WoW has historically worked on a daily limit to progression model for the endgame, so the 3 day early access is potentially a 3 day permanent boost for the people who buy it. I would imagine competitive raiders going for world first and “clearing hard difficulty versions of raids while they’re current content” achievements and their related rewards will be essentially mandated to buy it.

As for gamers obsessing over things at launch, I wish it were different, but I think of it like movies or TV shows. If you go and watch a movie a year after it came out, nobody is gonna be talking about it anymore. And for some people, that social buzz around a new piece of media is half the fun. Playing a game and talking about it with your friends, the sense of discovery finding things out before you can just look it up on some wiki site, etc.

For me, it’s more about how much I enjoyed the experience than a simple dollars per hour equation or something. It’s a very case by case basis for me.

I remember when Alien:Isolation came out, I told people I got my money’s worth in just the first hour from how scared shitless I was the first few times the xenomorph came out to hunt you.

On the other side, I got Starfield for $20 off in the release week, but despite how many hours you can sink into that game, I found the entire experience rather bland and dull and regret buying it.

I’ve seen people make the argument that no matter what you do if they successfully break adblockers, Google stands to make a profit, but it could actually hurt advertisers.

Obviously, if you stop watching, then that’s less overhead for them, and if you pay for premium, then that’s literal money in their wallet. But if you start watching ads, Google can leverage more money from advertisers for the increased views. But people who use adblockers are unlikely to click ads, so advertisers pay more for their ads to be shown to people who weren’t going to click on them anyway.

Ironically, it’s in both our interest and advertisers to stop Google from breaking adblockers.

On the one hand, you gotta do what you gotta do to put food on the table. But on the other hand, that’s 3 years to be looking for a new employer…

Yes, this is a political issue, and yes, I’m concerned about regulation, because of laws like this that will potentially hurt unrelated people like myself in the process because people who have little understanding of the subject already have an opinion on it. Simply stating the facts can drive somebody who has already formed an opinion based on their immediate emotional response even deeper into their stance without being concerned about how that stance affects others (or they might just jam their fingers in their ears and ignore any facts that don’t align with their worldview, like anti-vaxers).

I’m a trans woman who runs a business on Etsy selling 3d printed earrings. If I had a criminal record and lived in New York, this law could potentially put my ability to put food on the table at risk as collateral damage in the name of fighting ghost guns. Obviously, I have a strong opinion on the matter, as it could directly affect me.

My entire life is a “political issue.” In the first 6 months of this year, Republicans tried to pass at least 235 anti-trans laws. That’s more than 1 law per day, attempting to regulate me out of daily life, with the support of a voting populace with little understanding of the subject who have already formed an opinion on it. Like this law, those laws don’t affect me, but they’re still “political issues” that could put my rights at risk, just like laws like this one.

Obviously, I don’t know your opinion on the matter of 3d printed guns (or if you even have one), but the people who get upset at people who “always make things political” are the people who have never had their rights at risk of being revoked.

I meant to put it in my second paragraph, but I meant 100% printed PLA full auto guns chambered in pistol calibers (with maybe some basic metal parts inside). I’m not really into the gun part of 3d printing, but I keep an eye on it because there’s been a lot of innovation there that has changed manufacturing ideas in the rest of the 3d printing world. They figured out how to rifle a metal barrel with nothing more than a bucket of saltwater and an electric current, no milling machines or anything required! We definitely aren’t in the world of one-shot pistols using rubber bands in the trigger anymore.

There used to be a fantastic documentary on the history of 3d printed guns I would recommend people watch by a channel on YouTube called 3d Print General, which mostly does 3d printer reviews and stuff, but the video recently got deleted by YouTube, despite some of the VICE videos showing more about how to actually make 3d printed guns than his documentary.

But the thing I always want to make clear to people is that the vast majority of people printing guns are the equivalent of the guys making kit cars in their garage - hobbyists, not criminals. Because you can buy a $200+ printer and spend the time learning how to use it, or you can go to a state with no gun laws and buy a cheap pistol for $150 from a gun shop.

Yup. In California, in fact. By a Republican governor named Ronald Reagan.

Your average consumer grade 3d printer cannot print in metal. I looked into this at one point for jewelry, and you need commercial printers that cost thousands upon thousands of dollars for most metals.

Having said that, yes, 3d printing guns has reached a point where people can make 100% 3d printed full auto guns in pistol calibers. In fact, that’s exactly what the Burmese resistance groups are using to fight back against the genocidal regime in their country. Because nobody in the international community cares enough to support them with military arms, but they can get 3d printers to print enough guns that they can kill and loot soldiers for better guns.

I don’t think this is really a good comparison since Starfield was in development for years before Microsoft came in. Plus, Redfall was forced by management to shoehorn in a live service model with mtx during its development, butchering what it had been before.

And, this is just my personal opinion, but I think Starfield is a pretty mediocre game. Besides the ship design, it’s largely the same design that Bethesda has had since Oblivion.

Welcome the new management, same as the old management.

I think it’s a bit of both. King is a big name in the market, but mobile gaming is just such a massive revenue stream for companies anyways. IIRC, the mobile market accounts for more money than all other gaming markets combined.

And this right here is why the “Ghost Gun” thing is largely just a scare like the Halloween drug thing that happens every year. Because it’s generally cheaper and easier to go one state over to the state with lax gun laws and buy a gun there for the price of an Ender 3 instead of going through all the effort of buying a printer and learning how to use it. Same reason why the Mexican cartels smuggle guns out of the US and into Mexico, and not the other way around. Guns are cheap and plentiful in the US, and they’re not hard to get.

There’s some “teh gubernment is cummin fer muh gunz!1!” chuds out there 3d printing guns, but there’s plenty of those people with guns they bought legally as well. The biggest large scale ghost gun manufacturing I’ve heard about is the Burmese resistance fighters who have been printing en masse a design to fight back against a genocidal military coup in Myanmar because the international community has largely ignored what’s going on there and they can’t get guns any other way, which is exactly the sort of situation that design was created for.

It’s called Simple Tab Groups, and it’s actually a Firefox recommended extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/

We could even use the same photos of the bomb from Die Hard to convince the public that they have WMDs!

I recently switched back to Firefox after using Chrome for like a decade, and one of the first extensions I installed was a tab grouper that allows me to group tabs into my own custom gcontainers while still only using one window. As a tab hoarder, it’s been a life saver.

I by no means have a raging hate-boner for Epic or anything, but they’ve definitely done enough to irritate me to the point where I haven’t even bothered with the store for the free games.

It started off poorly with the store launching in such a bad state that it would’ve failed the HTML class I took in high school (it didn’t even have a cart. How can you launch a shopping site without even having the ability for people to buy more than one item at a time? I learned how to program that in 2007!) and it went downhill from there with stuff like the exclusivity deals and that sale they did where they marked 30% off on games that hadn’t even released yet, without even telling the developers or asking permission. Then they’ve rushed to embrace pretty muchthing I’ve praised Valve for refusing to deal with, from NFT games to AI that may or may not be violating copyright laws with the stuff making up the learning databases.

Plenty to criticise, but I’m getting tired of watching them try to shove their foot back into their mouth.

It’s not about the global or countrywide scale. It’s about the local scale. If you take a cup of salt and eat it, it’s going to end back up in the ocean eventually, but it’ll make you sick before it gets there. Dumping salt into an area is going to screw with the ecosystem in that area, in a major way. We actually have similar problems in many areas due to stuff like fertilizer runoff from people’s lawns during rainstorms, causing toxic algae blooms in ponds and around beaches.

Depends on what you mean by far away and what kind of fish you’re talking about. Big fish like tuna are often caught far out at sea, but they’re also caught by the same small boats that do charter fishing an hour or two out from the shore. There’s plenty of inshore fishing that would be at risk, especially in bays where the salt would be less easily dispersed. I used to work at a fish market, and offhand I can think of multiple fishing industries that would be put at risk by carelessly dumping salt back in the ocean. The majority of shellfish, for example, is caught within sight of the beach. I don’t know if it’s still the case, but there used to be a ton of fishing done in Boston Harbor, and I’ve heard stories of crates of lobsters being opened only to find the lobsters carrying pieces of bodies dumped by the mob off the docks and into the harbor.

You’re correct, but so are they. In the long term and at a large scale, it balances out, but in the short term, there is a very real concern about local salinity levels wherever you’re reintroducing that salt to the ocean. Keeping up with the desalination plants will be a tricky business of logistics to avoid destroying the ecosystem around where you’re dumping that salt.

Adding the salt into water leaving sewage systems before it returns to the ocean might be a good idea, as you could basically kill two birds with one stone: put the salt back in the ocean while also avoiding damaging the local ecosystem with the fresh water of the sewage system reducing local salinity levels. But I’m no engineer or water treatment specialist, so I dunno if that’s at all a real solution.

I think the real issue is with schooling before college, and this article seems to be looking at college as the same sort of environment as the previous 12 years of school, which it isn’t. So much of everything through high school has become about putting pressure on teachers to hit good grades and graduating student percentages that actually teaching kids how to learn and how to collaborate with others has become a tertiary goal to simply having them regurgitate information on the tests to hit those 2 metrics.

I have taught myself a number of things on a wide range of subjects (from art to 3d printing to car maintenance and more. City planning and architecture are my current subjects of interest) and I’ve always said when people ask about learning all this stuff that I love to learn new things, despite the school system trying to beat it out of me. I dropped out of college despite loving my teachers and the college itself both because I didn’t like my major (the school was more like a trade school, we chose our majors before we even got to the college) and because I had never learned how to learn in the previous 12 years of school. I learned how to hold information just long enough to spit it out on the test and then forget it for the next set for the next test. Actually learning how to find information and internalize it through experience came after I left school.