blindsight @ blindsight @beehaw.org

Posts

6

Comments

755

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yeah, exactly. Steam gets very little money from me (well, aside from the Deck), but I get all the benefits from their services. Not sure how that's monopolistic...

Essentially, this hinges on whether demanding price parity with other platforms is anticompetitive... I think that's going to be a tough hill to climb, especially as they're only asking to not be undercut as a supplier. There's no requirement to sell exclusively through Steam, and Steam even allows developers to give Steam keys on other platforms, including with game bundles that have a total "value" well below Steam sale prices.

Like, I use Steam daily, and buy multiple games most months in game bundles, but in the last few years, I've only made a handful of purchases on Steam. One game and my Steam Deck Dock were my only Steam purchases this calendar year, and my Steam Deck OLED and two games were my only purchases last year, but in that time I added about 150 new games to my Steam library.

I didn't like summers or winters where I used to live, so I moved to somewhere where I like both seasons. Then moved again to somewhere that I love all four seasons.

But I get what you're saying; you're describing the summers of my childhood. Hot and humid so you feel like you need a cold shower within 5 minutes of walking outside. Sticky by day, swarmed by mosquitos at night.

But you lost me at the sand bit. I love the beach and ocean when it's like 10-30°C out. Colder and hotter are okay, too, but not as nice.

Do videogame records count? A friend of mine from uni holds dozens of works records for a reasonably well known indie game. She's showcased it on a Games Done Quick charity Steam, too.

I can't say the game or it'll doxx her, though. She has most of the records.

I've been playing a lot of Ziggurat 2 which is a roguelite fantasy-themed FPS with 4 categories of weapons. Instead of spamming Y to cycle through weapons, I can select my weapon directly with the back buttons.

I'd just email the CEO, media relations, and legal (if you can get all their email addresses), inform them of their non-compliance with the GPL and ask them to resolve this swiftly before it needs to be escalated. Then if you don't hear back in 2 business days, reply all again CCing someone they might care about: local media to their jurisdiction, the FSF, the EFF, etc.

In Canada, I've never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system's time.

Even if it does go to court, there's a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that's, what, $50? They don't want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.

Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there's a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn't with their legal costs to pursue.

So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.

(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)

IIRC, there is a setting to just make it open an Explorer window every time and skip all the crap. I'm on my phone, so I don't want to look for it rn, but it's only a few clicks.

(It might just skip the OneDrive step; I don't have documents this way often, so I can't recall off the top of my head.)

Ironically, I just passed Explorer to save to a OneDrive folder, but it's faster and easier to get to the right spot with a classic Explorer "save as" window.

Really interesting avenue of research; who'd have thought that discounting future value, as a concept, would come from clergy in a tenuous political and financial position with the Reformation and the start of inflation.

I'm not an economic history expert by any stretch, but isn't the 1600s the early start of the industrial revolution? Was the industrial revolution the cause of inflation? That would make sense, since it would be a major break in the value of capital in the short term to increase profits in the long term.

I mean, sure... But a whole lot of people use Photoshop professionally without a license.

Krita is great, though. Their Android version is even fully featured, so you can use a tablet with a digitizer if you don't have a drawing pad for your desktop.

I learned from Franklin books and Mario games that you're wrong. A picture showing a clear cavity where a turtle could pop out won't convince me!

The whole movie changes if it's a puff piece commissioned by Bruce Wayne after the fact...

I agree with all of that! Well explained.

My point was just that the government can't exert complete control on the market to keep housing values inflated. If it's a bubble, then eventually prices will revert to their "true" value, regardless of government interference.

I mean, they can try, but market forces are outside their control.

I don't think the US wanted to have their housing market collapse in 2008 (?), but it happened nonetheless.

It would suck, psychologically, to "lose" 30% of my house's value in a downturn, but it would be better for the economy if that happens. And, really, now that I'm a homeowner, all that really matters is the difference in house values when I go to sell/buy. So a downturn might actually be "good" for me, since the differential between this first and a "better" house would be smaller.

Right now, boomers are selling in hot markets to find lavish retirement, transferring wealth from the younger generation to older on massive volumes.

I don't know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you're uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that "seeding" if you aren't a "seed" with 1.00 availability? idk.

I'd still count that as "seeding" since you're running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there's a precise definition somewhere.

Very well explained.

Anyone who's on a variable rate mortgage and hasn't increased their monthly payments significantly is going to be in a lot of trouble when they go to renew.

This might actually lead to housing prices dropping significantly.

I don't think that's an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.

Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there's a "complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped" torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.

You could even get a situation where there are no "seeds" but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.

I'm not fully looped in to why Anna's Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I'd be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I'm not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that's useless to me without the full archive.

I have a lot of devices, but I rarely use most of them.

1. My desktop is my main device for all my work from home. Work desktop for work at the office.
2. My work laptop only gets used for client visits.
3. My personal laptop only gets used when I need a second mobile device for work and Zooming with my family (to bring to where my kiddos are set up playing).
4. My wife's work laptop is her main work machine and her personal laptop is our evening TV.
5. My Android phone is my ADHD dopamine machine most of the time. Some light work use.
6. My gaming is almost exclusively on my Steam Deck (but I'm working on getting a WiFi mesh network so I can stream from my desktop to my Deck). Used nightly in bed.
7. My 8 y.o. daughter's tablet is an audiobook machine, some edutainment apps, and sleep sounds machine. Occasionally a screen for shows/art video tutorials.
8. My 6 y.o son's tablet is mostly podcasts and sleep sounds.
9. My DSi is my wife's Tetris machine.

TL;DR: I mostly use my desktop for work and Deck/phone for entertainment. My laptops see use a few times/month when I'm on the road for work or Zooming with family and basically never in between. But we have a lot of devices that have specific use cases for different members of my family.

I don't think this will affect housing, yet. Not much, anyway. This rate decision has already been widely anticipated and fully priced in to mortgage rates. The language used by the BoC sounds very similar, too, so I don't think there's any signal to the market that will change expectations significantly.

People on variable-rate mortgages will get a bit of relief, I suppose. But that won't move the needle much on housing prices.

The kids shirts in panel 9 just makes it.

Sadly, I've heard a lot of these almost verbatim. Sometimes I don't like living in a small town.