There’s a huge difference though with physical media. Yeah, you don’t own the movie, but you own the DVD that it’s stored on. They’re not going to come into your house and take the DVD back. Once you have it, it’s yours forever. When you “buy” something hosted on a corporate server, you can lose it if they don’t want to host it anymore, as evidenced by this Sony thing, or if they go out of business.
It’s not nebulous. You cannot own digital entertainment unless it is on physical media. You are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want, as long as they have it available, and don’t change their terms of service. They say in their terms of service that they can change it whenever they want. There’s nothing we can do about it except not buy it in the first place. Their asses are covered quite well with that 60 page document they make you accept. They had a team of high powered lawyers write that thing, knowing that most people will never read it. They conditioned people to accepting the ToS without reading it by pushing ToS acceptance on meaningless things in the early days of software. Everyone became accustomed to just clicking okay, but now it actually does matter, and we still just click okay.
Well that’s handy. I wonder what determines if it can relaunch a program or not. Does it retain your actual work state though, or just relaunch those programs? On my MacBook if I tell it to restore stuff when I shut down then it takes me back to exact same state, sans some VPN logins. Unsaved text editor files will still be there, whatever I had open in vs code will be active, all my browser tabs will restore, etc… It acts more like a hibernate than a shutdown.
That’s an important distinction. Whenever trillion dollar tech companies say they’re not going to do something hugely unpopular and selfish because of public sentiment, what they really mean is they’re not going to do it right then. Instead they back off, do something like this to get everyone’s attention focused elsewhere, and then they’ll push the original unpopular idea anyways, but quietly.
They backed off their web drm, because it was hugely unpopular, but also because they remembered they own chromium and can just disable adblockers directly. They tried to over-engineer something that requires everyone else to adopt a new standard, when all they ever needed to do was use a sledgehammer.
I’m not sure. I guess because they go hard in the simulation aspect of the game. Although if we’re being realistic, it’s unrealistic that you’d have an interstellar space ship without an autopilot. I read that there are mods to enable autopilot, but I also read they can get your account banned, so I stopped looking into them.
There should be a happy medium. I haven’t played Elite Dangerous in a year because I’m 50 jumps away from where I need to go, which means like 3 hours of nothing but travel. But the realism is out of this world. This Starfield thing of never needing to fly is too far in the other direction. I think a happy medium would be a system like Elite Dangerous, but if you need to travel more than a couple of systems over, have a long distance jump gate or something like that, and maybe autopilot. Eve online has jump gates and autopilot, but it can still take hours to cross the universe. It’s more entertaining to have a quick travel option for those scenarios. Eve has wormhole systems that will let you cross the entire universe in a few jumps, but finding those connections will take longer than just flying directly, unless you’re in a huge wormhole corporation that uses 3rd party tools to map all of the wormhole connections to known space.
World of Warcraft without a chat box and keyboard would be pointless. Socializing is a huge part of the appeal for WoW. I suppose you could use voice chat, but it’s just not the same as being able to type out conversations with multiple people at the same time and being able to converse with total strangers, without having to listen to some screeching kid hogging the voice comms.
Even ret pally was stupid bursty. I remember dueling one on my rogue at level cap, had him down to about 2% health through a series of stun-locks and good positioning, and he cast his heal which took about half a second, healed to full, and hit me for 90% of my HP with one spell, instantly killing me. WoW has always had at least one broken class. When I finally realized that was intentional to keep people rolling new toons and grinding it killed some of the magic for me. I ended up quitting in Panda, went back for the next xpack and played that to level cap, then quit for good when I became completely frustrated with the state of CC in PVP. Even still, I’ve never had more fun in any other game than I had in WoW. Azeroth was a second home for me for several years.
My wife and I built a couple of holy paly twinks and we could defeat the entire enemy team at the graveyard in Warsong Gulch. It was ridiculous. We had a one-shot kill spell every few seconds, and a one-shot full heal spell too, and they were the same spell. Between the two of us there was absolutely nothing the enemy team could do.
That doesn’t account for the frustration and confusion, the time wasted troubleshooting, the loss of property and time spent replacing it, the consumer trust violations, and the destruction of private property. They should face criminal charges for destruction of private property. By “they” I mean the executives who created and mandated this idea. Then they should be required to pay pain and suffering to each affected user at a rate of $100 per hour, with 5-10 hours assumed, and then have to replace the controllers they broke. Not give money to replace them, they should be required to immediately ship a new controller of the same type that they broke. Anything else is just lip-service, and a nice check for some random law firm.