Rounding errors are one way to make money at scale. If the smallest denomination you had was $1, you can bet that combo meal would suddenly become $12.50 so you had to pay $13 for it.
The solution is electronic money, like a debit card. Many EU countries have been introducing rechargeable debit cards for people without a banking account, in Spain we can get one at the Post office. It has limitations to the amount and number of recharges per month, but otherwise you can get your salary/pension deposited onto one, then use it with €0.005 rounding errors.
Yes... it will kind of depend on which layer of compatibility will a game require. Debian is Linux + GNU, which is what most people identify as "a Linux system". Android uses Linux without GNU, but starting with Android 15 it will come with a VM (container?) system to run a GNU userland. Android can already run Linux distros via Termux, which can be set up to run a desktop, but having it by default will mean apps will be able to use it directly. I've just tested RetroArch on Android, with DosBox to run Windows 98... but that's kind of a mindfuck of its own 😂. macOS is BSD, which shares the POSIX interface with Linux, but it does some things in a different way, however there is a GNU userland for BSD, so games using only that, can run on it already. WSL 2.0 is a full first-class VM with full Linux + GNU and a desktop interface that can coexist with Windows... since Windows 10/11 itself runs by default in a Hyper-V VM (the bootloader is Hyper-V).
The world is governed by the United States of Earth, established after a devastating war in the 1970s between the Western Powers and the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China and its satellites). The West won the conflict with the aid of Lunetta, an orbiting space station that dropped nuclear missiles on the Soviet Union.
Some games already use P2P, or provide servers for the community to run, so only the private servers would need replicating. Even in that case, I'd argue that having "some" common API, would make it easier than chasing around everyone's different implementations.
The nice thing about Steam, is that it's "too big to clamp down":
People used to 🏴☠️ on the high seas, for many reasons.
Steam came up as a "single point of sale", at the same time as Netflix was doing the same for movies and series.
Over time, companies tried to carve out chunks of the pie, restoring some of the original fragmentation...
...but while Netflix has been torn to shreds of its former glory, Steam is still the main "single point" for games...
...with a "single point" DRM
Steam's DRM only exists because game updates keep coming out with constantly updating DRM versions. The moment Steam tried to act against its clients, and they decided to leave Steam, every Steam game copy at that moment, would get cracked all at once.
Maybe EA, MS, Nintendo, Sony, etc. don't see that as a great thing... and that's why they've been setting up their own stores... but I think it's AWESOME! 😁
MagSafe wouldn't help, it's just a bunch of magnets, yank and it's gone. It could keep the phone charged, but that's about it.
When I used to ride a bicycle, I had a front torch, back light, and a phone in a waterproof "cage-case", attached to some solid mounts with a "unlock lever, rotate, slide" release mechanism. Quick enough to take them off when parking, not easy enough to randomly grab and run. Still, using an old phone was an extra precaution, also against random accidents (almost got clipped by a bus or van, more times than I'd like to admit 😬).
A trick I learned about mounts, is that they can break from vibration over time, so it's a good idea to add some rubber under the mount as a shock absorber. As a bonus, it protects the paint. Also, never buy the cheapest one... if you can't throw it against the floor and keep using it, then it's not good enough.
Well, this has been a blast from the past. Haven't set up all the drivers, or an internet connection, but with the turbo button it's been the fastest Win98 install I've ever done 😆
I've installed RetroArch on Android... but kind of feel this could be pushing it too far. I do still have some official keys for 95, 98SE, ME, XP... sigh
Spanish has redundant subject referencing, meaning the conjugational reference works as a sort of pronoun. Same thing happens in all languages which include element-coordinated conjugation, be it with subjects, time, objects, locations, etc.
If you check Latin, stuff like "Romani ite domum" can easily drop the subject since "ite domum" already includes enough clues to deduce its meaning. Basque has even more clues in its conjugation, with a single word like "zenekizkitenelako" including references to time, subject, object, number, mood... or was it mode? Bah, I get lost with the terms. I understand that Hungarian has even more fun with its cases and conjugations.
If you like descriptivism, then you can have a field day with Basque, with people still not fully agreeing on how many dialects there are, and there being at least 50 described "varieties" over a relatively small geographic area. Was it Irish that had a similarly fun variability? Anyway, fun stuff 😁
Well, this might sound funny... yes, I am a fanatic, but I don't remember why 😅
Since I studied philosophy, I decided that the only logical thing to do was to always follow the scientific method, for ontological reasons. "Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum". Scientific knowledge can be neither 0% nor 100%, only beliefs can, it needs at least a sliver of doubt for falsability to be possible.
Is a wall solid? Depends on the definition, a wall is mostly void as far as we know. Walls work like particles, which work like magnets, which work like chairs (see: Feynman on magnets). It's a tautological definition with extra steps, which make up most of our knowledge. We keep adding more and more steps, allowing us to navigate and manipulate the tautology, yet never breaking out of it. We're the universe observing itself from the inside, which necessarily means some part is going to stay unobserved.
The funny part, is that a few decades ago, I had a metaphysical discussion... which ended up in a fundamental disagreement, with me saying "it's obviously so" and the other party "it's obviously not"... but I've since forgotten what the discussion was exactly about 😆
Based on that, I have to guess I am a fanatic in some sense, and you could say I'm a fanatic of doubt... but that's kind of the opposite of fanaticism, so I'd say I am a very little bit of a fanatic.
Because traditionally there were few Linux devices.
Android 15 is going to change that: it comes with a virtual machine API and a Linux Terminal running Debian for ChromeOS compatibility.
Soon, the most popular consumer OS in the world will be Linux:
3.3 billion: Android / Linux
2.2 billion: Apple iOS/macOS *NIX
1.6 billion: Windows
400 million: Windows 11 + WSL 2.0
250 million: gaming consoles
"millions": SteamOS Linux
Wine might still make sense to keep things standardized for some time, and as a compatibility layer for older games, but native Linux games will also work on the Linux solutions for Android, Apple, and Windows.
Yeah... only OCR and AI have advanced to the point where a spammer/bot can easily bypass them.
20+ years ago, Microsoft proposed a Penny Black project, which was superseded by reCAPTCHA. Nowadays, we might have to go back to that... maybe by mining crypto as a proof of effort.
At this point, CAPTCHAs feel designed [...] training image models
It was never a secret:
The reCAPTCHA program originated with Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn, and was aided by a MacArthur Fellowship. An early CAPTCHA developer, he realized "he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles"
I have nothing to hide, all I ha$#&@$* this user is fully supporting the actions of the government and the Corporate Congress, now and in the future. Long live Elon
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Your congressman doesn't need a spine, they need an army of law enforcement officers.
Power is Power