Yeah it’s particularly weird in this case because Ubisoft and Valve both have publisher, developer, and distributor departments within each company. So the agreements they signed and put into place are probably somewhat complex.

Looking at the Steam page though it says

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft

So in this case it’s whatever Ubisoft as a publisher signed / agreed to with Valve when they accepted their distribution terms. These are probably not the same boiler plate terms an indie dev would sign if self publishing.

Yeah but it’s fairly simple.

You can generate Steam keys using the Steam developer tools. This allows a game key to be purchased on any storefront that supports selling them, which can then be activated on Steam.

The main requirement? You can’t price those steam keys on a 3rd party store cheaper than on Steam itself.

For that, it means if the 3rd party store takes a smaller cut than Steam itself would take, the developer makes a bit more profit through almost no additional effort. Steam is the system users use to download and update the game, and cloud save syncing, and community guides, forums, workshop, etc.

The developer is, afaik, more than welcome to also sell a UPlay key if they partner with Ubisoft at any price point they want (regardless of the Steam price) because Ubisoft is the taking on the burden of distribution, etc.

The only price requirement Valve imposes is on selling Steam keys on 3rd party storefronts. Not UPlay keys. Not Xbox keys. Not Epic Store keys.

Edit: and I read the article, while albeit short (can’t access the linked Bloomberg article sadly), they claim exactly that, that the version on UPlay was significantly cheaper than the version on Steam for essentially the same game. Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

Not sure about Mac support but I suspect Outbound checks most / all of your boxes?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2681030/Outbound/

Sadly that used to be the case but more recent court cases have changed that in Alberta specifically.

https://www.apega.ca/news/regulating-software-engineers

Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.

Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.

Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.

Cachy has, at least in my experience with a Zen 5 processor, it’s own special Arch pacman repo with meta packages for various processor types. I believe for the most part mine uses Zen 4 packages.

Add your processor meta package and it adds the appropriate repo where packages have been custom built with feature flags / optimizations for that specific architecture of processors.

So it’s a little closer to Gentoo or LFS in those regards, without you having to actually build every package from scratch.

So while yes any distro could do this, in practice a lot don’t bother and only release basic i686/amd64/arm32/arm64 sets of packages. Whereas Cachy offers zen4-amd64 packages as an example, and I assume they offer various Intel architecture and other AMD architecture specific packages as well.

I’m not sure if you’re making a joke that the rockets are the explosives or if they actually have rockets they launch that are like cluster munitions that drop a bunch of mines in to the water.

Yep. Back in the day all the MUD servers ran on Linux. I wanted to set up my own. I knew my cousin used it so I asked him about it.

He never answered my questions directly. But he did show me how to look up the answer to my question using man pages and/or search for info online.

That first install was so painful… My friend and I didn’t know how to set up the network and it turns out the tulip driver wasn’t installed by default. So we’d boot to Linux, try something to get the network working, write down the error message on a sheet of paper. Boot to windows to research the fix to the error message. Rinse and repeat until we finally got it working.

The funny thing I’ve been reading / seeing is that the paralympics are still ongoing.

The Olympic truce says no one will start a war during the 7 days before the Olympics and for 7 days after the Paralympics finish.

The US and Israel should be banned by the IOC from competing at the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games (even though the host country is the US).

It won’t happen though.

If I recall correctly compression, especially lz4, has been shown to impact performance negligably.

That’s gonna make for an awkward all hands meeting.

It was hard to get some real numbers of refineries but maybe I’m just not using good search terminology since I’m on my phone.

This paper has an appendix on page 18 that talks real numbers. https://researchcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-Refinery-Report-Final.pdf

In 2018 the total output value of the refineries in WA state was 19 billion USD. In 2019 it dropped to 18 billion. I assume price fluctuations in the market.

Per https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-gross-domestic-product-gdp/state/washington-state/ in 2018 the GDP of WA was 562 billion.

That makes the WA refineries output about 3.4% of WAs GDP in 2018. It’s not nothing but it also isn’t really that much. Considering the boom in the technology sector it’s probably much less of the GDP these days.

I’m originally from Alberta and I do think Canada should have it’s own refineries but don’t try to press that WAs economy is make it or break it because of these refineries.

As someone who lives in WA state, people have been trying to get income tax implemented here for a while now, but it’s against the state constitution. It has nothing to do with refineries.

People want income tax here because the current sales tax system misproportions tax on only what people spend. This means lower income earners foot more of the tax bill, as they spent most / all of their income just to live. Higher income earners might spend more in general but they also invest that extra income, which eventually will have capital gains tax (but only on the gains) but will never be hit by sales tax until it’s spent.

Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).

I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.

I don’t know, why?

Technically it’s battery if she actually made physical contact. :p

I too played the Mad Max Video Game…

VAC bans are pretty nasty iirc.

Your account gets flagged for cheating and you can’t play on any official Valve servers for that particular game ever again.

Also if you family share the owner of the game gets the ban (don’t share with people you don’t trust).

Edit: oops it’s only for the game you were found cheating on.

Just getting my password manager being able to type text into other windows was a bit of a pain in Wayland in CachyOS. That’s a common thing everyone should be using these days.