backgroundcow

Ackchyually-- IEEE 754 guarantees any integer with absolute value less than 2^24 to be exactly representable as a single precision float. So, the "divide by 2, check for decimals" should be safe as long as the origin of the number being checked is somewhat reasonable.

Here is a DallE rendering of the same setup that maybe is less offensive.

What are you talking about? Amazon's digital video purchases don't require any monthly access fee. He paid £5.99 with the idea that he'll get to keep it indefinitely, just like a physical DVD. I don't get why you think it is ok for a seller to revert the sale of a digital item at any time for just the purchase price + £5 but (I presume?) not other sales?

Nowhere do they use terms like "rent" or "lease". They explicitly use terms like "buy" and it's not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.

This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing "buy" unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To "sell" cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.

Are you fine with me taking anything from your home as long as I pay you the purchase price + £5? Some of us assign a greater value to some of the things we own than the purchase price.

People losing media this way should sue, with the argument that it was presented to end users as a "sale", and it is not sufficient to merely compensate someone with the purchase price to undo a sale. Companies "selling" digital products should be forced to write agreements that allow them to redistribute content indefinitely.

It's because the licence holder of the movie decided Amazon can't show it anymore. Perhaps they were asking Amazon to pay a high fee and it wants worth it.

I get that this is what the license holder wants. But, why can't we just put into law that a license is not needed for a company to host, retransmit and play copyrighted media on behalf of a user once the license holder has been compensated as agreed for a sale?

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." // Carl Sagan.

How the f**k do we have functional AI that speaks like a human and solves general problems on the level of a university student, but somehow household chores are still done with tech that was invented 50-100 years ago?! Why isn't there just a hole in my kitchen counter where I can dump dirty dinnerware, pots, pans; the machine sorts it out, washes it, and returns it to the cupboard? Why doesn't my washing machine sort by color, wash, dry, fold, and stack my clothes? Why do I still have to clean surfaces in my house by manually rubbing a wet sponge at them for hours?

I'll tell you what I think: inequality. Women did house chores, men invented shit that was fun and useful to them. Maybe as the world moves, hopefully, toward more equality we will find that people who shares their time between chores and inventing stuff will start to actually tackle the problem of simplifying boring chores.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.

A few things:

• Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn't seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.

• It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn't matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.

AND add a clause to the TOS banning retroactive updates of TOS to existing games.