It’s pretty obviously both things that were a problem. A mediocre prebuilt with a $200 premium over other mediocre prebuilts was unattractive, but plenty of people do buy overpriced mediocre prebuilts. The killer feature being that nearly no games were compatible was going to kill it even if the price was right, though.

Now we’re in the era of Proton, and games just work, if the price is fair, it’ll sell. If the price is you cannot get anything like this without spending much more like the Deck or how consoles used to be priced when the hardware made a loss and the profits came from games, then it’ll sell really well.

I’ve never used or dissassembled an American microwave, so wouldn’t know about anything American-specific.

Having a ceramic plate at the end of the wave guide isn’t evidence that there’s not a wave stirrer on the other side of the plate or part way along the wave guide. As far as the microwaves are concerned, the ceramic plate is a hole, though, because (unless the manufacturer selected a stupid material), it should be about as transparent to microwaves as the air is.

if the diagram’s any good, it should show the wave stirrer in the roof rather than on the ceiling of the food chamber. There’s typically a waveguide to take the microwaves from the magnetron to the top of the chamber, then the wave stirrer is at the end of the waveguide to vary the angle that microwaves enter the chamber at. There’s usually something to stop food splashing/spraying into that section, though, e.g. an extra few centimetres of waveguide afterwards with a bend in it.

Of all the dangerous devices to disassemble, they’re one of the safest. A phone charger might still have 400V across one of the capacitors ten minutes after unplugging it (if you’re in a 230V RMS country, so have more than 400V peak-to-peak), but a microwave’s high-voltage section is only powered when it’s plugged in, and microwaves are so long wavelength that even if you reassemble the waveguide or outer case badly and leave gaps, there probably won’t be dangerous levels of microwaves escaping as gaps much smaller than the wavelength in question don’t compromise the Faraday cage.

Usually it’s not inside the same chamber as the food as then it would be a nuisance to clean. You need to take a microwave apart to see the wave stirrer.

Most microwaves have a spinning wave stirrer in addition to the rotating plate. From the description here, it just sounds like either your plate rotation motor is broken or you’ve got a weirdly simple microwave.

I know people who say exactly this kind of thing entirely seriously (potentially because they first saw it as an unlabelled joke that they took too seriously). Sometimes people are just incorrect pedants smugly picking fault with things that aren’t even wrong.

It depends on the sense of wet that you’re using. Most of the time, the relevant kind of wet is how much water something contains, and water achieves peak theoretical wetness by that definition. It’s only in specific circumstances that the surface is coated evenly by a wetting agent definition is relevant, like painting or firefighting.

Unless you’re a Ferengi or Ayn Rand, a free market shouldn’t allow agents within the market to manipulate each other, as that inhibits trades being done solely based on what gives the best value for the least currency, making the market less free. The regulation here isn’t taking away a choice you want to have as supermarkets that run BOGOF offers just set the unit price to the cost of two units, so your choice is between paying for two things and getting two things or paying for two things and only getting one. Effectively, your choice to just buy one thing at a fair price is taken away by supermarkets, and it’s dressed up to make it look like you’re getting a bargain when you pay a fair price for two things and get two things.

A parenthood licence is a really common trope in dystopian fiction because it’s fundamentally the most authoritarian thing a state could do short of mind control. If you don’t trust a government to decide whether or not there should be BOGOF offers on crisps, you absolutely shouldn’t trust them to decide who gets to have children. For most of the twentieth century, the British government was actively trying to suppress minority political opinions like it being acceptable for people to be homosexual or anti-pollution. If they’d been deciding what the requirements were to get a parenthood licence, they’d absolutely have made people agree to teach their children that it wasn’t okay to be gay etc…

Unless you want to do something dystopian like requiring a parenthood licence before people are allowed to have children and then force them to keep it renewed by attending regular parenthood classes, you can’t force people to receive education on how to be better parents. The state doesn’t have many levers to pull that don’t involve taking people’s children away. Making harmful products less appealing by preventing retailers promoting them is a much better balance of good effect against oppression. The kind of deal being restricted here is something supermarkets do because it manipulates people into buying things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s not like every time you see a BOGOF sale in a shop it’s because they’re overstocked and are trying to clear things before they go past their sell-by date. If that’s not happening, then the only rational reason for supermarkets to have these deals is to manipulate their customers, and it’s not oppressive for a government to prevent multi-billion pound companies from manipulating its citizens.

You can have loyalty cards from as many shops as you want, so it’s not inherently anti-competitive. They’re not even particularly meant to encourage loyalty, they’re a way to track what individuals buy over multiple trips and then deliver targeted advertising. The non-loyalty-card prices are high to ensure that customers are incentivised to sign away their data.

You’re thinking of firmware, not drivers. To make a GPU work, you need new enough versions of the kernel, driver and firmware. The open source drivers for Nvidia GPUs are still slower and less featureful than the proprietary ones.

The good advice that they just won’t take is spot on for the Arch Wiki, though.

With how the law is written, if you think anyone might ever make a mistake (likely), think the government might ever bother going through the hassle of enforcing it (probably less likely if you’re not running a big website), and don’t have loads of spare money to pay huge fines with or to pay an age verification service with (likely), then blocking the UK is the only way to be compliant. It doesn’t require a technicality. The law just doesn’t have any leeway for honest minor mistakes or small hobbyist websites.

Some instances use the image proxy and others don’t. It seems that mine doesn’t.

Fun fact: I can’t see the screenshot as I’m in the UK and your instance has taken the maximally paranoid literal meaning of the OSA and blocked access just in case anything’s accidentally not flagged as NSFW.

Godwin’s law isn’t claiming that it’s fallacious to compare things to Hitler or that the person who first mentions Hitler is wrong, it’s just observing that comparisons to Hitler eventually happen if an argument goes on long enough. It’s kind of obvious, too. Reductio ad absurdum is a valid form of argument, and as long as whoever you’re discussing something is isn’t ludicrously off the deep end, they’ll agree that Hitler is obviously bad, so if someone says something, and that thing when taken to its logical conclusion would imply (in the logically guarantees sense rather than subtly suggests sense) that Hitler wasn’t bad, it’s quick and easy to point that out as a demonstration that the thing must be wrong.

In this specific case, though, it’s even simpler. Hitler and Thatcher are both obviously bad, and they were putting words in my mouth about Thatcher when objecting to a comment where I’d explicitly called her evil to suggest that I was claiming she wasn’t evil.

But her favourite story book said that if she destroyed all the industry then the invisible hand of the free market would liberate all the workers from drudgery and they’d all become doctors and live lives of luxury and never have to do any work.

Thatcher was a die-hard believer in Ayn Rand’s economics, and a core part of that is that people are poor because you give them the opportunity to be, and then through several unexplained leaps of logic, that if you take away the option to be a bit poor, instead of making everyone even poorer like obviously happens in real life, somehow they’ll instantly gain qualifications in unrelated fields and become rich. It’s insane, and yet somehow a wildly popular worldview among the ‘intellectual’ right, despite being dismissed as moronic by anyone with two braincells to rub together and every serious academic.

It’s roughly equivalent to claiming we should enslave short people and call them house elves and then as a result we’ll all get wands and certificates from Hogwarts that let us do magic (except the house elves, who wouldn’t need wands), but then instead of being placed into a secure hospital to protect the public, you get put in charge of one of the most influential countries in the world, and by an unrelated coincidence, the North Sea Oil Boom happens and makes that country more wealthy, so then decades later, magic being accepted as fact despite being purely from a fantasy novel full of plotholes.

Stating that Hitler thought he was helping Europe by slaughtering millions of Jews and other minorities doesn’t imply any degree of approval for anything he did or acceptance that if he’d been right, the end state he was aiming for was worth the atrocities committed trying to get there. Evil in the real world isn’t like a cartoon where the bad guy just enjoys being bad for its own sake. Pretending otherwise just makes it harder to recognise when people are doing evil things again just by being simultaneously incorrect and in charge.

It seems like you’re under the impression that thinking you’re doing something good is virtuous, but I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think morality should be solely judged by outcomes, either, but rather whether you take reasonable measures to ensure that even if you’re wrong, you don’t make things worse. Everyone hears the phrase the road to hell is paved with good intentions as children, so should know that having good intentions has little to no bearing on whether they’re a good person unless they’re also making sure they’re not doing evil by recklessness or negligence.

It being obviously fucking stupid to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality doesn’t mean that Thatcher didn’t think it was true and wasn’t one of the people unwilling to think. She should have been sectioned for being deluded into thinking Atlas Shrugged was real life, but instead managed to get elected, and decades later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of putting the country in the hands of someone guided predominantly by their favourite storybook.

There’s really clear evidence that there was an attempt to make normal people buy stocks in water companies in the fact that there was heavy television advertising in the run-up to privatisation encouraging people to buy stocks in water companies while they were still a fixed price. Post-Thatcher privatisation of UK infrastructure and public services, on the other hand, has always been done behind closed doors straight into the hands of hedge funds, venture capital, and individuals capable of buying the whole thing. The end result is always the service going to shit once there’s a profit motive conflicting with the service motive, but if you compare the percentage of these companies that are owned by pension funds and individuals who hold less than a few hundred pounds worth, it’s clear that the water companies have much more of their ultimate ownership in the hands of normal people than, for example Royal Mail. Obviously (to sane people), it’s way less than if the state owned the water companies, but it’s not nothing.

Accusing a post of whitewashing Thatcher when its opening line explicitly states she was evil is a pretty big leap. Calling someone evil should be the opposite of whitewashing, and isn’t inconsistent with saying they thought they were helping. Plenty of evil people are deluded into thinking they’re doing something moral and that, because of that, the ends will justify their amoral means, or they don’t even notice their means are amoral.