Quoting: Purple Library GuyOne of my first memories is sitting in a pleasantly dim living room watching a little black and white TV set showing men in spacesuits walking and jumping on the moon for the first time.
Odd to realize that we couldn't do it today. Well, we could, but we'd have to first spend years and billions of dollars to develop and build new Saturn V equivalents. There is a capacity we had in 1969 that doesn't currently exist because we let it lapse.
(Edited to add: That's an odd "we", now that I think about it. I'm Canadian, and we never had the capacity, only the Americans did; while if I go worldwide, I don't know if the Russians might still have some rockets hanging around they could strap together and send to the moon--they never actually did that, but I wouldn't be surprised if an Energia booster could have done it. But perhaps the main spacefaring country had the capacity and lost it)

The Russians landed a rocket (Luna 2) on the Moon in 1959. China landed on the far side of the Moon in January this very year and had previously landed a rover on the Moon in 2013.

I think you are a bit American-centric there ;)

edit: and SpaceX launced a Israeli funded lunar lander in February 2019 so the Falcon 9 have the capacity to at least send unmanned space crafts to the Moon.

Long list of landings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing [External Link]

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I like their humour. Naming the release "Djungelvrål" (Roar of the Jungle) after the Swedish candy:


It's that extremely salty liquorice that few people outside of Scandinavia enjoys :-)

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: x_wingLets stop playing this game of "what if" and "what I understand" and lets go for the facts:

Indeed, I see no point in further refuting your wrong claims that contradict the TOS which says you need Steam account to be allowed to use their games. You can show me the source which says that Steam allows you doing backups and using them without Steam account. Or otherwise let's move on to other topics, because I'm not going to agree with you.

You are both going at this backwards. Valve does not hold the copyright to any of the games on Steam except their own. Further copyright does not cover usage (making backups however is a copy so that is covered) so no party here Valve nor the correct copyright holder (the game publisher) can sue you for copyright violation for playing a game.

What the Steam TOS defines is that Valve have no legal liability to provide you with copies of the games that you have bought on Steam after your account have been terminated (as well as defining terms at which Valve can terminate your account), not weather you are allowed or not allowed to use the games after the account have terminated. And this is the DRM part of it all, DRM puts a technical limit on how you can use a piece of software and not a legal one.

Remember that when e.g BSA (The Business Software Alliance [basically Adobe and Microsoft]) gets money from businesses that use pirated copies of Microsoft and/or Adobe products they do this by extortion (i.e pay us money or we will publicly shame your company for using pirated software) and not by suing in court. Filesharers gets sued in court since they perform distribution of the software which is covered by copyright.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: TheSHEEEPYour argument is based on an eventuality that will simply never happen. You think police will kick down your door and arrest you for using a copy of a game you bought some time ago, but no longer "own"? Come on!

What will never happen? That you close your account? That it gets closed? May be.

I'm just talking about legality issues. Some people care about that. You obviously not. That's your thing. It doesn't make my argument invalid, Steam is restricting the use of the software after having 'sold' it. This is DRM. You can ignore it, but neither deny it nor force others to accept it.

Valve would have a very hard hard time arguing in court that you violate any laws by using a DRM-free game without a Steam account since Valve does not hold the copyright to said game. AFAIK all they could do is see this as you violating the TOS and thus they are eligible to terminate your Steam account which is moot considering the basis of the question.

Actually the exact same thing should possibly be attached to the DRM games that Valve sells through Steam, even though they claim that you only license the game and not own it in their TOS they still don't hold the copyright to the game (only the publisher does) so their legal reach should not extend more than that they can terminate your account due to you violating the TOS. This however might play differently depending upon which country you live in and can ultimately only be solved once such a case is ever brought to court.

AKA if you terminate your Steam account and still play say Mass Effect 2 then only EA can bring you to court for violating copyright, not Valve.

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Quoting: Comandante Ñoñardo

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThe video game market is broken as shit. You have publishers gouging money from gamers everywhere you turn, so people turn to other sources in order to buy games for less. Its been happening for decades. Remember when copied games were sold in the market for a fraction of the retail price?

(Not talking lootboxes and nonsense into account here..)
In my humble opionion, most games are way too cheap.
In the 90ies, a game usually costed 100 german marks.
With inflation, this translated to 83 euros / 93 dollars.
Back then a game was made by, dunno, a handful or two of people?
Nowadays, even productions by hundreds of people cannot ask for 90 dollars.
And productions by a handful of people are often condemned if they take more than 20 dollars...

If you where lucky back then you could afford one game per year, so the many hours we spent as kids looking at the backsides of games in the store so not to end up with the shitty game for the whole next year. O boy have the times changed, and then there are plenty of people crying all over the steam forums that 9$ for a game is a rip-off... Sometimes the old grumpy me wants to smack those kids on the head and tell them to get off my lawn!

But, remember that in the 90's it wasn't necessary to buy the games for to play them. We were able to RENT games for consoles like Sega Genesis, SNES and playstation Cd's, etc..
And We were able to rent games for computers with MSDOS, totally DRMFREE in Cd's, or even Floppy disks.
I miss that freedom!

Not back in the 80ies and early 90ies where I live (there might have been some NES games for rent in the later part of the 90ies in larger cities at the video stores however). Today however you can borrow PS2-4, XB360-One, Wii, WiiU, GameCube, DS and Switch games at our local library for free.

edit: some research shows that we indeed had NES rentals as early as 1987 in Sweden but this must have been in major cities only, I never saw one on the villages where I grew up.

edit2: seams to have been later than 1987, the company that did this was launched in 1987 but they only rented so called video boxes (VHS players) initially so I have no year of when they launched their NES rental business.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: GuestThe video game market is broken as shit. You have publishers gouging money from gamers everywhere you turn, so people turn to other sources in order to buy games for less. Its been happening for decades. Remember when copied games were sold in the market for a fraction of the retail price?

(Not talking lootboxes and nonsense into account here..)
In my humble opionion, most games are way too cheap.
In the 90ies, a game usually costed 100 german marks.
With inflation, this translated to 83 euros / 93 dollars.
Back then a game was made by, dunno, a handful or two of people?
Nowadays, even productions by hundreds of people cannot ask for 90 dollars.
And productions by a handful of people are often condemned if they take more than 20 dollars...

If you where lucky back then you could afford one game per year, so the many hours we spent as kids looking at the backsides of games in the store so not to end up with the shitty game for the whole next year. O boy have the times changed, and then there are plenty of people crying all over the steam forums that 9$ for a game is a rip-off... Sometimes the old grumpy me wants to smack those kids on the head and tell them to get off my lawn!

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Guest

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: ThormackThe new Steam officially supported distro just launched.
Awesome.

(Just a speculation, for now...)

Nah, I don't think so.

There's a lot things to do after the installation. IMO they will support a more friendly distro, preferably with a corporation behind, like OpenSUSE or Fedora

Maybe they create a new distro for desktop use based on Debian.

I don't see where people get the impression that Ubuntu is more 'user friendly'. Nothing says that better than their python based installer that regularly crashes at the partitioning step with a bunch of exceptions that are surely easier to read for the average user than plain language.

Because the average used does not use whatever advanced setting that you are using that are causing those crashes. They will simply click "next" all the way. And once they have done so they will have a fully working desktop, and if they need further customization or changes then the Internet is full of blogs and nice looking guides for how to do this in Ubuntu.

That is why.

Agreed. Although I do have one minor peeve about that Ubuntu (and Mint) installer nonetheless. As a pretty basic user, I still tend to need to muck with the partitioning. Why? Because even the most basic user would be well advised to put their /home on a separate partition from the / with the actual OS. Eventually you're gonna update or reinstall or try a different distro or something, and when you do your life will be so much easier if your actual data you care about is on a separate partition from the one that's gonna get formatted. Sure, you should do a backup anyway, but having those two partitions is basic. But do they have that as an option, or even the default? They do not. If you want that you have to go into the full partitioning thingie and worry about swap and a little boot space and crap like that. Grumble mutter whine bitch.
(I swear I have a recollection of Mandriva having that option available in its installer in the old days)

What you cite is not an argument for partitioning, but rather for the use of LVM.

And frankly I don't know why anyone would partition any linux installation today (except for sharing a drive with Microsoft crapware, of course). It seems to me that this should have been abandoned in the nineties, when I fully switched to using LVM on every installation.

AFAIK you setup LVM in the Ubuntu Installer via the partition utility. At least you do in the advanced installer.

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Quoting: Guest

Quoting: fagnerln

Quoting: ThormackThe new Steam officially supported distro just launched.
Awesome.

(Just a speculation, for now...)

Nah, I don't think so.

There's a lot things to do after the installation. IMO they will support a more friendly distro, preferably with a corporation behind, like OpenSUSE or Fedora

Maybe they create a new distro for desktop use based on Debian.

I don't see where people get the impression that Ubuntu is more 'user friendly'. Nothing says that better than their python based installer that regularly crashes at the partitioning step with a bunch of exceptions that are surely easier to read for the average user than plain language.

Because the average used does not use whatever advanced setting that you are using that are causing those crashes. They will simply click "next" all the way. And once they have done so they will have a fully working desktop, and if they need further customization or changes then the Internet is full of blogs and nice looking guides for how to do this in Ubuntu.

That is why.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Tuxee

What are your thoughts?

That Wester is either an idiot or a hypocrite. I'd go for the latter.

I would more say that he is speaking from the viewpoint of his own company, it's of course in Paradox best interest to keep their own prices as high as possible while having to pay as little as possible to others like Valve. That is hardly being a hypocrite.

Just because being a hypocrite is solidly in your best interests does not make it stop being hypocrisy.

So what does his hypocrisy consist of? AFAIK he is not imposing a 30% cut of other companies to use the Paradox store?!

I feel like backing up a moment and talking about what hypocrisy is. If you don't agree with me on that, then obviously we're going to see different things as hypocrisy. To me, hypocrisy is when people morally condemn the same or similar actions in some cases but not others, usually precisely because they are speaking "from the viewpoint of" their personal (not necessarily monetary) gain. It's a violation of the "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" principle. Refraining from hypocrisy requires speaking not "from the viewpoint of your own company" but rather from the viewpoint of principle. That may seem like an unreasonable requirement, but it only kicks in if you're making ethical or normative claims--of course those should be based on principle because you can't have it both ways; if you want to talk from your parochial interests then you have no business bringing morality into it.

So here we have a guy who clearly charges what the traffic will bear for his products, condemning Valve for charging what the traffic will bear . . . and doing so in a disingenuous fashion which makes what are pretty clearly knowingly false claims about Valve's (lack of) expenses. So, clearly his condemnation is not made out of genuine moral impulses--he knows he's lying and he knows he'd do the same because he more or less does; he's just trying to put some pressure on Valve in hopes of getting a price break. The details are different, and no doubt he could defend his pricing practices, but he's making false claims about Valve's so it would appear he doesn't care about that kind of fairness. And of course another element of hypocrisy there is that he would surely object strenuously if someone claimed to him that all those DLCs cost Paradox nothing to make.

Seems to me like he's pretty clearly treating the Valve case very differently in terms of rhetoric and moral judgment than he would treat his own. And he is doing so in the interest of monetary gain. So that's hypocrisy.

If he just said "Valve's cut costs my company more than we want to pay, we don't want to pay it so we'd rather they reduced it" then he would be talking about his company's interests but not making a moral judgment and so would not be open to accusations of hypocrisy. One thing I find interesting is that in a world which is supposedly all about the dollars and cents, where the official ethos of the market is that there is no such thing as morality and profit is its own justification, CEOs very often end up reaching for ethical claims because in the end, no matter how much our system tries to explain them away, they remain compelling.

Thanks for clarifying your position! Laying out the details the way you did here I think that I agree with your position to 100%.

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Quoting: g000hEven if their source control server went down, it is usual for developer workstations to retain much of the working code. (True of git, perforce, subversion anyway.)

Exactly this. Where I work all the developers have each a complete copy of all our source code (myself I do a "svn up *" every morning) on our work computers, many of us have it on our home computers as well. Then the subversion server is backed up to a remote server in a different country. And we are a small 8-person company.

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