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Comment Re:Licensing Variety Creates Choices (Score 1) 152

Making contracts where you lease/rent a game illegal just removes choices/products for everyone on the market

Making motor vehicles without safety features illegal also removes choices/products.

the risk of making them (perpetually maintaining game servers, or giving away massive amounts of IP) were too intimidating to embark upon the project.

Multiplayer video games ought to be designed up front for private servers after end of support, in the same way that motor vehicles are designed up front for the safety of occupants of that vehicle, occupants of other vehicles, and pedestrians.

A choice becomes a Hobson's choice when all sellers in the relevant market choose not to offer an option to buyers, such as an option to run a private server after end of support. A Hobson's choice is no real choice.

Comment Re:It's entertainment (Score 1) 152

If I pay for a movie ticket do I own the movie?

That's advertised up front as the equivalent of a rental. I draw a sharp contrast with buttons labeled "buy" that do not grant equivalent rights to those of the owner of a lawfully made copy.

You've never "owned" media.

Per the copyright statute of Slashdot's home country, Title 17, United States Code:
- A copy is a physical object in which a work is fixed. (Section 101)
- It is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to resell that copy. (Section 109)
- And it is not an infringement for the owner of such an object to make another copy of a computer program in RAM as an essential step of running it. (Section 117)

Comment Re:Can't expect online support forever! (Score 1) 152

Game companies don't always fully own all of the server tech that runs the game. Some or all of it could be licensed and not redistributable.

If it becomes a crime or tort for the server middleware publisher to provide middleware that is "licensed and not redistributable", server middleware publishers will have to either change their standard license terms going forward or close.

Comment Re:Change to a monthly service (Score 1) 152

Until you realize that to keep up with what your friends are playing, you need the equivalent of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max, Peacock, and a bunch of other services. Netflix streaming began as the online extension of Starz, and now Starz is its own separate subscription service.

Comment Beales and Eisenach 2014 (Score 1) 1

I use DuckDuckGo Privacy Tools. I see every single advertisement on John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball and on Read the Docs. DuckDuckGo does not block them because these sites serve ads in a way that respects viewers' privacy. They are contextual, not behavioral.

However, larger sites with a more general audience can't rely on contextual ad placement. Instead, they feel a need to tailor each ad impression to each viewer's interests inferred from observing the viewer's interests across several websites. A 2014 article by Beales and Eisenach reported that behavioral advertising produces triple the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) compared to contextual advertising.[1]

Before Forbes, Wired, and The Atlantic went behind a paywall, they went through a phase of treating privacy tools as ad blockers.[2] The Atlantic's help page insistently mentioned "ad or tracking blockers" in the same breath.

A lot of times, I can get past misclassification of privacy tools as ad blockers by using an extension to turn off all script-in-the-browser for a particular domain.[3] Other times, I find that the website was deliberately made script-dependent. Articles on Reuters didn't load for me last I checked a couple days ago. Instead, I got a notice to reenable JS and turn off ad blockers.

[1] JavaScript Switcher by meetDeveloper on Mozilla Add-ons
[2] Doc Searls. "An invitation to settle matters with @Forbes, @Wired and other publishers" (April 15, 2016).
[3] Beales, Howard and Eisenach, Jeffrey A., "An Empirical Analysis of the Value of Information Sharing in the Market for Online Content" (January 2014). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2421... or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

Comment Deno is awesome ... (Score 3, Interesting) 7

... I hope this move doesn't screw it up.

For the uninformed: Deno is basically the "new" official non-shitty successor to Node.js. It's secure (closed) by default, supports TypeScript natively without the need for transpilation, has the full browser API on the server side and comes with a bunch of neat other features that turn Jamstack development from the bloated and fickle shit-show that is Node into a chill walk in the park. I've been using it exclusively for a few years now and have come to avoid Node.js like the plague for real world deployment.

Comment Errrmm ... No.(?!?) (Score 5, Insightful) 100

Dude, FOSS has been fragmented since the dawn of time. It's what we lament about every day. "Why can't there be one distro?" "Why so many JS frameworks?" "Oh, yeah, yet another ORM and yet another PHP CMS, just what we needed!" etc.

FOSS certainly doesn't need AI to be the noisy mess that it is. If anything I expect AI to accelerate development for teams who want to get well-rounded user-centric stuff done and know what they're doing.

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