With respect to Call of Duty games: Yes. Games supporting Xbox Live on the original Xbox console are no longer playable online. Games for PlayStation 2 had a trend of closing even earlier with DNAS error -103 "This software title is not in service."

And with respect to recent games: The publisher of the game Concord closed its sole server less than a month after release.

And with respect to recent games that rely on Windows security technologies: Players of Marvel Rivals on Linux and macOS got banned from the game's sole server for a century until server administrators had to reverse the bans manually. If you want more examples, I can provide them by searching DuckDuckGo for linux games ban site:slashdot.org.

I suspect that grandparent means that the concept of an "unsupported platform" is itself anticompetitive. I certainly believe it is. If a paying licensee can technically make a computer program work on a particular platform, it ought not to be the publisher's privilege to arbitrarily ban said licensee for using said program on said platform.

I work for Retrotainment Games, and we sell pixel art games for about $10 to $15 on Steam* or $60 on cartridge.

* Disclaimer: A paid download on Steam or a major game console's download store is not a sale of a copy as defined in the Uniform Commercial Code.

Probably the same phenomenon as when a publisher's system confuses Steam Deck users who do not cheat with cheaters.

This invites a lawyer to find a client with a disability who can't use a website because it blocks the assistive browser extension on which the client relies. Together, they sue the browser publisher and website operator under Americans with Disabilities Act or foreign counterparts.

If you are coding in a language that doesn't have pointers, then you don't actually need to understand how pointers work... any more than you need to understand how assembly language works in order to program in C++. It might be helpful in some cases to understand pointers, in the same way it might also be helpful to understand assembly, or transistors, but plenty of people successfully write software (even well-designed, correct, performant software) without it.

Is that obvious? To me it looks like the task was defined by someone who was looking to simplify the requirements so that test-takers could focus more on the relevant parts of the problem and less on corner-case minutiae.

It's the programming equivalent of the Physics exam question that ends with "ignoring air resistance".

Some website publishers have threatened publishers of ad-blocking software pursuant to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), or other similar legislation. See "A Copyright Claim Was Reportedly Used to Stop Ad Blocking, But It’s Complicated" by Rhett Jones for details.

Perplexity's accusatory and belligerent tone is as good as guilty plea in my book. They sound like someone who is trying to insult the other party into submission so that they won't have to come clean.

It depends. Does the Perplexity agent faithfully relay the personalized messages from sponsors that would have otherwise been presented adjacent to the information on the website?

Putting it on board a rocket means there is a significant chance that it will be scattered across the launch site or the area downrange of the launch site, if the launch goes wrong. I don't know how you could mitigate that risk.

Part of the problem is that there's no way to pay "journalists" as a whole. Because of electronic payment networks' fees per transaction, online newspapers have to sell a monthly subscription, not a single issue they way they would with cash in a vending machine. And a subscription to NYT includes zero articles from WaPo or WSJ. This means readers get sucked into the ideological bubble of the one publication that happens to be part of their subscription plan.

Really? AFAIK it was a joke phrase some individual came up with to gently mock the idea of "coding" without actually knowing what you're doing... and then (some) people somehow went ahead and adopted it as a serious idea anyway. (I wish those people luck, they are going to need it)

Stopping distance for a fully loaded semi at 55 miles per hour is 133 yards. If you step out in front of that truck 15 yards ahead, there's nothing the truck can do about it -- well, it could try to swerve, but it's anyone guess whether that would help or just makes things worse.

I'd go a little further, and say that any single sensor technology alone is inadequate, due to the amount of damage that occur after an unmitigated sensor failure. Multiple sensor technologies should be active at once, so that if (when!) any one type of sensor gets fooled, the others can override it and nobody dies.

My friend's cousin got rear-ended by a semi truck that didn't see the red light at the end of the off-ramp, or the car that was stopped at it. He was instantly killed, his car was crushed like a can.

It turned out the semi's driver had been on the road for 14 hours straight, and was not, shall we say, in a fully lucid state.

Would a self-driving truck have avoided this death? It's hard to say for sure, but we can probably at least say that its cognitive abilities wouldn't degrade over the course of a long day, due to lack of sleep.

I concede that I have not viewed incest-themed video games, as sexually explicit works do not appeal to me. However, US law classifies a video game as an audiovisual work, little different from a motion picture. I'm aware of more than one film adaptation of Lolita, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov depicting sexual abuse of a minor. I'm not aware of any statute or regulation that disqualifies a work of authorship from having "artistic value" solely because it is interactive. Could you give me something to cite about categorical exclusion of interactive audiovisual works from having "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" per the Miller test?

The conviction was reversed and remanded. From Wikipedia's article "Miller v. California, section "Opinion of the Court":

The result of the ruling was that the Supreme Court overturned Miller's criminal conviction and remanded the case back to the California Superior Court for reconsideration of whether Miller had committed a misdemeanor.[5]

[5] Beverly G. Miller, Miller v. California: A Cold Shower for the First Amendment , 48 St. John's L. Rev. 568 (1974).

From the opinion of the Court, 413 U.S. 15 (1973):

The judgment of the Appellate Department of the Superior Court, Orange County, California, is vacated and the case remanded to that court for further proceedings not inconsistent with the First Amendment standards established by this opinion.

Could you give me something to cite about Miller's conviction having been upheld on remand?

I quoted the part of the Miller test on which authors and publishers would most likely rely in a defense. The Miller test is not like the fair use test in the copyright statute (17 USC 107), in which the judge is expected to weigh the factors against one another. A work has to meet all three parts of the Miller test to be obscene.

This is where we disagree on how the opinion of the Court ought to be interpreted.