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  • Steam sells non-transferable lifetime licenses to each game you "buy", that let you play it on one PC at a time but never transfer it to anyone else, even as part of an inheritance after your death.

    If you have a family there is a "sharing" plan which allows you to let family members also play some of the games in your library, but not at the same time.

    Nintendo is imposing a bit more ceremony if you want to share digital games each time you share them, but the essential "one device at a time" nature is the same that steam imposes.

  • Nintendo made a huge deal about virtual game cards, saving us from exactly what you're afraid of.

    Not as good as what Sony and Microsoft do, where we can essentially install our whole library on every console we have, but it's about as good as what Steam does.

    Plus they're bringing back a "game share" like feature, so some multiplayer games should be playable in a local family with only one purchase.

  • This isnt 1984. You have as much freedom to say whatever you want as you did in an equally-dense area in 1955, and you're exactly as subject to what you say being reported inaccurately.

    What's changed is that you actually have a plausible ability to broadcast yourself. Today's equivalent of newspapers and TV stations have infinite channels and infinite paper, and mostly just let you say whatever you want.

    If you do cross that "whatever" , though, they can and do refuse to publish your stuff, but you're free to go elsewhere.

    And if it's actual surveillance you're worried about... Well, much hasn't changed since "Enemy of the state" and you should be practicing both good privacy safeguards and rhetorical defense of the same whenever you can.

  • It says something about modern physics that possibly the two most famous bits of it were named by people trying to call bollocks.

    What it says, though, is too many STEM folk skimp on humanities and are just really bad at naming things.

  • Not even.

    2+2=(3,4,5) is just recognizing imprecision in the original measurement.

    The "budget" not matching appropriations is "I'm only going to spend 100 on lotto tickets this month, and save 50" and then buying 150 in lotto and putting the 10 you 'won' in savings.

    It's not the math ending up. It's just recognizing that budgets are nonsense if the actual spending is a wholly separate act of Congress.

  • D- day is a great example of why opsec matters so much. The Germans knew that the allies were going to invade, and if they had been prepared they very well might have rebuffed the invasion. But the secrecy worked, and operation overlord succeeded instead of being a bloody failure.

    If the target of the military raid had known when it was coming, they could have simply relocated anything actually important away from the target zone.

    A useful analogy is probably a boxer and a ring: your opponent knows that you're going to throw a punch, but you really don't want him to know exactly what punch you're going to throw when.

  • Is this moron still involved in any way?

    Was he ever?

    (Apropos reminder that Musk has nothing to do with Tesla staring; he just showed up with his PayPal golden parachute, picked "founder" as the title he wanted, and they proceeded to success largely in spite of anything he actually did.)

  • As said elsewhere: 30 days or else what?

    Trump will withhold the federal dollars Congress appropriated to NY that he already wants to withhold? Projects that would be DOA in a hard-right Congress might be even deader?

    Hochul will get another empty threat from the fed DOT?

  • What exactly business are taxed on varies a bit from state to state, but for a tax on "profit", which is the most common in the US, wages are definitely deductable from revenue to get the "profit" for a given period.

    Walmart and Amazon would pay a hell of a lot more tax if they couldn't subtract the wages they paid to their employees and contractors from the money that comes in the door when calculating their tax bill.

    Maybe note that Wages arent like office equipment, in that there's no asset to plausibly be sold to recoup a purchase price?

    (This isn't directly my area of expertise either, but I have a hard time thinking of a tax scheme that would allow deducting the cost of an office chair rented for an employee but not the wages paid to her.)

  • Security,.privacy, and logistics would all adapt and be of weirdly more manpower with teleportation than without.

    There would be companies who do nothing but teleport goods across the world all day. Just because I don't have to drive an hour to the warehouse doesn't mean I want to take an hour to teleport to the warehouse and pick up my purchase myself.

  • I assure you that anyone who ever put on a town hall debate, including the League of Women voters and definitely the TV networks, screened the questions and reserved the right to exclude anyone they chose to.

    No debate or political event since well before Nixon/Kennedy has been "open to everyone".

  • "town hall" is a style of event. Back when there were meaningful debates during presidential campaigns, it used to be a regular choice.

    I guarantee you that they were closed events, with attendees chosen legally-arbitrarily by whatever TV network was hosting the event.

    So long as he takes questions from those in attendance, it's a town hall. Even if no cameras are allowed.

  • Unless the town hall is paid for with taxpayer dollars or held on government property, it's a citizen who happens to be in Congress having a private event with their political supporters.

    Same as a political party convention or fundraiser dinner,.AFAIK.

    (And, depending on state law, even a function on government property may be legally private.)

  • There is a mythical "Sony fan" customer who pays extra for their video game consoles, and justified that by believing it comes with a right to be special and awesome and play games no one else is allowed to.

    It's a pantomine of a Nintendo fan, who pays for an underpowered console for first-party games that use unique controllers. None of whom would ever complain if their games were sold on PC so long as they could bring the controller over.

    AFAIK, the only real people who want exclusives on PlayStation are Sony employees and shareholders.

  • This really depends on what you mean by "pray."

    Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It's as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.

    Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.

    Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God's service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.

    There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it'd be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including "water is wet".