I don’t want Microsoft to police what sort of speech my kids are and aren’t allowed to have, nor do I want them to get to decide what the consequences for breaking the rules are.
What I’d like to be able to do is set up a server and let our kids and their friends play on it, without anyone else. That would protect the kids just fine.
This doesn’t take a globally unique Microsoft account, it takes a player guid. I’m pretty sure the capability is all there, too, but they just decided to lock it behind their ecosystem.
Microsoft is definitely laughing maniacally over their power to ban a 12 year old from a video game.
Moderation is hard work, expensive, and doesn’t scale. And Minecraft doesn’t have even a theoretical sinister benefit of being able to sway public opinion with it. It’s just a cost center to keep the ecosystem non-toxic.
> Moderation is hard work, expensive, and doesn’t scale.
And yet they are seeking the power to ban people from playing on their own private servers. It's a blatant power grab, but I guess it not real authoritarianism unless they're laughing like a cartoon villain when they do it, right? Give me a break. All corporations are power hungry by nature; and the largest and most powerful of them have demonstrated this nature time and time again to become the way they are today.
It's no longer a native app, it was rewritten in 2015 to be non-native. It's the same story everywhere, they're using Electron (or similar) so they can maintain one codebase for everything written in HTML/CSS/JS.
It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees. Those jobs are routinely bid out to contractors, who complete the job with a profit margin.
It's both sides of the coin coupled with a relentless need to profit off everything possible at every opportunity.
> It's the private sector completing these jobs, not government employees.
They're government projects. The details of how they staff them are part of "why is the gov't so incompetent" question. Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency relative to other countries: Apple's $256B of spending per year isn't a large multiple as inefficient as Samsung.
As far as the reason, people have been trying to take a rigorous look for years and years and have come up with every reason under the sun, spanning the political spectrum: onerous environmental review, lack of nationalized benefits pushing into labor costs, unproductive construction unions, lack of oversight of private contractors, etc etc etc etc.
But since the blame is bipartisan, our political culture doesn't know how to handle it. There's no constituency for basic competency in government if it can't be monocausally forced into the box of an existing generic political slapfight (as in your comment).
>Comparable-scale private projects don't exhibit the same horrendous inefficiency ... Apple's $256B of spending per year
Literally Apple's HQ was $2 billion over budget. Private enterprise has these exact same problems. Government isn't any more or less incompetent than your average US business, unless you completely ignore how your average business operates.
I think the problem is that it wasn't low maintenance. The moderation of the links for malicious links was becoming an increasing drain on resources. It's the same problem most large tech services run into eventually.
Unfortunately, most people just throw "eh, it's low-maintenance".
To bring down the point, here's the source code for that link shortener: https://github.com/technoweenie/guillotine. It was last updated in 2015. If you don't believe that this is the source code, this was directly linked to in its announcement: https://github.blog/2011-11-10-git-io-github-url-shortener/. If the extreme lag (in an attempt to save the links) is indicative if its backbone, it's probably just running in a single server, which is very likely to be horribly outdated. It might not be due to the cost of removing the malicious links, it might be that Git.io as a platform has a cost in of itself (even excluding common things like domain and hosting costs).
... and you didn't understand the underlying problem, which proves my point of people quickly dismissing "low-maintenance" applications. This isn't a Windows application which still chugs because of immense herculean compatibility made by Microsoft, this application, which was supposed to be quickly installable in Heroku... isn't. That says a lot.
Very unlikely to be honest, especially that there's no private* data present in Git.io.
* Technically the links are not publicly listed, which might jeopardise some obnsscure but technically-available repository, but it doesn't store private data.
Public service means government run. A newspaper isn't a public service (in the US), but official notices can and do appear there. Even if no one reads the newspaper anymore. Same thing with private broadcasters like CNN, Fox News, etc. Public service has a specific definition.
Novo Nordisk (the maker of the newest insulin Levemir) spends about 17.8b kroner a year on R&D (or about 12.6% of their revenue). Levemir was introduced in 2005; they've long since made up any R&D costs. The first synthetic insulin (Humulin) is from 1978. These aren't new medications, even Lantus is over 20 years old. The R&D costs don't factor into the price they charge at this point.
You would see USENET posts back in the 90s about C/C++ vs ASM basically arguing that C/C++ was better than ASM because hand tuning ASM wasn't worth the man-months of effort required to extract the small amount of additional performance. It's basically the same argument, writing in a higher level language provides more benefit than the performance losses that aren't really that big to begin with.
If you file in small claims court, they might settle. Saying you're going to file doesn't work like that (because people say it all the time and very few people follow though). At most large companies, the script if you threaten legal action is to notate it in their file, refer them to the legal department and stop communication except through legal.
Long story short, don't threaten lawsuits. Just file the suit.
I figure it is worth trying anyway, as the cost to send an email/phone call is almost nothing compared to the time it takes to fill out paperwork for the small claims court and actually go and deal with that.
You know, because Minecraft is a game targeted at kids. And maybe you don't someone spouting racist/sexist garbage at them all day.