That shit drives me nuts. Wanna be trusted with my life savings, but they can’t be bothered to implement modern security features until they’re already being phased out. I don’t know what will replace modern 2FA schemes, but I guarantee banks will adopt the current ones about three years after the replacements become standard.

Also, they’re charging you a poor tax for not having enough money, whether that’s a minimum balance or just accidentally spending a nickel more than you had on hand.

Classic Doom 1 and 2. There’s gotta be over 100 levels if you count TNT and Plutonia, which I think were sold as Final Doom? Anyway, if you just get the base games for 1 and 2, there are thousands upon thousands of community made maps, including some total conversions, so you can play new Doom content until it physically pains you to continue.

Of course, I feel obligated to mention that even though it would be super easy to pirate the WAD files and play with a free modern source port like GZDoom, like absolutely trivial to find copies of DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD floating around the net, probably showing up easily on Archive.org, but… Um… Where was I going with this? Oh, right, don’t pirate. Cheap on GOG last I knew.

Personally, I’d say anything with RetroAchievements support. Why buy new when the classic is still just as good as it was back then? I don’t care much about graphics, though, so remakes don’t typically offer much I care about. I don’t want changes to game mechanics or content, I just want to be able to play it without needing specialized hardware I have to attach to my TV.

Well it’s certainly not going to happen if you ignore the realities of first past the post voting systems, vote third party, and let the party that depends on tactics to subvert democratic will win an election they shouldn’t have. Do that, and you may just not get to vote at all anymore.

For individuals, particularly those without piles of cash, you’re probably right.

For large corporations and the owner class, though? Eh, that’s not so true. Being able to fund an army of lawyers means knowing exactly when you can tell the government to get fucked and being able to fight about it if the government wants to.

You’re focusing on the non victory and ignoring the failures. Cowards.

That’s not true, they successfully did their job of protecting capital and the owner class. Same reason they don’t go after Trump. He’s in the owner class, so their job is to serve and protect him.

So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.

I didn’t realize I needed to have a formal policy plan before I opener my mouth. I’ll freely admit I don’t fully understand the intricacies of how we handle real estate, but the general belief that real estate prices must be protected and they must generally trend upwards is the unhealthy core of the problem. It prioritizes profits over human needs.

Aren’t there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don’t expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that’d cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can’t do that. I’m sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.

It does limit choice, but so long as you aren’t retaining the generation list somewhere an attacker can find it, how are they to know your list? As long as your list is incorporating less common words, your attacker can’t even simplify the problem by focusing on the most common words. Just one rare word can expand the list they need to use by tens of thousands of words.

Trigun is a fucking classic. I need to start Trigun Stampede and see how that is… I’m skeptical, but it deserves a shot.

As you’ve phrased it, this seems to me to be a question of how to balance the rights of the developer versus those of the end user. The developer wants to monopolize commercial usage while the end user wants full control and authority on their machine.

Some would argue that the developer’s goals are unethical, but I think it’s an unfortunate consequence of a societal system that would see them starve on the streets if they didn’t earn with their work. In an ideal world, end users would prevail unquestionably, but so long as developers must operate under capitalism where ownership is critical, concessions will have to be made.

In the case of libraries, the users of the libraries are not the end users of the program. The users of the library are the developers.

Except the end user does inevitably become the user of the library when they use the software the developer made with it. They run that library’s code on their machine.

It claims that it’s freedom for the users, but that’s not true.

In light of the above, this is incorrect. By using GPL, you preserve the end user’s freedom to understand, control, and modify the operation of their hardware. In no way does the end user suffer or lose any freedoms.

When I see a GPL license I don’t see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can’t statically link to it.

One of the arguments in favor of GPL and other “forced openness” licenses is that users should have the right to understand what their own device is doing. You paid for your computer. You own it. You should dictate how it operates. You should at least have the option of understanding what is being done with your machine and modifying it to fit your needs. Closed source software may provide utility, but it doesn’t really further collective knowledge since you’re explicitly refusing to publicly release the code, and it provides obscurity for developers to hide undesirable functionality like data collection or more directly malicious activity.

I’m not personally sure how I feel about that argument myself, but I can at least readily acknowledge it as a valid one whether I agree with the decision to force openness or not.

It’s wild that everything you ascribe to NATO is clearly some Russian shit. As if you’re steeped in the Russian view and trying to project it on the west. You think NATO is going to punish Ukraine for effectively losing a war they didn’t even start with a former global superpower? Western countries may have their own problems, but the geopolitics are too coldly pragmatic. Until Ukraine fully sides with Russia, they’d want to do what they can to prevent that.

the Ukrainian people, especially the ones being forcibly conscripted to go die on the front in a war they don’t want to even be involved in.

Another clear example. Ukraine largely wants to remain free. Russia is having to trick people into enlisting, including foreigners, and forcing them to fight. But no, it’s the Ukrainians that should give up because they’re the ones that don’t want to be fighting? For their own freedom?

Aw poor corporate behemoth doesn’t want to spend the pennies (compared to profits) to do things right. If we’re being fair, fuck them for cheaping out at our expense.

Misinformation and election interference efforts from Republicans. They were studying those things in general, not just from Republicans, and Republicans fought to silence them because they’re the primary offenders. If they weren’t, they’d be lauding the results for an opportunity to skewer their opponents.

It’s a genuinely nice thing you’re trying to do, so on the one hand, I don’t want to discourage it, but on the other hand, every tip workers get is an incentive to not raise wages. Hell, if they make enough in tips, they’ll start actively lowering wages for new hires. Someone I know always likes to tip, but I just see management thanking them for covering their labor costs for them.

But if it’s used as fuel, wouldn’t that typically return the CO₂? Just about all fuels are burned, which creates the CO₂, and you have to make sure the energy you use to make and transport the fuel is clean, too.

You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It’s in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven’t played much of it, so I can’t give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.

It’s also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven’t been playing any RTS lately.