Is this meant to be sung to the cadence of one of Tom Bombadil’s songs? I dunno why that’s just what felt right when I read it.

Counterpoint: toaster 1 looks like Hitler. Use toaster 1.

That article reminded me of that politician who said women’s bodies would prevent pregnancy from rape. Clearly he had so little contact with women he confused them with ducks.

Roaming the earth means roaming all - or at least a very significant portion of - the earth, not some very isolated region. So I would say yes - if some tiny population of mammoths was still alive in some limited area at this time, they were not ‘roaming the earth’.

None of this makes sense, but you can at least follow the nonsensical chain of events if you know the full story.

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Not ‘to grant them greater control’ or even ownership. To secure exclusive right for a limited time. And this only because it was meant to promote science and art.

Using copyright to prevent a work from spreading is a direct perversion of the intent, it is using it in a manner diametrically opposed to what it is supposed to do.

These changes could be applied retroactively; this isn’t like creating an ex post facto law and then jailing people for breaking a law that didn’t exist at the time of the event.

How about reword it slightly: it must be available for purchase if you want to use IP law to prevent others from distributing it.

Too fucking bad? The purpose of IP was to give the public access to novel ideas and art, not to increase the control creators had over it.

I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand the author is right, for this to happen days before release does speak to some massive incompetence in oversight of this project.

But if the game was really that bad, I kinda have to applaud somebody for finally making the decision to shitcan it. We complain a lot about unfinished garbage being released, so if this was that, then good that they didn’t push it out and try to at least make some money before it flopped. Reminds me of back when Blizzard actually cared about quality and scrapped some of their games because they decided they were not good enough.

I feel like it should be simpler: did the culture the body came from have good enough records in other ways that we would be unlikely to learn anything by digging up the body that we couldn’t learn by studying other records? Then leave it alone.

If they failed to keep good enough records, and knowledge would be gained by the study, then study away.

Science is blue because in every 4x game I’ve ever played the science icons are some form of blue.

Lucky? From some of the other comments it sounds like you may be referencing something, but just taking the comment at face value, there is no way that is not the most horrific fate I can possibly imagine.

Assuming you’re not conscious the entire time and only ‘wake up’ when you enter a solar system to study, it’s still horrific. You wake up, completely alone. You have no body and cannot move, and your attention is directed toward gathering data on some distant points of light. When you understand what’s going on, sure, there’s a bit of a sense of wonder…but it quickly becomes tedium, maddening, isolated tedium, as you slowly drift through a star system, gathering data on each planet and its star, over the course of fifty years or so. There’s certainly bits of interesting stuff, but we are still talking insane levels of isolation and boredom. Assuming you’re somehow prevented from going insane by the software in order to keep you functional, you can’t even escape into madness.

…and then we imagine what happens if you aren’t shown the mercy of being conscious only during the few decades the probe is drifting through a solar system. What if you’re conscious the. entire. time. Once you’re in deep interstellar space, you’re alone. Able to think, perceive, experience, but in an unchanging, static existence. A year passes, and everything is so close to exactly the same that only with the precision of the measurements your tools can take can you determine there’s been any change. Ten years pass, then a hundred, a thousand. You drift, slowly, through interstellar space toward a destination impossibly far away, all while you wait, conscious, unable to die, unable to escape into madness, just…eternal…waiting. Until thankfully you finally enter a target solar system, get a few blessed decades of what, to your new perspective, seems like frantic activity. Something, finally, to do, to see, that actually changes. And then…you drift back out into interstellar space after a few gravity-assisted slingshots around this star system’s worlds, only to proceed on to your next destination, another several thousand year journey away.

This is, by far, the most horrific imaginable torture.

This developed because it couldn’t be fixed in our world, long enough for these people to develop communities, culture, and literally their own language.

In a world where it could always have been fixed, such communities and cultures are not likely to have ever developed, since the only people who could not get it fixed would be poor, and the poor are in a bad position to gather together in groups based on their shared experience and thus be able to form their own culture.

Furthermore, people not wanting to be cured today exist in a world where there already are significant accomodations for their disabilities. It is not likely these people would be able to do this if our society had not made the collective decision to put in the effort needed to accommodate disabilities.

The day Gabe Newell no longer owns Valve/Steam things will begin to change, I’m sure.

Why? How is it better for society and people overall if they have the power to do this?

Allowing the creators to profit is understandable and necessary in our current system, but what benefit is gained for the public by them being permitted to stop distribution altogether?

If there is a benefit to the public and society that I am not seeing, then ok, but ‘they created it so they should control it’ is harmful to the people at large, and that should be prioritized over a creator’s ego or desire for control.

I’d say generally yes but maybe not in every instance. Consider it an overall principle rather than a hard no exceptions rule.

That said, copyright/creator control is not the correct tool to use to do so.

Like, people should be allowed to remove stuff from the Internet that they’ve created if they want,

No, no they shouldn’t. This is antithetical to the generally good intention behind copyright.

The point was not to allow people to take away things they have created, but to permit them to profit in order that they might choose to make more, and be able to support their life in a capitalist system. These intentions are largely good.

Allowing people to take away what they have created is the opposite of this intent, and harmful to the public good, which benefits from as many works as possible being accessible to the public.

‘Nobody would create anything’ is an absolute lie that we’ve been fed, simply another part of the capitalist brainwashing propaganda.

The truth is people love to create stuff for the sake of it, and many people will create things even when it costs them time and money, because they enjoy it. The only thing that would be necessary for them to create things prolifically would be to ensure their ability to live and work without having to worry about ‘making a living’ or having to ‘earn’ enough money to live, and people would be producing tons of content.

If you doubt this, you’re not paying enough attention. People create amazing stuff without even hope of being paid. I have read hundreds of fanfics - some poorly written, some very well written - that never made money and never could make money. They were written because the writer wanted to tell a story with characters they loved. I have seen vast amounts of fanart, again, made with no hope of obtaining money. Especially before things like Patreon - these days you can make some money making fanart, which artists resort to because they have to, but every artist I’ve ever talked to hates the part of their life they have to devote to the ‘business’ side of things. Most early webcomics had no way of making money. Even today, most webcomics do not make money - most are simply made by creators that want to share their story and art.

In the gaming world, mods - free, unpaid mods - have been around for ages, and many of them are as amazing or even moreso than professionally made games. A very tiny minority of mod creators manage to turn a successful mod creation into a job in the industry, but the vast majority do this simply because they want to and enjoy making a thing people will appreciate.

Movies are about the only field I haven’t seen a plethora of freely made stuff in, and that’s probably a personal experience thing. I know there’s some.

Overall, I guarantee we would not see less things created as long as we allow creative people to use whatever they want and do not force them to toil for their survival, to have to monetize everything or else lose their standard of living. We would see rather an explosion of new creations, just like we saw when the internet rose to prominence and people started doing this kind of thing and posting it publicly. Only we would see it at an even greater scale.

If you actually want to do something other than choose between the two options presented by the two major parties on election day, then your ONLY real option is to get involved in the process at a MUCH deeper level.

That starts with voting in primaries…and voting for lesser elections…but it also involves actually getting involved with one of the two major parties at a local level and doing more. Supporting candidates you like from the ground up, perhaps even running as a candidate for some minor office if there’s not enough competition, attending meetings and otherwise getting genuinely involved with the political process.

Because voting third party in the US on election day has no more meaning than not voting at all. Third parties are not viable in the US system, and never will be. The choice will always be between two at that point, so the only way to improve is to get into it earlier in the process.

If you don’t do that, then all you can do is pick between Republican and Democrat and that’s it. Doing anything else is not participating, it’s pretending to participate. It’s showing up to a game of poker and declaring your 2 aces as blackjack. You’re not playing the game that’s being played if you do that.