EU is an organization of bureaucrats. They want rules, first and foremost. Rules that they can lord over you and that justify their continued existence. What those rules are about is a secondary matter.
The software industry certainly didn't give up. Most smaller game studios outsource their copy protection to Steam. Larger studios use Denuvo which works better than ever. Some Denuvo games stay uncracked for years. Non-entertainment software mostly moved to SaaS with a subscription model which is essentially uncrackable or, where that was not feasible (CAD and video editing), use extremely invasive copy protection measures. For example, Dassault can catch your Solidworks cracks even on an airgapped computer. They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Steam effectively solved game piracy as far as I can tell.
The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy. That's it. That's all you need to do. There will, of course, always be piracy by those who can't afford to purchase the software or have other ideological goals, but for the vast majority of users, making it easy and pleasant to fork over cash for goods is how you stop them from stealing.
Meanwhile music, movies, and TV have decided to sprint in the exact opposite direction. It's now so onerous and expensive to even find let alone watch something that normal users are flocking to piracy. Not because it's cheaper, but because the experience is better in every conceivable way. To most people, the fact that you now own a real copy forever is merely a bonus. The real killer feature is that if you want to watch something it is always available. You can search for anything and get a result. Torrents don't usually go away on a rotating weekly basis. If you want something, it's available, and nobody gets in your way (if you do it right).
Steam's DRM is completely symbolic. There are widespread cracks available and Steam is AFAIK not even bothering with the cat and mouse game, and Denuvo games released this year are being cracked in < 24 hours.
I would never underestimate the lengths people are willing to go to to 'crack' games. Countless online-only games have been cracked with users reverse engineering the network protocol and writing their own servers. LLMs will probably greatly ease that process as well.
The SteamDRM wrapper tool itself, freely distributed through the Stramworks SDK, used to straight up ship with a feature to strip the DRM from any exe.
Oh wow that's really smart of them, now you have a reason to send your hacked version along the cad file so the user on the other side can escape from their spyware :D
> They taint every file you create as pirated and when you give that file to a licensed user, their legitimate copy will phone home and have their lawyers force the legitimate user to betray you.
Can this be manipulated to frame arbitrary users for piracy?
Given the opportunity, at the time, I would have happily taken steps to prove my presence would be of benefit. Instead, I had to spend my time asking family to give me their pension statements.
Later, I was recognized for that potential benefit. Last December, I became a citizen.
1. Citizens have a right to enter at ports of entry, can refuse to hand over social media accounts, etc. Greencard holders are still at the discretion of border officials.
2. Citizens can wander the world and live abroad for however long they fancy and always be allowed to return to their country of citizenship when things go awry. Greencard holders can't do that.
3. Citizens get consular protection, greencard holders don't.
I lived in central Europe for two years. Had to wait in line for 20 hours halfway through my time there to renew my visa, otherwise it wasn't much of an issue.
Actually, if you do something bad enough, your citizenship can be removed. This is true in the US, UK, India, and maybe others. The exact procedures and criteria vary.
If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it. I was on Green Card and when I crossed the border, I was questioned by the customs officer as to why I didn't get my citizenship yet because it was 15 years I was on GC and the point of the GC wasn't to be literally permanent. I quickly got my citizenship after that just in case the same thing happened again.
If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
>If you leave the country for more than 6 months, you need to seek prior approval, and you definitely can lose it.
Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
>If you get arrested for a major crime, you can lose your GC but you can only lose your citizenship if you lied or committed fraud at the time of your application, or if you committed treason against the government.
California and New York are the most famous examples but asking perplexity I got:
As of the current 2026 rules, the states that do not require ID at the polls are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, plus Delaware has a special affidavit process if you do not have ID
In some of those locations non-citizens can vote in local elections, like Maryland and San Francisco. Also in some of those locations you get registered by the DMV, like California, and non citizens mistakenly have voted in Federal elections (which is a crime).
Note I am not endorsing the latter as it can come up in future citizenship applications.
There’s the answer I was actually expecting. Yes, in some LOCALITIES, (which “Maryland” is not) non-citizens can vote in things such as school board elections. Voting in any statewide or federal election as a non citizen in any state is still a crime.
Wish granted: You are no longer a citizen because you never "proved you were beneficial". Please remit $100,000 to the Citizenship Payment Service immediately to avoid being downgraded to serfdom. /s
Framing it that way is backwards and anti-democratic. Democratic citizenship is something the government "owes" you because it is imposing control on your life. It is not some kind of magnanimous gift of club membership, you already deserved to have a say in what's being done to you.
That's why most Americans (and their children) have never once been required to "prove" that they are "beneficial", and it's why people the government is controlling in jails are still citizens rather than objects.
Speak for yourself. I do write essays in Slack. Just because you, the author, are too dumb or too lazy to put some effort into written communication, doesn't mean that we can't do it either.
A while ago I worked with a guy that did not put effort into written communication and he was doing the marketing for the company. I would have words with the boss about this and, initially, I struggled to explain why spelling, grammar, punctuation and use of paragraphs was important.
After some thought I was better able to explain the not-so-obvious. It is all about respecting the time of the reader.
Some people don't respect the reader since they think they are important. Notably with the Ep*tein files, we have this clique of wealthy people, with few of them able to string two sentences together. Writing standards were those of an eight year old at best.
Personally I write fairly long form because I don't have ideas that I can express in glorified grunts. However, this LLM stuff is encroaching on my turf, since the likes of the guy I used to struggle with can now churn out better English than I can. That is the problem for those of us from the pre-internet, pre-grammar-checking age when written communication mattered.
Yes. Here in Hamburg you have to pay some useless consultant to come to your house and check that there's no other way to decrease the temperature before you are allowed to install one.
You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.
Accelerationists are people who want to embrace the ultra-capitalist surveillance state to force a societal collapse in order to eventually built a better society on its ruins. We are very far from that goal, so I don't see how they have been proven right about anything.
The police will try to discourage from reporting that at all, and if you insist you'll get the crime number and promise that nothing will ever be done.
They even refuse to send the patrol that could recover a stolen car despite the owner pinpointing it to the very specific garage based on the GPS tracking.
The police will, however, beat you and arrest if you dare ro protest against killing kids with bombs.
Send me a shipping label. (I'm only half-joking. I told the original seller I'd send it back to them, so I feel like I ought to give them at least a week or two to get me the label they said they'd send. But, seriously, email me in a month, and if I still haven't heard back from the seller, I'll send it to you.)
Out of curiosity, based on a comment I read on HN the other day, I fed your profile notes into Claude and asked it to tell me your email address. It had no problem. I guess the days of obfuscating email addresses that way to foil scrapers is behind us.
That is a fair observation, especially since my default Claude model is Opus 4.6, which is about as far away from efficient as you can get. I don't have any recent models downloaded on my MBP, but maybe this evening I'll try it again and see how that goes -- especially the smaller lightweight models.
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