licensing issues

I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.

Must have been the wind.

The difficulty of restoring to life someone who is already alive is why such high-level magic is required.

It adds insult to injury, since it shows that they expect that some people will want to apply those filters, but then they don’t care enough to make the filters work. They just waste even more of my time by creating the false impression that they have made a tool that does what I want.

I agree that the offsets have exactly the problem that you point out. I think the value (moral value, not financial value) that this company has is that it is setting a precedent for the deliberate release of SO2 as a form of climate engineering. Going from “responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are talking about it” to “responsible experts oppose using SO2 but weirdos are doing it” takes us one step closer to “responsible experts are seriously working towards using SO2 (or finding that it really is counterproductive as opposed to simply saying that there isn’t enough evidence)”.

This couple of guys with their balloons got a critical article in the NYT about using SO2, but it’s still an article in the NYT about using SO2.

Once when my sister and I were teenagers, she was hogging the computer and so I just picked up the chair with her in it to move her out of my way. As I walked past, her friend (whom I hadn’t touched) used her bite to make an attack of opportunity against me. It wasn’t gentle - there was no blood but there were tooth-marks.

I had mixed feelings afterwards. On the one hand, it hurt. On the other hand, a girl touched me. With her mouth. I had never been kissed at that point but being bitten was close…

(I didn’t end up marrying her.)

Also a d6 bite is nonsense. The average commoner has 4 hp and 10 strength, so one commoner would be able to kill another commoner with a single bite 50% of the time. I’m not saying a human bite can’t be lethal, but it’s not “stabbed with a shortsword” lethal. Meanwhile, even a d4 bite from a level 1, 16-str barbarian is already invariably lethal to a commoner.

(Yeah, I know, HP isn’t supposed to be realistic, etc. I just hate fun.)

Sulfur dioxide added to the atmosphere through human action does contribute to reducing global temperatures. There’s a Nature article about it. From their abstract:

In 2020, fuel regulations abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.

Ships had been emitting a lot of SO2 and the effect of abruptly stopping that is apparently quite large:

a doubling (or more) of the warming rate in the 2020 s compared with the rate since 1980

In other words, the laws against SO2 emission by ships are making global warming twice as bad. It’s ironic that environmentalists are contributing as much to global warming as everyone else put together.

The guys running this company sound like loose cannons, but it may take a loose cannon to overcome the bias that institutions have towards doing nothing rather than taking an action that involves risks. It’s true that adding SO2 to the atmosphere may have serious unintended consequences, although the huge amount that ships had been adding until recently wasn’t catastrophic. However, doing nothing as the planet keeps warming will definitely have serious unintended consequences! It’s the trolley problem: these guys are pulling the lever and their critics are saying “They’re going to kill one person!” but if the critics had their way, five people would die.

In the original Fallout you could defeat the final boss just by talking to him, but in addition to the speech skill you actually had to find and bring the evidence that his plan was doomed to failure. The issue wasn’t a matter of opinion - you needed scientific proof.

You could also choose to let him convince you that he was right, which was one of the ways to get the bad ending.

Less documentation means more job security.

I’m not a fan. I don’t like looking at swastikas in any context. Sometimes it’s necessary as part of learning about history, but I would prefer not to see one twice a day if that was the metro station I used to get to work.

Also IMO it has little artistic worth; it’s not much more sophisticated than putting up a portrait of Hitler and labeling it “Bad Guy” would be. Something like this takes fundamentally the same idea (destroy the symbol of a hated enemy) but expresses it in a far more aesthetically interesting way.

Think of it as assertiveness training.

My issue with this is that it works well with sample code but not as well with real-world situations where maintaining a state is important. What if rider.preferences was expensive to calculate?

Note that this code will ignore a rider’s preferences if it finds a lower-rated driver before a higher-rated driver.

With that said, I often work on applications where even small improvements in performance are valuable, and that is far from universal in software development. (Generally developer time is much more expensive than CPU time.) I use C++ so I can read this like pseudocode but I’m not familiar with language features that might address my concerns.

Is this ich_eil?

The “wear a loincloth before growing 30 feet tall” direction?

Historical swords aren’t spiky for a reason

Yeah but people in ancient times also liked cool-looking but impractical “ceremonial” weapons. They didn’t go to war wielding them, but neither do modern people who think they look cool…

I think if you’re just Huge and you’re grappling a Gargantuan dragon, you’re going to look like a dog humping his leg. Which may be what OP wants to do, but still…

If the guy with the bow isn’t bringing the DPS then what is he even bringing?

I think the general population always knew that there was a transparent substance all around them which had to keep going in and out of their lungs or they would die - the “breath of life” from the Bible. I mean, even an uneducated peasant in ancient times could blow bubbles underwater and see that there was something coming out of his mouth.

No, that means we have transcended the petty limitations of biological sexuality. We are like gods.

I didn’t claim that politics don’t matter at all to anyone ever. That would be a silly thing for me to say.