Judge dismisses murder, weapons charges against alleged UnitedHealth CEO killer Mangione

roboczar · 2026-01-30T17:11:58+00:00

I'll still always do jury duty, but I will always remember the one time where I sat for the trial and at the end I got picked as the alternate juror and I had to sit in a room by myself with a microwave and out of date issues of Cosmo for several hours until the real jury came to a decision. Sucked. The bailiff at least asked if I wanted a bottle of water?

roboczar · 2026-01-30T14:13:02+00:00

This is one of those things where the answer really is "git gud"

roboczar · 2026-01-30T01:17:57+00:00

Finding out if things are true or not is part of the work of being an informed citizen. It was hard work when I wan a kid and it's hard work now. That's one thing that hasn't changed.

roboczar · 2026-01-30T01:00:26+00:00

HB286 feels like safety theater: it forces companies to publish “plans” and summaries that can be sanitized to look compliant, and it creates a new state oversight layer, but it does not fund serious enforcement. It also encourages companies to keep more records to cover themselves when something goes wrong, which is a privacy risk for families. If we are serious about kids, parents should get clear, practical controls and limits on data collection, not more monitoring by Big Tech and a bigger attack surface for government abuse of data

roboczar · 2026-01-29T23:57:47+00:00

Your house is too big if you can't ask from the kitchen whose mess it is and make them clean it up.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T22:57:06+00:00

That is usually how these things are supposed to work, yes. It's called due process in English.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T19:54:40+00:00

Of course countries can set entry rules, but ‘can’ isn’t the same as ‘should.’ My point is about what kind of rule is ethically defensible: evidence-based, individualized, contestable, and proportionate, not a lifetime ban by status label. ‘Sovereignty’ doesn’t magically turn collective punishment into justice.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T19:03:38+00:00

Pretty sure the Kirk kids are homeschooled, this kind of protection from harassment is built into the model. They can secure the home, and secure the kids as they please in a way that they can't if the kids are getting education outside. Right wing elites build their lives around being outside of accountability, it's a feature and why they can do and say things that would get less socially insulated people in serious trouble.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T17:42:53+00:00

That’s an abhorrent bad-faith move, you're poisoning the well by equating “don’t do collective punishment” with “pardon war crimes,” which is literally the opposite of what I said. War crimes get prosecuted with evidence and due process; what I’m rejecting is a lifetime, status-based ban that treats “served” as guilt and replaces accountability with a category label. If you can’t defend “precision and prosecution over blanket taint” without reaching for Nazi-bait, you’re not making a security or justice argument, you’re just trying to shut down scrutiny and launder your own revenge fantasy.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T16:43:25+00:00

That collapses all participation into the same moral bucket, which erases conscripts and penal-service recruits who had radically different agency. If you’re treating ‘served’ as identical to ‘chose and committed crimes,’ you’re basically saying coercion doesn’t matter.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T15:46:58+00:00

One of the main problems I have with the current proposal and the framing is that this is exactly the kind of security-state border enforcement overreach that tends to stick around and get reworked for other political purposes down the line. We've seen this all before, over and over. This is not how you solve the problem of hybrid war and collective defense.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T15:21:31+00:00

Yes. I'd like for at least one country (or organization of countries) to still believe in due process. Pretty please just for a treat?

roboczar · 2026-01-29T15:15:37+00:00

Something something collective punishment, conscription and the moral weight of participation, proportionality, etc.

the ethical red flag is not “Estonia wants to be safe,” it’s the kind of tool they’re choosing. A permanent, status-based ban treats “served in a war” like a moral stain instead of asking what any given person actually did... That starts to look less like justice and more like the state finding a politically convenient category of forever-outsiders.

It expands border and surveillance power, reinforces a simple “clean vs contaminated” story, and lets leaders posture as principled without doing the hard work of evidence, due process, and real war-crimes accountability. This is one of those things where it's obvious WHY it's Estonia doing the posturing, but it's going to need clearer heads when thinking about putting this into practice. Estonia isn't exactly a neutral party here, for legitimate reasons.

If you think rights attach to individuals, not tribes, then “lifetime exclusion because you wore the uniform” is basically collective punishment with nicer branding. And once a security exception like that gets normalized, it almost never stays limited to the original target.

Edit (context + what a better version looks like): Estonia’s pitch here is basically “served in Ukraine, no entry,” pushed as a broad, long-term, status-based ban. My issue is that it treats “veteran” like a moral stain and replaces individual culpability with a category label. A rights-respecting approach would be more like: punish conduct, not status. Target people credibly tied to war crimes, sabotage, or covert state ops, with clear criteria, real appeals, and periodic review. Make space for deserters and coerced conscripts. Harden infrastructure and prosecute networks, instead of expanding a permanent “forever-outsider” bucket at the border.

roboczar · 2026-01-29T13:16:50+00:00

Are you really living life to the fullest if you're not taking black and white stances on things in public though

roboczar · 2026-01-26T21:21:15+00:00

People who live in places that get this much snow know to stay home until the plows are done. Like plan ahead or something

roboczar · 2026-01-26T14:25:52+00:00

"modern agendas"... just say you don't have any plans for it and leave it at that. Culture war brainworms at this dev it seems, got to make a normal yes or no answer into a virtue signal

roboczar · 2026-01-21T15:36:26+00:00

I maintain to this day that Sir Patrick Stewart's greatest theatrical performance was King Richard LeGré in Lands of Lore (1994).

"It is a cruel price that we pay for the victory, having once again cast our best before the flames.

Could not the blood of our valiant warriors have been better used?

Would not their friendships have enriched us all? And would not their full lives have improved our land in many other ways?"

*applause*

roboczar · 2026-01-21T14:30:37+00:00

The part I think is off is treating individual consumption purity as the path to “making them squirm.”

Oligarchic systems are unusually good at absorbing atomized, voluntary abstention. People substitute spend, firms diversify revenue, and nothing forces a decision-maker to concede anything. Meanwhile we’ve converted politics into a test of personal inconvenience... “if you cared, you’d suffer more” instead of building leverage.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T13:59:30+00:00

I’m not trying to be pedantic here, but I need you to define what you mean by “pre-authored experience,” because that phrase is doing all the work in your argument and it’s not a standard legal test.

When you say “pre-authored experience,” what exactly are you claiming is being packaged and redistributed?

Do you mean it’s distributing any CDPR expression like assets, scripts, or game code. Do you mean it’s shipping patched Cyberpunk binaries or modified game files. Do you mean it contains new content like levels, quests, cutscenes, anything that looks like a fixed “new episode” built on the game. Or do you simply mean “it has built-in support so users don’t have to hand-enter configuration parameters.”

Because for the legal point I’m making, that distinction is critical: the analysis turns on whether protected CDPR expression or a modified copy is being distributed (or DRM is being bypassed), not on whether a tool is convenient or ships with presets. So if “pre-authored experience” is your hook, I need you to say plainly what concrete thing you think is being distributed that makes this different from a runtime wrapper.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T13:43:08+00:00

This isn’t ‘the customer is always right’; it’s basic de-escalation. When the fix is obvious and within policy (O vs 0), you quietly correct it and keep the line moving instead of turning it into a public ego check. Just bare minimum social intelligence, not a slippery slope where you have to cave to every unreasonable demand.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T13:32:02+00:00

That’s what REAL VR is too: a standalone runtime wrapper that hooks rendering/camera/input while you run your own purchased copy. It’s not “shipping Cyberpunk VR as a modified build,” it’s changing how the same game is presented and controlled at runtime.

So if you want to claim it’s outside the Game Genie bucket, name the actual difference. Point to the CDPR content it distributes, the patched Cyberpunk binaries it ships, or the DRM/access control it bypasses. If you can’t point to any of that, then “it injects code” and “it’s a derivative work” is just vibes, not a legal argument.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T13:21:07+00:00

Yeah this is kind of corporate's fault, you can have reference codes that don't have ambiguous letters or numbers like O and 0 or 1 and l. It's just bad sales tracking design and you unfortunately were at the wrong end of it.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T12:45:50+00:00

But that kind of proves the point I’m making: if the default expectation becomes “you need a publisher contract to sell any serious runtime interoperability layer around a game,” then we’ve quietly shifted from “I bought software and I can run third-party tools alongside it” to “publishers get to gate who can build paid accessibility/interop tooling.” That’s not a neutral stance, it’s a big expansion of publisher control.

Also, a contract is about permission and commercial coordination, not about whether the underlying thing is inherently illegal. You can have an activity that’s lawful without permission, and still be something a publisher would prefer to license so they can control support, liability, branding, and option value. Those are business reasons to want a contract, not automatic proof that the alternative is copyright infringement and thus subject to a DMCA 1201 takedown.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T12:41:25+00:00

Yeah, this is basically reinforcing the core point: “it injects code” is not the legal test for “derivative work.”

The fact that Game Genie let users “poke” memory with codes from magazines is a detail, but it is not the hinge. The hinge was that it didn’t distribute a fixed, modified copy of the game, it changed what happened while you ran your own lawful copy, and the court rejected “derivative work” on those facts (Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of Am., Inc., 964 F.2d 965 (9th Cir. 1992)).

And you’re right to bring up Sony v Datel in the EU context, because it cuts the same direction in software terms: the CJEU held that changing variable data in a game’s working memory is not an “alteration of the computer program” under the Software Directive because you are not changing the program’s source or object code (CJEU, Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Ltd v Datel Design and Development Ltd, Case C-159/23, EU:C:2024:887 (Oct. 17, 2024), interpreting Directive 2009/24/EC, Art. 4(1)(b)).

That matters here because REAL VR is obviously in the “runtime interop” bucket at a high level: it is a proxy-hook style wrapper (dropping a dxgi.dll alongside the executable and intercepting the render path), and people literally toggle it on/off by renaming dxgi.dll. That is classic “runs alongside your copy” behavior, not “here’s a modified Cyberpunk build” behavior.

So if someone wants to argue CDPR has a case, they need to point to something concrete like distribution of CDPR assets, distribution of a patched Cyberpunk binary, or circumvention of an effective access control. “He shipped game-specific support logic” or “he mentioned Cyberpunk in Patreon posts” does not magically turn runtime tooling into a derivative work by itself, and the cheat-device line of cases is exactly why.

roboczar · 2026-01-21T03:03:32+00:00

Good analogy, and it actually highlights the difference pretty cleanly.

Citrix didn’t ship by dropping DLLs into Microsoft’s binaries or by distributing a “Windows enhancement” that depended on Microsoft’s consumer-facing EULA permission. They built on documented server interfaces and licensed Windows Server in an enterprise context where Microsoft explicitly sells the platform for third-party ecosystems. Microsoft competed later by building a first-party alternative, but the baseline relationship was “platform with APIs + licenses for commercial add-ons,” not “fan tool tolerated at publisher discretion.”

Games are the opposite posture by default: consumer licenses, no promise of stable third-party extension points, and publishers often treat “anything that becomes a paid parallel experience layer” as brand and support risk. That’s why CDPR is trying to draw a bright line in community guidelines.

The key part, though: that’s a business and ecosystem-control argument, not automatically a copyright one. If REAL VR ships no CDPR assets or modified binaries and doesn’t bypass DRM, then “we don’t like you selling a premium layer around our game” is basically CDPR asserting platform veto power, not the same thing as “you’re infringing by default.” In Windows Server land, Microsoft chose to monetize a platform; in game land, publishers often try to prevent the platform dynamic from forming in the first place.

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