The English Law Act 1962 stipulates that English common law will apply to Gibraltar unless overridden by Gibraltar law. This means that amongst others the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 as well as earlier and later laws around surveillance, apply in Gibraltar by default.

I supposed one would need to find legal counsel in Gibraltar to determine if Gibraltar has passed laws that nullify English laws on surveillance powers, and until proven that Gibraltar has passed said laws the most logical expectation to have is that the same surveillance laws that apply in Great Britain also apply in Gibraltar because that’s the case for most laws.

That is not informing the potential buyer in a simple way, that’s hiding the information in a different page, one which is a long text made up of legalese which one need Legal Training to fully understand.

You’re just making my point.

You know what would be a simple, obvious, honest way of in that page of telling the purchaser that they’re buying a license?

• To the left of the discount and the price put the text “BUY A LICENSE FOR:”

“Strangely” Steam chooses not do any such thing or similar and instead chooses to “inform” buyers with a link to a different page which is a wall of legal text.

I’m just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:

Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage. (emphasys mine)

What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than “a very small percentage”.

Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.

It’s just that “very small percentage” part that I disagree - if you’re technically proficient you can “hack” your way around Steam’s closed system for most games since it’s not really closed tight.

Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:

• It’s designed so that only people with a certain level of knowledge can actually do that, those being a minority of Steam users.
• Even such “hacked” access is unreliable - maybe it will work easily, maybe it will be hard, maybe it won’t work at all.
• There is no way to, before buying a game in Steam, know if that’s one of those games which can be installed and run independently of Steam in that way or not, so one cannot make an informed purchasing decision on a game being possible to install and run without Steam or not.

The whole “it’s not totally impossible” thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate “the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam” like to like with “GOG’s is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system” which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That’s deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.

Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn’t at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.

Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole “Agreement” is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they’re buying.

It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it’s a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.

Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?

The fact that it’s legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you’re buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like “THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT’S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING” is the actual problem.

IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.

People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can’t actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don’t because they’re not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.

Can’t blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.

Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.

Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that’s very much a purposeful choice.

However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it’s not reliably possible and there’s no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.

Meanwhile “No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers” is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.

Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don’t work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can’t just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.

In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can’t have any DRM as “No DRM” is GOG’s unique value proposition as a games store.

Steam doesn’t make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that’s not at all the same as “here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they’re guaranteed to have no DRM”.

Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people

/s (just in case)

👍

There’s dozens of us!

Back in the era of physical media PC games too could be bought and sold used (though only some: it really boiled down to whether it used phone-home DRM or not, something which in the PC world was all over the place).

But yeah, you were right that console games could be bought and sold used in a much more standardized way, whilst that wasn’t really a value proposition in the PC were such possibility was not at all a standard feature of PC games and it wasn’t really reliably supported in the broader ecosystem (for example, with game stores not usually buying back used PC games as they often did for console games).

Naturally, as a unique value proposition (vs PC games) used as bait to get users inside the console walled garden in earlier days, this feature of console games was taken away from users with their enshittification.

Personally, I always thought that in the PC world the absence of this was balanced by games being a lot cheaper and even piracy for those for whom even the cheaper PC games weren’t cheap enough, and in the long run, as we see, the “much cheaper” part is being way harder for PC publishers to try and undo (they’ve definitely tried of late, and IMHO it’s failing which is why AAA game publishers are bitching and moaning that their market share is falling) than the used console games market was, and the piracy part is even harder.

If there’s one think I learned early on in Tech as a professional already back in the 90s is that in the mid and long term sticking to open tech will save you from getting squeezed, both as a professional when choosing 3rd party tech stacks and as a consumer. This has just become more so as the normalization of always-on Internet connectivity meant that the external 3rd party could control much more tightly and and in realtime how the software they provided was used, including adding further restrictions on use at a later stage.

If you go by the definition of “console” than includes things like the ZX Spectrum or the Amiga, then you are partly correct (you got my age wrong) as all home computing started with such “consoles” (and then there was a time when it was pretty much all PCs, and then came the modern consoles which are the ones I was talking about).

Technically speaking the modern age “console” was a reinvention of the “game consoles” of the pre-PC era, only originally the “closed system” nature was mainly a technical limitation as there was way less uniformisation of things like CPUs, whilst the closed system nature of the modern age consoles was a choice.

Having lived and used computing devices in both eras, I would say that the modern ones have almost nothing to do with the original ones, especially the business model - things like the ZX Spectrum tried to be open and educational (for example, by including a built-in BASIC language interpreter) whilst things like the PlayStation are almost the opposite.

And Starlink satellites are small and in Low Earth Orbit, already inside (the very top of) the atmosphere so they have to use fuel to stay in place and de-orbit naturally when they run out of fuel purely because of atmospheric drag, so they last 5 - 10 years up there and then have to be replaced.

A whole data center would be much larger and replacing one every 5-10 years would be insane, meaning they would actually be higher up all the way out from even the thinnest part of the atmosphere, more distant from the surface hence with more latency.

“Black body radiation” is the physical process by which you “dissipate” (the correct word here is “radiate”) heat in space.

In space you can’t just have the heat be passed from the radiator to some “substance” that fills space (like on Earth the heat is passed to air or to water that then gets released to the environment) because almost all of space is empty of matter (not exactly: there’s incredibly low density stuff in it, mainly ions, but such low density means pretty much no available mass to sink the heat), so the only way for that heat to leave is the natural physical process of a warm body emitting photons merely because of its temperature (the wavelength of which depends on temperature) which is called Black Body Radiation.

As others have pointed out, it’s a way less efficient process that dissipating heat by it being passed from the radiator directly to some substance that’s part of the environment (i.e. transmission).

At some point Sony bought a Movie Studio in the US and a few years afterwards the company leadership started coming from their Media division instead of their Engineering division.

This was in the early 00s.

That was when Sony started enshittifying, with things like locking down their consumer devices (not just to block copying but also to do things like segment markets via region locking) and at one point they even shipped Music CDs with a PC Rootkit (the infamous “Sony Rootkit” scandal).

IMHO, Sony was maybe one of the first large companies to start enshittifying.

I’ve actually been boycotting Sony since then, so roughly for 2 decades now.

Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.

So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn’t really worth it.

Then, specifically for the PlayStation there’s Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they’re the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the “Sony Rootkit” scandal)

So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn’t at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.

Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.

It really depends on whether you care or not about State Surveillance.

If you don’t and only really care about general privacy and things like not getting letters from lawyers demanding money because you torrented something, then any no-logs VPN will do:

• For starters just having a VPN means it’s not just a case of a lawyer claiming to represent a copyright owner demanding from a local ISP the identification of the user of a specific IP at a specific time (which many countries have made laws to facilitate, so they don’t even need a court order) so now they probably need a court order
• Then if the VPN is in a different legal jurisdiction said court order needs to be from a court there, not where you are. Even if said lawyer are there and get that court order, they still need the ISP in a different country to give them the information of the user whose IP is in the VPN logs, so that’s a lot more complex.
• Then if the VPN has no-logs, they can’t even get the user IP address because it’s nowhere to be found. They would need a court order to install what’s basically wiretapping equipment or software in that VPN in order to catch a user whilst they’re actually using that connection to torrent some file or other. No court is going to be issuing a wiretapping order for a VPN provider to catch a non-commercial case of copyright violation.

If, however, you care about State Surveillance, then merely a no-logs VPN isn’t necessarily safe anymore. You see several countries, such as the US and UK, have special surveillance courts (such as FISA courts in the US) which can issue court orders to facilitate data access for mass surveillance WHICH THE RECIPIENTS CANNOT PUBLICLY ADMIT THEY’RE UNDER. In other words, the wiretapping equipment/software to allow bulk tracking of what users are doing might already be installed at the no-logs VPN (and they cannot tell you about it otherwise they’ll literally end up in jail) so it’s not in fact no-logs because the likes of the NSA is actually logging it all. Any VPN hosted in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it, any company registered in such legal jurisdictions can be the target of it and it doesn’t matter how honest and pro-privacy the people in those companies are - I vaguely remember the case of a secure e-mail provider in the US (forgot the name now), who tried to fight one such court order and ultimately the only way they found to do so was to close down the service and their company.

So if you VPN company is for example registered in Gibraltar (which is a British jurisdiction) or the US and they’re still operating, they’re very likely compromised and even if they’re not, they can silently be compromise at any time.

If you care about avoiding mass surveillance from actual governments, then beyond the usual autocratic nations you’ll want to avoid VPN exit points in and VPN providers based in or registered in at the very least the US, UK and Israel and any of the regions under their jurisdiction (for example Gibraltar and the Channel Islands for Britain, Puerto Rico for the US), probably more broadly all the 5-Eyes nations (so, the first 2 plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand).

So check were that “wonderful no-logs VPN” company is registered and were is based and avoid those in countries with insane civil society surveillance legislation like the Patriot Act and even avoid exit nodes of other VPN companies in such countries.

I used to have the circus music (Entry Of The Gladiators) as my ringtone in my Razr.

In my own experience, now in my 50s and having played games since my teens, including a long period of RPGs and FPS online, reaction times start dropping in your 30s.

It’s a tiny bit and you only really notice it when you’re operating near your limits (same for intelligence, by the way - if you’re using it near capacity, you’ll notice that your capabilities start falling at around your mid 20s).

However, you can compensate it with experience, smarts and even wisdom - for example in FPS games you use the environment against other players, lead them into doing something predicable and get them then and/or prefer play styles that don’t depend on reaction speed.

(IMHO, the world top people at for example sports, are the ones who already early in their careers combine top physicallity with experience, smarts and wisdom)

It’s just a fact of life that physical and mental capacities do decay with age and far earlier than you seem to think, and whilst if you keep on using them it’s not that much, if you’re using them at a near peak-level it’s noticeable if you pay attention as you can’t just reach the peaks you could reach before.

Well, I’m in my 50s and the previous poster is totally right about reaction speed - there comes a point were your aim is as good as it gets, but so is the aim of the kids doing the same FPS 10h/day and they’re faster than you.

That said, with age comes experience (well, can come, if you’re trying - plenty of people age but don’t learn) so you can beat the kids with smarts and wisdom (things like leading them into situations which are traps, using the environment in your favor and, more generally, just playing in ways were your reaction speed doesn’t matter).

That said, I’ve been out of the FPS genre for a decade now. Like the previous poster I simply don’t get enough fun from a game if it’s low complexity, which tends to be the case for fast paced games that require fast and/or precise moves.

If I wanted to be the target of homophobic insults, I could just do it to myself in front of a mirror, though granted, I can’t really emulate the voice of a 12 year-old so it’s not quite the same experience bouquet.

Beyond that, multiplayer is almost like working - you’re supposed to relentless keep at it, on somebody else’s timings even if you’re in a guild: done it in EVE Online and WoW and, frankly, for the experience of work I have real-life were I actually get paid for it rather than the other way around.

Then there’s the whole creepy monetisation shit - I’m not really interested in the constant sales pressure, especially when it’s “buy this or else you’re handicaped vs those who did” (EA is still in my shit list since they did it with a DLC in one of the older Battlefield titles), especially nowadays when I’ve managed to mainly remove advertising from my life.

So I just stopped doing multiplayer a decade ago and pretty much avoid it like the plague.

Maybe I’ll try Guild Wars 3 if it’s in the same style as Guild Wars 2 (which came out before the monetisation era).