Quoting: scaineIf a product is "free" (Steam itself, is free), then you're the product.

While I agree with this concept in general, I'd want to argue that Steam is far from free. You pay for it directly in money--it's just that, like some sales or value added taxes, it doesn't show up on the sticker price that 30% of your purchase went to Steam. Sure, they're gathering data on us and stuff, but their core revenue model is much less subtle than that. Sure, we're "the product" in the sense that Valve is essentially saying to developers: The people want to come here to do their buying, so if you want to be bought from you'd better be here too. But their business model is less handing our information over to people who will pay for it, than handing over our mere presence and willingness to buy. Given that, they depend on customers being pleased with Steam--finding it convenient and ideally even enjoyable to spend time in while not actually playing games as such, the better to entice us to buy more games.

So while I'm sure they're happy to spy on us, I would say that if there ever comes conflict between the spying and the market share, if some instance of spying becomes disliked by Steam users to the extent that some might leave, Valve would definitely consider user market share more important than user market information and publicly dump whatever was pissing people off. Those 30%s are much more important than gathering more information. This is far from being true of all "free" online services.

The eternal question about Steam is not so much how they're getting money from us when the service is "free" as whether the services they provide are actually worth the 30% (ish) tax we pay them on every game we buy. I personally still have no idea what the answer to that is--I don't think the information we'd need to evaluate it is available.

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Quoting: GuestPlace when I life this year: excess number of deaths is above 100 000 and Covid kill 6 000, fight against covid kill much more humans that covid did, people were dying in hospitals because the doctors were afraid to help them (because of covid)

I suspect you are misinterpreting something. I am aware of many places where people are/were dying in hospitals because Covid patients (disproportionately anti-vaxxers) are taking up all the beds and there aren't enough staff to treat everyone. I have never heard of a single case of doctors refusing to treat people because they fear Covid--even though they do, in fact, fear it and are stressed as hell as a result. Although they probably fear it less now, because they're all vaccinated.
If you are not misinterpreting your information source, I suspect that instead your information source was slandering doctors with false allegations, a practice I disapprove of and which has become all too common during Covid among certain political groups.

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou do realize the the whole and only point of laws about "intellectual property" is to allow money to be made from it, right?

Just like any other profession. Are you "greedy" because you work? The laws are there to protect you from theft and exploitation of your work, regardless if you make bicycles, write books or create software.

I can't believe we're still having these discussions around piracy. I really honestly can't believe we've not gotten further.

As far as I know I was not having a discussion about piracy, because there is in this case no allegation that piracy is going on.
As to what the law is for . . . individual people do what they gotta do. If the law and the system that the law creates is bad, that does not mean everyone living in it is bad. In Pinochet's Chile, the government disappeared thousands of people and was vicious and oppressive. Does that mean every schmoe working for the government, say in vehicle registration or teaching primary school, was evil? Of course not. So no, if I criticize the current system of "intellectual property" that does not mean you are an evil person for working within it. That's how the game works, you're just playing. So please stop taking it all so bloody personally.
But anyhow, the system of intellectual property we have was not put in place for people like you; you are a grudgingly accepted side effect. The current length of US copyright protection, for instance, was put in place specifically for Disney--it is unlikely that you have a real use for copyright protection that lasts until your death plus fifty years. And no real person can afford to patent anything any more.

You talk like anyone who isn't pleased with the current "intellectual property" system must want lawlessness and anarchy. I can't speak for anyone else, but my position is that, duh, bad systems should be replaced by better systems, not by nothing. People tend to by hypnotized by how things currently work where and when they happen to be, into thinking that's the only way things could possibly work, or the only way things could work well. But they worked differently in the past, they work differently in different places, and they will work differently in the future, so refusing to so much as entertain the possibility of things being different is a kind of madness.

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Quoting: amataiBy the way, what is DLSS ?

It's a weird new-ish graphics technology. Far as I can tell, it lets you run stuff at lower resolution and then kind of pretends they're higher resolution again, giving you the high-res level of detail, almost, but for much less processing cost, so you can get a better frame rate. It and another similar tech (one NVidia, one AMD) were kind of introduced to let computers run ray-tracing at faster than a crawl, but it has much broader applicability.

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Stardander? As in . . . dandruff from stars?!

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Quoting: F.UltraThe difference most likely down to vaccination rates, Sweden have so far vaccinated 63.7% of the entire population while Romania 28.1%

Our vaccination rates are higher than Sweden's in Canada and we have a wave happening. It's the Delta variant; if that takes hold you need near complete vaccination coverage before it would decline with no other measures, because it's way more infectious. So the Swedes better hope they don't have any Delta.

And yeah, I think Valve made the right call here. Thinking of variants, an international gathering like that would bring them all; then they'd duke it out in a tournament and the most infectious would win. The prize? Getting to go back to all the countries the participants came from . . .

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Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: scaineIf they release their Trilogy at a higher price, it's simple greed. If they release it at a lower price, it's a stupid move that costs them: in sales, in legal fees and in reputation with their fanbase (whatever that might be worth).

It's not just "simply greed". To defend your properties do come at a cost. To choose not to defend your property because the bottom line isn't green enough - now that's rather what one should call greed. To drop it because it doesn't lead to short term immediate economical gain.

You do realize the the whole and only point of laws about "intellectual property" is to allow money to be made from it, right?

Also the whole and only point of the existence of limited liability corporations. Greed is technically their sole raison d'etre.

So, if an entity dedicated solely to making money deploys legal powers created solely to let entities make money, in such a way as to lose them money . . . that's just brain dead. There's no higher purpose to those powers, using them to lose money is just failing on the only level available.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: BeamboomQuoting: scaine
It would be the kind of brain dead thinking you often see from publishers (re: DRM).
I don't think it's brain dead to defend your own intellectual property.

I don't think so, either.

I do think they are stupid to go about it in that way, but they are fully in their right to do so

Scaine didn't comment on whether they are within their rights to do so. I don't think it's illegal for me to, if I legally own a firearm, use it to literally shoot myself in the foot. But it would be brain-dead for me to do it.

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So does anyone else wonder what's up with Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS 64 bit? The stat says it's at 15.38% and went up +15.38%. So, like, it just came into existence?

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Quoting: DerpFox

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: DerpFoxThe Index as impressive as it is in terms of tech. It was (and still is) way overpriced in the current VR market.

They can't even supply the demand, so you're obviously wrong here.

That absolutely mean nothing.

That depend entirely on their manufacturing capacity. For all we know, they could only be able to make a dozen a day.

Well, but the point is, there's no sense making a mass market loss-leader thing that can sell ten gazillion units if you can only produce a dozen units a day. You might as well make a boutique thing that sells at a solid margin if you are only going to be able to produce boutique-thing numbers.

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