Valve has enough lawyer money to keep Microsoft at bay.

This puts competitive pressure on Microsoft. Valve’s goal is to turn Steam OS into a legitimate competitor to Windows for gamers, and Microsoft should fear Valve’s success.

Right now, Microsoft has no legitimate competitors in the PC gaming space. They are free to do anything they want to their OS and consumers have no choice but to tolerate it. If Microsoft say “watch these adverts”, consumers open their eyes. If Microsoft says “pay up”, they reach for their wallets. If Microsoft says “suck”, they kneel.

If a competitor arises to Windows, then Microsoft will have to actually start worrying about losing customers to Steam OS. More importantly, every customer who switches to Steam OS is one who isn’t paying for Game Pass and one who isn’t buying games from the Microsoft Store and paying Microsoft their 30%.

Valve is not well meaning. No large for-profit company is ever well-meaning. It’s merely the case that Valve’s best interest happens to align with those of the consumer, and they have decided that their business model is going to be to win over consumers’ loyalty through goodwill rather than milking them for every penny they can get. And they are very successful at this, seeing that there has still not arisen any serious competitor to Steam. That’s entirely because consumers are loyal to the platform. Valve provides a good service, consumers reward them with loyalty. It’s not friendship, but it’s symbiotic, which is as close as you can get to friendship in the harsh world of business.

And if you fail the V2, it’ll just take your word on it and let you pass anyway.

The Trojan Nuclear Plant near my city was closed in 1992. They started moving stuff away in 2003. The cooling tower was demolished in 2006. The various other buildings were demolished in 2008. All that remains are some security posts and abandoned office buildings and empty tool sheds.

It does not ignore any information.

The cost per kWh is the totality of all information. It is the end product. That is the total costs of everything divided by the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity produced.

I understand that you’re deeply invested in this argument, but you’ve lost. You’re repeating the same claim over and over, and when proven wrong, you just said “nuh uh” and pretended that nothing I said is true.

Nuclear energy can be cheaper than solar or wind. It is more reliable than solar and wind. It uses less land than solar or wind. All of these are known facts. That’s why actual scientists support expanding nuclear energy 2 to 1.

But people will still dislike it because they’re scared of building the next Three Mile Island or Fukushima. That, as I explained, is the reason why fewer nuclear plants are being built. Because the scientists, the ones who know the most about these, are not in charge. Instead, it’s the people in the last column that are calling the shots. Do not repeat this drivel of “iF nUcLeaR pOweR PlanTs So Good WhY aRen’T tHerE moRe of ThEM??”. I have explained why. It is widely known why. Your refusal to accept reality does not make it less real.

That is the end of the argument. I will not respond to anything else you say, because it is clear to me that no amount of evidence will cause you to change your mind. So go ahead, post your non-chalant reply with laughing emojis and three instances of “lol” or “lmao” and strut over the chessboard like you’ve won.

Because I don’t give a pigeon’s shit what you have to say any more.

Utility-scale solar comes out to around US$0.06 per kWh (source). Nuclear power comes out to US$0.07 per kWh (source).

Commercial-scale solar costs US$0.11 per kWh. Residential rooftop solar comes out to US$0.16 per kWh.

Edit: This does not take into account the cost of battery capacity or pumped-storage hydroelectric solutions, which are necessary for solar solutions but not nuclear ones. Lithium-ion battery storage costs US$139 per kWh. You’d need at least 500 MWh to accommodation a medium-size city, which would cost US$70 million. If you get 5,000 charge cycles out of the battery, this adds an additional US$0.03 per kWh.

You seem to think that the politics behind choosing energy sources is based on rational reasoning. It is not. It is fear and emotion that drives the decision to not build nuclear plants. If humans were all rational, there would be more nuclear reactors coming online every year.

But yes, you are correct, the fossil fuel industry has a hand in this… in fear-mongering nuclear power to discourage its adoption, that is. Because when countries take nuclear power offline, they are usually replaced with fossil fuel plants. This has happened all over Germany, who are replacing decommissioned nuclear plants with new coal plants. And it has happened in my city as well. Portland General Electric decommissioned their Trojan Nuclear Plant, which at one point produced an eighth of all the electricity in Oregon, and its capacity has been replaced with mostly natural gas plants.

One kilogram of uranium produces more power than one hectare of solar panels does in two years.

The value proposition is absent for developing countries. When you have a lot more money, then nuclear starts to become a serious option.

You can build nuclear plants in almost any climate. That is not true for solar and wind. Nuclear plants are also “one and done”. You don’t need accompanying battery infrastructure to accompany them to get reliable output. As long as you have water, uranium rods, and nuclear scientists to run the plant, you will have reliable electricity output.

On top of that, one nuclear plant can produce as much power in two hectares of land as a wind farm could in a hundred hectares.

If you hate nuclear energy because you think it’s dangerous or polluting, that is as dumb as choosing to drive instead of taking the train for the same reasons.

Nuclear energy is one of the methods of generating electricity with the smallest environmental impact and also much, much safer than the alternatives. The number of nuclear accidents can be counted on one hand, while the number of people who have died from cancer from coal power plants is conservatively estimated to be in the millions.

Almost none of the people who are excited about AI know anything about computer science. I say this someone who always encounters idiots claiming my computer science degree will soon be obsolete because of AI… lol

I love the Internet Archive but they are pretty clearly legally in the wrong here.

Not morally, mind. I support open access to knowledge. But they very clearly broke copyright law here.

Perhaps the only way to get rid of them for sure is to require a CAPTCHA before all posts. That has its own issues though.

What are the implications of this?

For what it’s worth, English Wikipedia editors reached a consensus to deprecate (ban) it for unrealiability last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_424#RFC:_The_Cradle

The following notes are present:

The Cradle is an online magazine focusing on West Asia/Middle East-related topics. It was deprecated in the 2024 RfC due to a history of publishing conspiracy theories and wide referencing of other deprecated sources while doing so. Editors consider The Cradle to have a poor reputation for fact-checking.

Password is necessary for two-factor authentication. The factors of authentication are something you know (like a password), something you have (like a cell phone), and something you are (like a biometric).

An example of three-factor authentication would be this—imagine a spy going into a secret bunker. They need to scan their iris, insert a key card, and then enter a passcode before the door opens. This has all three factors of authentication; the passcode is something they know, the key card is something they have, the iris scan is something they are.

If it just sends a code to your phone, that’s one-factor authentication (something you have). Anyone with your phone can get into your account. Unless, of course, your phone hides its notifications and you have a screen lock. Then that’s actually two-factor authentication because you also need to know the phone PIN or have the biometric.

If it just asks for a password, that’s one-factor authentication (something you know).

If it asks for your password and then sends a code to your phone, which you need a fingerprint or face scan to unlock, you have achieved three-factor authentication.

Edit: Interesting tidbit—in the USA, you can rent a mailbox at the post office to receive mail when you don’t want to give out your real address. Useful for privacy reasons. I’m sure they have similar things in other countries. These mailboxes come with a key. This is actually two-factor authentication, because the keys usually don’t have the mailbox number written on them! So you have to have the key and also have to know which mailbox among the hundreds at the post office it opens.

TOTP is standardised by RFC 6238 so all TOTP clients must comply with the standard and therefore work equally well. Pick the one whose UI you like the most and is otherwise good enough for your use case and personal preferences. It’s similar to arguments over CPU thermal paste—its presence or absence makes a much larger difference than the method of application.

You do, however, want to pick something that is free and open-source and also popular. Google Authenticator (closed source) definitely is a functional TOTP client but you have to trust that the Google engineers have done a good job building a secure app. Since it’s Google, they probably have, but a principle in security is that you should not have to trust more people than absolutely necessary.

Yes, but this is like replacing the front door of your house with a bank vault door. Yes, it’s more secure, but there is a point of “reasonably secure enough” for most people and at some point, you are just inconveniencing yourself for no tangible gain.

It’s not a hard concept. In almost every well-designed security system, the weakest links are invariably the humans