I don't think it'd technically be illegal to write up the counterclaim with prompt injection attacks

As amusing as it is to think about I can think of multiple ways that would not just be civilly unlawful, but criminally illegal. Our hypothetical scumbag lawyer would well be in danger of triggering all sorts of wire fraud, contempt of court, and tortious interference claims and charges.

Then what you are describing is not at all a license.

316 years of copyright legislation and litigation since the Statute of Anne says otherwise.

They sort of have been doing with the steam deck. I've had one for around six months and I'm consistently surprised at how well the thing runs. Not everything runs superbly, but those that dont I just run on lower settings, and my eyes are too shit to tell the difference half the time.

Hmm. Not so fast. Part of the value equasion with the steam deck and steam controllers is they get to exploit the control scheme mappings already in place for the steam decks. The big thing tthere is the twin touchpads that replace the mouse on the steamdecks (Though they also have touch sensitivity, but the screens on the decks are a little small to make that particularly accurate). I'd hold out for an alternative that better maps onto the control scheme.

What keeps me up at night, is the fate of Tim Smith from the Cardiacs. In my view possibly the closest pop music ever got to a Frank Zappa league songwriter. The man wrote crazy complicated , surreal and energetic music that admitedly is an aquired taste for people. Anyway, at the height of the bands fame, he was out one night at a sisters of mercy concert, and he got robbed for his wallet, and immediately had a massive heart attack. Rushed to hospital and clinically dead for 7 minutes before they revived him. This triggered a stroke of sorts. When he came too he was completely paralyzed down one side of his body, completely mute, and suffering massive pain signals up and down his body.He was fully cogniscient of what was going on around him ,the stroke did not affect his cognition, but unable to function at all. He never left hospital and stayed in limbo in hospital, for a decade before another heart attack kileld him. Ten years in hell. Fucking nightmare, and popular music lost one of its greatest songwriters.

Look after your tickers people. A full coronary heart attacks can be horrifying what it'll do to you, and thats if you survive it at all. And contemplate buying one of those Apple or Samsung watches that'll call an ambulance if you collapse.

The real annoying thing about the climate stuff, is in 2026 we have all the knowledge in place to actually solve this cursed problem. Its literally cheaper to get power out of renewables than almost any other means, and if we are prepared for a lead time and a bit of cost, we are quite capable of going nuclear too, if we sort out the red tape and bullshit. But 50% of the population vote for parties that campaign on "DIG BABY DIG! PHYSICS IN THE SKY IS A COMMUNIST PLOT" and the other 50% of the population are content to let their slightly less mouth foaming prefered party move deck chairs around on the titanic and not a knob of goatshit ever gets done.

Theres a bit of a magic trick with a lot of it.

These things are *realy* good at drudge work. Shitty reactjs sites. wordpress themes. The kind of stuff you give to the fresh recruit from university, whos still got enough vigor in him to tolerate working on mind numbing web shit all day. But you give it a hard problem, race conditions in a multithreaded code, cache chaos, or worse mashing it all together and debugging memory leaks in a cached multithreaded system across multiple language translation layers in a system designed by insane architecture astronauts on meth, and they fall to pieces. I mean, its impressive, but its not going to be replacing senior devs anytime soon.

Probably one of the most brilliant people of the century who we lost due to bigotry.

Sadly, one of so many. Recently found out my best friend in highschool had suicided likely because he had been outed as gay. All I can think of is he should have told me, I'd have supported him, he's hadly the only gay friend I ever had. And in retrospect it should have been bleedingly obvious, the man would practically run from any woman who showed him affection, and he was pretty dandy. Singing in a hair metal band and being kinda..... camp with all the frizzed hair and leather tassles and shit. Think motley crue or poison or whatever. But it was the 1980s and people where pretty brutal to young gay people back then.

Even if I go back to the 1990s and boxed retail software, you were never actually buying the software, your purchase was for the license to use it.
The real issue here is the gamers being sold software whose functionality is tied to third-party servers and denied first sale doctrine (the ability to transfer/resell their license if they want to someone else).

Thats always been a gross simplification of the rights generally involved with a software sale. While yes, technically its a license to use software, rather than the software itself, license sales have always had a series of expectations associated with them in law, common law and in user expectations. And those expectations matter in a courtroom.

Most of the world consumer law is very clear that if you give a license to use something, and its sold as "buy" rather than "rent" or "time limited" , its not revokable and its subject to the same sort of consumer protection laws buying a toaster or a car has. Most importantly that it remains fit for purpose for the natural lifetime of the product, and that term "lifetime" is absolutely not "until we tire of letting you use that thing you paid for" but rather "How long would a reasonable consumer believe they can use this before its basically bitrot". To simplify that, assume it means "as long as the physical software is capable of running without a rewrite" and NOT "until we send the kill-command to the DRM".

The tension here is that software is attempting to move to a service model whilst trying to retain the language of a product model. You dont purchase a pool cleaning man, you hire a pool cleaning man. Well, unless your in a southern state during a terrible time in history, I suppose.

And thats where cases like this the complainant stands a good chance of winning. Because if California law has strong protections (A lot of america *doesnt* , but europe* and australia but apparently not canada for reasons that are mystifying to me, have strong protections) then if it can be shown that at the point of purchase it was not made clear that this product was time limited or was going to be made unavailable to people who purchased it, then the complainants have a strong case for deceptive advertising.

* I am aware europe just voted down a 'stop killing games' law. I am surprised by that, because honestly, it should have been the default anyway. I smell the acrid stench of industry lobbyists foul deeds

They're guilty, they knew it and still pushed forwards with bad policies. They don't provide ANYTHING that can't be replicated quickly of from a competitor. Sick the dogs on them and let the lawyers feast. Maybe a class action AI is the correct method ? /s

This is the GAME that made PC gaming. I'm still running/making Doom/Doom2 wads and pk3 at 57. Just finished a new map by a 15 year old that wasn't born when the game was made. I'd say it had an impact on the WORLD. I'd be happy with the soundtrack as a requiem.

I'm not even sure if it's that deliberate, or it's just the fact that Trump is thinking about rigging the election... so he talks about rigging the election.

But it's hilarious how consistent the pattern is. Normally with something like that there's just a few occasional examples. But with Trump if he says "Democrats are kicking puppies!" chances are that we're about to find out that Trump kicked a puppy.

Said "Billionaires" will spend far more $$$ in political "donations" to avoid the 1 time tax. Just pay 10% on your earnings like the rest of us.

HPE is not HP. Do not confuse them. HPE was spun off into a completely separate company ages ago and has no business relationship or ownership relationship (different stock tickers etc) , decades ago.

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.