As someone in tech who also has a friend that works for UPS, this is amazing for them! Anything that can improve their lives is a win. UPS people who incredibly hard (regardless of how much shit I give my friend when UPS does something silly with my deliveries)

My issue with typescript... and, correct me if I'm wrong... is it doesn't exist without Javascript. Typescript needs to be compiled down into Javascript to be run. It has no stand alone interpreter (that I'm aware of) and definitely not one baked into web browsers or NodeJS (or adjacent) tools. In essence, Typescript is jank sitting on top of and trying to fix Javascript's uber jank, simultaneously fracturing the webdev space while not offering itself as a true competitive and independent language for said space.

That's my amateur two cents for what it's worth.

I was in college for Computer Science when these ads must have just started because in a Computer Ethics class, I remember the teacher actually using "you wouldn't download a car, would you" argument.

I recall answering... "Would the original owner still have their copy? Yes? Then yes, yes I would download a car." The teacher did not like me.

The first phrase spoken when opening a new project, be it yours or someone elses... "What the fuck..."

I mean... The Enterprise is always doing questionable things with that deflector dish.

My head cannon says the Enterprise explored a wormhole to the Farscape universe, did a reverse gravaton beam on Moya, then immediately went back through the wormhole... And that's how Moya got pregnant.

Would also explain why all starships in the federation, after that point, were female (no dangly deflector)

I am not a lawyer, but... This does not prove you're pirating the software. It's informing the customer (who, as far as they may be aware, obtained the key in a totally legit manner) that the company thinks the key to be a pirated key (of which, it might not actually be, but, rather identified as such by the company or software in error). It is definitely designed to illicit some form of guilt if you did in-fact pirate the software (which is between you and your conscience), but it is not proof that you pirated it. That said, I totally back what this company is doing!

Unless it's an e-ink screen... then, it doesn't emit light

First of all if you're a poor (and possibly solo) developer who could only spring for the lowest tier you're being charged the highest rate per install. That rate is 20 cents... per install... not per purchase... per install. If I buy the game once and install it on my desktop machine, my laptop, and my steam deck, the developer has to pay 60 cents. one of those computers breaks down and I need to reinstall the game, that's an additional 20 cents every time. I have a young nephew who thinks nothing of installing a game to play for a day or two then uninstalling it to make room for another only to reinstall that first game again later. He does this with a lot of games... almost all of which are Unity games (I know, because he wants me to play these games with him quite often, so I see that logo pop up). Come January 1st, every time he installs that game, BOOM, developer owes 20 cents. My nephew isn't special and, if he's uninstalling and reinstalling games like that you can bet there's 1000s of other kids doing the same! Hell, you don't even have to be a kid. I might play a game for a few months, uninstall it, then reinstall it years later. That's another thing... this 20 cents is perpetual! As a developer, what happens when you're done with your game? You do have the time or energy to maintain the game anymore? This pricing model doesn't care. You abandoned your game 5 years ago? Don't care, 100 people installed your game, you owe us $20!

Any respectable teacher will recognize what the students are doing and support it regardless of any added hassle. As a matter of fact, the teachers supporting the students can use this in support by showing the immense waste of time the R-Small-Government bureaucracy is causing, resulting in less time available to actually teach. A proper protest must disrupt.

An anti-vaxxer does have a choice, but so does the society around them. If you do not vax you run the potential of carrying a larger load of a decease that can harm and/or kill me and/or my family simply for having been in the same space as you. I do not want that risk and if enough of society believe that risk to be too great, then you, the anti-vaxxer, must vacate the public space.

Abortion is explicitly different as, for one, it doesn't physically effect any other human being except the mother. Now, beyond my feeling that this question is quite explicitly a smug attempt at a "got ya" question, in the case of an abortion, the Mother is the whole of society, and, like in the anti-vaxxer case, the society gets to determine what's best for the whole... to be clear, that means the Mother has sole determination to whether to carry a pregnancy or to abort.

That's the key, though... KNOWINGLY stolen! If you purchased an item but where unaware that it was stolen, there's no legal issue and, unless there's something that can link that item back to it's original owner... I guess it's yours then.

As far as the digital key is concerned, this is even more nebulous. Sure, their database or software thinks the key is stolen, but that's just a binary bit somewhere which could, by accident or by a bug in the software, be in error. If, as a purchaser, you were unaware that the dealer from which you purchased said key was selling keys illegally, they is the same as buying a stolen TV from the flea market. Unless you knew, you did nothing wrong. As for the software telling you it's stolen... again, that's only what the software things. It could be wrong.

Additionally, purchasing suspect keys is even more legal as there's no intrinsic value to the key itself. It's just a string of numbers and symbols. Keep it, it's yours. Have fun. Play hangman. The company who owns the software for which that key was intended... didn't loose anything. They still have their software. If the key worked? Well, if the key worked, that means the company and/or software doesn't think the key stolen or otherwise illegitimate (which, can also be an error on the companies part).

In this case, the company says, in essence, "We think this key is stolen, but we cannot prove you did the stealing. We're not going to belabor the issue. Keep on, and let your conscience guide you"

Sounds like that may rankle your sense of right and wrong, but, them's the fact. You have never seen someone arrested for purchasing a software key, nor have you seen anyone arrested for purchasing a physical product they believed to be legit even when it wasn't.

This is what makes this technology anxiety inducing at best...

So, for yourself, you have no issues seeing the artificiality of the image due to your extensive exposure to and knowledge of photographic principles. This is fair... that said, I have read your earlier comment about the various issues with the photo as well as this one about light sources, and I keep going back to scrutinize those elements, and... for the life of me... I cannot pick out anything in the image that, to me, absolutely screams artificial.

I'm fairly sure most people who look at these verification photos would be in a similar boat to me. Unless there's something glaringly obvious (malformed hands, eyes in the wrong place, a sudden cthulhu-esk eldritch thing unnaturally prowling the background holding a stuffed teddy bear) I feel most people would accept an image like this at face value. Alternatively, you'll get those same people so paranoid about AI generated fakes they'll falsely flag a real image as fake because of one or two elements they can't see clearly or have never seen before.

And this is only the infancy of AI generated art. Every year it gets better. In a decade, unless there are some heavy limitations on how the AI is trained (of which, only public models would ever really have these limitations as private models would train be trained on whatever their developers saw fit... to shreds with what artists and copyright said), there would probably be no real way to tell a real image from a fake out apart at all... photographic principals and all.

Interesting times :D

This does bring up an interesting observation... The Temporal Agents apparently have no qualms about coming to not only take back their gadgets and gizmos after someone from the past uses them, but seems to just drop in on the past and cryptically hand out missions to those same ancestors out of literal nowhere! This time travel stuff can be so mentally damaging that even those agents trained to directly work with it (Captain Brackston, for example) can mentally break. Whatever stress La'an was shouldering at the start of the episode has now surely compounded.

You would think that Starfleet of the future would have put together some form of "Temporal Psychology" department, or something. People who's jobs are to go back to ancestors emotionally effected by time travel, and help them deal with any trauma. Telling La'an to, basically, just "shut up and suck it up" is a horrible way to deal with someone who, essentially, just saved your existence. I get she can't talk to any of her contemporaries, but surely someone from the past could pop-in and act as a counselor of some sort.

IDK... I felt the temporal agent's cold response to what La'an had to deal with was rather un-starfleet.

They don't... But the option is still there if you want an emo-ink display

Even excluding the cosmetics, this DLC includes the soundtrack. I haven't purchased it myself (yet), but I'd imagine that a soundtrack to a game with over 200 hours of cinematic would be rather extensive (again, I have not seen it, so I don't know). Even if it's only 30 to 40 minutes of music, at $10, that's at least on par with the cost of most albums anywhere else. I feel it's got to be more than only 30ish minutes of music, though, so, for the album alone the price seems legit.

Not so weird... A Knife I can understand. There are a number of uses for a knife beyond being an offensive or defensive weapon. I'm not a knife person, personally, but even I have a few to cut food, or open sealed boxes. I've seen knives used to cut bindings and they can even be used to craft art (whittling being an art form where the knife is the primary tool of choice)!

A gun? Outside of a legit, active warzone? A gun either says you're hunting, or your scared. That's it! I have all the respect for a hunter going into the forests to hunt game animals. I do love myself a burger and a steak... but in a public setting? What're you hunting? What utility is a gun in a public Walmart?

Just to be technical, here... Those past games, BG1 and BG2, utilized a very different ruleset (the ADND ruleset, if I recall correctly) to the ruleset BG3 utilized (5e). While they share a lineage, ADND and 5e are quite different.

Sorry, no. This is not accurate either. According to Unity's own FAQ regarding the subject... Which you can look at right here...

Do installs of the same game by the same user across multiple devices count as different installs? We treat different devices as different installs. We don’t want to track identity across different devices.

So, again, if I install the game on 3 different devices, Unity considers that 3 installs. If I build a new computer later, then reinstall the game there, it'll count as a new install. The scary thing is... what if someone hates you as a developer? They now only need to buy your game once, then setup a script to roll VMs and install your game on VMs (each VM counts as a seperate device), and you, as the developer, will be hit with the new install cost each time.

Additionally...

Does the Unity Runtime Fee apply to pirated copies of games? We are happy to work with any developer who has been the victim of piracy so that they are not unfairly hurt by unwanted installs.

The issue here is... the developer would already have been charged the fee for a "pirated" install, because, how is a developer supposed to even know their game was pirated in the first place. Here, the developer may already be financially hit for a pirated game and now has to spend time and resources with Unity to convince them that some percentage of installs are pirated installs. Earlier in their FAQ, Unity claims they do not have a "phone home" when a Unity game is run, so, how are they determining installs in the first place? "Aggregate data"... or, another words, "trust us".

I disagree. Even if one is new to programming, learning GDScript still teaches one how to program. Loops, conditions, variables, functions... basically all that is programming is still part of GDScript and it would be no more difficult, once learned, to switch from GDScript to any other language as it would to switch from C#, C/C++, Python, etc. That is to say, once you understand how to program, it's nowhere near as hard to switch languages as initially learning your first one.

That said, the same could be argued when working with different engines within the same language. C# in Unity, C# in Godot, and C# in ASP.Net applications all have their idiosyncracies that might make the language feel different, even though, at it's core, it's the same language. How a library functions can have a drastic effect on how you program a language, and if you change one library for another, even in the same language, you may find you have to alter your programming style.

Additionally, languages can be ported. GDScript currently only exists in Godot, but nothing is stopping anyone from writing a python-like or nodejs-like runtime interpreter for the language that allows you to use GDScript sans-Godot.

As for how nice the language looks... that's subjective. I, honestly, find GDScript to be a very clean looking language (much like I do Python... probably unsurprisingly). C#, on the other hand, I find to be a verbose mess, seeming to take 100 lines of course to accomplish something I can do in 10 in other languages. But, again, that's subjective

To flip this argument... Are the vegetables from a black farmer worse than a white farmer? Do queer farmers make worse cheese than a straight farmer? I somehow doubt it. Therefore, if output is equal, maybe it's time to spread the love to these black and queer farmers.

You say, "in the end, it's a matter of skill and you can have that regardless of your sexuality or skin color"... and that sounds great, on it's face, but using that as your argument now, when, statistically, it's shown over and over again that skill is rarely the factor that matters, is disingenuous. When we, as a society, can get to a point where we can regularly show that, statistically, race and sexuality (or any other reason humanity chooses to use to make "others" out of our fellows) truly do not effect ones prosperity, then, and only then, would your statement hold any meaning.