Yes but no.

They could have left support for old drivers. They're dropping support for the encrypted drivers they used to support.

For your comparison, the thing about encrypted overlays on file systems is that the encrypted overlay works independently. People will move simply by virtue of using a natively-encrypted file system is easier and more convenient than an overlay system. But nothing precludes the use of an overlay if people want to do it themselves.

In this case there is no more support. It's a migration at gunpoint: "migrate or lose your data".

For lots of users it's a whole lot of nothing. Lots of people have already moved over years ago. For old archives and legacy systems, it's brutal. Re-encrypt the old archives, re-encrypt the old systems, or lose them.

There are still low-volume subs that are worthwhile, and good communities that use it. I've got an account, and interact with mostly friends in a few subs, most are in the low hundred users, but a few like /r/cooking and /r/photography are higher traffic.

I understand requiring accounts for the interface, anonymous use is unfortunately abused.

That said, the day they kill off old reddit or subvert my ad blockers is the day I stop going back. The endless scroll design and ad-powered updates are unbearable for me.

This is great fodder for lawsuits around competition / anticompetitive business practices, and consumer protection lawsuits.

On their face, individual agreements that lock in prices as a voluntary agreement are enforceable. However, an awful lot of laws kick in when they are more than an individual contract and from the story they're hitting 16 of the biggest ones, and therefore a lot of the market.

Depending on the market such as the country or the state, there are potentially enormous penalties that can be applied. For some laws, the fines can be 2x the gains. If these account for 40% of the company's revenue, the massive fines would mean 80% of their revenue for as long as the profiteering was on the books. In the short term while they grind through the courts they'll look like a windfall, in the long term when court rulings come down they'll look like bankruptcy, as potentially years of revenue get charged to massive fines.

And that's the core of the issue.

If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.

If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.

As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.

A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.

I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.

These days people use bullets, the 4th box of liberty.

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, all shot and killed while in office. Seven more presidents had shots that landed but didn't kill them. Most presidents in the 1900's and all of them in the 2000's have had assassination attempts that were intercepted and stopped before they could get their shots fired at the president.

The story is that even during the constitutional convention, when discussing why a president would leave power after a successful impeachment and conviction, or after an election, one of the delegates reminded them "if they don't go peacefully, they can always be removed the traditional way", which ended the discussion.

A positive thing I note is that after all modern authoritarian regimes collapse, many of their followers become unemployable. The SS after Nazi Germany, the Stasi after the cold war, many KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union ended up turning to organized crime instead if they weren't picked up by the new government's security/intelligence services. People just don't want to hire them. I suspect in a couple years, anybody who decided to remain at ICE will struggle to find jobs as long as that's on their resume, and government prosecutors moved from being a prestigious mark for a lawyer into quickly becoming a limiting factor instead. From the first administration, quite a few struggled to get work after it ended, I'm assuming it's going to be worse for them after round two, however this current presidency ends.

Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.

In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, and those approaching retirement finish out their careers training everybody, mostly just supervising and commenting, and that's a good thing for knowledge transfer, both for institutional knowledge and collective wisdom across the industry.

In corporate environments people want to hire already-trained, drop-in experts. Phrases like "hit the ground running", rather than "six month training period", unless the worker themselves are expected to pay for that training period. Companies see training, mentorship, and learning as something people do on their own time, not something the company does. And there's no retirement phase where the declining workers spend their days passing along their institutional knowledge, they're fired the moment after passing their peak, and the institutional knowledge vanishes.

It's what passes for journalism these days. Give it a few rewrites, it will be on the various news aggregation sites that you're an insider with first-hand knowledge, or that you're a spokesperson for the company.

Same, I had that for a while.

The wifi names were "Surveillance Van 5" and "Surveillance Van 24" for 5Ghz and 2.4GHz channel. I set the family's cell phones network device names "Surveillance Operator 1", "Surveillance Operator 2", "Surveillance Operator 3", and "Surveillance Operator 4". For house guests sometimes it got a chuckle, "connect to surveillance van 24". I know when I went to friends who took their networks seriously, I had someone ask about it.

Seems like this all boils down down definitions. What does a grade mean?

If a grade means understanding the material, there's no reason every student couldn't get an A. Sure, many won't, but when we're talking about Harvard students, especially at lower-level courses, the barriers to get into the school are so high that it makes sense most students would be able to master the material.

If grades are relative to other students, even if every student understands the material perfectly there's still going to be the curve, some A's, B's, C's, and some must fail.

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

Unfortunately that industry lobbiests got their hands on the politicians.

It has a *TON* of loopholes. The biggest loophole is all they need to do is start including these words in their disclosures: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM OR BY USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." Just make sure it is included in the webpage along with all the other terms and conditions, and they can do all they want.

Yup, collusion, price fixing, and antitrust violations are a few of the ways it is an issue. Indirectly by third parties doing the collusion, as was done with apartments, is still collusion.

The special interest groups clearly got their hands into the politicians for this version. Here's the text, pick the version of the full text in the dropdown. Even though it has loopholes you could drive a delivery truck through, it's a start.

Kinda. Yes, the US-based judge could issue a judgment that affects the .org domain, as that's managed by a US-based company. But the rest? The judge has no authority for Liechtenstein (.li), Sweden (.se), India (.in), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm), Greenland (.gl), Switzerland (.ch), Pakistan (.pk), Grenada (.gd), and the British Virgin Islands (.vg).

The rant about threats, harassment, coercion, not so much.

Yup, that caught my eye too.

Security isn't "my blueprints are secret."

Security comes with: "Here are the blueprints, here is the research behind the blueprints, here are copies of the safe to practice on, here are conference papers discussing the known exploits of the safe, here are the reviews done by experts in the field, and here is the list of implementations used by governments around the world, if you discover exploits you'll make global news and companies everywhere will want your brains."

Intermissions are still a thing in concerts, plays, theater, musicals, and in many types of Indian cinema.

The break lets the audience stretch, visit a toilet, talk about what they've seen, and buy the high-priced concessions. Run for about an hour, have a break, finish it up. Or a 3-act, with two breaks.

It makes a change for the writers, with a one-act movie there is a continuous momentum from beginning to end, with breaks the writing can be more episodic. Neither is really going to be right or wrong, just different for storytelling. Many take advantage of the break with time passing or off-screen events as part of telling the story effectively.