I don’t really expect anything good coming from them. To me the likes of Blizzard, Ubi, Bioware, Bethesda, EA etc are shareholder-driven companies, that stopped innovating a long time ago and now only produce and regurgitate the absolute bare minimum slop.

I have been pleasantly surprised on occasion, like for ubi’s Anno 1800, or blizzard’s diablo 2 remake, but they’re few and far between.

Lobbying. The greedy fucks will lobby until they get their way

Another satisfied customer of the Cat Distribution System

What are you going to do with billionaires CEOs that are basically chinese/russian puppets? What about security elements that are “american software” but have leaked to the highest chinese bidder?

How the hell are you going to enforce that no “chinese and russian software and hardware” make it into the cars? Its hilariously difficult to enforce it because its vague, and its vague because its not about national security but trade.

We do need laws to prevent the inevitable abuse that comes with chinese cars but this particular ban reeks of bullshit.

Almost pulled the trigger on a Skyline, but then read about the bootloader not being unlockable, and hmd “promising” to make it unlockable at a later time. That’s bullshit right there - if you offer only 2 years of software support you better make the bootloader unlockable, otherwise it’s e-waste.

Looks like modular is the new buzzword for phones that look like that new nothing phone, with straps, pins and whatnot. I wonder is there really a market for these things?

I mean, I love what they’ve done with the Skyline, but this thing looks kind of useless.

Well if they’re out of original IP maybe they should, you know, CREATE some original IP. Surely there’s bound to be some creatives left in that behemoth of a company.

I know I know, it’s a stock listed company and these just stop innovating and just buy up studios, but they could try it for once.

Not sure why you feel the need to defend your actions by drawing analogies with real piracy - it’s their attitude towards you as a content consumer that you should note in this situation, and that’s just appaling. Your actions may well be piracy but frankly that’s just a word they use to guilt you out of choosing convenience and safety. Be a pirate and be proud, goddammit!

Serious question: in what way did maps.me get shitty? I’ve been using it for years as a gps replacement and other than being closed source and having a paid tier found no issue with it ( or at least no extra issues compared to other OSM apps )

Fair enough

Yeah, android authority posts a lot of Google-favorable “articles”. Almost as if they were getting paid to.

A shame motorola is cutting back features on their low end phones as well. They used to be the only decent manufacturer that offered fm radio. That’s now down to a handful of phones. The jack is gone as well. Expandable storage is also growing ever rarer. Meanwhile their cameras are still shit, their manufacturing quality is down, they don’t even bother with ip ratings. So what’s their selling point? Why would you buy a budget moto nowadays instead of dozens of other, better priced and better equipped alternatives? The gestures?

Yes, but the nexuses did not have the courage and the vision to remove jacks and sd cards, all while getting more expensive. Fuck I miss me a proper nexus.

The Play Integrity API was never meant to detect fraudulent apps, but to make it easy for google to become the arbiter of what’s trustworthy and what’s not. They knew this of course, but this lawsuit indicates they might have something solid to stand on. Good luck GrapheneOS!

Yeah, privacy. That’s definitely what it’s for

Ladies and gents, this is what you get when an industry stops innovating. Moving search bars up and down, adding endless “summary” pages, obfuscating pages behind others etc

I think it had something to do with credit card fees

Edit: found this on reddit

Grey Markets are often done by credit card scammers which results into chargebacks by the credit institute resulting in processing fees for the producer of the game or even getting them cc banned.

Edit edit: it was Factorio - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/05/g2a-confirms-stolen-game-key-sales-pays-40000-to-factorio-devs/

I wouldn’t. There was a dev ( I forget which game, but def indie ) that said the pirated keys from those dodgy sites actually ended up costing them money, and they would’ve been happier if people just pirated the game instead if they really didn’t want to pay for it.

I don’t think this will bury MS because they can easily market this to enterprise clients ( if they haven’t already ). Recall is a particularly useful tool for any employer that wants to keep track of everything employees do, especially in an age of WFH. They probably figured they can take the PR hit from users concerned about privacy and move on unaffected.

Just wait until you find out some of us still want FM on our phones.

The thing with SD cards is that there’s a crapton of phones with 64/128 internals and still don’t have one. I for one wouldn’t really need one if I had 512, but to get to 512 you usually hace to pay a huge premium, because all major manufacturers have adopted the apple model of upcharging for storage. And frankly in the age of affordable 1tb SD cards I should’t have to pay hundreds to get a measly 256 or 512 gb of storage.

The jack is also a manufactured problem ( also pioneered by apple, iirc ). Why would I give up my existing wired headphones to replace them with expensive sub-standard battery operated ones. Its especially ironic for manufacturers who do a lot of greenwashing. The usb-c adapter is an ok compromise though, and I for one am coming around to that l because you can only find jacks on niche or crap phones these days.

I’m not sure why you brought the “tech is old” argument because frankly it doesn’t make sense for these two.