God fucking dammit

Are you saying that’s happened? Or that you expect it will?

It serves the key purpose of Mumble, in that it provides a reliable way to get in a voice chat with people. The other features (text chat, video calls, screen sharing, “servers” that let people aggregate for a dedicated purpose/community) come together to make a legitimately good product that’s hard to replace.

With little to no attachment to one’s personal life, unless I’m mistaken.

Is there a peer to peer equivalent to Discord? That feels like it would be the best option, since it wouldn’t rely on a centralized company that could enshittify the product.

It is a bit baffling. I think it’s more ethical than the alternative though: pay gating useful functionality. Offering paid pallete swaps doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, someone who would never pay for that, but it does at least mean I can just ignore it. If they were to, say, restrict voice calls to a paid subscription, suddenly I’m in a position where either I’m paying for the service or ditching it entirely.

In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.

I got a message from my boss today asking me to come into the office (I’m nominally fully remote). It’s probably fine, but…

I doubt the deposits were for the full cost, right?

“several X users claim”, they say for sources. Christ Almighty.

Not sure I want to tell all my friends to get simplex with me.

Thanks for the information – good to know. I assume that like American law, he couldn’t be punished for something that wasn’t illegal when he did it?

Regarding the Uyghur comment the other guy made, definitely a bit tasteless but I don’t think it’s that ignorant given the genocide China perpetrated against them.

I think that’s the joke, Clyde!

The one use case I can see being valuable is dynamically reading a custom name. In Skyrim for example, all NPCs refer to you by your title as Dragonborn. But some smart person made a mod that uses AI trained on the NPC voice lines to embed your character’s name into dialog!

As long as voice actors are appropriately compensated/protected, say with royalties for every game that uses their likeness or an ironclad contract making sure the company can’t stiff then out of future work, I feel like that could be a great thing.

Not what?

Well…the headline only says the planet is 6.9 times as big as Earth. Jupiter is at least that large, last time I checked, so without more context I also don’t know what is special about it.

Against the terms of agreements they made? Yes.

To be fair, this is what I meant when I said wrong. Enough people have taken umbrage with my wording that I think I should update it, though. Thank you for your reply.

My understanding is that the IA had implemented a digital library, where they had (whether paid or not) some number of licenses for a selection of books. This implementation had DRM of some variety that meant you could only read the book while it was checked out. In theory, this means if the IA has 10 licenses of a book, only 10 people have a usable copy they borrowed from the IA at a time.

And then the IA disabled the DRM system, somehow, and started limitlessly lending the books they had copies of to anyone that asked.

I definitely don’t like the obnoxious copyright system in the USA, but what the IA did seems obviously wrong against the agreement they entered into. Like if your local library got a copy of Book X and then when someone wanted to borrow it they just copied it right there and let you keep the copy.

ETA: updated my wording. I don’t believe what the IA did was morally wrong, per se, but rather against the agreement I presume they entered into with the owners of the books they lent.

I feel like in that case one would be loudly fighting to get the law changed, rather than insisting it’s actually fine. Maybe that’s just semantics.

I do not understand what point you’re making. Can you elaborate?