FWIW, the PlayStation was meant to have the Nintendo button layout too. In Japan, O is synonymous with “yes/good” sort of like a check mark (✅) and X means “no/bad”. So the X and O buttons were meant to be used in that way. But western game devs didn’t know that, and designed their games with X as confirm and O as decline.
Take it a step farther. Why is cheap grain available on the market? Because European import regulations were relaxed to support Ukrainian grain exports.
In case you weren’t aware, grain is one of Ukraine’s largest exports.
It’s primarily meant for people who have slow connections. If you’re downloading a game over DSL or satellite (which is often the only thing available unless you’re in an urban/suburban area) then the 5GB of extra compression could be a huge time difference. It’s also true for metered connections, where you have to pay by the GB, or where you have a data cap.
I mean, she’s never tried to hide the fact that she’s Russian. And she also hasn’t hidden the fact that she dislikes Putin. But lots of Europe is struggling right now. For instance, the farmers protesting across many parts of Europe, as a result of the war and Ukrainian exports.
I mean, the real end solution is to host your own server. Then you can federate/defederate with whoever the hell you want. As long as you don’t do anything to get banned from a specific instance, you’ll be fine.
But that’s more work than most people are willing to put into a Reddit clone.
Was going to say the same. Windows and Linux both use “lazy” ways of deleting things, because there’s not usually a need to actually wipe the data. Overwriting the data takes a lot more time, and on an SSD it costs valuable write cycles. Instead, it simply marks the space as usable again, and removes any associations to the file that the OS had. But the data still exists on the drive, because it’s simply been marked as writeable again.
There are plenty of programs that will be able to read that “deleted” content, because (again) it still exists on the drive. If you just deleted it and haven’t used the drive a lot since then, it’s entirely possible that the data hasn’t been overwritten yet.
You need a form of secure delete, which doesn’t just mark the space is usable. A secure delete will overwrite the data with junk data. Essentially white noise 1’s and 0’s, so the data is completely gone instead of simply being marked as writeable.
Also, nothing strikes fear into a party quite like knowing the BBEG has Power Word Kill in their back pocket. No save, no spell attack, no change to interrupt. They just tell one of your party members to die, and the party member keels over dead. Hopefully you have a 9th level spellcaster who has counterspell prepped and is willing to upcast to prevent it.
It can force the party to come up with some pretty elaborate traps just to bait the PWK prior to the fight. Since you can only use it once per day, the goal is usually to force them into a fight with something sacrificial (like a golem or a troll,) bait them into use the PWK on that creature, then rush in before they can escape.
My party jokes about the Palabard’s helmet being a mimic. He went College of Eloquence, and the DM allowed him to swap the Persuasion/Deception bonus for Persuasion/Intimidation instead. He also took expertise in intimidation, so with RAW he can’t roll lower than a 21. And sue to a mimic’s CHA of 8, it has a -1 on any intimidation saves, so it can literally never out-roll the Palabard.
We joke that the mimic started as a helmet to try and entice a creature into wearing it… But now (because of his min-maxed intimidation bonus) it’s afraid to actually reveal itself and attack the Palabard. On top of that, it has realized that if it just sticks with the party that it’ll eat plenty from the corpses they leave behind.
Yeah, my brother lent my game disc to one of his friends. When that friend returned it, it looked like a cat had clawed all over it. It was so scratched that it wouldn’t read anymore, and the best scratch buffers in the world would’ve been useless.
Turns out, that friend had a known habit of leaving his game discs out on the floor and just walking all over them with his muddy shoes when he wasn’t actively playing them.
This is doubly true for games, which tend to be re-released over and over again on different platforms. This is true to a lesser extent for things like movies, but it’s much worse with gaming where each console is a closed ecosystem that’s incompatible with other systems. At least with Blu-Ray, you can expect any Blu-Ray player to play the movie you’ve purchased. It’s not like a Toshiba player will only play Toshiba brand Blu-Ray discs.
Companies love to use the “you don’t own the game, you own a personal license to use the game” line when revoking rights to play games you’ve legally purchased… But that goes both ways; If you own a personal license to use the game, it shouldn’t matter what platform it’s on, because it’s the same game regardless of whether you’re playing on PlayStation or PC.
Because the dude said the ships were piloted by non-humans, and that the pentagon took the non-human biological remains to experiment on. Like he didn’t outright say the word “aliens” but he 100% meant aliens.
You bet. And to be more specific, the “alternative facts” part came from a discussion about the size of Trump’s inauguration. Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly touted that Trump had the largest inauguration in history. When that was proven false, (Obama’s had a bigger crowd,) the reporter mentioned something along the lines of “well the facts say that Trump’s wasn’t the largest. Why would Spicer (the press secretary at the time) utter known falsehoods?” And Kellyanne retorted with something along the lines of “He wasn’t lying; He was simply giving alternative facts.”
It was one of the big times that democrats realized the White House would just straight up lie through their teeth about anything and they didn’t care if people believed it.
It’s Kellyanne Conway, the former senior advisor for Trump. Her job was basically to hold the press releases and try to keep the good PR going.
She’s the one that coined the term “alternative facts” when pressed about Trump’s team being proven to have lied about key topics.
Threads is going to be federated. But lots of instances have already said they’re going to defederate it immediately, because lots of people expect that federation is part of the EEE business plan. That’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Originally pioneered by Microsoft, it’s basically a way to kill off tech that you don’t want to compete with.
First embrace it, and do everything you can to be friendly towards the people using it. It’s an open standard, and you want to act inviting and supportive. Lull your competition into a false sense of cooperation.
Then extend it. Start creating proprietary additions which exist outside the standard. Do this under the guise of supporting the standard. These additions should be difficult for competitors to implement, but you maintain that this is all done to further improve the standard and bring more functionality to the end user.
Then extinguish the competition. Once you’re the de facto producer for this tech, (because users have come to expect those proprietary functions,) then lock down those proprietary changes so competitors can’t use them at all. Make the alternatives noticeably worse to use in every way, to force everyone into your (now closed standard) platform.
A good example of this is Microsoft Office. Ever notice that Word documents have historically been awful to try and open/edit in other word processors? This was because Microsoft was using EEE to make the other word processors worse. It’s also what Google does with Chrome, implementing non-standard additions then using their market share to bully competitors into joining; Every Firefox user has seen the dreaded “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Use Chrome instead” message at least once.
Firefox doesn’t use chromium. It uses Gecko, which is an entirely separate codebase.
Same. Companies like Nintendo have repeatedly proven that they have zero interest in preserving their old games. In fact, they often do the exact opposite, and work to stop people from preserving their own (legally owned) game libraries. But Nintendo also has zero interest in re-releasing those older games. So the only way you’re able to realistically play them is via piracy, since the actual company that owns the rights won’t release them for sale on a legal platform.
On the other side of the same coin: When I mass edited my comments before quitting Reddit, I got site-banned. Basically, my first account’s automated edit got me auto-banned from several subs with pro-spez mods. Some subs had set their automod to detect when people were using the more popular methods of auto-editing, and set the automod to ban for using them. Then when I did the same with my second (and third, and fourth, and fifth, etc…) account, it almost immediately got site-banned for ban evasion.
Basically, account 1 was banned from a sub, so when account 2 started doing the same thing on the same IP address, it was flagged as ban evasion. And ban evasion is one of the few things that will get you banned site-wide instead of just from a specific sub.
I went back and checked a few months ago, and all of those site bans were lifted and the edits were undone. Likely because a site ban prevents the comments from showing up (which hurts Reddit’s bottom line, because they show up as a bunch of [removed] comments instead,) but also prevented any of the edits from actually being published. So when they lifted the site ban (to get those old comments to show back up again) it was as if I had never edited them at all. I had probably a million karma spread across my various accounts. I was extremely active at one point, so Reddit had a direct incentive to unban those accounts with literal thousands of comments.