ImplyingImplications
I heard The Birds was a classic movie so I watched it one day. The only thing I remember is that the woman who is being chased by murderous crows runs into a bar and asks for a ride home to avoid being attacked. A guy downs his whiskey and then says “I’ll drive you home, miss”.
What is the benefit of forcing developers to provide access to old games that require online functionality indefinitely, instead of just hard limiting them to say 10 years wich is essentially indefinite in terms of non-live service games.
In a choice between “you can play online until 2035” and “you can play online forever”, the answer is pretty obvious. All things being equal, the indefinite option is better. I think the problem is that all things are not equal, and making it a legal requirement that all games with online features come with a guarantee those features work indefinitely is incredibly vague and can lead to situations that outright hurt developers.
If the devs need to provide a server binary for players to host a server, how do they ensure these servers only allow players who have purchased the game to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is forcing companies to allow pirate servers to exist
How do they ensure people running these community servers aren’t charging money for people to play? If they can’t ensure it, then the law is allowing people to use a company’s IP to generate money without a licence.
If the original version had an in-game shop where you can unlock things with real life money but the offline version doesn’t have a shop, thus making parts of the game forever unobtainable, did they follow the law? If not, then devs would have to give out paid features for free.
Unless these kinds of details are accounted for, this vague idea is doomed to fail because no government is going to force a company to give up their copyright/IP for free. I know a lot of people have also said “fuck these giant corporations” but this also affects indie developers as well. Copyright protects small creators as much as it does large ones.
They’re doing this because they’ve lost so much money investors are angry and the executives want to win people back. They aren’t worried about law changes, they’re worried about their stock price and reputation.
In the 12 years since European Citizens Initiatives have existed, there have been few successful campaigns even fewer actual law changes. If I were a greedy company, I wouldn’t be worried about this in the slightest.
If ECIs are to become a useful tool for civil society, campaigners would benefit from a better understanding of how to craft their demands in a way that is likely to lead the Commission to actually propose a legislative initiative. There have now been 133 ECI attempts, millions of signatures collected, a significant amount of money spent, and little to show for it.
I also thought the entire reason for treating minors differently is because they’re more likely to commit petty crimes and that shouldn’t hurt their future.
A teenager who did a breaking and entering made a bad decision and should be given another chance. Their bad decision shouldn’t haunt them for the rest of their life because that just ensures their only option is to continue committing crimes. A mass murder should not be given another chance. That’s not a stupid decision a kid makes.
For my (Canadian) city:
Total expenses are $207.6 million
Police, Fire Rescue, and Ambulance are listed together at $35.7 million, or 17% of expenses.
The biggest expense is Social Housing and Welfare at $72.5 million or 35% of expenses.
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter.
