What patent are you referring to?

Lemmy loves to shit on billionaires, until it’s one they think they like.

You’re trusting that a) they’re not malicious and b) they have their shit together and c) even though they do have their shit together someone doesn’t find a random exploit anyhow.

You could say this about literally any solution short of hand-delivering cash in person.

You do realize that if the bank authorizes a transfer, that you did not… it’s wire fraud and they’re obligated to refund that cash, regardless if they recoup the cash or not.

You do realize that not every transaction happens in countries where these protections exist, right? Not everybody can rely on something like the FDIC to protect their funds.

On the other hand, if you give your credentials to a 3rd party, that’s against the ToS none of us actually read, and if something happens to your account; they’re going to deem it as your fuck up.

You’re not providing your bank credentials directly to the third-party, either. They use OAuth-like systems to log you in, typically. I’m not familiar with Ozow, specifically, but from what I can tell about their company, they appear to be doing mostly the same things as Plaid.

It’s also risky to give. Banks will generally approve all transactions between two accounts if one of them is a business account, because the assumption is that those are business transactions and are legitimate 99.99% of the time, so there’s very little scrutiny involved for those transfers. Giving the merchant your routing/account number gives them access to make withdraws from your account at will and at any time and can’t be revoked, and giving that access to somebody you may not fully trust the reputation of is a dangerous move.

A trusted financial institution as a middleman can be useful for those situations, because they’ll tokenize your details to expose as little as possible to the merchant, directly. These services are typically insured, so even if something did happen to your account, you’re more likely to get your money back than if you gave a merchant direct ACH access to your bank account. It’s basically a modernized version of Western Union.

That’s unusual, but not unheard of. Some online merchants will allow you to make payments via ACH transfers. Can be useful for things like international purchases or if you don’t have a normal credit/debit card to use. Sometimes smaller merchants will prefer this, if they don’t have an existing business partnership with a payment processor already.

Usually these will go through a third-party system that tokenizes your login with your bank. This way the merchant can only access your routing/account numbers to do the transfer. As for why you’d need to provide your bank login instead of the routing/account numbers directly, it’s usually just a form of fraud prevention, as the login verifies that you’re actually the account owner and not trying to pay with a checkbook you found on the street.

It’s similar to Plaid, which is a near-identical service that some merchants in the US use. From what I can tell, Ozow appears to be legitimate, so realistically it’s probably safe to enter your login details as long as you’re not getting any certificate errors on the page.

E: Not sure why this is downvoted. I’m not saying it’s a good system, just saying that it’s not inherently a scam.

I feel like “I’m making a personal choice to pirate because my deliberately-crafted use-case scenario is not being specifically catered to” is a worse argument than “I can’t afford it”.

distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen

This is like an F1 racer getting angry at 7-Eleven for not offering fuel that works for his supercar. You’re not being treated as a second-class citizen; you’ve created a situation in which you are above first-class citizens, because you’re using what is, these days, niche and specialized hardware that is far outside of the norm, but for some reason you’re still shopping at the gas station the rest of us peons go to.

Amazon will often just let you keep items, even if they refund it. It’s generally not worth the cost of shipping back, so they just eat the loss.

I’ve been getting back into playing The Finals lately. Kinda similar to Splitgate, in that the mechanics are easy to understand and mastering them will yield you a lot of fun and victory. The movement is very snappy, there’s a lot of variety in how you can play, and matches are relatively quick.

It’s an objective-based shooter, so you won’t win just by getting kills; you have to complete a specific goal before your enemies to actually win. So it’s a bit like Overwatch or TF2 in that regard (kinda dated references, I know) in terms of goals and a player’s abilities. And the gunplay feels very much like Battlefield, which would make sense because ex-DICE devs worked on this game, I believe. It’s also got crossplay.

It’s got a seasonal/live service model for cosmetics. The battle pass and any other MTX are all only for cosmetics, though; unlocking weapons/abilities can only be done through gameplay, with no skip mechanics. So no weapons, abilities, maps, game modes, etc can be bought with real money at all. Figured I’d mention, since I know that’s a turnoff for a lot of people, but I’ve been enjoying it as a free player.

I miss the arcade-y feel of older racing games. Everything these days tries too hard to be a simulator, that they end up stripping the fun out of it. I want sparks to fly out of my tires when I drift even though they’re rubber and wouldn’t actually do that, I want wacky announcers with color commentary, I don’t want to shift gears.

I want games like Ridge Racer and Need for Speed to make a comeback.

It’s more of an antijoke than a dad joke.

I would definitely classify The Finals as a live service. The way I see it, any game that is designed to be “never-ending”, and have a constant stream of new content (free or paid) would fall under this category of game.

I wouldn’t say it’s a requirement for all live service games, but I’d also say that anything that uses “seasonal” content models would also be considered a live service.

Ahh, a voice changer right where it belongs: on the ankle.

SO HERE I AM

ZZZ is a master class in video game animation. It’s one of the most stylistic games I’ve played in years.

Honestly, it’s pretty far into the PS5’s lifecycle at this point. I think a PS5 Pro this late into the current generation would be a bad move, because a PS6 is undoubtedly around the corner in just a few years and will effectively obsolesce a PS5 Pro, anyway.

If they released a Pro version last year, that’d make more sense. But unless Sony’s expecting this generation to stretch out longer than normal, this just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

I’m pretty sure he just hams it up for the camera. I’ve seen some other, “normal” videos with him and he seems like a mostly normal guy, personality-wise. He’s not as flamboyant as his on-screen persona.

Elon is a fucking terrorist. Deport his ass back to daddy’s emerald mines.

I long for a moneyless, classless game in this genre where the incentives are community thriving, trust, pleasure, and all the other aspects that make life worth worth living outside of capitalism.

I think Sim Ant technically meets these conditions.

It’s not a lie! It’s technically the first thing anybody was stupid enough to name “giga train”!