This is a tough and complex issue, because tech companies using algorithmic curation and control mechanisms to influence kids and adults is a real, truly dangerous issue. But it’s getting torn at from all sides to force their own agendas.

Allowing large corporations to control and influence our social interactions is a hugely dangerous precedent. Apple and Google and huge telcos may be involved in delivering your text messages, but they don’t curate or moderate them, nor do they send you texts from other people based on how they want you to feel about an issue, or to sell you products. On social media, companies do.

But you’ve got right-wingers clamoring to strip companies from liability protections from user-generated content, which does not address the issue, and is all about allowing the government to dictate what content is acceptable from a political standpoint (because LGBTQ+ content is harmful ^/s and they want companies to censor it).

And you’ve got neolibs and some extremely misguided progressives pushing for sites that allow UGC (which is by definition all social media) to have to check ages of their users by implementing ID checks (which also of course treats any adults without an accepted form of ID as children), which just massively benefits large companies who can afford the security infra to do those checks and store that data, and kills small and medium platforms, all while creating name-and-face tracking of peoples’ online activities, and legally mandating we turn over more personal data to corporations…

…and still doesn’t address the issue of corporations exerting influence algorithmically.

tl;dr the US is a corporatist hellscape where 90% of politicians serve corporations either willfully, or are trivially manipulated to.

PS: KOSA just advanced out of committee.

Except they filed a patent for exactly that recently, so I’m guessing it is for the capture mechanics. It shouldn’t pass muster in that case, but Japanese courts be wild (and very pro-Nintendo).

massive amounts of digital pornography and pictures of cats, the landfills have millions of Styrofoam cups and plastic spoons, and someone will have to pick through that mess and decide what mattered and what didn’t.

I have bad news for you…

My GCW is too slow to play anything, honestly. It struggles with even GBA games. I love the idea of the Ouya as well, but I think that I’ll probably just go with an rPi if I ever go that route again.

I kick-started the Ouya, years and years back. Played a few games on it, but it was just too underpowered.

The GCW Zero was another similar story; just an underpowered handheld console.

I really like the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro. It’s a non-major console that is 1000% worth the money.

S.T.A.S.I.S.

Nightmare House 2

Silent Hill 2

Halo: Combat Evolved (the Flood levels are horror masterpieces)

Lone Survivor

Crow Country

Dino Crisis

I think the first game did a better job of making the player feel like they were starting at 0, and working upwards from there, which is my preferred RPG progression.

In 2 I sort of felt like I was already a badass from the start. Might have just been my perception, but I remember in 1 finding the harpies scary and challenging when you’re escorting the ophidian head on the cart to the capital. In 2, you run into a bunch of harpies right after the first camp, and they were just like nothing.

True, but a card or a comic isn’t dependent on an equally old electronic device to be useful. New in box retro games have value as collector pieces, but used games that have modern re-releases are much less valuable.

They just released Riviera: The Promised Land on Steam for $35, so I don’t think retro games will maintain their value. Studios will just re-release them and charge full price again if the secondary market heats up.

Haha, that’s crazy. My boomer dad may play Halo as a cover-shooter, but he can at least hold the controller properly. :P

Personally, I preferred the first one. If you’ve played through 1 and are still itching for more, 2 is definitely a fine game.

It is, but it’s also much more obscure, and definitely much older (2005), than most of the other games on here. I saw just now that there was a remake in 2018, which must have been PlayStation-only to have escaped my notice.

Neat list! Seeing Shadow of the Colossus was surprising.

The Hanging Dumpsters of Babble-on

“The internet is the blue ‘e’ swirl thing on my computer’s home screen.”

Speaking as an infosec professional, security monitoring software should be targeted at threats, not at the user. We want to know the state of the laptop as it relates to the safety of the data on that machine. We don’t, and in healthy workplaces can’t, determine what an employee is doing that does not behaviorally conform to a threat.

Yes, if a user repeatedly gets virus detections around 9pm, we can infer what’s going on, but we aren’t tracking their websites visited, because the AUP is structured around impacts/outcomes, not actions alone.

As an example, we don’t care if you run a python exploit, we care if you run it against a machine you do not have authorization to (i.e. violating CFAA). So we don’t scan your files against exploitdb, we watch for unusual network traffic that conforms to known exploits, and capture that request information.

So if you try to pentest pornhub, we’ll know. But if you just visit it in Firefox, we won’t.

We’re not prison guards, like these schools apparently think they are, we’re town guards.

Schools literally, legally, are not companies.

School is not work. Work is compensated. Work is voluntary. School is neither.

I think you want Roots of Pacha.

Contribution is a currency used in Roots of Pacha. When the player donates food or supplies to the clan, contribution points are awarded as acknowledgement of their efforts.

Contribution points must be expended to develop ideas. Certain clan members have items for trade in exchange for points, as well.

Items are donated by placing them in the contribution bin, found just north of the bonfire. Donated items may be viewed and retrieved until the end of the day. The value of the contributions is tallied overnight and the bin is emptied for the next day.

It’s not just a rename of money, it’s more like your social renown in the village, like how much people respect you because of your contributions, and you use it mostly to choose what improvement project you want to build next in the village.

Sure, it’s possible to make AVs into basically drone swarms that have perfect coordination, the problem is that unless you also kick all human-controlled cars off the road, it’s not going to work. Drone swarms don’t have human controlled drones, or even drone swarms from other manufacturers, flying through the middle of them, or they would be crashing into each other all the time.