This is why shaming the idiots who say things like “what’s the big deal, it’s just a field in a text file” is so important. They need to be made to understand that solidarity is required to resist the tyrants.

Capitalism isn’t merely rational self-interest. Capitalism is legal structures that allow ownership to be separated from both the process of doing the work and the accountability for the results.

Trouble is, it also give them an excuse to “launder” copyleft software to use in proprietary ways.

What regulatory capture of the FTC does to MFer.

All this shit should be considered false advertising, at the very least.

Real talk, though: why has Linux taken at least five tries (OSS, ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio, PipeWire) to get audio right?!

Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t as precise as I could’ve been. I was really just trying to convey the motivations (i.e. that it was due to being mistaken for foreign as opposed to being targeted for using a VPN), not go into the details of exactly which aspect of the VPN (the entrance IP geolocation, the exit IP geolocation, or the company HQ location) would actually trigger the “foreign-ness.”

Due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, both affected regions have experienced physical impacts to infrastructure as a result of drone strikes. In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impacts to our infrastructure. These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.

Translation: servers got turned into charred scrap.

I agree, assuming the game was released reasonably “complete” and with a minimum of bugs the first time. Or in other words, if the devs were held to the same standard as they were back in the '90s, when games got mastered to physical media once and routine, easy bug fix updates weren’t a thing.

Those are the ones that would cause them to surveil you.

The issue isn’t necessarily “the government will target you for using a VPN;” the issue is “if your IP makes you look like you’re outside the US because that’s where your traffic exits the VPN, the laws against domestic spying won’t protect you properly because you’ll look like a foreigner.”

Frankly, the headline is heavily spinning it to be anti-VPN fearmongering.

guess I need to look at bit for “how to stuff a huge graphics card into a mini box”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2Y62JGDCo

(That’s only the latest in a whole series of videos of his on that topic.)

^{chirp chirp}

They had Data in the '80s. Star Trek TNG started in 1987.

Of course, they also had Lore. (And Moriarty, for that matter.)

Linux can be frustrating when something goes wrong, but at least you know it was by accident (either a bug in the software or a mistake on your part). In contrast, when proprietary software goes wrong it’s often due to some megacorporation deliberately trying to fuck you over, and that’s what’s really infuriating!

Beats me; I wasn’t trying to talk about that. I was just pointing out that StarCraft and TA (and therefore their Free Software successors), despite both being RTSs, are different enough from each other that it doesn’t necessarily make sense to try to share a codebase between them.

I mean, if the game engine is the issue you’re worried about, people had already been working on Free Software WarCraft/StarCraft clones almost a decade before the Spring Engine existed. https://stratagus.com/stargus.html

I think the reason nobody has is Starcraft is so much more limited of an RTS design it feels weird to start from a Total Annihilation inspired rts game engine and take a whole bunch away (shift clicking, build cues, actually 3d trajectories of cannons, complex unit interactions rather than simplistic rock-paper-scissors relationships, actually flying aircraft, organic terrain variation instead of simplistic stepped levels…the list goes on and on)

Exactly. Those “limitations” (I would use a less biased word, BTW) make it a different game. Not necessarily worse or even more simplistic, but definitely different, kinda like how Chess and Go are different even though they’re broadly in a similar genre.

I haven’t played Beyond All Reason or this “StarCraft-inspired” game, but I have played Total Annihilation and StarCraft and I wouldn’t consider them to be substitutes for each other.

WTF are you talking about? Every multiplayer PC game had that when I was growing up; it was just the normal way multiplayer worked. One player hosts a game and the other players type in their IP address and join it. Server browsers using external infrastructure (whether third-party, like GameSpy, or first-party, like Battle.net) didn’t come until later, and even then, they were just matchmaking services and the game server itself was still run by you.

Restricting multiplayer to only servers run by the publisher is the abnormal, fucked-up thing!

This sort of shit is why we shouldn’t have accepted it when games stopped coming with the ability to run your own server.

I wanted to upgrade my kids from Pi 4s to Pi 5s, but ended up just getting NUCs instead.