It wasn’t an intentional feature. But, when they realized it happened it became a feature that they thought was useful.

There are a lot of things like that, where something has a design quirk that people come to rely on. The quirk is so useful that people assume it was designed to work that way intentionally, but sometimes it was just coincidence.

In a proper society with socialist benefits, you wouldn’t need to join the military to receive those benefits.

Basically, those are employer benefits. Your employer happens to be the US government, and you get healthcare, college tuition and housing as benefits from your employer.

Often when there are no laws about something it’s because most of the key laws of the US were set down 250 years ago when modern communication tech didn’t exist, people travelled by horseback, etc.

But, you would think that a procedure to determine if a key member of the government were alive or not would have been even more important 250 years ago. Back when legislators had to travel by horse across rural areas that were unlit at night, it must have been relatively normal for someone to just disappear. Maybe they’d get waylaid by bandits. Maybe attacked by wildlife. Maybe kicked in the head by their horse. Maybe caught in a flash flood.

OTOH, maybe back then “just wait until the next election, even if it’s 6 years away” would have been considered reasonable.

Which is what a “proof of life” would determine.

Graham

LET US WATCH THEM POOP!

Make your vote count.

True Names (1981), Software (1982), Neuromancer (1984), Hardwired (1986), Wetware (1988)

Cyberpunk is lowlife and high tech. It’s completely dystopian. The early 1980s was the height of the Cold War with Reagan in power. People were not optimistic about the future in the 1980s, they were just hoping that it wouldn’t end in a nuclear war.

I’d guess 99.9% of Android users have only ever used the Google Play store.

IMO, this case is a kind of “canary in the coal mine” for whether or not the US can maybe return to a country governed by laws. Trump is massively corrupt. He has been pardoning all kinds of criminals. His justice department has been jailing innocent people and refusing to investigate obvious crimes. He has openly admitted to crimes in press conferences, and that’s just becoming normal now.

But, despite all that, this judgment is out there and he can’t seem to make it go away. If this were Russia, E Jean Carroll would have “committed suicide” by now, maybe leaving a note behind about how she was so sorry to have falsely accused Donald J. Trump, and how he was a tremendous, so tremendous leader, and man, some people are saying maybe the best that has ever lived. The judge that ruled against him would have accidentally fallen out of a window.

So, this might be a kind of Hungary situation, where there’s a leader who has warped the entire country and seems all powerful, but who is simply voted out of office and is no longer driving the headlines.

The estimates of Trump’s net worth are much less reliable than most net worth estimates. For example, a big chunk of his net worth is now in meme coins. They tend to calculate his net worth by saying each coin is priced at $X and he has Y coins, so his net worth is $X*Y. But, the second he starts trying to sell those shitcoins, the price will plummet. There’s nothing backing those shitcoins, there’s no real demand for them. People are only holding onto them because they think maybe other people will believe they’re valuable. If Trump sells them, the game is up and everyone knows they’re worthless, so the true value of what he owns in coins is a tiny fraction of that.

People have been trying to bribe him in various ways. But, again, that’s often through crypto, so it’s not like real money you can spend. Most of his net worth used to be in the supposed value of having his name on various properties. He didn’t own the building, but he’d slap “Trump” on it and collect royalties. But, right now, for most of the world slapping “Trump” on something decreases its value.

People who are rich via huge amounts of stock in a company they started are sort-of in a similar boat, but to a lesser extent. Elon Musk is worth, on paper, nearly $1 trillion. But, that’s due to comically ridiculous overvaluations of Space X and Tesla. He can sell a bit of his stock without triggering a massive sell-off. But, if he wanted to sell every share he owns and convert his money into cold hard cash, he could only get a small fraction of $1T because selling off big amounts of his companies would cause other people to sell off too, and the value would tank. In the mean time though, he can still go to a bank and borrow money against the supposed value of his shares. That’s something Trump can’t do because banks have realized that he can’t be trusted to repay his loans, so they won’t loan him money.

So, Trump could pay off this $5m judgment, but not without it seriously taking a bite out of his actual, liquid net worth. I’m sure a lot of the reason he’s refusing to pay is that he doesn’t want to, or doesn’t want to set a precedent, or just likes getting away with not paying his bills. But, another reason is that for him $5m really is a lot of money because his supposed billionaire status is with a lot of asterisks.

Just because a day one patch is standard doesn’t mean it’s good for the game developer. Also, just because the game can be released in a buggy state doesn’t mean that’s good either. There are a lot of games that received massively negative reviews because they were released in a buggy state.

It gives you a chance to save your reputation if your QA processes are shit, but if they are that will bite you in the ass at some point.

Games had a higher quality to them before being released.

The quality was definitely higher, but there were also definitely still bugs in the released version.

Why do you say that the ability (and requirement) to patch the game after release is a benefit to the company that released the game?

How to think of games has changed over the years.

Arguably the first real computer game game “Spacewar!” followed the “the “hacker ethic”, whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright”.

After a while, copyright came into play, and people were expected to “buy” a copy of the game, but “piracy” was common.

Meanwhile, the consoles pretended the game was a physical object, and that you needed that physical object to play, and that you could give that physical object to someone else, or sell it back to the store.

And then there was the shareware model, used for games like Doom. It kept the idea that games were copyrightable stuff, but it didn’t try to stop people from copying, and allowed them to share the games around. People were just asked to pay for extra levels, or sometimes just to send in some money if they liked the game.

On PC, Steam became the dominant platform because it’s less of a headache than piracy. Steam doesn’t pretend you own a physical object, you’re buying a license.

Fundamentally, gamers want the games to be free. If possible, they want to avoid paying for them at all. They want to be able to give them to friends, and have no restrictions on how or where they can run them: online, offline, on a phone, on a toaster, whatever. Once they have access to the game, they don’t ever want to have to give up access for any reason. They want the companies that make the games to release patches for any bugs that are discovered, and ideally, they’d like free additional content post-release.

Game companies want gamers to pay as much as possible for games. They want people to buy their games, they want an additional purpose for every additional machine the game is installed on. In addition, if they can manage it, they want people to pay continuously for playing the game, so it’s not just a one-time payment. They also want to be able to revoke access to the game at any time, and not have to pay the players when they do that. They don’t want to have to keep maintaining the game after it has been released, though they might be willing to do that if it’s profitable because it means more people will buy the game.

Neither extreme position makes much sense. If people aren’t going to give money to the developers, there will still be people making games as a hobby, but there won’t be high-budget AAA games made as a business. On the other extreme, if a game is too expensive, can’t be refunded, might be revoked at any time, and requires that you continuously pay while playing it, most people won’t bother.

So, what’s left is a negotiation, what will people put up with? Gamers typically hate paying for live service games, but if they do that there’s a reasonable business case for the game company to keep releasing content for the game. Gamers would like to be able to re-sell their game (really their licenses to those games), but that means a significant loss of revenue for the game companies, so they’re unlikely to accept that. The additional revenue means they can either keep the price lower, or can make a better, more polished game. Gamers would love to be able to play games forever without additional payment, even online games requiring servers. Game companies don’t want to have to support that based on a single sale that might have happened a decade ago. Game companies would love it if old games stopped working, so people have to buy new ones. That’s unlikely to be a fight they win in the long term though, because unless there is a required online component, it seems absurd to cut off access to the game just because it’s old.

In the end, there will probably be compromises. For a lot of people, the compromises will be unfair. Maybe they’ll play more indie games or even free software games. For other people, they’ll grudgingly accept, but in exchange will get games that have 100,000x the budget of something like “Spacewar!”

• and a pony

I never liked the jewel cases. Not enough space for anything interesting inside other than just the disc.

What I miss is cloth maps. I don’t know what I did with mine, but if I ever open a moving box and find one, I’m framing it and putting it up on my wall.

That reminds me of this awesome video

Apparently Dortmund did their own version more recently, and they did it with a whole stadium full of Dortmund supporters present.