Also not that it matters anymore but the Supreme Court already ruled it unconstitutional a long time ago as it’s a form of poll tax. Remember when Supreme Court decisions weren’t just “whatever Trump wants today” and actually were based on the constitution? Pepperidge Farms remembers.

Sure, but that’s not the way the story is framed. The framing makes it seem like the FBI having the records is the story rather than the FBI firing agents for doing their jobs. The headline is just terrible and is blatantly biased to try to make the agents actions seem nefarious. To be clear I wasn’t criticizing the posting of this story or trying to suggest that the poster shouldn’t have submitted it, it’s more a criticism of reuters and the way they’ve chosen to approach this story. It would have been nice to see an article posted about this that focused more on the blatantly corrupt firing of the agents rather than dedicating most of the story to discussing the seizing of the records and getting sound bites from politicians.

… and? They were private citizens and the records were relevant to the case. The only reason they’ve got their panties in a knot over this is because they’re trying to cover things up which is exactly why the investigation was happening in the first place. As long as the FBI had a warrant for those records they seized this is a non-story, just an intelligence agency literally doing their job exactly as they’re supposed to.

Unfortunately the EU has no say in the tariffs that the US charges its own citizens. US customs can just ignore the Supreme Court ruling and keep charging people to get their stuff out of lockdown and there’s not a whole lot anyone can do. In theory the Supreme Court could maybe charge Trump with contempt of court but that’s about as likely as Trump suddenly becoming a decent human being instead of an ambulatory bag of excrement.

As if anyone in Greenland would want the substandard American healthcare, particularly with Mr. Brain-worm toilet-licker in charge of things now. Anyone visiting that ship is more likely to come away with some new disease like measles and a prescription to horse dewormer than they are actual healthcare. Greenland should put up a giant quarantine zone around the ship.

Or in the ground, I’m not picky either one is good.

In a perfect world Vance would die from a freak couch accident, and Trump after being told his favorite sentient anal polyp was dead would be so shocked he’d have a massive instantly fatal heart attack.

The problem is that if you’re traveling here you’re likely to be grabbed at customs as you’re either entering or leaving the country so whether your final destination is a blue or red state is kind of irrelevant. While the current regime is in power it’s safest for everyone to just avoid traveling to the US.

It’s always the ones you most suspect. You could probably be closely aligned with the constitution without knowing a single thing about the law by just always taking the opposite position from whatever Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh take.

It’s like a twisted new version of the old pump and dump scam crossed with insider trading. Take out a bet, blog about it to influence the outcome and/or get a bunch of people to bet against you, and then profit in when it comes out like you expected.

I mean… kind of. It is a world wide brand that is very popular. I’m not sure this one person stepping down is really going to change anything, but it’s interesting I guess. It’s definitely not important news, but I can see an argument that it is news, and it’s world wide.

As always piracy is a symptom not the problem. People pirate when a) they don’t have enough money or b) the experience for paying customers is significantly worse than for pirates, or c) the price of services far exceeds their perceived value. Piracy was down for a while because Netflix and Hulu were relatively cheap (or free), ad free, and the economy was doing OK so most people had a little disposable income.

Now that we’re in a recession that’s starting to look like it might turn into a depression and Netflix and Hulu (and others) have cranked the prices of their services up and stuffed them full of ads, yeah I’m not in the least surprised to see piracy surging. Every time you turn around there’s another email from some service letting you know they’re raising prices another couple bucks a month, and a bunch of people cancel their subscriptions and start sailing the high seas.

Neither party would let him. He’s the antithesis of everything Republicans stand for, and the old guard in the Democrats would black ball him even harder than they did Bernie Sanders.

And it was relatively pleasant. Walk through a metal detector, have your carry on x-rayed and you’re good to go. Whole thing would only take a couple minutes once you made it to the front of the line and most of that was just waiting for the tray to go through the little x-ray conveyor belt. Even the people running the machines were relatively pleasant, not the surly assholes looking for an excuse to power trip on somebody that are all running things now.

It would be truly amazing if any international warrant was issued for Trump. I’m not sure anyone would be willing to actually act on the warrant, but just issuing it would be worth it.

The cold war era propaganda and policies have really fucked everything up. There’s a straight line between them and today’s Republican/MAGA party that runs right through Reagan’s economic policies. MAGA sits at the crossroads of that and the festering racism that was never dealt with following the civil war. Unfortunately America’s world police mentality (and CIA fuckery, another result of the cold war) has spread those policies and attitudes to a bunch of other countries (who all for some strange reason have a dominant conservative media company owned by Rupert Murdoch, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence right?).

Japan has struggled with horrendous xenophobia for pretty much their entire history so this isn’t really surprising even if it is disappointing. Unfortunately we’re seeing a rise in far right parties around the globe and there are depressingly few liberal governments left. If this keeps up it’s not going to take much to ignite WW3 with all these nationalists taking control.

It’s a workaround for the historical trash fire of JavaScript in the browser. Since nobody could agree on a way to do something other than JS in the browsers they came up with this gradual replacement where initially WebAssembly was just a special version of JS, then they turned that into a bytecode interpreter. The end goal was to let you use any language as your browser scripting language but the implementation isn’t there yet. It’s pretty painful to do anything with the browser APIs via WebAssembly because you’re still using the terrible JS APIs rather than something more ergonomic for the language you’re using and you need to write JS shims around all your non-JS code.

Basically it’s a start, but it falls short of what’s needed. Since you end up needing to write a bunch of JS anyway you’re mostly just creating more work for yourself rather than being able to avoid JS in the first place.

That said, by accident it’s also created something close to a universal bytecode since a very wide variety of languages support compiling to WebAssembly.

Oh no. Anyway.

As far as I’m concerned DHS can stay unfunded indefinitely and we’ll all be better off.

It’s not the whole country, it’s the perfect storm of the absolute worst people who spent the last few decades working to seize power combined with the death throws of late stage capitalism. The political and economic elite in America (and most other countries) have merged and corrupted each other beyond redemption, but the ultra capitalist systems of the US means there are few if any effective checks to their power. In a properly functioning country the government checks the power of corporations via regulations and laws and in turn is checked by the will of the public but in the US the incessant corporate propaganda has convinced a depressingly large chunk of the population that government regulations are inherently bad and that everything works better when corporations are free to do whatever they want. That combined with the absolutely blatant bribery and corruption in US politics means that corporations control the US government rather than the other way around.

The whole thing worked for a little while while the corporations were at least pretending to somewhat care about consumers and things like anti-monopoly regulations, but now that Trump has shown the government is very loudly and publicly for sale to the highest bidder they’ve all gone mask off and are just doing whatever they want. The problem of course is that they’re also run by morons that either don’t see the cliff they’re all collectively racing towards or just don’t care because they’re planning to bail out with all the profits while the greater US economy burns.

Ultimately this is the sprouting of the seed that was planted back in the 50s from an amalgam of the cold war anti-communism propaganda and the latent racism that was never properly dealt with following the civil war.

Sure but it’s also a badly done lawsuit for that. It’s a class action of Valves customers when the percentage almost entirely impacts developers and publishers not customers. If this was really about Valves cut it would be a class action by developers. The reasons it isn’t are that that’s a much smaller group, consumer protections don’t apply to them so that would be a much harder case to win, and finally they would struggle to find developers willing to join that lawsuit. There’s also the slight problem that the 30% cut is the industry standard. Both Apple and Google take a similar cut. I’m not sure who originated that as the standard, could go all the way back to brick and mortar stores or it might have originated with one of the games consoles, but Epic is actually the odd one out in this case not Valve.

As someone else pointed out there are things that Valve could be better about, things like lootboxes in some games or the frankly predatory CS item markets. The issue of course is that none of that is actually illegal even if it is anti-consumer. It would also be nice if Steam had some actual competition, but there isn’t anything Valve can do about that, rather it’s everyone else that needs to get on Valves level.

It doesn’t have anything to do with Epic, it’s because Steam provides a great service with a ton of features nobody else offers, and Valve has demonstrated time and time again that they make policies that benefit consumers.

It would be great if Steam had some competition, but Epic ain’t it. What people want is another service of equal quality to Steam. Instead the best we have is GOG and that still falls well short of feature parity nevermind the anti-consumer cesspool of Epic.

Suing Valve isn’t going to do anything to improve the situation. Realistically what could Valve do to be “less of a monopoly”? Lower the percentage they take of sales? Consumers wouldn’t see any benefit from that only developers. Ironically it would also increase Valves monopoly because if they took a smaller cut there would be even less reason for companies to sell on Epic as Epics lower cut is literally the only reason developers (outside of Epic literally paying some of them mounds of cash by way of exclusivity contracts) pick Epic over Steam.

If Epic really wants to do something about Valves monopoly it’s simple, they just need to offer all the same features that Steam does. Things like family sharing, streaming support, a cross platform store and launcher, and an excellent review system so people can better understand the games they’re thinking about buying. Until that happens yes people will stick with Steam because it’s the objectively superior experience.