I think it is a common high school shop class project. Or similar.

They also sell $12M in sales annually, years after release. Which is a great model for a small studio.

Holy hell. Not what I was expecting at all.

As a huge sci fi fan, thanks for the rec. Have never read Forward.

Yeah, I love to say: if you assume unlimited free energy, then… all sorts of cool things suddenly become realistic. But we also probably just boil the planet to a cinder (unlimited energy becomes unlimited waste heat) due to short sighted greed instead. Cause things like Bitcoin make no fucking sense on the scale of civilization, and yet how much energy do we spend on it?

With unlimited energy someone will be like: damn, I could make a fortune harvesting all the atmospheric nitrogen and hoarding it and selling it back to the world so they can be 3% nitrogen by mass. Or some shit.

One: gravity pulls you in. You die in a flaming fireball just due to the speed you gain entering the gravity well. Like, your kinetic energy is so high that the impact of you (or your spacecraft) into the atmosphere is a small nuke. Every kilo of your ass blows up as though it is several kilos of TNT.

Well, okay, let’s say you engineer something to brake with - like the largest rocket every conceived (and you brought it with you), or a really clever aerobraking rig. And you enter the upper atmosphere.

Well, it’s just “air”, mostly hydrogen and some helium, but also some smaller amounts of stuff like water, methane, nitrogen, sulphuric acid… Fluffy clouds of stuff. If you have an energy source, you could probably find a way to generate lift and stay alive near one atmosphere of pressure, circling around in the clouds. Avoid the storms, the lightning, and (depending on the gas giant) bring a good heater.

Hard to create a blimp on a gas giant. It works on earth due to the density differences between hydrogen/helium and the air. Guess what the air is made from on a gas giant. So active lift is required. Motors, fans, wings, etc. Hopefully you have a nuclear power source or something cause eventually you’ll run out of energy and drop.

Then, well, you probably drop slowly. Terminal velocity will be a thing, but the atmosphere gets thicker as you go down. You’ll get crushed before anything gets terribly interesting, chemically speaking. You won’t see the diamond rain, or the metallic hydrogen core. Too bad. I hear it’s lovely.

I concur. It is also relatively unmolested in terms of fucking up KDE programs.

Well shit. There goes my weekend.

I remember when Mandrake was a young distro – a redhat derivative – and they (gasp) chose to compile for i586 instead of i386. People were like VROooooOM! And a bunch of other people were like: why would you target CPU instructions that not everyone has?!

Yeah, if you do it often enough, it’d get so routine as to be super boring. But at least you get to think a bit about it if each case is distinct – as opposed to assembly line construction.

Probably someone’s pet project

Probably mostly AI written.

Long article for one sentence of trivia and no info on the algo itself. The death of the internet is upon us.

Haven’t seen it on my Steam version. What platform are you on?

Ticketmaster is cancer

I’m sorry you had a bad experience. I’ve used it as my daily driver with minimal effort post installation on multiple occasions, usually on work laptops where time spent tinkering is time wasted. I’ve found it to be a good choice in that context. I now own my own business, and OpenSuse has allowed me to repurpose older laptops as workstations for my employees with minimal effort.

The only actual pain point I’ve seen is setting up a wifi enabled printer … required that I change my firewall zone so the printer could be discovered. And that only required a few minutes to figure out. The fact that the firewall is set to a more secure default is probably a feature, not a bug.

OpenSuse Leap or even Tumbleweed. After getting the media codecs up and running, and remembering to set you firewall zone to “home”, you’re pretty golden.

You’re applying logic when logic doesn’t apply. Why would he tarriff Canada?

One of the last pure science probes we will probably ever see.

(Feeling pessimistic today)

Assuming you’re still in your expedition save.

When you finish your expedition and have claimed all the rewards in the expedition, it will pop up a dialog box asking if you wish to return to your main save. Do not click Accept. Hit ESC or O or whatever the equivalent button is on your system to dismiss this dialog box. Head to the anomaly and find the Expedition Terminal. Transfer items into the terminal and then choose End Expedition from the terminal.

This is the standard way anyway. There’s a bit of a hack to transfer more items if you have more than what fits in the terminal. But use the standard way the first time :)

What’s the weirdest one you’ve tried? Most challenging? Have you found any really cool defining features in any distro?

For example GoboLinux and NixOS eschew the Linux file hierarchy standard (FHS), and that becomes their defining feature. But many other distros have some other defining feature. Slackware uses tarballs as package management and oldschool init. LFS has you build from nothing. Etc.