And you’ve got KOTOR and Pillars of Eternity and others that are clearly D&D derivatives, but solve the problem handily with a “stash” whose contents are never accessible in combat.
I have never understood the fascination with inventory management. I just want to find stuff, and use that stuff later on. If I wanted something as boring as my actual job, I’d just do my actual job and get paid for it instead of buying a game.
I think what distinguishes Internet service provision from all the other “platform” aspects of the Internet is that Internet service has become a kind of baseline utility. Everything depends on it: your smart home devices, your security system, Point of Sale systems, etc. You can’t search for employment without it, your kids can’t attend remote school, etc.
We all understand that when someone buys advertising space in a newspaper, they are forming a contract with that newspaper, and the paper has to be a willing participant. But that’s not really how we think of utilities. I think we’d all be pretty unhappy if the electric company refused service to a facility, or if the water company refused to hook somebody up to the water supply, or the fire department refused to put out a fire, due to the property user’s political speech. Even if we deeply disagreed with that speech.
I think ISPs are a lot more like utilities, and a lot less like newspapers. If it’s that important, then write a law explaining exactly how and when ISPs are intervene by removing or refusing service in these situations, and defend the law in court. But don’t leave it up to ISP terms of service.
Will Apple sell more devices if they fully support the standard?
I stand to the question. Apple is pretty famous for saying what people want to hear, and not actually doing much.
My cynical interpretation of the right-to-repair announcement is: we know Europe is gonna cram this down our throats, so let’s try and get control of the narrative while there’s still time.
Hard to say. The bill is neutral on the question of vendor-locked parts, it only says that the company has to make the real parts available to product owners as they would make them available to authorized repair centers.
I mean, it would be nice to mandate that the vendor can’t implement technology to prevent the installation of third-party clone parts, but I don’t know how you would structure that, legally.
I’m not knocking Framework at all here (and in fact they may be my next laptop), but repairability and long-lasting don’t quite mean the same thing. Usually when people say “long lasting” they mean something that is durable and reliable. Repairability can contribute to that, of course, but the option of 3D printing my own parts, or open specs on certain parts, doesn’t really make the device last longer without breaking. At best, it gives me some options to remediate it when it fails, and if I’m not capable of making my own parts, then my only option may be to buy parts anyway and deal with downtime.
I’m not sure there is much intersection between PC & console gamers and social/casual gamers.
I can’t speak for anybody else, I guess, but neither I nor any gamers I routinely interact with play these freemium/social/mobile type games. Like, at all.
I think that looking to ourselves and our habits for answers will not tell us much, as those gamers are not in our sphere of influence.
Yeah, my mom has been using AOL.com since the 90s. When the dedicated client went away, I pointed her at mail.aol.com and she was fine. She’s still using it today.
Err…
Users will keep their exisiting (sic) email addresses on this service, and would get it free for the first year. After that, there will be options of paying for a service, or an ad-based free service after that.
So, what’s the problem, exactly? Just take the ad-based free service. Gmail, Yahoo, etc. are ad-based free services too. Nobody is forcing them to change anything.
Although you don’t have to be smarter than the experts, just smarter than police. Few local PDs can bring the kinds of resources to bear to do a decrypt on a properly encrypted data store.
Obviously if you’re pissing off major state actors, all bets are off – they are probably already surveilling you and saw you type your password through a zoom lens pointed at your window, or worse.
It’s layers on an onion. Every extralegal step they take provides a possible mitigation if you go to trial.
Obviously, if they straight up murder somebody, that’s a whole different problem. But in general, you should invoke your rights at every step of the process, so that if they trample over those rights you’ll have an argument in court to get evidence or charges thrown out.
Yeah, just get an MP3 player that uses an SD card, and copy your MP3 files to the card.
The question is, where are your files? Are they already on your phone or iPad? If not, you have the challenge of ripping from a USB CD player to the iPad or Pixel. I have no idea what software can do that, but there are apps on the Google Play store that claim to be able to.
Sounds like a great opportunity to dig up an old laptop and use Linux, though. I’ve got a couple of USB DVD readers sitting in a drawer that I pull out for these jobs, they’ve worked fine for years.