I just got an email notification and while I can understand that they're doing this (all those GB must add up to a significant cost), the relatively short notice seems unnecessary.
Image retention is 6 months though, so it seems slightly unclear if the timer starts counting from today or from Nov 1st.
Best to assume the worst but still plenty of time to write a cron that pulls all your images, assuming for some reason you need images you don't pull for > 6 months.
Even having a publisher doesn't address the underlying issue: There are simply too many 'indie' games. Relatively simple high-concept low-fidelity retro games don't have a huge audience and that audience is getting swamped with a torrent of games of varying quality.
But what percentage of systems is actually ONLY implementable using a block-chain-based cryptocurrency?
I love decentralisation as much as the next guy but it's not a feature. Apart from the obvious authority-circumvention (both positive and negative), what killer features do these systems have?
All the interesting projects I've seen for ethereum rely on Intel SGX to bring ground truth about the real world onto the chain.
In the case of SingularityNET, AI agents are accessible and composable. They can interact with other agents, or act in unison to form larger, more complex agents. The market incentivizes development and maturity of both the system and the individual agents. This is a killer feature if you ask me. There will be a great number of already-useful agents available upon launch of SingularityNET, to kick-start the service's ability to provide tangible value.
However, you're right that most of these projects fail to deliver any value. Many projects are riding the hype-train, and many more are outright scams. However, the example I named is none of those.
Edit: I should add that a big problem of centralized markets is that nobody wants to put all of their eggs in one basket. Take Second Life for example: In SL, your digital avatar and assets are siloed into that world. You cannot transfer them to the next great virtual world. This is conceptually similar to the standardization debates. Anyone can make their own protocol, but if there are profit motives behind one, the industry will be reluctant to adopt. Standardization takes a lot of time, trust, and debate. And for good reason!
With decentralized marketplaces, standards are not quite as important. An implementation can be as fluid as an app, and the cost of replacing one interface/implementation with another is much lower than the cost of standardization. The internal workings of the marketplace itself can be altered with a democratic vote.
This is all theoretical, we have yet to see these ideas produce real returns. But the killer feature is that people have more incentives to invest their resources toward adopting the platform, and that itself is a tangible value, as long as the adoption of the platform itself creates value in other ways.
When you have a need to establish some business procedure between different parties that do not trust each other, smart contracts might be very useful. No other database is able to provide guarantees/features comparable to the public blockchain in that respect. A trust model of most modern databases just do not comply with "everyone trusts noone" principle.
About relying on Intel SGX. Yes, blockchain oracle to be trusted needs to be run in some kind of protected environment. So what? It doesn't imply that technology is useless. I would say, we have a synergy of different security technologies to get really impressive results.
Clicking yes might not even be necessary: I recently went to a laywer-oriented event (IANAL) that discussed the GDPR and it had a cheerful talk about "Alternatives to Consent"
The talk listed all the possible ways the law allows you to store/manipulate user data without requiring explicit consent... There are a shocking number and iirc they apply basically whenever you have a direct consumer relationship with some company.
IANAL, just currently wading through GDPR material.
As I see it the most relevant processing conditions for companies offering a service and storing / processing data without gaining explicit consent are likely to be
6(1)(b) - Processing is necessary for the performance of a contract with the data subject or to take steps to enter into a contract
6(1)(c) - Processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation
My understanding is that these are far from a blank cheque to store / manipulate arbitrary personal information. Specifically, the storage and use of data in question must be provably fundamental to either provision of the relevant service in (b), or meeting legal obligations in (c).
So yes, a company providing you a service will gain the right to store certain customer details demonstrably necessary to provide that service - say hosting your email. It won't however allow arbitrary use of such data to e.g. provide targeted advertising, since such use is not fundamentally required for performance of the service. This would require a specific opt-in (and from what I recall, a failure to opt-in cannot interfere with the provision of said service - not so clear on this however).
It's sobering to think about how easy it must be (for a sufficiently funded organisation) to effectively determine "public discourse" on a large number of topics.
Then again, never underestimate just how willing people are (all on their own) to grab their virtual pitchforks without much consideration.
She was CEO during the start of a wave of subreddit bans and the dismissal of a very popular Reddit employee (Victoria). Whatever her actual level of involvement in those decisions, I think it's reasonable to say the pitchforks came out because of them. As the trolls found more real or imagined "dirt" about her, it escalated as many were eager to believe it.
I'm sorry to say this but your country uses an outdated, deprecated implementation of Democracy. While we respect it greatly for its historical value as one of the first stable implementations, it is no longer recommended for production environments due to its many known critical bugs, most famously the first-past-the-post issue in its election algorithm.
Instead we'd recommend one of the European-republic forks (E.g. Germany's federalism 2.0) or, if you're feeling adventurous, one of the smaller forks like 'Direct Democracy' or the nordic-style forks.
Please note that those newer implementations have significantly higher system requirements, usually calling for a well educated population that is willing to debate and compromise rationally.
there are more realistic choices (left, left/green, far left, conservative (but very centrist, even sometimes a bit left-leaning), liberal (unfortunately economic-liberal) and idiots), also if you don't vote for a mainstream party there is a real chance that they might make it (threshold is 5%). In the last years we saw more political experiments in the form of new parties. On local elections there is even more choice, depending on the state.
It's still not electing policies, but there is one party proposing such a plan (pirates).
That's a great idea! Not only does it just 'feel right', it also prevents some of the legal mess people were seeing with effectively moonlighting for the hiring company.
As a minor, your parents decided for you, but once you're 18 nothing is stopping you from either trying to re-negotiate the contract (i.e. become politically active) or trying to find a better deal (emigrate). You can also decide to simply unilaterally break the contract (become a criminal) and in practice you could even live without such a contract in a variety of vast areas that are largely uninhabited.
You're not being compelled to accept this contract, but it's such a good deal that few people decide otherwise.
You're right that nothing is stopping you from trying to become politically active or to emigrate, but the chances of doing either successfully are very low.
Politics favors people of certain backgrounds and/or very high charisma. The more substantial the change the higher the level of politics you need to get involved in, and the less likely you are to successfully be involved.
Emigration suffers from the problem that the less money and education you have, the more difficult it is to successfully emigrate. You can't just decide you want to move to a country, they need to decide to let you in. The bar for entry in a lot of countries is very high so it's just not an option for a lot of people.
It's 2016, we have Amended the Constitution so the Senate is democratically ellected, we have live video footage of police brutality for when we are abused...and yet the collective constituency of the nation has to pick between two presidential candidates with the lowest approval ratings in theirown parties that anyone has ever seen. Yet, you try and say that social contract theory applies to an individual? When it clearly can't even apply to the masses? This is the 21st century, this is most likely the best moment in human history. This is the worst evidence for social contract theory. Think about it.
