Uriel238 [all pronouns]

TIL game cheats is a category of deplorable that belongs with pirates sofware and warez.

I remember looking on line to unlock game cheats for Saints Row IV specifically to turn off the downstage pixellation effect and found that this was the most common SR4 cheat in use.

That is the way that the police work in the United States yes.

We’re not talking about the police, we’re talking about the Secret Service protecting the President-Elect of the United States… at a golf park Not only that, but a park where people have to be super rich since access to Trump (leader of the GOP and now President-elect) is figured into the membership fee.

And while the police are happy to gun down the rest of us shlubs, they treat rich people like they treated OJ Simpson after he hacked up Nicole Brown. When they don’t and they actually shoot a rich person, then high-powered (blue-haired) lawyers come and sue the precinct and county for enough money to collapse the GDP.

But I do hear you. Police in the US are bastards to the last.

That’s assuming I actually look like a threat, rather than someone infatuated with the weird robot dog.

It’s a golf park full of rich old people. I bet the dog-hecklers will come dozens per hour.

The ones at Mar-A-Lago are unarmed.

My approach to the armed ones, particularly the TASER-equipped ones used by some US law enforcement departments, would be very different.

Coo at them. Pet them. Call them a good doggie. Drop a treat on them, all in defiance.

Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.

Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.

Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.

Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.

On mechanical keyboards its a standard keycap.

This. I’m used to using extra keys (like the menu key or Capslock) for chording macros and personal shortcuts. In fact I get gaming keyboards with the customizeable keys (usually perma-bound — perma-binded? — to ctrl-, -2, -3, -4, -5 respectively) so they can be easily trapped and redirected to common macros.

I think the Super key was developed on the same principle.

The visible woman? Chrysalis?

Artistic nudity must be explicit.

I noticed this with Bing as well.

While I completely agree with you based on the data, DRM is absolutely sold to publishers on the pretense that it combats piracy, at least with keeping paying customers from engaging with media in ways the publishers don’t like (such as lending content or selling that content used in a secondary market).

And yes, the more draconian their restrictions, the more they drive people to resources that provide cracked or DRM-free content. That said, Sony is notorious for going to extreme lengths to severely limit use of their content outside narrow consumption, often with obligatory ad-viewing, driving people to either piracy, or avoiding Sony content at all.

At one point, I might have been interested in playing Horizon Zero Dawn and went from buying it, to getting a refund to thinking about pirating it to eventually deciding I cannot be bothered. But then I steer clear of most AAA game companies, now.

The way we murder DRM is by it affecting the business bottom line.

This might be an offense worthy of litigation if Sony is not sufficiently contrite.

It’s telling how unfriendly the DRM is, that it doesn’t inform the protectionist of problems until the minute the show starts.

Sony is a real dick.

These days, Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies is something of a liability, as a lot of people are quick to assume (sometimes in bad faith) that a comparison to actual nazis is hyperbolic. I’ve taken to applied Godwinism, that is getting very specific in my comparisons.

That brings us to the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence service of the German Reich that was run by Reinhard Heydrich. The Behind the Bastards podcast two-parter on Heydrich gets deep into the starting of the SD. One of the things it highlights is that in the investigation and persecution of Jews, it was only supposed to go after known felons, but it went after anyone it could plausibly nail. It was an open secret within its own ranks, but by the time anyone on the outside wanted to check Heydrich’s methods, he’d have enough dirt on them to keep them mum.

Cut to NSA and PRISM, which is the massive internet surveillance program that monitors traffic between Americans and foreigners. Yes, it’s only supposed to be counterterrorism (Islamist terror, specifically) but from the beginning, it ruled-in any internet packet that crossed the US borders, even when the sender and recipient were both in the US. And since the mid 2010s, NSA has been allowing the mission to extend to all law enforcement, including letting local precincts know about large amounts of liquid assets in transit to be intercepted and confiscated. Some searches of the blog website Techdirt should yield you dozens of examples of incidents that made it to courts, to civil rights watch organizations and investigative reporters. The FISC was always a joke, known even by the FBI as a rubber stamp court.

Incidentally, ICE also engages in the same kind of ignoring (or reinterpreting) mission parameters. Ordered to only arrest and deport undocumented persons who’ve committed violent felonies, they go after everyone they can, including locking brown American citizens in a room with no phone and no resources and order them to prove they’re a citizen. People deported, often shores alien to the deportees are quickly swept up into human trafficking rackets with which ICE closely operates.

So no, it’s not as bad as we imagine. It’s far worse.

It’s headed in that direction, but we’re not quite there yet.

There are two ways to fight the autocratic takeover. One is opportunistic: The US is immense and has a lot of interlocking and often conflicting systems in place, which makes for a lot of chaotic complexity. So the way that dinosaur clones were able to breed, escape Isla Nublar and survive despite a lysine addiction (all contrived to contain them) we need to find opportunities to impede their takeover or creatively disobey.

The other is in creating local mutual aid organizations. Make sure that your marginalized and outcast locals are getting fed, keeping warm and otherwise having needs met, and the police will find it harder to push them out. Whatever you can do to allow strikes and protests to last longer will tax the goons of the plutocrats, and tax them until either they retreat and rally elsewhere or ratchet up the violence so that it becomes too atrocious for the neoliberal public to ignore.

The US was really awful on its watch. It’s really hard to imagine even China might do worse. There are no good custodians of the international community.

The federal government is entirely captured. Were going to get only little platitudes from it (if that) until stuff blows up (sometimes literally).

They’ve been rolling back civil rights for decades now. Autocracy is as good as here.

I will totally check out Alestorm.

So listening to Billie Jean without thanking Michael Jackson is theft? That is use.

How about Billie Jean’s baseline which is borrowed from Hall and Oates I Can’t Go For That. Was that theft? Michael felt guilty about it but John felt it was routine for creatives to borrow from each other all the time.

How about money- and lobbyist-inspired extensions of copyright so extreme that both songs (heck, the whole oupuses of both artists) have been denied from the public domain? Is that theft too? Or does it only count when companies and rich estates are denied profits?

From your copyright infringement is theft blanket assertion and your inability or refusal to parse out fair use of copyrighted materials, I infer you don’t actually understand what copyright is or what purpose it is meant to serve to the public. You are just regurgitating the maximalist rhetoric you’ve been spoonfed. Its really kinda sad.

Feel free to exercise more nuance. Or if you like you can double down and remove all doubt.

Elaborate. Consumption of copyrighted materials is normal use whether by a human or a machine.