"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), introducing a new bill to fight the practice of "a rental disguised as a sale".

Kotaku reports:



The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it's already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that.

"I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it," Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York's 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down...

The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people's digital libraries earlier this year.
Representative Torres "did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors," the article acknowledges, "or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it."

But players will see the bill's importance next month, the article points out, "when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases as just a download code in a box, giving fans no control over a purchase that starts at $80.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web:
Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enough power. One estimate found more than a quarter of data-centre capacity slipped in 2025 alone.
"The data centre was due to receive its power supply at the end of the year," reports the BBC. "But as first reported by the Telegraph on Sunday, Nscale has been told this will not happen until the 2030s." (Though Nscale and Microsoft are still working together on other projects in Norway, Portugal and America.)

But now anchor-tenant Microsoft has pulled out of the Essex deal, reports the Telegraph, adding that Microsoft's move "leaves the site in apparent limbo. The company was its only announced customer, having agreed to rent 23,000 Nvidia AI chips at the facility..."
Microsoft's decision threatens to undermine Nscale's attempts to push ahead with a Wall Street flotation worth up to $35bn (£26bn), despite a brutal sell-off in AI computing stocks. Rival data centre developers have seen their share prices plunge over the last week on concerns that they will struggle to repay their debts as interest rates and inflation continue to rise.... Tech analyst Gartner said last week that $3.5 trillion could be written off by 2030 if the AI boom fails to deliver on its promises.

And "our research indicates that enterprise and consumer AI revenue will be insufficient to support profitable returns on all planned AI capital expenditures during this period," Gartner wrote:


"In 2026, AI providers are expected to spend nearly $1 trillion on AI infrastructure, and are forecast to invest an additional $6 trillion between 2027 and 2030," said Will Sommer, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner.... Failure to achieve sustainable return on investment capital (ROIC) on rapidly depreciating assets would almost certainly necessitate write-downs. Based on Gartner projections, a continued AI infrastructure investment trajectory could leave more than $4 trillion in asset value exposed to write-down risk through 2032. In this scenario, Gartner does not expect the 12% ROIC to be achieved until the end of 2032 at earliest...

Gartner estimates AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66 billion in 2027 to $174 billion in 2030. "The growth in spending on AI-optimized IaaS will be too low for most AI compute providers to recover their AI investments before the current generation of AI semiconductors is replaced," said Sommer. By 2030, Gartner predicts that cost pressure and a lack of a differentiating business model will force over 80% of neocloud [AI-specialized infrastructure] providers to cease independent operations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, December 1963

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

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Onlangs herinnerde ik mij een mooie oktoberdag in 2003. Op een boot voeren wij op de Hollandse en Utrechtse wateren, om een heftige periode te verwerken.

Plaats de cijfers 1 tot en met 9 zo in het diagram dat elk cijfer precies één keer voorkomt in elke rij, kolom, negen vetomrande 3x3 vakken én de vier grijze 3x3 vakken.

Report reveals that a shady mobster-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up murder

An in-depth investigation by the New York Times is raising further questions about the high-profile OJ Simpson case, in which the former football player was accused in the 1990s of killing his ex-wife – and whether a shady mobster-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up the murder.

The Times’s investigation revealed that California prosecutors were unable to fully investigate whether Simpson, who was accused but not convicted of his ex-wife’s murder, may have had an accomplice at the scene of the crime.

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マシューマシュー has added a photo to the pool:

Nikon FM2n
Nikkor 28mm f2.8 AIS
Kodak Pro Image 100
2024-09
Development: カメラのアマノ栄店
Scan: Filmlab App Desktop