And what stops you from making a seperate license to play on the servers provided by the company that is based on good behaviour and/or monthly subscription fees?

This is what the Stop Killing Games movement is also about: Sure, we understand that eventually you wind down the online servers, no problem. But if I paid for a game, why should you have the right to disable it? With no other things I buy can you at any time later come to my house and take them back or disable them. Not with my microwave, not with my shower, not with my lights.

1) Typically the systems monitoring, if not the systems themselves, is dumped on the police along with the funding. I agree in principle that police data systems should be handled by an arms-length agency without ties to any particular police service. I also believe this should include their body cams, interview room video, and even their fleet and weapons/ammo tracking. They should not have any oversight over their own data because that leads to the potential for abuse.

2) At least where I am... officers can query, but queries of federal databases are audited and monitored. You've never seen someone walked out of a building faster than when they are caught with their hand in that particular cookie jar. And yes, charges happen for the serious incidents. However, that still leaves a lot of room for abuse of non-federal data.

And that title is backed by the fact that a decade ago or so I was implementing proper auditing to track cops because they were... abusing video systems and it made it into the news.

Cops are just people, the badge doesn't confer ethics or strength of character. It often does confer a sense of superiority to the general public and a belief that they're above some of the rules the rest of us abide by.

Even the best, most upright cop should never be taken at their word - there should always be some form of oversight. Because they're humans.

You wrote: "Isn't it funny how the Republican Party always gets very concerned about spending and the reach of government when the Republican Party doesn't control government; but just as soon as they do have control they start spending like crypto bros and use government to interfere in literally everything that doesn't fit their questionable narratives?"

See also: "The GOP used a Two Santa Clauses tactic to con America for nearly 40 years; This scam has been killing wages and enriching billionaires for decades"
https://www.salon.com/2018/02/...
        "The Republican Party has been running a long con on America since Reagan's inauguration, and somehow our nation's media has missed it - even though it was announced in The Wall Street Journal in the 1970s and the GOP has clung tenaciously to it ever since.
        In fact, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski's 1974 "Two Santa Clauses Theory" has been the main reason why the GOP has succeeded in producing our last two Republican presidents, Bush and Trump (despite losing the popular vote both times). It's also why Reagan's economy seemed to be "good."
        Here's how it works, laid it out in simple summary:
        First, when Republicans control the federal government, and particularly the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor and run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. This produces three results - it stimulates the economy thus making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy, it raises the debt dramatically, and it makes people think that Republicans are the "tax-cut Santa Claus."
        Second, when a Democrat is in the White House, scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how "our children will have to pay for it!" and "we have to cut spending to solve the crisis!" This will force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus. ..."

So it is not hypocrisy so much as a precisely-thought-out effective political strategy. Whether the majority of voters in the USA like the results or realize where those results come from is a different issue.

I just wanted to add that whatever the truth there, this idea that LLMs are not (by themselves) the way forward is increasingly appearing in various places. One recent example on Slashdot:
https://slashdot.org/story/25/...
"Project Prometheus is building AI systems that learn from physical experiments rather than just analyzing digital text."

Humans learn to speak usefully with just a few years of immersion in a social world and without reading the entire internet. My college advisor back in the 1980s (George A. Miller) though this suggested language had a partially genetically-wired component in the brain even as much was also learned.

Beyond reading Asimov robot stories as a kid, I first learned more formally about AI taking an independent study course in High School in the late 1970s based around Patrick Winston's first edition Artificial Intelligence textbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Then in the 1980s, some of my college work was also related to AI as cognitive science and exploring triplestores and so on (which very indirectly helped inspire George to create WordNet as I was graduating, where WordNet lead to Simpli and Google AdSense). I spent about a year hanging around the CMU Robotics Institute after graduation (where I got to ride in the first "Autonomous Land Vehicle" or "ALVAN"). And then I was a research assistant co-managing a robotics and expert system lab for a time. I also made one of the first simulations on a Symbolics of kinematic self-replicating robots (presenting that work at a conference on AI and simulation, where I commented on the total surprise to me when I saw emergent behavior of unexpected cannibalism of offspring in it until I kludged in a virtual sense of smell to avoid eating creatures that smelled the same). As a grad student later I learned a bit about neural networks related to self-driving vehicles.

I later worked for a time in IBM's speech research group in the late 1990s (mainly using existing tools to build implementations, aspects of which were forerunner to Apple's Siri as IBM's "Personal Speech Assistant" and also an interactive speech-operated display wall I built mostly for fun which was intended to in-theory eventually support advanced design and also patent writing).

Anyway, with that for context, I think LLMs are pretty amazing, but they just don't seem like how humans learn to think and speak. Not saying they can't be useful as part of a larger system though. But fundamentally, even if neural networks are involved, humans think in concepts (or word senses, as in WordNet) which they mostly learn by inference from just a relatively few examples. And that learning tends to have a precise aspect to it related to the actual experience and some notion of "truth" (as in actual experience even if the experience is hearing or reading about what someone else experienced or said they experiences).

So the idea proposed here by "Cringely" makes some sense (as part of this trend to seeing the limits of LLMs) -- although whether or not he can pull it off is a different issues.

But there remains a concern of whether or not such a thing (making powerful self-taught AIs) is worth doing right now given a competitive economic system and also the existential risk of creating essentially a new intelligent species (one without all the evolved safeguards humans have as a social species, limited as they may be as demonstrated by various tech-bro behavior). Anyway, such concerns is why I mostly left the AI research field in the 1980s (other than to kibitz about it from the outside).

This YouTube comment was not posted by me but it almost could have been in some ways:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      "@Jenkkimie 2 weeks ago
      Former AI developer here. Hear Mo Gawdat's message to heart. I regret my past, regret that I helped companies to build AI's at all. I can't undo history but I left the AI industry when I saw companies were starting to plan on using AI in unethical ways that I could not stand by. I've lost a lot of money over the years but as far as I am concerned that is the sacrifice I made because I don't want to be part of the destruction of humanity and the world.
      There has got to be better ways to use AI than pure greed, and we need to do better than this. To remember ethics, not just our bank accounts. So I've joined among many other former and current AI developers in advocating for regulations, change of how we think about economies and the role of money in our world and what is our place in it. Maybe we are fighting a losing battle but all of us should do what we can to steer and orient this world to a better tomorrow rather than submit to the will of the oligarchs evil desires. The fight is not over yet, we can still change the direction of it all."

Mo Gawdat (interviewed in the video that comment is posted on) is the only major AI executive who so far I see seems to get the main idea my sig in relation to AI: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Whatever AIs we build, unless we (or they) understand that irony, it seems unlikely that there will be a happy result for humanity of such work.

Wow. Thanks for posting this, A.C.. In trying to verify any of what you posted (which was all news to me), I found this:
"The cost of lies: A Mineserver story" by Jeremy Reimer
https://jeremyreimer.com/rocke...
      "Creating and shipping a brand new product is insanely difficult. It takes a ton of money, sweat, and time. Even people with tons of experience can underestimate timelines and encounter unexpected difficulties. So telling the story of a failed Kickstarter is not especially interesting.
      This is not that story.
      This is a story about what happens when someone builds up a reputation over decades of work and then destroys it in a couple of years. Not because they failed, but because they lied about it. Over and over again. Until the lies got too much to handle, and they had to create newer, even larger lies to cover them up.
      Why would anyone do this? We'll get into that at the end. But first, the story. ..."

I can still wonder on the use of the word "lie" in that article by Jeremy Reimer versus, say, "irrational exuberance" especially if his kids were involved in making the Minecraft server project happen? But the article does make it sounds like a larger pattern. Ironically, the behavior even sounds a bit like an overly-people-pleasing LLM hallucination?

Having read many Robert X. Cringely articles in InfoWorld and so on way back when, I would be sad if this was all true. Kind of like losing faith in a celebrity of computing from my younger days.

Related (although in general I have not found it that true about most computing people):
"Never Meet Your Heroes: What It Means & If You Should Meet Them"
https://www.wikihow.com/Never-...
        "Itâ(TM)s a proverb that suggests meeting your idols can lead to disappointment. âoeNever meet your heroesâ is a piece of advice that means people shouldnâ(TM)t meet their heroes because they may be disappointed by the heroâ(TM)s true personality. This happens because people tend to idealize people they look up to instead of viewing them as multifaceted humans with flaws, and they may have unrealistic expectations about what will happen when they meet their hero.
        The hero might not have the time, energy, or interest in meeting their expectations, destroying the perfect image that person has built in their head.
        The logic behind this proverb is that many celebrities craft public personas, and the image they portray online or on camera may be vastly different from how they act in real life.
        With that being said, some people say that meeting your heroes can be a positive experience and serve as a reminder that heroes are no different than normal people. ..."

Related by me from over two decades ago: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
        "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. ...
          Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works.
      If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?
        Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. ...."

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the US, SMPTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization."

Buy indie games.

It's only the big players who have these delusions.

I'm not saying the right answer is to get a refund. The right answer is to not make the license revokable.

For the theater comparison: If the theatre would invalidate my ticket and throw me out mid-movie, you can be sure that I'd ask for a refund. And in any sane jurisdiction, I'd get it.

Just don't buy these crappy licenses. Retro-gaming is booming for a very good reason.

And, if you're looking for another reason not to buy -- the way hardware prices are going, retro emulators are probably all we'll be able to play soon because nobody will be able to afford the GPUs and RAM needed to play the next wave of new release games anyway.

Mostly, the difference is some legales, but the kicker is: "revocable". That is an insane difference. I'm quite sure it doesn't say you get a refund if they revoke your license.

"These things"? You mean the government shouldn't be drafting regulations for government, which is what we're talking about here? Instead, private industry should be telling the government what to do?

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

"Please protect us from child-harm lawsuits since child harm is pretty much our business model."

Statism creates billionaires.