Aceticon

It's called Corruption.

If this goes through, watch out in a couple of years for ex-commisioners being paid fortunes by large Tech companies as non-executive board members, giving speeches or consulting gigs.

It's the same way as in the US, were people in positions of power doing "favours" today for large companies "by an amazing coincidence" later end up being paid enormous fortunes by those very companies or related companies for "working" 1h/month or similar - at that level the exchange of political favours for money is not done using brown envelopes full of bank notes.

Investigation and Prosecution of Corruption in Europe are a joke whilst Conflict Of Interest legislation is non-existent or riddled with so many giant loopholes that it's actually worse than if it didn't exists as it deceives most people into believing these things are properly legislated for.

We live in a seriously corrupt era in Europe, even in the countries which were traditionally cleaner.

I think that if you look around (just look at things like ChatControl, ICE in the US and the support for the Genocidal White Colonialist state of Israel in most of the West) we in the "developed" West are fast moving backwards and becoming more like Russia - more surveillance, more authoritarianist use of force, more corruption, more racism, more imperialism, a more oligarchic economic system, more concentration of power, more inequality.

Even in a perfect World were common Russians accepted it with open arms, I'm not so sure an occupation of Russia by Western nations would ultimatelly end in them "developing" towards Western Standards rather than in Western nations finishing regressing towards Russian Standards.

The serfs will work harder if they are made to believe their voice counts and when the serfs work harder the Owner Class makes more money.

The irony of the descendants of immigrants into North America trying to detail Native Americans as immigrants is trully world-beating.

The problem is that the very capabilities that let a game have "way more of something than it could otherwise have" (say, thousands of unique voices reading context-specific runtime generated text) can be used to reduce the need for workers (so one can just pretty much generate all speech in game by paying a bunch of random people of the street for to come over and read text for 1h and then just clone their voices and used that to generate all in-game speech - the quality way less than pre-prepared lines read by a trained voice actor, but the cost will be a tiny fraction of it).

AI can helps us do things which in practice would otherwise be impossible but many (maybe most) companies are just using it to cut manpower costs even though it delivers inferior results than than trained professionals.

Theoretically the sites would have to block all IP addresses of all cloud providers, including massive ones such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, because people in Wisconsin can just run VPN Server software - which is side of the VPN were the network connections exit the encrypted tunnel and enter the Internet - in a container or virtual machine inside one those to have their own personal (or shared with whomever they want) VPN.

Similarly they would have to block all exit IPs of most companies because somebody in Winsconsin might be using the VPN of the company remotelly go to their company network and via that network access those sites and which point the connection will probably appear as originating from one of the company's routers because of NAT.

The way the VPN technology works, theoretically every single IP address on the internet might be an exit point of a VPN which is being used by somebody in Winsconsin to access one of those sites, since one can even run VPN Server software on a mobile phone or Raspberry Pi.

Theoreticaly those sites have to block every single IP address which might directly or indirectly be used that way.

This law is completelly insane.

Given that the only way for those websites to block VPN traffic is to block the IP addresses of all known VPN exit points, what you would see is first the commercial VPN providers regularly rotating those IP addresses of their VPN server exit points, and second people simply setting up their own VPN servers software in rented VPS machines in cloud providers anywhere in the World to run their own personal VPN.

You don't really need a full blown remote session, just a VPN server in a machine (physical or virtual) with an IP address which isn't yet blocked by such a site.

Now, the sites might try and block this by only allowing in connections from blocks of addresses which are known to belong to ISPs (which would theoretically only be direct connections from individuals, so not using a VPN), but that's way less reliable than merelly lists of IP addresses of the VPN servers of big providers, plus it would block thing such as the entirety of Amazon AWS.

Ok, so basically when your computer uses a VPN it just connects to a VPN server over the Internet using an encrypted TCP/IP or UDP/IP connection. On your computer side all your connections to the Internet just get shoved into that encrypted tunel instead of going directly into the whole wide world from your own network connection - so nobody but that server sees those connections - whilst on the VPN server side they're recieved from that encrypted tunel and then exit to the whole wide world from that VPN server as if they're connections initiated by that server not by your own machine, so to the whole world they look like connections coming from the VPN server machine.

Nations with nation-wide firewalls can try and block VPN by blocking the actual encrypted network connections to VPN servers (there are ways to recognize those, but there also ways to disguise them), but for websites to block them (which is what this legislation demands) the websites have to block the actual VPN servers since the websites can only see connections to them which seem to originate in those servers, not traffic elsewhere on the Internet such as the encrypted connections from VPN customers to VPN servers.

Now, there are lists of the IP addresses of the exit points of VPN providers (generally the VPN server internet address), which are the IP addresses were the traffic of somebody using that VPN enters the Internet, so to try to comply with this legislation those sites would start by blocking all traffic from any of those IP addresses - remember those websites don't know were the traffic coming from a VPN server to that website really comes from, so they can't tell traffic from people in Wisconsin using that VPN server from traffic from people elsewhere using it, hence have to block everything from it to catch everybody from Winsonsin.

This would affect everybody anywhere in the World using those exit points of those VPN providers.

Then there's the problem that the legislation applies to all VPNs, not just commercial VPN providers serving retail customers, meaning that the websites would also theoretically have to block VPN servers from business VPNs (and given how the networks of many large companies work, that might mean blocking the entire company) as well as things like schools using VPNs and, even more entertaining, VPNs set up by individuals by, for example, renting a Virtual Private Server or physical server and installing a Linux there running their own VPN server software or even installing the VPN server software on something like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, which means they might have to block every single IP address of any provider of servers space anywhere in the World (as any Wisconsian could, theoretically, over the Internet rent a cheap VPS in, say, Malasia, and install a Linux with running the VPN server software in it) as well as of all AWS and Azure servers since again any Wisconsian could theoretically run VPN server software hosted in one of those providers.

The whole things is insane as fuck and would have some trully fucked up implications for any website that tried to comply, as well as for anybody anywhere in the world using VPNs who might want to access such sites.

If I understood it correctly, per that legislation and given how the technology works, adult sites would have to block everybody coming to them from a known VPN exit point, not matter where the user actually is (because a site can't really tell were a user actually is when they're behind a VPN) to comply with it, meaning that it would impact everybody everywhere in the World using a VPN.

De facto Wisconcin's legilslature is trying to imposed their will not only on those who live in Wisconsin, not only on those who live anywhere in the US but on those who live anywhere in World.

Look, mate, Intellectual Property Laws are literally the government creating and giving somebody an artificial monopoly on something which would not naturally exist if it wasn't for artificial limitations on "doing the same thing" being forced on everybody thanks to legislation and the coercive powers of the Legal system, and this was purposefully written in Law to do exactly that, so it's not an unexpected legislative side effect.

So anywhere were Intellectual Property legislation can apply the market is not free, on purpose and by policy.

Now, a good argument can be done about how IP law incentivises the creation of things with a high utility value which would otherwise not be created, but that doesn't alter the fact that the whole thing is a giant legislative sledgehammer with massive destructive capability for both the Economy and people's lives, which needs to be handled very carefully in order not to do more harm than good.

As it so happens IP has gone completelly out of control in the US because Corruption there is incredibly high, more some when it comes to the property of ideas since holding a piece of such property can yield billions of dollars in profits - the profits from owning ideas can be far vaster than of merelly owning land - and this shit has been copied around the world by almost as corrupt politicians (for example, the thoroughly corrupt crooks in the EU commission pretty much copy every single "this will make me personally lots of money from thankful corporations" pieces of legislation from the US).

So Copyrights now last an insanelly long period - about 1.5 times the average human lifetime - before things covered by it go into the Public Domain, whilst lots of Patent Offices (most notably the ones in the US and Japan) will just accept patents on everything no matter how obvious without even a proper search for prior art, hence things like the "round corner button" patent that Apple has as well as countless business patents for "solutions" which are obvious to any domain specialist (many such patents literaly the product of paying a domain expert for an hour of their time by a patent troll to just "think up a solution for this" as no actual implementation is needed to get a patent, just the idea of how it could be done).

All this to say that this fucked up situation of insane government-given monopolies all over the place for shit that's obvious to domain experts or derivative (a common trick in patents for medicine is to just do a small tweak in the formulation to get another 25 years of patent protection on pretty much the same thing) was created ON PURPOSE by the very politicians who claim to want a Free Market.

The entire thing should be reviewed and ajusted in exactly the opposite direction it is going (so we should have shorter protection periods, no "ideas only" patents, proper prior art searches rather than relying on expensive court cases to nullify patents on things somebody else already did or which are common practice in that industry, no business patents, properly funded Patent Offices, no transnational recognition of patents - so that countries *cough* Japan *cough* can't just use their Patent Office as some sort of commercial weapon to benefit their local companies in other markets - and so on) but given that Intellectual Property is an area worth trillions (and, remember, it's entirelly artificial, so without that legislation such property would be worth nothing at all) and politicians are incredibly corrupt nowadays, this shit is getting worse rather than better (and, IMHO, severely slowing down the speed of progress in the current Era versus a Free Ideas system)

Were I am, you just get Insulin for free with a prescription from you Family Doctor, because we have a National Health Service.

Even without said prescription, it's only €70.

Americans are being thoroughly screwed, and it's very much on purpose thanks to the way laws and regulations around Healthcare were designed in the US (and, at the risk attractint the crowd throwing "bothsideism" slogans around to defend "their" "tribe", this is due to the actions of both US major parties) since in a real Free Market, Insuline over there should cost around the same as it costs over here without a prescription, not 10x more - without artificial market barriers there would be investors literally flying planeloads of the thing from Europe to US to make a killing out of buying it cheaply over here and selling it for "merelly" twice as much over there.

For me it really depends on the game and whilst the "glitzy" is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they're games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added "highly curated" to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much "play once".

Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don't Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of "story" games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it's after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.

My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - "Glitzy AAA open-world-ish" RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they're a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can't be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don't have the patience to babysit somebody else's ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).

It's not that AAA can't do games with massive replayability, it's that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either "curated experiences" or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is "self-assembling" emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.