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Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 152

The game server is in the domain of the seller. -- Irrelevant.

No, it's not. Nice of you to cut away the part that already said so. It is HIGHLY relevant if something you purchased becomes unusable due to an action of the seller or not.

Why should you be allowed to? Because you gave them money?

If you are new to this planet, this might be news to you, but otherwise: Yes, that is how commercial transactions work. You pay for something, you get to use it.

Just because you paid money doesn't give you permission to do whatever you want

No, but it absolutely DOES give me not just the permission but the RIGHT to use the thing I paid for for its intended purpose and for any other purpose I see fit. First sale doctrine and so on.

If refunds for a disabled games were to be a thing, they'd have to figure something out, because it's not the store's fault.

That is correct. But the store could either sell the same game again (in your case where the buyer personally was banned for whatever) or demand a refund from the manufacturer as is common practice when defective goods are returned. Really, there's not much to figure out, this is already a solved problem.

[the word "buy"] does not automatically mean you are now the owner of something.

Actually, that is exactly what it means.

Merriam-Webbster: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buy)

"to acquire possession, ownership, or rights to the use or services of by payment especially of money : purchase"

Seriously, why are you trying to defend an indefensible position ?

Comment Ancestor worship (Score 5, Insightful) 82

do these substances bring out a reality not normally visable, or do they make the brain invent these things. if so where or what is the brain getting the info from ? Why do multiple people report the same things ? (suggesting external input not self generated ?

The mushrooms are almost certainly not making an invisible aspect of reality visible.

That being said, this report is very interesting from an anthropological point of view: ancestor worship.

The report doesn't say whether the tiny people were recognized by the viewer (and I couldn't find any references), but this effect might have been the source of ancestor worship among the people of southeast Asia, where the mushroom grows.

Ancestor worship and animism (belief that the spirits of things hang around after death) might have its roots in this sort of psychedelic experience.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 152

A dependency required for the software to function no longer exists (like when a game's servers get shutdown) is essentially the same as an object breaking naturally over time due to wear and tear.

There's where your mental model is just wrong. The game server is in the domain of the seller. Some hardware breaking due to wear & tear or abuse is NOT. That is an incredibly important legal distinction.

f you spent $50 when the game launched and played for 500 hours, should you get a refund when the game shuts down 4 years later?

What EXACTLY do you mean with "the game shuts down"? That is the whole point. The game SERVERS shutting down is not the same as disabling the game. If it's an online-only game, there could still be OTHER servers, not run by the seller. Official or unofficial. That is the whole point of "stop killing games".

If your license was revoked because you were cheating, breaking rules, and generally being a complete cunt in some online game

Again, this is relevant for online games only, and is not about the game at all, but about access to a specific community or server. Even if I am the biggest asshole on the planet and every ban was absolutely justified - why should I not be able to set up my own server, invite my equally assholish friends and play there? There is no reason to disable the GAME, only the access to a specific server. These can be two distinct things. You buy the game, but you subscribe to a server.

Come to think of it, how the fuck are they supposed to issue refunds accurately anyway?

They shouldn't create the need to refund. You're making up a problem here. Every refund ever was done at the point of sale for the price you paid. That's why invoices and receipts exist.

You can't steal a contract, which is all the license really is. Your payment gets you a contract.

But that's not what it says. Every shop ever treated games as a SALE. Steam doesn't label the button "buy" anymore, but most other shops still do, and even on Steam everything else is handled exactly like a sale of a product. Shopping cart and all.

Because they want to eat their cake and have it, too. I'm sure players would be more hesitant to part with 60 bucks if it clearly said: "temporary, revocable at any time for any reason, permission to play".

Comment Re:Why? (Score 0) 179

There is no way the businessmen involved in building these reactors are going to want to spend the time and money to properly maintain them let alone decommission and shut them down when they are no longer safe to run.

This is the actual problem with nuclear power. And by the time it comes around, the people who made the decisions have already safely moved elsewhere or into pension.

Comment Re:Is vice signaling the new virtue signaling? (Score 1) 110

The guys who built those giant ovens could have told themselves that somebody was going to be baking a whole lot of bread ... very inefficiency.

Somebody wired up all those ICBM missile silos too. The ones who do think all of the above is just fine. There will always be someone.

Comment Ryzen/AMD 16/8GB (Score 5, Interesting) 91

Skipping the paywalled article I found these specs and was underwhelmed.

Sure it looks fine for playing mid games but my guess was something unique, unified RAM or a clever bus or something. It seems like a decently tuned Ryzen build. I do like the lower TDP on the CPU which should be doing less work.

A nice form factor for those who don't build their own.

Hopefully this is their entre into the PC world and v2 will have more innovations.

What's most cool is the generation of teenagers who will have default Arch/KDE instead of default Windows.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 152

If you think software never breaks, I have a bunch of 5.25" disks somewhere that want to have an argument with you.

It's a complete strawman to argue that physical things break. If I buy music, digitally, that won't break and yet nobody sane would expect that the band can at some random time in the future say "we revoke all our music". I can also think of a number of physical things that unless I mistreat them will easily survive me and three generations down the line.

This is not about replacements, it's about taking the product sold away but keeping the money.

Comment Re:revocable (Score 1) 152

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.

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 88

What needs to be done is make these dischargeable debt.

We tried that, graduates would declare bankruptcy, get the student debt discharged, and just have to wait 7 years or whatever to take out a loan to buy a house.

This will make lending focused on degree payback and the college graduation rate.

How do you figure? Right now student loans are all but guaranteed for all that apply, and we have tremendous delinquency rates despite the debt not being discharge able. If you make student debt discharge able, what's the incentive to pay it back? Maybe you meant to add "and put student debt back in the hands of private lenders, who will bear the cost of that discharged debt, so they will be very selective about giving bad credit risk students tens of thousands of dollars for their degree"? Is that what you meant?

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 88

Many other countries besides the USA have lower tuitions and lower per-student debts. Why? Government support for education.

So let's start with your last item first - do you imagine the U.S. Government, and state governments, DON'T support education? How much money does each state pour into state and community colleges? Acvording to you, nothing.

You know what the difference is between all those "free colleges" in Europe and elsewhere and US Colleges? The vast majority of foreign "free" colleges are run by the gov't, enrollment is limited, and students get in based on merit. In America, the vast majority of colleges are privet, "non-profit" institutions, and they admit almost anyone willing to pay the tuition they charge, usually with money they hope to earn after they graduate.

If you want to compare apples to apples, let's compare "free" European colleges and state colleges, let's not compare them to private colleges.

In America, any student can buy their way into college with borrowed money, and somehow that's unfair. Fine, let's stop government secured student loans and make all state colleges 'free, but merit-based', let's stop offering remedial math and reading classes... let's be just like Europe, and anyone that can't earn a spot at a free state college is free to find the money privately to attend the local 'non-profit' schools. Is that really what you want?

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 88

Have you forgotten that countless borrowers (former students) either simply don't make payments or, as we've discussed here frequently, will chose to simply move out of the country, in order to avoid paying for the education they wanted?

PS - there are NO HARD ASSETS securing student loans, which can be described as giving loans of tens of thousands of dollar/year for years, to someone who's never held a job/drawn a paycheck or even made a loan payment before getting approved.

Comment Go Janitors! (Score 4, Interesting) 40

I see so many names in the commit logs, but some standouts include: Blum, Cook, Torvalds, Solodai, Tyragu, Stitt, Bergmann, Wysocki, Panda, de Mello, and no doubt some I missed who have a large number of commits fixing this problem.

Thank to all who undertook this Herculean chore!

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