About Casting, at least in the granddaddy of programming languages, C, just meant interpreting the value of a variable as if it was a different kind of variable. Important detail is that variables are actually just memory locations and the number of bytes that conform it. So if you have a variable x of type string that holds the letter A, and a variable y also of type string with the letter B, if you do

x+y

You get ‘AB’. But if you cast the variables like this:

(int)x + (int)y

You get 131

To put it in words as you asked, you are saying “please add the values located at memory locations x and y, but treat the values found there as if they were numbers, and not the ASCII codes for letters (which is what I had originally told you was there)”.

It’s been almost 30 years since the last time I actually used this, so I might be recalling something wrong.

Demons’ Souls (PS3)

Tie Fighter

Outer Wilds

Master of Orion 2

Shenzhen I/O

Yes because the genocide started with this piece of shit, it hasn’t been going on for 78 years or anything like that

The options you are talking about happened because they were publicly recommended by a tips sheet from a popular broker.

Now this is so patently false that it borders on gaslighting, and in turn casts doubt on the rest of your assertions and your intentions. The trading anomalies were so large and significant that foreknowledge of the attack was patently obvious, there were several news stories over the next few days and then all sorts of academic analysis over the next few years, all pointing in that same direction.

Now, even the news stories back then and the initial assumption was that it was Bin Laden himself that had placed those financial bets through shadow international holdings or somesuch, precisely to profit from the attacks (similar to today, think Israel affairs and Polymarket), and the SEC immediately -and understandably- put all its effort and focus on the investigation. When following the money led them not to Al Qaeda, but to US financial institutions with players having deep CIA connections, the investigation was stopped, all names were redacted, several typical “nothing to see here” statements were issued, evidence was blatantly and illegally destroyed by the SEC, and all subsequent reports always had the actual names of the people involved blacked-out.

You can read all about it here on this compilation from an amazing researcher, which means you’ll have dates, names and -most importantly- links to all primary sources of information (original news, SEC reports, etc) so you can dive deeper into any one of the relevant facts:

Researcher substack piece

So it’s not opinion or truther/conspiracy bullshit, documented and historical facts point to some people connected with and also within the intelligence apparatus had foreknowledge on several aspects of the upcoming attacks: dates, airlines involved and apparently also one of the targets (the WTC).

And you’d be correct. The only reason Israel is a tech powerhouse is them having a captive and defenseless population in which to field-test anything they come up with, AND THEN have everything paid for by the US taxpayer.

“demonstrably”? You don’t have the self-reflection capacity to realize that you only think it’s better because that’s what is used wherever you happen to live? And to realize that it’s the exact same for everybody on the planet?

Ironically, it means the same it has always meant: resistance to colonization/imperialism/opression, it’s just that in the past it was disguised with the veil of “civilization”, and now the mask is off and you can see the naked brutal truth of how the term has always been weaponized

Hmmm, so you’re saying that being able to sell on steam is, for lack of a better word, valuable?

And then, as with everything else in life, you consider the price/value and determine if it makes sense to you?

How do you haplessly wander into it? I can’t even deliberately visit with the url, it just throws an error thru lemmy.world

“Absolutely, yes, 1000%.”

Then do just that? Unlike with Sony, Nintendo, Apple, MS ecosystems, the PC is an open platform, you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to just start selling your stuff for it over the internet.

Watch it, pointing out israeli terrorism and war crimes is antisemitism of the highest order and will be dealt as such.

I’m no steam fanboy, we’ve been at odds ever since they decided to stop supporting Windows 8 and 7 and deliberately breaking the client so it stops working with those old systems, but there’s no denying that Steam does a bunch of things right.

All these Monopoly charges are just bitter competitors envious that they can’t just walk in throw some money and start getting market share from the PC market, they would actually have to put in an enormous amount of effort to to even approach all the functionality and feature set covered by Steam.

The PC is an open platform, you’re not obligated to anything, there are multiple storefronts which you can decide for or even go at it without using storefronts. Tell me again what are the alternative storefronts on the Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Apple and Android ecosystems?

And for the “if you’re not on steam you might as well not exist” crowd, isn’t that, like exactly that, the value that Steam brings to the table? You only need to decide if that’s worth the 30% cut they ask in return, like with any other purchase or contractual decision you make in your life.

Yes, because north Koreans must have a gene for authoritarianism or something. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with having all of its towns destroyed and 20% of its population killed by the US in a savage bombing campaign where more bombs were dropped than in the entirety of WW2, and have been under a deathly and relentless imperialist siege since.

I’ll contend the biggest play Meta ever did was buying Whatsapp. They saw the app had reached critical mass and was an actual necessity, unlike their facebook crap which only appeals to a certain subset of people.

And now we’re all stuck with it and Meta’s enshitification and progressive privacy violations.

I would contend that you haven’t really grasped the sheer scale of the universe if you think space travel or colonization is even remotely possible. Sure we went to the moon once but it took pretty much all of our might coupled with gobs and gobs of money. We will surely be back at some point, and I think it’s inevitable that some humans will at some point travel to mars, or one of the moons of Saturn/Jupiter (on what will assuredly be one-way trips), but that’s it. Forget about even attempting to reach our closest neighboring star; our current understanding of physics ensures that we would never be able to make that trip. Same reason we’re not hounded by alien tourists all day every day even though the universe is teeming with life, those other instances of life are equally locked to the respective places where they spawned, which brings us to the next point:

Life. Yes, earth-based life is very resilient, on earth. Consider the massive, incomprehensible planetary forces fighting it out for billions of years until some semblance of a stable -but incomprehensibly unique- balance was reached, where life was finally allowed the necessary time to thrive, flourish and diversify around that very particular balance. Take life out of the environment in which it developed and it fizzles out very quickly. 99% of the effort in any kind of human space exploration would be on trying to replicate earth’s environment to a ridiculous degree of precision and then hope/pray that nothing ever breaks on any of the systems/machinery/technology you use to replicate earth, because then you’d be SOL and fizzle out quickly.

Here on earth we’ve got gargantuan industries (just to name a few think about electronics, plastics/petroleum, metals), built piece by piece over hundreds of years in all material sciences, mutually interacting and interdependent, with massive and incredibly specialized supply chains that rely on readily available amounts of very specific resources that you can get on earth. You can get a plastic ring seal, any size of nut&bolt, and a microcontroller here on earth for $1. No amount of money will get you any of these out there in space. We only manage this for the ISS because it is pretty much tethered (at a distance of only 400km) to a huge-ass planet that can source and produce anything it could ever need, put it on a rocket (costs a lot of money but can be done on demand) and have it get there in a matter of hours, and even then it’s very specialized, technical and perpetual effort to maintain it.

I can see us maybe pulling that off for something built on the moon (our backyard, really) but for Mars, our closest neighbor? No chance if you want to have actual humans involved, only machines and very slowly over hundreds of years, if at all.

I appreciate your level-headedness, and I definitely get where you’re coming from, but I need to point out the big gaping blindspot in your argument: the crackdowns and the facism are already here, and they’ve pretty much demonstrated they don’t particularly care for or wait for justification.

Do you see why arguing “you’re giving them ammo and justification” rings very hollow at this particular point in time?

Or because the amount of evidence of all alien spacecraft all through human history is and has always been: zero.

It’s bewildering to me how this continues to be an issue only in the US, the rest of the world figured out this problem around 2010, and I’m not kidding. It’s like you guys are still arguing about Beta vs VHS in 2023