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while (true) { if (stop) { break; } }

If there only was a way to stop while loop without having to use extra conditional with break...


Feel free to read the article before commenting.


I’ve read it, and I found nothing to justify that piece of code. Can you please explain?


The while loop surrounds the whole thread, which does multiple tasks. The conditional is there to surround some work completing in a reasonable time. That's how I understood, at least.


Does not seem so clear to me. If so it could be stated with more pseudo code. Also the eventual need for multiple exit points…


article specificaly mentions rooms with poor ventilation. if you have proper ventilation, then you don't need this system in the first place, because you will get ouside air UV sterilised by the sun...


I was recently thinking about this... We've been building houses and other structures using plum lines and water levels all the time before afordable optics came in play. This kinda means most of our buildings are actualy polar rather than cartesian. Surely enough given the size of earth the error is quite tiny. But it's funny thinking about how the room i am sitting in right now is shaped like frustum with spherical floor and ceiling, rather than block. Despite what architecture drawing says...


If the floor and ceiling (and walls) were leveled and flattened and brought to plumb with a straightedge scraped in with the three-plate method [1] (Popularized by Whitworth in the 1830s, but the ancients made straight edges and flat plates too), then they were actually not 90 degrees at the corners!

[1] https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...


There are very long and narrow wave pools used for research and testing and they are long enough that the surface of the water curves measurably vs extending perfectly straight lines from the center out.


Long bridges, like the Verrazano Narrows in New York City, have plans that account for Earth being a sphere. The towers at either end are not parallel, but tilted apart so that each is aligned with its local gravity.


i imagine imperfections in construction dominate this effect


If you have two buildings 4km apart (about the length of Central Park), that’s about 1/10,000 of an earth circumference so 0.036° change in ‘up’. If the buildings are 300m tall, 300*sin(0.036°) = 0.188m

That’s less than those buildings are probably expected to sway in a strong wind, but probably outside the tolerances for modern construction so theoretically measurable as an average deviation.


This only offers me 19 languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Woodard The article claims that it has 335


Explained at the end of the article:

After a full month of coordinated, decentralised action, the number of articles about Mr. Woodard was reduced from 335 articles to 20. A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community.


It’s a good idea to read whatever you’re commenting on


That is a most improper suggestion on this here orange website. It is established etiquette to _imagine what the content of the article might be_, based on the title, and then comment on that, preferably angrily. At _absolute most_ one can read the first paragraph.


And when called out on it reply that the comments are often more interesting than the article which is a) trivially true when you don't read the article and b) probably because bickering in comments is more emotionally satisfying and requires a shorter attention span than reading a rather long article (I'm not immune, seeing as I'm now bickering about the bickering).


No no, thats reddit. We shun this here. They embraced it long ago.


or at least, that's what i guess is written in the guidelines


Maybe we can just configure webservers to block anyone who requests robots.txt, regular browsers don't do it, but robots do to get list of urls to crawl (while ignoring rules). Just create simple PHP/CGI script that adds client IP addres to iptables once /robots.txt is accessed.


One way to easily bypass is to let external services fetching robots.txt (archive.org, GitHub actions, etc...) to cache it and either expose through separate apis/webhook/manual download to the actual scrape server.

robots txt file size is usually small and would not alert external services.


Isn't that just gonna keep the patients in constant fight-or-flight mode? Perhaps developing PTSD or something over time...


With soldiers it makes sense to use it explicitly to enforce the "fight" mode as needed. This can range from "occasionally in emergencies" to "all the time".

But militaries have famously not cared about the long term health and well being of their forces past their active use. So any consequence of "long term fight mode" past victory day are just the cost of doing business.


"Your injuries were not service related."


“Victory day” lol, I think the only one I’ve been alive for so far was “Mission Accomplished”


It's only constant if you constantly administer it


Sounds like a secondary concern to me /s


There already was a time when Steam managed to free people from need to use funny pieces of plastic in their lifes... They've done that with CDs, they can do it again with Cards.


Yeah, that was when Steam freed the users from actually owning any game and instead gave the users limited licenses for using games.

I am looking forward to the day when they shutdown and everybody realizes this.


Steam has famously gone on record that they will provide a DRM removal patch for everything they’re legally allowed to, if/when they go under.

If they don’t do this and it’s all just lip service, then it makes a strong argument for ethical piracy at that time.


This is a very persistent rumor. I forget the details but it comes from a customer support email, not some official statement or promise from Gabe, and even that was originally posted on a long gone forum which you can only find quotes of. Even if there was first hand proof of an official statement, I wouldn't expect it to be upheld. Minecraft's website used to have a line from Notch saying he would make it open-source in the future.


Steam DRM is and has been for decades famously easy to crack. Literally look up steam auto cracker and crack all your games in couple minutes. It is also optional by the way. I much rather have weak but popular steam DRM that makes it less likely devs use much stronger and expensive denuvo DRM.


The real loss was in the inability to sell the 90% of titles I no longer care about owning, but that's already true immediately after purchase.

Steam shutting down and taking your library with it really doesn't change much except you lose that nice delivery platform with good integrations (achievements, workshop mods, multiplayer integration, automatic updates) for games you're active in. For the 90% you were never going to touch again it wouldn't be noticeable, outside the annoying reminder you were never able to resell them. The other 10% just reverts back to "pirate it" which is about here on my scale:

"find that legal physical copy to play with" < "pirate it" < "click button on Steam"


Can't I still just run the .exe of the game? Or DRM nightmares?


All (most?) Steam games have a very simple DRM that is extremely easy to bypass, and you can find examples on github.

However, a lot of games add their own DRM and/or protection scheme that complicates things.

EDIT: technically there are two distinct component: the actual DRM, called steamstub, and the steamwork library, that does not work without steam but it is not considered drm. Both can be easily bypassed/emulated.


I see, but there is Steam DRM there. So, I guess as the other commenter was alluding to, if Steam goes belly up so does your collection, regardless of the dev studio's intention (Or atleast, locked behind a DRM bypass).

I understood this in terms of Live Service games, but did not consider Steam's ability to shut down their own platform and kill my locally installed single player games with it (Again, I'm seeing its possible and seems easy to bypass usually, but the principle of the matter)


I tried to search if it's possible for a dev studio to release a game on Steam that works without it, by which I mean that if I uninstall Steam, the games keep working; I wasn't able to confirm, but it seems to be theoretically possible...

None of the games I have in my library work like that, but online some people suggest that some games work even without Steam, once installed.

Your point, however, still stands.


Definitely not all games, and for games that do have it cracking it is in most cases as simple as swapping out a Steam .dll (so very easy). It's primarily there as appeasement for devs who would be reluctant to engage with a platform with no copy protection, or in otherwords is mostly theater.


Do you know of any games downloaded from Steam that work even once Steam is removed? I tried to search a bit, but I couldn't find any.

I would like to test it for myself to confirm it.


I haven't tried with too many games since the usecase only comes up rarely, but I know that Downwell and UFO 50 work this way off the top of my head. They come with a Steam dll that will try to launch Steam for the sake of getting achievements and such, but if you delete them or just don't have Steam they launch all the same.

Google turns up this Steam curator that lists games that run without Steam and are DRM-free out of the box, though it seems far from comprehensive: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38523697-DRM-FREE-GAM...

The PC Gaming Wiki has a couple of better lists it looks like: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g... and https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_...


Ok, lets stop being delusional here. I'll tell you how this will actualy work:

Imagine your device sending Google an encrypted query and getting back the exact results it wanted — without you having any way of knowing what that query was or what result they returned. The technique to do that is called Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).


queries are Oblivious Transfer - a second limited case of FHE that actually addresses the filter threat model.


This is not really about office suite choice. It's more about custom software that is developed for government for riddiculous amount of money only to be a huge vendor lock-in.

I would like to see how complex the software really is compared to its price and make it possible for other companies to offer maintenance or adding new modules without having to go through the original authors. so basicaly the freedoms government should already have to something they've payed crazy amount of money for.


Me: Visits Morroco (or pretty much any other country), has smartphone set to english. Also me: Gets youtube ads in Berber language. Has no idea what the ad is about or why someone would pay google to show it to me.


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