Won’t help now but only deal with contractors that have a contractor license. That license number means they paid insurance into a fund so if they take the money and run, you can recover your money from the state insurance fund even if they personally don’t have any money.

It took like 3 years for the process to work through but I got back all my money from a contractor that took a payment and disappeared.

Russia’s most important objective for Ukraine is denazification.

Russia invaded with Wagner named after Hitler’s favorite composer. Russian became a far right Nazi country under Putin.

I have close to 100. They’re like books on a shelf. If I read a good book I put it on the shelf even though I’m not likely to ever read it again.

There was a time when Russia considered joining NATO.

it is totally unacceptable and this is the exact reason of Russian aggression towards Ukraine.

If Ukraine wanted to ally with another country, that’s their right. If Russia treated them better they’d choose Russia over the EU. Just like countries are choosing China over the US.

If you think Russia invading Ukraine is fine because it is in Russia’s economic interests then you must also believe the US blockading Cuba and attacking Venezuela is also fine.

It’s Western Propaganda that Ukraine hasn’t been defeated by Russia? Wtf copium are you on?

Trump is a pedophile who betrayed Ukraine. That was clear 10 years ago when he tried to blackmail Ukraine.

Could you post different photos? I don’t know what I’m looking at? I see a phone/tablet with some sketches.

.ml lemmy’s really are different breed

It’s become clear over the past several years that many ml users aren’t pro communism or against the US. They are only pro Russia/China.

They want Ukraine to fall to Russia even if the US isn’t involved.

Do you really think Russia is failing,

4 years into a 3 day special military operation to annex. Yes Russia has failed.

the resources would definitely shift from Ukraine

Trump has already abandoned Ukraine and the EU has filled in.

Russia can simply annex Ukraine.

Wtf? Russia has been trying and failing for YEARS.

Steam was by no means the first form of DRM

While there was a game that had online authentication before Steam, Steam popularized it to make it industry standard.

Copy protection is very different than online authentication that restricts your ownership rights.

. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell

Absolutely untrue! You were denied the right to copy the software. If you bought a CD, you absolutely had the right to resell it.

Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.

There was no code to exclude other browsers. Netscape at the time was the monopoly web browser. Netscape failed because Netscape 4 was a disaster. JWZ wrote about it extensively. I personally experienced Netscape’s failure. Netscape 4 had a bug in their dialer that couldn’t handle area codes. When I called to tell them, despite having already paid tens of thousands to Netscape in licensing fees, they wanted $80k to look at the problem. I called my friends who ran other ISP’s to ask them what they were doing because Netscape 4 was broken. They said they weren’t even trying- they were shipping only IE 4 on their CD’s. I wanted my customers to have the choice so I spent the development time to work around Netscape’s bugs and had my tech support field the calls.

Netscape ran themselves off a cliff. The Netscape coders themselves said so. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that MS sabotaged them somehow with “code and deals”.

So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores?

As I already said, monopoly is a label given to businesses that have dominant marketshare. It doesn’t matter how it is obtained. Once you own the market, you have restrictions placed on you that smaller companies don’t have to keep the free market working.

Monopoly is again, the manipulation of market forces and regulatory control.

That’s not the definition used by the government. You are declared a monopoly and after that restrictions are placed on your actions.

Steam is not the main force behind that.

Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/

Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.

Trump purging his best staff like Stalin in 1938.

Stop connecting to My connection. Connect to your own.

They said the exact same thing about Iraq.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush

Why does the browser need to open?

Serious answer:

I believe many office environments have customer service reps using only web apps. They don’t run an .exe, they go to a webpage that has the corporate web apps.

Personally I had to spend a lot time getting my raspberry PI to autoload Firefox at boot because I have a custom html home automation panel. A distro that had the option of “boot to web page” at start up would have saved me an hour of googling.

but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.

That is absolutely not true. I was President of a mid sized ISP at the time. We shipped both IE and Netscape on CD for consumers to pick which they wanted to install.

The bundling was a problem because of their already pre existing dominant market position.

Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome

Microsoft did not own and control Netscape’s rendering engine which was the really dominant market player. Apple uses their market position to make Safari the majority web browser in the US. (phones outnumber home pc’s and Apple has over 50% marketshare.)

go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.

I don’t give a fuck about Epic. Steam is Walmart and Epic is Kmart.

It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys

If it was only about developers then consumers could have the right to resell their game at whatever price they wanted.

EU countries wouldn’t have to sue Steam for consumer rights:

https://blog.igv.com/steam-freedom-equality-and-game-resale-steam-vs-france/

It was restricting the web browser market.

If bundling a web browser is an uncompetitive act that requires government intervention then Apple, Google (Android), and commercial Linux distros would also be sued by the government. Microsoft was sued, not for the action in isolation but because of their monopoly position. They didn’t get their monopoly from bunding a web browser. They already had a monopoly. People overwhelmingly chose Windows because it was the best. At the time Linux didn’t have consumer friendly distros and MacOS was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from 1982.

Steam’s monopoly destroyed ownership of games. You used to buy a game at Egghead, and when you were done playing, you could sell it for whatever the free market said it was worth.

Steam’s monopoly also means you can’t open a small game store- they wiped out those businesses just like Walmart. Vendors deal with Walmart because a tiny profit of being in every Walmart is better than a large profit from a few stores exactly like vendors sell on Steam.

Italy follows with their Roman euro: