This. I was so pissed when I saw the EULA for KSP2. I love KSP more than probably any game that has ever been released, due in no small part to the vibrant modding community. The fact that they decided to abuse the very people who made KSP great is disgusting and short slighted.

You can’t really say Blizzard has not raised prices when they have added microtrans and mental health costs to the game.

Gabe heads a company which is successful because it respects its employees, customers, and suppliers instead of constantly trying to marginalize and abuse them. They are not perfect by any means, but they do fit into the definition of ethical capitalism, which should not be understated. They don’t employ anticompetitive tactics like bribing/coercing developers into exclusivity contracts. They don’t operate with a bunch of 1099 contractors so they can avoid providing benefits. Etc.

What, you don’t want to pay another 80 bucks for what could have been a content patch to last year’s game? Pshhh… You’re not a real fan.

Is what I would say if I were the type of guy who should take a long walk off a short pier.

This raises a rather sticky situation for the coming years. I have been seeing more and more posts about developers using GPT generated code in various projects. If a game is made and it is found that GPT was used for some parts of the core code, does the whole project lose its copyright?

Other way around. Require sales of licenses to games to be perpetual. The way you phrased it means that the license holders can charge way more.

Same. I initially had the sinking dread then I saw that they actually fixed the arbitration clause and I became quite elated.

Your idea is one of the specific reasons many companies try to label everyone as an “independent contractor”. Especially people like voice actors are not “employees”, and thus do not count as such for your idea.

You assume that the governments of which you speak are not assisting intentionally. These companies did not write the EULA legal frameworks that allow them virtual carte blanch to take and do whatever they want just because the population is trapped in the endless cycle of coercion that is our life.

Why do all of these companies decide they are so tired of existing?

That is actually intentional. They do it to restrict refunds on Steam and consoles.

My landleech padlocked the basement and attic of the house I rent. I keep a large screwdriver for exactly this eventuality. Something goes wrong in the basement and that lock point is done for. Just slip it in the gap around the padlock and pull. Will only take about 200N to rip the thing off the door and I can get way more than that with a little bit of leverage.

I play Rimworld and Factorio. Those are 200 hours per playthrough each and I do about 2 a year for them. My Steam Deck helps a lot with the latter though. The UI for the former unfortunately does not lend itself to the smaller screen even though the game plays well.

Vehicles are generally owned and maintained by the driver. Also, these charges long predate the digital age. They pass them off as paying for maintaining a shitty app for ordering, but it is just a convenience fee, extra money they can make off those of us who are too busy, tired, stuck, or lazy to go pick it up. Always has been, always will be. Proof: if I go the old school way and call in to order it directly they still charge it.

Isn’t a true air gap pretty solid though? Aside from someone actually coming into your house and interfacing directly it would be pretty hard to bypass, or am I on Mt. Dunning-Kruger over here this time?

I prefer the answer of giving the giy the reins and letting him get it so riddled with viruses then when he calls for support replying “sorry, your property your problem. You have absolute dominion over it and thus we give no warranty as we have no responsibility.”

Not that I know of. In the end you are editing the browser rendering parameters. Anyone can inspect the page and see that the opacity on the page is being turned down. Finding where it is happening is the only thing you can really make hard. Have a couple of the pass through scripts be machine generated and you can have it use nonsensical variable names and a bunch of dummies that lead on wild goose chases. It could all be fixable, but you can make it a pain in the ass. Add a redundancy or two and it will make debugging a nightmare because even if one is fixed, the others will make it look as though it has not.

The real answer is to have NEVER do freelance web development inside the client’s firewall. Never. If they try to require it, walk away. If it is inside their firewall then they can just take the source code and stiff you. If they try to spout some BS about security, say that is precisely what you are concerned about and point blank ask them what safeguards they are willing to allow you to put in place for developing in their system. If the answer is none, walk. If they are willing to let you VPN in, run the code from a local copy over the VPN and node lock it so if someone attempts to serve it from another machine it fails.

Apologies. I’m tired and hate businesses taking advantage of “Independent Contractors”.

Bury it six JavaScript and 2 php scripts deep so it is a pain in the ass to find.

Just start suing. Then donate all the money back to the library you sued.

What gets me is part of Project 2025 is planning on reclassifying all of the workers in the exact agencies this affects with sycophants and yes-men. As I understand it, the entire idea of that move is that Trump and the GOP can bypass Congress and the courts and essentially rule however they want.

Doesn’t this decision run counter to that? Instead of allowing the regulatory bodies that are going to be sycophantilized to just run shot over their domains, now the risk having a non-sympathetic judge or an unfavorable swing in voting in Congress?