Even if one believes that piracy on an individual level isn't the big deal that has been made of it, a large business doing it on a massive scale with the goal of destroying others' ability to continue to meaningfully subsist and produce new things is a completely different matter.
There's a world of difference between someone downloading a book and a company basically burning down the entire publishing industry and making writing as a profession increasingly non-viable. The latter should be approached in the context of antitrust (leveraging a dominant position to knock over unrelated markets) and racketeering.
As someone who cashiered in college, I vastly preferred monitoring self checkouts over being monetarily forced to interact with an endless line of the kind of people who don't use self checkouts.
As a shopper, I don't want to be one of those people either. Ideally, I want lower friction and to be able to pay on my phone instead of dealing with the kiosk.
The GDPR does. Consent to data processing must be unambiguous, accessible, informed in plain language with no legal or technical jargon, and not have any preselected boxes.
The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.
This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.
The corporate espionage ring targeting Apple also isn't a good look. A company that does that is a company that will lie to you about harvesting internal materials from your company.
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Any time I crossed a bridge near me that is kind of steep and has a structure over it, the automatic braking engaged HARD. Like hard enough that I nearly caused accidents until I figured out how to turn it off.
I wonder if there will be some extra liability if the driver kills someone and the logs show automatic braking would have engaged. Something similar happened near me where a lamborghini driver disabled traction control, spun out and killed a girl on the way to school. They had to add new laws increasing the liability if you disabled TC.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
>was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives
To be fair, if the cars behind you had automatic emergency braking you would be at much lower risk of getting rear-ended when there's a false positive.
Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance.
The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you.
In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
Yeah, I suppose this could vary by geography, but my understanding is that in Canada, you're nearly-absolutely responsible for hitting anything in front of you, and nearly-absolutely not responsible for anything hitting you from behind.
The only exception I could think of would be if someone intentionally jumped in front of your car, or if you did a patently and clearly unsafe maneuver, but even then I think there'd be a sort of rebuttable presumption of fault.
Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!
Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.
I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.
It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.
This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.
The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?
Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.
Confirmed: you don't understand this subject. Any readers who find themselves needing to stop a modern car in an emergency are advised to stand on the brake pedal with maximum force while the computer sorts the situation out.
i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.
As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.
Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.
Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.
Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
I disagree with the assertion that Valve is responsible for the death of physical game copies.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- Sony has a track record of removing purchased media en masse, while Valve does not.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
> Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.
You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.
Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.
Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.
Sony doesn't DRM the power that you use to run the Playstation either. But to try and meet the comparison: there are different manufacturers of fuel just like there are different publishers of games and while Volkswagen can't force you to not put standard fuel in your car they can certainly void your warranty if you don't use premium (and fuel is still tested and regulated for industry compliance).
I'm getting a tad lost, though. The point of the sub-thread is that Sony does not have a monopoly over the video game industry. They get to choose which games are allowed on their platform and under what terms. Consoles and Cars both have proprietary components and open interfaces. A console and car have different purposes. And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
It's easy to get lost in arguments where analogies are used. They're almost always terrible and are the death of nuance and detail. Fuck car analogies, a car isn't a video game console.
Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.
This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.
I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.
If as a society we want to create an information age bill of rights and (1) protect hardware ownership and right to root (without exploits), (2) require platform marketplace neutrality, and (3) require digital intellectual property be distributed under lifetime irrevocable and transferable licenses, then I’d happily sign my name, and not least because you’re solving the problem at the core.
> And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.
Until you actually buy one.
Obviously there are levels of wealth where this is all irrelevant, either because buying every console is a relatively minor expense or because you can't afford any console whatsoever, but for the people in the middle where you can more or less afford a console, once you buy into one, you're now kinda stuck with it.
Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.
Apples and oranges. If you goal is to simply play games, well then there's plenty of hardware out there for you to use. If you want to play Sony exclusives then you have to use their hardware. If I want to get from point A to point B then I can use any vehicle. If I want to get from point A to point B in a Volkswagen then I have to buy a one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two kinds of apples. Both get you from A to B, which was the entire goal. A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything. If you can't tell these apart, perhaps you should go back to elementary school.
> A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything.
Are they not two kinds of games?
I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.
A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.
A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.
How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.
This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.
Some of the best selling movies in the past couple of years were video game ones: Mario, Minecraft, Mario Galaxy were all huge. All close to or over a billion dollars at the box office. The Sonic films were popular, and Detective Pikachu was decent.
The new Mortal Kombat ones did pretty well, but I prefer the original.
Honestly, video game films have been outperforming super heroes for the past several years, though Spider-Man turned that around.
So long as it is configured to be a mass surveillance apparatus, then yes. It is possible to have lots of data without organizing it in a way to enable mass surveillance. Google, Facebook, and recently Ring, are excellent examples. I don't know what AccuWeather is to comment on it, but I would say your ISP (what I'm assuming is what you mean when you say "the internet" since "the internet" is not any single entity) is likely not a mass surveillance apparatus, since with the implementation of https, the spying they can do is superficial at best
* The NSA has backdoored core routers of the Internet, to gather traffic and metadata. The metadata is not superficial, but since the Internet is no longer decentralized, the useful surface for spying has moved into the applicaiton domains. This is what I mean by "The Internet".
* And FISA warrants do allow large-scale spying.
* Not only is Facebook explicitly a mass surveillance (and mass influence) device, but there are multiple vectors into it for law enforcement.
Authorship is also required in the Constitution's section on copyright, and is likely entangled in international treaties. Any change that foundational would probably require a constitutional amendment.
There's a world of difference between someone downloading a book and a company basically burning down the entire publishing industry and making writing as a profession increasingly non-viable. The latter should be approached in the context of antitrust (leveraging a dominant position to knock over unrelated markets) and racketeering.
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