Quoting: cprn

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: cprnI get the target audience is software that doesn't release on Steam at all but let's face it: most of games sooner or later does.

And they can still keep using mod.io, unless they absolutely need Steam Workshop for the Steam client integration. I don't really care if the game provides their own mod manager using some other service.

Yeah, but that's for as long as there aren't many. It kind of reminds an xkcd strip about standards. The one where they say:

- Hey, there are 13 competing standards for this!
- You're right! That's awful! We should make our own that will merge all the good solutions and leave out the bad ones to make life easier for everyone around!

...

- Hey, there are 14 competing standards for this!

When each solution has its own problems and many different games use many different solutions for the same thing it's very hard to make anything consistent and inconsistencies are what frustrates the end user. That's how e.g. Microsoft and Adobe stole big chunks of their markets.

You'd have a point if Steam Workshop was a standard. And if games had any consistency in their UI designs.

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Quoting: cprnI get the target audience is software that doesn't release on Steam at all but let's face it: most of games sooner or later does.

And they can still keep using mod.io, unless they absolutely need Steam Workshop for the Steam client integration. I don't really care if the game provides their own mod manager using some other service.

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Ooh, nice! I haven't actually played all of them yet.

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Quoting: WendigoOtherwise I'd agree that it is a stupid move since developers can already see in their steam statistics how many potential Linux customers have put the game on their wish list.

Of course this won't give them reliable data, but it might affect their motivation.

Wishlists are obviously not a good way to gauge interest though. I for one won't bother adding any games to my wishlist unless they're available or soon to be released for Linux, and people who haven't manually set Linux/SteamOS as their only platform in the Steam client won't even count.

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I'm afraid to even try any of these retro racers. I loved them as a kid back when they weren't retro, but now even watching a video makes me grind my teeth at the stupid physics.

Quoting: Geppeto35@Liam: Do you have to chase some gangsters or be chased by police at some points? if so = <3

Whaaat? Am I really the only one who lost interest in the NFS series after they introduced police chases in the third installment?

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Quoting: vlademir1

Quoting: liamdaweIt seems people still get hackers and computer crackers mixed up.

I gave up that fight in the mid-00s.

I still maintain that "hacker" is simply what programmers/developers/coders now call themselves to sound cool. I can't help but feel embarrassed whenever someone uses the term to describe me. I might have come up with a dirty hack or two over the years, but that does not make me a hacker. :P

"Hacker" was a common term for people breaking into systems back in the eighties and nineties, whereas "cracker" referred to people specifically breaking software protections. (DRM in modern terms.) But I guess language evolves.

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Quoting: BOYSSSSSAkon Has Done More for Africans in One Year Than Most Charities Have Done in Decades
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/akon-africans-year-charities-decades/ [External Link]

As reported by Akon's charity group. :)

Seems like a successful charity project, but the article reads more like marketing than journalism.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiThe right way to control the growth of populations is through education, access to contraceptives and better standards of living. You might not believe it but these have actually proven to be the most effective ways to do it.

I do believe it.
But how is it helping to just cure people of ailments and give them food and clothing and send them to their daily lives again, which will just end up increasing the overpopulation?

That's not the big picture though. None of the organizations I just mentioned do that and call it a day.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow, the number of children receiving basic education and health care is exactly what I was talking about earlier. It makes the situation of those people "barely tolerable", instead of "intolerable" which would eventually lead to a change from within.

No. Education is the basic necessity for a community to start on the road to self-sufficiency in today's global society. You might swallow the idiocy even our own government is spouting currently, but inhospitable living conditions do not inspire people to fix things. They just force them to exhaust all their mental and physical energy on the struggle to survive. Pushes them deeper down the rabbit hole so to speak.

That is an absurd theory.
If reality was anything like that, events like the French Revolution or the American War of Indipendence or the Uprising of the former British Indian colonies or other similar events would have never happened.
If the majority of a people's situation becomes dire enough, they revolt in one way or another. Change under such circumstances is inevitable - if no "third party" intervenes.

Just take a closer look at all these incidents and notice the fact that all of these uprisings and revolts have actually been pushed on by people who have had the resources and means to do it. Slaves pretty much never led the efforts to overthrow their slavemasters, and the oppressed poor almost never took control without some symphatetic (or simply power-grabbing) party leading them. The underdog stories are mostly just stories, and the realities behind them are very different.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow, I might agree with the education part. Education is the surest way to enable someone to find ways out of their misery on their own.
But if you counteract at the same time by providing what the government should provide (health care), you only become part of the government, if you want it or not. And you only slow down the change that you want to bring - it is simply inefficient. I don't disagree with the goals, I disagree with the methods, if you want.
Too much helping, too little "help yourselves, here's how to".
At that point, why not go all the way and become the government? But that would be called colonialism or imperialism and isn't really to en vogue right now.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?!" ;)

Your thinking is still too black-and-white, all-or-nothing to my taste, but hey, at least we're starting to find some common ground. :P

Quoting: TheSHEEEPMaybe the next 30 years will prove me wrong. The last 30 certainly didn't.
Of all the 3rd world countries, only few managed to truly improve their situation. Like India, or China. China even to a point where they will (in due time) likely become the primary world power - if nothing unforeseen happens and their upwards trend continues just as the US' downwards trend does.
And lo and behold - they did it all without interference from any western organisation (other than trading with them).
It is almost as if interference of those companies did not help African countries at all, maybe even the opposite...

I don't see how this shows that relief organizations do more harm than good. All I see is "maybe".

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiYou can call your arguments logical, but that doesn't necessarily make them so. We're not discussing basic arithmetic here but complex issues. Facts are necessary to make proper judgments.

Everything is based on logic. Except love, hate and morals, maybe ;)
Facts are results, they are not required to predict results, or to discuss theories.
If it was any different, there would never be any theories.

That's not how science works. You make a hypothesis, you test it, then you refine your theory based on the results. And if you're researching something extremely complicated like the issues we're discussing here, you'll do it again, and again, and again... That's because you might not see results until a couple of generations later.

Of course, politicians won't talk about anything that doesn't produce results during their time in office, which makes modern politics inherently short-sighted.

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Quoting: HoriIs there any point in switching to playing it on WINE?

Apart from the rainbows and unicorns you mean? :P

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiThey've even got the balls to publish their sinister agendas [External Link] for all to see!

See, that's the funny thing about do-gooders.
Say anything not blissfully positive about them and they immediately see a threat, lashing out.
"How could anyone think they are doing bad?!"
I never said anything about "sinister" agendas. Just that they have clear agendas and will obviously try to underline them with their own research. Therefore, their research can never be free of the claim of being biased.

No, you see, that was what I call a joke, with maybe a touch of sarcasm. I'm sorry if I don't take this as seriously as you do.

A bit more seriously: I guess there's just no way for an organization you don't agree with (or any independent researcher) to publish statistics or research that supports their cause without you calling it out on an agenda. You know that's the kind of mindset that keeps the intelligent design kooks, the climate change deniers and flat earthers of the world in the dark. Of course everyone has an agenda, but both (proper) journalism and science have guidelines and a peer-review process to combat this.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiYou're absolutely right. A lot of research is invalidated by a bias (sometimes obviously so), and no single paper or report should be blindly trusted without proper peer-review. But we need to remember that claims of invalidity are just as often similarly biased. I'll still take scientific research any day over uninformed opinion thank-you-very-much.

Well, you chose to believe in what you want to.
I chose to believe only in trustworthy sources (Those without clear agendas. And those are rare) and basic, irrefutable logic.
But of course, that is only "opinion" as soon as it isn't what you think. Cute.

Now who's getting patronizing. As I said, no source is bias-free, and you'd be better off getting your info from all sides and making your own informed decisions. But please, if you think you've found the elusive news outlet without and agenda, I'd be really interested if you could share it.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiWould it help if I found you lists of preventable diseases Unicef has helped eradicate through massive immunization campaigns in third world countries, like polio in India and in most of Africa? How about if I brought you a list of conflict or disaster torn regions where the doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières have indisputably saved countless lives? Maybe numbers of children that receive a basic education and health care due to Unicef's programs.

Developing cures to illnesses or even wiping them out is obviously positive, at least in the long term.
Short-term, it is problematic as the biggest problem mankind is facing is that there are simply too many of us, living too long, leading (soon) to a shortage in resources. I guess we can only hope we solve the resource problem before we have to solve the overpopulation problem, right? That is a problem many people, especially many do-gooders, choose to ignore.

You're pushing goalposts here, but part of this might be because the issue of overpopulation is for many of us not a good reason to just let people suffer. The right way to control the growth of populations is through education, access to contraceptives and better standards of living. You might not believe it but these have actually proven to be the most effective ways to do it. Also, keep in mind that trusting a conclusion that isn't the direst or picking a solution that isn't the most drastic aren't necessarily proof of naïveté.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP"How could saving people ever have negative consequences?" is something I rarely see them ask themselves. It would not be a "good" thought.

Or maybe they're not idiots and they do understand this. Have you considered that? I'm sure you've never bothered checking, but they do include risks and negative effects in their public research (if not in their marketing materials, understandably) and they couldn't hide their failures even if they wanted to. These are openly discussed in their conferences and strategy papers, at least for the mentioned organizations. They're big, but they're not corporations. Their organization models make it very hard to keep any hidden agendas.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPNow, the number of children receiving basic education and health care is exactly what I was talking about earlier. It makes the situation of those people "barely tolerable", instead of "intolerable" which would eventually lead to a change from within.

No. Education is the basic necessity for a community to start on the road to self-sufficiency in today's global society. You might swallow the idiocy even our own government is spouting currently, but inhospitable living conditions do not inspire people to fix things. They just force them to exhaust all their mental and physical energy on the struggle to survive. Pushes them deeper down the rabbit hole so to speak.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPOf course, the elites of those countries gladly take the help - after all, it helps them maintain their current system, doesn't it?

Not really. An ignorant population is much easier to control. But I'm right with you on the corruption issue. You can call me naive all you want, but that doesn't make me so.

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: tuubiBut yeah, I think the burden of proof is on you, seeing as you haven't brought any facts to the table.

I don't need to bring extra facts to the table. Logic is on my side. Prove my logic wrong and you're good to go. Shouldn't be that hard if you are right. Or, of course, you could just ignore everything I say as "opinion" since that would relieve you of having to find actual arguments.

First of all, opinion isn't a derogatory word. You can substitute the word "hypothesis" or maybe "stance". It turns to trustworthy information only when we get enough evidence to back it up. What I say is opinion as well, naturally.

We went through this before with the common sense thing. You can call your arguments logical, but that doesn't necessarily make them so. We're not discussing basic arithmetic here but complex issues. Facts are necessary to make proper judgments.

PS: I know our discussion won't ever go anywhere, but hey, maybe someone got something out of it. If they can be arsed to read these walls of text.

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