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Comment Test for disabling all video autoplay (Score 1) 112

The main things are to:
- disable all video autoplay. (not just sound, but all)

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

Comment Some reasons for forums' decline (Score 2) 112

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

Comment Re:Tragedy of the commons (Score 1) 362

Tragedy of the commons isn't a problem with human nature, it's a problem with the incentives in a capitalist economic system. Look at what happened with the real commons - individuals who were using it decided to organize and regulate sustainable use of the commons. Only corporations are selfish and short-sighted enough to fulfill the theory's prediction.

Comment Re: Fatalism (Score 1) 362

It may not be intentional anti-environmental shilling (in general, with sinij in particular it's quite clear that it is), but it is practically indistinguishable from it. The best time to build nuclear was 50-60 years ago, but the second best time, at this point, is probably never. Renewables with storage are vastly cheaper and vastly faster to build. Building nuclear today means locking up resources for decades that could've been used to rapidly deploy far greater amounts of cheap clean power instead. There are only a few niche uses where nuclear could still make sense and they are steadily being eaten away by renewables with storage.

Comment Re:Licensing Variety Creates Choices (Score 1) 152

Making contracts where you lease/rent a game illegal just removes choices/products for everyone on the market

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

the risk of making them (perpetually maintaining game servers, or giving away massive amounts of IP) were too intimidating to embark upon the project.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

Comment Re:It's entertainment (Score 1) 152

If I pay for a movie ticket do I own the movie?

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

You've never "owned" media.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

Comment Re:Can't expect online support forever! (Score 1) 152

Game companies don't always fully own all of the server tech that runs the game. Some or all of it could be licensed and not redistributable.

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Comment Re:Change to a monthly service (Score 1) 152

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

Comment Beales and Eisenach 2014 (Score 1) 1

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

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