It’s not as dumb as you make it out. The issue isn’t that GPS is really, really good at what it does; it’s that it’s also incredibly vulnerable to disruption and spoofing. And due to the particulars of how GPS works, we can’t entirely fix that. We can do some things to ameliorate it, but a lot of those aren’t suitable for smaller things that use GPS today.

The other thing is that GPS largely replaced a tremendous number of other navigation aides and techniques, including other radio-navigation systems like LORAN-C.

Bows are actually incredibly hard to use. When you see a “draw weight” of the bow, this is the force you need to exert to pull it back to its full draw. 40-50lbs is considered normal, I believe, while the English Longbow - famous for its use in the Hundred Years’ War - had a draw weigh of at least 80 pounds, with some scholars suggesting even 50% greater numbers than that. Imagine lifting a weight that heavy each time you wanted to loose an arrow!

Bows, then, require extended training to use properly. Not just strength training, although professional archers were jacked, but in how to properly employ the weapon. The dominance of early firearms had much to do with not just their absolute performance - at times, they were actually outperformed by bows in absolute terms - but by that their effective use could be broken down into simple actions which could be easily drilled into new recruits.

If we’re talking about modern guns, this effect is much exaggerated. Guns can take some getting use to, sure, and modern bows have added features for ease of use. But guns are, honestly, shockingly easy to use for what they can accomplish.

On the G502, the first button directly beneath the scroll wheel should lock and unlock its free-spinning mode.

This. I think people are way, way underestimating the integration costs for all of this. It’s not as simple as “buy the pieces, plug them into each other, instant sensor system!”

Especially for riding around in a rough environment, a Pixel is sensors, communication, storage, power, all wrapped up in a reasonably robust case and featuring premade software to run the whole mess when you purchase it.

Sounds like a perfectly good reason to check out whether your local library has it. And/or take up a career in sailing.

With every month that passes, I feel ever more infuriated that so many of the programs I use are essentially hard-locked to Nvidia, with frankly miserable performance on other GPUs. Not the cards’ fault, the software devs’ fault for - when they even bother at all - doing a piss-poor job of integration with other GPUs.

I love watching cats get that first taste of actual petting with an actual human hand. Watching them go from “Not sure if want?” to “I need more!” is always heartwarming.

TDP has two main leads, one white and one black.

I’m not walled off from Star Wars’ controversies, merely pointing out that “every time” isn’t accurate.

“Every time” is certainly an exaggeration. Just off the top of my head in a minute:

• The Dragon Prince - nobody gave a damn.
• Star Wars [pick any of several releases] - we’ve had various people of color, both human and alien, as protagonists. I don’t remember much of a fuss over that in particular.
• Various MCU things - Brave New World just came out, again featuring Mackie as Wilson - taking the place of the stereotypically WASP Steve Rogers, no less.
• Hazbin Hotel: Vaggie is heavily coded as latina.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury - okay, not a non-white lead, but the first Gundam series with a female lead, and a lesbian romance front and center. Once again, no attack.

If I looked around further, I’m sure I could find more. All of these have variously been critiqued for writing, characterization, or pacing, but failed to draw attacks based on the ethnicity (or orientation) of their protagonists.

Is this kind of attack a thing that happens? Absolutely. Is it “every time”? No. I’d suggest it’s more often when a series goes out of its way to bludgeon the audience with a message related to it, or tries to sell a newcomer as a superior replacement for a legacy character, that people can get riled up.

Oh absolutely. OP only asked about UI, so I focused on that. But Generals had a lot of WC3 flavor in it.

Command and Conquer had traditionally used a “right-pillar” control interface, with your map at the top. utility controls like “sell building” or “power down”, followed by a build selection screen below. There you had 4 panels you could select between - “main base” buildings, defensive buildings, infantry, and vehicles - and you could scroll up and down a given panel. So long as you had the right production building, you could select things to build from anywhere on the map. If a unit had a “special ability”, it would be triggered by double-clicking on the unit.

Come 2003’s Command and Conquer: Generals, the UI had been totally redone to resemble the layout of Blizzard’s wildly popular Warcraft 3: The control panel now sat at the bottom of the screen, with the map on the left. Building a particular kind of unit required you to select the building or unit that produced it. Selecting an individual unit gave you a list of magic spells special abilities it could take, such as using an alternative weapon or purchasing a particular upgrade.

Yeah, I do apologize - I’m somewhat simplifying my explanation because when you start going into the full detail, it just brings up more questions.

So yes, like the other comment says, the particles are constantly bouncing into other things.

• If they’re bounded in by something - walls of a container, or even just more gas surrounding the specific sample you’re looking at - they’ll bump into that, and transfer some of their energy to that.
• If they don’t have something to bump off of and the particles are free-floating, they’ll take off in any given direction. If they only have something to bump off of in a limited number of directions, they’ll take off in the other direction. (For instance, in a rocket engine, we make a lot of molecules really, really hot and then surround them with barriers in every direction except the one we want them to zoom out in.)
• In some cases, the molecules have electromagnetic bonds with each other, which take more energy to break than the energy contained in their “bouncing around”. So they’ll stay stuck, just bouncing off each other, even in a vacuum, (Or at least, until they radiate away their heat via electromagnetic energy… another whole story.)

Yes, and no. Heat and kinetic energy are fundamentally all just energy. What we call heat is, technically, the kinetic energy of molecules vibrating around.

When exhaust gas passes through a turbocharger, it is both slowed and reduced in pressure, resulting in it coming out slightly cooler than when it entered. This device is using a different method of getting energy out of the exhaust gas, but it’s fundamentally still the kinetic energy of those very energetic exhaust gas molecules bouncing against one side of the thermoelectric generator and giving up their energy into it. I would still expect the exhaust gas to come out of it slightly cooler and slower.

I’m always a little sorrowful people unfamiliar with cats will look at this, see narrow side-eye, and think “Oh, that cat is being cold and distant.”

No. That is a cat content with the world. That is a cat who is totally comfortable and at peace with her perch. Congratulations, and - if those are your legs under the blanket - my condolences at your eternal entrapment beneath the immovable kitty.

Obligatory IANAL, etc.

If the template is being used for non-commercial services and does not closely replicate any of the material the characters is based on, then it probably falls under Fair Use - similar to how many rulings have affirmed that fan fiction is broadly legally permitted. Conversely, if the chat service owner is charging for the use, then it would probably be forbidden under the grounds that the service host is financially benefiting from another’s copyright.

Between that, is a murky zone.

• Content creators and owners have at times made legal demands that pornographic, shocking, or other fan content which could reflect poorly on the original owners be removed, on the basis it damages their value. If I remember correctly, rulings on this have gone both ways and the issue remains largely unsolved.
• If the bot hoster makes small changes to obfuscate the identity represented to the bot, it could likewise become iffy. It’d likely depend on the court ruling whether the identity was “substantially changed” enough.
• A new course would be to argue that - given some of the issues regarding how bots have become abusive or encouraging of harmful behavior - any chatbot usage represents an intolerable danger to their brand value. I actually expect to see this litigated fairly soon.

Now this is the good stuff I look for in a Tech community.

Subjectively, I’ve been seeing a lot of high ping/packet loss in gaming and sites loading tonight. Can’t help but wonder if something more fundamental is going on.

To be fair, Star Trek always had its fantasy element as well. They dressed it up with Treknobabble a lot, but many of the episodes had fundamentally fantasy elements as well. Like, remember the time Kirk gets beamed down to a planet where the inhabitants use literal, actual magic and it turns out the Salem witches were actual witches?

Y’know, I was just browsing earlier and thinking that there wasn’t even any technology stuff in my feed anymore, it’d all been subsumed by the political churn…

Anyhow, to answer properly: I like Star Wars’ aesthetic better, but Star Trek also had some incredible stuff. I’ve also been increasingly burned out on Star Wars since the Disney takeover, to the point I barely follow it anymore. Back in the day I was neck-deep in the community of nerds who loved analyzing how the technology in the setting worked!

But the real love of my science-fiction life is Babylon 5. Something about how they planned the show’s myth arc out over multiple seasons leading to huge payoffs for both characters and the overall story.

This entire “glitch” is posited on the idea that altering your subjective past does not alter your absolute present.

And you’re right - that’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t taking away something from the past alter the present? This is called causality and thermodynamics, and it’s one of the reasons physics, as we understand it presently, doesn’t really allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived. It’s not about gold coins, exactly, but the idea that you can’t end up with more energy than you started out with (or the mass equivalent of energy).

But OP started with the idea that a time machine which break causality and thermodymnamics exists, so I just pointed out how massively broken such a machine would be.