Hmmm. Everyone takes Steam refunds for granted now. But until late 2015 they refused to do refunds for any kind of game purchase, even if the game was literally unplayable by buyers - until they were dragged through the courts by the ACCC and fined, with similar legal demands happening from the EU around the same time.
Dunno if I’d call that, “never abused their power to the disadvantage of customers”.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
The EU definitely helped. I’ll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014. They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is ‘not fit for purpose’ then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
“Valve’s culture of compliance was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if [legal] advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they’re definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
I’m as fatigued with bad Star Trek as I am with bad Star Wars now.
I’m honestly not excited to hear of any new Star Trek until they have a major change to show runners, or enough people who enjoy classic and 90s Trek come out and say, “oh wait this new one is great”.
“Look what you made me do!”
I’m reading the study to find the part where it says that these participants didn’t have any social or societal support to attempt to deal with their other problems.
Oh right - sorry I see now that you were just vocalising the chip on your shoulder.
Yes, correct. User was claiming “water condensation” is energy intensive - not just the particular tech in the post.
I pointed out how silly of a claim that was.
Haha claiming the sun is “energy intensive” is some new mental gymnastics that I’d not heard before.
Will ignore you now 👍
“Commissioned in March by Pennsylvania State University and conducted by Tamir Sorek for the Israeli polling firm Geocartography Knowledge Group, the survey polled a representative sample of 1,005 Jewish Israelis. It posed a series of “impolite” questions – topics typically avoided in mainstream Israeli polling – about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“Energy intensive”.
There are also commercial versions that are designed for permanent use. Again, zero energy use.
Generally when you make a claim, its on you to back it up with evidence, not everyone else to ‘prove you wrong’. “God is real, prove me wrong.”
https://www.futurity.org/water-harvesting-condenser-humidity-2588972-2/
I would not put any stock in anything Thunderfoot claims, he’s a grifter and makes profoundly dumb arguments.
Source is biased obviously, but contains many, many references: https://skepchick.org/2025/01/thunderf00t-is-still-an-ignorant-loser/
Begun, the very cold war has.
82% of them are happy to expel all Gaza’s Palestinian residents, that doesn’t sound like people who experience shame for their governmeng killing ~40k civilian women and children over the last few years.
A further 56% favour expelling all Israeli citizens with Palestinian bloodlines and a lovely 47%…
agreed that “when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua’s command – killing all its inhabitants.” Sixty-five percent said they believed in the existence of a modern-day incarnation of Amalek, the Israelite biblical enemy whom God commanded to wipe out in Deuteronomy 25:19. Among those believers, 93 percent said the commandment to erase Amalek’s memory remains relevant today.
I’m not seeing much conscience or shame in those numbers.
And will get even shorter now they’ve seen the bajillion dollars dropped into Sony’s lap by making Helldiver’s 2 available on PC and then Xbox, and cross-platform play available between all three.
The coming generation might be the last gen of console wars. Xbox has already said its coming, PlayStation I think are likely to be next.
Yeah, very reasonable. I updated my original comment to highlight that I was overstating the problem. Thanks for your comments.
There are significant patterns with Israel’s government protecting those who abuse minors, and more widely in the US within the orthodox Jewish community - not unlike the Catholic Church abuse systemic protection. It’s all rarely reported on, however this article & video discusses how the institutions are so disinterested in helping that citizen-run foundations are resorting to travelling to Israel and performing citizens-arrests to get any kind of justice for the victims - and this is only successful if the accused have offended in Israel as well as abroad.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-jewish-american-pedophiles-hide-from-justice-in-israel/
I’ve looked, what you say is mostly accurate but getting a bit dated - the NVME performance gap with SATA SSDs keeps widening especially with DirectStorage games (eg Spider Man 2 - triple the load speed vs SATA).
This gap will continue to widen as devs focus performance improvements on the tech available to them, and as the price difference between SATA SSDs and NVME is diminishing rapidly (only a 5% difference in common mid tier models now) there is very little reason to recommend SATA over NVMe for cost reasons - which was kinda the focus of this thread. I’d not advise anyone today to buy a SATA SSD over NVMe for gaming unless the cost saving was large.
First article I could find from a website I recognised (there are so many SEO-stuffing AI-generated trash sites today to wade through its truly frustrating) - https://www.techspot.com/article/3023-ssd-gaming-comparison-load-times/
The performance improvements outside of load times, eg during gaming are significant but harder to benchmark, because pop-in of assets during gameplay is not something we can currently easily measure, it’s something you need to compare side by side videos of and there are many that show significant stuttering and pop-in for DirectStorage games like Ratchet and Clank. Another analysis with some videos double, triple or longer wait times in-games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl8wXT8F3W4
I’m hopeful this leads to being able to play older Android games.
One of the things that sucks about Android is that as the versions march on they raise the API requirements (ostensibly for security), which leaves old games being unable to run on new devices.
I have a bunch of games purchased om Humble Bundles over the years that now just refuse to run on my Android devices as their API target level is too old.
What? A SATA drive (presuming you mean a sata SSD, not mechanical) will do absolutely nowhere near the load times of NVME. SATA3 peak bandwidth is 600MB/s, closest drives gets in real world read speeds is around 550MB/s.
NVME drives do at least ten times that for a midrange one. Up to thirty times for the latest gen top of the line.
Edit - commenters have fairly pointed out that the difference in actual load times is not as huge as I thought, it might be triple as fast but it’s not a huge deal as it’s still sub-second. However, it is noticeable and increasing as games develop more for the new tech. Most PC builders do not recommend a SATA SSD over a NVME because the price difference is now minimal and they will be more future-proof as more DirectStorage and similar tech is utilized by modern games.
“Runicphobia” is a non-existant phobia.
You have a persecution complex.
P.S. I just have 🍻
I’m willing to bet the crying laughter from people around him came after his glasses got snatched off his face and snapped.