WTF is going on with this website? I had to turn my phone to read it in landscape lol.
I am 100% sure that Microsoft was asked about the impact to their staffing by various government regulators and media for each of their recent acquisitions. Zenimax and King are the most relevant ones here, but I would argue the rest of them like Activision-Blizzaed would still be relevant too. Disappointing to not see anything in this article.
Oh yeah it’s setting the table for a terrible hellscape.
I moreso meant that Elon won’t be the first. Whoever the first is will of course be a terrible precedent.
For what it’s worth, from quotes from Kimball Musk, Elon himself, and their associates, it seems as though Elon may have been an illegal immigrant himself at one point. Snopes has collected a lot of the potential info, though they don’t go so far as to reach a conclusion one way or the other.
I think Trump is going to revoke citizenships and deport people anyways. Which is terrible, but I don’t think him doing so to Musk will be a precedent. If anything it might be interesting to see if he gets any pressure to deport Melania too.
The beautiful irony here is that you are believing in and spreading IDF propaganda for them.
It would be a logical fallacy to jump to such a conclusion without interviewing a randomly sampled and much larger population. It is possible you may be correct or incorrect, but you are jumping to a conclusion about a topic with insufficient data to do so.
Your evidence supports that there are members of the IDF who are enthusiastically engaged with what they’re doing. I am not debating that- i think you’re right.
But it’s important to remember this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen interviews of IDF members objecting to what they are doing does not mean those members do not exist. I would expect the IDF to have systems in place to minimize the external visibility if any such objections, which makes a generalization like that dangerous.
They aren’t going to let you see the unenthusiastic ones.
Lol what a strange stretch. I’m not Christian, I’m an atheist socialist annoyed at how the US government has historically worked to overthrow socialism everywhere in the world.
NYPD has offices all around the globe. Because… 9/11 or something.
Socialism has failed every time it’s been attempted, for one very good reason.
I fully expect the CIA to get involved. Probably before the general election even happens.
So they can go work for EA? Or Ubisoft? Or one of Take-Two’s dev teams? Or something owned by Tencent or Embracer or Epic?
This isn’t just “Microsoft bad”. It’s “Microsoft is one of many giant mega corporations that are ruining the entire industry”.
Maybe some of these people could join or found smaller indie studios, but there are reasons why they didn’t do that already.
The regulatory bodies of several nations really dropped the ball by allowing the Zenimax and Activision-Blizzard acquisitions.
This isn’t the result of a market being “overextended”, and it isn’t about finding efficiencies. It’s about Microsoft doing what it’s always done- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Just one more offenses added to the pile of anti-consumer tactics employed by tech companies.
The EU is slightly further ahead than most, but globally most governments have been asleep at the wheel when it comes to protecting consumers from anything digital.
Is there a reason to use those over Steam Link?
I have a AMD cards in all my desktops, so Moonlight is out. I could never even get Sunshine to run properly on my desktop, let alone stream.
Steam Link just… Works. It’s an official Valve thing. There’s a ton of options to dial things in or work around weird issues, but for the defaults are usually fine. It handles non-Steam games just fine. All sorts of resolutions and refresh rates- I stream to my 4k TV in my living room, my 1080p tablet, various phones, and the Deck. My only complaint about Steam Link is that, for some bizarre reason, it’s not on the steam store. It would be a lot easier to just install it from the store in Gaming mode on the Deck, with a default controller profile. The picture is good, the latency is fine unless I’m on wi-fi and getting really far away from my router b
FYI- you can also stream from your laptop to the Deck. Technically you can do it on a per-game basis through Steam (which you may have already noticed), but I find it’s even better to install Steam Link as a non-Steam game, similar to what you probably did with Chiaki. As long as you have a good local network it’s great and uses way less of the Deck’s power.
I have no idea why Valve hasn’t added Steam Link to the Steam store. That would make things so much easier, and you get way more settings and fewer bugs that way than doing the per-game streaming option.
I don’t want to accuse Trump or his administration of having rational or intelligent decision-making processes, but it’s hard to really have any productive thought or conversation about theit decisions if I just assume they are irrational or stupid. So bear with me as I try to make sense of something that might be senseless.
There have been a handful of odd discrepancies from the Trump administration piling up. Mueller, for all his flaws, did prove that a good chunk of Trump’s campaign in 2016 had illegal ties to Russia and Putin. Even though Trump avoided direct consequences and pardoned some of them, they were still convicted and the ties to Putin are solid. Heck, there were ties between Trump and Russia going back to the 80’s.
Musk also has ties to Russia and Putin. So it was not all that surprising to see Musk throw his full support behind Trump last summer and then do the whole DOGE thing. It was a bit odd to see someone so thoroughly tied to electric cars support someone so pro-fossil fuels, but I could see Musk deciding that defense contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other businesses might outweigh reduced EV subsidies for him.
Allegedly, Trump and Musk had a falling out. The back-and-forth on social media, Musk stepping back from DOGE, and later walking back some of his statements. Speculation as to whether that was real or not. Was it really over the spending bill? Was Musk really leaving DOGE? Was this all a ploy to manipulate the stock market and do some insider trading? Was this just Musk on drug-induced psychosis?
Then the tensions between Israel and Iran flare up again. Trump sides with Israel as the US traditionally has, Putin sides with Iran as Russia traditionally has. There was the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Ted Cruz, and we’ve seen some discord among the far-right over whether to support a US war against Iran or not. The US struck Iran and didn’t appear to do a whole lot of damage, and Iran struck back in the most polite way possible and did pretty much no damage.
Other wonderful folks have dug up old Trump tweets from the Obama years, speculating that Obama was appearing weak and would strike Iran as a show of strength.
So was this all just political theater? Trump doesn’t actually care whether Iran has nukes or not. He wants Trump to appear strong and willing to go to war. He wants to show his support for Israel and reaffirm America as the World Police.
So my guess is that Netanyahu keeps pushing what he can get away with. Allegedly, there was tension between Netenyahu and Biden over the line between counter-terrorist operations and genocide. Biden, the consummate centrist neoliberal, allowed the genocide as long as it didn’t hurt businesses, but seemed to have been pressuring Netenyahu to keep restrictions on it. Trump abandoned those and Palestine seems to be suffering far more since he took office. Then you add the Israeli strikes on Iran on top of that- I don’t think they had anything to do with new intelligence Israel received, just that Netenyahu felt he could get away with it while still maintaining US support from Trump, which he could not have done under Biden.
Where I start to really speculate- I don’t think Trump cares about Iran. He doesn’t care about of they have nukes or not, he doesn’t care about Islam vs Judaism vs Christianity. He care about the media narratives, especially in the US. Same thing with the tarrifs- it was more about appearing powerful to his base than actually being powerful.
Well, this isn’t about side-loading or alternative app stores though. The lawsuit is looking to force Sony to allow 3rd party key sellers. So you would have to use a different device like your phone or PC to go to another website, process your payment and get a code, then go to the PlayStation store and redeem that code to have the game added to your account and available for download. Just like there are 3rd party sellers for Steam keys. I know Nintendo allowed that for the 3DS, because there was a period of time where you couldn’t process payments on the 3DS’s eShop, but you could still redeem those codes.
What you’re suggesting would be akin to allowing Ubisoft, EA, or Rockstar to have their own stores on consoles where you could bypass the PlayStation Store/Xbox store/ Nintendo eShop if you want. Potentially 3rd parties like GOG, Steam, or Epic, but certainly there would be restrictions there. For examples, Steam would probably just be the Store without all the other platform features Steam offers. GOG’s anti-DRM stance probably would not fly.
Another key difference is that consoles have physical media. As far as I know, you’ve never been able to go to an Apple store or any other electronics store and buy a physical copy of an app. Even the digital edition of the PS5 now has an optical disc drive available for purchase.
This isn’t adding up. I’m all for consumer protections and I love European countries forcing global countries to behave, but this reads more like a console-war fanboy hit piece than legitimate criticism.
According to the article, Sony “is enjoying the position of a monopolist with 80% of the Dutch console market”. That number does not pass the smell test, and there’s no further details provided or sources given. I know Xbox sales are considerably worse in Europe, but the only way I can imagine Sony hitting 80% markets are is if we ignore the Switch and Switch 2 as “handhelds”, and also ignore gaming PC’s and the Steam Deck. Which seems like a bad faith argument to use when evaluating software markets.
The article also claims that “Sony can easily control game pricing in its digital store”. So is this lawsuit exclusively discussing Sony-published titles, or are they just ignoring the role of the publisher in this?
It looks like the goal of this lawsuit is… To force Sony to allow 3rd party platforms to sell download keys that can be redeemed on the Sony store. Which… Is fine I suppose but I don’t expect that to really help the consumer or have an impact on competition. The article doesn’t provide any data on that and I’m not sure whether any actual research has been done there, but in my anecdotal experience those kinds of sites either just follow the MSRP and sales, or are doing shenanigans with different regional price rates or FX rate arbitrage, which can occasionally lead to issues for users depending on how the game works and how important the region is to it. There might be some reduced fees from Sony in the transaction, but I expect that to be made for by similar fees from the 3rd party, or the publisher pocketing the difference. It doesn’t seem material enough to change the price consumers see. Digital “goods” don’t have supply restrictions, so this won’t increase the supply and I don’t see how it changes demand.
Also there’s a lot more questions I have about their methodology. Maybe things are different in the US than Europe, but Nintendo is famous for having fewer sales with shallower discounts than anyone else, with multiplatform games (both physical and digital) being more expensive. The phrases “Switch tax” and “Nintendo tax” have been around the Switch for almost its entire life. Is the Switch just being excluded as a “handheld”? And when they are looking at disc prices, does that include used copies too, or perhaps include a factor for resale value that is reducing the cost?
Maybe they are right, but this article leaves a lot more questions than answers, and I can’t find those answers from a quick Internet search.
Is there enough value in AI to justify burning down the planet for it?