X-COM & its sequels are THE strategy PC series I played & replayed the most ever, on both PC & Android on my tablet.

No other copycats I played like Jagged Alliance came close to my love of X-COM.

I always picked my team members that's high on Psych att/def. I prefer mind control the aliens to recon & go on suicide missions than using firepower.

I know it's mentioned at the end of the vid, but I want to do a quick PSA for Nebula. Don't mean to sound too much like an ad, but if you like edutainment-type videos there really is a lot there for your money.

I will say Nebula's platform tech is a bit rough at present. So far as I know there's just the web version and iOS / Android apps. I really want a Roku app, which should exist eventually. I'll note that for some reason the web version is limited to the most recent 100 videos on each channel, while the mobile versions don't have that limit (a bug of which the service is aware).

I tend to watch quite a few of what had been my favorite YT channels on Nebula now, to get the ad-free / slightly longer versions (I think they show up slightly earlier too). This channel, Legal Eagle, Wendover... discovered a few others I'd not have run into as well. So yeah - unpaid endorsement over.

(Edit - I didn't realize he mentioned Logistics of D Day at the end of the video - it's damned excellent if you're into WW2 stuff.)

I knew about the "planned obsolescence" of bulbs and nylon stockings, but this video had more details.

I gotta call B.S. on the "everlasting LED bulb" comment he makes at the end. I've had many LED bulbs fail after 2 years when they are supposed to last at least 8. Most of them Feit brand. Sure I could request a warranty replacement, but I'd have to pay shipping both ways, which costs more than getting a new one.

Apple has had class-action battery lawsuits almost every year since the iPod introduction. I did take advantage when they had $30 battery replacement for iPhones, but guess what - that's gone back up to "overpriced" as of last year. At least they support iOS devices with 5 years of software updates. Google has always been worse, and some 3rd party (HTC for example) ship new Android phones (at least their cheaper non-flagship models) with outdated software, and never release a patch.

I was thinking I can pretty much calculate my age from that video.

C is my native tongue (but was far from my first language) but I just realised it's probably 20 years since I used it in anger. I do the odd bit of scripting at home and work, and still have an android app to scratch a personal itch that I keep failing to make time for.

I'm also surprised at the recent stats - some languages far lower than I'd expected, some far higher. It is nice to see Python up there - as a Monty Python fan I remember seeing it very early on and have been urging it on ever since.

From the start of the video: iPhone, Android, macbook, pc, kindle, netflix, facebook, instagram...

The video really feels like a over drawn insistence that people recognize that the American economy isn't a pure capitalistic 100% free market environment. That's something that should really be obvious, and not require being said unless your audience are 12 year olds or idiots. It still stands that compared to other giants of the world in China or Russia, it is still America taking the lead on 100% of the innovations that Rob listed, and by comparison, a far more capitalist oriented economy sets America apart. Heck, even include the EU in there as a slightly more socialist economy than America's, and still low and behold it is America that came out with every single example listed...

Pfft, Gauntlet: The Third Encounter was clearly the best Gauntlet. You could be a Valkyrie or Wizard, sure. But other options included Android, Punk Rocker, and Nerd.

It raises the question of why go to the trouble of creating a killer android who looks like a short girl when she also doesn't look like a human. It's not much a disguise.

*ban self link. Posted another vid from same channel. https://videosift.com/video/Android-P-Developer-Preview
Also look at the hash tags the submitter added in the description that was not in the description of the yt video.

Awesome animation. Cuphead was developed by a Canadian company so if available on Android with good controls I'd support by buying the game. Whether I can finish the game is another thing though. I hate virtual D-pad on tablets...

Fucking kids. Stop breeding, people. It's high time we let the androids take over from here.

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

To be overly anal about it, uncanny valley concerns more the eeriness or revulsion 'peak' of a near lifelike replica. Think dead eyes in Polar Express or the plastic faces of Japan's android models.

This to me at least is beyond that trough on the uncanny valley chart, I do not sense any revulsion personally. I can of course detect it is still not real but no particular facet triggers that doppelganger reaction.

Apparently, voice recognition in a car (or using SIRI, or whatever the android version is) is as dangerous as actually using your phone while driving, primarily because it doesn't always work and drivers get annoyed.

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