whut?

Time out, it kinda got ahead of us, everyone needs a break. Just unplug the whole internet and let NIST catch up. It's not safe to be connected without a current CVE database.

Yes!

We must build an absolute monopoly on inventions which is permanent and heritable even if by so doing retard the progress of science and the useful arts. Without legislative protection, innovation would be like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Society must give a permanent exclusive right to the profits arising from them, lest they be denied by their nature the status of property.

Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.

It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.

Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!

* $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.

Don't wait for your contact to "expire"

No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.

What makes a good text coms system:
Global interoperability
portability
adherence to open standards
Reliability
store & forward
Local storage and background sync
fast, indexed search
save draft and resume later
structured formatting
Organizational mechanisms like folders
centralized directory

What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.

If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupport.delta.chat%2Ft%2Fa...

And redmine. I mean updating anything is a horror show, but redmine.

Companies suffering should band together and fund a FOSS tool that meets their needs. Or just set feature bounties for projects that are a near fit. Those fees would fund an awful lot of really great development by talented people and create a lasting legacy.

The real harm now is dialog.showModal() and dialog.show().

The in-page pop-ups and overlays are the new window.open(). Popup blocking should start with opt-in only for any dialogs on any sites. Popup blockers worked in the before time, so W3C let abuses back in the back door with the tag and in-standard DRM extensions.

The web is just as captured as it ever was, and now with Net Neutrality being murdered in the public square these abuses are just going to continue.

Whoa whoa whoa.. back up a bit with the gender mud, I'm pretty sure Obama wants to be called he.

Doesn't matter. They'll just be calling us all "cucks" since we don't beat our wives or espouse genocide against people of color.

The camera "sees" the user and even knows which user it is seeing. The camera then locks the screen immediately when the user is not present.

How long before the computer "sees" the user and notifies the police that they can pick up their known dissident. I mean, really, given the kind of governance we're about to enter into, this (not to mention Alexa-like audio surveillance "features") are the last thing I'd want on any equipment in my home.

And no, I don't have anything to hide. But conversely, I also don't use the restroom in the middle of 5th Avenue. Privacy is a thing, even in a world full of morons who think it isn't.

Yes, quite carried away. Your exposition is quite naive in thinking that people think in the scope you think they do. The failure to respond has been repeated historically quite a number of times.

And I think your timing of off by 50+ years, nothing will happen until people are really starving.

Nothing will likely happen until the 0.1% are starving, by which time it will be too late to do anything. The only reason to even hold out what little hope there is, is that people like the grandparent are at least thinking about, and worrying about, these things. If enough do, then real change can happen. Like the outcry that forced the Republicans to back off (at least for now) gutting the House Ethics committee, when the masses do voice their concern, they are heard. Unfortunately we all feel too weak, and too powerless, to make much noise unless things really hit the fan (by which point it is often too late). This is not an accident, and there are very specific reasons we as citizens are constantly made to feel powerless (hint: it benefits those running the show, on whichever side of the aisle).

While this request has DRM implications I really don't like (lense to screen encryption) and is no doubt an MPAA wet-dream, I unfortunately have to support this, as the clear and present danger to journalists, and the potential for regimes like the Trump Administration, Putin, et. al. to distort or destroy evidence of wrongdoing, demand something like this. At least with encryption journalists can keep their data safe, and if done properly, we can detect changes to the raw video/audio data. Both of which will be critical if we don't permanently want to live in a so-called "post-truth" reality (which really means "nothing but lies, lies, and more lies" reality).

Since the game plays _just_ _fine_ without a connection to "the servers" (at least on PS/4) because it's not WoW in space, the presence of item 2 on this list tells me that you've never actually played this game. "The Servers" in No Man's Sky are just data repositories for the discoveries you upload, and the chance to download other peoples discoveries if you find anybody else's planet. There's no "instancing" because your machine is the instance.

Meanwhile, I have not seen a single broken promise in the game. I don't know what the munchkin power-gamer types _thought_ they were buying... but what I got was pretty much exactly what I was sold: An exploration and survival sandbox game with a rich story that you have to "discover" (by reading the texts you farm out of ancient monoliths and ruins).

Now I know the people who didn't pay attention to what was being sold are quite disappointed because they were thinking they were getting Destiny "life full of boomstick!" redux. But go find me a single video from the makers that tried to sell that at all. They talked about exploring worlds, mining, crafting, and dodging sentinels.

Is the game flawless? Fuck no. It's essentially impossible to find your way back along your flight path to that one planet that had that one resource that you desperately need, and ibid for finding your way back to an on-planet trade hub. So the mapping and waypointing needs some work. And I can see signs of bigger things that got waylaid (like observatories that talk about locations in distant space that, instead, direct you to far-away points on the planet you are on), but I suspect that that became a question of things simplified in play-testing.

So I agree with the parts of your sentiment that "you pay your money and you take your chance", but I disagree with any part of anybody's complaint if they are bitching about "the servers" and the lack of WoW-in-space behaviors.

I've yet to see a single complaint that really boils down to a broken promise. I've seen a lot of complaining about things that were fully disclosed in the advanced coverage where the complainer took great liberties with their imagination, insisting that what they were promised was not delivered. But those undelivered promises seem to be entirely in their heads.

Minus a couple small things (like every planet has lots of upload points instead of having to find an upload point on just some planets) this is _exactly_ the game Hello Games was hawking. I just don't think the audience was paying attention.

Procedurally generated universe: Check. Of _course_ the universe is therefore limited by the number of procedures and skins available in the download, duh...

Rich Story: Check. You of course have to farm the sources (like monoliths) to extract the story.

Completely customizable personal tool, suit, and ship: Check.

Peace versus War is your choice: Check.

Basically the game was marketed as the opposite of Destiny et al. It's survival and exploration instead of "closet full of boomstick!" : Check.

So I went online and found guides on how to quickly max out your ship, suit, and multitool. In other words guides on how to skip the game content. Skipping game content is boring. Check.

I've seen screenshots of people who've advanced further and faster, including people surrounded by sentinel walkers and whatnot.

I got a great sense of accomplishment when I finally figured out how to properly kit out my ship to take on a swarm of fighters (hint, the cannon is dumb fire but the burst beam is on a tracking turret).

And with a low-slot multi-tool, built poorly, I was _everything's_ bitch. But now I've built up a tool that I barely have to aim to take down large creature in moments. (hint, wide-shot bolt thrower and rail-gun mod then build up all the mining beam distance and focus, then never switch to bolt mode, the mining beam gets an invisible halo of destruction).

I did a free-flight (no pathing) and found myself in a world of hurt, and got back on path.

There are six or eight pathing pips and I've only unlocked one (you get two for free) so I'm assming eventually those other pips mean something.

I've had only one group of crashes on my PS/4 (version 1.4 had a tendency to crash if you opened your inventory in space). Other's have had more crashes. I've hat that same experience on other games, and when it's happened I've done a "rebuild database" on the PS/4 and then reinstalled and the problem went away, so that's more of a platform issue than a stability issue IMHO.

So I've seen a lot of bitching by power gamers and power levelers who then discovered (or didn't figure out) that they should be reading the text in a story game, and no, you _won't_ end up in a one-man super fortress because _duh_, that's not this game.

Quite frankly some times it is boring, which is the nature of exploration, but I've managed to sit down and play for eight hours straight... completely engrossed in the game.

So a bunch of whiners want their money back because they didn't pay attention to the advertisements. Ha Ha, sucks to be stupid. But in terms of being a "bad game"... not so much.

What I regret is that this means that the money won't keep floating in so the company probably won't be able to roll out the next chunk.

TL;DR :: Everything promised has, so far, been present in the game. But if you are a stupid munchkin power gamer, who wants every room to have one monster and one treasure, then you will be sadly disappointed. If you were looking for world of warcraft in space, this is not your game, and its developers never pretended it would be. The people who want their money back are essentially guilty of bad decision making and failure to pay attention to plain-spoken promises.

I know you are correct, but I have decided to hear it as "I could care less (but that wouldn't be worth the effort)".

Alternately: "It might surprise you to know, seeing how little I care, that I could care less than I appear to, but it would take quantum observation to discriminate between how much I care and the theoretical zero point."

So it's wrong but it's not wrong-wrong.

This is hand-in-hand with "It's not 'apathy' per se, I just don't think I care."

In english the ironic is normative. 8-)

They didn't declare the same variable twice. They declared two independent variables with the same purpose to use the same name. If the second one said "d" instead of "c" it wouldn't break the pattern but it _would_ confuse the point that the two ifs create two scopes with no bleeding through.

Your comment seems to miss that point.

The real goal is to create an initializer that is valid for both the "then" and the "else" part but that DOES NOT introduce variables beyond the scope of the liftime of the if. That's why the full comparison text include the outer braces {thing c=stuff(); if (some_status(c)) okay(c); else no_bueno(c); } implies printf("%p",c) error because C is out of scope.

Using the same variable name twice was exemplary of the common closure of scope in the suggestion.

Alos note that the particular example was to bring it into line with the okay=complex_function(); if (!okay) return error; okay=next_complex_function(); if (!okay) return error;

Programmers _suck_ at stringing conditionals and making sure that the whole stop and exit at first error paradigm is met. The above monad can already be done as a number of graceful or degenerate cases.

if all your success states are boolean true, and failure is boolean false then a simple "return co1() && co2() && co3();" series continues until one fails or all succeed. But larger cascades from less boolean series can get "interestingly decorative" depending on how the programmer likes to arrange this sort of thing.

Of course the "Real Answer" is exceptions, but only if you don't then screw that up...

So the solution is a "not bad" attempt to deal with the horror that is "in-band error reporting", a horror that most languages make us blind to due to ubiquity alone.