So that someone ordering online doesn't try to buy your seat. Obviously.

Neither storage "solution" is currently adequate for fossil fuel replacement and may never be for high-density populations. Nuclear is less impactful than burning hydrocarbons or damming rivers and fearmongering about radioactive waste products isn't helpful because, again, every nuclear accident or leak to date has been less harmful than normal exhaust from coal-burning plants and riparian habitat destruction.

If we had kept investing in an actual energy solution we would have gen-IV reactors already and the waste concerns would be even lower.

Taping off the radio didn't kill the music industry, neither did Napster. Adobe did perfectly fine while small artists were using pirated copies of Photoshop. Sharing DRM-free software isn't going to bring about the apocalypse. It's already been happening for decades.

Providing a convenient storefront and launcher is enough for most customers if they think the price is fair. Gating multi-player, or achievements, or even hats behind some kind of proof of payment is going to catch a lot of people who might otherwise get a free copy.

"You can’t stop regular digital items from being copied and distributed for free, it’s simply not possible."

Yes, good, stop trying. Accept that some people are going to pirate. Fighting this just makes the user experience worse for everyone else.

Steam is the worst acceptable format, is what I'm saying. Licenses and DRM are a thing we should move past not embrace.

The people I know that have cut out parts of their family are happier for it, not miserable.

I'll simplify: I don't want that future. Steam is currently acceptable because they provide a low-impact market, I think their 30% cut is reasonable, and offline mode is adequate. If that changes I'm done. GOG also exists and is a preferable model, but the experience isn't as polished.

I don't care if sales drop a bit, the early success of stuff like netflix and spotify and steam proves that most people will happily pay a reasonable price for access rather than pirate. It's only a "problem" for the capitalists and fuck em.

Sure. Digital "ownership" is like trying to put a round peg in a square hole, it's applying rules and concepts to a fundamentally different thing. As long as it comes along with a tip culture for creators or some kind of guaranteed income.

I recently set up a password with a 16 character max, alphanumeric only, no spaces. The service is in no way a security threat but still.

Even at its most harmless, astrology normalizes magical thinking and leaves the door open for more predatory things. Not that big a leap to alternative healing and psychics and other conmen persuading the naive away from legitimate help.

"If we hold the country hostage, they'll definitely do what I want before the opposition makes everything irreversibly worse."

Don't give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I've been told in no uncertain terms that .ml and hexbear were the instances full of people arguing in bad faith...

None of that helps low-level play or games without meaningful progression. Continuing to use Rust as an example, because I'm most familiar with it among games with controversial anticheat: people get banned all the time. All the time. And they keep coming back with brand new Steam accounts, and continue to cheat until someone notices and an admin happens to be online. Rinse and repeat. Seemingly an infinite pool of cheaters, or finite cheaters with infinite money for new copies of the game. And it only takes a few minutes to ruin someone's week.

The most effective prevention method is probably strict gatekeeping: require a minimum hours played in wild west servers or a certain value of games owned in an account before a player can be whitelisted. Proof of investment, that kind of thing.

That kind of stuff catches legitimate users all the time. In Rust for example it's common to get kicked for "fly hacking" while jumping on vehicles. The more open-ended the game the more weird edge cases become very relevant. Especially if it has a halfway decent physics sim. Tons of ways to give players weird velocities. Then it has to account for the variance ping introduces...

Some stuff, yeah. Should be easy to check if a player has too much HP. But spoofed communication between the client and server is a tough nut to crack when you can only see what the client wants you to see. Keeping everything server-side would help but that introduces latency to every input, unacceptable for anything even moderately paced.

All thay said, it would be a lot easier to swallow the "necessary evil" argument if it actually fucking worked.

I don't know exactly who you're talking about but there's a bunch of people on my block list so I hope I already got them.

Of course not, protein is very literally what gains are made of.

It occurs to me that you might have just been talking about gaining fat, which is also more complicated nutritionally than you might expect. Especially to do responsibly.

The "gourmet premium eggs" (regular eggs laid by pastured chickens instead of life-in-a-tiny-cage chickens) also barely increased in price during the covid/bird flu/supply chain price gouge excuses.

Hank Scorpio would be much preferred.

Might be worth clarifying Demon's Souls and onward, some of us are old enough to have played Armored Core.