Nuff said

The whole process that split AT&T's System V and BSD should bear some weight here, at some point there was an agreement that, once BSD rewrote the few offending portions, AT&T had no claim anymore.

Frankly I'm surprised that the settlement between SCO and IBM didn't include verbiage that this was a done deal with no right for any successor-entity to bring this up again.

There are tons and tons of pathogens with high mortality rates without medical intervention. There are tons of pathogens that only see minimal death rates without active medical intervention because vaccination reduced the penetration that those pathogens have into the community and may have even forced evolution for increased transmissibility in lieu of virulence in order to spread at all.

I didn't get the feeling that the GP post was claiming it was valueless. I got the feeling that the concern was it would get out of the control of its creators, manage to mutate or evolve past a death in five generations, and become a threat to everything we know and love.

I think the "home server" software kit is sort of the ideal solution the SKG movement has in mind - just let the people do the work of hosting and leave the developer out of the loop. For some games, it may not be so simple, if the publisher's servers handle matchmaking and coordination across the whole player base, for example. But even then, allowing people to run a traditional dedicated server would at least allow them to create private matches with friends, or utilize server browsers to find one to play on.

I think a reasonable and broader approach to this issue is to require that *any* digital good to which your access can be revoked must be described as a "rental" or "subscription" with the term of access clearly spelled out. Require publishers to commit to support for a known length of time, or issue prorated refunds if they fail to meet that promise. This would also address the issue of people losing access to digital movies they thought they purchased. If Sony knows it's going to lose streaming rights to a film on a certain date, you should know that before you hand over your money; otherwise you don't really know what you're getting.

I would really prefer the other way around, invoking Windows containers for the few Windows apps that I am stuck running.

Just because someone is stupid doesn't mean that they aren't subject to specific protections under law.

Ernesto Miranda, for whom the Miranda Warning is named, was by accounts a terrible person. Miranda's conviction was thrown out on those technical grounds that his confession should not have been permitted, then he was retried and convicted of the crime without his confession as evidence. Once he was released from prison he died in a bar fight.

The point of protections are that they apply to everyone, guilty or innocent, and are supposed to regulate the way that the legal system all the way from the patrolman to the attorney general behave. That doesn't mean that criminals aren't still criminals, but it does mean that the government has to provide proper justification for its actions against persons. If someone really did commit a crime then the government should be able to show cause, and this keeps everyone else from being scrutinized when the government has no business scrutinizing.

I don't wonder what PJ is up to. I can't even remember the site name/URL that originally was covering that and had forums, but when the password restrictions because utterly freakin' stupid for a new aggregator and discussion forum I just stopped bothering to visit.

I remember selling my hoard of Bitcoin at $4500 thinking how absurdly high it was and that it was just a fluke and how stupid it all seemed. Look who's stupid now. I still retired, but "if I'd just HODLed" I'd be a retired philanthropist instead of just retired and comfortable.

Don't you have better things to do, Jensen?

That might be true if both prices and supply weren't artificially fixed by a cartel. Note that there are even fewer major DRAM manufacturers now than there were then, so it's much easier to ensure everyone's in on the collusion. See also Gamer's Nexus coverage.

No lessons were learned from the last time. The Samsung manager that went to prison got a promotion after being released. This Micron deal is absolutely them holding their customers over a barrel using limited supply to demand locked-in price deals. If you don't sign up, you go to the back of the line. "It'd be a shame if you couldn't buy RAM for that device you're making."

This is not true for games that provide a dedicated server software you can run. Games like Counter-Strike, which is 26 years old and still averages about 8,000 players, do exactly that. Although Valve provides an in-game server browser that queries a central server, you can directly connect by IP address to play online multiplayer without any help from Valve. Minecraft and many other popular games use this model. One of the things the SKG community would like is for publishers to provide some pathway to this capability to keep games playable. "Online multi-player" is not synonymous with "publisher-managed multiplayer"; it never has been and should never be taken that there's only one way to do it. For some games (such as those where match-making among a very large number of players is important) it makes sense, but is not necessary for all.

This is where it gets complicated - the SKG movement cites the game The Crew as an animus, where an online game that could have been playable offline was disabled by the publisher, despite them having developed code to make that possible (but not enabling it). Since it was shut down, the community has written software to make it playable again. One of my racing games, Dirt Rally 2.0, even in the single-player campaign mode, requires a constant internet connection, and will kick you out of your race event if it loses that connection for any reason. There's no good reason for that. Once Codemasters shuts down the server, the single-player campaign will be unplayable.

As for games developed for significantly older systems, emulation makes that a lot easier than keeping antique hardware operational. My favorite racing game of all time, Whiplash, was released in 1995 and works great in Dosbox on the Steam Deck. I still play it regularly. It took some effort, but not much - DOSBox is a well-supported and documented program - and now that it works I don't have to mess with it, and the configuration I made is portable: I can just copy the directory to another machine and play it there. My Steam Deck has games on it originally developed for the Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, DOS, and Windows in addition to the native Linux programs.

Socialized only to make sure they fail, not to provide for the general welfare.

The modern democratic party is quite right of center, and that's a problem. The Democratic party is an enormous fan of corporate welfare and subsidies for industries that are aligned with their talking points. There are still a few firebrands in the party, mostly centrists like AOC and Elizabeth Warren and possibly Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar, but they took suck at the teat of irresistible corruption.

And this is not a both sides argument. For there to be a both sides argument, there have to be two sides in opposition, and the truth is that there aren't.

Except when it's not. It's not always clear at the time of purchase that the publisher has the ability to shut down the game at some unspecified future date. So "just saying no" requires some knowledge of the future that may not be available. In addition, on platforms like Steam, publishers can push updates that you *must* install to continue playing which remove features or add an online requirement that didn't exist when you purchased it, leading to it being disabled remotely when the publisher eventually shuts down the servers. The TOS/EULA generally require that you agree to all future updates to the TOS/EULA without notice or ability to opt out, so the consumer really doesn't have any actual rights to the games they "purchase" in this system.

Even if the outcome of Stop Killing Games isn't legislation that requires publishers to create tools or release code, an acceptable outcome (IMHO) would be regulation that requires transparency, labeling, and prohibits what's effectively sabotage so the consumer can make an informed decision and have some guarantee they get what they actually paid for. If a digital storefront carried a disclaimer that said "This game requires an online connection to the publisher's server to run. The publisher has not guaranteed the server's operability for any length of time" then a user would at least have the opportunity to consider that risk when purchasing. Additionally, if a regulation prevented publishers from deploying an end-of-life update (a "time-bomb") that didn't exist when purchased, that would also protect consumers without harming publishers. So there are some easy approaches here which don't burden publishers.

Personally, I'd like to see a law that stipulates that any digital good to which your access can be removed by the publisher must be described as either a "rental" or "subscription", with the length of the term clearly spelled out, with penalties for revoking access before the end of the term. That way, you can know exactly what you're getting, for how long, and can count on it being there; and publishers can't trick you into thinking you're "purchasing" something you aren't. As much as I love Steam, I'm aware this would include the entire Steam library. The most obvious downside to me is that this would likely lead to the normalization of the idea that you don't own your video games in general.