I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.

I wanna say it became a thing from Twitch streamers when e sports was a big thing, but I’m by no means sure that that’s correct.

Yet another case of the medical industry not caring one iota about women and women’s ability to identify what is going on with their own bodies. The number of times I’ve heard of doctors dismissing women’s pain and issues makes me want to scream.

I was trying to remember the name, I immediately thought of that when I saw this. I love how it turned into a fundraiser for a nearby children’s hospital and a canned food drive.

Winner of the Best Josh was a 4 year old kid from the hospital too:

Since posting, I’ve learned some extra context that may or may not be true but would be very relevant here. Supposedly, Sony are the ones in charge of the actual store page. Which would mean that it was their decision to have it listed in countries where you can’t make PSN accounts.

Meaning that there are two mistakes here: Sony knowingly listing it, and Arrowhead not making it clear that the optional account linking was temporary. The second of which the CEO of Arrowhead has already taken the blame for on Twitter.

I don’t disagree there, I was talking about Arrowhead specifically. I’ve now seen people saying that Sony is the one in charge of the Steam store page, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Sony had done it knowingly.

Except that people didn’t realize that the account was mandatory until this announcement because they didn’t read the store page nor the message you get the first time you launch the game, and Steam probably doesn’t tell devs why a game was refunded.

The PSN account was mandatory when you first logged in on day one, but was made optional later that day due to server load while Sony rolled out extra infrastructure. Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?

The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.

It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.

Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.

Or, Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts and Steam isn’t directly involved in the creation of any individual store page unless they have reason to be - like limiting the regions Helldivers 2 is sold in after the fact.

You and I both have no way of knowing whether or not Arrowhead knew that they were selling their game in regions where people wouldn’t be able to play it, but I could totally see it being the case where Sony didn’t tell them and it just never occurred to them that that was a possibility because it’s not an issue where the company is located. The PSN account requirement was in the game and listed on the store page from day one; it was only temporarily made optional due to how overloaded the servers were at launch. Arrowhead themselves said they expected an active userbase of around 10k people.

And if Steam is anything like Etsy, then the most involvement they have with setting up any individual store page is their automated systems like the profanity filter. I run a business on Etsy and they have no direct involvement with any of my store besides providing the hosting platform and systems to create the storefront and listings (as well as backend systems like tracking pageviews and such). The only time that they’d get involved personally would be if something like this happened.

Regardless of where the blame lies, I think Arrowhead are the only ones who will suffer unless Sony relents on the PSN account requirement. The money for refunds isn’t gonna come out of Valve’s pockets, and I can’t imagine Sony forking over the cash now that they’ve taken their cut.

And that second option already happened with this exact game when people expressed concern over the DRM, which is designed like a rootkit, giving it essentially full control/access to your system while it’s running.

People can still get a refund. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified instead of just being okayed by the automated system.

Reminder that the hours played rule is only a limit for the automated refund system. You can request a refund for a game at any time for any reason. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified by a person.

Plus, a number of older gangs originally started as neighborhood groups to protect neighborhoods that the police wouldn’t bother going to and turned to drugs later to fund themselves.

Personally, I tend to use my mouth to inhale other things.

Has it? The last I heard, the new strains were even more infectious and more dangerous, but people weren’t getting as sick thanks to the vaccines.

But that was before this current strain, which is resistant to boosters from before late September and is the cause of the second highest spike in infections the US has seen, with an estimated 2 million new cases on the 11th alone. Hopefully, this new strain has mutated to be less dangerous than the original, and that’s why it’s resistant to the vaccines/boosters except for the most recent.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don’t have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they’re not hanging out online, then they’re probably at somebody’s house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there’s no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don’t want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.

As I saw somebody once say, “The US is a 3rd world country in a Prada belt.” If we didn’t have that big chunk of post-WW2 money keeping our economy chugging along all these years, we probably wouldn’t look all that different from them.

Yeah, after making that comment I realized the whole “customs gives you a receipt” thing, whereas the scenario I was talking about basically comes down to your word vs theirs, and what they write in their report. It’s a scenario with a lot less accountability than customs has.

In the US, the way it works is that the cash part never makes it onto the report, though more commonly this happens when the police do a “no knock raid” on “the wrong house” and then empty the family safe. The contents of the safe simply never get reported as evidence or mysteriously disappear from the evidence room without being reported as missing, like a fairly decent portion of the drugs taken as evidence every year does.