You’re not the only one.

Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.

As the old saying goes “Possession is 9/10 of the Law” - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else’s hands (in Steam’s servers or in GoG’s servers if you only ever use their launcher and don’t download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it’s your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what’s supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).

It’s hilarious that people think “Steam is great” because they don’t often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people’s collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they’re generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it’s just that so far they’ve not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn’t have in a different system - they’re comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they’re still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.

Absolutelly, use Steam when it’s worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you’re chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they’re definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.

PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with “it’s not really yours” systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.

“I love babies: they’re great roasted with small potatoes” - some baddie in one of the original Mad Max films.

There are countries (such as the UK) were one of the main pathways for Tax Evasion for very rich people is to make a Charity or Foundation (in the UK case, you register it on one of the Channel Islands tax havens) to which one gifts the entirety of one’s income (the way it works for tax evasion in the UK is that the entire tax on the money given to said Charity or Foundation is sent to them by the UK State) and then that Charity or Foundation pays for all your living expenses.

Even better, such a scheme also works for evading Inheritance Tax - you just have to change who the controlling board member of said “Charity” or “Foundation” is and now the control of all that money is in the hands of the descendant(s), tax free even if the amount is high enough that inheritance tax would be due (so, for very rich people).

But that’s not even the most special part. The most special part is when some people who uses such tax evasion schemes boast very publicly that “I give all my money to Charity”, since most of the public aren’t aware of this scheme.

These “” seem to have fallen from around the word convenience, so I picked them up for you.

LOL!

Reduced to name calling.

Good try, shame you don’t have the chops (as the way you express yourself gave away very early on)

I very explicitly said the whole thing is slower than the speed of light (much slower even) and even pointed out why: at the most basic of levels, the way charged particles push each other without contact is the electromagnetic force, meaning photons, but the actual particles still have to move and unlike photons they do have mass so the result is way slower than the speed of light.

To disprove the idea that a push on a solid object can travel faster than the speed of light (which is what the OP put forward), pointing out that at its most basic level the whole thing relies on actually photons which travel at the speed of light, will do it.

There was never any lower limit specified in my response because there is no need to go into that to disprove a theory about the upper limit being beyond a certain point. (Which makes that ironic statement of yours about the speed of sound-waves quite peculiar as it is mathematically and logically unrelated to what I wrote)

Going down into the complexity of the actual process, whilst interesting, isn’t going to answer the OPs question in an accessible and reasonably short manner using language that most people can understand.

And how do you think the information that an electrically charged particle is moving reaches other electrically charged particles…

You’re pushing the atoms on your end, which in turn push the next atoms, which push the next ones and so on up to the atoms at the end of the rod which push the hand of your friend on the moon.

As it so happens the way the atoms push each other is electromagnetism, in other words sending photons (same thing light is made of) to each other but these photons are not at visible wavelengths so you don’t see them as light.

So pushing the rod is just sending a wave down the rod of atoms pushing each other with the gaps between atoms being bridged using photons, so it will never be faster than the speed at which photons can travel in vacuum (it’s actually slower because part of the movement of that wave is not the lightspeed-travelling photons bridging the gaps between atoms but the actual atoms moving and atoms have mass so they cannot travel as fast as the speed of light).

In normal day to day life the rods are far too short for us to notice the delay between the pushing the rod on one end and the rod pushing something on the other end.

I’m surprised the DNC boot-lickers haven’t yet rushed this tread parroting the propaganda that it’s all the fault of the non-voters that it’s the horrible Fascist-lover Genocide-supporter Trump doing bad things to Palestinians whilst conveniently ignoring that their very own Fascist-lover Genocide-supporting Biden was the one “unwaveringly” supporting Israel in things like this (even gleefully spreading the Israeli lies on this, a man who as POTUS definitely had access to intel to know that Israel had activated the Hannibal Protocol) and even worse, supporting the year-long Genocide the Zionists were doing in Gaza complete with tens of thousands of murdered children, all of which the other of the DNC’s chosen candidates, Kamala Harris also supported.

One of the most disgusting things in all this is the extreme hypocrisy of one bunch of supporters of child mass-murder blaming those who wouldn’t vote for supporters of child mass-murder, for the result of an election were a different bunch of child mass-murder supporters won, as if supporting child mass-murder was anything else than their choice a choice which they could’ve changed at any time and yet, repeatedly, chose to double down on.

It makes me sick that people who actively SUPPORT the enablers of child mass-murder portray themselves as having the moral high ground versus people whose Morals and Ethics stopped them from supporting any enablers of child mass-murder. You do not have and will never have the moral high-ground for the rest of your life when you supported the people who were behind 17 pages worth of murdered babies: blood of those babies is forever in your hands.

I suspect that starting your own version of the API is the Software Designer / Software Architect version of Programmers’ “I know best so I’m going to do my part of the code my way which is different from everybody else’s”.

Mind you, at the very least good Software Architects should know best, but sometimes people get the title without having the chops for it.