I think you’re both right. What’s really important is the lives at stake, and only the software can really meaningfully improve, but the incentives aren’t there right now to make those improvements happen.

One thing to consider though, is the incentives can always be tweaked. Maybe the robo taxi company barely blinks at a $100,000 fine, they chuckle about a $1 million fine, do they still laugh about a $50 million fine? They may really start to sweat over a $200 million fine. And hey, I can think of larger numbers, we can always provide them a better incentive (while financing the state).

list of installed plugins.

Yeah, as you said, that’s a pretty serious security issue. That’s a data leak that explicitly lays out the shape of your attack surface. It tells the attacker exactly what additional software your server is running and if any of it includes known vulnerabilities, the attacker now knows how to gain access.

This is a big part of the problem. You can use Plex on PlayStation, xbox, Roku, apple tv, iPhone, android, etc…

The apps are ubiquitous, the coverage is complete. In just about any situation, Plex is a workable option.

Do you know how to rebuild your car’s engine?

Do you know how to remediate black mold spreading on the walls of a houseboat?

Do you know how to compile Linux to run on some custom arm hardware?

Do you know how to repair or rebuild a crumbling stone retaining wall?

There’s a good chance you may not know how to accomplish all of those tasks. There’s also a very good chance you may not care about knowing how to accomplish all of those tasks, as some of them may not be relevant to you. This is ok.

Finally, I know you’re posting on the Internet, but you don’t have to be an asshole, that’s a choice.

It does not, not at all.

I’m up-voting as hard as I can…

Well I do appreciate that response, these are hard questions.

Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?

This is my favorite sentence of the day.

Yeah, we like to pretend things are black and white, but nothing is simple, there’s always another perspective to view things from.

I bought it a while back on a friend’s recommendation. I should actually play it again solo, but at the time, I totally hated it; I just couldn’t connect with it. It was way too dark, hard to see what was even going on. And I couldn’t care less about the character I was playing or the gameplay mechanics. To me, it was just a fantasy reimagining of left4dead, but without the fun characters, with unintuitive level design, and just generally feeling kind of sloppy.

I might be being unfair, it’s been a long time since I played it.

We as a planet might be though.

There’s no guarantee that the US will be a cultural superpower going forward… (I think the US empire is likely to go the natural way of empires sooner than we may be ready for)

Hey, if I’ve offended you, I do apologize for that, it truly wasn’t my goal. But I do strongly disagree (which is allowed).

And I think it’s pretty obvious that microtransactions could never, ever, possibly be more lucrative for Valve than selling games. It’s just a numbers thing. I mean, dlc can sometimes make more money than game sales for some titles, that’s a fact. But Valve has what, a dozen games that they could potentially sell dlc for? That’s a pretty hard limit. Whereas they also make money on every title sold in the store, and there are currently over 10,000 titles available from the steam store. That’s just like, a lot more than a dozen…

Um, no?

I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it’s just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah… some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.

But hey, if you’ve got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.

I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that’s their business model.

I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It’s just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

That’s what I’m hearing. Honestly, I think that checks out.

This is the same reason that harvesting solar energy in space and beaming it down is also a stupid fucking idea. It’s politically problematic. Nobody wants anybody to have giant death rays in space, so there’s effectively no way to get the energy down to earth. It looks like we’ll all just have to rely on all the green technologies that already work.

Having played Minecraft and No Man’s Sky, I can say that no world is necessarily too big, because infinite is not too big.

I had some of these bad capacitors blow in my video card, back in the day. I was extremely proud of myself for managing to order some replacement capacitors and soldering them in myself.

The most impressive part might be that I ordered the right items. I knew nothing about electronics repair at the time, I just wanted to be able to play World of Warcraft again.

Honestly, it’s hard to figure out what the first step in that chain is. If you want to start up industry in space, great, there are lot of potential benefits to that. But where do you start?

Within the next 50 years I do expect a broad sector of space industry to emerge, but I really can’t predict what the first opportunities might be. Still, we can poke fun at it all we want right now, but I suspect a great many people will be working in space 50 years from now.