Itty53

Ancient. Technology.

It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.

It’s this. It’s a business decision. You don’t spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there’s contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven’t even looked at it.

That sounds a lot cooler than “civilizations have to do something with their poop”.

Microsoft doesn’t want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that’s fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.

Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would’ve costed more to be able to run less.

As to being reliant on Windows, that’s been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There’s no good reason they shouldn’t. The whole verified question goes out the window. That’s huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They’re still reliant on MS in major ways.

Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.

Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.

Sounds like they could though?

Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of “let’s pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law” actions by major companies because … well, who’s stopping them?

I think this is worse, arguably. Don’t get me wrong, Wakefield wasn’t good. But this is actually worse.

Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn’t care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.

So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.

This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there’s frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn’t saying any of that. It’s simply saying “here’s a reason not to trust climate science at all”. That’s the argument. That’s way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.

Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn’t take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.

Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.

“gamers are doing with a new Bethesda game what they’ve done with every previous Bethesda game! You won’t believe what comes next!”

This has big “I voted the general election in three states and then complained about voting security on Fox News” energy.

“you guys screw me out of thirteen or fourteen more Kickstarter funding rounds and I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

- SC funders

Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

“Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?

Had the same thought. Got sidetracked sniffing pens.

Jokes aside, any of y’all remember the scented markers for kids? Holy shit talk about grooming children for addictions. Whole classrooms of kids just sniffing chemical markers. The gas station rose vial of the kindergarten.

Ah yes, rather than address your inconsistent arguments, call me a racist. Clever one you are, why didn’t I think of that?

Jokes aside you can be mad all you like, you’re still wrong. We can talk about the awful shit America does and has done, but it won’t be the same as what China has done.

Enjoy your second year of community college.

That’s a highly generalized take that doesn’t hold water at all. The American government sucks but they’re not operating organ farms in concentration camps targeting religions, they’re not redrawing their maps to include parts of neighboring nations like Mexico and Canada, they’re not funding North Korea as the DPRK launches missiles over South Korea and Japan, they don’t have social credit scores, they don’t systematically harass and threaten their own citizens abroad…

We can keep going if you want. And we can talk about the terrible shit America does too.

But “these two entities are both bad and therefore they do the same exact things” is fucking dumb, naive, myopic, childish, and a bunch of other pejoratives I could think of. Grow up.

Nintendo just waiting for the thing to go on sale to drop their lawsuits.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater wants you to remember it. The game that launched an entire music genre into the mainstream.

This is far, far from a first.

Great, we’ll have nanoplastic waste brought about by using solvent and high heat furnaces - furnaces that are totally green we pinky swear.

This just takes the eco waste and turns it into smaller eco waste by virtue of wasting more energy. I’m sure the exhaust isn’t something you’ll wanna breathe either.

Stop subsiding oil. It’s real fucking simple.

The steam deck is already right there at the limit with it’s weight. This thing looks significantly heavier.

Also can’t wait for Nintendo to sue. This article even called them “joy-cons” as if desperately calling out to Nintendo, “yep, pull that trigger”.