TBH, age verification services exist.

If it becomes law, integrating them shouldn’t be more difficult than integrating a OIDC login. So everyone should be able to do it.

Depending on these services, you might not even need to give a name, or, because they are separate entities, don’t give your name to the platform using them.

Other parts of regulation are more difficult. Like these “upload filters” that need to figure out if something shared via a service is violating any copyright before it is made available.

Where did I or the original post mention anything about occasional smokers? This post is offensive to those struggling from lifelong addiction to cigarettes, which is almost never a choice.

Where did they mention addiction?

They mention cigarettes, and their bad affects on the people using them and the people around that. Stating that they are bad should not be offensive, because that is stating the facts.

If they are offended by that… IDK. That is something they have to work through themselves.

Gee, that’s such great advice! Why didn’t the lifelong addict think of that one themselves? You just singlehandedly solved addiction.

You are misrepresenting what I said. I said that to get over an addiction you first have to want it. And you say: Just wanting to stop is not enough, and I agree.

Noone chooses being addicted to cigarettes. It’s a mental health disorder just like being addicted to fentanyl or heroin, and a crippling one at that for some. Please educate yourself about what addiction is before defending posts like this. What you are doing is similar to shitting on people for “choosing” their sexuality or gender.

True, however people don’t just wake up one day and be addicted. They have to take it first (willingly or unwillingly), putting a social stigma on the act of using these addictive substances, can at least prevent some people of getting accidentally addicted.

So I would be in favor of supporting people getting out of their addiction, while preventing people to get addicted, by showing what is bad about these drugs and trying to fight against the social component of “taking them makes you cool”.

What are you fighting for? Finding ways of being offended?

What does smoking a cigarette here or there has to do with addiction?

Cigarettes aren’t the only way you can get addicted, you know. You made the connection between cigarettes and addictions, here in this post.

Also wouldn’t it be the best advice against addiction find the will in oneself to stop doing it? If addicted smokers know what their cigarettes do for themselves and others, then they might want to try search for help, to get them off their addiction?

Unless you are also complaining about it when white male characters are also surface-level, 2-D, copy-and-paste characters then all you are saying is “Only white male characters are allowed to be simple or a stereotype/trope.”

What? Where am I saying that?

Yes I would complain about all kind of stereotypes. Even the “white muscular tough guy” could be considered sexual objectification. IMO CoD is sometimes pretty gay coded.

Lets be honest, not every game needs a complex and well written character, and that is fine. If they choose to go that route it doesn’t matter what race, religion, or gender the character is in the first place. So it doesn’t matter if they are a white male, a latina woman, or a black non-binary person.

I wasn’t saying that. You can have games without a single character. Or where the character doesn’t really matter, because it just an empty shell you are driving around and not more.

But IMO I mostly play story driven RPGs, where you are someone, and where you want the environment to react to you. It would be awesome if when you run around with colorful hair or tattoos, it would slightly change the disposition of the NPCs or cause them to comment on your appearance. Don’t let this stuff be just cosmetics, it should be more meaningful, and embedded into the game world.

I don’t think representation is the main issue, it is more about how they are presented.

Striding for a perfect 50/50, doesn’t really sense if they are all just stereotypes and sexual objectified. Also there are many other underrepresented population groups.

IMO, it is more important to focus good well written and complex characters, that represent real circumstances right.

I don’t complain that AAA studios have gone ‘woke’ because they now include choices to select from marginalized groups, I complain about them because they are often do not offer a deeper perspective of people in that group and are just different skins.

In some way, I can understand, games often happen in a Fantasy world, but I would wish that selecting different characters would do more than just exchanging the player mesh, texture and voice pack.

If we take the goal for long term stability of a civil society as the normal, then many current economic, civil and environmental policies are very radical.

Well I worked for a while at a large international corporation that maintained (and AFAIK is still continuing) a managed Linux system, which worked well enough. And there where a lot more people, especially the people that were the most productive, interested in it.

Sure that might have just been a nice island inside the larger company, but the people there were the internal consultants, which often had to pull other projects out of the gutter.

If you over your specialists ways to use the tools they need, you will improve the whole company.

But it is not a “Linux Subsystem”, it is a “Windows Subsystem”.

If I write a hypothetical Driver for Linux to support windows, it would be a “Linux Module” not a “Windows Module”.

I guess they could have called it “Windows Subsystem for Linux support”

Linux on a corporate desktop is mostly about how well you know the IT guys and do they trust you. And of course the software stack.

I would say it depends more on the commitment of the IT admins to support and manage a fleet of Linux workstations. There are Linux “Active Directory” servers, configuration provisioning tools, ways to centrally and automatically rollout updates, etc. It really depends on if the IT guys invest the same amount of effort to support them or not.

Mdisks are a viable offline long term backup solution, and cheaper to get started with than tape drives.

I just tried this on LO 25.2.3.2 and could not reproduce your issue.

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Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn’t really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren’t games, but instead simulations.

Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.

Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven’t seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.

So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.

I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.

I would say many games with procedural generated worlds, like Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, etc. Where the main task is deciding where do I go next, where do I settle down, maybe there is some better place over the next hill, next planet, etc.

There are other games, where it is also sometimes not quite clear what to do next. Like games have a lot of progression and rebuilding of stuff that was done before because of it. Like Satisfactory, Factorio, etc.

And on a more literal sense, where you actually redo the game over and over to progress, like The Stanley Parable or Outer Wilds.

Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn’t really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.

Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.

I am against the concept of individuals or legal entities owning property, it belong to everyone. However, if you take something from the society in order to be allowed to used it exclusively for a while, you ought to give something back, that is what tax is for.

If you see propaganda everywhere, the it was successful on you. One purpose of propaganda is to erode the fundamental trust in society and sow distrust about anything and anyone, that way people become politically ineffective and easy to manipulate.

Propaganda doesn’t necessarily need to convince people, but can instead attack the peoples ability to differentiate truth and lie by sowing mistrust about the most mundane and conventional things. When people stop believing their own eyes or following logic, they become easier to manipulate. A bit like gas-lighting, where you sort of turn the critical thinking against them, but on a large scale.

I don’t really understand what it is I would be wrong about. Is it about the word “shareholders” in the wiki instead of “owners”, what I called them?

Shareholders of a private company is often a small group of individuals or just one person, and they can also be called the owners. “Private” means the shares are not traded publicly.

A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the legal owner of shares of the share capital of a public or private corporation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder

Valve is private and already takes a 30% cut.

Yes. That is rather high, but AFAIK the same on Xbox, PlayStation and GOG. Itch.io is on 10%.

It’s not possible for valve OR epic to enshit according to the definition of the word.

What do you mean by that? Enshittyfication is when companies try to offer a good platform first to reach many content producers and consumers and then, once the consumers and producers depend on the platform, it goes bad for them in order to favor profits of the company owners or stakeholders.

Just because a company is private, it can still change to favor short term money extractions from all their customers.

GOG doesn’t need a launcher, because the games don’t have DRM. It is just nice to have, in order to keep games up to date.

Steam, Epic, Origin and the Microsoft thing needs a launcher, because DRM. The non-optional part is what is annoying, it is not a choice, if you buy something there, you have to use their launcher software, that needs to run in the background all the time (Sure it doesn’t need to run all the time, but just having to start it in addition to the game, is annoying).

With Steam being the first one to require a launcher, it was annoying at first, but became useful and people started considering it the standard game delivery solution. Now we need another one for Epic and all other stores that peddle DRMified games.

If Epic would be just another store, where you buy and download games, nobody would complain, but Epic created (reinvented) an additional incompatible game delivery solution that required their launcher, that is what people are mostly annoyed about.

If the industry would come together and create a vendor neutral and compatible software and game delivery mechanism, where people are free to choose where to buy their software and games, and with which launcher they want to keep it up to date, that would be awesome, but sadly capitalism favors short sighted, wasteful and monopoly building competition instead of cooperation.