Unfortunately, not just at first.

It was available to players. Peak user numbers were abysmal.

Because crypto is too volatile and slow to be a viable currency.

Notice where they are allowed to do this and where they are not. It’s in cities where these companies have the most political and economic influence.

The vast majority of people are unaware of the existence of such tools. It’s not unlikely that there were only a handful of people among the 1250 who replied who both knew about this and thought about using it here.

About 16, 17 years ago, I was briefly obsessed with browsing freely accessible webcams on the Internet. Most were surveillance cameras outside of businesses (some even with motorized controls!) and it was fun to explore the world that way: I saw sunrises in the Arctic Circle, busy Asian city streets, lots of interesting everyday moments from around the globe. Just harmless fun, right?

However, two cameras I stumbled upon made me stop this entirely: One was from an office in Russia, a hidden camera placed under a desk shared by several young women wearing short skirts. The other (thus the connection to the title) was a camera inside someone’s home, right above a baby sleeping in their crib. In fact, the entire house, every single room, was covered in cameras, all of them accessible to the world. I felt like the worst creep, even though I found both completely by accident.

I was about to say, my experience with battery life on Linux has not been a positive one.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Pick virtually any advanced technology or scientific field and there’s at least one lab or company right at the cutting edge in Israel. This country has very little natural resources, a small population, has been sanctioned and blockaded in one way or another since day one, so it was an obvious choice to heavily invest into education, research and high-tech manufacturing. That’s why the gap in capabilities and standard of living between Israel and its neighbors has been ever widening.

It’s very much comparable to Taiwan in this regard and the end result is similar: You’re likely owning a whole lot of devices with tech from both countries (at the very least tech based on patents from there) or have been unknowingly using it in some other fashion.

All of this took smart minds many decades to build up. Unfortunately, Netanyahu is squandering his nation’s potential with his selfish and criminal recklessness.

I experimented with this as well, but since I was keeping full copies of the discs on my hard drives anyway, it was unnecessary in my case. I still have most of these disc images; now on my NAS.

I think the first time I tried N64 emulation must have been in late 2002. There were indeed still games released for this system at the time, although not many. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 (ported to the console in 2002) was one of the last big games for it. Fun fact: The PC version at lowest settings looks almost identical to the N64 port.

Early N64 emulation was spotty, but the fact that it worked at all absolutely blew my mind, especially since I was just in the process of switching from N64 to PC as my main gaming platform. Super Mario 64 was one of the first titles to be properly playable with next to no issues, but outside of that game, it was a bit of a gamble and remained so for years. Performance could vary wildly, glitches were very common (some titles remained unplayable until surprisingly recently, like the excellent voxel-based Command and Conquer port for the system) and the plugin system proved to be a nightmare, as it fractured development resources.

GameCopyWorld is still around today and still being updated. Looks the same as it did decades ago.

My go-to method was to create a disc image of games from the local library and then use either DaemonTools’ copy protection emulation feature or a crack from that site. They had and still have a really good selection of the latest titles (nothing 18+ though, the equivalent of the American M-rating), although it’s almost entirely console games now due to mandatory online activation with most PC games.

There was also software (probably still is) that records the state of your computer before using a program. Then you’d run the program and it recorded any changes (with filters, of course), which you were able to undo with a simple button press. At the time, it was usually a change to some registry entry. This was another method I used to reset timers and usage limits of software like the one you mentioned. As before, I tracked down registry changes by hand until I discovered a more convenient option. This was necessary, because many programs with usage limits left information behind when uninstalled so that you couldn’t just do what you did.

I could swear I did something like this (although obviously not at a kernel level) decades ago with trial versions of software that would only work for 30 days or similar. At first, I did this by hand for the entire system, but I’m pretty sure I had a program for Windows 9x that could independently set time and day for any given application, without affecting the rest of the system.

Have you tried AC Rogue?

Has this ever been the case? For as long as I’ve been playing games (early 1990s), there have always been buggy games that were clearly not thoroughly playtested. The difference was that back then, patches were either impossible (console - at best there was a silently patched re-release later*) or required PC players to purchase a gaming magazine to get them (if there were any). Perhaps the fact that it’s now easy to distribute even large patches has incentivized developers to adopt a “we’ll fix it eventually” approach, but I have no actual data on this resulting in worse games on average. If there is an actual measurable decrease in software quality in the gaming world, it could just be that the increasing technical complexity of games makes it impossible to detect the majority of bugs these days.

*GTA San Andreas is one of the better known examples of this. There were game-breaking bugs in the original PS2 release that made 100% completion impossible. Only later releases (and ports) had these issues fixed.

Until they aren’t being offered anymore. On PC, physical games are practically dead and on console, they are only making up less than 20% of sales at this point (which is why both Sony and Microsoft are offering versions of the consoles without disc drives). Not to mention, there’s often mandatory day-one patches in the tens of gigabytes or (particularly on Switch and Switch 2) the physical media only containing some of the game files, requiring a download to play.

I agree. I recently watched a video of someone exploring a Waymo servicing point and it was just masses of low-paid workers cleaning and repairing these robo-taxis. What a disappointing future.

There has also been a steady trickle of Denuvo cracks that do not need this potentially risky bypass. Black Myth Wukong is the most recent example I’m aware of.

At least your ass still was until you laughed it off.

How to get forked and forgotten about in one stupid move.