licensing issues

I understand that the buyer doesn’t lose the de facto ability to install the game from a local copy of the installer, but is it possible to lose the de jure right to install the game in that way due to licensing issues on GOG’s end? I’m not saying it is, I’m just curious.

I do find myself shopping at corner stores a little more than I used to, specifically because they have plastic bags. I wonder if they’re exempt from the law or just ignore it.

According to the article, the use of plastic for bags has actually gone up despite the ban.

I’m not sure this is going to be any more effective than the original (ineffective) ban. Maybe I’m biased because I don’t like carrying bags around so I am accumulating more and more “reusable” bags that I never reuse.

Alanine. No baroque ornamentation, just the beauty of simplicity. A timeless classic.

We read the ingredients on shampoo bottles and we liked it!

The US has never sent soldiers to fight for Israel during any of Israel’s previous wars, even when Israel’s continued existence was in extreme danger. Therefore I think American boots on the ground are very unlikely. Even in the case that the US military intervenes directly, that intervention will probably be limited to long-range aerial attacks.

Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.

I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.

With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.

I don’t see how this is bootlicking. I don’t gain anything from saying it; it’s just my sincere opinion. The USA as it is now, with the tech billionaires, is very rich and very powerful, and this does benefit ordinary Americans and not just tech billionaires. My impression is that many people on Lemmy focus on the problems in the USA and lose perspective of how good it is here compared to pretty much everywhere else. There’s a reason why so many people are desperate to immigrate, and that’s because they will be better off here even as poor Americans.

I expect some people are going to think of countries like Sweden where the standard of living is claimed to be better than it is in the USA. I’m not convinced that it actually is; I’d rather live here than there. However, even if people in Sweden do enjoy a higher standard of living, it’s because they benefit from the world order established and maintained by the USA since the second world war. Their defense and their access to international trade is subsidized by the USA. (That’s one thing Trump is right about, although the way he went about saying so was foolish because it undermined the perception of NATO unity that is so important.) If they USA declines, Europe will decline with it.

And yet somehow I trust Google acting in its own self-interest to benefit Americans more than the government breaking up Google with the intent of benefiting Americans. American companies dominate the internet (outside of China), this is to America’s great advantage, and I don’t think the government should risk losing that advantage.

Children are killed even in a just war, so morality on the scale of nations is necessarily different than morality on the scale of individuals.

That’s true; I am assuming that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the overall age distribution of civilians. Maybe efforts to minimize child casualties skew the actual distribution one way, or maybe children’s greater frailty skews it the other way. I don’t know but I think that my assumption is reasonable as a rough estimate.

Let me try to explain it another way.

We know that 1/3 of the dead are children, according to the headline. We also know that children make up about half the population of Gaza. We assume that none of the combatants are children.

If a person is killed, that person is either an adult combatant, an adult civilian, or a child civilian. Since child civilians make up 1/3 of the dead and there are as many adult civilians as child civilians in Gaza, adult civilians therefore make up another 1/3 of the dead. That adds up to 2/3 of the dead being civilians. 2/3 civilian dead and 1/3 combatant dead is a 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed.

That’s not what I’m saying - I don’t have a term that represents “#deadKids/#allCivilians”.

If I were to use your notation, I would write:

#deadKids/#allDead = #deadCivilians/#allDead * #allKids/#allCivilians

I recognize that it’s macabre to treat this as a word problem, but the math works out if you do. If out of 100 dead people, 33 are combatants and 67 are civilians (the 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio I have calculated) and half of the dead civilians are children, then there are 33 dead children, which is the “one third” in the headline.

That’s not what I am assuming. My assumptions are only that none of the dead combatants are children and that the age distribution of dead civilians matches the age distribution of the civilian population.

If we assume that (1) the civilian population is 50% children and (2) none of the combatants are children then:

(fraction of the dead that is children) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (fraction of the civilians that is children)

(1/3) = (fraction of the dead that is civilians) * (1/2)

(fraction of the dead that is civilians) = (1/3) ÷ (1/2) = (2/3)

This is where my 2:1 civilians to combatants number comes from.

The fact that among the dead, the ratio of civilians to combatants equals the ratio of adults to children is a coincidence.

Many people seem to think so but the evidence doesn’t support their argument. A 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed isn’t particularly low but it is far closer to the best that Western armies have been able to accomplish than it is to the ratio seen from armies that are not trying to reduce civilian casualties. For example, Russia’s ratio in Mariupol is approximately 8:1 and that was against Ukrainian soldiers in uniform who weren’t deliberately hiding among civilians. Urban warfare always involves heavy civilian casualties.

About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.

The fact that it won’t have any record of calls I missed while the phone was off or didn’t have reception, although actually that’s probably the fault of the service provider. They can send me texts I missed. Why can’t they send me a list of missed calls?

Removed by mod