Uriel238 [all pronouns]
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Those aren’t gambling. they’re surprise mechanics that are ethical and fun.
FBI is not a monolith right now and has multiple conflicting opinions.
The part that wants to save democracy says you should encrypt your communications by using an e2e provider, and they recommend Signal.
The part that wants to serve the country (by serving the current administration — the J. Edgar Hoover part of FBI) is terrified of going dark and has been nagging encryption experts for over a decade now to nerd harder and invent a backdoor only good guys can use.
The nerds know this is mathematically impossible. And in fact bad guys (industrial spies, black hats, other nations, etc.) have leaks readily available to uncover the backdoors.
And right now a lot of FBI is scared the new admin is the bad guys.
🤓 The development of the Atari joystick to the NES / SNES controllers to the Sony Playstation controller was about being able to enable more easy-access control options. Flight sims on the Atari had to be very simple.
Curiously, mouse and keyboard (or for me trackball and keyboard) are so intuitive for looking around a 3D environment that I prefer it to the Sony config, but then it took years and years before a working config (involving easy selection, locking and auto-aim) could be made for FPSes.
Joysticks are also difficult to replace, and plenty of flight sims / space sims still allow for joystick controls when they are available. The problem there is that potentiometers which allow for gradient maneuvering tend to deteriorate quickly, so we’ve veered away from joystics to laser-tracked mice (which don’t depend on moving parts). /🤓
Yeah, I claimed it was a plausible rumor, and given Win10 and Win11 are already spyware and resistant to end-user full control, I already have strong cause to distrust Microsoft, which is what I said.
So chill your reactor before it melts down. Unless you want a block, because this is how you get a block.
Steam came before it’s time, while we were still on dialup. Once high-bandwidth internet became common then it made sense, as did many other cloud-computing and cloud-storage ideas.
Sadly, it still has problems, especially when end users can’t get along with the customer-facing staff and lose access to their licenses. There’s also the problem that has revealed itself with other game clients, when games shut down, when distro-clients go out of business (I still hold a grudge with Stardock / Gamestop) and when governments seize cloud storage without consideration for the end-users (as happened with MegaUpload). When Newell dies or retires, then we only can wait to see what becomes of Steam and our libraries and what company is going to attempt to buy (and exploit) all that responsibility.
It’s going to be trading Robert Baratheon for Joffrey.
What I heard (on here, and I hope it’s a vicious rumor) is that TPM 2.0 comes with backdoors accessible to Microsoft via the OS so that a significant chunk of the computer belongs to Big MS and not to the end user, and it will squeal and cause problems if the end user tries to take it back.
The whole point of TPM 1.0 hypothetically was to allow a larger secondary encryption key of a device to be accessible only by a small user-provided key (say a four-digit PIN), and requiring use of the key-query software to run to get the secondary key. A limited number of chances with longer delays with each wrong answer heightens security.
But this pissed off government law enforcement across the world, who want backdoors for when they want to crack the phone of a very important criminal.
It would be nice if Apple, Google and Microsoft had more respect for their end users than they do national and corporate institutions, but we know this isn’t really the case, so it’s at least plausible that TPMs 1.0 or 2.0 come pre-backdoored. It doesn’t hurt that this is exactly what FBI and NSA want even though (Pre-9/11 and Pre-PATRIOT) NSA is supposed to be assuring that no-one, not even police can crack our secure communication protocols.
Despite efforts to look into it, I’ve yet to get an answer I can fully trust whether or not they are backdoored. But since Microsoft is notorious for exactly this kind of bullshit since the 1980s, I assume it’s true that TPMs are backdoored until I find convincing information otherwise.
Ubisoft is not a serious game publisher, rather is a racketeering company that uses gaming software as a vehicle for its monetization schemes.
It’s also a sex harassment and assault den for its upper management to prey on its clerical staff, and its HR notoriously covers for them.
I no longer play the Ubisoft games for which I have licenses, and I say this as an old fan of the Far Cry series. No longer.
Ubisoft needs to fail enough to get liquidated and bought out, I expect, by another AAA publisher gone amuck or a private equity management company. In either case, may Ubisoft assets load them down like a neutron star.
I’m reminded of a struggle I had with The Long Dark trying to do basic things (like find a bed in a cabin) in the pitch black dark. IRL, when in similar situations, I could feel around, and had no problem figuring out where up and down were, which is a problem without a field in first-person games.
I suggested a slight gradient in absolute black to indicate poles, or some other kind of artificial horizon, but they said no.
English is not allowed during posting, again.
A [Lego] minifig doesn’t hold a gun
A Star Wars lego minifig absolutely holds a gun. It may be a blaster, but it’s still a military weapon for killing people.
Disney also has gun wielding pirates and cowboys frontiersmen. Tron: Legacy showed Disney franchises can be about people killing people (without it being Star Wars ) so long as they can sneak it past the parents. And their Atlantis First Person Shooter didn’t show even a half ounce of creativity, and just promised it was not really shooting or killing.
They may only allow Mickey to do [brand-safe] things in official games, but in past Disney products they’ve just found ways to make violence family friendly, rather than making material that had promoted non-violence.
Part of the problem is the failure of patent offices to do due diligence. Granted, this was exacerbated by the lack of an electronic database that tracked prior patents, public domain stuff, and things declared too general to be patented by the courts.
The project in the US to transfer old patents to digital and make them searchable is way underfunded and understaffed, and still is expected to take decades to finish.
The thing is, big companies like being able to win IP cases just by outspending their opponents, so they lobby to keep IP law byzantine and draconian, and to install judges who are either ignorant or just will side with the bigger company.
WTF?
Newton’s Long John Silver was a solid enough performance to warrant a sequel / spin-off, so TTAPD would be like a day to honor Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or even James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader.
These people have absolutely made their mark on American culture.
Black Friday, the shopping day is a gimmick taking advantage of an already popular shopping day. Not necessarily the most popular or most profitable or even the worst day for shopper shennanigans and violence. But then, it’s difficult for capitalist phenomena to not be turned into gimmicks used to market more sales.
The save the world plot is new.
I appreciated the capitalist / industrialist commentary that this is what Ficsit does: Drop a few pioneers onto a planet and turn it into a giant self-consuming manufacturing plant, like a bacterium infecting a cell, that feeds some remote market with hyper-processed goods.
Oh well. I expect it still to be amazing.
There’s a reason I no longer play Ubisoft games, even the ones I own.
This instance isn’t it. I stopped when the big sexual exploitation and harassment ring was reported and became news.
But when shit like this happens, it reminds me that I should have no regrets, even when I miss a specific moment in a game.
Sorry Ubi, you’re just too toxic for me.
My plug on Satisfactory is you come for playing around with and making sculptures with conveyor belts, and then stay to play with jump-pads, pneumatic hypertubes and later, trains (that actually carry freight and have a purpose). Also the planet is pretty (and you’re going to ruin it all by turning it into factories).
As with other automation games, it’s coding in disguise, and if you get a buzz from configuring logistics to distribute parts and fluids from sources to processing machines, then this game can take over your life. The two principle schools of players are make it efficient and make it pretty. In the end, you have a giant playground to zoom around in and watch all the parts zip this way and that down conveyors, each with actual purpose behind them.
Here in the states, a lot of the Republican party campaigns as Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush conservatives or OG conservatives, and I have to remind them that those conservatives and MAGAs (Christian nationalists, white power) are the exact same thing.
The policies of Reagan accelerated our path to the precipice of one-party autocracy. What they pushed as policy then figures largely in how we got here, with the last vestiges of US democracy tilting off the precipice into one-party autocracy.
Old fiscal responsibility / family values Republicans just wished they had another mile or two to plummet and the cold rocks below weren’t looming so close.
To toss in another metaphor, they didn’t just buy a ticket to ride, they used their railroad shares to vote on where to lay the rails, and where the line ends.
GPT 4 can lie to reach a goal or serve an agenda.
I doubt most of its hallucinated outputs are deliberate, but it can choose to use deception as a logical step.
Was Popeye’s spinach the first catch-trope powerup?
Rules are consistent with the Pac-man powerup