Even lawyers can’t get you out of trying to patent something that was clearly already in the market. Previously, Nintendo’s patent lawsuits had been for specific mechanics such as throwing a ball to capture npc animals.

It sounds incredibly vulnerable to this exact argument. Patents aren’t valid if it’s been invented already.

RAS Syndrome

I thought him including video of a trump rally was too blunt, the audio was enough. I enjoyed the implication he was making about the game’s difference between the US and south american superweapons, which isn’t openly stated and doesn’t have to be.

It’s a shame, because their launch site in Bowen is much closer to the Equator than the continental US. When/if they get it right, they’ll be able to need far less fuel than US launch sites.

Remember how everyone was horrified when an authoritarian government like China forced everyone to disclose their identities to get online? You’re thinking of Korea, its government required every citizen to have a ten digit online ID until 2008.

Yes, Settings -> Update & Security -> Activation will give you an offer to upgrade your edition of Windows or change your product key.

Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent.

This is both funny and also an excellent summary of why Wikipedia uniquely has an incentive not to jump on the AI bandwagon. Like a bank maintaining COBOL decades after everyone else moved on, its (goal of) reputation for reliability means that there’s a strong internal conservative faction opposed to introducing new disruptive features.

I played the first one, and found it to be extremely boring but with potential. Unfortunately, playing 3 and Syndicate afterwards showed me clearly that Ubisoft smothered the potential and cranked up the boring. The worlds they’ve created are certainly immersive, but they’re also devoid of energy. 3 has a half-Native American protage who spends five minutes in his home village and then goes off to the colonies with barely a thought spared for his home, so when it’s played for drama it falls flat because we haven’t seen his relationship to his family. And Syndicate’s characters had might as well be carved from soap with how crude and flat they are. There’s a transgendered gangster from New York who joins the Assassins’ gang, and he has absolutely nothing to add for the entire game. Characters with seeming potential come in, have one side quest, and that’s their lot.

Not only that, but trust from a self contained community is not the same as safe for the general public outside of context. Imagine asking for a summary of the Gamestop shortsqueeze and getting an answer from Superstonks.

honestly, not sure I -ever- found a useful answer on Quora.

Reading them taught me one thing, Quora had/has a weirdly strong hardon for Steve Jobs and is/was all too happy to talk about anecdotes of him buying the authors’ lunch or reconciling with his estranged daughter. The only time I read criticism of Apple or him was when the question specifically asked for it.

There’s ways to rate limit, like increasing response time per IP address per hour to make rapid, massed requests slower and easier to handle. Taking them all down at once is an extreme move.

Let me add one thing more, that a realistic aesthetic brings with it certain expectations. For example, I don’t question how Security Bots in Bioshock refuel themselves, or fly, or recognise intruders. I don’t ask how come the turrets in Portal never run out of bullets (though it’s answered as a gag in one of the videos). They’re not presented as realistic, and I don’t expect them to be. But when you make the choice to use realistic miniguns in Talos, those questions are going to bubble up to the surface, like “Where’s the ammo box on that thing?” and “Who’s maintaining these on islands in the middle of nowhere?” and “Scratch that, who’s making them?” and “If Elohim (yeah real subtle name there) did all this then why bother with a machine that requires maintenance in the first place instead of a magic pillar of fire or smth?”

The author is the host of Behind the Bastards, and produced a pair of episodes to accompany the article on the same subject: https://pca.st/episode/96a1d3d1-7966-412b-bc8b-492c817b9f93

I can say I was put off at first glance by the “realistic” aesthetic, with props like jammers and minigun turrets that have an unnecessarily detailed, grounded look when as a puzzle game, graphics should not be the focus of the experience. A stylised, or minimal, graphical style would put the focus firmly where it belongs - on the puzzles themselves.

The commentary said they wanted to do rival criminal gangs, which would have made a lot more sense than the construction magnates they went with, but my guess is they realised West Side Story already did it.

a firefox extension that does this automatically?? removing the redirect/tracking link and convert back into normal link)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/utm-eraser/

Be sure not to leave fingerprints!

I highly recommend you watch Netflix’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing.

As a free alternative/companion, I would also suggest the PBS documentary Boeing’s Fatal Flaw, which features the CEO subtly throwing the pilots under the bus for one of the MCAS crashes.

I use FreeFileSync: https://freefilesync.org