Is there pirate software on F-Droid?? (I’m assuming that’s what OP is referring to based on us being on /piracy)

In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

No, because in Russia there are no gays according to Putin.

And because of the logarithmic nature of decibels, 6 dB louder approximately means twice as loud. So these claimants are saying the airpods reached about 700 times higher volume than they can.

Yeah, true. Charging a tax on downloaded copyrighted material can be kinda okay if you don’t actively chase it. It’s not right to charge people a penalty for doing something but then prevent them from doing it. You can’t have it both ways, if it’s not right you can chase it, but don’t make me pay for doing something I’m not allowed to do! That would be like having to preemptively pay traffic fines before you actually drive over the speed limit, just in case.

This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.

Simplifying a lot:

• The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
• The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the “culture creators”, but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (…) industries.

They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.

• You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
• You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
• You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don’t, well, fuck you)

It’s a fucked up system and I don’t know if things have changed in the past few years as I don’t live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.

The UK measures alcohol in units to track total amount consumption, as it’s not easy to track with percentage in volume. A unit is 10 ml of pure alcohol, and cans/bottles/etc have the total units printed. That way it’s supposed to be easier to track how much alcohol you drink e.g. if you drink a beer, then a wine - now that’s 4 units.

I’m not British so I’m not used to units, but at least that’s the theory.

I always thought it was because 440ml is a round number when you convert it from metric to medieval units (not a pint though, which is 568ml), but a quick google shows me there’s another reason:

One reason for the popularity of the 440ml size is its convenience for calculating alcohol units. A 440ml can at 4.5% alcohol by volume (ABV) equates to exactly 2 units of alcohol, making it easier for consumers to track their alcohol consumption

Oh I had never thought of this or come across this concept! That’s a really elegant concept. Of course, in a transaction you’re putting in more effort than the money. The time it takes you to go through the purchase, the research, the cost of opportunity of that money… meaning those have to be covered in the cost of the transaction, and therefore the goods must be cheaper than the perceived value by those amounts.

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole and I thank you for that. Now I’m off to read about economics 🤓

This doesn’t necessarily apply to multiplayer games though: the free-to-play part of the playerbase is there to pad the numbers and ensure queues are short (if it’s a match based game), cities are lively (if it’s a MMORPG), etc.

If the developer can’t appeal to those too, then you’re left with a ghost town of a game that can’t appeal to the whales either.

Unfortunately in the 2020s you don’t even own the games you have the physical media for.

Edit: as a more serious answer, Linux might be a better bet than Windows for playing windows games (ironically), either through Proton or Wine.

Brother still can’t do inkjet right? I read somewhere there’s a big patent that lets only a select few companies be able to sell inkjet printers.

I used to have a laser printer, and they’re great for documents, but now what I print most are photos, and for that pigment-based inks rock.

I have an Epson printer but even if they’re nowhere near as bad as HP, Epson also has some weird shit from time to time.

These assholes used to spy on people - their app used to keep users’ microphones open, so that together with location, they could detect whether bars were airing football matches, and try to find unlicenced ones.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/12/732157537/spains-soccer-league-fined-for-using-app-to-spy-on-fans-in-fight-to-curb-piracy

I really hope they don’t get away with deleting apps from people’s phones.