Absolutely correct. If prisons are run by for-profit corporations, recidivism is in their interest. More "customers", you see.

Me too! Retired in 2023... perfect timing, I think!

I guess it depends on what you're typing. For English text, it's probably fine. But I do a lot of programming and doubt that speech input would be effective for that.

This feature is great in an office that uses small cubicles. Even better for open-plan offices!

But seriously, apart from disabled users who might not be able to use a keyboard, I don't see a use case for this. The reason we use dictation on mobile devices is that they typically have poor keyboards. If you have a good keyboard, you can be far more efficient with it than with voice input.

I grew up in a country that adopted PAL rather than NTSC, so never saw the hue and saturation settings until my family relocated to Canada. I was baffled by how backwards NTSC was.

What percentage of coffee-brewing costs are from energy consumption? I would guess that most of the cost is the coffee itself.

To boil 500 mL of water that starts out at room temperature takes about 0.05 kWh, which costs very much less than one cent in pretty much any jurisdiction. Enough coffee to make two cups of coffee probably costs 5 to 25 cents. So I don't see the energy saving as being "very significant".

Seems to me it's the GOP that is obsessed with this issue and with what's in kids' pants. They're the ones constantly stoking the culture wars.

s/giraffe/drain/

Where are the usual "think of the kids!" politicians? I guess accepting kickbacks from Meta...

Requiring a drone license is reasonable; it's required here in Canada for any drone over 250 grams. You have to learn the regulations and pass a test to get your license.

But I don't see how forbidding buying or repairing drones in a specific city makes sense.

I have a (very old) Roku that I quite like. Oh well. I'm glad I didn't spend the money to upgrade to a newer one.

If your company becomes that valuable, then yes... you should be forced to either share your wealth with your employees and other shareholders, or else give it up to the government if you are unwilling to do that.

I don't know about you, but the prospect of being worth $100M would be more than enough to motivate me to do all of the large things you just mentioned in your comment.

This is why there needs to be a 98% wealth tax on assets over $100M and 99.9% on assets over $250M. No individual human needs more than $100M in wealth.

Of course, to be fair to the poor oligarchs, we can index the thresholds to inflation.

By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!

The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.

Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.

But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.

Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)