Man, suddenly I feel ahead of the curve. As a university employee my email is through work, I have a vestigial Facebook page which I visit maybe once a year, I don't have files in the cloud. I do buy stuff on Amazon some, but not enough that I'd have any big worries if I was somehow locked out of it. I do have some kind of Google ID, but I only use it for, like, if I'm reading articles with certain fairly common comment systems and want to comment I'll use the Google ID.
All in all, the only online service that would make me even bust out a few cusswords if they dumped me would be, well, Steam. I haven't downloaded all my games, only the ones I've actually played . . .

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The "actually in game" number is less than a third of the "on Steam" number.
What on earth are all those people doing on Steam when they're not playing games?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: dubigrasuBoy, I hate when I have to edit one single letter typo and then I have to carry that "last edited by etc etc" badge...

Same here! :D
It's... soiled!

I'm afraid I've gotten accustomed to my fall into decadence . . . I'm so damn picky I almost always look over my posts and decide I need to make some kind of tiny change.

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Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: Whitewolfe80But it kind of was I am old enough to of played the og Duke 3d when it was new, way younger that i should of been as it was 18 rated and i think i was about 8/9 but the sequel was kind of trash 2 gun limit wait what the og let me have 11 guns plus a melee weapon Did not have the real version of the ripper, way to many turret sections and the jokes werent edgy so much as worryingly shite.

I'm gonna show my age here, but... I am old enough to remember when Duke Nukem (no, not Duke Nukem 3D - which was actually the third game in the franchise - the original Duke Nukem) was brand new and to be honest, my only complaints with Duke Nukem Forever were that:

• It felt rushed, particularly once you got about halfway through the game;

• It looked incredibly dated, but the time it was finally released;

• Most of the jokes were so old they were no longer relevant, which for me made them less funny and for everyone younger than me, just served to confuse them.

I get that the there's a lot of reasons for these issues and to be honest, I kinda wonder whether they should have released it at all, considering some of these issues were inevitable... But since they did release it, I wish they'd port it to Linux-based operating systems.

Quoting: Whitewolfe80Really even knowing that your ISP tracks everything you do even when your using a vpn, they sell it same as google will privacy in 2021 means no internet no phone no credit card no debit card and everything paid for in cash and literally nobody does that now.

Actually, not all VPNs are created equal and some VPNs make it near-impossible for one's ISP to see their activity, using various methods (such "over-the-top" strong encryption and obfuscution is not without its own issues - but that's another story)... Granted there are plenty of other ways to track someone if you're dedicated enough / have access to the "right" resources, but Google is one of the three biggest data hoarders in the world (the others being Facebook and Amazon) and with the exception of Kindle eBooks (they're the easiest to strip DRM from, in my experience), I don't use any products from those companies, let alone have an account (nor do I have social media accounts).

Does that affect me in the Real World? No, not really - DuckDuckGo has served me well for years now (though I'm currently assessing a couple of other privacy-focused alternatives), and there are countless alternatives to Facebook / Google "things" that are equal, if not superior. Much of my spare time also involves regularly reviewing ways to further increase my privacy (e.g. "Can I replace 'x' with 'y' and gain more privacy?" or "Can I cut-away 'x' entirely and still get by?").

Obviously this doesn't guarantee my privacy - anybody with half-a-brain knows that there are plenty of other ways to track someone in the Modern World (your credit card example being a perfect example here) - but it does minimize how much data "The Big Three" have on me, which is a good thing, considering that between them, they control approximately 3 / 4 of the data on the Internet, in one way or another.

I can imagine a downside to that kind of effort to retain your privacy: Somewhere in an NSA database, your record has a flag saying "One of THOSE people who want privacy--keep an eye on". :tongue:

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: Purple Library GuyOccasionally I think I'm missing out by not owning a cell phone . . . but when I think of all this sort of issue, plus the ability to be actually alone with nobody bugging me when I'm alone, plus over the last 10 years I've probably saved at least $5000 (Cdn) not having one, which is most of a European vacation for me and my wife, well.
It's definitely good that my wife has one, but just one between the two of us seems to work fine. We're rarely both outside the house and also not together anyway.

A cell phone has been relatively cheap to own and operate here in Finland since the late nineties. We used to be ahead of the rest of the world in these things for a long while. These days not so much.

But yeah, I was the last among my friends to get a cell phone (good old Nokia 5110), and definitely the last to start using a smartphone just a few years back. And that was only because I was given an original Jolla—from a batch sent out to developers at launch, exclusive back cover and all—as a hand-me-down a few years ago. Then I got a used iPhone later (from work) which I hated, and now I'm using the first smartphone I actually had to buy myself. Don't really need one for much, as I'm never far from a computer. But it serves fine as a modem and an ebook reader I guess. :D

If I lived in Finland I might have one. Canada is notorious for pricey phone and internet. Goddamn price-fixing oligopolies.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: slaapliedjeAnd apparently someone ported SailfishOS to it. Too bad I haven't had the time to set it up...

It's an official port. Jolla made a deal with Sony to support Sailfish X on the Xperia 10, 10 Plus, X and XA2. Meaning you'll need a proper paid license from Jolla to get the full Sailfish X package with Android emulation and all. You can read more here [External Link].

Too bad you can't even buy these phones anymore, and no support has materialized for the newer models. I fear the day when my current phone inevitably breaks down. I think I'd rather just go back to a dumb feature phone than use Android. I dislike it just as much as I dislike Windows, with the added bonus that I'm not a big fan of smartphones in general.

Occasionally I think I'm missing out by not owning a cell phone . . . but when I think of all this sort of issue, plus the ability to be actually alone with nobody bugging me when I'm alone, plus over the last 10 years I've probably saved at least $5000 (Cdn) not having one, which is most of a European vacation for me and my wife, well.
It's definitely good that my wife has one, but just one between the two of us seems to work fine. We're rarely both outside the house and also not together anyway.

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Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: SeegrasIn chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

That's a way we the society ensure that. It's not at all the only way. For instance, Moderna's development of a Covid vaccine was financed entirely up front by the US government--they didn't spend a dime of their own money and indeed made a profit before they'd ever started manufacturing. Then they were given a patent as well, but I don't see what the point of that was.

It's kind of an odd approach generally. I mean, most people who defend the patent system for pharmaceuticals concede that the big pharma companies don't really do a whole lot of original basic research--that's mainly public sector and pharma mostly piggybacks off the public sector ideas. What pharma does is lots of clinical trials, which cost a lot of money. OK, fine, for clinical trials to be done, money has to be spent, but what should that have to do with patents? It's a fairly mechanical process that doesn't involve coming up with original ideas, so why should our method of compensating it pretend that it does?

And as a method, it doesn't work terribly well. Vaccines don't typically make pharmaceutical companies a ton of money, so they don't spend that much money developing them. But vaccines are very useful in terms of public health. In fact, in terms of medicines, there is to some extent an inverse relationship between utility and profitability. Palliative treatments are more profitable than cures, since they can be sold again and again.
If you're a fan of "free markets" (which, OK, I'm not), patents are a massive distortion of those whether you're talking about the original Adam Smith et al. sense or the modern sense, since from Smith's perspective they create huge windfall economic rents and from the modern perspective they involve massive government intervention and from both perspectives they represent the literal creation of monopoly for the express purpose of distorting prices.
Those prices can get jacked up especially high because of the nature of medicine--how much will you pay the only person who can save your life? The highest profit will necessarily come at a price-point high enough that many won't be able to afford it. This is cruel and immoral. But there is also a substantial public interest issue. Bad public health has social and economic implications.
So between these issues, leaving it to the (patent-distorted) market to decide just which treatments and vaccines should be pursued is inevitably going to give you perverse outcomes where worse medicines are emphasized over better ones, and the medicines produced are undersupplied and overcharged for, leaving many untreated, and sucking unnecessarily huge amounts of money out of the broader economy, leaving pharmaceutical companies with huge windfall profits.

Those windfall profits are also a huge motivator to falsify the outcomes of clinical trials to make drugs look better and less risky than they are. This has caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would be better to just have companies that do clinical trials, have public agencies that decided which drugs should have trials done, and pay them to do them. The public agency's purpose would be to improve public health, not make a profit from perverse outcomes. So they wouldn't be motivated to avoid cures in favour of palliative treatments, nor to falsify results of clinical trials. Clinical trial companies would compete on price and accuracy. Then the drugs, once approved, could be handed over to generic drug makers who would manufacture them cheaply and, again, in competition rather than with a monopoly. And that's just one possibility. I'm sure there are plenty of other approaches that would be better than what we have for everything except letting big pharma siphon off windfall profits.

I agree completely with you, I believe that pharmaceutical research should be funded by government and the results not patented.

I simply replied back to the argument that companies funding everything in private should immediately release their findings for free or be seen as psychopathic.

Ah, well, fair enough then.

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I've never really run into most of the problems people are talking about. Sure, little bugs now and then . . . there was this weird thing in my last playthrough where my pops were turning up on the slave market and, first, I didn't see how they could have got there, and second there would be the notification at the top, I'd pause the game to go buy my guys out of hock, and half the time there'd be nobody for sale. They started turning up after an endgame crisis with extra-galactic aliens coming to eat the galaxy--they ate one of my worlds before I crushed them and then afterwards suddenly my people are turning up for sale. But like, I don't get why extra-galactic devourers would have been popping by the slave market to sell my people instead of, you know, devouring them.
But it's not like it had any impact on the game. As to sectors, maybe it's because I'm a micromanager who assumes AI is stupid, but I've never noticed a real problem with them. They're a thing that means you need to hire another leader to boost output and reduce crime on a few worlds; if you start using features to automate stuff you deserve what you get.

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Quoting: randyl

Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: randylThe contract between Valve and the publishers/developers may have clauses or stipulations which give an "MFN" status and that has to be determined during the hearing.

Aaaah! MFN is a term used to qualify a situation... They want to convince the court that some part of Valve's contract acts like a MFN. Is that so?

Edit: For the record... Don't know why I haven't tought about that in the first place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_favoured_nation [External Link]

This seems to be so and more so that if their contract has an MFN clause that it harms both consumers and developers. If you have the time to listen to the YouTube video that was posted earlier the lawyer explains what this is and how it could apply to Valve. He goes over the highlights of the law suit and explains what it means legally and what it might mean for Valve or the plaintiff.

I think it's probably worth a watch, and I actually started . . . but it's a frigging hour, man!

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Quoting: PhiladelphusThis may be the most excited I've ever been about a Stellaris update. I, uh, often end up becoming the de facto end game crisis (in fact I have weird "luck" with the crisis just…not spawning in most of my games, even when I want it to), so being able to do it with actual mechanics sounds amazing! :woot:

Sounds like a great excuse to pick up the Necroids species pack and play a empire bent on wiping out the rest of the galaxy. Literally.

Can't be a co-incidence that those two expansions came out right after each other. Necroids + "Become the crisis!" go together like ham and eggs.

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