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Quoting: Eocene84As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

This has nothing to do with parents properly parenting their kids or not. This is all about control and consolidation of power. Taking the power away from the individual and putting that power into the hands of the gov to tell you what you can and can't do. This is just one tiny aspect of the overall goal. The gov doesn't give two shits about parenting.

so instead of you going about your day doing whatever you want with your computers and websites, now you have to check in with the gov and ask them if it's okay if you go about your day doing whatever you were doing. Then they can tell you yes or no. They have the power now, and you have lost your freedom. Yay Murica.

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The last diagram in your steam tracker page "Linux market share on Steam, another way to look at it" is also interesting.

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Quoting: Eocene84As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

It's sadly not about protecting children.

It is simply a lazy and easy excuse because any criticism of the law will open you up to be marked as "dangerous to children" and thus socially destroy you. It has been used for all kinds of things going back hundreds of years. It is unfortunately quite effective on the species as a whole.

These laws also hurt small businesses and marginalized groups harder than large businesses and privileged groups, so it is unfortunately very apropos in the current political climate.

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I liked Windrose.

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proper comment is something about fornication and the equine transport
🤬

The lunatics are running the asylum.

(and yes, 1984 was not a "how to")

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I am above 18, so I will tell: I have 120 years - no matter how old I am. Does telling your age should not be prohibited? Why Google, MS and other should known, how old you are?

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Quoting: Jarmeroh didn't know that! I always play every single arpg ssf because I dislike multiplayer, but ..... now that you've enlightened me to these "merits" I may or may not have to look up if there's a way to hack or mod these into new chars without ever getting them to begin with!

You don't even need multiplayer - SSF means "never trades items from your other single player characters" and that's presumably not you - you just need a character that's already reached that difficulty. Go buy a Merit with your Elite or Ultimate character, stick it in the shared stash, et voila. You do need the Forgotten Gods expansion for them.

That said (and I have over 1,000 hours in) I've never really found the GD story to be that much of a slog to work through in all honesty. You can complete the base game in a few hours when you know where you're going and have some decent equipment shared.

Of course there's also nothing wrong with just not playing Ultimate if you don't want to. The game has plenty of content without it.

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It's funny reading the comments to this because I wonder how many actually read through the article.

This is the compromise we could hope for; if they're going to keep demanding an age verification, having that verification instead ONLY on the host device instead of it being face or ID scanning, and that host device simply sending a signal to any requesting site, etc, that "this user is in this age bracket", that's about as secure as you could hope for while still meeting a requirement for an age check, especially if it remains as just a "enter your birthdate" text box at the setup of an OS. It keeps the onus of verification off the website providers, which means user account creation isn't required to verify age because it can just ask for the proper flag from your OS or app provider, and is better for privacy overall than what others are proposing.

The BEST for privacy, of course, would be to never have to ask for that information in any way, shape, or form, but it appears that bridge has already been burnt, so we're now just hunting for the best and most secure and privacy-enabling compromise without just streaming your damn face to every web page 24/7 while you're using it.

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I hope they do not search for reason to made GNU illegal.

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Quoting: Eocene84Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

Too late. There are reports that they are doing the same thing.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-level

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As someone who doesn't have kids (thank God) and never will, I'm really tired of being punished because other people can't or won't parent their children, which makes the government feel the need to step in. Hopefully the state I live in, Colorado, doesn't do something like this.

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Quoting: JarmerIf all they're doing by this idiotic law is making a new checkbox that says "are you over 18?" then 🤣

Even that would be a risk. It would signal to law makers that the idea works and that they just need to change the requirements for how age is checked.

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Networking. Netplay is experimentally supported on all games that can do it, both DirectPlay and Windows Sockets.

Oh my god!!! It is possible to play again "Star Wars Episode I: Racer" in multiplayer mode??? Like in the good old days?
I will vérify this asap.

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Monster Hunter Wilds and Everspace 2 have been my poison this month, with a healthy majority of it streamed from GeForce Now while I was playing docked to my TV.

THAT SAID, both are actually playable on the Deck natively, they both just suffer from the same thing: specific environments will drop the frames down to the mid 20s (Planets for Everspace 2, Windward Plains for MHWilds), and the amount of upscaling required can sometimes render the game difficult to read; less of an issue with Wilds just because the monsters are as big as they are.

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on deck: nothing really. Just no time right now.

On desktop: I gave up on Ghostwire Tokyo about 2/3 or 3/4 through. AWESOME GAME! Absolutely loved it, but my god that end game just got REPETITIVE. Wow. I pretty much maxed out the combat and exploration skills, so there was nothing left to unlock there, and they had the same ol collectathon missions over and over again, just getting more tedious with their mechanics which makes them LESS fun. Overall I'd give it a solid 7.5/10 and I absolutely loved all the cool x-files side missions.

So now I moved on to Sector Unknown. A small indie crpg from a solo dev. I've had this one on my radar for a long time, and it just recently released out of EA! so far so good! I'm just at the beginning building my base up, but seems cool! I'm a sucker for a scifi crpg since there's so few of them.

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Here's my thoughts:

• Ardenfall - absolutely loved it. Can't wait for release! Morrowind is back baby! (it never left but hey ...)


• Replaced - can I just hook myself up to this art style and mainline it all day every day? Incredible.


• Dead Fibers - ouch. Shouldn't have released this demo. Sadness.


• Dungeons of Dusk - seems great for the Deck!


• Darkhaven - meh. TQ2 is top of my argp list right now, and I have seen SO MANY arpgs with promising EA periods flame out and get abandoned (cough cough wolcen). So it's a "wait and see" and I hope it turns out awesome! We need more good arpgs to challenge the diablos and poes of the space!

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Non-issue. Download and install Linux on your device, you automatically fall in the 30+ age bracket 😄

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is this just a change of reporting method? Strange.

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Quoting: vic-bayWhy doesn't Steam just collect hardware data automatically, are there any legal issues with it? I'd like to see smooth statistics without sampling swings every month.

This is not really a problem of sampling swing, it's chinese new year. Every year, there are massive rush of work in China / southeast asia until mid jan, then relax time starts, and people suddenly play many more games, with many probably only playing at this time. This culminates with chinese new year's golden week. Since Linux is not used much for Gaming there, you automatically see a huge drop at that point. So factually, during that period, there are way more Chinese players, and they factually use windows more than they use Linux.
It's true that a yearly or at least quarterly average would give a broader picture though.

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so a 15% increase. Honestly not bad and I was expecting higher.

Also ... how does HK get away with no price increase?! lmao

Quoting: ChrisznixNarf. I even got scammed while trying to buy a used Steam Deck OLED... not fun.

just curious: what was the scam?

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I'm not a huge controller user (only on deck) so I'm wondering: isn't this just recreating the steam community layouts feature? Why not just utilize that?

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Oh no... this is really going to delay the release of AmigaOS 3.3!

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from a technical standpoint this is a complete non-starter since there's about 50 ways it just simply is impossible to implement in the linux space. And by that I mean TRUE age detection with some kind of auth.

If all they're doing by this idiotic law is making a new checkbox that says "are you over 18?" then 🤣

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What I find interesting is that it applies to any user base size, includes hobby OSes, and could even apply to a rescue disk OS if it allows downloads from say, flatpak for instance. I suppose the rescue OS could just disable internet or try to claim it is "enterprise software".

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Great, now it will be super easy for scammers to target children. Imagine what the ad industry will do with this. Targeting toys and fast fashion ads to the most vulnerable (fews kids can ignore ads and they have yet to develop defense systems against ads). That's totally crazy.

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I know MidnightBSD is entertaining a desktop ban on California starting 2027.

That'll be an entertaining precedent. lol

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Quoting: doragasuAnd what about my smart light bulb? Will it have to verify my age to turn on?

Your light bulb will stream the picture to the central server where AI will evaluate your age. If you're <18, The light will automatically turn off at 22:00 so you get a proper rest before school.

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Why doesn't Steam just collect hardware data automatically, are there any legal issues with it? I'd like to see smooth statistics without sampling swings every month.

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1984 was a warning, not a tutorial.

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Somehow some folks manage to make every day a bit more dystopian than the next. You have put it out first that this will come, and here we are - faster than i expected. I have four children, and of course i want to protect them, and yes, i have to bickle about media usage every day with them. But this is not protecting kids - it's cocooning them. And absolutely hate that they use our kids as an excuse to deploy all this.

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