AnyOldName3

Plenty of plumbing is done with moulded plastic pipes and fittings, and I've 3D printed garden hose fittings (things like GHT to BSP adapters, which aren't easy to buy) with success, so it's not like moulding is the only way to make plastic good enough.

It's not so much a loophole as they'd reasonably have expected mods that chopped up voice lines to make new sentences, and mods have been doing that for Bethesda games for years, sometimes with surprisingly effective results, but that's obviously super time-consuming and not as good as someone just reading aloud, let alone actually acting. Generative AI can suddenly chop up voice lines to make newer ones way faster with next to no effort, and give comparable quality to the original voice actor reading lines aloud, even though it can't do the acting part.

It's no skin off Bethesda's nose if people use generative AI to voice modded dialogue, but it could be a problem for the voice actors. Wes Johnson's done voice work for mods before, so mods aren't operating in a completely separate space to the voice actors who worked on the games. From a quick search, it doesn't seem like he charged for any of the work he did for mods (one was specifically for a charity fundraiser), but it wouldn't be immoral of him, or any other voice actor, to take paid commissions for mod dialogue. That's not as viable if generative AI can compete.

Anyway, none of this is really relevant to OpenMW specifically - sound files are game content, and we don't deal with game content

You have made a mistake and in doing so summoned an OpenMW developer to this thread. Lua is not an acronym, it's Portuguese for moon, so should not be written in ALL CAPS.

It's a fringe example where it's legally okay as the Construction Set EULA that you have to agree to to use the original engine's modding tools grants you the right to make derivative works of the game's assets (including the sound files) provided it's only to make mods for Morrowind (and some other restrictions, e.g. not charging any money). For nearly any other game, no one's granted you that right, so it's not legal, but any other kind of modding that requires you to make things based off the game's original files and distribute them wouldn't be legal either.

Morally, it's dicey as a modern voice actor contract would either have a clause about being unable to use the recordings to train voice synthesis, or charge more for the privilege, so the voice actors for Morrowind signed a right away that they didn't intend to because their agents failed to realise it was something they could do or predict that it would ever become relevant. No one tricked anyone, but it's not what would have been agreed to if everyone involved was clairvoyant.

First, someone has to email [email protected] to tell Randal Munroe that there's a potential licence violation so he can file a suit.

xkcd comics are available under a CC-By-NC 2.5 licence, so you've successfully pirated by not including attribution (as long as people can't tell at a glance that it's xkcd from the art style or comment thread you posted it to), but to seal the deal, it'd be a crime to sell it.

A Spud apologist! Sabotage by a scarecrow was beyond Bob's control, and the cause of most problems.

Most of the languages you've mentioned aren't systems languages, so don't make being a good language to write an OS in a high priority. More languages might be accepted in the future, but if they are, it'll be ones that are a natural fit for the problems they're solving.

Returns and refunds happened because the EU warned them that if they didn't, they'd create legislation so they'd have to, as they were already in a grey area under EU law. EA had a similar refund policy for games bought through Origin before Steam did.

Other than that, nearly everything you listed was done because it made business sense and would lead to more profit. Decoupling PC gaming from Windows by working on Linux means they're not at the mercy of Microsoft's whims, and was started at a time where it looked like Microsoft might make a version of Windows that could only install third-party software through the Windows Store. Discouraging kernel-level anti cheat discourages one of the last hurdles to Linux being able to play all Windows games. Supporting VR lets them still VR games through Steam.

Not being publicly traded lets them be concerned about their long-term profits above their short-term ones, so they won't do things that tarnish their reputation nearly as often as their competitors, and can do multi-year projects. They look good because their competitors are bad rather than because what they do is altruistic.

Edit: I just did some maths. The Steam Deck has sold somewhere around 5 million units and a Windows licence costs somewhere around $50 to an OEM with a volume licensing deal. Both these figures are approximate as I couldn't find precise numbers, but they're enough for a ballpark figure. This means that Valve have saved around $250 million by shipping the Deck with SteamOS instead of Windows. Even if my figures are way off, it's still a huge amount of money and goes a long way towards making all their work on Linux pay for itself.

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they're getting something straight from the developers, so they're not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can't climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it's comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind's a little worse than nuclear, and solar's a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

The article's talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you've got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you've got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn't exist with fusion. It's so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you'd just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they'd cooled down. It's impossible for fusion power, once it's working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

PowerShell has a system to sign scripts, and with its default configuration, will refuse to execute scripts, and with the more sensible configuration you should switch to if you actually use PowerShell, refuses to execute unsigned scripts from the Internet.

I suspect that most of the scripts you're referring to just set -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to disable signature checking and run any script, though.