This is what you get when you combine racist Austrian politicians with crooked Romanian ones. The Austrians wanted to look good to the racists at home, and our cronies wanted to keep their lines of cash from customs ( which are very, very lucrative ). They settled on allowing air passenger shengen, which was a win-win-win ( for all but the businesses ): Austrians get to say at home that the immigrants are at bay, Romanians get to keep their crooked customs and public pressure is also gone because people get simpler transfers in airports.

Just a bit of reading between the lines:

the Thunderbird team has decided to take a different approach

and

The MZLA team is working to essentially rebuild the software from scratch, featuring a new interface and support for modern email capabilities.

I may be over-reading though.

Oh god. They're gonna stuff it with AI aren't they?

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.

These days I play a lot of Forza Horizon 4 and not much else, since I haven't found anything else to really click. There's a couple good ones out there though: Motor Town is pretty good as a car game in general, not just racing. Also BeamNg if you just wanna fuck around with the physics engine. Ooh, and Dakar Desert Rally is a fantastic rally raid simulation (albeit somewhat flawed)

Otherwise I would give some classics a shout: GRID the original, still holds up today. Also NFS Porsche, which was so ahead of its time it's ridiculous.

Almost forgot: Driver San Francisco is a gem of a game, and Re-Volt, which is bound to get the remaster treatment any day now.

Lol, getting downvoted into oblivion because you offered a different viewpoint. Classic lemmy.

The thing is, nobody really expects the companies to keep the servers online forever ( at least according to the petition ), that would unreasonable. People ask that online games are either patched to allow offline play after delisting, or provide protocol information to allow non-official servers, again after delisting.

Normally I'd agree with you, it's the developer's prerogative to schedule games in order to maximize their profits, but for the past decade there have been A LOT of online only games, even single player games that require a connection just because ( see the recent forza motorsport, or simcity 2013 ). There's a clear tendency in the industry to force this as a form of planned obsolescence and that needs to stop.

And yes, I realize that even if the petition materializes into something the developers will find a loophole. This is why I'd advocate more towards educating gamers to recognize and avoid abusive patterns. See the crew 2, where even if they basically give it away now, it's still chock full of mtx and dark patterns, and a lot of games that are designed to be online only have those patterns ( I for one learned to recognize these and avoid the game and/or the developerr altogether ).

Sadly I doubt this was thanks to the petition itself. More likely ubi is trying to claw back some goodwill ( and make some cash too, by promoting the title that was full of mtx instead of the retired one ). They've also done this offline fix thing in the past ( with anno 2070 for one ) and also after a healthy dose of player backlash.

I haven't played skyrim in years and I swear this screenshot is exactly how I remember it looking like.

Yeah, RDR2 is friggin gorgeous.

This article reads like an ad.

Also

For me, the best change in Firefox 130 is Firefox Labs. This new section in Settings makes it easy to opt-in to try-out experimental features in development for future releases. If you’ve used Firefox Nightly builds you may be familiar with this page.

A handful of ‘experiments’ are offered in this release, including the handy auto-open picture-in-picture option I wrote about recently, and the ability to access an AI chatbot of your choice from a sidebar, or selecting text and clicking the sparkle emoji.

This article reeks of propaganda. "We've done the analysis and trust us, only crooks use telegram! Look! there are DOZENS of terrorist chanels!"

I know telegram is shite, but isn't it strange that western governments seem to have it in for it lately?

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.

Concidentally, I only saw these captchas from hell on sites that also have their own apps. I suspect they're trying to force you to use the app instead of the browser (while also training AIs of course).

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.

30 million? For a billion pictures of faces? Lol. Of course they hacen't appealed, that fine is a pittance to them.

I don't understand the vitriol either. Must be a lemmy thing ( see every thread about microsoft doing something shitty and people going "you deserve it if you use windows/don't use linux" ). Even the reddit threads related to this issue aren't this bad, they're mostly friendly and helpful towards the guys that got grifted.

I'm cautiosly optimistic. On the one hand the ubisoft mainz team ( formerly Related Designs ) have always delivered wrt anno games. On the other corporate Ubi and their tendency to enshittify everything they touch.

As a fan of futuristic annos I'm also not big on the theme, but they did outdo themselves with 1800, so there's hope.

Starfield was the same. Looked pretty meh, but almost all (initial) reviewers gave it high marks. It wasn't until people started playing that the truthful reviews surfaced. Guessing either paid reviews, or reviewers having a skewed view of what makes a game great.

Its fascinating to see that a chinese state controlled app has the power to potentially destabilize small economies. Also fuck influencers, they are a plague on this world.

Wow, it actually looks ok. Fuck, ubi, you better not screw this up!