OK, so explain how you had supposedly never heard of the Transformers? They've been around since 1984.

I don't understand the nature of your comment. Are you confirming that you were 11 or 12 at the time?

Hint: Have you checked my /. ID?

And yet you'd never heard of the Transformers before you saw the Michael Bay movies. I guess you were 11 or 12 at the time?

I'm told she's had some well-liked stories.

Still, James Gunn seems to have this obsession with pulling up C-list characters from the comics and putting them in central roles in movies. For a lot of the running length of Superman, it was a movie about some guy named Mr. Terrific that nobody's ever heard of. I assume this is because he wants to tell new stories, rather than rehashing the same old origins and motives for characters that everybody's known about for years. But it's not the same as actually introducing new, appealing ideas; these characters are C-listers for a reason. Nobody cares.

Haven't seen the movie, but I've heard it's not just that ... she also apparently spends a lot of the movie not seeming to believe there's much urgency to the situation at all. That has a way of hamstringing the idea of a "ticking clock" plot.

Two words: Government contracts.

"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?

No, but HPE is. HPE does not sell printer ink.

Failing that, stroke something else.

Hmm. Just from my own bullshit experience, if you find yourself in an empty room, you probably look to the right and then, naturally, you're moving counterclockwise.

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.)

Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.

So then what is the point of Yoda being immensely old? Is he basically 63 in Yoda years?