tal

Same reason that it's uncommon for any page to have most of the page covered in ink, regardless of whether it's a book or a sheaf of papers or whatever. Ink costs something, and it's cheaper to put ink on a little bit of the page than it is to put ink on everything but a little bit of the page. Unless there's a compelling reason to do otherwise, you take the cheaper route.

Hmm.

For the early titles listed, when the games came out, Linux was pretty irrelevant from a gaming standpoint.

Later, many games that had cross-platform releases used engines that provided cross-platform compatibility. Those games would have been written to the platform, so I'm sure that ports weren't as easy.

Now, the games are very elderly. The original team will be long gone. I don't know if there's anyone working on those at all -- unless a game represents some kind of continued revenue stream, there isn't a lot of reason to keep engineers on a game.

WINE runs them fine, so there's a limited return for Blizzard to do a native port. In fact, as I recall, Starcraft was one of the first notable games that WINE ran...I remember Starcraft support being a big deal around 2001, IIRC. The original Warcraft was for DOS, so you can run that in a DOS emulator.

I doubt that the investment in a Linux-native port in 2025 is going to get much of a return relative to what other things one could do with the same resources.

I guess maybe I could see an argument for World of Warcraft, as a very successful, long-running MMORPG that still has players and still represents revenue. But I think that I'd be surprised to see native ports of most of their earlier library.

It's an interesting idea. If their thesis is true, it might cause compression of the income range.

I believe that this is just temporary. If I remember correctly from skimming the Reddit FedNews subreddit where a lot of people are talking about this, there's some legal requirement about layoffs where the Secretary of Defense has to perform some review first to see if the layoffs are problematic, which apparently was not done. The SecDef is Pete Hegseth, who is quite happy to do the layoffs, so...

kagis

Okay, here's a reference to it:

https://fox28savannah.com/news/nation-world/pentagon-halts-mass-firings-of-civilian-employees-pending-review-of-mission-impact-department-of-defense-secretary-pete-hegseth-military-services-cuts-legality-title-10-section-129a-doge

Pentagon lawyers reportedly started reviewing the legality of the planned firings after CNN reported it could conflict with Title 10 section 129a of the US Code.

According to the law, the secretary of defense "may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis" to ensure the impact on mission effectiveness is considered.

An analysis had not been carried out before military leaders were ordered to list the employees who would be fired, according to a senior defense official.

So I imagine that he's just gonna do whatever the legal minimum requirement is here and then they're going to proceed.

The direct effects on the world of a nuclear war between the US and Russia isn't going to include killing 90% of the world's population.

“During the identification process, it was determined that the additional body received is not that of Shiri Bibas, and no match was found for any other hostage.”

The Israeli military confirmed in the early hours of Friday that two of the bodies belonged to Bibas’s children, Ariel and Kfir.

“In an unimaginably cynical manner, they did not return Shiri to her small children, the little angels, and instead placed the body of a Gazan woman in a coffin,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “We will act with determination to bring Shiri home along with all our hostages – both living and dead – and ensure Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and evil violation of the agreement.”

I mean, they probably just accidentally dicked it it up, dude.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_the_Bibas_family

In late 2023, Hamas claimed that Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir had been killed during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Like, they were probably hauling corpses out of rubble and grabbed the wrong corpse.

https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Winter

Even using the most conservative numbers here, an all-out exchange between the US and Russia would produce a nuclear winter that would at most resemble the one that Robock and Toon predict for a regional nuclear conflict, although it would likely end much sooner given empirical data about stratospheric soot lifetimes. Some of the errors are long-running, most notably assumptions about the amount of soot that will persist in the atmosphere, while others seem to have crept in more recently, contributing to a strange stability of their soot estimates in the face of cuts to the nuclear arsenal. All of this suggests that their work is driven more by an anti-nuclear agenda than the highest standards of science. While a large nuclear war would undoubtedly have some climatic impact, all available data suggests it would be dwarfed by the direct (and very bad) impacts of the nuclear war itself.

They're claiming that the people are being let go for poor performance in their termination letters, presumably for legal reasons, so I guess that they technically qualify as firings.

But, I mean, that's not what's actually driving this -- they're just getting rid of people who they can get rid of without regard for performance -- so I'd use the term "layoffs" myself.

If we wind up in a situation where the EU mandates a form of censorship that the US bans, I assume that the platforms in question would have to separate their EU and US users and sites.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet

just want to browse what is out there.

If you don't specifically want Facebook Marketplace, there's stuff like Craigslist and eBay.

EDIT: It looks like if you go directly to the Facebook Marketplace page rather than the main page at Facebook, it'll let you search and browse Facebook Marketplace (or it let me do so, at any rate):

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/

I did get a popup asking me to log in, but I closed that and was able to do searches.

That makes me wonder about Amtrak.

Hmm.

• The Project 2025 stuff seems to mostly align with what's on the Heritage Foundation website. Looking at said website, they are not happy about Amtrak.

• Apparently Trump tried eliminating federal subsidies for long-distance Amtrak routes at the start of his first term and failed.

I mean, you can probably stick whatever you want in there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail

In 1959 the U.S. Navy submarine USS Barbero assisted the Post Office Department, predecessor to the United States Postal Service (USPS), in its search for faster mail transportation, with the only delivery of "Missile Mail". On 8 June 1959, Barbero fired a Regulus cruise missile – its nuclear warhead having earlier been replaced by two Post Office Department mail containers – targeted at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The Regulus cruise missile was launched with a pair of Aerojet-General 3KS-33,000 solid-rocket boosters. A turbojet engine sustained the long-range cruise flight after the boosters were dropped. Twenty-two minutes after launch, the missile struck its target.

The USPS had officially established a branch post office on Barbero and delivered some 3000 pieces of mail to it before Barbero left Norfolk, Virginia. The mail consisted entirely of commemorative postal covers addressed to President of the United States Dwight Eisenhower, other government officials, the Postmasters General of all members of the Universal Postal Union, and so on, from United States Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield. Their postage (four cents domestic, eight cents international) had been cancelled "USS Barbero Jun 8 9.30am 1959" before the submarine put to sea. At Mayport, the Regulus missile was opened and the mail forwarded to the post office in Jacksonville, Florida, for sorting and routing.