Now wait for manufactures introducing mandatory flight mode on devices (with Apple leading the way) that “trusted partners”, like airlines will be able to force-activate themselves.

Because they knew it’s not a real threat and they wanted to land at United hub for cost saving reasons.

What is even better now phone calls are prohibited, but all these airlines had actual credit card phones installed in every seat just 20-15 years ago and really wanted you to do phone calls for $1 a minute. And some people did, and it was annoying, and it was “fine”. Now that they can’t charge extra suddenly it’s “against regulations”.

And, of course, terrorist manual states that any weapon needs to be labelled as such.

Can you potentially see the difference (red-tape-wise) between a centralized/trunking FAA-certified radio on one highly-specific frequency vs. random, uncertified rogue transmitters all over the spectrum? This wasn't a carrier regulation.

That's not what the parent comment is talking about.

Calling over the cellular network has been prohibited since time immemorial. What the parent comment is talking about is carriers also prohibiting making calls over airplane-supplied WiFi.

You can't, for example, join a Zoom meeting, or use your phone's built-in WiFi calling ability, on a typical flight nowadays, for better or for worse.

Does your phone's cellular radio work at 30000 feet? Calls occur over flight wifi. Streaming video and audio are not permitted on most flights for bandwidth purposes, so it follows that calls are prohibited for the same reason.

What transmitters? Now calls happen over WiFi which companies sell.

They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game.

Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.

So, CA should get rid of those loopholes, too!

We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!

And how you would craft a law to prevent a company from forming sub-companies for specific games to isolate risk? Or make it illegal for a company to go bankrupt?

Creating sub-companies is common business practice that even small businesses use. Like if a small company wants to buy a building, they may form an LLC to hold the property to isolate that risk from the rest of their business.

Bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, so releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.

Bankruptcy sells the assets on behalf of creditors that have specific priority in law. Just releasing code to users would be a pretty serious abrogation of creditor rights.

The most likely outcome is that some PE firm would buy the software rights out of bankruptcy and figure out how to bleed money out of people that want to continue using that software.

> Just releasing code to users would be a pretty serious abrogation of creditor rights.

Would it, if legally required at the point of sale of the good the source code is based on and utilizes? I doubt creditors claiming ignorance of state law works well as a defense.

Besides bankruptcy there is also shutting a business down, in which case are no new owners. Lavabit and Silent Circle being examples of businesses that shutdown rather than comply with laws they didn't like.

Shutting down operations as Lavabit/Silent Circle did doesn't negate existing contractual obligations. Voluntarily dissolving the company would also involve completing performance of outstanding contracts.

How would this solve anything?

Performance under existing contracts is still required to shutdown. The mechanisms for getting around contract performance without bankruptcy essentially require handing control of the company to the contractual counter-parties.

Sub-companies are owned by companies. Don't cap liabilities to the limited assets of a sub-company that actively violates the law.

Or cap them to a reasonable standard: 100% of revenues derived from the game.

I don't know how you'd craft that law--I'm just saying they should. How to encode the spirit of the law into the letter of the law is the job for legislators.

Whenever the topic of regulating companies comes up, there's way too much fatalistic "Oh dear, we can't possibly incentivize good corporate behavior because companies are oh-so-clever and there's just no way to handle all the edge cases they will exploit!"

We'll never get anywhere at all if we simply give up the moment someone forms a shell LLC.

Loopholes are possible from excessive regulations. Regulating everything will never stop. Vote with your money and support game studios that provide the best online support. Or buy games that are standalone purchases that don’t require online services.

Voting with your money on its own rarely accomplishes much unless it is an overwhelming majority vote. There are also a huge number of things that simply cannot be managed properly, to the overall benefit of society, by demand-side market forces. There is a time and place for regulation, carefully considered and designed, with a change/revision process in place.

A big problem with lawmaking systems in the USA at all levels of government is that the change/revision process is virtually nonexistent. Laws are not adjusted as requirements change and understanding shifts. Regulation is hard in that environment, but the optimal amount of it is certainly much greater than "none at all".

It's simply not possible to maintain a functioning society without regulations on at least some things at least some of the time. Anti-regulation dogma is just propaganda by rich people who would become richer if their preferred bad behavior wasn't prohibited by regulation.

Excessive regulations? Or insufficient regulations and regulatory capture?

You can keep plugging holes, but each time you plug you are using a narrower specification of who is at fault or who is exempt. That creates loopholes. This is known as “Whack-a-mole regulation”.

If the only alternative to imperfect solutions you'll accept is no solution then I disagree. I think the treatment here is still better than the disease.

Or vote with your vote and support lawmakers that make good laws.

There are always ways around it. Especially laws around business.

I mentioned this in a separate thread. It seems like a huge risk to release an online game if you don't do this now. A single bad game can take down a studio. Now there's even more risk because a previously successful game may come with a big bill in the future if you have to do refunds or some late architecture change when you instead want to take a product down to save money.

Perhaps they should just write games in a way where they can actually release server code when they it shuts down?

Perhaps "they" can write games however they want? If you don't like it, don't do business with them?

This is a weird thing to be legislating on.

It's too late to decide not to do business with them once they've stopped you from using a product you already bought.

The word "buy" is defrauding people when the thing purchased can be bricked before even getting it home.

>Perhaps "they" can write games however they want?

No? I don't want any developer to suddenly "want" to write code that bricks my OS for instance. What if they decide to do this after the game was released and I bought it?

I think it’s a great thing to be legislating on. I would like to see it on the federal level, myself.

Consumer protection laws are "weird"? I'd hate to live in your world...

Perhaps "they" are in a country with laws, and the laws now include restrictions on "however they want"?

So nobody to come after you for copyright violation if you run a community-patched (a.k.a. cracked) version of the game?

Well, no. Just like other purpose-built vehicles (like the ones for motion picture productions), they will transfer rights to other entities before shutting down.

And then lose the rights to those franchises/codebases/etc? I don't think that'll realistically happen.

How is something like that not considered when a law like that is passed?

Despite the good intentions of SKG, their efforts are being heavily shaped by the intense lobbying against them.

This law has a lot of weird omissions and obvious loopholes because industry lobbyists want it that way for their clients. It's a very clever law in the studio and publisher's favor. It changes pretty much nothing. The worst GaaS plagues on the industry will be able to keep trucking along as usual and the few service games remaining that have an upfront cost will slap on the tiniest singleplayer function to meet the law. Hell a model viewer might even meet it, or at the very least bait people into trying to waste time in court over it.

All while making nice headlines implying that SKG is making meaningful progress (they're not)

Judges are in fact allowed to notice that someone is obviously fucking with them.

These laws just complicate things, make it more expensive to run a game company and these government people don't get it. This will just result in making it more expensive to make games and keep them running. On top of that, it incentivises subscription based games.

> 'it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.'

The only winners are lawyers. NOT gamers. The lawyers always like to call their laws "protect X" lol

Disagree. I can see the challenges for games that are really only meant to be played on a centralized server, but what about games that need to connect to a server just to play locally? Demanding consumers be able to do that is not making things particularly hard on the company.

That's correct. This will make it more expensive to make games. However, the games will be better for it, and the games made the most expensive are those with exploitive business models such as lootboxes.

right, but what are you going to do? Have strong regulations for anonymous, criminal, businesses which operate as a shadow political class that can multiply at whim and influence global governance?

Yah, right!

Because for awhile they had access to infinite money printing press (search ads), and in the situation like this it’s impossible to focus and seriously compete in other areas.

Essentially all Google efforts were in protection of search ad revenue.

And amazingly free version is very usable as well. It’s same BBEdit package, and without license it doesn’t activate extra features, which I don’t need anyway. They used to ship it as free separate editor TextWrangler and now rolled it in into main BBEdit instead.

I read that as they're going to pay the COBRA premiums for 6 months for the laid off employees.

I started with x86 assembler and Turbo Pascal (I still remember when I got documentation for Turbo Vision - this was groundbreaking!).

The simple truth is that I had to constantly learn something new and this is how it is in this profession. We’ve been in the trenches and we did it over and over again.

Now I’m using AI full time, doing same thing I always did - shipping products.

Newcomers with first set of skills don’t understand what is meta responsibility in this field - it’s never coding something, it’s shipping products to solve business needs.

Grok has the most useful voice mode (ChatGPT voice mode is very dumb, grok seems to use same model as main chat), so if I want to use voice this is the AI I use.

Also I use it for all uncomplicated topics because it gives precise short answers without fluff. Very refreshing.

These tractors are not new, they are rebuilt.

No, only the engines are remanufactured - the tractors are new.

And a remanufactured engine can easily be better than it was when it left the original factory.