FishFace

Tracking via cookies means gathering personal data, the exact thing GDPR regulates. GDPR says that data must not be collected except on one of a few lawful bases, one of which is consent. Article 7 clause 4 of the GDPR says:

When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether […] the provision of a service, is conditional on consent to the processing of personal data that is not necessary for the performance of that contract.

to me this reads like: “consent does not count if you need to agree in order to access a service” and that they imagined consent as being, “yes, you can have my personal data to serve me personalised ads, because I’d rather have personalised ads than generic ones,” which some people (probably not many here!) do think. However, it’s only expressed as “account shall be taken” when determining whether consent was “freely given” and the lawful basis does not specify that consent must be “freely given,” which is where I imagine these kinds of gaps creep in.

Guess you agree that this isn’t something the law should be involved with. Cool chat.

The only thing I have to fuck around with like that is the setting for Windows Update itself. It’s pretty annoying but also pretty different from an AI feature (because the modification I want to make delays updates, which is less secure). Maybe you’re thinking of something specific?

Anyway, yes, if they add an AI agent that you can’t turn off without hacks, that would be bad. But given that they haven’t done that, complaining about the law (without saying what the law is lacking) is silly. What would the law say - “don’t add features to software if any user doesn’t want it?” there is no way to make what the commenter above said make sense.

But the Steam Machine is also likely to be positioned as a console competitor on some level, just like the Steam Deck - sure the Deck is just a PC in a handheld form factor, but it’s designed to be a handheld console.

“Those who care about the freedom PC gaming affords” surely aren’t in the market for a pre-built machine whose main attractiveness will be convenience and support, either. I play PC games because it’s what I grew up playing, where I’m most comfortable, and it gives me better access to a wide variety of games at good prices than console games do. I can play in higher fidelity than an equivalent-generation console, and I can play games which are poorly suited to controllers (ironically: like Call of Duty. Which I haven’t played since Black Ops 4, but I have played other games with restrictive anti-cheat) For me, it’s not about some abstract concept of freedom at all. I also use Linux for everything except gaming for concrete reasons.

Saying the Steam Machine sucks because of this is idiotic. But saying it will limit its reach, or is a reason to not buy it, or whatever, is totally legit. My PC plays as broad a gamut of games as possible, and while I’ll look into it, I’ll take a lot of convincing to potentially have to put up with the Linux desktop issues I put up with routinely on my main (non-gaming) computer. Not being able to play my friends’ flavour of the month would be a big red flag.

Just don’t turn it on?

Gdpr seemed like it was designed to ban this, but lately companies (especially German ones?) seem to be trying this. I guess it won’t be resolved without a big, slow, expensive court case.

That’s the orthodoxy but noone ever bothers to actually back it up. If I write an encyclopedia and refer extensively to external sources it’s not a derivative work, and that seems to be the closest obvious example.

Do you know about how much it cut out?

You take that back!

I never knew about the recut, but presumably it gets rid of a lot of the monster-of-the-week content?

I don’t think any of that was actually bad. It didn’t move the overarching plot along all the time, but that wasn’t the point.

Most people don’t really care about that shit though… Those that do are mostly already here :P

2 minutes every few years? What? Where are those numbers coming from? You’re going to plug the controller in for <1 minute/year!?

Why do you need to replace the battery after only a few minutes of use? Did you miss that you recharge it in the controller?

You only need to replace it when it no longer holds enough charge to be useful, which is going to be at least a couple of years. You’re not replacing the battery in your phone every couple of days, are you? Why would this battery be different?

Your edit:

I’m not answering the same questions yet again.

I did not ask any questions in my last comment that I had asked before. You have never said why you think you need to replace the battery in the controller often enough for a screwed-down battery cover to be a problem. You have never said why the battery not being AA-sized makes it take longer to replace, when there are many quickly-swappable battery designs out there.

You have tried to say that the Steam Controller won’t be like that - but without evidence and without acknowledging that you said something wrong. That’s not very good.

Yeah I’ve only seen the pouch type.

Why is 5 seconds every few days better than 2 minutes every few years? You just keep talking up how easy it is to replace AAs as if that’s somehow the only important thing? For it to be worse, it has to be worse than the alternative which you just don’t seem to understand is going to take up less time?

That is obviously not the case with the Steam controller.

How do you know? Do you have a preview?

But you’ve again completely ignored the point, which is that the non-AA alternative is quicker to swap, so the time to swap was never about the battery type, was it?

Once you’ve understood this we can talk about the point you never initially mentioned, but I’m not opening a new discussion when you’re being so willfully ignorant on the first one.

The problem as you’ve stated it compares replacing an AA battery (necessary very often) to replacing a rechargeable battery (only necessary when it’s health depletes after years), so your characterisation of it so far is unreasonable, which is why I asked again.

If it’s both you’ve failed to explain any inherent problem with non-AA batteries when it comes to the time taken to change them. I can change a the custom battery in my camera as quickly as any AA. Faster, even, than the typical AA sprung enclosure because of the housing.

Ok, and you’ll only have to swap this battery out after a couple of years, so what’s the problem?

Glad we’re agreed it’s about the access, not the battery itself.

I’m talking about the actual physical object and its characteristics. The part that affects time taken is the access to the battery, not the battery form factor.

It’ll take all of two minutes to swap the battery, chill out.

In your imagined world where the steam controller has AA batteries, the difference you’re taking about is the battery door, not the battery firm factor.

Swappability is not a matter of the exact size and shape, but how many screws are needed to access it etc.

I think laptop batteries are usually thinner than 18650s? All the ones I’ve seen are, anyway

Do you still love me?