The genocide argument is a really bad one. Yes the Biden administration is culpable. The Trump administration would pump more money into it and start parading around the genocide like it’s a good thing.
There’s voting for the side who might get tired of the public opposition and stop funding that shit, or letting the genocidal wannabe dictator win.
I mean I’m not really picking to not play anymore because I don’t want to. They said they were going to turn it on like two months ago and I believed them. I wasn’t about to risk my account on the odd chance my crapple device is good enough to play it.
Vanguard was announced and was supposed to be added to League imminently a while ago. I stopped playing months ago as a result. I can hardly imagine that I am the only one, so the number seems cherry picked for convenience.
I’d like to know what the average daily player count on Linux was prior to 2024, I suspect it’s higher than 800.
That said, I get the trade-off. I won’t support that trade-off though because I will never agree with an anticheat implemented like Vanguard is.
No bedframe, no nightstand, only one monitor and it’s tiny as hell
This looks like a prison, get me out
That checks out. Exactly what I’d expect from a devout Christian.
Unless it’s a Java Minecraft server which I believe exclusively uses TCP still.
Not that I’m (seriously) advocating for them to go into a dorm, but these people decide their salaries.
If they were doing their job properly they would have raised it, or better yet they would have established a higher-end apartment-dorm type solution that is paid for by the state and so their paychecks are not used to cover their living expenses in DC (not college freshman standards, more like two bedroom apartments unless they want to pony up part of their paycheck, one for a bed and one for an office).
They’re not actually doing either of these things though, so I hardly feel bad.
They’re not actually advocating for mob rule, mob rule is only acceptable if it’s the mob rule that accomplishes what they want.
Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay out the ass just so they can live a nicer life than the rest of us while they continually make far more than us and don’t try to govern properly (like raising our minimum wage).
If normal people need a bunch of roommates to afford DC, the less well-off Congressmen can deal with something similar until they have made enough good financial decisions to get something nicer, just like the rest of us do.
Also if someone sucks at making financial decisions, I honestly don’t think they should be in a position to decide fiscal legislation for the entire country, it’s clearly not a skill in their wheelhouse and that’s not the place to acquire that skill.
They can’t spell, and even if they can they can’t read and don’t listen.
There’s a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).
I can’t really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no “trying to create a competitor to Steam” isn’t pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it’s not like Epic couldn’t have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn’t play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I’m aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam’s rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn’t need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve’s servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn’t be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it’s not like Steam doesn’t add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve’s decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren’t, I can cite:
It’s really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.
I don’t think it’s Linux.
I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.
Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.
I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.
There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).
Fortnite loads fine on Linux but closes after reaching the main menu. It doesn’t crash, it closes. They’re actively blocking the community from self-supporting.
None of this is mutually exclusive with what I said and you got really close to my point…
that have no empathy for the civilians plight and that have deep pockets
I keep seeing everyone talking about only a few groups:
I’m not seeing anyone mention the group of people who do not care about Israel as a people either and only want to protect their money and power and view Israel as a tool to do so.
That last group is currently escaping the headlines which are essentially all about people who are vocally pro-/anti-Israel or pro-/anti-Palestinians and not about the group who care about neither. The last group needs more attention because they will be funding the next war too.
I think that’s part of it, but I the government is also using Israel as a proxy, and we do have silicon manufacturing there. The government has a vested military and security interest in Israel (money and power is far more important, the votes are a bonus).
Unlike all of the other countries in the Middle East, Israel is surrounded only by enemies. Israel can’t turn on the US without a replacement military superpower, so they’re effectively bound to the US for guaranteed protection.
Example: Despite Iran’s posturing they weren’t going to attack knowing they’d get a military response from the US if they did. They almost certainly could get away with attacking a different country the US isn’t protecting though without anything more than sanctions.
The (my) comment that you responded to presented you a list of actual monopolies that have no alternatives on their platform. There was no “logic” presented, it was a statement of observation.
The existence of the lawsuit does not mean there is proof, it means that Wolfire has enough of a case to begin discovery on two of their claims that the court is interested to find out more. That’s it.
One of the claims is also very weird and I can’t actually find any information corroborating the claim besides the claim itself (re: Valve acquiring and shutting down World Opponent Network). The only thing I see is that Sierra was acquired by Havas who made WON into it’s own entity, then merged it with PrizeCentral under the name Flipside.com and the last WON game was released in 2006.
The only thing relating to Valve I can see is that Valve announced Steam in 2002 and then they removed WON from their own games, which they had every right to do so.
WG’s strongest claim is the MFN clause, and they actually have to prove that it’s for anticompetitiveness.
They are all monopolies in their ecosystem.
(Satellite Internet doesn’t reach everywhere.)
You got a list of monopolies, stop trying to move goalposts in order to slam Valve and defend a bunch of anti-consumer publicly traded companies.
Standard Oil was a monopoly, but using your logic there wasn’t because there was an alternative of not using oil-based fuels.
An example of a company that actually fits your definition of a pseudo-monopoly would be Nvidia in the GPU market.
Locked down App Store on iOS (EU is trustbusting this one)
Locked down PlayStation ecosystem
Locked down Xbox ecosystem
Locked down Switch ecosystem
Regional monopolies by ISPs
No I’m thinking in terms of we cannot revive the dead so let’s not put the genocidal wannabe dictator in power for 4 years. I clearly can’t stop what’s currently happening but I’m sure as hell not going to vote in a way that results in more people dying more quickly.
You mistake accepting genocide with trying to prevent a worse genocide.