The reason he recruited a bunch of incompetent college kids is because nobody with any experience or wisdom would touch this rolling crime wave with a 10 foot pole

That’s it young man, I’m revoking your DNA privileges

Yeah but I don’t think the average smash and grab thief is going to be smart enough to recognize the potential value of the data on the laptop, they’re just going to pawn the thing off as quickly as possible

Anyone smart enough to want the data probably doesn’t need to smash a window, they’ll just access the data remotely when the computer is on and the drive is unencrypted

So even then, it only protects you from the very narrow overlap of thieves who are dumb enough to need to break into cars for a living, but smart enough to harvest data off of stolen laptops

I still stand by full disk encryption accomplishing almost nothing for the average user but separating them from their own files

If you don’t have data on your PC that someone might be willing to kill you for, you probably don’t need it, and Microsoft enabling it by default for Win11 installs is crazy

Many bug’s native habitat is actually inside your home, putting them outside is like sending them to die a slow death in Siberia instead

In the EU at least, companies can say whatever they want in their ToS, it doesn’t change the fact that you legally own your digital games

Chopping the heads off the hydra will kill it this time, for sure

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up some feature or low-priority bug only to find the answer is “there’s a PR for this that will be added in 10.9”, commented like a year ago, glad to see the future plan is more frequent but smaller feature releases!

Hot take: A well armed populace is important for keeping the power of the state in check, and a well armed state is important so that it can’t be easily overthrown without a majority taking up arms against it

Basically, domestic mutually assured destruction will keep everyone playing by our agreed upon rules

Sega v. Accolade was about using proprietary code, Sega lost and the small snippet of code that was reverse engineered out of the Genesis was deemed fair use because there was no other way to get an unlicensed cartridge to run on the console

I don’t know if they’re still there but it used to be if you looked at the description of any officially uploaded music on youtube, there’d be a laundry list of music rights groups for like a dozen countries/areas

Google doesn’t just get blanket rights to stream a song, they have to license the rights to play that particular song separately for each individual country where they want to stream it

You would think that in 40+ years of being completely ineffective against pirates and only hurting paying customers they would have learned that that time and money could be better spent elsewhere, but I guess that would imply that the rich are rich because they make good decisions, instead of just being born with good options

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

• Gabe Newell

At 20 per day it would take me 3 years to fetch subtitles for my entire TV library

I feel like a lot of people don’t realize this, keeping your data a secret is these ad platform’s top priority, knowing what you like (for highly targeted ads) while others don’t is one of the biggest ways they make money

I’m not trying to hate on Gabe Newell or Valve or anything (and not to say that it isn’t a pretty objectively win-win) but I think there’s some pretty easily explainable motivation behind this that isn’t just “out of the kindness of their hearts”

I think the product they intend to sell is actually the software and services (there’s a reason the Deck seems to be sold basically at cost), they’re betting on these PC-based portable gaming devices taking off and being a viable segment of the market that other hardware companies will want to invest into, and if they do, what highly functional and easy to integrate (since it’s all open source) operating system (and its subsequent game store integration) might they be more likely to use?

And why push upstream? They’re by far the largest PC games provider, so more games running on more (Linux) devices can only really serve to financially benefit them

The reactor was never in danger of turning into a nuke or rendering huge swathes of Europe uninhabitable. Nuclear explosions only happen under tightly engineered conditions. A big pile of molten reactor slag, while certainly dangerous, can’t turn into a bomb.

The danger wasn’t that it would cause a nuclear explosion, it was that it would melt its way into a large reservoir of water underneath the reactor, instantly turning it all into steam, causing a massive explosion that would fling radioactive material over a much wider area

I don’t know if there was a risk of that happening in reality, but that’s how it was portrayed and explained in the show