Quoting: scainePlease keep the discussion civil. There's been a lot of pretty ambiguous comments on this thread that could be read several different ways. I'm pretty sure that there was nothing personal intended in any of them, so I've tidied up where I think the line was crossed and please just everyone remember the human behind the comment.

Thanks.

Fair enough. I want to debate ideas, not take anybody down personally because there's no value in doing it.

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: TheSyldat

Quoting: EikeRemoving some negation, I read it as adapting for women is (still) fine for men.

That's not how I read it and that sentence definitely means quite litteraly the exact opposite to me .

Rereading it, I guess it really could mean both.
I took the "Supporting women [...] is not downgrading" part literally. You probably could also read it as "I see what has happened as downgrading, which is not what I think supporting women is about".
Ah, this human language...!

I'm sick of women being used by companies as a way of scoring PR points. It's a distraction from Stadia's real problems.

"Look at us! We're supporting women! We're the FIRST ones to ever do this! Aren't we cool! Pay no attention to the input lag behind the curtain!"

It comes across as pandering and not genuine. They could have said they were making a controller that fits in smaller hands and left it at that without gendering hand size.

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Quoting: TheSyldatI'm intersex and my hands are very much drinking all of the feminine stuff and have short fingers small palms.
While the steam controller is a godsend because its design is thoughtful, having to use an XBOX One controller on the other hand is always a pain in the ass for me because its design is legitimately downright painful for my hands.

The steam controller only LOOKS girthy but when you take the time to assess button placement and spacing and overall shape of it all no actually the steam controller is one of if not the best designed controllers in the world, so using it as a your point of comparison isn't exactly the best of all ideas.

Part of the reason I commented on it, as it's extremely well-designed. I didn't understand why people would have problems with Steam Controller, but they're not me or my body.

Quoting: namikoSupporting women also isn't downgrading (subjectively) male things to second-best.

Quoting: TheSyldatAs for this one here I'm not even gonna comment on it and just quote you so that you read yourself back if don't see what's wrong in that sentence I don't know what to tell you other than "welcome to the mute list"

I see it as wrong when any person is set below another in a sense of making things more equal. Taking another down doesn't bring another up, it's just switching places and creating another inequality. Facing each other side-by-side, equally good, equally imperfect, equally able to critique one another, is the way to move forward, without dismissing each other for being different or disagreeing.

Thought we'd have had some good things to talk about after agreeing on the Steam Controller, entire reason I signed in to comment. This situation sucks...

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Quoting: TheSyldatTL : DR Gender Neutral as in "For once we ALSO tested our designs with ladies who have tiny short fingers like a lot of women do to make sure the controller is ALSO comfy for them"

Saying something is for women isn't always necessarily complimenting or supporting women. Supporting women also isn't downgrading (subjectively) male things to second-best. Not sure if that article does either of those things, but that's my two nickels (pennies don't exist in Canada aside from digital form anymore).

I also have stubby fingers, small hands, and the Steam Controller works fine with me, RSI wrist/finger strain from long periods of gaming aside. Maybe I have big palms?

Back on topic, if Stadia's "free" games are always subject to change, it's hard to say what kind of "ownership" is available on the platform. At least Valve lets you keep games that even leave the storefront completely, with very few exceptions. I don't trust Google to do anything but to squeeze information from people with its services, whether they like it or not.

Also dislike that Stadia is Debian-based, hopefully Google will focus on developing it on their own and not push Debian developers into force-fitting their distro to Google's needs. Android used to be a kind of Linux, but now it's nothing but a proprietary Linux-based OS.

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Quoting: tuubi

Quoting: namikoIt's an issue of responsibility: How much should the average citizen be responsible for their own foolish mistakes? Some think government should take more responsibility for these mistakes, others, less responsibility.

The average citizen is fine. It's the most vulnerable of us who need a hand. Survival of the fittest is not a sound social policy.

Most average citizens (or politicians) don't understand technology aside from it being a useful tool, and presume experts informing in good faith are always brought in for consultation on tech-related laws (they may not be).

In this case, the average citizen may also be quite vulnerable.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI'm not sure I understand how a profitable gambling establishment can exist without taking advantage of its clients. It's giving them nothing and taking their money, by definition. What you're describing is the establishment of some sort of consensus of how much "taking advantage" our society considers reasonable. But as soon as you acknowledge that, it becomes clear that this is not a line that must exist at a particular place as you're trying to say, but rather that there are a constellation of social values that contribute to where we might want to put that line.

Good points, all. :)

It's an issue of responsibility: How much should the average citizen be responsible for their own foolish mistakes? Some think government should take more responsibility for these mistakes, others, less responsibility.

It is indeed important to investigate where the "line" of responsibility a group of citizens is in relation to their wants or needs, and there's no universal answer for all jurisdictions. It may be much harder to undo new laws than to create them, so lawmakers should have the patience to avoid the "Do Something!" panic that difficult issues will inevitably bring up. Better to take things slow, as it may take even more years to undo a poorly-implemented, rushed law, if it can ever be removed from the books at all.

Unfortunately, I see the global trend going against the average citizen who may want to have fewer laws to worry about, but also moving more in favour of multinational businesses. Probably another reason why governments are so reluctant to act unless they could get some sort of extra benefit for regulating (children's data, and pay checks for the people developing or maintaining the surveillance system).

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Quoting: Arehandoro

Quoting: Tetsgovernment is like mafia. Probably worse, mafia takes your money and then leaves you alone (mostly). Government takes your money and with it tells you what you can (and can't!) do, how to behave, what to do with your life... I'm a human, not an ant or Chinese.

I can't believe how in one comment someone can show so much ignorance and racism. Reported, by the way.

*facepalm* Can someone mention a well-known criminal society and implicate a (for all intents and purposes) totalitarian country and not be castigated for saying that their systems are not good and remind him of how corrupted some governments or organizations go?

All italians are not affiliated with the mafia. All chinese citizens are not their government.

*phew* That aside, since this dumpster fire's been fanned nicely by Liam (this isn't Twitter, so it provides much less benefit for you to insult GoL commenters whose positions you dislike on GoL), I'll mention a new concern about this this law, particularly this section:

* Games distributed online should get a legally enforceable age-rating system like physical games

Now, it's been a long time since I last bought a physical game, but so far as I know, as long as a parent is with a child/teen at the time of purchase, the age-rating systems don't matter, as it's a matter of parental override on the rules. It works that way for games, and works that way for movies. (At least when someone at the cash register/ticket counter gives a crap about the law more than making money, it varies.)

If the UK government wants ID to be legally enforceable in the digital space, would it limit kids from playing games their parents may have no problems with? Is the same kind of in-person parental override even possible? In addition, it's the same thing as the "porn license" idea, it's a way of tracking what UK citizens are doing online. Even if the cause is decent (lootboxes are probably addictive, and it's also too easy to 'borrow' a parent's credit card number and security code), the way it could be implemented sounds disturbing.

Do we want anybody other than Steam or people looking at our public profile to be know what games we're playing and when? If they mandate the ID for kids, who can say if it won't spread to adults as well, just to make game distributors cover their asses further? Would the GDPR-like fallback rules when Brexit may (may not?) happen also apply to government children's ID data collection?

If we're going to be keeping companies cleaner, are such heavy-handed measures really necessary in the pursuit of fewer people getting ripped off by publishers and devs? If the regulation were focused on the companies, they could implement government-mandated restrictions on themselves regardless of age (no age limit on addiction, right?). But no, it's easier for citizens to be forced to act instead of making businesses unhappy with direct regulation. Laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work, *some* regulation should be in place. Then again, I'd be reluctant to regulate any entity that has millions in potential taxes for my country and could shuffle the funds off to a tax haven at a moments' notice.

Not an easy thing for government to do, no matter how you look at it. But making your (relatively) poorer citizens do the work is an easier move that will feel good in the short term, no doubt. Most of the ideas put forth are probably impossible without a central tracking system in which data may be completely out of the hands of the citizens to control.

Yeah, I know, Five Eyes countries do this all the time between one another, no surprise, but should we be encouraging that kind of tacitly accepted surveillance towards the behaviour of our more vulnerable children?

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Quoting: chrBut I think we shouldn't ignore the fact that despite this being almost always a sincere concern, there are also those who are just hiding their intentionally malign anti-societal behavior behind pretending to be a victim of some global mass movement of silencing and censorship. I do get it that some people sincerely feel this way.

It's in our best interests to submit to the will of the majority or law, but it isn't always to our benefit, personally or to the rest of humanity, in the long run. We need more in-depth discussions and scientific testing to discover how we can best do things. Something offensive to someone is bound to come up during this process, but if we falter at the 'wrong' words or ideas, we can't progress our thinking any further, because going against what was formerly 'normal' is sometimes the starting point of new discoveries.

I honestly don't know how far censorship is being promoted, but it seems like it's been gradually increasing online for some time. People call it a global mass movement because it really appears to be. I mean, who among us would want to publicly profess a like of the "wrong" political candidate, even to our families and friends? Maybe we tell no one. Maybe we'd lie right to the faces of our loved ones because we're afraid.

That some people even contemplate these things is a bad sign.

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Quoting: Eikehttps://xkcd.com/1357/ [External Link]

(to paraphrase Bob Dylan):

How many doors must someone go through
until they are let back inside?

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Being "canceled" means being too offensive to work with, associate with or even to be spoken positively about at the worst.

Are some things so offensive as to make it necessary to remove someone from the public sphere, sometimes permanently? (banning, firing, refusing to associate with, maybe even being fined or arrested depending on where you live, etc.)

I don't know where the boundary on offense should be because I can't predict the future, times change, laws and policies also change in a waxing and waning of liberal to conservative and back again (in a general sense, no political parties implied). If this kind of de-personing is going to be the default, we're isolating a lot of people. There's a dark path to be gone down when we start thinking people are permanently irredeemable, even if they sincerely apologize. Or even if they are accepted again, can we say they're sincerely accepted, or is there a permanent, invisible "scarlet letter [External Link]" of sorts that will hang over their heads indefinitely?

It feels good to be a part of a group that's "better" than the "bad" one(s), it's a rush that's probably chemically addictive. That's why I can't see "cancel culture" stopping anytime soon, it just feels too good to be more "right" than the person or group being accused.

If there's no road to forgiveness, can any of us honestly say that we're above reproach when it comes to our words or actions? Whether or not we think what Stallman's done or said is acceptable doesn't matter, but what we do with people judged to be offensive does matter, because we'd want a chance at forgiveness if we were in Stallman's shoes.

EDIT: some clarification on the last sentence.

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