Itty53

It’s actually a really old practice, “the first DRM”. You’d place things in your game that could only be solved by having the manual on hand, meaning you purchased it. Many games took a jovial approach to it, letting you play the game, but in a broken state if you answered incorrectly and indicated you’d pirated it. Castles II comes to mind, also Kings Quest 5. Others did the “die if you didn’t have the manual”, but those let you go on … just knowing you’d lose every single time.

It’s this. It’s a business decision. You don’t spin servers up in a second and take them down hours later, there’s contracts involved. You spin up enough servers to handle the load you expect normally, not at launch.

Honestly I played Payday 1 A LOT, enough to be in the top 1% of 1% of players. Got invited to the studios after being among the first to complete the ARG.
Then played Payday 2 A LOT.

But I quit halfway through the lifetime of 2 because it was clearly not getting any better, but worse. They stopped innovating and just started looking at player builds and releasing more and more powerful bulldozers. Got boring really fast.

So when 3 was announced? I haven’t even looked at it.

Microsoft doesn’t want to rely on licensed software every time they install their programs either. Again, Valve taking a queue from MS. And that’s fine BTW, the whole industry follows MS.

Moreover the real issue, the difference in computing cost between running Win10 with all the unnecessary boost vs Linux is massive. Had they used Windows it would’ve costed more to be able to run less.

As to being reliant on Windows, that’s been their standard most of their history. Steam was Windows based. If Windows were to go ahead with making a stripped down Windows OS that was specific to gaming, such as the one demoed in a code jam earlier this year, you can bet steam would be selling that version of Windows direct from their store, and likely have a easy tool ready to use to install it to your deck. They would probably offer it as an installation option too. Why not? There’s no good reason they shouldn’t. The whole verified question goes out the window. That’s huge. But again, MS controls that situation, not Valve. They’re still reliant on MS in major ways.

Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.

He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It’s literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.

I really don’t get why people think he’s all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn’t sell, theft and litigation.

Put simply, they could not retroactively apply new changes to you.

Sounds like they could though?

Jokes aside, this is another in a recent string of “let’s pretend our ToS are legally binding documents as fool-proof as the law” actions by major companies because … well, who’s stopping them?

Counter point, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I’m not gonna argue your brother (“my sister in law is the wife of a cop” is a strange way to say that) is evil simply for being a cop, no, but your brother does defend bad cops all the time. Every cop does. They call it a brotherhood for a reason, and the expectation is that their brotherhood runs deeper than yours. Be aware of that and keep him aware too. Because if he’s “one of the good ones” he’s in real danger if ever he spoke out against the bad ones. Real, life threatening danger. That I can say that of police and back it up with a dozen examples of cops killing other cops should at the very least give you pause.

By the way if you do the “don’t assume their gender” thing from my assumption that it’s your brother, oh boy they’re in a lot more danger than I originally thought.

Somehow? I’m not stopping you. You keep talking about something else - you keep insisting China and America do the same bad things. And I’m correcting you. That’s all.

I’m not stopping you from talking about what America has done, in fact I already told you we can talk about it. Four times I said those words, in each individual comment I wrote to you. Every time you made a choice not to and instead chose to double down on your original take, flawed and incorrect though it was. Every time you just insisted I was defending America and I never did.

So talk. You have things to say, say them. Don’t do this childish “well fine” act where you pretend I’m controlling what you can and cannot say.

By the way China never murdered and raped the middle east. Just one more example of the point isn’t it?

Call me a hypocrite, that’s fine. I never cared much what children think of me. Grow up kiddo.

“gamers are doing with a new Bethesda game what they’ve done with every previous Bethesda game! You won’t believe what comes next!”

“you guys screw me out of thirteen or fourteen more Kickstarter funding rounds and I’ll take my business elsewhere!”

- SC funders

Am I supposed to be upset? I’m not. Grow up dude you’re not that cool.

You’re not a tech bro. You’re not a venture capitalist. You’re a sys admin. That’s not a tech bro, and depending on your industry it might not really even be the tech industry. Shit, frozen burrito companies need sys admins. They’re not the tech industry.

Your know your history is public yeah? You sit and play video games all day. Fifteen pages of video game commentary, and not high level stuff either. Just basic “I play these aren’t they fun” commentary. Believe me, you’re not special or unique, you’re an open book that can be read from twenty feet away.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure I can say with confidence you’re not some venture capitalist speaking for other venture capitalists, kiddo. Dream on. Those guys wouldn’t sit at the same table with you.

“working in tech” is a very different thing than “working among vc startups”. Tech bros is a perjorative that refers to the latter. I’ve worked as a software developer for nearing on two decades, but I’ve stayed far far from the vc startup world. They are two wholly different things.

So unless you think of yourself as “a tech bro” (which if you do, that’s weird, because it is a perjorative), then yeah. You understand exactly, based on your experience. I bet you don’t work among the vc startup crew that dominates mainstream tech news. Most of us don’t.

I’m surprised the FBI wouldn’t have a master key for each manufacturer.

AT&T anyone?

For the uninformed. If you think that a safe manufacturer providing a master key directly to law enforcement would be “a step too far” I invite you to click the link below.

Security is mostly theater. So Privacy is mostly theater.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Tech bros aren’t typically progressives any more than green party candidates are Democrats. Tech bros are typically libertarian. They try to align with the left since it markets better but that’s always been an obvious, transparent lie. Progressives and tech bros aren’t friends.

Uh you can get every one of those details from inference in their PR response. No speculation required. Just read like an informed adult.

They were asked to open the safe by law enforcement because they had a warrant for the safe. Not targeting the company itself. The company won’t be mentioned in the warrant. But they have very likely done this many many times prior - they said as much and I’m sure law enforcement types have a great working relationship with gun safe manufacturers for very obvious reasons. We’re talking like four companies that hold 99% of the market. That’s an easy assumption.

It’s the cognitive dissonance between pro-police and anti-authority that a very certain political bloc is dealing with in this “news” that makes it “news” at all.

And that reality makes the comments very very telling. Lotta folks wearing masks here.

The company willingly complied with a law enforcement request, that’s literally all that happened. Happens all the time. It’s only news when they don’t comply -that’s abnormal- or when it’s being made a political issue by people who insist they’re above politics. See some in this thread.

The company complied, the government only asked. They didn’t force anything.

Don’t be their customer. You’re the one making this political.

“contraband” being just “things” made only contraband by virtue of being illegal. Just like certain kinds of speech, such as conspiracy to commit crimes.

So tbf, they’re still the exact same thing.

Edit, @theragu40 it isn’t pedantic. Law enforcement is about enforcing laws, not preventing violence. That the two things coincide every now and again means nothing. Words matter.

Pedantry is being picky about words when the definitions are irrelevant. When communication was successful despite the wrong word used and someone wants to correct the word anyway, that’s a pedant. Here, the difference between violent illegal and just illegal are pretty much irrelevant as far as what the law says.

with Liberty Safe Inc getting into trouble if they didn’t comply.

Only if the warrant included Liberty Safe themselves. Which it most certainly did not.

There is no legal obligation they have to cooperate with law enforcement in investigations they aren’t subjects of. That’s true of every company in America. Every person in America too, for that matter.

I don’t disagree with them for doing so, nor do I disagree with you in that they would’ve gotten that safe open anyway. But don’t conflate a business being willing to bend over for law enforcement as an obligation. It rarely ever is. Lots of MAGA morons here doing exactly that too, saying the government overstepped. They didn’t. They just asked, Liberty complied willingly. If you’ve got a problem here, it’s with that company.

See the Apple case for all the nitty gritty in that. Apple doesn’t cooperate with Law Enforcement.

Again, we can talk about the terrible shit America has done and still does. I won’t deny it. Yes murder is bad. Okay? That’s not what you’re here arguing though. You wanna try again, no sweat. I’ll listen. Will you?

“Anything bad China has done, America has too” is what you said. That is not just factually wrong, it’s childish and ignorant and above all lazy. You can’t even be arsed to be more than nominally aware of things.

I was very clear about this already, so that you want to keep arguing tells me you’re not reading my replies at all or they won’t matter anyway, you’ll just pound your fists and stomp your feet. Fine. Do that. It’s alright. Won’t help you, won’t get you any closer to a better world, but you’ll feel better for a half second. Neat yeah?

Ah yes, rather than address your inconsistent arguments, call me a racist. Clever one you are, why didn’t I think of that?

Jokes aside you can be mad all you like, you’re still wrong. We can talk about the awful shit America does and has done, but it won’t be the same as what China has done.

Enjoy your second year of community college.

That’s a highly generalized take that doesn’t hold water at all. The American government sucks but they’re not operating organ farms in concentration camps targeting religions, they’re not redrawing their maps to include parts of neighboring nations like Mexico and Canada, they’re not funding North Korea as the DPRK launches missiles over South Korea and Japan, they don’t have social credit scores, they don’t systematically harass and threaten their own citizens abroad…

We can keep going if you want. And we can talk about the terrible shit America does too.

But “these two entities are both bad and therefore they do the same exact things” is fucking dumb, naive, myopic, childish, and a bunch of other pejoratives I could think of. Grow up.