It’s more like that hunting permit fees fund actual conservation efforts, not that there’s really much of a legitimate conservation effect from the hunting itself. (Except maybe when it’s an invasive species.)

What Nintendidn’t [yet], because that DS ad is a lot more recent and I don’t remember Nintendo itself having anything quite that risque in the '90s.

SEGA did what Nintendidn’t.

You are weirdly combative and rude about this.

Honestly, I’d be inclined to hire the high school’s ornamental horticulture class.

In general, I feel like students/recent grads might be the best way to get somebody who’s at least trying to do a good job, for a good price, at the cost of a higher chance of a genuine mistake due to inexperience rather than apathy.

I’m paranoid enough about it (and also stingy enough) that I mostly do my own work. I hired somebody to fix my HVAC once or twice because I know very little about troubleshooting it and they satisfactorily replaced the compressor capacitor, but later when the blower motor quit working (and I was able to figure out the problem on my own) I replaced that myself. Everything else, including plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc. that’s been done to my house in the last decade and a half, I’ve done myself.

I need to replace my roof soon, which (being critical to finish quickly once you start) is not a job I feel comfortable DIYing, but I can’t bring myself to try to hire anybody either. It’s a dilemma.

Just had one set of subcontractors throw away material for other fixes… Lead group days that the ones involved are no longer a part of the project, so we’re on the hook for even more.

Surely that’s not how that works. Somebody owes you the money for that material, although you might have to sue to get it.

I see every reason to anticipate the possibility and look for actual solutions (not just workarounds) that would head it off, such as organizing to defeat “age verification” politically in the first place.

Having a cavalier attitude like yours is a great way to fucking lose in the long run.

If they’re anonymous, it’s impossible to tell that they’re cops and therefore they must be arrested as criminals.

Once they’re identified and proven to be Federal officials, then they can be released and go on their anonymous way. But only after they’re identified.

I was really just trying to be funny by mentioning the film Nintendo would like everyone to forget, which also happened to vaguely meet your description, but thank you for telling me the correct one.

It’s only a suspicion, but I think crazypeople.online might be related to hilariouschaos and/or exploding-heads. I give extra scrutiny to users from those instances just like I do with those from the .mls, for the opposite reason.

What are you going to do when it’s at the hardware and/or ISP level, and there are no workarounds for it?

They’re not “self-imposed” if they’re illegally imposed by a tyrant.

a b rated movie about some old coots in NY.

What, you mean this?

It’s not “extra” if it’s a legal requirement.

More to the point, I’m not saying it has to be licensed as Free Software or that it has to be made immediately public. I’m saying that a copy needs to be sent to a government archive, regardless of how messy it is, so that the government can make it public later when the company doesn’t care anymore.

LOL, what? You’re the one trying to make a point here, not me. Spit it out. I’m not gonna do your fucking work for you!

It sounds like you’re trying to “hint” at the idea that a bunch of games are using Epic Online Services and/or the Online Subsystem Steam API associated with it, but beyond that I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.

If you’re trying to obliquely cite that as some kind of counterexample where it’s reasonable for a game’s source code to remain secret just because part of it is that library, then no, it fucking isn’t. I can’t tell whether EOS has the source code available along with the rest of the Unreal engine or not, but if not, it ought to be and IDGAF about any excuses Epic might have for not making it so.

If you go full blyatski and outlaw personal ownership, you get Soviet Russia, a nation whose contribution to global culture has been a few ballets, some long depressing books and precisely one video game, because nobody is given incentive or even opportunity to create anything, so they don’t.

To be fair, Soviet Russia probably has a bunch more stuff than that; we just don’t know about it because it didn’t get translated and distributed to the West. The “Dr. Livesey Walk” meme is from a Soviet cartoon, for example.

I can only assume artists got funded by government grants or something, IDK. It probably did result in a lot less of it being created than in the West, though.

(Also, I think the ballets and books you’re alluding to might’ve been pre-Soviet?)

Anyway, I completely agree that copyright and patents are a compromise, and that the pendulum has swung way too far to the side of rights-holders at the moment.

This would be the only type creative work that would be burdened like this.

It’s the only type of creative work that needs to be burdened like this, as all other types of works have always been “self-contained” (for lack of a better term) with no continued reliance on the publisher after the purchase.

Ditto with older games, BTW: you’ll notice that this “Stop Killing Games” movement didn’t start until the game industry started using tactics like DRM and “live service” architectures to forcibly wrest control away from the gamers. Before that, people could just keep playing their cartridges and CDs and even digital downloads, and hosting multiplayer themselves using the dedicated server program included with the game, in perpetuity and everything was just fine.

The industry got fucking greedy and control-freakish, and this is the inevitable and just attempt for society to hold it accountable.

I find it paradoxical that we’re trying to save the gaming industry by burdening (mostly) small developers. Larger studio will no longer be able to abuse the system, but complying will be easy for them.

I find it weird that you’re making what seems to me to be a strawman argument about “burdening (mostly) small developers,” as I’d say they are mostly not the ones trying to do this bullshit where they try to retroactively destroy art and culture because it stops being profitable enough. Indie studios typically don’t design their games to use publisher-operated servers with ongoing costs attached in the first place, let alone to self-destruct when they shut off!

¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

If no such thing exists, they should create it.