IDK man, console access and cheats are still pretty common for PC games. Although there are exceptions too, at least one game series I know, first few titles had console access and cheats, then they removed it after they stupidly left DLC content accessible through console commands in the base game… Which is pretty much an example of what OP claimed. So maybe it’s not always the reason, but it sure is sometimes.

Well I don’t know. Their response overall is quite incoherent in places, but they mentioned somebody, presumably German, interfering twice now:

we didn’t port the feedback from our German QA to other languages

https://x.com/GOGcom/status/2062981104362242551

This was noticed before distribution, and out of respect for local sensitivities, the material was not sent to the German community.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gog/comments/1txmcyd/ts_gotta_be_racist_gog_explain/opxtour/

And yeah I can absolutely see a German translator/QA person just going, “No, I’m not sending out a fucking SS rune. That’s a fucking crime.” Because apparently it was only censored in the German language version of the newsletter, Germans with language set to English still received it with the runes. So that part, the “hey the German censor was the only one who caught this”, that I can believe. And some PR person rephrasing this embarrassing state of affairs as “German QA” and “respect for local sensitivities” that I can believe too.

Beyond that, there is pretty deep lore on this already. The developer used an Indian sun wheel before being made aware of possible “connotations”, and then apparently misinterpreted the term connotations, see here (same reddit thread as above, but different comment). Then the GoG rep saying in the reddit thread above the S-like runes were supposed to be Sowilō runes, which are indeed sun symbols, although not Slavic ones, which may comes in pairs, but not in the same orientation, and seem to render different depending on fonts. But the email seems to have used Greek Kappa, which may or may not render differently, looks like it doesn’t. It’s confusing, but plausible enough to have a difficult time disbelieving it outright.

But on the whole, those three/four symbols just don’t come together by accident. Some person put those there on purpose and is trying to play it off as a mistake. I suspect the author of that first damage control message on reddit.

I think you mean *wields.

Although *yields would also make sense in this particular context. :D

This kind of behavior simply isn’t possible under anything that can be described as an occupation.

Well if its still a de jure occupation, by virtue of other countries having rights over the subject country, I think that alone already makes it fair to still call it an occupation. If the occupying powers furthermore do in fact still have active military deployments in the country I am beginning to wonder how you could not call it a military occupation.

This is incorrect. Occupation ended in West-Germany in 1955, […] exceptions: The right to station troops […] even without explicit consent from the West-German government

Lol, the occupation ended, except it didn’t end. Yeah ok. The actual end of the Allied Control Council was in 1990/1991, following the two+four treaty and reunification. That’s when the US (and others) lost rights to station troops in Germany at their discretion and Germany was granted full sovereignty. And until then there had been occupation troops there, doesn’t matter that they had been much reduced compared to the first ten years.

the US didn’t just flippantly “figured something out”

I didn’t say figuring out, I said figuring. Presented with two choices, close everything down or pay rent, they chose the latter.

but kept it active as both a logistics center […] and as a deterrent against Russia

Which was all I said, so we agree essentially: “why not rent already existing bases instead of building new ones elsewhere”

Ignoring the rhetoricity of the question: The military occupation of Germany after WW2 lasting for 45 years (1945-1990/1991) resulted in a lot NATO-standard military infrastructure being already established throughout the country; So when the occupation officially ended the US essentially just figured “why not rent already existing bases instead of building new ones elsewhere”.

Man fuck Axel Voss! Damn copyright shill. Guess we can take solace in the fact that he seemed to be the only one clearly taking the publishers side here.

And if I’m not mistaken, the European Commission representative argued in his reply to Voss (around 12:20) that “collective management organisations” or “cultural heritage institutions” might well be allowed to preserve games that are not commercially available anymore already under the current framework.

Well yeah kind of, except for the caveat that there are some things in those tests a website can’t really check. The tests are standardised and publicly available. There isn’t really any reason to not implement a (half-way) proper test, even if you are just harvesting data.

Above average that has to count for something right?

Well they aren’t though, 345/1000 people having a worse score than you means there are 654/1000 people who have a better score.

“IQ 100” is a moving target that gets regularly updated to the new average (which relatively speaking has been mostly climbing for decades).

cool-new-thing factor: KDE plasma 6!

I found the “Fall apart” option last week which makes windows explode into tiny bits when you close them. Never had so few lingering windows open in my life.

Give Ubuntu Studio a try maybe? It comes with a lot of audio production stuff preinstalled and preconfigured, one of the most important ones in this context being low-latency process scheduling.

Essentially most distros just have default process scheduling options, which means a process might be starved for CPU time, theoretically for up to 2s or so at a time, which is very bad if that process is generating or consuming an audio stream. Low-latency scheduling, while not entirely preventing it from happening, should significantly reduce this.

You could also just configure most other distros Kernels to do low-latency scheduling of course. Or if you don’t want to muck about with kernel settings try Ubuntu Studio, which has that and more all ready to use.

Well that one is pretty obvious isn’t it? Consoles and the like have a single target hardware, or very few at least, so their testing is way more reliable. Meanwhile a random PC will have one of several hundred chip designs, implemented by a few dozen different vendors, ranging over decades. Development for and testing under such conditions is just way more complicated, so all devs can really do is aiming for #worksonmymachine and hope for detailed bug reports and feedback when others have issues.

Yeah the law is indeed quite complex, with a lot of caveats and cross-references. One important bit is the continuation of your second quote:

wenn sie die Bundesrepublik Deutschland länger als drei Monate verlassen wollen, ohne dass die Voraussetzungen des § 1 Absatz 2 bereits vorliegen.

And §1 (2) says:

(2) Die Wehrpflicht ruht, solange Wehrpflichtige ihren ständigen Aufenthalt und ihre Lebensgrundlage außerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland haben, wenn Tatsachen die Annahme rechtfertigen, dass sie beabsichtigen, ihren ständigen Aufenthalt im Ausland beizubehalten.

If you have already lived outside of Germany more than three months than that is a “fact that justifies the assumption” that you will continue to do so.

One person argued that a headline clarified that it is for people with duties. It’s possible but I am not sure.

If by duties you mean being under “Wehrpflicht”, that’s just any male 17-45 (during peace) that hasn’t been exempted. If you mean “Wehrdienst”, then no, the paragraph is explicitly about Wehrpflicht. This is intended to keep track of anybody that could be recruited in case of war.

Worth noting here that this article of the constitution already had to be changed once because the European human rights court ruled that treating men and women differently isn’t allowed. The case wasn’t about the stipulation that only men need to serve but about one explicitly preventing women from doing so, and thus Article 12a (1) remained intact; But it stands to reason that it would be struck down if somebody brings the case before the courts, especially since there is precedent now.

Since it’s April, all expats have failed to apply for a permission.

This is incorrect from what I can tell, the law provides an exception for people who have already reported the abandonment of their permanent residence in Germany (which was already required by another law, Bundesmeldegesetz § 17 (2)).

“Niemand hat die Absicht, einen Ausreiseantrag abzulehnen.”

(“Nobody intends to reject a travel permit!” - A reference to East-German leader Walter Ulbricht saying “Nobody intends to build a wall” before they built the Berlin wall)

Well I haven’t tried it, but if you want to just play around with it you should be able to emulate a RISC-V system in a VM, e.g. using qemu: https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/target-riscv.html TL;DR: It’s kinda complicated, lots of different board/chip designs to choose from. But seems possible. Several Distros like Ubuntu/Debian seem to have RISC-V releases around.

Ah scheiße, hier gehen wir wieder.

Germany has effectivly the same law

I haven’t heard anything about that and a search doesn’t turn anything up either. Can you give any details on what you mean specifically?

Well the German Democratic Republic is unique among the former USSR countries in that it was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany. The latter already had a strong focus on privacy laws resulting from the Nazi time (meaning there was strong mistrust towards the state, but Nazis trying to hide in plain sight was obviously also relevant). But when the sheer amount of information the communist intelligence services were storing on their citizens became known after reunification this pre-existing privacy bias was put into overdrive, it confirmed all the worst fears west Germans already had about the state becoming too powerful.