There’s a really popular sandwich shop in my hometown. It regularly has a line out the door. I just checked their prices and it’s 10.75 for most options so I’d say this is spot on.
Not all Steam games use it as DRM. Many Steam games you can simply launch the executable without Steam installed and it will work.
Still, GOG is much better on that front.
But even games I buy on GOG, I often launch through Steam to take advantage of tools like Proton and Steam Input. Steam’s dominance stems from unwavering commitment to building a good user experience, and I’m not ashamed to reward that with my wallet vote.
First off, this is just another step, and if you believe it's the last one then I have a nice bridge to sell you
Slippery slope fallacy. This law is basically just asking for a more unified and organized version of how we already check for age verification (which is every individual app or website asking for your birthday). If there was anything more than that I’d agree with you. I do agree that it’s annoying this is coming in the form of a law instead of an addition from Apple that they use in marketing that gets others to follow suit. I think that would have been a healthier way for this sort of organization to happen.
That being said, I do agree with you that the potential “next step” of asking the OS to verify your age would be an issue.
Do you believe that the app developed by some random kid in a random country will start checking age just because newsom wants it?
They already have to select what age range the app is for when they submit it to Apple or Google, and it’s Apple or Google that will have to make changes to comply with this law. If they aren’t distributing through an “app store” there is nothing the 3rd party developer needs to do or worry about according tot his law. However, I am curious how this will end up being applied to command line tools and package managers.
And IF this system allows you to put in whatever date, then what's the point, beyond some security theater?
I agree, except it could be a form of parental controls. One thing I really don’t like about this law is I think the parents should decide what content is appropriate for their child, rather than the App Store. But not having any validation both puts the control back in the parents hands to some extent, while also making sure the law stops short of becoming a serious privacy and security issue.
This bill is absolute horse shit and won't go anywhere because this is not how the world works. This will likely end with citizens in California having a really really tiny amount of software available to them legally
Considering most of the biggest software companies in the world have offices in or are based out California, that’s simply not true. Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all comply, regardless of how reasonable the rules are. At best they would fight it in court.
I doubt anyone is planning to sue open source OS developers over this, but honestly the changes it asks for are pretty small, so I expect most linux distros will follow suit anyway.
Ofc I don’t think there is anything California could do to enforce this on FOSS software in any practical way, if it came to that.
There’s a huge difference between adjusting the color mapping of the RAW data and using Photoshop or AI. It’s really hard to get an “objective truth” color mapping, and that certainly doesn’t come by default.
When I take a photo, I want to see the photo I took. If I decide to photoshop something with it, that’s my decision, and it’s no longer a real photo, and I would be a liar if I were to present it as such.
We should not start accepting manipulated images as a replacement for real images, and it’s unacceptable that Samsung didn’t give its users a choice in whether to use the real image or a manipulated one.
OSes to take user birthday during account creation
this info is binned into categories (<13, 13-16, 16-18, >18)
the category info must be made available to basically all software
software is supposed to use this data to age gate content but is not allowed to send this data to 3rd parties
What this bill does not do:
Your full birthday is specifically not to be sent to every application
OSes are not being asked to check your id it doesn’t say the OS should do anything to verify the birthday, just that it should record it
There isn’t anything to prevent you from entering 1/1/2000 instead of your real birthday
Honestly this doesn’t seem that bad to me. If anything it’s a little pointless. This style of age verification is basically universally already used. I guess you could read this as forcing OSes to have parental controls.
I do think there is a bit of a privacy issue in this information being shared with every program, but they attempt to minimize this using the binning (so ironically it really only hurts the privacy of teenagers since for adults it will just say >18), and this information is supposed to not be shared with 3rd parties (but we all know Facebook and Google are going to do whatever they can this info, pushing the limits of that part of the law, or just waiting to be sued and paying the fine when it happens).
I honestly think most Linux distros will just implement it.
I tried downloading the BF6 free demo and I had to jump through a bunch of hoops trying to get it to run just to find that because the last time I used my EA account was a decade ago, my Steam account is banned from their servers until I go through customer support to unlock it.
That’s part of the job as a DM. I would often have new enemies show up to the fight if it was going too well, or secretly nerf the enemies stats if it was going too poorly.
doesn't have the track record of totally redoing their entire OS in the course of a single OS generation
I have a grandparent who’s been on macOS for a long time and would complain whenever they changed something. Usually not the whole OS, but something like the Photos app, which they completely redid like 7 years ago or something.
Also macOS is currently headed in the direction of merging with iPadOS, but they are making that change gradual.
Bruh this might be one my new default search engine link