AnyOldName3

The green slime was originally mouldy bin contents made of food waste from several days before. It was far from innocent.

Copyright law is written as if magically duplicating the fruit is the same thing as stealing it. In a discussion about what the law is rather than what it should be in a sensible society, the analogy is fine. As Microsoft is the copyright holder, you only have the right to do anything with their files that they have deigned to grant you, and anything else is legally piracy. In the case of this specific link, they’ve granted the public the right to use it for evaluation purposes, but they’ve not granted any other rights, so it is legal to use the link to download the file for evaluation purposes, and illegal to use it for anything else.

If you want a slightly different analogy, it’s a little like how if Disney put on a free screening of the latest Marvel film for disabled children at a cinema, and didn’t check at the door, an able bodied adult could wander in, past signs saying that the screening was for disabled children only, and watch the film for free, but the fact that they could physically gain access doesn’t mean they had any legal right to be there. They could be ejected from the cinema and/or sued for the cost of a ticket and any legal costs. You do not have a legal right to click link on Microsoft’s website next to some text saying that it’s for evaluation purposes only unless you’re clicking it for evaluation purposes only. Just because you’ve made it to the link, it doesn’t mean you can ignore the text saying who is and isn’t allowed to click it.

It’s freely available for evaluation purposes (from that link - it’s freely available for other purposes from other links, too, and so are other editions of Windows), but that doesn’t mean you’re legally allowed to use those public links however you want. If the copyright holder says they’re for evaluation purposes only, then if you know you aren’t intending to pay even if you like it, then you’re not evaluating whether or not the download link is public, so it still counts as piracy. It’s still stealing to take produce from a roadside stall with an honesty box if you don’t pay even though the produce was just sitting out in the open.

No, they’re illegal several times over as you’ve got to pirate the thing in the first place to end up in a situation where you need one, and then they’re inherently a DRM circumvention device, which are illegal to possess, and then using them circumvents DRM, which is illegal to do. The upside is that you’re unlikely to be caught.

Legally, it isn’t. The DMCA (and compatible laws in non-US countries, which those countries have to have or they’re not allowed a trade deal, and not having a trade deal with the US is devastating for an economy) doesn’t require copyright holders to do anything to defend their copyright. It does make it illegal to do (nearly) anything with copyrighted media that you don’t have explicit permission to do from the copyright holder (there are some exceptions, but people generally think they go further than they really do). It also makes it illegal to do (nearly) anything to circumvent DRM, even if you have a legal right to use the thing that the DRM is protecting, no matter how crappy the DRM is and how easily it can be bypassed.

You’re allowed to think that the law is stupid (it’s the DMCA - everyone who looks at it and isn’t a multibillion dollar publishing company thinks it’s stupid), but that doesn’t mean that it’s not the law, and for legal terms like piracy, you can’t just substitute your own definition based on what should be legal if it conflicts with the definition that says what really is legal.

The reason why non-crap DRM exists when there’s no legal reason to make it not crap is the same reason why DRM exists at all when there’s no legal reason to have DRM at all when piracy of DRM-free stuff is already a crime. It’s that publishers think that the more of a hassle it is to pirate things, the more likely people are to buy things legally. Technically, a shareholder could sue a company for using crap DRM that failed to protect their IP, but the company has a decent defence by saying that they felt that intrusive DRM would hurt their reputation with legitimate customers, so not using strong DRM is not grounds to say a company’s been negligent and liable for any losses they make due to piracy.

Circumventing DRM by any means, whether that’s by modifying it so it doesn’t work or just clicking buttons that the DRM provider doesn’t want you to click, is legally considered piracy in most of the world. If you didn’t get the activation code from Microsoft (or someone Microsoft authorised to give it to you), it’s pirated.

I’m not sure I’d consider this a total upgrade - I have a Steam Controller and an 8bitdo SN30 Pro, and despite the 8bitdo one being newer and having been used much less, I wore through its original thumbstick rubber and had to replace it much sooner than the Steam Controller’s thumbstick cap, which hasn’t even worn through, it was just flaking.

Either that was a fluke, or the 8bitdo rubber isn’t as durable.

Technically Temu doesn’t import anything. They’re allowed to sell toxic or otherwise dangerous goods because the customer’s the one importing them, and there are plenty of things you’re allowed to import for personal use that you wouldn’t be allowed to import for retail. The EU’s working on closing this loophole, but the UK isn’t in the EU anymore.

They got lots of consultants in from MindGeek who own Pornhub etc. and several age-verification services. They told the government that the consultants who were raising issues were overreacting, and the government believed them because obviously the world’s largest porn company wouldn’t encourage them to enact a law that would do bad things to the porn industry. They didn’t stop to think that the law as written means there’s now a requirement for smaller compliant porn sites to either spend more than their total revenue implementing an age-verification system or buy in one of the ones MindGeek own.

The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.

We’re in a thread that was started by someone complaining that their Windows machine kept waking up seemingly on its own when they put it to sleep, so how wake on LAN behaves for a computer that’s completely shut down was never particularly relevant, and certainly not something to be taken as the only situation we’re discussing. When a computer is asleep, wake on LAN can wake it, and because the OS is still loaded, it doesn’t need to do a full boot before running any wake on LAN handling it has. If wake on LAN is disabled in the motherboard settings, then a computer in a deep sleep like S3 can’t respond to network activity at all.

Also, I’m not sure where you’ve got the idea that wake on LAN is mainly for fully powered off machines. There’s a reason it’s usually called wake on LAN, not power on by LAN. The ability for a network event to power on a machine from S5 power off is usually a separate setting and isn’t even possible on all hardware that supports wake on LAN.

I’m also not sure where you got the idea that only the hardware aspect counts as wake on LAN and the OS-side handling for being woken on LAN doesn’t count. Like with many things related to computers, it requires a hardware aspect and a software aspect working together to form a whole system, and in this case, it’s the whole system that’s called wake on LAN.

It’s not any packet that’s waking up machines configured to wake on LAN without restricting it to magic packets, it’s any packet addressed to the machine’s MAC. Just like a regular packet when the machine’s fully awake, it’s specific to the network adapter with that MAC, and gets handled by that network adapter. Once it wakes the machine (either to fully on or a sleeping-but-still-doing-things state like S0), the OS starts/resumes and is told why it was started and can choose to access the packet and respond to it. From the perspective of the device on the other end of the wire, it sent a packet to a machine and got the response it expected. It doesn’t have to know whether the machine was fully powered on or whether it woke up to deal with the request before going back to sleep again.

By default, for most network traffic that partially wakes Windows when the machine has wake on LAN enabled in the UEFI settings, Windows sees it’s been woken by LAN activity, checks the packet, decides it doesn’t care, and goes back to sleep before anyone notices (or remains in S0 sleep if it was in S0 sleep as it wouldn’t need to wake up to deal with the packet). For a few other kinds of LAN activity, it opts to respond to the packet. If you’ve got your UEFI settings set to only wake on magic packets, these won’t make it that far, though. There’s also a Windows setting to force it not to respond to regular non-magic packets and immediately go back to sleep if it’s woken by them.

The MAC-specific magic packet is an optional mode for wake on LAN, not a mandatory one. Plenty of network adapters forward packets to the OS if wake on LAN is enabled and let the OS decide whether it only wants to respond to magic packets, and by default when wake on LAN is enabled, there are other kinds of packet Windows responds to, e.g. Address Resolution Protocol, which lots of routers use to check whether devices are still connected. It’s not supposed to wake the machine, especially if S0 sleep is enabled, but it can, especially if it’s done excessively.

When Windows wakes itself up to do things like that, it wakes itself to a different sleep level where it can still do things but the machine isn’t visibly on. That’s the whole point of S0 sleep. If it’s fully waking itself up to do things, then either S0 sleep is disabled or there’s a firmware bug affecting the motherboard that means certain actions during S0 sleep will exit sleep (which is more common than it should be).

That’s almost certainly because you’ve got wake on LAN enabled in your BIOS settings and something else on your network wants to have a late-night chat with your computer.

AMD’s GPUs were much faster than Intel’s, and making GPUs for this kind of application was something AMD already did. Nvidia didn’t, so would have to design a whole chip from scratch, and didn’t really have a power efficiency advantage (in recent generations where AMD’s desktop cards have run hot, it’s because they’ve been clocked high to keep up with Nvidia’s cards, but the same architecture runs cool when clocked lower for mobile applications, e.g. Vega was notoriously inefficient on the desktop due to being delayed two years and having to compete with a different generation than it was designed to, but was great in laptop APUs). Intel would also have gained experience with chiplets and packaging a fast GPU with a CPU. It let everyone involved make more money than doing it any other way.

That’s not the conclusion the study’s authors drew. The particles being airborne for longer means they can float further and contaminate things further away from the toilet, and also are more likely to end up inhaled. That could be a bigger problem than the number of particles initially released, so the study didn’t make a recommendation of whether the lid should be up or down. More research is required before anyone should be issuing definitive commands in bold to strangers on the internet.

My comment was explicitly pointing out that closing the lid can have the opposite of the intuitive effect and make things worse even though you’d expect it to make them better. It seems that I misrepresented the study’s findings, though, as while closing the lid does make particles remain airborne for much longer, so my overall point is sound, closing the lid does reduce the number of particles that initially become airborne.

I can’t get the full text, but https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/acmi/10.1099/acmi.fis2019.po0192 has the abstract. It looks like I misremembered its findings (or remembered an article that oversimplified them), though - having the lid down does something to the released particles to make more of them stay airborne for much longer, but it does reduce the number that escape, like you’d expect.

There’s a University of Cork study showing that putting the lid down aerosolises more material so spreads bacteria etc. over the whole room, whereas having the lid open produces a smaller number of larger droplets that nearly all just fall straight back into the toilet. The lid is not sealing the toilet and preventing the need to clean the bathroom.