Wing Commander 1-4, space epics of my childhood.

Moderate Inflation (around the 2% target) is necessary for the current economical system to function. It incentivizes people to either invest or spend their money instead of sitting on it.

What we call AI today is also not going to evolve into an actual AI.

You can call the field of research what you want, but the current products are not AI. Do you also call potatoes vodka?

Let’s start by not calling it AI anymore. Cause it isn’t.

they could steal your personal data without you knowing

Is that supposed to be more intimidating than corporations stealing my personal data with or without me knowing?

It does not. You can download and backup all your GOG installers, making the games functionally equal to games you purchased on CD ROMs back in the day. They can revoke your license all they want, they wouldn’t be able to keep you from using the software you acquired this way. That makes all the difference.

100% ok. Be prepared for weird stuff happening to you whenever I need a plot hook.

Only 63%?

On the other hand, if it was 107°C outside, the outrage would be so much more justified.

So the ending was always going to have to move away from what made the series interesting/successful

While you have a point, I don’t think the ending was necessarily bad because of that.

To me the resolutions they did use were just badly executed. I’d have been fine with the battle of the bastards resolving the Bolton plot, if the battle as shown didn’t make me scream at my screen every 2 minutes from all the logic holes. Same with the fall of Highgarden, Daenerys going insane, Bran becoming King etc. They could have reached mostly the same outcomes and it could have been fine. But the build up and the attention to detail just weren’t there at all. And it wasn’t even that they ran out of time, they deliberately shortened the last 2 seasons because they wanted it to be over.

Nope. You cannot.

Of course they are. You can pay or consent to tracking.

You called bullshit on it being common on the continent, I provided examples from the continent.

At least one German outlet has been shown to still track you after paying. Just a bit less. So they use a rubber with a few holes poked in.

the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

We are rapidly nearing a point where you can’t read online news from any major (ergo “widely considered somewhat credible”) source without one of those schemes. So I’d argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.

Sadly, newspapers are not considered “platforms”. A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.

So while this is a good first step, it doesn’t cover all online services.

www.spiegel.de

www.faz.net

www.sueddeutsche.de

www.heise.de

www.golem.de

www.derstandard.at

www.repubblica.it/

It’s not a grey area, it’s clearly illegal (consent has to be given voluntarily. If you can’t use the site without paying, that’s not voluntary). Agencies so far just decided to look the other way and play dumb. There are lawsuits ongoing.

German news outlets all do it. The data protection agencies have sadly so far ruled it’s ok (there are still ongoing lawsuits afaik).

“I didn’t ask how big the room was, I said I cast fireball!”