Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that’s a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don’t pay at all. So it isn’t really a ‘both sides’ issue.
You get that level of precision in a standard “double” floating point number. So that’s basically the normal level of precision you get without trying.
What in particular do you feel like is missing? I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on Linux already. There’s no shortage of apps or games. But there might be some specific thing that you want that linux doesn’t have.
I notice that 3 looks like a sideways ω, which is the symbol used to represent an ordinal number larger than all finite ordinal numbers.
In other words Valve might see 3 as essentially meaning infinity, and is thus unreachable. No matter how many new versions they make, they can never get to 3.
Terms like that matters more for some services than for others. For something like Spotify or Netflix, if they terminate the agreement it doesn’t matter much. You lose access, but there was no accumulated value. So you can just go somewhere with only minor inconvenience. Whereas on Steam, if they terminate the agreement then you could lose decades worth of accumulated games from your library - which could be very valuable. So that’s a big difference.
Now, it’s unlikely that Steam will just press delete on everyone’s account. But we can imagine a very profit-hungry leader taking over Steam and deciding to put the squeeze on their vast user-base. There are many things they could do; such as adding ads, requiring ‘consent’ to include spyware on your computer, or charging additional fees. Long term users would not be in a position to refuse these things, because their Steam library is being held as collateral.
If you trust that Steam is never going to give you up, and never going to let you down, etc. Then there is no problem. Things are currently going fine, and they may continue to be fine for a very long time. It’s just a matter of trust, and power, and hedging.
I don’t know how you can be pleased by anything. Isn’t your life tiring living the life of a zealot? Or do you have just an unsatisfiable need to complain?
wtf man. Did someone shit in your breakfast cereal or something?
Yesterday I bought something on Steam for the first time in many years. (I have a large Steam library, but in recent years I’ve been getting games from gog and itch instead.)
Since I hadn’t bought from Steam in a long time I figured I should read the “Steam Subscriber agreement” that you have to click to accept when you buy something. Let me just say now, the agreement is a very very bad deal for customers.
It goes to great lengths to make it very clear that you don’t own anything. You aren’t buying anything, you have no essentially rights. You are simply paying for a license subscription to use software with various conditions. Valve is able to end your subscription with no refund if you break the agreement. And the best bit:
Furthermore, Valve may amend this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use) unilaterally at any time in its sole discretion.
So by using Steam we’re putting a lot of trust in Valve; because the ‘agreement’ basically says they can do whatever they want, any time they want, for any reason they want.
Steam is quite good. I particularly appreciate their Linux support. But they are clearly using their position of dominance to make people agree to unfavourable terms. At the moment, things are fine. But make no mistake - when you use Steam, Valve has all the power. They can screw people over whenever they choose to.
With all that in mind, buying DRM free is better if you want to still have access to the software when a company decides to change direction for whatever reason.
That’s a view I have for many things. The desire and possibility of, getting more money always distorts and corrupts. It makes pretty much everything worse by rewarding deception, externalised waste, and exploitation.
No one is born knowing what those letters stand for. In fact, people don’t even know what letters or words are when they are born. So obviously there must be a point in each person’s life when they go from not knowing to knowing. That will happen at different time for different people, depending on who they talk to and what their interests are.
If you want to better understand how someone can not know what bdsm stands for, perhaps you should just reflect on something you’ve learnt recently. Anything at all. Just think about how you didn’t know it, but now you do. That’s how to works.
Nar man. It isn’t all about idiocy. Not everyone has your level of education; and even aside from that, people tend to grab bits and pieces of ideas that support what they already believe.
So if someone believes in god and the power of pray etc. but they feel that life still isn’t going there way - they might see some value in this ‘reason’. And even if this evil satellite thing is still implausible, a person might take bits of the idea to make their own version about something / someone else blocking prays. It could be 4G radiation, or vaccine microchips, or some other boogieman crap. It all feeds into a persons broader ‘understanding’ of how things could be even if they don’t take in the whole idea.
You and I are basically immune to this particular post. It just looks like total garbage immediately. But it is incorrect and dangerous to think that only ‘idiots’ can be conned or tricked. All it takes is for someone to post ideas on the boundaries of what you understand, with a taste of what you want to hear. That’s what hooks people in. For smart and educated people, that boundary of understanding can be pretty far in - but it still exists, and that’s where the manipulation can still get them.
It could be that the characters in the movie thought it was about energy, but were mistaken. (But to be honest, having a group of people believe that to be the reason is just as implausible as it actually being the reason - either way it makes no sense and we just have to suspend disbelief.)
I remember in the early days of the internet Alta Vista search worked quite well. It was easy to find what you wanted, and find new things relevant to your interests - and so it became very popular. Unfortunately, Alta Vista only worked well if people made their websites in good faith. It was searching meta-tags and text on the page; and so when greedy people wanted to get more traffic on their website, they found it easy to exploit Alta Vista’s search. As more and more people started exploiting the system, the search got worse and worse.
I remember the day I switched to using Google. I was searching for some C programming stuff on Alta Vista with technical words - and the results had more porn sites than programming sites. Like, wtf. Obviously that search doesn’t work anymore. It stopped working because arseholes were exploiting it.
And now, pretty much the same thing is happening to Google. Their algorithm worked better for longer than what Alta Vista was doing, but it seems that self-interested people have kind of cracked the system, and now the results are mostly just junk instead of useful stuff. (Note, I stopped using Google several years ago. I’ve been using Duck Duck Go. But you’re right that the problem is more widespread than just Google.)