Turning waste heat into electricity is a very old goal but it really does come up against problems with entropy fast. Basically if you have a LOT of heat in one place you can boil a great deal of water and make electricity. If you have a lot of heat spread over a wide area there’s no good way to “herd” it together enough to boil water in appreciable amounts.

I couldn’t even get to the paywall - their cookie consent dialog was halfway off the screen and I couldn’t click “reject”

I would say that’s lights out for Republicans in the midterm elections, but we are well into full irrationality in this country at this point.

It’s really a shame. Ebikes are amazing and have the potential to really bring bicycling to the masses. But these jackasses riding motocross rock hoppers down the sidewalk are going to ruin it for everybody.

That’s what I thought as well yet I see what are essentially electrically powered off-road motorcycles everywhere. There’s no enforcing the sales end of it, which I guess means it’s up to local law enforcement?

Yes but the souped up e-bikes doing 30 need regulation as well. Maybe not by placing them into an existing category where they don’t fit but some of these rigs out here are freaking ridiculous and ruining it for everyone.

I might not underestimate how much big tech companies hate this too. They are pretty famous about despising all regulation of their space. I wouldn’t put it past them to block a backwater like Utah.

Why are you assuming the ambulance is the first car behind the Waymo? Are they supposed to bash through all traffic to get to the Waymo and then push it? You know a lot of ambulance drivers are just low level private employees with a couple weeks of training, right? They’re not going to just use the ambulance like a tank and then tell their corporate ambulance company employer to sue Waymo, a huge and powerful tech company. Christ man join reality.

Okay. Most of your comment seemed to be focused on whether they resemble actual humans. I don’t think we have any information about whether these impact your mental health but I would tend to agree they can’t be good.

Perhaps the point is to seek something that’s not like real humans.

Someday soon, and it isn’t as far off as some people think: the government will know who we are.

I know what open source means.

A group that wants to host that game server is eventually going to need to fix it, or adapt it to new software / hardware if we expect it to be able to run in perpetuity. They will need to be able to modify that source code to do so.

So the game publisher can’t just publish one final compiled package “for people to use.” The software has to be able to be maintained, not just used. And if we expect the software to survive over time, it will need a community not just one group. Open source is the only thing that would allow the game publisher to walk away from it, but allow the software to live on.

But then how could anyone use it? If it’s to download and run at home, you can get away with it. But in many of these cases they’re saying open source it so volunteer group XYZ can host a server and keep the game alive. Wouldn’t group XYZ be vulnerable to copyright action?

Pourquoi pas les deux?

Yeah I think there’s some promise in “open the source” as a remedy here. Because that doesn’t really put any onus on the game maker. They can keep making games exactly as they do now, but if they want to utterly walk away from a title, they have to open the source.

I think the complications with this would come from IP and copyright law, licensing, etc. for example, if the developer licensed any other software (or music or whatever) in order to make the game, do they actually have the rights to open source all of that? Perhaps not.

It’s kind of like accelerating the public domain thing. Very interesting remedy for this situation, but extremely complex legally, I would guess.

The process of approving such a process would be partisan, and agreeing on a notion of non-partisanship would be partisan. Anything that would budge the balance of power from where it is would be called partisan. We’re so far down the partisan hole.

Absolutely. Age verification sucks. It’s just an example of the complexities between a two sentence concept and an actual software implementation. I lived through SOX, GDPR, and many others. They sound simple. “Right to be forgotten” but they are complex as hell and often have unforeseen side effects.

I wasn’t referring to you but rather the heavy downvoting that my comments are receiving. I know when I’m muddying the hive mind’s cherished narrative with complications from reality, and that’s a stoning offense, no mistake.

I believe you’re trying to make it sound like “no it would be simple, just don’t go out of your way to do the bad thing.”

I know people just want to root out only the most obvious most insidious cases where online is totally unnecessary so it can seem like a simple matter of not doing it. But what about all the rest of gaming? How are we going to define these concepts? Write this law so that it will work for Fortnite, Among Us, MOBAs, and Hearthstone. Just try.

If someone wants to write ten paragraphs defining “single player games” with due precision and “unnecessary online components” and the required remedies for games that do have online components I’d love to hear it. No one here will take this time even though ten paragraphs is a laughably small length for such legislation to be written.

This bound/enforce bit is a distinction without a difference. In each case you need to understand the letter of the law and dance around it. SB2420 has plenty of things to “simply not do” and any “ensure offline play” law would absolutely have things you must do.

Yes it’s video games and people want what they want and always think it’s simpler to deliver than it is.