I had a friend in silicon valley who worked at one time or another at some of the real biggies there, Apple, General Dynamics, and Oracle. She said Oracle was the absolute worst place she had ever worked and taking a job with them was the worst decision of her life. She was an very accomplished competitive alpha type, so I hate to think what it would be like to work for Oracle if you were just an average person.

If any of ya'll were from the south, you would know Backyard Burgers is where you go for burgers.

Let that scumball skitter back under the skirts of the Verizon where he belongs. Nice to see his youthful little boy look is morphing into chubby middle age ugly with Beltway jowls.

Yea it's nice to see the blubbering moron buffoon LUMPOTUS go, but Biden, like most idiot Dem presidents before him, is still in the corporate back pocket and will no doubt appoint some equally anti consumer corporate shill.

I will say one thing that the morbidly obese Orange spray painted baboon did do that I admired was he stuffed every office he could with people from his party. Idiot Dems have this stupid bipartisan BS dream, and they appoint lots of basically republican corporate shills, and it always comes back to bite their party. Pai and Comey with Obama, Janet Reno with B Clinton, the list goes on. Biden looks to be about to repeat that whole sad act.

RE: Alice's Restaurant

The younger whipper snappers may not get why Alice's Restaurant is a thing.
Unless you lived through the late 60s' early 70's horror show that was the Vietnam War and the Nixon years you can't really appreciate this song.

The song gives thanks for those who stood up and resisted the whole dismal affair from day one. Now it gives thanks for being successful in shutting down that war, and eventually seeing Nixon and his dirty tricks crew go.

That is still something to give thanks for.

The article about Foolbook and Crapple...

Foolbook reports it as advertising revenue, but in reality a huge chunk of what they sell is your raw data to any person/corporation/nation with the deep enough pockets.

I just love how the Motherzucker goes out of his way in every public pronouncement to pose as just an advertisement business when in reality selling your data to anyone is more like it.

All I care about is the top prize for best SF novel of the year, the rest is inconsequential fluff I totally ignore.

I used to think of the Hugo as a representing deep, solid, exceptional written word art in the Science Fiction genre.

This kind of thing trivializes it, as I can't think of a single game that has ever done anything in terms of deep solid exceptional Science Fiction, 99% of game SF is shallow and mostly there for eye candy and background. Telling stories is really not games strong suit, and SF stories tend to way too deep for any game to do more than trivial justice too.

I really like how this game releases what I consider to be mini-expansions, where they add a bunch of neat things, every so often, and are not going for the massive expansions of other games adding multi zones, and a truck load of gee-gaws. I also like that they charge a reasonable price for these expansions.

We all know how this little relationship is going to play out. Some time passes, the contractor delivers their first batch of planets/star systems. CR looks at them then sends them back saying, "Oh, now we want every populated planet to have a unique fully developed language you have to learn (new skill tree) before you can read the signs, do business, etc., also each planet needs several unique and lethal diseases (with fully modeled and animated body deformation and decay), that the player will need to seek out medical facilities with the proper vaccinations, and you will have to redo these anyway since we just reconfigured the game engine so we can show more rivets on our ships, so your scaling is all wrong."

Re: Valve employees playing Valve games - This is the first time I have ever seen any game company even address the issue of employees playing their games. Over the years of playing online games, I have seen over and over game employees exploiting their status and access to various in game controls, like bans, and yet after researching it, there does not seem to be a single game company with any official policy regarding employees behavior when playing any game they publish. I hope this is a start and we see more in the future.

Blizzard, we make the best trailers in the biz, too bad about the actual games being average.

Heck, Drupal sites are vulnerable to 'attacks' from every patch.

If you know anything at all about gerrymandering in the US, you know the Republican party has a virtual lock on many state elected positions, from dogcatcher to Govenor, Senator and Congress persons. It's just as nefarious as the House of Lords, and just as likely to continue as they are the only ones with the power to ever change it.

PS - The crap from MS - it's all about money, they don't want to give data for free to governments, but if governments would pay them like all the multinational corporations who do buy the personal information about you that MS has do, then MS would have no issue.

Like Rudy G's recent performance and the soon to no longer be the LUMPOTUS's blather about his not a hope in hell legal challenges, this is Chris Roberts doing a pantomime of a successful game, all solely for the benefit of the sucker whales still sending him money.

Lets just pray Chris Roberts does not show up on the Republican party's short list of potential future candidates for POTUS.

Unfortunately hate speech, like poison, only takes a small amount.

Still plenty of total mis-information, lies, deep fakes and total misrepresentations as well as kook nuts wailing about vacines, or common sense, or not wearing masks in a pandemic.

Speech without liability is chaos and poison to democracy.
230 needs to go.
Irresponsible social media needs to be held liable.

The sooner 230 is canned, and fat con boy is gone, the better.

What a dog and pony show, nothing at all said about how Foolbook and Twatter spending millions in research and data mining to identify kooks and help them find each other

The sooner that morbidly obese orange spray painted really bad combover flim flam man is gone, the better.

230 needs to go to prevent socially irresponsible media (Farcebook, Twatter, etc.) from promoting the kind of false information that got this clown elected in the first place.

Free speech without liability is chaos.

And Priority Patches added to the Gacha pool in the shop in 3, 2, 1...

Socially irresponsible media needs to go.

230 was a huge mistake.

Free Speech without liability is chaos.

So Fool book has one room with a handful of volunteers "fighting dis-information" while they have 4 or 5 huge data centers with thousands employed to do the opposite. Find idiots, find idiot content, connect the two, collect cash from advertising and selling lists of said idiots.

While Foolbook has it's bakesale funded moderators ineffectually doing a keystone cops routine, it is still pouring millions into research into identifying people gullible or in the slightest way likely to respond to hate based fringe wacko right wing white nationalist conspiracy theories, finding ways to help them find each other and funneling as much as possible of that info garbage to them.

Speech without liability is chaos.

230 is right up there with Citizens United in terms of lethality to democracy.

Socially irresponsible media needs to go.

Covid is getting to be the new 'my dog ate my homework' excuse.