Peruvian_Skies

Outdoor advertising still works. TV ads still work. Social media advertising won’t collapse. It may become less effective if legislation moves towards greater privacy protection but it’ll still be effective.

If your diet lacks certain vitamins, a vitamin supplement may help. If not, it won’t. Excess vitamins are eliminated by a healthy body.

Possibly stupid question: if they found out that people were doing illegal stuff on it, doesn’t that mean that they were monitoring people’s conferences? I thought that the FOSS community was big on privacy.

Don’t worry about it, you were right.

It might actually preclude some games from even getting a Switch port at all due to performance.

You are right, I mixed it up with something else.

Pretty much.

Edit: I’m an idiot.

Poor white people whose peasant ancestors were left jobless and homeless due to being unable to compete with free slave labor should pay reparations to the descendants of the people who were forced to work for free, while the rich descendants of the slave owners who dislodged one group while exploiting the other put their blood money in offshore accounts and laugh as the poor people squabble over crumbs.

Exactly. But AFAIK every Denuvo game eventually gets cracked, so at least we will have the pirate copies. From a preservation standpoint, a dumped ROM is much better than a physical cartridge anyway, since it’s more portable and easier to back up. It’s the contents of the cartridge minus the physical limitations.

Dehydrated water: just add water.

Good, maybe in two or three more years Windows 11 will be useable. Right on time for Windows 12 to roll out and drag Microsoft users back to the Stone Age again.

That’s just because we don’t let children get drunk.

I think there’s a clear subjective difference between consciously spanking a child as a form of discipline, as a rational decision and with the absolute minimum force required for it to work, and hitting a child as a form of punishment guided by negative emotions. In the first case, you’re doing it to improve the child’s life in the long run. In the second, you’re just being violent towards someone weaker than you because you’re the lowest of the low.

It’s like the difference between a tasteful nude photograph meant to highlight the beauty of the human body and porn, or between using dissonance in music to create tension and using it because you’re a bad composer. There isn’t a set of general, objective rules to distinguish the two, but if you see it, you immediately know which one it is.

The flipside is that unless you’re hired to be someone’s teacher, nobody is obligated to explain things to anybody else. There are also “the journey is the destination” type questions where the answer doesn’t matter as much as the process of figuring it out yourself. Like science experiments in school where the answer is already known and the point is to teach kids certain ways of thinking or how to use certain tools. So yeah, there are legitimate reasons to say that, but a lot of the time it is indeed a cop-out. And your example is absolutely one of those times.

Should cars be required by law not to let you drive to drug deals? Should glasses be required by law not to let you read banned books? Should testicles be required by law not to produce government-unsanctioned sperm?

I was actually agreeing with you and in no way do I think it’s ok because everyone does it. Rather, I’m very dismayed that everyone does it. Yes, it seems like a good idea on paper to use paid alpha and beta releases to fund development but the system has been shot to hell by the fact that the overwhelming majority of publishers who do this abuse it.

Very neat, thanks for sharing! What do the dotted lines between non-Fediverse protocols and Fediverse platforms represent? Do those platforms use multiple protocols?

It’s called the Network Effect. Most people, like you, want to be on the platform that everyone else is using. Others want to be on the “best” platform (whatever that means for them) and when they find one they like, they’ll start advertising it to others. Eventually, enough people will move to a new platform that it starts making sense for people like you to move there as well.

Remember how everyone used to be on ICQ, then MSN Messenger, etc? It used to happen a lot with messaging and social media platforms until Facebook and Twitter got big enough to start buying and shutting down the competition. It’s happening now with people leaving Reddit for Fediverse platforms like Kbin and Lemmy.

There is nothing wrong with waiting for the Network Effect to push you to a new platform, if it ever does. The point of social media is being social - if you’re there to interact with friends, you obviously want to be where your friends are.

I prefer a single upfront purchase, though I am not against the idea of expansion packs or meaningful DLC (extra character races, maps, campaigns, etc). For online games, I think cosmetic DLCs are a good way to bank server costs. People who don’t want to buy them aren’t missing out on anything really, and the people who do get some nice swag/street cred to show off.

What I am completely against is pay-to-win crap.

In PvP, skilled players are at a disadvantage against prepubescent kids with daddy’s credit card and that really ruins the experience.

The most ridiculous to me is when you can use real money to buy items/skills/exp for single-player games. I remember being shocked to see that there were several launch-day DLCs for Tales of Zestiria for packs of healing items or early weapons that are normally obtainable in-game, just to help you out in the beginning. There used to be cheat codes for this sort of thing, now the “cheat” is forking over cash.

Not only is it predatory, people are actually paying for something the game already gives them access to, essentially giving the publisher money for being able to play, and then giving them more money for being able to play less.