Red hat isn’t a publicly traded company, but they are owned by a publicly traded company (IBM)

Going public just means that the shares will be traded on a public market (stock market) rather than being held privately. So anyone who wants to buy shares can. There are some legal requirements to be publicly traded, largely regarding public disclosure of finances and assets.

The major difference would be that suddenly anyone who wants to have a say in how they are run can buy shares, and if they buy enough shares, they can pressure leadership in to making decisions they would not have otherwise made. also, people buying the shares probably will want to see their shares increase in value, and thus leadership will be pressured to please the stock market hive mind. Potentially it opens them up to a hostile takeover where some outside group buys up enough shares to replaces the leadership with people they want in charge.

Pyanodons specifically, what with all the loops and inexplicable animals in the production line.

Largely comes from shit heads who use open VC, especially on FPS games, to say heinous shit, given that it’s pseudonymous and they’re not likely to face real consequences from it.

It’s less of a thing these days simply because the novelty has worn off and pseudonymity is less of a protection than it used to be, since a bad reputation in an online community actually means something if you spend a lot of time there.

But, a loud obnoxious idiot shouting slurs or spamming them in text chat tends to paint a whole community in a bad light, creating the stereotype.

They make a good point about how massive multiplayer games shouldn’t try to compete with wow, nor to try and implement every feature that wow has, but I think it goes beyond that. I think they need to question the pre existing assumptions of what an MMO is. Like, fundamentally, it’s a mass multiplayer online game, but so much of what gets associated with that concept is not really inherent to it.

Quests, bosses, grinding NPCs for equipment, ect ect. What the shape of content even looks like for these kinds of games.

There is so much potential in the concept of a big world with lots of players all interacting and it is held back by attempting to hew to a certain formula that looks very similar to WoW. Specifically the reliance on NPCs to fill out the world and to act as a source of resources.

Someone brought up foxhole and I think that’s a really good example. It is made by a small team(like… 10 people if I recall?) and it completely lacks a lot of the stuff normally expected in an MMO. No NPCs, no leveling or skill points, no quests or missions. All of the purposes those systems normally fulfill are handled through largely player driven dynamics. It’s a profoundly collaborative game built on team based PVP and an entirely player driven economy. Importantly, you are not playing a hero or unique character, nor collecting particularly valuable equipment overtime. You are cannon fodder, and you will die. In some ways, you are the NPC. Some parts of it definitely share heritage from the genre, but it expands on a lot of stuff that I feel is under developed in most.

It’s a departure from the normal formula and I think it shows that the potential audience for MMOs is actually much larger than the current crop, as a lot of people who play were never into other MMOs. The genre has pigeonholed its self by attempting to chase an existing audience that are used to a certain dynamic, but there is so much more potential that is left on the table.

Yah, I think foxhole is a really good example of why the idea of “reinventing the MMO” is a really good discussion.

Before foxhole I had largely bounced off of MMOs because a lot were overly focused on “quests”, boss fights, loot tables and other spreadsheet nonsense. The sword and sorcery setting of many also just didn’t grab my attention.

Foxholes focus on collaborative logistics, supply chains, and large scale persistent warfare, not to mention being more grounded as a setting, actually engaged me and got me involved in teamwork and collaboration that was very fun.

Also blue team rules green team drools.

For a theory to be useful, there needs to be a way that it can be proven wrong. If there is no way the theory can be proven wrong, then it’s not a theory. Something that can’t potentially be proven false also can’t potentially be proven to be true.

The problem with this kind of off the cuff “but what if” stuff is that not enough thought has gone in to it to even know what could be tested.

Thermo dynamics, in short.

In long, because adding some heat recovery system to the engine block would mean decreasing the cooling efficiency of that block, thus making the block hotter, and decreasing the efficiency of the engine. Since the engine makes power based on the differential of heat/pressure from the top of the stroke and the bottom of the stroke. If you make the system hotter, then less energy can be extracted per unit of heat produced from burning fuel. Any energy generation from the waste heat of the block would be offset by efficiency losses in the engine it’s self.

Now, most engines don’t actually extract all the energy they could from that differential, which is why turbo chargers are a thing. They use excess heat in the gas exhausted out of the block, expand it to ambient pressure and temperature over a turbine, that turbine then runs a compressor, and that compressor raises the pressure at the air intake. More air entering the engine in the same volume allows for more volume of fuel without having more fuel than oxidizer to burn it, thus increasing the energy density of the charge, increasing the differential in heat between the top and bottom stroke, increasing power and/or efficiency depending on it’s tuning. But that’s not utilizing heat from the engine block, but heat in the exhaust.

In reality, an internal combustion engine and a turbine operate on the same principle. Make gas hot, it expands and makes a thing move. The difference is just that in a steam turbine, the gas being expanded with heat to do work is steam, and in an internal combustion engine it’s the exhaust gasses of the combustion its self that are expanding to do work. In a piston engine that expansion is acting on a linear reciprocating piston, but in a turbine it’s working on a spinning set of blades in a continual flow. In the middle there is the gas turbine, where the working fluid is the combustion gas and it’s working on a spinning set of blades, this is what a jet engine is.

Ginkos are crazy because like, they were the last branch of a dead tree of life, secluded deep in mountain range in central China, likely to go extinct next time there was a significant climatic shift in the area.

And then humans were like “damn, I like this tree, I will plant it literally all over the world” and in all likelihood this just massively improved their chances of surviving a few more million years, since now they’re not liable to get one shot by a single event in the area they’re native to.

Also, like, it wasn’t just a “decision to stop” it was the end of a coincidence of factors. The mid century climatic conditions that led to several years of poor grass growth, with the combined hunting efforts of European American settlers on rail roads supported by the army’s policies against the Great Plains Indians, south eastern Indians displaced in to the great planes, and Great Plains Indians intensifying hunting via sophisticated methods they’d developed using horseback and fire arms, all driven by a demand for buffalo hides for use in industrial machinery. The end of the bad climatic conditions and the collapse of the hide trade due to development of other industrial materials is what stoped the over hunting.

With the pressures of hunting decreased and a historic climatic event over, the population was able to rebound somewhat, but, due to the encroachment of farms and ranching never really recover. Also the genetic bottleneck of the population probably hasn’t helped things but that’s not super well studied.

In the us, there was a dark and dismal corner of poltical science called Kremlinology, where far to much attention was payed to the positions various people were during speeches and parades, trying to determine who was and was not influential with in party at any given time, and then try to determine Soviet policy and action based on this.

Having access to the archives, we now know that they were almost entirely wrong, and the times when they were right were basically just random chance.

Like, it was ancient divination more than it was real analysis. People called them out on it at the time, but, they were influential because the CIA was gullible and congress was desperate for any sort of insight.

Same exact computer, they just don’t charge you for the windows license. So it’s a bit cheaper.

It is very private, by nature of it recording so little and leaving so little trace. Which is what was being asked about, not strictly speaking security.

Most distros don’t collect any data by default.

Basically any distro not built and maintained by a company will be a thousand times more private than Mac or windows. Arch and Debian are both good in that regard, most distros are derived from those. There is also Fedora which is a community project, but it’s very heavily involved with Red Hat inc who is owned by IBM. I’ve never heard about any privacy issues there, but, it’s worth keeping in mind.

If you want something super secure and locked down in regards to privacy, there is Tails which has a lot of neat tricks and tor built in. Not sure I’d recommend it as a daily driver but it’s got it’s use cases.

They had to build a really tall ladder to get this view. Quite the project.

The nasa blog on the final day said. “At 5,400 feet, Orion’s drogue parachutes were cut and the three main parachutes deployed, reducing velocity to less than 200 feet per second and guiding Orion on its final descent and splashdown.”

Which is to say “less than” roughly 60 meters per second. Somewhere else on the site I couldn’t find again they mentioned it being a touch down speed of 20 miles per hour, which is a fair bit slower at about 9 meters a second, but that’s still a car crash if you’re hitting a solid surface.

The point remains. Getting a large object like that down to a soft, non injurious, speed is not practical with just a parachute. Other techniques must be employed.

So, the issue does come down to the chutes. A chute capable of reducing decent speed to 10m/s is significantly larger than one capable of getting the speed to 60 m/s. Impractically large on a weight constrained thing like a space capsule.

The Soyuz uses a small set of retro rockets to reduce speed in the last few seconds before touch down, and even then it’s like being in a car crash.

On the Vostok capsules the astronauts didn’t even land with the capsules, they just bailed out and parachuted down.

Landing in the ocean is significantly more comfortable and less complicated.