I strongly dislike the end-around that these “live service” games are trying to do around copyright law. I’m a strong proponent of the idea that intellectual property law is a compromise. You get some time to make your money on your idea, then it becomes the heritage of all mankind. Treating games as a service is an attempt to weasel out of their end of the bargain.

So I don’t fucking buy them.

If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.

I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:

• The government looks at the petition and says “No we’re not going to consider that.”
• The government says “We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing.”
• The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
• The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.

But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.

I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.

Sure. I remember when Id Software released Doom as open source. They had just released Quake II earlier that month, Doom was old news and not really a money maker for the company, so they opened the source code to let the community play with it. That was a cool thing to do, it should be done more often.

I would say yeah, you should build a game in such a way that it can be played once its abandoned. The greed vampires who are actually in charge won’t let a law like that be passed. Or if it is, they’ll ignore it.

So…here’s the thing, folks: What you’re REALLY going to have to do is stop buying live service video games.

If I understand this, it is a petition to get the EU government to look into maybe thinking about making some laws to…do something about live service games becoming unplayable when the servers shut down. Okay, here’s how that’s going to go: “We looked into it and decided not to do anything.”

Has anyone tried…not buying the damn games in the first place? If you pay for these games knowing that the soulless reptilian cloacal slits that run the AAA industry can just shut down servers whenever they want, YOU are the problem.

Fail. Remap it to escape.

Concussion at an ice skating rink.

I’ll admit to liking the look of some gaming PCs, with a custom loop with clear tubing, colored coolant, coordinated lights; it hits the same way a well done build in Satisfactory does.

I’m not really interested in gaming peripherals like a big chunky mouse with a bunch of angled plates on it trying to look like Gigatron’s jock strap. Some RGB can be kind of cool, I kinda wish I could do more useful stuff with it, like I always throught it would be cool to have RGB lighting that varied from blue to red with component temperature or something. I’m not the biggest fan of just unicorn vomit for the sake of unicorn vomit.

In the 1940s or 50s. My family has owned it since the 60s.

Electronics engineering is a bit beyond my scope; as an electronics hobbyist or field repairman you’re gonna get the closest I have in my kit at the time, I’ll probably get within an order of magnitude of the spec unless it’s somehow very damn critical or the schematic calls for one of the oddly common oddly specific values like 220 ohm.

Live not on evil’s deeds; live not on evil.

Seeking a better life for one’s children tends to be a powerful motivator for people. The promise of a better life has driven a lot of people to get on a boat and sail to the United States over the last few hundred years. As a natural born citizen, I benefit from them all, from the cleverest inventor to the humblest fruit picker. We got folks in power right now trying to abolish it, and look how it’s going for us.

You sound, to me, like a Republican.

Meanwhile, me in the wood shop wearing safety glasses, over ear hearing protection and a dust mask in 95 degree heat and 95% humidity be like:

You’re getting a 10 ohm resistor and liking it.

It almost certainly have been trained partially on r/anarchychess so it’ll probably try to play pop tart to king’s bishop 3.

Time has been repealed. Everything took place 16 years ago earlier this afternoon.

So…let’s actually set up a pretend scenario here. Pretend. We are pretend red teaming here; any resemblance to actual terrorist plots living or dead is purely coincidental.

Let’s pretend our terrorist cell is going to spit up, travel to 10 places around the United States, and we’re going to do a coordinated strike on 10 government buildings. Probably the smartest thing to do is just…do it at a planned time and not communicate after we split up. But for some convoluted Ocean’s Umpteen reason we need to communicate and coordinate. I see 3 possible scenarios here:

1. Leader just needs to say GO to the rest of the team, expecting no reply. So one, very brief, one-way communique.
2. Leader needs to send several detailed instructions over a long period of time, expecting no reply. Repeated, large, one-way communiques.
3. The team is going to gather some intelligence and report back, and based on all their observations the leader will say go. Full on two-way communication.

In all three cases, the internet is the better tool for this.

You are correct in that it is difficult or impossible to remotely detect radio receivers, no matter what the BBC tells you. There’s no machinery making a log of who accesses what over analog radio. But the realities of radio equipment and propagation are going to eat into that advantage somewhat.

If we’re talking truly coast-to-coast, you’re going to need HF. MF/longwave won’t reach far enough, you need skywave propagation, and you get that on HF…mostly at night mostly during favorable sunspot activity.

I bet you’re imagining most of the team using one of those handheld commodity shortwave receivers that does AM/FM and shortwave, about the size of a pencil case with one of those telescoping whip antennas. That might do for 1 and 2, people hear hams on those sometimes.

The bosses transmitter would need to be a reasonably serious bit of kit. At the very least something like an Icom 706 mobile HF rig plus power supply and at least a two element yagi for 20 or 40m. This is an antenna that’s 30 to 60 feet wide. Hams do routinely make do with less, but when you’re talking to someone with those crappy little antennas, probably inside a building, I’d want to focus my beam at least a bit. A wire in a tree ain’t gonna do.

Oh, and, let’s say Boss is in Washington DC. It’s possible he can make himself heard in Los Angeles but not Wichita, because the “optics” of the ionosphere doesn’t bounce his signal down to the ground in the middle of the continent.

One communique of “Baker this is Oven: Preheat complete, insert the bread. Repeat: Insert the bread.” might not be noticed. Or some ham somewhere will hear it and go “What the hell, who’s horsing around?” If you don’t transmit again, you’re probably not going to be direction found. But that big radio tower you’ve got is a weird thing to have.

If you need to make routine transmissions, well now you’re going to have to try some steganography crap. They did recently relax the baud restrictions on HF, but you’re still talking about 2.8kHz of analog bandwidth that MIGHT get through. It’s gonna look really weird if you’re repeatedly sending digital pictures to…no one in particular on a regular basis. Now, to blend in, you’ll need some genuine callsigns, because the FCC amateur radio license database is a matter of public record. You use a bogus callsign and you’ll be found out. If you’re transmitting a lot, people will find you, possibly out of curiosity.

Especially if you’re talking about everyone in the terrorist cell communicating, well now EVERYONE has to have an amateur radio license from the government, and fairly large, fairly conspicuous radio hardware. There have been spies caught with shortwave radio equipment, and said equipment was used as evidence against them. Entering the US with a smart phone and laptop is utterly normal, entering the US with a shortwave radio is weird.

OR

Get accounts on Reddit, and post cat memes. Compared to sitting around listening to static on an HF set, that looks way more normal these days. Yes, there probably is a log of what IP addresses sent and received what, but it’s really easy to make two-way secret communications look like perfectly legitimate traffic. The equipment required doesn’t draw as much attention. Keep the steganography subtle or a matter of “which picture I post” and not doctor them at all, well now it’s 100% indistinguishable from people having casual fun. Some guy posts a picture of an orange cat, it gets 30,000 views 975 likes and 75 comments, and ten IRS buildings explode. Do you think the authorities make the connection to the cat meme in the first place?

xXx-=The_Mouse_Sl@yer_69=-xXx

Meowssolini

Karen the Paranoid Android. “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very litigious.”

“‘Can I manage a vending machine?’ Can I manage a vending machine? Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they’re asking me to manage a vending machine. Life. Don’t talk to me about life.”

Welp. That’s that for that.