What’s stored is hash(password). Then the password check is stored == hash(entered).

Hash(x) will be the same length, regardless of what x is. What that length is depends on which hash function it is. So the database can set the length of its storage for each user’s password to the length of the hash and the hash function will take any size password.

Until they remove checking that reg key from all versions other than maybe enterprise. If they decide that running windows requires an MS online account, they can keep bumping up the difficulty of running it without whenever they want.

Which suggests to me that MS stores plaintext passwords. Because a hash function doesn’t care about the length of what it’s hashing, the output will always be the same length, so they could verify a 300 character password with the same storage space as a 3 character password.

We are closer to the 2060s than the 1960s.

This year, 1975 is as far away as 2075.

Even with civilisation or society, there’s always been a subset of people looking to exploit whatever facet of existence they can, whether it be religion, politics, crimes of opportunity, weaknesses in social systems, or even the justice systems that are supposedly meant to deal with those flaws.

And to add even more complexity, other people who aren’t pieces of shit looking to exploit others form emotional attachments to those who are and are fooled by their lies and will defend them. Others don’t have attachments but see parallels to themselves and worry that attempts to deal with the problematic ones will result in the same treatment being applied to them (and aren’t necessarily wrong because even justice trying to act in good faith can get it wrong).

It’s all a complex web of power struggles and religion is just one set of stands.

KQ6 was great though. You’d go through and beat the game but notice that you’re many points short of the maximum and there were a bunch of loose threads that never got solved. It was the first game I ever played with two paths to the end and finding that second path was so good. Especially getting to play during one scene that was seen many times before as a cut scene, along with a puzzle whose solution completely changed the tone of the scene (figuratively and literally lol).

Though I don’t think I have the patience to do all of that again. I think I originally played that game over a period of months with no progress at all in many sessions. But I kept coming back to it as a kid.

Literally if you’re playing on the original NES controllers made in a time before Nintendo understood the importance of erganomics. The corners dug into hands and even the buttons wore at fingers and I say that as someone who has naturally thick callouses.

Iirc, they didn’t even have the satisfying button press mechanism most buttons have these days where the button resistance drops as you pass the threshold of a “press”. And many games involved mashing or holding buttons. Like it was painful to watch my daughter try playing SMB and not just hold the B button to constantly run.

They were iconic but I prefer to see them than use them.

Also OG doom is good if you get bored while opening your fridge because if your fridge door has a screen, it can handle playing OG doom and pass the time it takes waiting for the door to finish opening.

I grew up playing King’s Quest 5, 6, and 7. I was curious about the earlier ones and eventually found them on an abandonware site a while back and they didn’t age very well. Turns out 5 was the first one that was all point and click based. Prior to that, they were text based and you needed to know the exact wording or alternatives that they had thought of or you couldn’t do anything. I’m sure they were great games for their time but I just couldn’t get into them.

More recently, I bought the collection on steam. I’m not sure how well someone who has never played them before would enjoy them, but I found 5 and 6 still stood up, despite being like 30 years old. Though it might also help that I could still remember a bunch of the puzzles, as they could be pretty unforgiving of mistakes. Save often because you could die at any moment, and hope you don’t miss picking up an item you’ll need later on or you might get eaten by a yeti or something.

Yeah, I bought fairly recently (as interest rates were starting to climb) and it was 100% a qol decision rather than a financial one. I’m paying more in interest now than I was paying in rent before, so instead of giving my money away to a landlord, I’m giving it away to my mortgage company.

The only way I’ll come out ahead financially is if the value goes up. But I have mixed feelings on that, too, because the housing situation is fucked here and value continuing to go up will mean that the situation is still fucked. I don’t want this place to be my home forever, so if the price here goes up, then the price of better places will also go up and it ends up being a wash until I don’t need to own and can sell, but even that would be tough because inheritance is probably going to be my daughter’s only way of ever owning her own place.

Or, on the other hand, if they fix the housing issue here by limiting the number of residences any person can own and barring corporations from owning at all (or at least not having them count as new people for number of places they can own), then prices will crash and most people who currently has a mortgage will end up owing more than their house is worth and will still be fucked in that way. Unless the government makes the banks eat some of that or does a bailout for homeowners.

But anything in the above paragraph would probably take a revolution to actually happen because all of these bugs for regular people are features for those that have the wealth to influence the political power.