Some of this is correct, and some of it is myth. Source: I was there ;)
Qt way back in version 1 was merely “free for non-commercial use” and shipped with the source code. KDE was founded on that version. This was in like 1996, before KDE even had a stable release. Gnome was founded immediately in response, choosing GTK (the Gimp Toolkit) which wasn’t really ready for use as a full fledged desktop toolkit, but existed and the license was friendly. KDE and Trolltech formed a few agreements – the first was the creation of the QPL, an attempt to create an open-source compatible license for Qt, and the second was the creation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation (it said, effectively, if Qt were to become closed, the most recent version prior to that would be released under the BSD license).
However, the damage was done. Stallman and others would never forgive KDE for choosing a not-free-enough toolkit, and the Gnome devs were associated with redhat. That meant Redhat and Debian, the two biggest distros, defaulted to Gnome. Ubuntu just adopted Debian, ergo Gnome.
Qt would shortly thereafter be released under GPL, GPL3, and LGPL. There’s still a commercial license option, and that pisses a lot of people off for some reason. But it was never a risk to KDE or the community – not since before KDE 1.0.
Sort of. The triple point doesn’t really exist at standard atmospheric pressure. The true triple point is somewhere around 600Pa pressure – or a out 0.6% of atmospheric pressure. You can achieve this in the upper atmosphere, on Mars, or in a vacuum chamber where you pull the pressure down to that point.
There is such a thing as vapour pressure in our atmosphere which is different than the triple point. You see this as humidity. But this isn’t truly gaseous water – rather it is more akin to liquid water molecules held in a gaseous solution (the atmosphere being the solvent).
This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.
But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.
In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.
Geoscientist here. I concur. The names are punny sometimes (this example in particular), but usually non-descriptive. Exceptions for the super common things (quartz, pyrite) when used in a discussion where the chemistry is irrelevant in that specific context. Conversely, we generally don’t care about the chemistry when talking about “clays” in geophysics, so defining them chemically would become noise to the reader.
There’s a company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called “Battery Man”. Which is funny on a lot of levels. They lean into batman symbols a lot. But also, Manitoba is often abbreviated as Man (historically it was our postal abbreviation and such).
It’s so interesting seeing the prison in the warg pit with the chests that you know are meant for player gear during a prison escape sequence. And wondering how in the hell a player gets imprisoned in the goblin camp. Now I know :)