In practice. Technically, were M$ to go sue users left and right (or send those ISP-style “gotcha”, now pay up) emails.

Luckiy, M$ knows well enough that 90% of that userbase wouldn’t have too many qualms jumping ship if they got slapped with a huge fine, so M$ lets them be.

They value the high userbase more than a quick payout (and rightly so). However, there’s no guarantee that can’t change overnight (just look at Unity and before that, Adobe).

oligopoly

That’s a way to misspell monopoly, alright.

I’d say one point thirty-two. As others noted, much depends on geography.

Personally, I say the “actual” number up to 3 or 4 decimal places, with a lot of the reason depending on the specific context. If I had to asses, I’d say I say the “whole” number in over 50% of cases for 3 digits, and in about 10% for 4 digits. Anything over 4 decimal places and I fall back to individual digits.

outright confirmed the exclusion […] Notably, he didn’t specify whether or not

Yeah, that’s what “outright” means all right.

Error at or around “the”

He clearly needs his mornings to contemplate and relax so he can be infinitely more productive than the average peson.

If only everyone got to choose their schedules as freely and arbitrarily, everyone could be a billionaire like him.

The brain is, basically, a think-machine, even though it’s “just” a lump of meat. The brain tries to make sense of stuff and piece everything together “logically”.

Oftentimes the braim makes stuff up - your brain is very good at lying. Take for example vision - the eyes contain a relatively hole in the retina, yet you see a perfectly clear image. This is the “intended” purpose, but the core mechanism bywhich this is done is much more deeply rooted into the brain’s main “function” - it’s one of the core things the brain does. Its “thinking” is very malleable.

This can cause smaller “misinterpretations” of reality: Here’s a personal example: when my grandfather died, I periodically saw his reflection in the front door of his house. It would be visible only for a second, and then disaopear almost immidiately. I had to be moving relatively fast for it to appear, and couldn’t cause it to appear at will. 15 years later, I noticed it was actually my reflection, but since it was only visible in the exact same spot, from a certain angle, only in the evenings, with the porch lamp on and on a wood-textured PVC door, it took me that much time to piece all the puzlle pieces together and deduce the root cause. Me not having to visit his house all that often certsinly didn’t help the situation.

The other is plain hallucination: Take arthritis. You have pain which is proven not to be caused by anything external. Your nerves just send the “pain signals”, and you feel pain.

Additionally, sinesthesia isn’t just something someone either has or doesn’t, but it’s a spectrum, and, all the senses are in fact connected on a quite deep level.

What you describe definately falls somewhere on this “misinterpretarion-hallucination” spectrum. Maybe there was nothing to smell, yet you felt you smelled something, caused fully by your unconscious influenced by past experiences. Or maybe there was a totally different smell that got turned into this smell, but you couldn’t pick it out - as is the case with my grandfather and I.

This spectum can also be taken as the “physical-psychological” (cause) spectrum.

Maybe it’s a one-off thing for you, or maybe it’s a chain of conditions that’ll get fullfilled again every now and then. There’s most likely a logical explanation since the brain is inherently a logical machine, but chances are it’s not. There are just too many variables at play as far as outside factors go.

TANGO HOTEL ALFA TANGO INDIA PAPA ALFA INDIA SIERRA SIERRA TANGO INDIA LIMA LIMA BRAVO ECHO TANGO TANGO ECHO ROMEO TANGO HOTEL ALFA NOVEMBER TANGO HOTEL INDIA SIERRA INDIA PAPA ALFA

There is/was a new Windows 10 Control panel? I thought that was just the Settings app.

Sorry for being pedantic, but those foldable work rulers are exactly 2 m long (at least in MetricLandia), which is, incidentally, the span of IQ values (0-200).

So yeah, it literally can be mapped one-to-one to a (common type of) ruler.

Meh. CTU means stuff comes into e.g. Rotterdam and then easily wherever it needs to go from there, and complaining about “evading sanctions” seems to me like an exercise in futility.

Sometimes, refilling an empty cup with coffee is a good fix

Wait… Are you meaning to say UN is run by Hamas all along?

I wonder how Reagan’s is doing

Reminds me of Tom Scott’s Emojli

Is such a strategy really feasible? Adding legislation that a game has to be made operable in a reasonable manner after the publisher discontinues support for it in no way influences this strategy.

If someone wanted to do such elaborate botnet defamation attacks in hopes of getting the game playable on 3rd party servers they could’ve done that already without legislation.

Bots making the game unplayable is a problem, but opening the servers in general would help the problem as private servers can implement harsher requirements for players than official ones usually do, opting to rather make a huge bot-filled cesspool as you’ve already said.

However, this proposal isn’t a general “all games must have FOSS self-hostable servers” proposal. It’s just a “if you kill a game it still has to be alive afterwards” proposal. Whether publishers open servers or not before they shut theirs down is their decision without the proposal as much as it is with it.

was Israel not attacked?

If you’re attacked, you don’t have the right to escalate the situation however you please, especially if it’s against international law.

I genuinely have issues trying to discern the propaganda from the facts.

Sure, it’s hard. It isn’t easy sometimes for me either. You just have to take in information and draw your own conclusions. Of course, depending on the information you get your view will ve skewed. In my opinion it’s impossible to be biased, but you have to at least try to siniff out the propaganda and lies, which I commend you for doing.

from what I gathered, I believed that Israel just took some land on which other people were living ~70 years ago, displacing these people.

That’s true, sort of. Israel was given part of the land after WWII by the UN as a result of wellmeaning intentions. However, a conflict arose, culminating in the First Arab-Israeli war. Next was the Six-day war some 20 years later, followed by other conflicts. Then 5 years later, the Yom Kippur war. Other than that there have been other conflicts with the Palestinians, notably in 2007, 2012, 2014 and 2021. Finally there’s the current conflict which started last year.

Of course, some of this was justifiable by Israel, but the problem is the way Israel treats Palestinians. There’s a good chance that if they weren’t treated as 2nd class citizens none of the later conflicts would’ve happened.

Most notably, Palestinians were rsther explicitly forced out of Israel during the Nakba, itself a breach of International law. Nowadays, Palestinians are living under an apartheid regime: they are scrutinised much more closely during security checks, thir homes are appropriated by Israeli settlers, mkre often than not under the protection of the Israeli government. They don’t have the same civil rights as Palestinians are tried in miliary and Israeli citizens in civil courts. Military courts generally don’t offer the same legal or human rights protections, punishments are mlre severe, there’s limited legal representation of the defendant and no confidential communication with lawyers, and Israel isn’t an exception to this.

Regarding escalation: the Palestinians are rutinely, and often violently opressed in a systemic manner.

They can’t get building permits. They get kicked off their land by settlers. They get retaliated against indiscriminately.

If you systematically opress someone like this, of course the desperate people will fight back in their desperation. What is unnecessary escalation is the disproportionate response of mass murder via starvation and bombing, as well as the systematic opression during the 70 years you mentioned.

None of this would’ve happened if Israel just came to some land, holy or otherwise, planted a flag and fairly enforced their laws according to basic principles of human rights

Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits

Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game

If, as you said, as the game is EOL it doesn’t make profits, then it can’t cause losses either. Otherwise it’d have to be kept alive.

Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy)

Uh… If they’re 3rd-party servers then hosting isn’t paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don’t pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they’d axe that too if it induces any cost.

This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio.

It absolutely can’t. The game is DEAD. It causes no profits or losses. Nothing aboit the game matters to the publisher anymore except for brand/reputation for a possible sequel.

forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of

Nothing explicitly forces release of source code, any reasonable server application wpuld suffice, open-source or otherwise.

The “corpos” usually make the games. The monetization concern is minimal since a server for a game isn’t anything a corporation couldn’t make on its own if it wanted, nor is it something groundbreaking.

Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China)

The bots would attack servers nit owned or operated by/for the publisher.

and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation

What does any of this have to do with antitrust legislation? If anything, this would curb the publisher’s monopoly over the game servers although that in and of itself isn’t even an illegal monopoly.

Making a “allow 3rd party servers” update and a basic server application wouldn’t hurt an indie studio much. For beheamoths it isn’t even a drop in the ocean.

British Ambassador to Japan Julia Longbottom explained that her decision was because the city did not invite Israel to attend. Longbottom told reporters that unlike Russia, which invaded Ukraine, and Belarus, which cooperated in the invasion, Israel is exercising its right to self-defense. So, treating Israel in the same manner would be misleading, she said

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel will also skip the Nagasaki peace ceremony. According to the U.S. Embassy, Emanuel does not want to politicize the Nagasaki event.

the envoys of Group of Seven nations, except for Japan, and the European Union said that if Israel was excluded from the invited countries, it would be difficult to send high-ranking officials to attend the ceremony.

Totally not politicized. I guess supporting Israel is a better look than opposing nuclear warfare.