>But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
Need for Speed is trademarked, and they do actively continue to publish and sell games under that trademark. They don't sell some particular older games, but they definitely do make and distribute videogames games bearing the trademark "Need for Speed".
Massive issue with a game like NFSU2 is all the licensed music. I just watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGdLZTgMDd4&t=735s) of an EA producer working on bringing back old games, and he said it took them over a year just to get the music licenses for a 30 year old game. And that's if they can get the licenses. Famously, no one really knows who owns the game No One Lives Forever, and the supposed rights holders aren't particularly interested in digging through their pre-digital legal archives to try to find the required documents that assert those rights.
Games are bundles of licenses themselves. That music costs money, as do other assets and sometimes engines. And over time some of those licenses can expire or require renegotiation. Sometimes it's easier to just stop selling something than figure all that out.
Because this is a billion dollar corporation and those typically hire cutthroat teams that negotiate with other cutthroat companies. I recently tried licensing a 50-year-old unaired raw video from a news corporation. It's in the range of $5-10k. We're talking b-roll with dead air and such.. big companies aren't interested in this stuff
Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
My friends were there in 2017, and all photos and videos were looked at by a border officer before leaving back then. The border officer could ask you to delete a photo for any reason, including not putting a Kim in the center of the shot.
With NK's population not having freedom of movement, and checkpoints between cities, it's safe to say getting a real picture of how North Koreans really live is hard.
It's so strange that in the age of the internet, we still can't find out how North Koreans live directly from them. It's crazy, but at the same time, it's so fascinating.
I recall a PBS documentary that had video of people who snuck across the Chinese border to film. I remember them meeting a 5 year old boy living on the street who said his mom moved away for work and “she didn’t come back”.
That's actually sort of impressive, that a 5-year-old survives without parents or a home.
In the USA they would be immediately scooped up and placed in a protective foster home of some sort. Teenaged runaways can evade capture and return, but a 5-year-old cannot go trotting around wherever they please. I cannot imagine the fate of a girl in those circumstances.
Surely, this boy could not be surviving without support and guidance from elder allies. I am not sure what "fending for oneself" looks like in NK culture, but I can envision a lot of people taking pity and giving help and handouts of some kind.
My impression was that abandoned children sort of live in bands, the folks sneaking across the border brought them food and money. They were in pretty rough shape visually. It wasn’t clear how long they last.
>Tourism is open only for Russians. It's been closed for the world since COVID.
This is no longer true. They've opened up again in the last year and there's been a small flood of extreme travel of people going.
https://youtu.be/TUmEcL3Feo0
I went there pre-covid and yes they check your camera and tell you which ones to delete. They told me to delete some photos of soldiers. I had transferred photos to an external memory card so didn't matter.
But you're not going to get photos of what life is really like on one of these tours because they take you to places they want you to see.
The Verdana font that your message is written with - how can you be sure that its TrueType bytecode hasn't escaped the sandbox and snuck into your ring0?
You either put some trust into the systems made by other people, or you don't touch computers at all.
Absolutely, and we can discuss the amounts of this trust. Some people trust the anti-cheat devs. (I do too, on a PC that is used for almost nothing but gaming.)
okay, if you agree with that, i am confused about your initial comment comparing anti-cheat to a font.
it appears like you are saying "if you trust the font to be okay, you should trust anti-cheat". but we've just cleared up that they have wildly different levels of trust, due to their wildly different access, size, purpose, etc.
I mean - trust is subjective, right? Some people just don't care, some people are okay with the risk-reward tradeoff. I agree it's a bit absurd to compare vanguard to a font, but the parent comment was pretty unapologetic too.
Ancient Greeks had a steam engine. They called it a Hero's engine. They used it as a toy.
They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
There's an important lesson that can be applied to every technology, I think: technological progress is always iterated, never revolutionized. If your novelty - a programming language, a framework, a methodology, whatever - doesn't stand on the shoulders of the giants, then you have simply nothing to apply this novelty to.
That was a reaction engine, something like a steam rocket confined to rotate in a circle, and not a positive-displacement engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
They couldn't use it as anything else than a toy. The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
IMHO they definitely had the processes to basically add a PTO to one, but it was probably dismissed as impractical.
> The reason they couldn't because they didn't have the metallurgy and the machining to create pistons, valves, etc.
It was a turbine. You don’t use pistons in a turbine. They lacked knowledge of turbine blades, the metallurgy to make pressure vessels, and the tools to make parts with the tolerances needed to spin at high RPM and withstand high temperatures.
Probably could've connected it to some tiny device, and then someone surely would've thought, what if we made a really big one a d connected it to our Archimedes screws?
The Romans didn't have a need to pump water from coal mines because they hadn't yet cut down all their fuel forests or exhausted all their surface deposits of coal. Newcomen's engine was so inefficient, it needed to be at a coal mine to power it and this jet screw engine would have been even worse. If they wanted to turn an Archimedes screw, it would have taken less labor to just have a person turn it by hand.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
reply