I’m not an expert, so take my findings with a grain of salt, but the current scientific consensus seems to be:

We don’t know.

Recent studies suggest that the behavior of spiders is more complex than previously thought. They show behavior that can’t be explained by simple automatisms, such as the development of hunting strategies depending on their prey.

Keep in mind that these findings do not indicate any capability to love or to grow fond of someone. But there is an ongoing discussion about whether invertebrates should be considered sentient.

I unfortunately can't really see how a browser could still be nice to use and properly resist fingerprinting.

The site https://amiunique.org/fingerprint tries to fingerprint your browser and lists the used attributes along with their uniqueness within their dataset. And while a browser could pretty reliably lie about its User Agent or Platform, it's often just necessary for a modern website to know, for example, what your view-port's resolution is or what kind of audio/video codecs your device supports. Going through my own results, I'd say combining these necessary data is probably enough to identify me, although I'm pretty privacy-conscious.

Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think preventing fingerprinting would need a regulatory instead of a technical solution. Unfortunately that doesn't seem very likely anytime soon.

The source for this data is Equaldex. According to their data on Sweden, for example, the following things are rated negatively:

• non-binary genders aren‘t legally recognized
• intersex infant surgery is not banned
• donating blood is not always possible for homosexual men
• conversion therapy is not banned

They might also take their public opinion section into account for the country‘s overall score, but I haven‘t looked into that more thoroughly.

(source)

Not a map, but at least some more data from some other countries. The own car is unfortunately the most used mode of transport for commuting in every surveyed country, but the US seem to be especially far behind when it comes to alternatives.

Firstly, I‘m not twisting words, there is no mention of „plastic“ in the post I was replying to, just plain „recycling“.

Secondly, I’m sorry, but I really don‘t understand how a non-perfect rate makes plastic recycling a scam. Recycling is hard. There‘s no magic recycling machine, which just converts 100% of plastic waste to newly usable material. There are so many reasons for a less than perfect recycling rate (non-separated trash, contamination, badly designed packaging, technical limitations when sorting etc.pp.), that I find it just very strange and unhelpful to call it a scam without substantial support for that claim.

Sure, not using plastic would be best, but that‘s just more idealistic than realistic. I think that plastic is such an integral part of our lives right now, that it‘s not going to go away anytime soon. And that makes recycling, for now, an important step to reduce the total amount of plastic we use.

This is wrong, please stop spreading this misinformation.

It probably differs from country to country, but in Germany, for example, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing. Falsely claiming that recycling is mostly a scam and, by that, implying that it doesn‘t make sense to try to recycle you trash, is a horrible idea and only makes the situation worse.

There‘s a great video on that topic by Matt Parker (Standupmaths) which I‘d wholeheartedly recommend.

TLDW: No, terrain elevation isn‘t generally taken into account when calculating a country‘s surface area, though the actual method differs slightly from country to country. Switzerland would be around 7% bigger, if its mountains were to be taken into account.

Although I'd love to see that happen more frequently, this is simply not realistically doable for most commercial games.

Almost all of them use licensed third-party libraries which are integrated deeply into the game's code base, but which can't legally be distributed as part of an open source project. So in order to be able to open source a modern commercial game, you'd have to put in quite a lot of work finding all of your code integrating with commercial libraries and either replacing or removing it. And if that's not enough, you'd probably have to have your (expensive) legal team check the entire code base for any infringements just to be on the safe side.

All that work for no monetary gain just isn't a very good business case. So, unfortunately, I wouldn't expect a lot of modern games to be open sourced any time soon.

While that‘s true right now, a big patch called „Economy 2.0“ is expected to drop this week (more on that here and here).

I really hope this will be a successful first step of making the game actually better than its predecessor. Unfortunately the economy simulation is only one of many issues which make me want to play something else after a few minutes of gameplay. I think it‘ll be at least another year until they‘re able to fix all these minor annoyances, which sum up to one very big annoyance. Like not being able to place stuff sometimes without any obvious reason. Or those ugly, steep pathways on lots, when the connecting street isn‘t completely flat. Or missing animations for firemen, which currently only have to drive up to a burning building in order to stop a fire.

Cities Skylines was a better Sim City (2013) and was justifiably loved for that. For now, Cities Skylines 2 is unfortunately just a worse Cities Skylines.

They also always have a countdown on the top of the page, suggesting their unbelievable 80% off deal is about to end and you should buy it now or it‘ll be gone forever! Quick!

It‘s not ending. It never ends. It just resets at the end of the day. The guys running this site are dickheads.

I think it's important to remember that LiMux, the Linux project in Munich, didn't really fail because the software didn't work. The city had commissioned a study that blamed bad implementation, bad internal cooperation, and bad administration. It explicitly did not recommend that the project be shut down. Unfortunately, this recommendation was ignored by the mayor, who was previously responsible for convincing Microsoft to move its German headquarters to Munich and who calls himself a "Microsoft fan".

So it's probably worth noting that the success of such large projects doesn't only depend on the viability of the software. It's also very much dependent on the lobbyists the project is up against, especially in the public sector.

I‘d be really surprised if Apple tried that.

They have to know that it violates the DMA. And the penalty for violating it can be up to 10% of their yearly worldwide revenue (not earnings!) for the first violation and up to 20% for repeated violations. I don‘t think they‘d risk that, especially as the EU really isn’t known for its leniency when someone intentionally breaks their rules.