Quoting: SalvatosRe: Kickstarter: It’s always odd to me to see people clamouring for worker unions. Here those things are essentially a mafia and I’ve never heard anything but complaints from employees being forced to join unions and being strong-armed and bullied by them. They get rich off of protection money which they then use to lobby governments for their own purposes. It’s hard not to be sympathetic with KS’s stance coming from this background, although I imagine things are different in the US.

Unions tend to go bad like that when they are dominated by employers. How effective that is depends on the level and kinds of corruption tolerated in the particular society. In the US, historically unions have had a significant political impact making things better for workers (and profits smaller for those in charge). US elites have had some success co-opting union leaderships, but it's never quite secure or complete, so most of them feel much more comfortable eliminating unions wherever they can.
In Northern Europe, unions are far more important and effective than in the US, and nobody sane would doubt that they had a huge impact in helping the average person. But certainly in some countries, the fix is in and the unions can be awful. Really depends where you are.
But put it this way: Employers never have a problem with the kind of union you're describing. If you've got an employer who is anti-union, it is always because they fear a union might be useful to people.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: NanobangGlad to hear Stallman is staying on since he neither did nor said anything wrong. In a saner world he'd win a defamation or slander lawsuit against Vice.

He said a lot wrong.

Over the years, no doubt. On this occasion, such as?

And no, he would lose a defamation case against anyone who just printed literally what he said.

I can't recall all the text of the article; I don't believe that's quite what they did. But they're responsible for the headline, not just the article. The headline was certainly both inaccurate and defamatory--and headlines get read by a hell of a lot more people than the articles under them. (The article's author probably wasn't responsible for the headline, but Vice sure as hell was)

On the thread about this, I didn't see a single person getting upset at Stallman over what he actually said. To the contrary, pretty much everyone who was upset was basing their anger on what they assumed he must have said given the Vice headline and perhaps the tenor of the article. Nobody who went and read the emails seemed to be all that mad. This suggests to me that the Vice article was quite successfully defamatory.
(Some people may have been upset at what he actually said--I didn't see that, though; nobody was saying "He said this, which was a bad thing to say." rather it was all general and mistaken, along the lines of "He defended Epstein" (which he did not), or references to things he is rumoured to have said in the past, or explicitly based on the Vice headline)

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It's certainly got attitude.

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So they've got "hardcore tactical components"? Well, good to see they're not messing around with any lousy softcore tactical components.

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Quoting: GuestI was just wondering if this will modify the behaviour of the GOG buyers. I hope not. Of course the law would not allow copyright infringement.

But there is a difference between restraining from distributing your DRM free game through piracy channels and erasing your own copy of the game after you have sold it out of sheer honesty.

One seems (to me) more easy to do than the other.

Oh, I see what you mean. Good point.

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Quoting: BrazilianGamer

Total War games must sell reasonably well on Linux for Feral to port so many of them.

That's my opinion too. They announce a new game and right after it, they announce it will be ported to Linux. Linux sells very well otherwise there wouldn't be any reason for a many ports. May they come more and more

Probably the cost is also very low by now. I mean, Feral must know the codebase inside out at this point, they just poke around to see what's different, do a little update to their now-almost-standard setup for porting Total War titles, and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle.

I just finally finished the game of Stellaris I'd had going for ages. There I was, coasting to the finish line, even the ancients were Pathetic next to me, and then stuff started happening. First one of the ancients decided to go all crusader . . . fine, time to beef up the navy and crush them, no worries, and they hadn't even declared war on me in particular yet . . . then some AI thing starts trying to kill all sentient life, OK, let's whack that and ignore the ancients until I'm finished . . . then these other ancients decide it's their job to stop the first ancients . . . great, they'll keep each other busy while I kill off the AI thing . . . then the second group of ancients want me to join up with them to stop the first ones . . . with them as my boss. Yeah, thanks but no thanks . . . so then I find both ancient groups have declared war on me and intimidated half the galaxy into joining them, and I'm barely started crushing the AI things. And then I make the mistake of going along with a proposal to head a Federation to stop the ancients; the rest of the federation is useless but my fleet size cap drops because some of it is now allocated to the federation!
I took them all down, but it was like playing whack-a-mole for a while there. Ended up inadvertently owning most of the galaxy. All in all, the very late game turned out much more eventful than I'd been expecting.

So now I've started Battletech. Seems good so far.

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Quoting: NikoStudioRUHappy to say that saints row 4 is now working properly on latest proton 4.11-5 with dxvk 1.4, im new here btw so hello to all :)

Hello!

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Quoting: GuestI read that people who buy GoG games do not distribute them a lot ( How do we know that ?). I wonder if that would change if people could sell their GoG game but still keep the binary on their hard disk.

They can. What's to stop them? It's DRM free. They can copy the files and give them away or sell them. Not legally of course, and yes by all accounts people don't as a rule.
On the other hand, if you meant legally then this ruling would not allow any such thing. If you sold a game you would have to no longer have it yourself. This ruling does not grant the right to make and sell copies, that would be copyright. It grants normal consumer rights to transfer one's property to someone else.

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Quoting: DiableStallman lost his jobs because he said something that could be considered a defense of a well known convicted sex offender.

Well, except it couldn't. He was very very unequivocal about the well known convicted sex offender being a horrible rapist. He said something that could be considered a defence of Marvin Minsky, who as far as I know was not a well known convicted sex offender. His entire argument was that Minsky might not have known just how horrible Epstein was being. That is not a defence of Epstein and cannot be considered one without a massive dose of intellectual dishonesty.
Now, he may be wrong--frankly, I think it would take some world class naivete for a Minsky to think this girl is throwing herself at him because she's a huge groupie for aging AI research pioneers. But that's a somewhat different issue.

Quoting: DiableHe would have lost his jobs 30 years ago for saying the same.

Quite likely. Rush to judgment without looking at the facts is not a new thing under the sun. But it wouldn't have been right 30 years ago, either.

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Quoting: g000h

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: g000hFor those thinking this will be a good thing for DRM-Free Gaming: I think the opposite - This will push all new commercial games to become purely rental titles, i.e. You can download the game for free, but you won't be able to play it without a subscription. DRM-Free games will just be for free gaming (i.e. where no money is paid for the game title). Commercial game developers won't be releasing DRM-Free any more.

Until the next lawsuit. I'm not sure getting around law is quite so simple as all that.

I'm not sure you're quite getting my point on this.

My point isn't that a subscription model would be leveraged onto current games (although it isn't impossible). My point is that it will push game publishers/developers to adopt a subscription model (e.g. rent per hour) for all their new and future titles. This is something which is perfectly fine from a legal perspective, and it would allow them to get around the resale problem entirely (and not lose any profits to resale).

A subscription model like that would change the gaming industry in a big way, i.e. no DRM-Free titles from commercial developers, people who play more hours could end up paying more for the privilege. A loss of consumer ownership of the software - The software would not work if the rental wasn't paid. A subscription model is similar to a streaming model, but rather than streaming the game's video and remotely-controlling it, you still download the files and run it locally.

Yeah. Either someone will sue for the right to buy the goddamn game on the grounds that this is just the game sellers' way to avoid letting people have their normal consumer rights, or piracy will make a really big comeback, or both.
I don't think it will happen. At least, not as a response to this particular event, which I am pretty sure will have less impact than many here think.

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