This is a really neat idea! I never thought about taking emissions into account when provisioning infrastructure. Only a small subset of my cloud workload is performance sensitive. For the majority of tasks (tests, background ETL processing, etc) I wouldn't even notice small latency increases.
Interesting. Hmmm, I have to think this through. I believe that if the game followed normal chess rules, except for replacing the pieces with queens, then games where the captures are all even trades would result in draws, but if one side could come out ahead with K+Q vs K, then there would be the usual mate sequence.
HOWEVER the rule OP added that "a piece may only move if it is adjacent to another piece of either color" slightly complicates the endgame. My normal tendency would be to put the queen far away from the action to avoid blundering it, but here that would instantly deactivate it. It's kind of funny to picture the kings racing across the board to capture or reactivate the last inert queen.
I think one can still get the usual style of mate in this variant, you just have to walk the king and queen together, and pay extra attention to avoiding stalemate. For example, imagining white king on e1, black king on e3, black queen on d3. If white to move then Qb1# or Qe2#, fairly standard maneuvers (though if black to move that's a stalemate).
This is an interesting modification to the game, I'd play a few rounds...
I use a few different distros on a routine basis. Out of those, Ubuntu would probably be the best fit - it generally works right out of the box, the UI is intuitive for day-to-day use, there's plenty of information online about how to install/use/troubleshoot it, and the App center has an open source alternative for anything and everything. Mint might also be a good fit - I had a very positive experience last time I used it, but that was a few years ago so I haven't tried the newer releases.
> I suspect what's happening is they've got some rule against the word "spectrum" or something
I've avoided this by using only the first few and/or last few letters of the service in the email tag (e.g. "HaNe" instead of "hackernews"). It's an easy filing system for me, doesn't trigger concerns about phishing, and makes for shorter handles.
I have a personally-owned domain name connected to my [paid] account with a smaller email provider.
The domain is managed at a large well-known registrar, I keep it paid up 3+ years in advance, and make sure to keep my contact information up to date.
If anything goes wrong with the email provider (including going out of business), I will just redirect from my DNS settings. If I get locked out of my domain for some reason, there are clear next steps for me to open a ticket with the registrar and move towards resolving the issue.
I got it all hooked up in an afternoon, many years ago, and it was completely set-it-and-forget-it, besides logging into the registrar occasionally to extend the domain ownership.
(continuous backups are another matter - mine aren't fully automated yet)
Will this update get me over 30 fps, or break my ability to boot into a GUI?
There's only one way to find out ;)