While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.
Not if the admins of an instance want to maintain their echo chamber by shepherding discussions towards extremist viewpoints.
All states except Maine and Nebraska tally votes cast statewide and allocate all electoral votes from that state to the winner. Specific concentrations of voters in those states aren’t factored into the allocation.
Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.
If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.
For those worried about blocking certain viewpoints, it’s important to note that the sources on the list aren’t there for the unpopularity of their opinions, but rather the frequent publication of misinformation. For instance, Fox News, despite its frequent bias, is not one of the publications on the list.
As others have noted, the list can essentially be summarized as state-sponsored, tabloid, and extremist media outlets that, intentionally or not, have editing standards that result in misinformation on a regular basis.
In that case the issue is that it’s user generated content. Just as you’d cite the references listed after a Wikipedia article for the source of that information rather than Wikipedia itself, Wikipedia policy favors references to established publications over those compiled by users in a manner similar to Wikipedia itself.
For the information to be verifiable, its original source has to be both clear and reputable.
If you just want to browse Reddit and have a user script extension installed, you can use LibReddit Redirector to browse via a third-party frontend without turning off your VPN.
80% of Americans know that water is wet. /s
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
Valve could still operate as it currently does, including having sufficient profits to account for R&D and long-term costs, at a lower cut of platform sales (as another commenter mentioned, Gabe Newell’s billion dollar yacht collection is demonstrative of the platform’s profitability, especially when one considers how much it costs to maintain ships). Products such as the Steam Deck make money for Valve too, as Steam Deck users (myself included) statistically buy more games on Steam as a result. I don’t support profiteering efforts by game publishers either, such as the Factorio price increase attributed to inflation, $70 game releases attributed to inflation when digital releases have reduced their costs, and micro transactions in general. In any case, however, given that cost increases are always the consumer’s responsibility, cost decreases should not simply be a means for companies to bolster their profit margins.
Just because there’s an outdated industry standard doesn’t mean it should be perpetuated, let alone supported, for eternity. Valve’s server hosting costs on a per-installation basis have fallen substantially since they first launched Steam, so there’s no reason why the 30% cut is still necessary; even 20% would leave them a sizable profit margin. I’m not a fan of the Epic Game Store for bribing companies to not release their games on Steam for a set amount of time, and choose not to use it as a result, but it’s time that the 30% industry standard be dropped. In purchasing a game I want to support continued development of that franchise, and $15 of a $50 purchase going to the storefront is not only excessive and inflationary, but harms developers as well.
When voting red will turn Ukraine into Palestine and make the situation in Palestine twice as bad, yes, it does work.
Plastic Makers to Lawyers: Keep up the lobbying and we’ll be fine!
stay in islands
“With wall-to-wall flatscreen displays and surround sound, our luxury bunkers let you have the scenic beachfront property you’ve always dreamed of!” /s
I’m sure any and all chicken producers will use it as an excuse to keep increasing prices.
Perhaps more like what fridge companies do via incessant water filter replacement reminders: Enjoying your Super Deluxe CoolPlus™ Fridge? Don’t forget to check out the CoolPlus™ Fridge Magnetic Spice Rack and CoolPlus™ Fridge Juice Dispenser Add-on!
There isn’t a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing’s API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one’s search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google’s efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I’d be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.
Isn’t it only source available, and not open source, due to a restriction on reusing the code?
The loss of built-in PWA support was the biggest disappointment I had when switching from Chrome to Firefox, with the add-on solutions I tried having one problem or another in replicating my goal of making opening a handful of websites I had set to be PWAs look as much like regular applications as possible. While I wouldn’t switch back to Chrome in a second, and am still trying to get the rest of my family to make the switch, there’s a number of things Firefox needs to implement to remove the remaining roadblocks for people looking to make the switch away from Chrome or another Chromium browser.