"Of course, consoles are important, but the proportion of people who play on PCs is steadily increasing. Even in areas where consoles are not widely available, there are many people who say, 'I can play it on PC.'"

This quote hits a little different when you know that Sega sells almost everything digitally for PC in the Americas and Europe, but virtually nothing within Japan and other selected countries.

They do not care about making their games available to customers. They care about profits. Overseas, the PC segment is big enough to be worth pursuing. In some countries it outstrips the console segment. But in Japan it's small enough that it makes more sense not to support PC, but rather to try to keep customers locked in to consoles, where they have tighter control and less competition.

This made me laugh out loud.

"Click or tap on all pictures of ARMED INSURGENTS TAKING COVER IN RUINED BUILDINGS until no more are left."

We bought a new car a few years ago that came with a whole suite of sensors and warnings. I'd like to turn them off, but my partner insists on turning them on again every time I do, so I need to deal with them. In the first six months with the new car, I think I had four or five near-accidents caused by the "safety" system suddenly making some loud noise when I was already partway through a manoever. But after a while I became able to tune out the stream of beeps, boops, and buzzes that come about half a second too late to be of any use, when they're not false alarms.

The car also has a "safety" feature I don't think I can disable, that restricts acceleration when proximity sensors are triggered. It was not a pleasant feeling to be in the path of a multi-ton truck, flooring the accelerator, and having the car slowly mosey forward at the pace of a quiet afternoon stroll down a country lane. Worse, I believe that it was the barrelling behemoth itself which caused this reaction. Fortunately, I found quite by accident that if you keep pumping the accelerator in a blind panic for a couple of seconds, the car decides that you might really be serious about accelerating, and that maybe it should defer to the actual human intelligence that's nominally in control of the vehicle. That, or the idiot software finally clocked that I was already in the truck's way, and needed to get out of it. But subsequent events have lent credence to the pedal-pumping theory.

I feel like new, automated "safety" features are going to kill and injure at least as many people as they protect.

Great! Let's put 24/7 webcams in his house, so he'll perform spectacularly and we can get many more absolute banger ideas like this one!

I'm just doing what the man himself says: "Fighting for a world where the watching goes both ways." But then, I suspect that when he said that he was thinking it's "us versus the government", and not "regular citizens versus billionaire tech-robber-barons".

Why do these tech-bros always seem to act like the problem is government, and they're somehow "fighting the good fight" no matter what they do? The problem is any powerful group with the power to steamroller others. And big business is at least as bad as big government.

It's 2026 and people are still falsely conflating digital with suspect and physical with safe. We live in a world where plenty of commercial software that comes "on a disk" is unuseable without constant approval from the publisher, and plenty of "digital download" software can be downloaded once and then used and reinstalled forever without needing to ask for anyone's permission.

I understand the confusion. For a long time, you got an item on physical media, and no-one could take it away from you. Then downloads and cloud services became popular, and at the same time this crap started happening. But not everyone's trying to screw us with downloads, and the people who are, are doing their damndest to screw us via physical media as well.

The issue isn't digital vs. physical, it's own vs. lease.

A little while ago in a retrogaming community, someone asked why Atari 2600 games always ran at 60fps when even NES games sometimes had slowdown. It was explained that the video system in the 2600 isn't independent of the main CPU as it is in other consoles, so if the game program doesn't keep updating the display with correct timing, it gets scrambled.

Truly no choice!

In both cases the trading value of the currency has almost nothing to do with who originated it, and almost everything to do with how the general public feels about it.

Just like crypto, most "government" currencies are worth what they're worth only because everyone agrees that they are. That's called "fiat" currency. And that's why fiat currency exchange markets exist. The US Dollar hasn't been "convertible" (redeemable for a fixed amount of precious metal) since 1971, and many other world currencies were already backed in some way by the US Dollar at that time.

The real difference is in the supply.

Government fiat currency is difficult to counterfeit, although the government (or reserve bank) can always make more whenever they want. We trust them not to print more money, increasing the money supply and devaluing the currency. However, this is exactly what has happened sometimes in the past, and no doubt will happen again in the future.

Crypto currency is virtually impossible to counterfeit, and IIRC there's a finite (but not precisely known) amount of it that can be made, no matter who you are.

Personally, I still use physical fiat currency and no crypto. I'd like to use crypto, but regulation in my country makes it very difficult to use without registering your details with a central authority. And although everyone's pushing e-money options which are similarly tracked, thankfully I still have the option of using anonymous cash.

I don't do anything bad or illegal. I just believe that government and big business don't deserve to know everything I do in my life simply because they want to.

I second the "waterproofing a regular backpack" concept.

I commute by bicycle in a place that has a tropical summer rainy season. In fact, I'm looking at a storm brewing outside my window right now. Several years ago I started a hunt for a waterproof bag, but after a while I realized that a truly waterproof bag in the size I needed (40-50 l) was going to A) be very hard to find, and B) cost a small fortune, many times what a regular pack that size would cost.

So I decided to buy a regular, well-made and sturdy backpack, and to try using a waterproof backpack cover (outer) on it. At first it wasn't so good, but ever since I slightly modified the cover to stay snugly attached over the top of the backpack (the problem is where the shoulder straps attach) it's done a great job. The straps get soaked, and some parts of the pack that touch my back get damp in really heavy rain, but almost never enough to make it through to the inside.

I still keep some important things in plastic bags inside the bag, but it's very rarely necessary.

Another advantage of using a separate outer cover is that regular packs tend to be more serviceable, with pockets and straps and whatnot, which you can use freely when the weather's good, and will generally stay completely dry under the cover (although they will be less accessible obviously).

To say that social media is just people socializing through media is rather like saying that newspapers are just news on paper.

In both cases it ignores the deliberate, pervasive, and frequently toxic efforts of the platform curators to maximize "engagement" with their audience in pursuit of ad revenue.

When I socialize with people offline, it looks almost nothing like modern social media "services".

As the owner of a relatively new Android phone, who wanted to disable a software update nag, this is no longer always true.

In my research I built a history of instructions for disabling these nag screens/notifications on phones from this manufacturer. At first, there were things you could do on the phone itself. Then you had to change a setting with ADB. Then you had to disable a system app with ADB. Then you had to get root access to uninstall the app with ADB. And now, for my phone and other recent models, there's literally nothing you can do, even with root access in ADB, short of flashing custom firmware.

This is amazing. I've been on a bit of a J2ME jag lately, and it can be difficult to find working copies of games, and then guess the requirements for running them. There are archives of dozens of copies of the same game, all with nearly identical file names, but each one has been tweaked for a different series of phones. Which file targets which phones? Who knows?!

I loaded your .jar into my emulator and it worked first time. I had also seen this specific game and wanted to play it, but it seemed only to be available in Russian and Chinese.

Thanks for all your hard work. It's really appreciated!

For anyone who's interested in J2ME horror, I also recommend the Silent Hill Orphan series. There are three games that I know of; point-and-click first-person adventures with simple combat. I bought and played them on an actual phone back in the day, but I think they're still good in emulation.

Yes, and you've got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I've been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing "old" things.