TimeOmnivore

Ironically, a large portion (75%-95%, depending on the year) of why Mozilla/Firefox is still in business is the deal they have with Google to make Google's search engine the default - $1.2 billion as of the most recent deal. One of the main things Firefox does that nearly pushes me away is the constant redesigns that either break functionality or look awful. For example, in a recent update, they made bookmark folders take up nearly triple the vertical space they used to. A small annoyance, and one I eventually solved with about:config and CSS changes (which they also regularly break), but it's a frustrating, recurring problem that increasingly nearly drives me away. I still use Firefox and prefer it over Chrome, but Mozilla aren't doing themselves much of any favors, and I mainly stick with them out of spite for Chrome rather than a love for Firefox.

Looking forward to the eventual Persona 5, Bloodborne, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and the rest of the Uncharted games becoming playable in the future. Now if only they would release an official emulator for their old consoles and games. Or at least make a console with backwards compatibility - as that would be a good new selling point if exclusives completely go the way of the dodo.

Didn't really like the fact that this apology video was basically a bunch of excuses that seemed to want to explain why the game was released in such a broken state, but instead left me wondering why they didn't delay the game if there were so many issues. Also don't like how they brushed aside the PC release as if it was fine, even going as far as to say they were very proud of it despite the many issues it has - even aside from the bugs (of which there are still many even of PC), there's clearly a lot of cut content and underdeveloped core features, such as the police having severe AI problems. Its nice that they at least tried to address the problem as opposed to pretending everything was fine, but actions speak louder than words and only time will tell if CDPR will live up to their promises and are able to restore their reputation to some degree. It would be great if Cyberpunk's blunder of a release makes more consumers stop pre-ordering and wait until the game is fully released, playable, and feature-complete before buying - maybe then publishers would actually release games in a complete state rather than giving us a broken mess and promising to fix it later. But that's probably just a fantasy at this point.

Why? People wanted Cyberpunk 2077, not the broken, buggy mess we got that happens to have the same name. It's entirely on CDPR for making the decision to release the game in an unacceptable state. If they didn't want public pressure to release the game, they shouldn't have announced a release date until the game was actually functional. And aside from the technical issues, looking at past marketing for the game, I'm surprised there aren't more people calling them out for what seems like blatant false advertising and fraud given that many features they advertised are seemingly nowhere to be found. I find it interesting how the gaming industry is allowed get away with so much shit that other industries would be legally raked over the coals for.

You could already go to jail and have the government come after you for what this law describes - it's just that right now, because of technicalities in how the law was written it's only a misdemeanor (max of 1 year in jail); this proposed bill making it a felony just increases the jail time and gives you all of the other baggage that comes with having a felony on your record.

Media companies can't actually do anything to you in a criminal case though, aside from referring the case to the FBI, who simply won't waste the time and money on a streamer who isn't running any sort of large scale operation and will just tell whatever company to figure it out back in civil court.

I think you're confusing civil copyright issues, which is what you're describing and what the vast majority of YouTubers/Twitch streamers have to deal with, and criminal copyright issues, which have much stricter legal requirements and is what this bill is aimed at and what 99% of content creators don't need to ever worry about. This bill is about making the running of websites that stream things like sports, movies, and TV live into a felony, the same way that running websites where you can watch/download those things is already a felony (and I should note that this is only about the people running the streams, not anyone watching them).

This bill isn't that scary and is being blown way of proportion - it's meant to fix a loophole in copyright law where streaming content to others currently is just a misdemeanor compared to other forms of distribution which are already felonies. The only way for someone like a Twitch streamer to be affected by this is if they advertise their stream as for streaming the latest Disney films to their subscribers and that's literally the only purpose of their channel. And even then it would be extremely unlikely for that Twitch streamer to face criminal prosecution, which is a whole other ballgame compared to civil lawsuits for regular copyright infringement. The government simply doesn't go after random people for criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, they save their time, money, and resources on the big operations. Tl;dr Distributing copyrighted works right now, except by streaming them to others, is already a felony - this bill makes streaming them to others a felony as well. And for anyone that isn't running a large-scale piracy operation, nothing changes.

Summary Github has reinstated the YouTube-dl repository after the EFF sent them a letter explaining that YouTube-dl did not circumvent technological protection measures as the RIAA had claimed in their DMCA notice. They also started and donated $1 million to a new developer defense fund "to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims". Github is also changing its review process for these types of claims to make it easier for developers to have their repositories reinstated and to ensure that each claim is carefully scrutinized by legal experts to prevent abuse of the DMCA. Quotes From Github's blogpost: From the EFF's letter: My thoughts Glad to see the EFF joining this fight and Github standing up for its developers and putting its money where its mouth is. They seem to be taking this situation seriously and are going quite a bit beyond what would normally be expected. Hopefully the music industry will calm down with the recent onslaught of DMCA takedowns across the internet, but that is exceedingly unlikely until the DMCA gets a drastic overhaul, which is also unlikely given all of the money entertainment industries bribe lobby politicians with. Sources Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/github-defies-riaa-takedown-notice-restoring-youtube-dl-and-starting-1m-defense-fund/ Github's blog: https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/ EFF's letter: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf

Except Google's default search engine deal with Mozilla is the only reason they're still in business. If this lawsuit goes through and those default search engine deals become illegal, that will only bolster Google's dominance in the browser marketplace by killing off Firefox.

Considering that the default search engine deal with Google is basically the only reason Mozilla/Firefox is still in business, I kinda hope this lawsuit (or at least that aspect of it) doesn't go through. Of course, if Mozilla doesn't find an alternative source of income, it's only a matter of time until it shuts down, but I'd rather delay the inevitable for as long as possible. It's a bit ironic that if Google becomes unable to create default search engine deals then that would still be a win for Google, given that that would push many people over to Chrome once Firefox goes out of business.

Good, exclusivity is bad. The sooner everything is available on every platform and it's completely up to the consumer to choose which platform to use, the better. Now if only Nintendo would follow suit as well.

Makes me think he may have been genuinely trying to do a good thing, albeit poorly. Given that no one seems to have noticed until now, he was likely the only one putting any work into the project. That said, there's still quite a bit of harm that's potentially been done here. General public perception of the language is a notable one, but a more important issue is that Wikipedia is often used to train AI - such as auto-translators - and this could have really messed with any translations to and from Scots, which could hurt the actual language as a whole. Rather than placing all of the blame on the kid (though he deserves some), I think most of the focus and blame should be on the systems Wikipedia has in place that allowed this to occur at such a massive scale.

When Oculus was bought by Facebook, they explicitly stated that Facebook integration would never be mandatory. This just goes to show that you should never trust any company to stick to their word and always assume they will backtrack on any previously made promises the moment they think the benefits will outweigh the negative PR.

Is this sarcasm? The trailer for Far Cry 6 seemed like the most politically charged part of the entire event.

That trailer for Far Cry 6 was one of the best things I've seen out of Ubisoft in recent years. Unfortunately, I have strong doubts as to whether the game will live up to said trailer. The AC Valhalla stuff looks promising - in particular the return of social stealth and eagle vision - but a lot of the animations (especially facial animations) looked very janky and the combat looked a bit meh. Hopefully the game will get significantly more polish during these few months before release. Also wasn't much of a fan of what I've heard so far from the female Eivor voice actor. Also, they mentioned during a boss fight encounter that if you use stealth going into the fight you can get a critical hit - which is extremely disappointing to hear; if you sneak up on someone and stab them through the head, they should be outright dead. Assassinations only taking out part of the enemies health bar has been and remains a terrible design choice for this franchise. The Watch Dogs Legion stuff looked nice and the gameplay looked great and engaging with a lot of cool and interesting mechanics and systems, but the way they presented it, the narrator in particular, was incredibly cringe-worthy and makes me worry that the tone of the game will end up feeling very off-putting.

Counterpoint: What you describe is what's already happening, just on a state-wide scale instead of a national one. Namely, those people with political leanings that don't coincide with those of their state as a whole don't have any voice. Democrats in Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma, etc. don't have a voice in the current system. Republicans in New York, California, Hawaii, etc. don't have a voice either. No matter what system you have, there will always be groups who may as well not exist as far as politics are concerned. Personally, for things that affect the nation as a whole (such as the presidential election), I believe every person should have an equal say in the matter, regardless of where they happen to live. The fact that congress has one side that gives equal weight to every state regardless of population (Senate) and another side that gives weight based on population (House) should be good enough to prevent a few states from controlling the entire country.

It hasn't even fully gone through the senate yet. Then it still has to go through the house, which may amend it in some way, and, unless I'm mistaken, would mean it has to go back through the senate, and back and forth until both agree on the final draft of the bill. Only then will it go to the president to sign or veto. With elections coming up soon, there's also the chance that the bill could die if co-sponsors and supporters of the bill get voted out of office before it goes through the whole process.

Also, RIP Hearthstone and every other card game with loot boxes (aka card packs) if they get similar regulations as alcohol and tobacco.

Imagine Fifa, NBA 2k20, and other similar sports games having their ratings changed from Pegi 3 to Pegi 18 (and E to M), due to it being illegal for children to gamble. That would be glorious. It won't solve to the core issue of the prevalence of gambling mechanics in games, but it would be a huge blow to EA and similarly greedy publishers, which I'm all for.

I highly doubt Twitch refunding 10's of thousands of dollars worth of active subs would be a good idea on their part if this was just some publicity stunt. It seems much more likely that they're trying to wipe their hands clean of Dr. Disrespect entirely.

From what I've seen, Twitch has gone as far as refunding the people who subbed to him and his sponsors have pulled out as well. Whatever it was, it was likely something very serious and won't be simply undone in a few days, it likely is permanent. Twitch seems to be trying to distance themselves from him as far as possible, so this definitely isn't something simple.

The only way I'll get a PS5 is if it has full backwards compatibility and I can finally retire my old PS2 and play those games straight off the disks. Otherwise this will likely be a pass and I'll just watch Twitch streams and/or YouTube videos of the exclusives I'm interested in, like I did with the PS4.

I'm pretty sure they do exactly that, I've seen plenty of VODs with sections muted, but I guess it wasn't enough? No, plenty of people would agree with you, myself included. Unfortunately, copyright law is in drastic need of a rework, but the various entertainment industries lobby hard to prevent that from happening. Sadly, copyright law being dumb isn't a valid reason to break it. Copyright holders only care about getting a cut if their content is involved in even the smallest way, regardless of whether the viewers are actually there for their content or not.

One thing I'm sure many of you know if you watch Twitch streams with any regularity is that a great many streamers will have music playing in the background - copyrighted music. Apparently, those songs' copyright owners aren't too happy about this and have been issuing DMCA takedowns on Twitch VODs - many from 2019, but many also from clips dating as far back as 2017. Twitch's response to all of this is basically to tell streamers to go through their clips and delete those that contain copyrighted music - even though many streamers can have thousands upon thousands of clips to sort through. This has naturally led many streamers to be frustrated and scared that they could lose their job and income over this and find Twitch to be incredibly unhelpful during a time when their entire channel could go up in a puff of smoke at seemingly any moment. I'm honestly surprised that it has taken so long for copyright to start catching up to Twitch. YouTube had to deal with this issue a long time ago, so it has been interesting to see that Twitch streamers have been able to get away with significantly more copyright infringement with seeming impunity - at least, until now. Personally, I both do and don't feel bad for the streamers in this situation. On one hand, losing their job over copyrighted music in years-old clips seems rather harsh, but on the other hand, how did most of them not see this coming? Surely they had to know that they wouldn't be able to get away with blatantly streaming copyrighted music in the background of their streams forever; eventually publishers were going to put an end to it. I hope Twitch implements some system for deleting old clips on mass soon, before channels start getting shut down. Source:https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/gaming/twitch-streaming-dmca-copyright-music-ban-a4462261.html