One question I have about this is, can they handle issues like latency? Google seems to be planning to somewhat overcome such problems by the brute force expedient of they already have servers bloody everywhere, so huge chunks of the market can be physically close to where their games are running. Can Valve match that?

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Well, just for the record in case anyone wants to call anyone that, I am an extremist. :D
Although perhaps not on identity politics, which I consider in good part a game attempt to defeat problems caused by capital and class issues, while carefully avoiding any acknowledgement of either so much as existing. As a result, it ends up treating symptoms without addressing causes. I still support the efforts, just like I support giving a sick person something to bring down a high fever, but there are limitations to the approach.

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Quoting: psyminPlease share with us objective definitions of "racism", "misogyny", "sexism", and "bigotry".

Too often these terms are defined in a subjective manner.

Please note that it is quite possible to be racist against (or for) any race, including white.

Please note that it is quite possible to be sexist against (or for) any gender, including male.

Please share with us an objective definition of "definition".
Language is somewhat fuzzy, yes. And indeed, all terms are ultimately defined in a (somewhat) subjective manner. Linguistic meaning is determined by usage. But I've noticed that generally nobody has that hard a time getting what they mean across and nobody worries that much about this stuff unless either
1) They have an English Literature paper due and their prof is into postmodernism, or
2) They want to evade the common meanings of something for political reasons. So suddenly if we talk about sexism or racism we get all these postmodernist, deconstructionist right wingers wanting to quibble about linguistic indeterminacy and, not generally having a background in English Literature, not doing it terribly well.

Now, the whole "well, you can be racist and sexist against white males, too, you know" thing which I hear ad nauseam. Speaking as a straight white male, I've got it made. There's all kinds of shit I don't take because of it. It takes a special kind of whiny to complain that other races and genders and orientations and whatnot getting a fair shake now and then is some kind of reverse discrimination. Still, there probably are a fair number of blacks who are resentful of white folks and have skewed views of them, et cetera et cetera. But it doesn't matter. For two basic reasons: One, the fact that people worry more about one kind of discrimination than another does not affect the typical remedy proposed--so for instance, in no code of conduct anywhere does it says "You can't say bad things about any group except white males"--rather, the approach is always to apply some general principle of equality and/or civility, which will happen to protect the poor oppressed white males even though there was no particular intent to do so. Second, because prejudice is a problem largely because it is used by those with more power to step on those with less. If those with less power get upset about that, it has little impact on those with more power doing the stepping, so there's not much reason to fear it.

Some white males like to pretend that pendulums have shifted so far, people are worrying so much about (various other groups) that now we're somehow the oppressed group, but it's the most utter patent bullshit. White guys still have the money and the power and better interest rates and less chance of getting whacked by cops and on and on and on. The utterly wimpy fear I often see displayed, of the prospect of having to operate on a level playing field with everyone else, shames me.

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Up to now I've considered "Edge" just an edgy rebranding of same old Internet Exploder. But if they're doing a new one based on Chromium and not (well, so far) even coming up with ways to take it closed, that is certainly something new. And having it be on Linux is probably good, I guess. I mean, I'm not likely to use it, but still, the stuff Liam said.

Really, hard to find fault with this particular move, and I say this as someone with a long memory who has not forgotten why Microsoft is loathsome. I'm sure they will do plenty of other things I hate in the future, but I must admit this doesn't seem to be one of them.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Purple Library GuyWeren't you arguing that the point was that they should be able to exercise free speech while working in the project and so, in this example, act like a misogynist?

I never said that anyone should be able to freely take the piss on other team members or users, that would be pretty damn stupid.

But as long as they keep their misogynist acting outside of the project and interactions with its users, and as long as it doesn't become extreme with calls to violence or stuff like that, there is no problem.

Quoting: Purple Library GuyIf they're restraining themselves, that's back to the code of conduct you don't like.

The code is fine, for the most part. Just too much room for abuse, especially the "in private" part, which is by now confirmed to mean "in private among the community" as I suspected all along.

Ah, I see. It's actually amazing how little, if anything, we're arguing about then.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: KimyrielleWould I want to have a misogynist in a project I am leading? Absolutely NOT!!! Not even if their code was the best thing since sliced bread. I haul their sorry butt out of the door, period. And I find this the most natural thing on Earth, really.

If that misogynist in your project behaves just fine towards everyone in the project and the users and does a good job - what does it matter what views he holds privately?

Wait, what does that have to do with anything? Weren't you arguing that the point was that they should be able to exercise free speech while working in the project and so, in this example, act like a misogynist? If they're restraining themselves, that's back to the code of conduct you don't like.

Quoting: TheSHEEEPit is behaviour like that which drives more and more people to the extreme sides of the spectrum while not changing anyone's mind - quite the opposite, actually, it only reinforces their views and theories.

Mmm, no, I don't think that's the case--or rather, it may be the case for individual examples, but not overall. That is, sure, individual misogynists or whatever who get "policed" are likely to resent it and perhaps even become more misogynist, or more racist or whatever. At least for a while.
But in the broader picture, people get socialized by the way they see people act. So for instance, if kids in high school see their peers bullying people for being "fucking faggots", they will assume that's what you do and vaguely assume there must be some reason for it. Social environments set norms, which people (except for a few nonconformists) tend to follow. And once those norms are followed, they are for better or worse internalized by many as how things should be. So if you set up explicit norms, sure, people who were used to a different, more hostile or racist or sexist or whatever norm will for a while at least be annoyed. But all the people who were just going along, acting like assholes because that's what you do, will go along with the new norm too, and new people coming in will just absorb the new norm naturally. So for better or worse, such things are fairly effective.

They are not completely effective, mind you. I really don't think anyone's going to end racism by setting up some codes of conduct. Racism persists because oligarchy persists, and racism is useful to oligarchs, and they take measures to encourage it and give people a stake in it.

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Quoting: PatolaFreedom of speech is not exactly a right (although in many contexts it is made as such), it is more a philosophic doctrine, something to aspire to.

It isn't really that either. Really, no society can allow complete freedom of speech and function. It's just that most of the limits we place are so uncontroversial that we don't mentally process them as limits on freedom of speech, and this allows us to pretend to ourselves that such limits are rare and to be avoided. So we don't allow libel and we don't allow misquotation and similar misrepresentations of the speech of others and we're rather sticky about plagiarism and we don't allow threats of violence and we don't allow violation of copyright and we don't allow conspiracy to commit crime and we allow non-disclosure agreements, which inherently muzzle free speech (I'm actually not that enthused about NDAs) and so on and so forth. And for most of those limitations, I really don't "aspire" to get rid of them.

What this shows is, many kinds of speech not only are not worth protecting but in fact are worth stopping. And while the surprising number of deconstructionists in this thread may think it's impossible to establish the meaning of any text, all the existing laws and rules of conduct around these other kinds of speech, which work fairly well, suggest to me that rules of conduct around one more kind of speech can probably also work.

Sure, it's complicated. Big deal; codes, laws, rules of various sorts get gradually revised over time to deal with shortcomings in their wording. My union's collective agreement with management is decades old, but every time bargaining comes around there's always some language to be cleaned up because some manager or union member somewhere is interpreting it funny, or we realize they could potentially. Doesn't mean we should stop having a collective agreement; we need that thing. I'm sure this code of conduct is no different. It is certain to be a bit buggy; it will surely be amended repeatedly and never really finished. As with code, the fact that bugs exist or features are not present which could be, is not a reason not to ship--it's a question of degree.

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Quoting: ElectricPrismPoor bastards are fighting the inevitable pentecostal shouting for a open source driver.

I must say I find it tiresome and somewhat offensive the way some people continue to equate support for open source with fundamentalist religion. When one unpacks these offhanded remarks, they also turn out to be a form of what Aristotle would have called "false rhetoric".

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When I saw this I thought "Hm, a code of conduct. Well, don't much care one way or the other; if they think they need one I expect they have reasons, none of my business really."
And then I thought "But I'm not looking forward to the thread reacting to the code of conduct."

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Quoting: KlausLittle side effect: Supposely, video streaming ALREADY is a huge burden on the climate due to its electricity consumption, and with game streaming this would only get worse.

That said, I can't recall an original source for this; With media reports alone, it is hard to tell whether the effect is actually relevant compared to usage before, or if it only looks large because the emissions are concentrated to a single provider rather than decentralized.

The reported logic is essentially:

• Streaming is better than driving to the Video shop,
• but worse than taking a bike to the video shop,
• and definitely made worse, as the flat-rate character of streaming ups the total consumption.

It isn't really clear to me for video-streaming, given CDNs, how it really compared to pre-digital watching cable TV all day. It is even less clear, how the effects of game streaming would even be estimated.

Tricky. Presumably streaming video is using much more power than it ever did before simply because there are more people watching more video, and importantly at higher resolution, and presumably power used is in some manner proportional to information sent. So there has to have been major growth in the power use of streaming video itself.

On the other hand, old time pre-digital cable was I think a way less power-efficient format for information transfer. And then on the third hand, I reckon there were simply far fewer people living in first-world-equivalent conditions then; there are more people streaming video than used to watch videos, let alone use cars to go and get the videos they watched.

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