Word! The nastiest vendor lock in bullshit you’ve ever seen. My bitchin’ yellow Walkman aside, bad products top to bottom.

Im not arguing that all digital ownership works great for consumers. But it can work. Shitty companies will always be shitty and it doesn’t matter how you possess the goods, you bought them from shitty companies.

As a general rule which applies to all products: if the company you are paying has to pay another company a license fee for your product to work, it’s not going to work for very long. Be it a Blu-ray Disc or a marvel skin, your vendor will stop paying their vendor as soon as they can.

This is the most insane false equivalence I have seen in this thread.

The point is that some providers of digital goods have already surpassed reasonable expectations, and some fall very short. 20yrs of support for a video game on any format is really great. Any thing past that I think belongs in the preservation category which is the responsibility of libraries and archivists, not publishers.

Returning to your house analogy, when your 20yr old furnace fails, do you call the builder and expect him to fix it for free? When you clog the toilet do you plunge it yourself or does somebody owe that to you as condition of the sale? At some point everything you buy reaches the end of its useful life. What makes people thing digital goods should last until the sun burns out?

I agree. It’s hard to draw lines though right. Say your country made a law that companies could not pull the sort of shit Sony is pulling here. They would have to put a timeline on it right? It’s unreasonable that they should support a 10$ digital purchase for centuries. But 10yr old content disappearing is also horseshit. So what is a good line? What expectations is it reasonable to have as a consumer?

What can I reasonably expect when I pay a few bucks for a downloaded movie. I feel like that is what we are really debating here. To me, getting 20+ yrs of support for a game on steam seems like an insanely good deal. I never got that for physical games. I am forced to admit that digital games on steam are a better deal than any physical games I have ever bought.

Digital ownership CAN work but you have to decide who you trust. I would never trust Sony (or other console manufacturers) to maintain my digital library over the long term. But I guess trusting valve worked out. Shit, all my old ebooks still work too, and that’s Amazon, hardly a paragon of ethics.

The problem isn’t digital ownership, it’s the companies that are selling stuff and/or the regulatory structure that they operate in.

What good would a backup do for a game that requires specialty hardware to run. I still have my ps2 games. I just can’t play them.

I still have my cod1 pc disks, they just don’t do anything.

What is the backup for?

Dude it’s been 20yrs. I bought a game 20yrs ago and I can still play it. The physical media that I OWN did not last that long.

Any day it could go away. Just like my PS2 games went away when the only hardware on earth allowed to play them died.

A quarter of a human lifetime and counting is ephemeral? You think you are going to be able to get a blue ray player in another 20yrs? You know that making one requires paying fees to Sony, right? If you want media that lasts for generations, buy paintings and sheet music.

And people don’t use it because they assume it doesn’t work. Turns out it works fine and perhaps licking googles boots isn’t necessary.

I have no idea what google sheets can do when loaded in chrome but it works just fine in Firefox with the couple of sheets I have, one of them is rather complex with a bunch of muli-table vlookups and nested conditions. This thing washing your fucking dishes when you run it in chrome?

I have content I purchased on steam 19yrs ago. Shit was built for completely different hardware but I can go install and play it right now. The physical console games I bought that year only work in consoles that have long since broken. I can go play HL2 whenever I want, to play my copy of THPS3, I have to find and buy a PS2 that still works.

Digital ownership can apparently work just fine

Sony is reminding us that Sony is a shitty company. The company that bought you amazing technology like the memory stick ™ probably cannot be trusted.

Sadly no. Considering how few people use dns blocking YouTube was weirdly aggressive about moving the ads to the same domain as the video content. It’s probably inconvenient for them but they wanted to make sure that the couple thousand people using dns to control ads didn’t get one over in them.

Yeah, Firefox works on everything right now. I have not opened chrome in ages, could easily have been a year since I have needed it.

I know for a fact that Tesla puts parts on the road that have not completed validation testing. The majors would refuse deliver of parts at that lifecycle stage and Tesla is shipping them to customers.

They do not give a shit about safety. Tesla is a company that makes stock hype, the cars are an incidental byproduct.

Bingo. Putin is using every geopolitical lever he has to destabilize the world. 10/6 was an op. This Venezuela crap is an op. Sucks how effective it is at exploiting democracy.

Everyone made fun of mitt Romney when he claimed Putin was americas greatest enemy on the debate stage in ‘12. Dudes got a lot of problems but he was right about that shit.

No true Scotsman amiright!!

Read the dudes Wikipedia page, investigate the party and Hugo Chavez. They are autocrats like most other socialists/communists who hold any power. But they seem to be legit leftists

Maduro is a socialist. He is an ally of Putin and a strong supporter of Palestinian freedom.

The world isn’t so simple as you pretend it is. Conquest is not solely a right wing hobby.

It’s worth noting that communists and socialists also depend on population growth to sustain their civilizations as do trees and rabbits and beetles. It’s possible that economic systems don’t really matter all that much here.

Population collapse isn’t the road to some sustainable future. It is how species go extinct. Perhaps we are on that road, so it goes. But whistling past the graveyard pretending that “Star Trek” is on the other side is silly.

It’s pretty frustrating to see how the Ruso/Iranian axis was able to apply violence in exactly the right way to get exactly what they wanted. Everyone would play their part.

NATO weakened by disagreement about support for Israel. Western left angry and disengaged, leading to right wing (Russia friendly) parties succeeding in elections. Decreased focus on Ukraine.

All it cost was thousands of other people’s lives!

Israel was not the only party being baited and were not the only ones who got hooked.

Avg snowfall in London is 5cm or thereabouts. It’s a pretty mild climate despite the high latitude. There is a pretty big risk that cold melt water from the thawing Greenland ice pack will disrupt the gulf stream currents that warm Northern Europe and leave them with a much colder climate.

Heavy snow in the UK in NOV is slightly alarming. Though it could just as easily be an isolated weather event.

That is a better idea than me foolishly trying to get all of it running out of my basement. So many little things that lead to other little things. Right now, my “ditch gmail” project is a build my own router with openwrt project.

Fuggen rabbit holes man.

Slowly working on hosting my own. Stuff like this is not fast for me since I am a hobbyist and not in tech professionally. But, I’m getting there.

I am probably the perfect google customer. I used google search when it still had an exclamation point. I got my gmail account by invite in ‘04. Downloaded chrome on day one. I used nexus/pixel phones almost exclusively

Today, ddg search on Firefox. I am using an iPhone. I still have the gmail account but I am slowly migrating away from it. I am done with google. They don’t produce anything that has any value for me anymore.