Well, if the goal is to be something terrifying, you’ve got the spirit for sure.

Why the hate?

Gosh people… Shutdown your brain

You can’t seriously be shocked that people are downvoting you when your only defense is “stop using that silly little brain to think”.

Human life expectancy has doubled in those couple hundred years. Believing that something is good just because it is old is absurd.

Alright, I’ll bite: what exactly is a “stonefruit” in this context? Google just says “fruits with large seeds that are basically rocks in the middle”, which I suspect is not the pseudo-intellectual flex your boss is going for?

It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.

It kinda gets different when you’re talking about a series of actors intermingling in an environment designed by the seller. There are certain expectations for the experience that was sold to you, and another customer disregarding the social contract of what the expected environment is supposed to be like is problematic.

It’s like buying a ticket to go to a theatre. You expect the people around you to also use the product and environment in a way similiar to you. Someone on their phone, screaming at the movie, throwing their feet up on your chair, etc, isn’t okay, and the people who defend their selfishness with “I paid to be here, I can do what I want” deserve to be kicked out. Cheating on an online, competitive game is no different, and I expect such players to be kicked out so the rest of us can have the experience we were promised when we made our purchase.

Does this mean the game in question should have full control over the code you’re running on your machine? I mean absolutely not, no one is strip searching you at the entrance of the theatre, but there need to be some degree of limitations on how individuals interact with the shared environment that consumers are being offered. The theatre doesn’t allow you to take videos, and doesn’t give you access to a copy of the film to clip, or edit to your hearts content, and the notion that the consumer should have such rights seems insane. But taking an online game, editing the files, and then connecting to everyone else’s shared experience and forcing your version on others should be protected, because the code is running on your machine? To be clear, I don’t think you’re seriously suggesting that is the case, but therein lies the problem: there’s a lot of weird nuance when it comes to multiple consumers being provided a digital product like this. How they interact together is inherently a part of the sold product, so giving consumers free reign to do what they want once the product is in their hands doesn’t work the way it does with single player games, end user software, or physical products.

The real problem is the laziness of devs not hosting their own server environments, so I hear you there. But that is, unfortunately, a problem seperate from whether hackers should be held accountable for ruining a product for others.

Sick. I’ve had Rollerdrome on my wishlist for a while now, but have never seen a good sale, nor found myself with the free time and desire to play it on the spot to demand a full price purchase. I will gladly pirate and experience this now.

I mean, fuck Take2, I’d rather be able to hand these people money for a good game, but in lieu of being able to do so, I am happy to oblige their request.

Came here to post this as well.

Just watch the first episode or two, and if it doesn’t have you hooked, it’s not your jam anyway.

But it will have you hooked, because it’s the best piece of American television in recent history.

I like this. You’re good people.

Not sure how you can talk about “the big three” of condiments and leave out mayo. Is it just non-existant outside of North America or something?

This.

Nothing says “I have fulfilled my social obligation, but I don’t give a shit about you” more than a low value giftcard for somewhere generic.

Alternatively, give him a halfway decent gift and feel better about yourself for not continuing the cycle of neglect, even when he won’t appreciate it. We can make the world better, even for those of us that don’t deserve it, and considering how to make it a better place as opposed to how to get back at the people who make it a worse one is just a better use of our time and energy.

Besides, at the end of the day, truly awful people already live with the worst punishment so could imagine: having to wake up every morning and continue being themselves.

I take “nice” to mean something very different than “good” or “kind”. No, I am not a nice person. I am inclined to be an honest asshole over a nice liar. I try my best to be good, kind, understanding, etc., but “nice” is, in my books, more about manners than good acts or genuine understanding. And I generally feel that time and effort spent on attempting to be “nice” is much better spent on genuinely empathizing with and supporting people, even when that support isn’t kind or well-mannered at a glance.

I think I just take issue with the word “nice”.

Infinite growth is referred to as cancer. Your friend is obviously right that we cannot sustain infinite growth, but it’s misguided to think that the only way out species can possibly survive to any length is by having more children and increasing our population year over year.

With improving technologies and automations, far less labour is required to achieve the same results. There is no reason we need an infinitely increasing population on our decidedly finite earth just to keep our species afloat. This would take a major restructuring of our social and economic systems to do correctly, otherwise we run the risk of centralized wealth mucking it all up, but the point remains that there’s no necessity to continue reproducing at the rate we have been. This supposed “need” for labour is just capitalist propaganda perpetuating the idea that work is inherently good, all designed to fuel an inherently exploitative economy. Line must go up, otherwise how can the privledged few assure that their net worth continues to grow exponentially?

“Fuck them, I’ve got mine” pro-capitalist mindset in the wild.

Either “eating meat is fine because animal life is less valuable than people’s dietary needs/preferences,” or “vegetarianism is the only moral option, as all life is equally valuable,” but it seems to me like any answer in the middle is hypocrisy, no?

I dug into this more deeply in another response, but no. Life can be equally valuable and we can accept that evolution and history has led us to a place where we end life without feeling a sense of superiority over that life.

Imagine a poker game. You have been dealt a winning hand. You are incredibly confident of this and are correct to feel so. Are you a better person for winning that hand? Is this a signal that you’re not only expected to take the money of the others at the table, but permitted to do so because you are a better person?

We are the species that was dealt a better hand. This puts us in a position of power. This does not make us “better”, nor does it negate the value of those other lives, despite the position we find ourselves in. Yet we do, ultimately, get to collect as a result of that hand.

Yes and no. For one, many vegetarians and vegans would agree, so on some level, sure, that’s a very defensible opinion. Secondly, North American sensibilities would call it a moral tragedy to sell cat or dog parts, so at some point we have to accept that what is and isn’t okay to kill and consume is a question of cultural bias as opposed to moral truth.

Lastly, you can accept the state of the food chain without holding the belief that those at the top of it are “better” or “worth more”. I don’t eat beef because I am, in some universal truth way, worth more than a cow. I eat beef because I accept that in the chaos of existence, this is where the chips fell. I do not feel a sense of superiority for being able to do so. If you’re going to get really strict about it, I’d define “murder” as the act of killing for the sake of killing, and say that killing for consumption and in some cases survival is different. But even then, I recognize that this is bias. If you want to call murder the act of taking a life, I’ve murdered a lot in my life, and I don’t intend on stopping any time soon. Mosquitos won’t squish themselves.

The question of intellect and understanding and the weight of these qualities in the value of a life is a dangerous road to wander down, so I like to keep in perspective that we’re all meaningless specks in the grand scheme of the universe. Otherwise, the questions get even more challenging: to say a truly reprehensible thing, what happens when we replace the human or the animal in question with an exceptionally low functioning human being? Do we now say their life has little value because they can’t contribute to society, they can’t understand the state of their own existence, and in many cases they’re not even capable of verbal communication? Does it become okay to choose to let them die, as in the original question? Are they suddenly fit for consumption as cattle? Or does the responsibility fall on the more capable to protect them?

Appraising and tiering life is an incredibly dangerous road to go down. You can choose any example of historical racism to see just how dangerous it gets. Life is life, and the strange differences between what’s “okay” and what’s not is luck more than anything else. Even as I consume a steak while my dog begs for the scraps, I believe it’s important to keep an understanding of how we got here, else hubris allows us to justify basically any atrocity.

I dislike the belief that human life is worth more than any other animal.

Even if we’re going to argue that, because of intellect or the ability to grasp out own existence or whatever arbitrary philosophical reason we’fe going to come up it, a human life is in general more valuable than that of a cats life, my “worst enemy” would have to be someone so morally corrupt that removing them from the world would make it a better place. This makes is a very pointless question.

A stranger is more of a real discussion. The stranger is enough of an unknown factor that I think I could assume that allowing them to die is likely to have a worse impact on the world, so it makes sense to save them. I certainly wouldn’t be able to say so with enough certainty to fault anyone for disagreeing with me, though.

The Monty Hall problem is not a paradox, and I’m hesitant to call it a conundrum. It has a very simple solution. The “point” of it is that people inherently don’t like that solution because it challenges their instinct to stick with their first choice.

Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing “Cracked game content” the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.

On a related note, I’m very glad I pirated Starfield.