gila

Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can’t purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.

The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it’s been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.

The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn’t any skin gambling, though.

These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that’s it.

A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.

That and the other launchers are a product of Steam’s dominance, not a cause of it.

Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.

Valve has done a lot of great things, I’m not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn’t become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.

Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.

Also, GOG exists.

Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.

Neither offer something which didn’t already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)

In the parts that are actually hot, the new builds are generally off-white brick or double-brick buildings with white Colorbond roofs (an Aus brand of corrugated steel)

You do get the odd house with a dark roof, and when you go past them everyone points and laughs at how silly and uncomfortable they must be.

I don’t think there’s any reason why Oakes’ recollection of McBride’s intent trumps what McBride has publicly said about his intent. Doesn’t the court have a word for that?

It seems fairly logical to me. He had the personal experience of witnessing soldiers unfairly scapegoated by superiors. His substantiation for the unfairness is that those superiors were complicit in war crimes. That the motive was there for superiors to make false specific allegations of misconduct in order to sweep systemic issues under the rug.

If McBride were a perfect witness, he’d have been motivated enough by war crimes to speak up. But the doubt about his awareness of what he was exposing is an appeal to authority which flies in the face of Occam’s razor.

Simply, whistleblowing as a means of recourse only became preferable after his fellow soldiers, whom made the same choice he personally did to sacrifice their normal lives to enlist, presumably with virtuous intent i.e in Australia’s name, were effectively betrayed by their own.

That might leave something to be desired about his morals, but this must be considered in context, and “not whistleblowing” under prior corcumstances isn’t something that could reasonably be prosecuted. Oakes is right to conclude that our military personnel should have been more closely monitored in general. That doesn’t speak to the specific conduct of the soldiers McBride aimed to exonerate, though.

checks notes “”““privacy””“” preserving advertising in their browser, which is the exact same thing that brave has got hate for

No it isn’t. Brave replaces ads with those that companies have directly paid Brave to advertise. Their privacy-preserving nature is predicated on trusting Brave. Once landed on the advertisers page, there’s no system in place to preserve your privacy. Mozilla’s implementation sends deindentified data to a 3rd party unrelated to Mozilla. I’m not saying this is good but saying it’s exactly the same thing is fundamentally incorrect and misleading.

If you want to boycott Google, you can easily do so while using Firefox. And Mozilla still gets paid, so this doesn’t help Google at all (for users that don’t want it to)

There’s no action to substantiate your 3rd point which hasn’t also been retracted.

The rest is conjecture. There is very little reason to introduce potential vulnerabilities to my system by using a Firefox fork when there’s nothing really wrong with the upstream releases.

How does Mozilla making Google the default search engine in exchange for Google money help Israel? It helps Mozilla, by giving them an income stream not directly related to advertising.

If anything, using Firefox and switching to an alternative search engine harms Google, because they have to pay Mozilla all the same without getting any benefit in exchange.

Looks to me like the path in the image is heading just below his earlobe, so it wasn’t the bullet that hit him in the top of his ear. There’s no way he jerked his head up by more than the height of his ear in the time between it hitting him and the photo being taken.

At most it shows one of the multiple shots was very close to hitting him, if it’s real. So the hit could still be shrapnel/glass from that shot or another

I’m on smoko

I’m Australian/white and my predominantly Māori/Pasifika team of coworkers got me a greenstone as a sendoff present when I left the workplace. So I don’t think there’s any issues with it

I really liked enter the gungeon. It was one of the first roguelites I played. It’s fairly basic in terms of mechanics compared to some newer entries in the genre. But it’s just good arcadey fun. Bonus is that it runs on a lot of systems. It’s still one of my go to’s for plane trips or other offline scenarios

I grew up near gas hubs, where it’s normal to have gas mains at home, have family employed by producers. They’ve been spinning this yarn as long as I can remember. It has not clean energy by any stretch, this is just the basic sales pitch for natural gas unchanged for like 30 years

Meanwhile NASA’s next flyby depends on Elon Musk fixing Starship. I’m sure that won’t get delayed again.

They aren’t, though. That’s not an accurate preposition to associate with the courts from the circumstances given (about the case already determined), especially given Lehrmann’s trial was abandoned. The more recent findings against him were to do with a civil matter that he brought to the court. Any conclusion about the validity of his legal arguments is undermined by the fact he was under no obligation to make them.

There aren’t any actual cases where a false rape claim has been manufactured to exploit lack of evidence about the alleged perp’s alibi, because obviously real legal and non-legal risk remains about that, regardless of any standing prejudgement about belief. Consider even in the example you’re giving to justify prejudice of the court, there was no court-determined penalty imposed upon the accused to speak of. In that case you’re just asking for legal redress for the court not arbitrating public opinion about details of a truth defense that was forced by the complainant.

At best your position is against a perceived gender inequality whose legitimate purpose serves to address a real documented problem for many generations in Australia, over the imaginary problem you’re highlighting. I doubt your friend’s case will turn out as a better example of it. At least on the divorce court side of things you could find real bias towards women that is consistent with public opinion about those matters.

It’s probably a better example of a problem we do have, which is abuse of legal resources that she likely happens to have laying around to arbitrarily sue over nothing & try to force out-of-court settlement. That’s gender-neutral, though, and more a product of litigation as an industry than anything else.

It can become surprisingly complicated with axial deadzone settings, but that’s not really important to understand. The simple concept is it’s the zone in which the stick is moved but no change in movement is registered in-game. The complication that is added is mostly related to more precise calculation of where that zone is

You guys do know that outside the US you can’t generally advertise permanent positions and then just decide it’s temporarily more convenient not to have people on payroll, right?

Y’all need employment reform

Metroid Prime series are more “action games” than FPS’ per se, but they are must-plays if you haven’t, & might scratch that itch. There’s a switch remaster of the first game, none yet for Prime 2 or 3 but it’s likely they’ll come out leading up to the release of the recently-announced Prime 4

Moving a joystick is fundamentally different to moving a mouse. With a joystick there is a spring constantly acting to center it - no equivalent force when using a mouse. So you need to get a feel for estimating that force and accurately counteracting it in various gameplay scenarios. That’s a completely different “muscle” to have a memory of vs. using a mouse I think

Also, modern controller joysticks generally are not great. Most have medium to large deadzones in the center by default. I’d recommend reducing them for more responsiveness. It comes with the tradeoff of being more susceptible to stick drift. But that isn’t something you should be afraid of. It’s a physical impossibility for their design to not wear over time. I’d recommend recalibrating and adjusting settings regularly. At the end of the day, replacing joystick modules only requires screws (no soldering) so it’s cheap and relatively easy.

If you’re really serious you could get some hall effect joystick modules. That way you wouldn’t need to recalibrate often and could keep a consistently small deadzone setting without encountering drift. i.e. default settings from like dualshock 2, when stick drift was just as apparent but people hadn’t gone crazy over it yet.

Minecraft would be fine for learning fps movement in a relaxed setting.

Dodgy tactics like that are why it matters that our courts are strong: it’s not going to matter that she got an AVO out because if they didn’t have a history of conflict prior to his genuine identification of her in the video, it’s not relevant to the defamation case and won’t hold up in court.

Whether it’s technically possible to prove it’s her in the video isn’t materially relevant to a defamation case if it’s obvious to the average observer that it’s her. If she prove it wasn’t her, she’d need to prove his identification of her was intentionally malicious to win a defamation claim against him.

The idea that the Lehrmann trial indicates the courts are generally biased toward women is a couple bridges too far. Larissa Waters believes women in regards to their allegations of sexual assault against them where alleged male perpetrator denies it and where there isn’t a sufficient body of contradictory evidence. She isn’t saying she generally believes women about any and every grievance they may have, especially not having awareness spread about a crime they genuinely committed.