From the thumbnail I thought we were getting “Thirsty Sluts” for a half second.

And many with extreme fascination for boobs.

I don’t think so. Two paid upgrades in eight years.

• Bartender 2 - September 2015
• Bartender 3 - September 2017 (Free upgrade)
• Bartender 4 - April 2021
• Bartender 5 - Sept 2023

Seems completely appropriate and acceptable.

It works. End of thoughts.

$4 would get you an egg sandwich, a coffee and a pack a smokes in ‘83.

Chicken and egg. The tuitions have been able to reach the insane heights due to the ready availability of these loans.

It was a lot harder to get loans thirty years ago. Almost on par with the criteria for any other personal loan. A four year CompSci degree that could be had for under $25K, in total, opened the door to a $45K to $60K entry level position for a typical graduate.

Availability of loans broke wide open, under the guise of providing opportunity, and now the same degree costs 5-10x with yet the typical entry level salary remains more or less the same, give or take a few inflation points.

Because the alternative makes a lot more money.

Credential stuffing is, first and foremost, a user issue. There’s only so much you can do when people use the same password for all their different websites.

That being said, there are some “above and beyond” steps a platform can take and most companies definitely don’t.

Epic has never been about innovation in the retail space. Sweeney talks a good game but it’s always been consistently out of his ass. He launched the Epic game store framing it as some sort of crusade on behalf of consumers, “Apple bad”, “Steam bad” but the reality is he just didn’t want to split money with others in the stack. I don’t blame him for that but his marketing was disingenuous and it’s quite obvious, now, that his business plan was inherently flawed.

His performative crusade against Apple has now led to 20% of the company looking for new jobs. We all stood by cheering, selling our souls for a bucket load of cheap games that, for the most part, we wouldn’t actually have paid for and will never get around to playing.

Two thoughts on StackSocial. Even if they legitimately are an MS partner that bar is so low as to be irrelevant. I know, I’m an MS Partner. All it takes is an email address and two (maybe three) checkboxes to become a Partner at the lowest levels. Additionally, the product isn’t actually being sold by SS. the vendor is “SmartTrainingLab” which appears to only exist in the context of selling cheap keys via Stack Social and it’s clone, other clone, e-commerce sites.

As for selling Windows at a loss… They’ve always been split-brained on that front. They only just stopped giving away free upgrades to Windows 10/11 in the past few weeks despite that offer having expired over seven years ago. The real Windows Desktop OS money has historically been from the fees that OEMs pay for licensing. That’s why the retail price is so high; it establishes the baseline from which OEM discounts get negotiated. The $199 actually is pretty reasonable considering inflation, etc. Windows 3.1 was $149, Windows 95 was $209 and Windows NT 4.0, which current Windows is descended from, was $319. I wouldn’t even pretend to know what they’re going to do on that front but a subscription service seems highly possible, though I see it most likely being bundled as part of the Microsoft 365 products; you get the upgrades for “free” with one of the (product formerly known as) Office 365 consumer subscriptions OR you get ad-laden upgrades for free OR you pay $99 upgrade pricing.

It eludes me why people purchase these grey market products over just running unactivated. They’re not valid licenses, they just overcome the technical limitations of non-activation. Generally speaking, you’re supporting criminal enterprise for the sake of being able to change your wallpaper.

Edit: Truth hurts, I guess.

Highly depends on the quality of the sidewalk. While I love the aesthetic of my neighborhood much of the sidewalk is barely maintained brick and cobbles. Wheelchairs are safer in the road in many areas.

Like it or not, this is the curse of modern media and, in particular, social media (including Lemmy). Boring details don’t get clicks or upvotes. Hype does. If you spend much time being exposed to one sensational headline, article or discourse after another, you’re going to have a much different view of the world than those who don’t.

If you don’t believe me, walk away from internet media and cable news networks for two weeks. I guarantee you’ll notice some change in your perspective and, possibly, an even see improvement in your overall mental health.

Lemmy isn’t just “one thing”. Every instance has its own rules and standards. Lemmy itself has zero policy with regards to free speech, for or against. Nor does the Fediverse as a whole.

You can start your own Lemmy instance and have all the free speech you want.

As has been pointed out previously, this isn’t about censorship. It’s about low quality posting. Even if the information is completely valid your post to Reddit violated the sub rules and your low effort conspiracy postings on Lemmy serve no value.

Are we really doing this, yet again?

Heath Ledger Did Not Improvise in the Hospital Scene in ‘The Dark Knight’ After a ‘Mishap’

Nothing. It’s one of the alluring aspects of using third-parties. You pay a flat fee, people do work. You avoid all the overhead of HR, benefits, workers compensation and unemployment insurance. If you want someone gone there’s no process, you simply tell the third party that Joe doesn’t need to come back to work, ever, and you’re done.

Amazon and Google are not alone in this practice, nor is it exclusive to Fortune 500 companies.

Funny thing being that the only reason SONY is in gaming was to screw Nintendo. They had a hardware partnership that fell apart because SONY was putting the thumbscrews to Nintendo over revenue sharing. Nintendo said, you’re not the only one who can provide what we need, and dumped them. PlayStation was the direct result.

The backslashes were actually IBM’s fault. MS DOS 2.0 README