The thing is, it's not all about horsepower. You gotta think about horse amour too.

I mean, a country with minimal military spending (or, one that doesn't have their own encrypted satellite network) can get a commodity device that gives modern connection speeds with very modest latency.

But the empowerment it obviously gives to an underpowered military is phenomenal.

Indeed, that's how it was sold. But that's not what it ever really was. What it really is, is a big fat on/off button in the hands of a private corporation, and the nation where that corporation is based. It's generally a bad idea to put the on/off button of your entire military into the hands of an outside power, as is made abundantly clear now.

This kind of technology isn't really feasible for smaller nations to establish on their own. The only countries that should ever rely on Starlink, or it's equivalent, are countries that either control it, or countries that are already vassals of countries that control it.

Not like Ukraine exactly had a lot of options at the time, of course...

Me browsing Lemmy, finding this post

You've got three guesses!

That aside, I remember back in the day that Op4 received a lot of praise from fans, while Blue Shift was considered by many to be underwhelming. I love them both, but I always thought Blue Shift was the better game. Op4 might be longer and more full of new content, but it's also all kind of thrown together, playing very loose with the universe. Blue Shift was, by comparison, short, clean, well told, and nailed the setting and gameplay. To me it feels like a very Half-Life game, whereas Op4 feels more like fanfic, like the most impressive single player Half-Life mod ever made.

No, that's not it. It's a little "trick" that's becoming popular with European politicians from the right, all the way to the centre-left.

According to international law, those asylum seekers have a right to have their request for asylum processed, by the country they're in when they make that request. Processing someone's request for asylum is something that can sometimes take a long time, and if their request is denied, it can still be very difficult to deport them - which is why you also see some countries giving denied asylum seekers a monetary reward for going back.

Hosting asylum seekers, especially a lot of them, can become quite unpopular, both locally, and in the population in general. The reasons for this is usually that it costs money to host and process asylum seekers, which some people feel is an undue burden put on their country, especially if they have a perception of the asylum seekers not seeking asylum in good faith, but are rather just economic migrants.

Additionally, it would be a terrible disregard of human rights to lock up these asylum seekers, as if they were criminals, and the asylum centre a prison. That means that they of course need to be able to go outside, and live as normal lives as possible, while their request is being processed, and their children will have to go to the local schools, etc.

In addition, I believe there are often put restrictions on their ability to work, as a measure against economic immigration - but the side effect of that is that they are much more likely to be seen as an undue drain by the general population. Countries are often loathe to start integrating people, when they expect to reject the vast majority of them. The consequence of that is that these people end up being very poorly integrated.

Besides that, there also tends to be a higher average crime rate among asylum seekers. The local communities that host the asylum centres of course reacts to that, and some people will start to feel unsafe, whether due to prejudice, or due to incidents of crime relating to some of the asylum seekers.

So, the clever "trick" that is becoming popular among politicians is to pay a foreign country to have their asylum centres built there, send all of their asylum seekers off to those centres, and often to staff those centres largely or partly with nationals of this foreign nation. From the point of view of these politicians, it solves a lot of the problems, and it lets them look "tough on immigrants".

The legality of all of this is still being hashed out, and courts are sometimes foiling those plans entirely. Whether this trick is or can be technically legal or not, and even if this method could be used in a fair and reasonable manner, it seems to always be bereft with very questionable practices or methods, as in this case, or when a European country tries to set up asylum centres in an African country that has a long track record of human rights abuses against - whaddya know - asylum seekers.

Holy shit. I got Logitech peripherals, and an ASUS motherboard. I'm glad I'm on Linux. I still have Windows installed, and booted into it around 2 weeks ago, after it having lied dormant for four months. I didn't notice anything being installed, but maybe I had to reboot first.

Quite possibly, my peripherals and motherboard are all too old to have this anti-feature. Do you know if there is a list of which of their hardware this is the case for?

Damnit, I always preferred Logitech mice. I guess I might have bought my last one.

I remember that the sound of his voice surprised me a lot, but I really like it. It honestly sounds a lot more normal than I would have expected - but I guess the voice is the difference between a god and a fake god!

His first time was shortly after he tried what those in the scene refer to as "spinning". All that violence happened while he was still high on the rush from that very first spin of his. It seemed like a "good trick" at the time, but like with many other a vulnerable youth before him and after him, it was nothing but a "gateway trick", that started him down a dark side-path in life, where he, hungry for more, would seek out dangerous knowledge on how to perform increasingly darker and darker "tricks". But that path inevitably leads to oblivion, for anyone who takes it. He ended up destroying not only those he loved, as well as many innocents who happened to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, along the way, until his addiction to these tricks would eventually claim its final victim - namely himself.

And that's why you should always say "NO!" to spinning! It might seem tempting and harmless, when a friend offers you just a little spin, right? But that person is not your friend, and that spin is anything but harmless. So, take the Spin-Free Pledge with me and all of your friends today, and you will be able to take home your very own SpinNot™ diploma to hang on your wall. And when some hoodlum on the street offers you a spin, remember these words, which will surely make him reevaluate his own life decisions in quiet shame, as you loudly and proudly tell him:

Spinning - not even once!

What a shame that it isn't open source.

I'll happily continue to use Audacious with a Winamp skin.

Yes, that's the issue.

ISPs give special preference to speedtest.net, so that their metrics will look better. Which means it rarely reflects actual reality. Theres a good chance this test is closer to the actual speeds you're getting everywhere but on speedtest.net.

If you were a teenager, back when online porn were all pay sites, and so you were using Kazaa/Limewire instead, then you know.

Absolutely, but the chain of trust, in a way, doesn't start with the admin - only the explicit chain does. Implicitly, the chain of trust starts with all of us. We collectively decide if any given chain is trustworthy or not, and abuse of power will undoubtedly be very hard to keep hidden for long. If it becomes apparent that any given chain have become untrustworthy, we will cast off those chains. We can broke new bonds of trust, to replace chains that have broken entirely.

It's a good system, because started a new chain should be incredibly easy. It's really just a refined version of the web rings of old, presented in a catalogue form. It's pretty great!