Lurker > adjl

Last I heard, the earliest Omicron-specific vaccine will be hitting shelves in March, but I expect they'll probably stick with a six-month recommendation for further boosters unless Omicron turns super-deadly and an accelerated dosage timeline becomes absolutely necessary.

MartianManchild posted...

The one guy whos pictured they showed looked barely 18, dont know how many 18 year olds are driving trucks.

I value my intelligence too much to go dredging through the rest of your posts a second time, but I'm 99% sure you've boasted about how non-truckers are joining in on this protest because it's such a righteous cause that anyone that loves freedom is obligated to get in on it. Now, suddenly, anyone that "doesn't look like a trucker" is automatically not involved?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is called "confirmation bias."

I can't even be bothered to read how screwed I am, so probably totally.

Arcturusisnow posted...

First of all, how the f*** do you know what someone else is going to do with something you sell them?

Do you honestly believe he sold these without expecting people to use them to play pirated games?

Arcturusisnow posted...

Second of all, again how the f*** do you know that every pirate WAS going to buy a copy but decided to pirate instead?

Please quote the passage where I said that every pirated copy is a lost sale.

Arcturusisnow posted...

Edit: You also didn't refute my evidence against your bulls*** of modding for homebrew.

What evidence?

ReturnOfFa posted...

Some thoughts I posted elsewhere:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/5/3/AAUdByAAC5UN.png

The extent to which any attempt at factual reasoning immediately devolves into "It's about FREEDOM OF CHOICE" is pretty telling. Very, very few of them actually understand why they're supposed to be mad or can logically defend their anger, they just like being mad and glomp on to anyone that permits and encourages that instead of challenging them to think about it.

Again, while I'm perfectly willing to believe that the literal goddamn (just for you, Zeus, neo-)Nazis are a non-representative minority, there are enough of them (including many among the protest's organizers and leaders) that holding the rest of the protesters accountable for failing to denounce them is reasonable, as is assuming that the failure to do so indicates some degree of sympathy.

And, again, they don't have to be Nazis to be engaging in literal terrorism, so I'm fine with sticking to that as a means of criticizing the terrorists.

But then physical therapy will make you stronger, so it's still true.

Arcturusisnow posted...

He modded them period. What the buyer does is their business.

Again, nobody is clueless enough to believe that he genuinely didn't know they were going to be used for piracy. Any way you try to spin it, he has profited from being a willing accessory to piracy, even if there are other potential applications for the mods he installed and sold.

Arcturusisnow posted...

Except 1 pirated copy = 0 lost sales is very based in reality because there is no proof that the person was ever considering buying the game and only wanted to try it out.

To say that "1 pirated copy=0 lost sales," you are making the claim that absolutely nobody that has ever pirated a game would have paid for it if the option were available. The reverse is not true (which is the claim you're actually trying to make), but neither is that claim. Quite obviously so. The reality is considerably more nuanced and complicated than that.

EclairReturns posted...

Are these American dollars? If so, then that is remarkably cheap.

Canadian, per litre. That's about $4.60/gal.

That is indeed relevant. There's a very easy case to be made for piracy for obsolete systems, where buying games officially is difficult or outright impossible (and therefore piracy is the only option, as opposed to being an alternative to paying for it properly), but when it's a current system, anyone enabling piracy is presenting an alternative to the legitimate demand that companies depend on to function. That's a problem, even if the "1 pirated copy=1 lost sale" equivalency has little basis in reality ("1 pirated copy=0 lost sales" is similarly fallacious).

Apparently it's over $1.50 here now. Not a fan of that. I've still got a quarter tank left, so I'm not desperate for gas and can maybe hold out for it to drop again, but that's still bothersome. Pesky terrorists.

Arcturusisnow posted...

If the judge really believed that every single person that buys a modded product intends to use it nefarious purposes then he needs to be removed from the bench because he is delusional at best and really just unfit to perform his duties.

That's not remotely what I said. He modded these consoles to be used to play pirated games. That's the specific charge, and there's zero room for him to claim enough ignorance of that use as to not be responsible for it.

I don't know why so many people insist on interpreting this as "they want to make modding illegal!", but that's not at all what's going on here. Modding is legal. It's piracy that's not. He's in trouble for modding the consoles for piracy's sake, not for modding in general.

Arcturusisnow posted...

Edit: This is especially true since the government isn't going after the people that bought the modded switches. They so rarely go after the NRA and gun sellers after all with so much murder going on with said guns.

In theory, going after buyers would also make sense, but that tends to be less worthwhile because the damages that can be pinned on any individual pirate pale in comparison to those attributed to their supplier. It's like focusing on drug dealers rather than hunting down individual users (not that the government actually does that, but the War on Drugs is a hideous mess at a fundamental ideological level, so that's another issue).

The gun market, however, does amount to some degree of hypocrisy here. That's less a reflection of what laws are reasonable, though, and more a reflection of the strength of the gun lobby and its propaganda. Holding gun manufacturers, distributors, and legitimate owners responsible for ensuring guns don't end up in the hands of somebody that will use them for ill (background checks that include mental health evaluations, strict security requirements at every level of the chain of custody, a comprehensive system for registering guns and their owners, mandatory waiting periods...) would indeed go a long way toward solving the problem of gun violence, but arms manufacturers like how profitable unrestricted sales are, so the NRA lobbies against it under the pretense of "freedom."

Revelation34 posted...

Nothing wrong with my post. They severely inflate lost sales from piracy.

They do, but "$1000" is 100% a number you just made up because you liked the sound of it and felt it helped make your point, not one that has any basis in real data. They absolutely do exaggerate lost revenue, but you understated it, which is no better.

SeahorseCpt89 posted...

I consider this guy less horrible than any scalper selling PS5s for thousands of dollars. At least this guy added stuff to his Switches to make the extra cost worth it. 5 years is way too much.

And again, if he gets 5 years for this, PS5 scalpers should get more.

Scalpers are assholes and do indeed generally do more to harm the rest of us than any pirate does, but they aren't doing anything illegal. Piracy, however, is illegal, especially making an enterprise out of facilitating it.

Like many in this topic, you seem to be under the impression that he's been charged simply for modding the consoles. That's not the case. He's been charged specifically for modding the consoles to be able to play pirated games. Modding in general is perfectly fine. It's the piracy that's the issue.

Being sub-$1/L for so long (pretty much my entire youth, and before then as well), it was pretty standard for Canadians to quote gas prices in cents instead of dollars. Heck, I remember when $1+ prices started to become normal and most gas stations needed to upgrade their signs to accommodate the extra digit. The standard of writing it in cents has just persisted, though verbally, it's usually expressed more in terms of dollars (or, more commonly, "one-forty-four," which could really go either way).

Amuseum posted...

then entire industries based on "modding". mechanics, used cars, used books, computer PCs.

Yes, there are (though there isn't much market for modded books). As has been covered multiple times in this topic, this guy isn't on the hook merely for selling modded Switches, he's on the hook for selling Switches that have been modded for the express purpose of being able to play pirated games. Modding stuff is fine. Modding stuff to help people commit crimes is not.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

This was my assumption. The moment you introduce "timed" subscriptions for things that don't actually need to be maintained externally (like OnStar or Sirius/XM radio), you're just opening the door to jailbreaking becoming a thing for cars as well as phones.

If the hardware is there and only controlled by a software block, all you really need to do is bypass the software.

That, or make your own hardware. If you want a heated seat, go buy a heat pad from your local drug store and a car plug adapter, cut your seat open, and stuff it in there.

Decoy77 posted...

He seems to think that the POTENTIAL to hurt someone, even with NO ONE WAS HURT is reason enough to prosecuted. So I used the same situation, where someone COULD have been stabbed by someone picking up a knife but no one was, but the POTENTIAL was there so he best be prosecuted for it. Good ol "Freedom" right?

Allow me to rephrase: Are you really comparing the level of risk associated with picking up a knife to the level of risk associated with driving at 257 mph on a public road? You really think those risk levels are comparable?

Decoy77 posted...

He broke no laws (no speed limit in the area he drove) so why?

He didn't break speeding laws, but the question is whether or not he broke reckless driving laws. Reckless driving laws do not require a speed limit.

Fibre's available here, but cable is cheaper and more than adequate for my bandwidth needs, so I don't have much desire to pay more for it. But then Canada's telecom oligopoly situation is almost as bad as the US', so both prices are higher than they ought to be.

Decoy77 posted...

Oh you picked up a knife, in a kitchen where knives are used, you could have hurt someone. Some people who want to use knives should go to restaurants where professionals use them, not in homes. You should be prosecuted for it.

Are you really comparing picking up a knife to driving at 257 mph on a public road? You really think those are comparable?

Amuseum posted...

what is the definition of modding?

is drawing on a paper also modding? is cutting log into plywood modding? is cutting wood into furniture modding?

Generally speaking, those fall under the umbrella of "production," since you're turning raw materials into a product. Drawing is more of a grey area, since you could be modifying an existing product instead of creating a new one, but generally speaking the concept of "modification" keeps the base product and its functions intact and just augments or changes them in some way.

BEERandWEED posted...

Nintendo made their money when he purchased the switches.

Nintendo also makes money on game sales (in fact, I'm pretty sure they sell the systems themselves at a loss and recover that through game sales, so they didn't make money when he purchased them), which he was deliberately subverting. That $65 million figure is likely nonsense, based on the thoroughly fallacious belief that every act of piracy would otherwise have been a sale, but his actions absolutely did interfere with their ability to make money.

Arcturusisnow posted...

The seller of anything is not responsible for how the buyer uses said anything.

No judge in the world would believe that he sold these expecting customers not to use them to play pirated games, given that he specifically modded them for that purpose. These were very clearly sold for illegal purposes.

MICHALECOLE posted...

If you buy a car and mod it and sell it, is that illegal?

Depends how you mod it. Mod it with go-faster stripes and a spoiler? That's fine. Mod it with a hood-mounted minigun? Decidedly less so.

Probably haggis or blood pudding. I've also had a moose burger, but I wouldn't say that was very representative of moose in general (it struck me as being the moose equivalent of "school barbecue hamburger," if that makes sense) and I'd like to give it a more proper try.

I could accept this for services like OnStar or remote phone unlocking, since those rely on external servers that need to be maintained, but for something like a seat warmer that's 100% self-contained and there are absolutely no costs to the manufacturer when the consumer uses them, this is bullshit. Everything about that has already been paid for when the car was purchased; the only justifiable ongoing costs are those associated with maintaining it.

If anything, the general impression I have is that consumers are increasingly pushing back against having unnecessary add-ons in their cars (the general attitude being "that's one more thing to go wrong," though in my experience add-ons tend to be fairly low-maintenance), and I would expect this to only drive that trend further.

BUMPED2002 posted...

I disagree because once you buy something, it's yours whether anyone agrees or not. I remember when people began jailbreaking the PS3 and Sony wanted to send people to jail for that.

Some people who play video games like to use cheat devices or I guess they're called saved editors now i.e. game genie, action replay etc and some people like modded systems to play imports etc.

The issue isn't that he modded his own Switch, though. It's that he sold modded Switches to other people. Generally speaking, with anything piracy-related, it goes from "illegal, but probably morally okay" to "hell naw, bro" as soon as you start making an enterprise out of it.

Also, the Switch isn't region-locked, so you don't need modding to play imports.

chandlermbing posted...

Am I nave enough to hope for a 5.99 turn based strategy in the guise of advance wars with no ads or micropayments?

Back in the day, that is surely what we would have got. Sigh......

TBS has never really been Blizzard's thing. Granted, a low-budget mobile game might make a decent, low-risk foray into the genre, but as you say, it's much more likely to just be something excessively monetized that's more "engaging" than genuinely enjoyable.

The_Viscount posted...

Whole bunch of conversions I'd need to figure out for that to make sense.

It's two conversions, one of which is constant (3.89 L/gal) and one of which hasn't changed meaningfully in several years (1.3 CAD/USD has been a reasonable approximation since 2015). The rest of us are fine with tacitly being too lazy to do 10 seconds of basic math. You don't need to try to justify being similarly lazy by acting like it's some inordinately complex calculation process.

BlackScythe0 posted...

Is a L like a barrel or something?

A barrel is 42 gallons, or about 159 litres.

Ogurisama posted...

The way they announced this is more palatable then Diablo Immortal. Most people I have seen would have been okay if they had a Diable 4 announcement with it, or wasnt pushed as the major announcement of the Blizzcon that year

Indeed. There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of Diablo Immortal (aside from being a shameless cash grab reskin of every other mobile ARPG the studio has made that probably won't be very good), such that most people would probably have just shrugged and ignored it if it were announced normally, but it was hyped up as a major announcement to be made at a convention attended overwhelmingly by PC gamers that are long-time fans of Blizzard's games, who were generally starved for interesting news because the company hadn't done much with any of their classic franchises for a while. That was just stupid.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

The lack of speed limit isn't relevant. The citation should be for reckless driving. Traveling three times faster than every other car on the road is inherently dangerous.

This.

Bugmeat posted...

Nope. They just need to set a speed limit on it. Go ahead and make it a high one. But give everyone an obvious limit where the government has decided faster is considered reckless. Otherwise it's just to arbitrary. You can't have super vague rules like that.

But also this. I think this particular case should fall on the side of prosecution, since this is clearly ridiculously excessive (really, cars that go faster than about 80 mph shouldn't even be commercially available, but that's a separate issue), but there should be something official to fall back on when people take the "no speed limit" thing too literally and ignore basic common sense.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

If anything, the only questionable part would be filming it, because that can tie into distracted driving. But even then that's the sort of thing you should nail someone for while they're doing it, not after the fact.

You can (and should) be nailed for something like that after the fact if there's proof you did it. The fact that the video exists is incontrovertible proof, so...

wolfy42 posted...

I mean, he didn't crash or cause an accident, so was it really reckless?

Of course it is. "Reckless" just means "creating unnecessary risks." Those risks don't actually have to manifest (in fact, there are usually separate charges if they do, which I don't altogether agree with because the only difference between "dangerous driving" and "dangerous driving causing death" is luck), you just have to be driving recklessly. There's absolutely no way to argue that he was sufficiently in control of the situation to safely drive that fast (given that there were other people on the road).

The_Viscount posted...

And your premise is fundamentally stupid. If you had five drivers going 25 on the autobahn and you were going 75, would that be "inherently dangerous?"

Yes. Very obviously, such that I have no idea how you thought that was possibly a good analogy to make your desired point. The concept of a "safe speed limit" is defined by the conditions. A linear multiplier isn't necessarily the most reasonable approach to it (like if everyone's doing 2 and you're doing 6, you're fine), but going so vastly faster than everyone around you is generally a bad idea. If everyone around you is too slow, slow down, pass them reasonably, and then get back up to your desired speed.

Notschmendrake posted...

Your algorithm is likely different than mine, given your proclivity for kpop it's not surprising you get different results.

This sounds like a job for "pics or it didn't happen."

Mostly depends how feasible it would have been for you to help out. If you had to work all morning and couldn't spare a few minutes to speed things along a bit for them, I don't think there's anything to feel bad about.

None. Last one died in early 2019, at 98. Before that, it was either 2010 or 2011 (she started declining in December 2010, don't remember how long she lasted after that), another in 2005, and the first one in 1986, a few years before I was born.

Gacha-based RTS autobattler, anyone?

Greenfox111 posted...

yeah man i said that a while ago but no one listened :(

I listened. I'm just a cheap bastard.

CoorsLight posted...

People saying no are forgetting that TC makes $800k a year

Having money to waste doesn't make wasting money a good idea. It just makes it a less bad idea.

It's in the current Humble Choice bundle, along with BL3 and one of its DLC's. I'm half tempted, since Everhood has been on my radar for a while, but I'm undecided because I don't know if I want anything else (other than BL3, but I'm inclined to wait for a good deal on the complete package instead of picking up DLC's individually, especially where they've been so excessive with the DLC this time).

Jen0125 posted...

Well feedback from us isn't related to his personal fulfillment. That's something only he can decide.

Feedback can help with that. He's ultimately the only one that can decide how much he values whatever traits a more expensive one would have, but he can't do that without being informed what those traits are.

Even if he'd been 17, the issue was less one of pedophilia and more one of her being in a position of authority. That doesn't change with him being a year older.

I'm confus

Jen0125 posted...

Does the benefit you'll get from it personally justify the expense to you?

Presumably, this is the question he's looking to get feedback on. Not having played bass, he presumably doesn't know what benefit he'll get for $3000. Had the feedback been "it'll make it easier/more enjoyable to learn," that would have been cause to go for it. Where the feedback is "you probably won't notice a difference unless you stick with it for a while," that's a good reason not to.

mooreandrew58 posted...

Poor choice of words I'll admit. What I mean is if it's allowed you have to expect people will.

That is indeed true. See: What happened the instant the CDC said vaccinated people didn't need masks anymore, regardless of people's vaccination status.

hungrymike posted...

I would suggest starting out with a cheaper bass and learning how to play, and if you want to stick with then buy a more expensive one.

This. No sense spending that kind of money on something you might not even like.

MetalGarurumon posted...

i just sat down to take a shit and it reminded me of this topic

Hey now.

You should have more pride in your turds than to make comparisons like that. Your butthole worked hard to shape those.

I think the Jimquisition is the only Youtube production I actually follow, but I have no idea who would hold the most time watched, since I have spent a non-trivial amount of time watching gameplay videos for various games (probably mostly Factorio).

Hopefully we'll get to see some more before GTAV comes out on PC.

I've been starting with "arise." Knocks out three vowels, plus R and S (which I believe are the 4th- and 5th-most common letters in the language, after E, T, and A). Following that up with "mount" knocks out the remaining non-Y vowels, plus T, M, and N are also very common letters (and doing "sound" or "round" is an option if S or R were confirmed in the first try). "Adieu" is also a good choice for vowels. "Bayou" can serve a similar purpose, though I believe "Adieu" hits more common letters.

BigRhinoX posted...

Also, damn near 90% of the population is double jabbed.

Just shy of 80%, actually. If being dismissive of the problem requires you to understate it by half, you should probably re-evaluate being dismissive of the problem.

The other day, it was "Light." I got to _ight by guess #3, then used up every other guess getting to that and still had 2-3 more "_ight" words I could have guessed, which was just evil.

Veedrock- posted...

And everybody clapped!

The name of those hands? Albert Einstein.

TheGuiltySpark posted...

You lost me 2 seconds in at the word "Tramp". If your argument is good enough, you don't need to start slinging names and personal insults. Makes me think you're taking it personally. Trying to read past that point looks like one b i g "REEEEEEEEEEEE-" to me.

You must be new to Duckbear.

Fam_Fam posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/5/1/AAPJ8lAAC4fD.jpg

I guess people from the south don't understand maps then. Parts are Arizona is in line with or even further south than the states you mentioned.

adjl posted...

While I understand what you mean, I still have to laugh at the idea of states that are further north being considered "deeper south."

Mostly, the region names are just weird and don't really reflect geography.

mooreandrew58 posted...

You can't really b**** if the government is allowing it

Sure you can. People are perfectly capable of making decisions without the government forcing them to, and that means they can be held accountable for those decisions.