Minecraft itself requires an online account, though, yes? Is linked to some sort of central authentication system, needs to be connected to play?

Well, GOG sells a lot of commercial games and doesn’t require online connectivity for anything marked as “DRM free”. Tend to be older.

There are open-source games.

I personally like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is a very deep open-world roguelike. Steep learning curve, as a warning, but you can do all sorts of stuff. NPCs, build bases and set up electrical power, build ground vehicles, boats, and rotary-wing craft. Bionics, mutations, skills, music and sound packs, graphical tiles. There’s a build on Steam now, but you can also just download the builds from the dev site for free.

Dwarf Fortress also has a steep learning curve, is a colony simulator. Not open source, but free, also deep, many hours you can spend there.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an open source roguelike, relatively shallow learning curve. Really aimed at touchscreen devices like smartphones, but has computer builds, has support for keys and stuff.

You can broadcast to everyone connected to a WiFi network. That’s just an Ethernet network, and there’s a broadcast address on Ethernet.

Typically, WiFi routers aren’t set up to route broadcasts elsewhere, but with the right software, like OpenWRT, a very small Linux distribution, you can bridge them to other Ethernet networks if you want.

Internet Protocol also has its own broadcast address, and in theory you can try to send a packet to everyone on the Internet (255.255.255.255), but nobody will have their IP routers set up to forward that packet very far, because there’s no good reason for it and someone would go and try to abuse it to flood the network. But if everyone wanted to, they could.

I don’t know if it’s what you’re thinking of, but there are some projects to link together multiple WiFi access points over wireless, called a wireless mesh network. It’s generally not as preferable as linking the access points with cable, but as long as all the nodes can see each other, any device on the network can talk to others, no physical wires. I would assume that on those, Ethernet broadcasts and IP broadcast packets are probably set up to be forwarded to all devices. So in theory, sure.

The real issue with broadcast on the Internet isn’t that it’s impossible to do. It’s just that unlike with TV, there’s no reason to send a packet to everyone over a wide area. Nobody cares about that traffic, and it floods devices that don’t care about it. So normally, the most you’ll see is some kind of multicast, where devices ask that they receive packets from a given sender, subscribe to them, and then the network hardware handles the one-to-many transmission in a sort of star architecture.

You can also do multicast at the IP level today, just as long as the devices are set up for it.

If there were very great demand for that today, say, something like Twitch TV or another live-streaming system being 70% of Internet traffic the way BitTorrent was at one point, I expect that network operators would look into multicast options again. But as it is, I think that the real problem is that the gains just aren’t worth bothering with versus unicast.

kagis

Today, looks like video is something like that much of Internet traffic, but it’s stuff like Netflix and YouTube, which is pretty much all video on demand, not a live stream of video. People aren’t watching the network at the same time. So no call for broadcast or multicast there.

If you could find something that a very high proportion of devices wanted at about the same time, like an operating system update if a high proportion of devices used the same OS, you could maybe multicast that, maybe with some redundant information using forward error correction so that devices that miss a packet or two can still get the update, and ones that still need more data using unicast to get the remaining data. But as it stands, just not enough data being pushed in that form to be incredibly interesting bothering with.

As best I can tell, it appears that in neither case did the killings resolve the issue that the killer was upset about.

It seems that it agreed with it, as I don’t see anything in the “corrective action” field.

I do.

I think that it’s one of the services that dramatically enhances both my online experience, but also the world’s. And I’d rather have it donation supported than ad-supported or similar.

There aren’t many services that I’ll donate to, but this is one.

Context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxuUkYiaUc8

SNL skit: Sexual Harassment and You

Summary: be attractive, don’t be unattractive

I’d assume that at a minimum, someone in the EU somewhere is at least looking into how they compromised the satellite network and re-securing it.

I have a very, very tiny folding knife (less than an inch blade) on my keychain, and unless I’m flying somewhere, I always have that, and I suppose that that could cut a seatbelt, though I doubt that it’d be likely for the seatbelt to jam. No glass punch, though.

investigates

Hmm. Apparently, yeah, some Tesla vehicles do and some do not.

reads further

It sounds like autos in general are shifting away from tempered glass side windows to laminated glass, so those window breakers may not be effective on a number of newer cars. Hmm. Well, that’s interesting.

https://info.glass.com/laminated-vs-tempered-car-side-windows/

You may have seen it in the news recently—instances of someone getting stuck in their vehicle after an accident because the car was equipped with laminated side windows. Laminated windows are nearly impossible to break with traditional glass-break tools. These small devices are carried in many driver’s gloveboxes because they easily break car windows so that occupants can escape in emergency situations. Unfortunately, these traditional glass-break tools don’t work with laminated side windows. Even first responder professionals have difficulty breaking through laminated glass windows with specialized tools. It can take minutes to saw through and remove laminated glass. In comparison, tempered glass breaks away in mere seconds.

One other factor that I think is an issue with motion blur: the modeling of shifting gaze in video games often isn’t fantastic, due to input and output device limitations.

So, say you’re just looking straight ahead in a game. Then motion blur might be fine – only moving objects are blurred.

But one very prominent place where motion blur shows up is when the direction of your view is changing.

In a video game, especially if you’re using a gamepad, it takes a while to turn around. And during that time, if the game is modeling motion blur, your view of the scene is blurred.

Try moving your eyeballs from side to side for a bit. You will get a motion-blurred scene. So that much is right.

But the problem is that if you look to the side in real life, it’s pretty quick. You can maybe snap your eyes there, or maybe do a head turn plus an eye movement. It doesn’t take a long time for your eyes to reach their destination.

So you aren’t getting motion blur of the whole surrounding environment for long.

That is, humans have eyes that can turn rapidly and independently of our heads to track things, and heads that can turn independently of our torsos. So we often can keep our eyes facing in one direction or snap to another direction, and so we have limited periods of motion blur.

Then on top of that, many first person shooters or other games have a crosshair centered on the view. So aiming involves moving the view too. That is, the twin-stick video game character is basically an owl, with eyes that look in a fixed position relative to their head, additionally with their head fixed relative to their torso (at least in terms of yaw), and additionally with a gun strapped to their face, and additionally, with a limited rate of turn. A real life person like that would probably find motion blur more prominent too, since a lot of time, they’d be having to be moving their view relative to what they want to be looking at.

Might be that it’d be better if you’re playing a game with a VR rig, since then you can have – given appropriate hardware – eyetracking and head tracking and aiming all separate, just like a human.

Motion blur is a win if it’s done correctly. Your visual system can make use of that blur to determine the movement of objects, expects it. Move your hand quickly in front of your eyes – your fingers are a blur.

If you’ve ever seen something filmed at a high frame rate and then played back at a low frame rate without any sort of interpolation, it looks pretty bad. Crystal-clear stills, but jerky.

A good approximation – if computationally-expensive – is to keep ramping FPS higher and higher.

But…that’s also expensive, and your head can’t actually process 1000 Hz or whatever. What it’s getting is just a blur of multiple frames.

It’s theoretically possible to have motion blur approaches that are more-efficient than fully rendering each frame, slapping it on a monitor, and letting your eye “blur” it. That being said, I haven’t been very impressed by what I’ve seen so far in games. But if done correctly, yeah, you’d want it.

EDIT: A good example of a specialized motion blur that’s been around forever in video games has been the arc behind a swinging sword. It gives the sense of motion without having to render a bazillion frames to get that nice, smooth arc.

In contrast, the Internet very much designed for one-to-one communication.

It’s not widely used today the way broadcast TV was, but there is multicast. Twenty years ago, I was watching NASA TV streamed over the Mbone.

There, the routers are set up to handle sending packets to multiple specific destinations, one-to-many, so it is pretty efficient.

I haven’t been playing competitive FPS games for a long time, but they used to be a dime a dozen. There must be some kind of alternative multiplayer FPS that you could just play instead if you’re not happy with Call of Duty.

How can there not be rail traffic in Libya? I mean, there has to be some kind of line that runs along the southern rim of the Pacific.

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Libya

Hmm. Apparently the map is right.

There have been no operational railways in Libya since 1965, but various lines existed in the past. Since 1998, plans for an extensive system have been developed,[1] but work has largely halted since the outbreak of the First Libyan Civil War in 2011.

kagis for an Africa rail map

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fzewtbml8t4481.jpg

It looks like there’s rail along the south Mediterranean rim except through Libya. Doesn’t even detour south around Libya. I guess one switches cargo to ship or truck or something.

Doesn’t get taken up into the body, goes from the mouth out the rear.

Other than moderation in calories and getting some bare minimums of nutrients that probably isn’t an issue for most people, I think that one can’t really go very far wrong.

I personally try to eat more protein/fat and fewer carbs than I once did, and for the same reason you mentioned – I feel like a lot of carbs make me hungrier later. But, hey, as long as you can keep moderation with carbs, probably fine too.

Setting aside anything specific to the mechanism in that vehicle, I suppose that keeping one of those window-breaker tools in the dash might have been a good idea, for a car of any sort.

That being said, I don’t keep one in my car.

I don’t know the answer, but I’d guess that lubricants might be a factor.

Nigeria is not “the West”

I didn’t say it was. I’m just indicating wherevthe floor is.