Ah, all good. I didn’t downvote either way, just commented to try to make sense of the discussion. Sarcasm or facetious language is easily lost over text - thanks for clarifying

Saying “I can’t live without Harry Potter”, that’s hyperbole. Or if you’re serious, it’s just funny.

The argument is that funding Harry Potter directly funds JJ Rowling - whom then proudly and openly uses her wealth to pay for campaigns to enact anti-trans legislation and pays suppot to regressive anti-LGBTQ groups. Its a boycott.

People are justified in judging those who know this yet continue to support Rowling’s products monetarily or act in them as LGBT hostile.

From all the online back and forth I’ve seen though, few care if you pirate them therefore denying monetary support <- that’s nuance.

TL;DR: what you’d expect. Boring gangster disputes. A gangster laid the blame on him partially for killing an associate of the gangster, with little to no evidence. So they killed him publically to maintain street cred.

Channel 9 are not quite Fox News level but definitely Fox Lite. They’re careful in their written news articles to only be centre-right, but their video and TV news broadcasts are heavily favoured to right-wing bias and favourable story selection, and always very critical of any left wing interests.

I’m not sure of their YouTube channel is available worldwide, but if you check that out if you can and you’ll quickly see it’s got all the same talking points as Sky News Australia (News Corp - Murdoch, Sky News is the Aussie version of Fox News).

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I know the writer and editor had a lot of options to go through when choosing a lead photo for this story, but I think they must’ve simultaneously said “that’s the one” when they got to this pic.

Would it shock you to know that ALL of these are in the Steam terms of service also?

The only really sus one to me is the forced arbitration clause, and Steam also had that til they were pressured to remove it by multiple legal cases, including a class action brought to them by Steam users just last September. It is only sus because it’s outdated - companies are generally removing them now rather than adding them. https://www.legal.io/articles/5540864/Valve-Removes-Mandatory-Arbitration-from-Steam-Subscriber-Agreement

RE: remaining top 5 bullet points, 3 of the remaining 4 bullet points are uncontroversial bullet points about anticheat. The fourth is banning modding, which is also just a heavy handed anticheat attempt, and not uncommon for online games to add to their ToS to allow banning at their discretion. Either way its clumsy at the least as some mods can be harmless eg HUD mods for colourblind people and deserves some negativity - but not to this level, given everything else is just so boilerplate.

Collected data types: these are all for if you buy stuff with a credit card / paypal / etc off 2k/parent company Take 2. Remember, they sell games with in-game purchases. They also have an app which has location permissions option which is what the precise location is about.

So yes - again, as OP said, this is nothing controversial if you have paid attention to ToS meaning and content over the past 20 years.

Aside from the forced arbitration crap - which Steam, Microsoft, Amazon, Lyft, Uber, Google, AT&T - and hundreds of other major companies all snuck into their ToS over the years, and many have now been legally pressured to remove by consumer rights group. That is stupid because it shows their legal team is behind the times, companies are mostly removing their forced arbitration clauses nowadays because it has been the cause of many lost class actions.

Lol that this has a downvote already.

“Don’t be mean about my AI gf! She’s real to me!”

So… You know that leaving the porch lights on 24/7 is part of the light pollution problem that kills insects, right?

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Many, many countries have ‘historical claims’ that mean nothing in current day geopolitics.

Claiming that ‘Taiwan is not a country’ is enough for me to know that this will not be a fruitful discussion.

Literally the first line of the ‘Taiwan’ Wikipedia article:

“Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia.”

Expecting people to wade through 8000 word articles in the hope of finding mention of your claim is why you’re being downvoted.

Imagine someone making the claim, ‘Jesus hated gay people, it’s obvious’ and then when probed for a source, responding, ‘this is common knowledge available anywhere:
https://thekingsbible.com/’

👍

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More gross than China enabling North Korea to send troops to help Russia attack Ukraine?

Not even close IMO.

That doesn’t change that Democrats might respond to his comments?

I dunno, Bernie has said that and I haven’t heard any Democrats outraged at his comments. But I get what you’re trying to say.

It’s metaphoric. Macron is saying “if you don’t stay out of our geopolitical backyard, we will become more closely involved in yours”.

China is increasingly invested politically and financially throughout SEA (Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and more).

Pros of fibre:

• cheaper: much cheaper than copper or satellites.
• faster: latency is faster than copper and wireless (to satellite).
• very high bandwidth: theoretically unlimited. In practice a commercial fibre optic multicore run for domestic use at street/town level will be pushing ~800Gb/a, and this number generally doubles every few years as tech advances. The new spec being finalised is 1.6Pb/s.
• high stability: does not give a crap if it’s cloudy, foggy, or rainy, or if the trees have wet leaves, or if it’s just a very humid day, unlike all forms of outdoor wireless comms. Does not care about lightning strikes, as copper does.
• long life: 25 to 30 years life quoted for most industrial in-ground fibre, but real life span is expected to be much longer based on health checks on deployed cable in countries with large fibre rollouts. Upgradable without replacing the medium throughout that lifecycle.
• lowest power usage: fibre optic uses far less power and energy than 4G 5G and satellite infrastructure.

Cons of nationwide fibre:

• billionaires who launched thousands of satellites make less money.
• monopoly Internet Service Providers won’t be able to fleece their cable internet customers some of the highest charges for net access in the world.
• people will tell you “uhm acktually wireless internet is the speed of light also as it communicates via photons”, but will usually leave out all of the interference it experiences.

There’s nothing better than fibre optic infrastructure for general public Internet connectivity. Wireless/satellite should only be a last resort for remote users.