EldritchFeminity

It'll be opt-out with the setting in some obscure and hard to find menu, just like every other AI program. And that's if they're required to even allow you to opt out.

Already a lot of stuff is becoming one harddrive failure away from being lost forever. Companies don't care about preserving content, so it's largely up to random people happening to have saved a copy of something for it to still exist at all.

For some real-world examples of this issue, you can look at how the only reason we have any of the early BBC news reels and TV shows is because of copies recorded by people on their TVs. The BBC reused the tapes that they recorded on for new programming to save money on buying tapes. When they started to think about the preservation of news and shows like Dr. Who, they had to turn to the general public and ask them to donate any recordings that they might have made.

It's estimated that more than 50% of all video games are lost forever because companies didn't care to save a master copy, and this has already come back to bite some of these companies in the ass with the recent trend of remakes and remasters. There was a recent remake of one of the GTA games from the early 2000s that was very poorly received, and it turned out that the company who worked on it only had the mobile phone port of the game to work with because Rockstar hadn't bothered to keep a master copy of the game. There was another recent remake of a game that was very obviously done using a pirated copy of the game as the source, because they hadn't even bothered to remove the cracker's logo from the game.

With examples like that and Sony recently removing thousands of people's access to music and movies that they bought on basically a whim, it's pretty clear that preservation efforts will be done in spite of companies rather than helped by them. And so that means copies of things will be one random harddrive failure of some single person on the internet away from disappearing forever.

Unfortunately, all the electric train startups were bought up and closed down by diesel train companies decades ago, and the majority of the rail lines are owned by freight companies as well. This is partly why public train transit is so bad: the government has to lease the tracks from the freight companies, who get priority on the lines over public trains, meaning that if there's freight traffic the commuter rail has to wait for the freight lines to go through first.

How about that local generic sports team? They sure are doing good and/or bad.

I'd agree with you if the devs were being treated better, games should cost more and be shorter. But the price hikes aren't that. They're pure greed.

That extra money isn't going to pay the developers. EA just shut down multiple studios, including the studio responsible for the critically acclaimed AA game High-Fi Rush, and are already talking about shutting down more. EA has closed more studios than they've released games this year, and the past 3 years have seen record high layoffs - even worse than during the 2008 financial crash. All this while companies brag about record-breaking profits.

And with the rise of digital media, production costs saw a significant decrease. There was a short period of time where physical copies were $60 and digital were $40. Now digital are averaging $70 and execs are already talking about increasing the price to $80-100.

Or because the servers went offline or the company didn't bother to keep the source code. A few years ago, there was a really bad remaster of one of the GTA games where it turned out they used the mobile version of the game as the source code because Rockstar hadn't bothered to keep a copy of the game. There was another time where it turned out that the copy used for a remaster of a game was a cracked version of the game, and people could tell because they hadn't even bothered to remove the cracker's logo. It's estimated that over 50% of games are now gone forever because companies just don't bother to preserve copies of the source code.

There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.

Let's be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you're looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you're looking at 10x the throughput.

And that's not even getting into transportation that doesn't use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston's commuters use the T every day. That's half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn't exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?

That's the thing, the number of new cars using that road ends up being at least one additional lane's worth. So traffic moves at the same speed as it was before the extra lane, just now with one more lane's worth of cars on that road.

If anything, you might see marginally better traffic on other roads because of the cars that started using the new lane, but you'd be talking about a handful of cars per road. Probably not enough for any discernible change in travel time or congestion, and each new lane you add later will have diminishing returns because it will be a smaller fraction of the total number of lanes coming from any specific direction.

I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn't help, and the term they use is "induced demand."

Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you're just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.

You've essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.

How did they ignore it when it's both on the store page and the first thing you see ingame since day one? They didn't add that in later. It's always been there. It wasn't optional for a period of time on launch day, before the servers were overloaded. It was then temporarily made optional, and they said as much (though obviously not clearly enough for people to realize that).

They expected an active userbase of about 10k. They didn't know how popular this game was going to be.

More likely, they didn't know that PSN accounts are only available in select regions. They followed the stipulations on all fronts except selling the game in places that can't make accounts, and everything else is the result of the PSN account requirement being made optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player load.