When cops only legal responsibility is to enforce the law, and the laws are written to protect corporate interests, of course they will stand outside the school and arrest protesters. SCOTUS has ruled that way so many times that “to serve and protect” is literally gaslighting.
It really is unfortunate as it COULD be a really good feature if it were being implemented by someone who wasn’t just trying to crowdsource AI training data that will go into commercial products without compensation to anyone. It could be a great tool for professionals and experts to expand on what creators say, a way to call out falsehoods and Hypocrites, and a way to find your people in a world that is growing ever bleaker. But no, it is just being done to force more ads down our throats and harvest more money from us.
Why are we surprised? They were the ones who pioneered the DLC microtrans model. I would legitimately have been more surprised if this headline were the converse statement.
Yes, many. Are they going to do any of them? Not even remotely. If any actual governance occurs while Biden is in office then they can’t claim him to be inept at governing.
Tbh I have always had the same feeling about the absolute limit of speed being the speed of light (and thus most of relativity). I have always been curious if the behavior we observe that lines up with the theory is something akin to transition energy in a material. Once a material reaches the appropriate temperature to phase change, additional energy is needed to actually change phases. If you were able to raise water to precicely 100°C and only impart exactly as much energy is lost to infrared radiation and other effects, it would never actually start boiling.
Hypothetically, of we were water mocules observing our environment, that transition energy might look like a hard barrier with no way to observe the other side. Same idea here, we see masses increase and time slow down based on acceleration, and it appears asymptotic, but there is nothing saying there is not some here yet undiscovered energy level where the fabric of space begins to behave differently and the transition to superluminal velocities becomes possible.
I am getting really tired of these all these chucklefucks being in charge of things they patently do not understand. Modders are the modern lifeline of gaming. They work for free, fix your fuck-ups, and breath life into games that are years and sometimes decades old. Rimworld and Factorio both started their crowd funding campaigns in 2013, and both are wildly popular 11 years later, still selling copies. Factorio is just now coming out with their first expansion, and Rimworld just came out with their 4th. Neither Ludeon Studios (Rimworld) nor Wube Software (Factorio) have had ANY financial need to produce any other projects besides these games. Why are they so wildly profitable and evergreen? They both have rabid modding communities that have been supported and cultivated by the developers constantly fixing and expanding modding support to allow for an infinite variety of new content to be created for their games. Hell, the Vanilla Expanded team of Rimworld modders have actually turned it into a primary income source via Patreon.
AAA devs need to just sit down and thank these modders for tirelessly working on their games after release for free. Ever since DoTA became more popular than Warcraft 3, they all have their panties in a bunch and keep trying to claim ownership over all mods. No, bad developers smacks on the nose with a rolled up newspaper. God, it pisses me off to no end.
Only if you ignore WHY it has the ability to do that. The reason is the hydroelectric power plant, or more specifically the construction of the plant, required that they divert the falls for a couple years a LONG time ago. They have maintained the capacity to divert the flow of the river to ensure that they are able to perform maintenance on the plant and the various national park infrastructures around the falls. The seasonal diversions are usually to perform said maintenance as well as to protect parts of the power plant from freezing. It is actually one of the great engineering marvals of the early 20th century.
Not all heroes wear capes. Seriously, this man is now enshrined in my mental halls of great men along with John Bannister Goodenough, whom I just discovered died last year. I’m going to go be heartbroken now.
This is all technically true and I 90% agree with the measures you suggested. My only issues are the fact that the ability for a seller to just ignore the negotiation request functionally means that EULAs are nonnegotiable contracts. Our rights mean nothing because their right of refusal is inherently more final. A consumer has no recourse to press the engagement of a seller who has refused negotiations.
I agree in principal that the advocacy should be held at arms length from government agencies, but then you end up with well funded minority advocacy groups like the various right wing religious “parents” groups that push for censorship and other BS that most people are not for. The only way I would accept a civilian advocacy group would be if it were heavily regulated on how it can operate and absolute transparency on the books. I want to know who is funding them, who is directing their “advocacy”, and have the ability to collectively pump the brakes on them of they start working against our interests.
I think the strongest idea is the one we share. EULA contracts need to be reigned in and be much more heavily restricted in what they can and cannot say. There also should be a legal framework for managing the whole “if any part of this contract is found to be unenforceable, all other clauses remain in effect” because it allows companies to put bullshit clauses that they know are outright illegal and violate consumer rights into the EULAs and just write it off when they get caught without consequences. There should be a limit somewhere. Some way for a judge or regulatory body to step in and say “OK, you have like 5 unenforceable clauses in here, the contract is void and all consumers who were previously party to it are released. Also, here is a $10,000/affected consumer fine, you have 30 days to pay it.” Idk, something with real teeth.
Feature gating behind data privacy permissions needs to be illegal immediately.
I literally have a real “Consumer Protection Act” wishlist that I keep a running tally on in my head. Near the top of the list are things like “rent caps”, “strict opt-in for direct marketing”, and “strict opt-in for all data tracking”. On the last two, it is a “no purchase necessary” situation. Features and functionality are not allowed to be gated behind opting in.
Oh, and big one here, no subscriptions gating features on purchased or leased property. If it is not directly paying for a perpetual service, fuck yourselves. If I see the word “subscription” tied to cars one more time I may start fomenting revolt. I have been seeing it more and more. Manufactured goods having their functions gated behind continuing to pay for the item is absolute bullshit and should be illegal. I’m wanting to lump SaaS in with that too. Consumers should be allowed to file suit to force companies to justify their subscriptions and there should be some pretty harsh guidelines on what qualifies. We need to be allowed to own things. Subscriptions and SaaS both do away with consumer ownership.
Last one… EULAs need to be negotiable by individuals. Period. The idea that we can just “not use it if we don’t like the contract” is ludicrous in the modern world. No matter how careful one is, if you want to participate in the world, you must enter into a binding contract which can essentially take any rights and liberties they want with no recourse on the part of the consumer. And I don’t care if it would he prohibitively expensive for companies to do that. Just don’t make EULAs that people will feel the need to object to and you won’t have to worry. Costs nothing but all of the souls you harvest on a daily basis.
Just train a couple LoRAs and you can add in the vectors needed for doing whatever you want. “Circumventing” “safeguards” in this case means using a feature built into the system already. I have been making AI porn from the start. The day in installed their local framework for using it and got a Rick Astly image instead of anime tits I went and found their censorship function and neutered it. It is just python code, super easy to do.
I saw that line and immediately thought “oh ho ho, we have a loophole. This wasn’t a subjective review, it was entirely objective. The game is objectively shit.”
My hot take, in the digital age, all direct marketing should be opt-in with the platform. Opt-in for industries with the ability to ban specific advertisers.
Yo ho ho my friend. Yo ho ho.
They just need to be sure to let them know that this is a 10 day cease-protest trial period and that after that 10 days is up they will be moving the protest to the front lawns of the board of trustees.
As far as I’m concerned the inclusion of the “anti-DoTA” clause in their EULA murdered it for me. I was so excited. KSP is one of my favorite games of all times, largely as a result of the vibrant and very technically advanced modding community. Same goes for essentially all of my favorites; Rimworld, Backpack Hero, Factorio. The free labor that expands the games in major ways extends the value of my money and let’s me have fun forever in them.
Putting in a clause in a EULA which automatically and irrevocably assumes all ownership and rights to any code or assets that are created for a game is just too far. Assuming rights at all is a huge issue for me, but I can accept that it is beneficial to assume royalty free licenses to the mods, I’ll even begrudgingly accept clauses that allow developers to gaffle features and optimizations from mods without giving remuneration or even acknowledgment. But wholesale ownership that revokes all rights and licenses for the independent 3rd party creator. Fuck that. I will never support a game that I find out is treating the people who keep games alive and relevant for decades for free like that.
The example of stubbing ones toe is a strawman. It is levying a rhetorical argument which has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It is also hyperbolic and satirical.
Taken from excelsior.edu on the topic of sreawman arguments.
Distort: equate it with a non-topical example.
Exaggerate: use hyperbole in the example to describe a link between stubbing one’s toe and deaths in car accidents.
Lack of engagement with my argument: there was no support for your assertion that the companies I mentioned do not engage in phone/textual communication when all of them work on the phone, are able to make voice calls, transmit text between phones, and are able to be set as the default SMS apps for a phone, which then subjects SMS communication to thier monitoring and filtering.
I know it subjects them to filtering as I once had Facebook Messenger set as my default SMS app and attempted to SMS a friend a porbhub link and FBM said that the message failed to send. Non-pornhub links worked just fine, but they filtered my porn message, and it was on SMS.
I know precisely what a strawman argument is. I made a good faith response, you did not.
No, they will continue to do that because it makes them uncomfortable.