vaguerant

joined 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (8 children)

Somebody has fed you or you have invented bad information. Neither Yuzu nor Ryujinx, the two Switch emulators which recently ceased development due to intervention from Nintendo, included Nintendo's code. The Yuzu settlement required those developers to acknowledge that

because our projects can circumvent Nintendo’s technological protection measures and allow users to play games outside of authorized hardware, they have led to extensive piracy.

There was never any mention of them stealing Nintendo code.

Ryujinx, we know even less about, because the agreement went down privately, but there's literally zero indication of any stolen code. We know that Nintendo contacted the developer proposing that they cease offering Ryujinx and they did.

Obviously, Nintendo was bothered in both of these cases because the emulators do facilitate piracy, but that's not the same as them having infringed on Nintendo's copyright by using their code which you are claiming. Both of these emulators were developed open-source; if they were built using stolen Nintendo code there would be receipts all over the place. That was never the problem.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (10 children)

I'm not going to check the whole archive, but going back to at least 2005, Nintendo was asking users to ...

report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities

https://web.archive.org/web/20051124194318/http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html

Here's some more quotes from the same page where Nintendo is viciously anti-emulation:

The introduction of video game emulators represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers. As is the case with any business or industry, when its products become available for free, the revenue stream supporting that industry is threatened. Such emulators have the potential to significantly damage a worldwide entertainment software industry which generates over $15 billion annually, and tens of thousands of jobs.

Distribution of a Nintendo emulator trades off of Nintendo's goodwill and the millions of dollars invested in research & development and marketing by Nintendo and its licensees. Substantial damages are caused to Nintendo and its licensees. It is irrelevant whether or not someone profits from the distribution of an emulator. The emulator promotes the play of illegal ROMs , NOT authentic games. Thus, not only does it not lead to more sales, it has the opposite effect and purpose.

Personal Websites and/or Internet Content Providers sites That link to Nintendo ROMs, Nintendo emulators and/or illegal copying devices can be held liable for copyright and trademark violations, regardless of whether the illegal software and/or devices are on their site or whether they are linking to the sites where the illegal items are found.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

I'd say it started on at least Nintendo 64. The original Japan-only Animal Crossing game for N64 had playable, emulated Famicom (NES) games. Nintendo even ran a special offer to get an N64 Controller Pak with Ice Climber pre-loaded which you could plug into your controller like a game cartridge and play inside Animal Crossing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I do wonder whether the algorithm understands sarcasm. A while back, I watched a video about some movie bombing, something objectively bad like Morbius, and they joked that the movie wasn't actually failing for all of the obvious reasons, but because it was "too woke". They didn't really believe that, they were just making fun of people who say that about movies. Still, for the next couple of weeks I had to keep marking channels as "Don't recommend" because they were all unironic right-wing rage-bait about the woke agenda. I don't know for certain that that's why I suddenly got all those recommendations, but that was my best guess.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

For years I thought Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) and Mickey Rourke (1952-present) were the same guy. I'd see Mickey Rooney in a movie and be like "Wow, he's looking pretty good for his age," thinking he was a man 32 years his senior and/or dead.

I finally twigged when I eventually saw Iron Man 2 (2009) and was like "How is he doing this?!" and actually looked him up.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Despite being told regularly not to tease the animals, it is believed that Hannah taunted the tiger, which lunged at her, pulled its fixing from the wall and "tore her to pieces".

I gotta squint at this last part. Did this explanation come from management? "No, you don't understand, it was really the woman's fault that the caged wild animal we kept in a pub attacked. We're actually good and normal for doing this."

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Something very sketch is definitely going on. I'm not sure how much of the episode to believe really happened. Agatha's comportment completely shifting and her sudden awareness of who Teen is, the casual way Lilia responded to Alice's death and Teen's outburst, nobody was behaving in-character for the last scene. Maybe we just saw the beginning of a trial for Teen?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 days ago

They're laughing with me, Michael!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It's real in the sense that the established policy is to retire ccTLDs within five years of a country code ceasing to exist. But there are multiple provisos there:

  • we don't know with any certainty that the IO country code will be disestablished; it doesn't necessarily follow that Mauritius regaining control of the British Indian Ocean Territory will mean the end of the IO country code (and associated .io ccTLD), for a variety of historical and administrative reasons
  • we don't know with any certainty that IANA will unequivocally shut down the domain, vs. converting it to a generic top level domain like many other existing special-interest and novelty gTLDs (e.g. .cloud, .gay, .info, .tech)

Obviously it's worth keeping an eye on what IANA does with this situation, but personally I suspect one or the other of the above will happen. It's probably in the interests of Mauritius to retain the domain as a source of income, but if they don't then somebody else will likely want to take ownership, and there's plenty of moneyed interests in retaining .io since a number of large business customers (the largest likely being Alphabet/Google) are already using it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Yeah, this is pretty standard. Between the low production numbers and the fact that assembly is probably occurring in a country with stronger labor laws than wherever mass-producted hardware is made (mostly China), it's going to cost more than something you can pick up on Amazon or AliExpress.

There have been a few cases where open-source hardware like this has enough demand to get picked up by a Chinese manufacturer who makes a cheaper version through some combo of unethical labor practices, production scale, employing cheaper or cloned parts and/or dropping features, so it's not out of the question that a cheaper version comes along, as long as you don't mind the compromises to get it.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 week ago (13 children)

US$249.99 ready-built, for anybody curious. Not saying it's not worth that, but that will price a lot of people out of it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This makes me wonder if there are any exceptions, things that brains didn't name. Onomatopoeia seem like a good starting place (and maybe ending place). Did we name cats' meows meows or just hear them and go "OK, that's what that is then"? Cat brains didn't name them that either, they weren't thinking what they should call the sound they make, they just made it.

As far as things which name themselves, I can't think of anything else but sounds.

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