In most ways, yes. E.g. you clean yourself before you get in, so the water remains relatively clean after a few people. Unlike a hot tub though it's drained between uses, so it doesn't really have some of the nastier issues that hot tubs can acquire (nor does it need higher chlorine content to mitigate it).
Seems like we need some copyright reform WRT issues like this. We need a true way to have digital ownership; including putting assets in escrow and a way for access to continue after the store is shut down or the item removed from the store.
Your access to a digital product you have "purchased" should not be tied to the continued existence of the store you also bought it from. Similar to physical products.
If I bought a game at GameStop we aren't required to continuously reach back out to them every once in a while to check that they're okay with me playing the game I bought from them. And if GameStop goes out of business they aren't going to come knocking on my door to make sure I never play the game again or take it back from me.
Once a game or any other product is purchased from a digital store, it should not require the stores continued existence or permission.
Yes there are some drawbacks in that maybe they could argue then that they could stop allowing redownloading a game you've already purchased but so be it, they'd just be offering a worse experience and users would move away.
We also need to stop allowing unclear language. When we lease a car at a dealership they never use the term "buy" or "own". That's strictly reserved for ownership. We should require the same for other licensed/leased products.
One fun thing I remember from reading some EULAs for physical games I bought in the past: the EULA for StarCraft at least explicitly said that you are required to obtain prior written permission from Blizzard Entertainment before lending the disk to a friend. Obviously this is not practically enforceable, but it shows that nothing of this kind is new from these companies' perspectives.
The way the law is structured, you are never buying copies of digital goods, regardless of the format in which you obtain them. Instead, you buy a license to use the digital good under the specific terms and conditions of that license. That is why if you get a disk with GNU utils on it from the FSF, you are still bound by the GPL in what you can do with the data on that disk.
It's ridiculous to me that trying to play some recent games from Microsoft-affiliated studios requires me to sign in with a Microsoft account even just to play also malone. Paying them for Halo MCC or Gears 5 isn't enough to be able to play the campaign alone; the main menu is literally blocked by a sign-in screen. There's no reason whatsoever this should be allowed.
I've been posting a similar idea for years. Require that for each piece of commercial software there is a "method" to open it up and use without requiring on-line servers. The method is be registered with a special government agency for that purpose, who first verifies that the method works.
Later when the agency considers the software to be "abandonware", it publishes the method.
Remove DRM laws and make copyright on all media expire after 5 or 10 years off market. Abandoned franchises should get the same treatment. Call it Sackboy's Law. See how quick Sony and EA rush to port their back catalogue.
On the topic of copyright expiration, "It's a Wonderful Life" would have been lost if the current copyright regime had been in place when it was produced:
Copyright has been broken for decades. Disney famously lobbied to pervert it for a century longer than reasonable. (Hence, the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.) I'm honestly amazed we finally have new entrants to the public domain again.
We absolutely need reform, but it seems difficult (nearly insurmountable) when we have an ineffectual congress and highly effective lobbyists.
I don't understand movement: "W" makes me appear to move backwards, "S" makes me appear to move forwards. When I use space to stop, I move back to where I started.
When you speed up at speeds comparable to that of light, the angles, amounts, and wavelengths of light which reach you will change. This means you can't visually judge brightness, color, distance, and length the same as you normally would.
E.g. when you accelerate ("W") the angle the light rays from in front of you appear to be coming changes, making them look farther away. If you let go of "W" you should keep your current velocity and see you are indeed still moving forward, just in a world more pronouncedly warped by the effects of relativity.
Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
The problem is that bitcoin (and similar) are so computationally intense to run, that the transaction cost is much higher than Visa's.
Furthermore, a currency needs a government (or similar kind of body) to manage its stability, by printing (and buying) money. Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin.
Bitcoin and similar are computationally intensive to run because of a thing called decentralization.
Visa and Mastercard don't need consensus to perform payments, but they for sure don't have a single server running, I am sure they have more servers than bitcoin nodes, without counting on stripe, paypal, ... and other payment providers IN THE WORLD :)
There is something called lightning, which is p2p payments through bitcoin!
> Furthermore, a currency needs a government (or similar kind of body) to manage its stability, by printing (and buying) money. Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin.
call the economists! a currency needs a government! But only from 1971 onwards, before that people didn't have currencies!
Oh, you don't want to use the US dollar? the best currency ever!? I guess we'll have to bomb your country and neighboring ones to change your mind.
> to manage its stability
aka lose 2-4% of purchasing power per year. Thank you central bank! you saved us!
> Otherwise, we'll see wide fluctuations in value like what happens with Bitcoin
Oh no! The horror! A currency that can also go up!!! I guess we need a central bank for oil! to keep the price of oil stable! And food too!
guy who doesn't know what peer-to-peer technology is, laughs at man who does!
please stop using the internet! it might be slow and expensive to run! it requires insanely big cell towers and submarine cables! it won't scale!!11!! kind of guy
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
- The people who won't make any effort to learn the tools, and something as simple as reverting code (via git) needs to be done by AI?
- The awful programmers who we've had to endure working with, who are so bad at simple changes that they have negative productivity?
- Or Claude itself?
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BTW: I don't have these problems, but I'm also not afraid to do things myself when it's easier.
Edit: If I want to change a button's color, I just change it manually. If I don't know where the code for the button is, I might start with prompting, (because AI can often find the code faster than I can,) and then once the diff is proposed, start adjusting things by hand.
Then, IMO, the joke is lost: This feels like working with various forms of difficult, immature, indecisive, engineers; and possibly with very disorganized codebases where small changes require major refactoring.
BTW, Japanese bathing is somewhat visible in My Neighbor Totoro, a really cute movie.
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