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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked?

    Considering there are tons of games that are no longer supported, the answer is yes, the game customer is left to the elements when the publisher decides they’re done. And with the current DMCA, we’re not even legally allowed to break DRM for legal purposes (such as to play games we bought when the DRM is no longer supported.)

    Curiously, it does send a message for the determined end user that legality is only for suckers (or for companies who have to operate within the constraints of licensing). Curiously, Windows 10 and 11 depend on the ignorance of upper management regarding the degree to which Microsoft has surveillance access, since companies don’t get to medium-sized without having a few skeletons in the accounting closet. I’m surprised so few companies haven’t switched to Linux Red Hat (which has a similar support package) but then Red Hat is going through its own scandals right now.

    Anyway, if your game is popular, you can expect the old version to be supported until the redux comes out. If it’s a niche game produced by a company that the publisher bought a while ago and would like to forget, yes, it’ll disappear into the aether as you watch.


  • Right now we already have aluminum printers and arrays that will turn a stone (wood, ice, etc) block into a detailed sculpture.

    The cool thing is that prototypes can be printed and then turned into dyes to be filled with steel and cast, and NGOs are using this tech to arm African villages against warlords.

    About the same time we make fusion power viable, well be able to construct civil projects in a simulation, test it against the elements with an advanced physics engine and then send an array of constructor robots to build it from the ground up.

    Just in time for humanity to get wiped back to the stone age from perpetual severe weather.







  • This is not about whether your neighbor is committing wrongdoing in your community, rather whether the system itself, and the edifices that hold it up are conducting themselves in good faith. Without these major players pressuring government to extend the enforced monopolies of copyright longer (that is, robbing the public – you and I – of its catalog of public-domain material) and failing to enforce educational and fair use, we wouldn’t have IP laws at all, and piracy would not be a thing.

    Granted, some argue that creators would have no interest in creating, except that they do when they are given the means to do so. This is one of the threats social media has, in providing entertainment that is not sending its profits to the major players in the industry.

    We’re not pirating from the artists. We’re not pirating from our neighbors. We’re pirating from giant corporations who’ve been plying the government for over a century now to strip rights from the public.

    And given the government does not execute its function in good faith (that is, in service of the public, including protecting its interests from corporate capture), we have grounds to argue the authority of the state is forfeit, ruling the public by force rather than by consent (our elections allow us to choose from oligarch selects, and they have to obey plutocrats to keep their careers.)

    Without the artificial construct by governing systems to make IP a thing to be licensed (and the use of DRM to control its distribution) neither patents nor copyrighted material would be a thing at all, let alone have been turned into the monstrosties that are US and EU IP law.