Gerowen

They are regulated, but there’s a lot of breakdowns in the system. People passing background checks who shouldn’t, prior offenders passing background checks because local cops didn’t report them to the feds, etc. The DC Navy Yard shooter years back literally had fired a weapon into his neighbor’s apartment before and still passed a background check to buy the weapons he committed the shooting with. I also think if you’re a parent and you leave your weapon accessible by your children, and they go shoot up their school, you should be held at least partially liable. As somebody who is former military, the civilian population gets away with a hell of a lot with regards to firearms. No federally mandated training standards, concealed carry licenses are haphazard and go state by state, and not all states recognize other states’ permits, no federally mandated storage requirements, etc. When I was in the military, if I wanted to go target practice on base with my personal weapons I had to register them with the provost marshal on base, keep the weapons and ammo separate in locked boxes out of my reach while driving to the range, etc. And if one weapon went missing the entire base was locked down; gates closed and nobody in or out until it was located. Civilians get by with way too much.

I think a lot of our problem is loose or missing standards at the federal level, which leaves each individual state to kind of make things up as they go along and not communicate properly with feds when things go wrong.

Just one or two, and it’s been quite a while. One of them, I don’t remember which, it was because of some anti cheat that caused the issue.

If I can’t get it working on Linux I get a refund. For the past two years my Steam year in reviews have showed 100% of my play time was on either Steam Deck or desktop Linux.

Fedora got hit too.

I remember that! I had Unreal Tournament 2004 and it technically had a native Linux version but it wasn’t on the CD. You had to extract most of the files from the CD and go download the Linux executable file from the unreal website to drop into the installation folder.

Proton is just Wine from Valve. They add their own fixes and patches and whatnot and have an “experimental” branch you can try with games that don’t work right away, but it’s just Wine. Everything Valve does to Proton eventually makes it way back upstream to Wine proper. One reason Valve may not make it available for MacOS themselves is because they’re basing their SteamOS on Linux, and while MacOS and Linux are both Unix “like”, MacOS was/is more based on BSD, so the system calls may not always line up or work exactly the same when translating them. I do think however that Proton, or a modified version of it at least, is what Apple’s game development kit thingy leverages.

After Steam officially released its native Linux client I played Half Life 1, 2 and “Brutal Legend” because they all had native Linux ports before proton was a thing. Before that I remember playing games like Sauerbraten (quake like fps), Battle for Wesnoth (my wife and I still play this together), Frozen Bubble, LBreakout2 and several other Linux native games.

Edited my original comment for accuracy.

If I go to a buffet style restaurant like Golden Corral where there’s a long table full of precooked items, I’m gonna go up to that table and rummage around and fill my own plate, 😜

Thanks for clarifying. I hadn’t actually used that particular feature so I must have misunderstood the way it was worded in the app.

For most of my shopping, which takes place at our local Walmart (I live in the US), I actually really like using the self-checkout. Now when we make a big grocery run, having a person there makes things easier because they can scan and bag, I can unload things onto the belt and my wife can pull bags off the little turnstile thing and put them back in our cart, but most of the time I’m just running in to grab a handful of items so when I leave I can just walk up to the kiosk, scan my stuff, scan the QR code with the Walmart app on my phone and walk out the door. It’ll auto pay with the privacy card I attached to my Walmart account and give me a digital receipt to show if somebody wants to see it at the door. They even have a thing now where you can pay a monthly subscription for “Walmart+” where you can scan and pay for your items as you shop.

Governments should not depend on social media for vital communications, period.

I think a big part of it, here in the US, is besides all the post WW2 sentiment, a lot of folks here in the bible belt literally think they are God’s chosen people, and so whatever they do is right by God, no matter how terrible. I recently showed up for jury duty and was speaking to a lady there about her son who had joined the Marine Corps. and thought he might get deployed, and she said, I shit you not, “At least he’ll be fighting for God’s people”.

I’ve seen antisemitism. I’ve been in online communities that slowly devolved into rat caricatures and conspiracy theories about how Jews are out to destroy the world. So I know that modern antisemitism persists and is a thing to watch out for. But it’s not antisemitic to admit that Zionist Israel is butchering innocent people because they want to claim all of Palestine for themselves, and that the west is too weak willed to do anything about it for fear of being called antisemitic, or going against “God’s chosen people”. That’s not antisemitism, it’s an objective, observable fact.