"Stop killing games" is meant to prevent companies from taking actions that render games unplayable ever again. Like a game has always online DRM and then they pull the verification servers even if it's a single-player game.

The goal is to make it law that all games must continue to be playable past their end of life in some way. The specifics are not spelled out, though there are obvious possibilities. Our always-on game I described above could have final patch that removes verification requirements, but as long as the goal of "still playable" is met, problem solved. id Software famously released source code to many of their engines, for example.

Not to be confused with requiring constant maintenance. If the game worked in Win10 but not Win11 and it was EoL before Win11 was released, the devs aren't required to fix that problem.

Umm... since the kernel is GPL v2 specifically, doesn't it matter a lot what the license of the code generated is? What is the licensing status of the training data and does that directly affect the output? I feel like it does.

Short term, ffmpeg is receiving bug reports, but not patches to repair them or the funding so ffmpeg contributors must fix it on their own time and effort.

Medium term, these codecs see so little use that the attack surface is very small. If it didn't go against ffmpeg's standards, removing the codecs might be more viable. Maybe they could be put behind some kind of "are you sure?" warning with an explanation as to why, and note that uses of these codecs are rare and users should already know if they need them.

Long term, ffmpeg is fantastic and absolutely deserves that funding.

All DNSSEC provides is authenticity of the answer. Assuming the pirate DNS sites use DNSSEC, clients will know something is up. But what are said clients going to do about it? They can warn the user, but unless they can find an alternative DNS server to query they're still stuck not watching the game. Which is all the copyright holder cares about.

If you have original, working install media, you can extract the assets. There's no DRM blocking you from copying them forward and have it continue to work to this day even if you don't have a floppy drive any more. So Doom (2) is already in the green here. There is no requirement that the original author/publisher just give the game away after the fact, only that they not sabotage it for fair customers.

id Software might be a bad example here. Source code is nice, and solves most problems by offloading them onto the community. But it's not what's being asked specifically. Instead consider any game that was either multiplayer-only and no longer available, or that has always-online DRM and those servers don't exist any more. Rather than abandoning the game, we ask that the multiplayer server component be available for self-hosting, and the always-online DRM be eliminated, as applicable to the game. If my working game yesterday isn't working today and won't work tomorrow because a company made a decision, then boo on them.

Not necessarily. It doesn't need to be supported forever. It's more like one last update to release a user available server component (if needed, like for multiplayer games), the ability for users to select the server they want to join, and the always-on DRM removed. It's not like a game originally released for Windows XP needs to be constantly up to date with current DirectX, Windows 10/11 support, etc into the future. As long as that Windows XP version works as above, isn't that enough?

We're not asking for "keep it running on modern hardware forever". We're asking for "don't [permanently] break what works".

The ZFS ARC has patents... I don't know when they expire, or if they already have... ZFS is damned close to 20 years old now from a release date perspective. If anything I'd say they re-invented CLOCK, though they do mention how it differs.

(MRU = Most Recently Used, MFU = Most Frequently Used)

But ARC still isn't quite the same thing. Notably, once promoted to MFU, pages don't get demoted - MFU only evicts items when MRU items are promoted, bumping off the oldest MRU item. Whereas SIEVE effectively bumps MRU items back down to MFU as it touches them, though it's still just 1 queue and its status is just a flag. So a page really needs to keep showing it's wanted to avoid eviction.

ARC has two distinct queues... pages go into MRU first when loaded for the first time, and then moved to MFU if hit again before eviction and then this queue behaves like regular LRU. Thus a simple file copy might blow away the first queue, but the second should remain untouched. What makes ZFS's ARC special is those ghost lists are used to help decide the size of the two queues... cache misses for items very recently purged are actually detected as near-misses and is a hint that one of the two queues - whichever it belonged to - might benefit from being larger (at the expense of the other)

I can't attest to the algorithm they're using, but it looks pretty random and covers the full alphabet. It's printed on stickers on the motherboard along with other identifying information like serial number and MAC addresses.

The issue is this is only a minor roadblock. Default passwords are always exactly 10 characters long and all UPPERCASE. Most seriously, it turns out the IPMI protocol makes it possible to extract password hashes from the BMC if you can guess a username. So extracting a hash and turning to your favourite GPU password cracker is pretty easy. Knowing your pattern is 10 uppercase characters helps a lot there.

Keep IPMI/BMC off the internet! It's not remotely safe!

Yes, that was the plan. It's somewhat backfired because random idiot users suddenly see this as justification to post *actual porn* in these subreddits, since it's now an NSFW subreddit, right?

My condolences to the moderators who now have to deal with that.

Someone's going to hold up a flier from out of town, point out that the number in the flier and the sticker price don't match, and start yelling.

This way customers can't do that, and stores can say "look, we're selling at the correct price, it's the tax that's making the price go up! blame the government!"

There is a reason, believe it or not. With so many states, and so many different sets of rules and local taxes, prices vary by location too much.

If the true after-taxes prices were shown, it would be necessary for advertised prices (on TV, in flyers, on web sites, etc) be adjusted per-state for the local distribution areas. That's a problem all itself, printing multiple versions or requiring verification of the state the web site visitor is from. Or else people would complain about false advertising of prices and all that.

This is the solution. I hate it. And in Canada replace "state" with "province" but it's all the same.

Vehicle fuel - gasoline/petrol, etc - is about the only exception because the price varies too much and it's posted in big numbers on a billboard next to the refueling station so you know what you're paying as you drive in. Those are actually accurate with tax.

Yeah I could have written that much better. Whether it is "assume the user chooses to opt out" or "that the user must opt out after the fact" got mixed up. I meant that users needing to go out of their way to opt out...

my bad

Same reason spam in general has been seen as a scourge. Physical mail incurs a fairly significant cost to the sender, paying to have the flyers produced and delivered. By contrast to anybody who already has an internet connection and a PC, sending a million spam emails is so close to free it might as well be. I'm sure there's more dollars spent on dealing with spam than there is producing spam by a few orders of magnitude.

Spam should not be allowed. It's far too abusable. And the notion that it should be opt-out by default is equally wrong. That literally any business in the world can assume opt-in for any and every person in the world is bullcrap and my having to click "opt out" on each one is an unacceptable default.

Boeing published a list of changes they are making. There doesn't seem to be any hardware changes being done beyond the fact that these planes have been grounded for so long there's mandatory maintenance just to get them ready to fly again.

https://www.boeing.com/737-max... is where I'm getting most of my information on the new version, and I've read the report on the first MAX crash to get an idea of how things went wrong.

There were always 2 hardware AOA (Angle Of Attack) sensors, but this MCAS software at the time was only considering one sensor. The new version considers both sensors and is programmed to be less aggressive. Pilot training in a simulator is also going to be required. You bet the airlines are going to hate that because the whole point of the 737 MAX and the MCAS software was that pilots wouldn't require simulator training. Now they need to find a 737 MAX simulator and pass whatever course is needed.

Aside: the theory from Boeing was that if MCAS did go ballistic, it would be close enough to another type of failure pilots trained for called "Runaway trim" and that solution would still work. Thus a single sensor solution was adequate. In practice there would be other problems happening as a result of the sensor failure, the "runaway trim" behaviour doesn't exactly match the conditions in training, and the pilots of the crashed planes either didn't notice the runaway trim properly or responded too late and the nose was pointed too far down. I guess the new MCAS is programmed to not fight the pilots and be more subtle in its movement of the trim on top of reading both sensors.

I have some bad news for you. FUSE has existed for quite a while now and allows exactly this.