I can't decide whether I think that recommender thing is creepy, but probably a good idea, or probably a good idea, but creepy.

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Huh. Well I gotta say, if I'd been setting fire to bridges as hard as that guy was, I would have had a really hard time getting myself to build them again, so kudos there. Interesting fellow.

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: scaineIt's literally renting vs owning.

No, DRM is about restrictions. I.e. whether you are restricted in your usage after the purchase or not. Steam requires you to use the client to install the game. I.e. they don't sanction backups according to their terms of usage (except for using their own backup method, which again involves their client and etc.).

Whether they enforce it or not is already secondary. DRM-free store should not stop you from legally making backups. And they provide downloadable packages for such use case. DRMed stores quite explicitly avoid that, because they don't want you to back anything up.

I will argue that DRM are only the software restrictions that enforce this policy. If you are technically able to make back-ups, but are not allowed to do it by an agreement, it is not DRM. For example: copy protection in a disk is DRM; a label telling "it's illegal to copy this disk" is not. A law that prevents you from uploading a video file or a DRM takedown aren't DRM; encrypted media extensions are DRM.

Indeed, I would want to claim that the law or the label constitute ARM (Analog Rights Management).

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Quoting: MohandevirTalking about DRM... There was an update to Stadia's FAQ page:

https://support.google.com/stadia/answer/9338946?hl=en [External Link]

From the FAQ:

"What happens to a game I bought if the publisher stops supporting Stadia in the future? Can I still play the game?
Yes. Once you purchase the game, you own the right to play it. In the future, it is possible that some games may no longer be available for new purchases, but existing players will still be able to play the game. Outside of unforeseen circumstances, Stadia will aim to keep any previously purchased title available for gameplay."

Similar to Steam, it seems.

It's Google though. So does them deciding it's not working out and no longer supporting the whole service even count as an "unforeseen" circumstance?

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As someone who's studied Hamlet a bit in my time,
1. This sounds very interesting and could be cool and complex, and yet
2. She could solve the whole mess by just whacking Claudius while Hamlet's taking his time getting his shit together.

(In university, I actually took a Shakespeare course that me and my favourite prof defined as special studies in Hamlet just so I could get credit for taking the Shaksper course from her even though I'd already taken it before from a boring guy. My final essay argued that Hamlet wasn't actually having trouble making up his mind. But Hamlet was a university student. He knew he had to kill his uncle Claudius, but it was an unpleasant task, he didn't want to, so as a true university student he procrastinated, ending up getting the job done literally at the last minute (before he died of his poisoned wound). In the mean time he came up with various things he just had to do first, to put off what he was avoiding--things like acting nuts to throw people off the scent, pulling shenanigans to see if he could get his uncle to incriminate himself, bugging his mother and so on. It all fits! I got an A)

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Luckily this isn't really my kind of game so I don't have to decide whether I should buy it despite his attitude, buy it to show him how wrong he is, or refuse to buy it because I'm not feeling love right now. I can just not buy it because I wouldn't have anyway.

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Quoting: GuestOpen-source is not a religion anyway.

Saint IGNUcius would be shocked. Shocked!

More seriously it's been my experience that people often say things like "X isn't a religion" when what they mean is "I don't care about ethics and I don't want to have to defend that". There are ethical and functional reasons to prefer open source when it's feasible, particularly when it comes to infrastructure or other as it were "central" things which can create lock-in. The world would be a better place in significant respects if, in all the niches that have open source versions, those open source versions dominated over closed.

Games are a weird corner case in which open source is rarely feasible, and there are various reasons why it is difficult for that to change and why it doesn't matter nearly as much. Although game engines are another matter and I would be very pleased if Godot becomes a dominant player. From their evanescence (usually) to the importance of art assets, it just doesn't work well, at least in our kind of economy. Even Richard Stallman is on record in agreeing that games are something of a special case. So not worrying about the open sourceness of games is not really a reason you shouldn't be allowed to find open source important in general. And in general, open source is in fact important.

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Both cards are based on the Turing architecture

In a broad sense, aren't all cards based on Turing architecture? :wink:

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Quoting: Arehandoro

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: ArehandoroAll glory to the hypnotoad!

Meh. The first nine seasons were great, but after that it really went downhill.

I haven't watched it in ages, probably since that 9th or even earlier. I guess it was around the same time The Simpsons went downhill as well. Even the new that got released on Netflix is quite 'meh' as well.

Actually, I was vague-from-memory quoting something someone in Futurama said about the hypnotoad TV show/channel itself. Since all it ever did was sit there doing that thing with its eyes it's hard to see how the quality could actually change, so now I've gone and lamely explained the joke.

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Somehow I was expecting something different from the title. Makes me think . . . In all the masses of "Tower Defence" games, has anyone ever done a game that gets serious and in depth about classic medieval siegecraft? It might be fun to build castles with the full layout, all the murder holes and twists after the gatehouse so the battering ram can't just keep going to the next gate, moats and so on, plus making sure you've got lots of arrows and pitch and oil to boil and anti-scaling-ladder forked poles and so on. And it might be fun to be on the outside mounting a serious siege, having to acquire things like the ability to build trebuchets, siege towers, train sappers to undermine and so on, filling in the moat, planning concerted assaults on key parts of the wall.

You could add in supply issues; after all, one of the major issues in a siege is who can last longer. Besieging a castle is often a race against time. On one hand, the people in the castle are cut off from supply so they better have food and above all a source of water in there. Plus they could run out of arrows and crossbow bolts and whatnot. But the army on the outside has supply problems of its own. The bigger it is the better its chances of breaking in, but also the harder it is to keep in supply and the faster the local countryside is stripped bare; lots of sieges were broken when the attacking army found it was leave or starve. If you managed it wrong that part could be pretty boring though, so maybe go light on that. But the planning the attack and defence stuff I think could be pretty interesting.

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