My point is they never have and never will.

I think Ubisoft is clearly in the wrong, but you’re not making a good case. You’re conflating very different meanings of the word “own”.

In terms of legal ownership, only the copyright holder owns the intellectual property, including the right to distribute and license it. When a consumer “buys” a piece of media, they’re really just buying a perpetual license for their personal use of it. With physical media, the license is typically tied to whatever physical object (disc, book, ROM, etc.) is used to deliver the content, and you can transfer your license by transferring the physical media, but the license is still the important part that separates legal use from piracy.

When you pirate something, you own the means to access it without the legal right to do so. So, in the case at hand, players still “own” the game in the same sense they would if they had pirated it. Ubisoft hasn’t revoked anyone’s physical access to the bits that comprise the game; what they’ve done is made that kind of access useless because the game relies on a service that Ubisoft used to operate.

The real issue here is that Ubisoft didn’t make it clear what they were selling, and they may even have deliberately misrepresented it. Consumers were either not aware that playing the game required Ubisoft to operate servers for it, or they were misled regarding how long Ubisoft would operate the servers.

Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty, i.e. a promise that what they buy will continue to work for some period of time after they’ve bought it, and an obligation from the manufacturer to provide whatever services are necessary to keep that promise. Game publishers generally don’t offer any kind of warranty, and consumers don’t demand warranties, but consumers also tend to expect punishers to act as if their products come with a warranty. Publishers, of course, don’t want to draw attention to their lack of warranty, and will sometimes actively exploit that false perception that their products come with a perpetual warranty.

I think what’s really needed is a very clear indication, at the point of purchase, of whether a game requires ongoing support from the publisher to be playable, along with a legally binding statement of how long they’ll provide support. And there should be a default warranty if none is clearly specified, like say 10 years from the point of purchase.

Or, ownership itself is a service. Rights mean nothing if nobody enforces them, and that includes property rights.

I applaud the writers of that episode for doing that, but I’ve seen too many episodes/movies where people use alien technology with no indication they have a hard time with the interface, or where a Federation ship outright trades equipment with previously uncontacted aliens, and it just works. Hell, even Trip’s reproductive system is so compatible with an alien’s that she can get him pregnant! And don’t even get me started on how often people just walk up and use a control panel to access sensitive systems without needing to present any kind of credentials.

Hyperbole is indistinguishable from lying in a conversation like this one.

That’s called having just one distro.

I’m not gonna listen to Geordi because he lives in an alternate universe where everything is compatible with everything else.

Would you livestream video on the internet of your front door online, 24/7? Of course not.

If you can’t make your point without moving the goalposts over the horizon, you don’t have an actual point.

You think someone in Nigeria is able to change the locks and evict someone from their home in another country? I’ll have some of whatever you’re smoking.

So the scammer could save the trouble of taking their own photo?

If you think people being able to see the outside of a building on a public street is a privacy problem, I really don’t know what to tell you.

whether the software is memory safe depends on the expertise of the devs

No. Just stop. If a language depends on the expertise of the developer to be free of memory bugs, then by definition, it is not memory safe because memory safety means such bugs are impossible by design. Quit trying to redefine what memory safety means. A program being free of memory bugs does not in any way imply memory safety.

Ah yes, I love how C++ is has so little boilerplate. Sometimes I can even write several statements in a row without any!

If the standard is “you know what you’re doing and never make mistakes”, then all languages are memory safe. All you’re doing is arguing against memory safety as a concept by redefining the term in such a way that it becomes meaningless.

It’s the only operating system with that much market share to lose.

I’m very experienced with C++and I still feel like I’m juggling chainsaws every time I use it. And I’ve personally run into into things like use after free errors while working in Chromium. It’s a massive codebase full of multithreading, callbacks, and nonlocal effects. Managing memory may be easy in a simple codebase but it’s a nightmare in Chromium. Tools like AddressSanitizer are a routine part of Chrome development for exactly that reason. And people who think memory management is easy in C++ are precisely the people I expect to introduce a lot of bugs.

It’s a nice bonus but too short the be a full game.

Bowties have been out of fashion for so long they just look silly most of the time. That seems like exactly what you’d want for a character who’s supposed to be whimsical.

Also a necktie doesn’t go with a tophat. For reasons I can’t explain, that kind of incongruity looks more accidental than it does whimsical.

Linus brought a Unix-like kernel to the masses, but he didn’t invent the concept. That goes to a bunch of people at AT&T in the 1970s.

So a From Software DLC, basically?