiring it (legally, legitimately) requires signing up to a Customer License Agreement with Microsoft - it's not available to consumers or even normal business customers, despite the fact that a great number of customers would opt for it if given the choice.
Microsoft do not consider Windows 11 broken, because the garbage is strictly by design. They make money from ads, they make money when they redirect to Bing and they hope to make money from Copilot one day, so it's being jammed in everywhere to get as many people dependent on it as fast as possible. Windows simply isn't the product anymore; it's just the product delivery system and you are the product being delivered, via Windows, to Microsoft.
Yeah, the troll mod is unfair but that's Slashdot for ya.
The problem is "workstation" is now very loosely defined. Is a standard office PC a workstation or does it have to be more powerful than that? Does it have to have a specialised purpose like CAD or graphic design or can it be general purpose? Actual workstations as many of us would understand them no longer really exist - they're just PCs, maybe with a specific card to support whatever their primary purpose is, but still just PCs. In that case, there's no reason a powerful phone can't be considered a workstation.
Anyway - the way things are going, soon you won't be allowed to own anything more powerful than a thin client and all "your" computing power will be in the cloud. That makes the smartphone a perfect on-ramp to pay-as-you-go cloud computing - the tech bros' wet dream.
In my experience almost all lab or engineering equipment is like this. Software support is quietly dropped after a few years (usually something like "BioWonder Blue devices are no longer supported in BioAnalyze version 7" written in a small box on the download page) and eventually the software ages out of working with modern Windows entirely. Then you're left with, as you say, the support nightmare of running older versions of Windows while managing security and data access just to keep using a perfectly functional device that cost hundreds of thousands. The answer from the vendor is always "buy a new one from us" which is, of course, just a rephrasing of "what have you done for me lately?"
No vendor will pledge to keep extending support even though it's obviously technically feasible. Selling software support contracts must not be as lucrative as selling new devices. But hey, the new devices have "AI" plastered all over the product description, so they must be better, right?
The technical barriers to entry are so high and the capital outlay to spin up bleeding-edge fabs is so ludicrously expensive - not to mention the proprietary technologies you would have to hire industry-leading experts to basically reinvent as the established players have no incentive to share the details of their advanced manufacturing processes - that there's effectively no way for anyone else to enter the market. It's just too hard, too costly and a very long runway to any kind of profitability. The virtually unlimited budget that AI seems to have now means they can charge, effectively, whatever they want for datacentre RAM. Consumers cannot or will not pay the prices that the AI behemoths will, so their needs will simply go unaddressed. This is the free market at work; not every need gets served, only the most profitable needs.
The very best we can hope for is that the AI bubble pops soon and the manufacturers begrudgingly crawl back to their previous market segments, which looks extremely unlikely in the short term.
In the UK at least, if there's a sports broadcast playing in a bar or restaurant there will be a watermark on the screen to show that it's licensed - the form of the watermark depends on which broadcaster it is and which licence type they're using, but usually for Sky Sports it's a pint glass watermark on the bottom left of the screen. Inspectors can easily see at a glance if a pub is showing a valid commercial stream or not.
In the example above I would say that both entities may be liable; the streamer for sharing a stream in contravention of the license and the bar for allowing an unlicensed stream to be displayed on their TVs.
That's not the issue; it's not about running local models or AI generally. It's about MS about jamming Co-pilot into every nook and cranny of the OS.
Imagine if Clippy broke out of Office 97 and started rampaging around your computer telling you to lick 9V batteries to boost your vitamin B12 and that $false = $true is a really elegant bugfix.
LLMs- absurdly large language models- are as close as we've come to something that exhibits the appearance of intelligence.
FTFY
Of course there's no reason for it, it's just our policy.
