What strange times we live in. Your identify and likeness can be trademarked, copyrighted, and negotiated away in a contract. What does that mean to all those who know that person or are related to them or are part of the fandom? I remember the controversy when Lucas released the digitally enhanced versions of the Star Wars films which produced the "Han Shot First" movement. Various groups worked to 'preserve' the 'original' movies and produce the same high quality format used in the new films. The Lucas lawyers were swift and vicious. Copyright obviously gives the legal ownership to the copyright holder. But... what of everyone else involved in the production of the media? What of the fandom? Lucas was later quoted as saying, "Grow up. These are my movies, get over it." Is that... true? Do we really have no say with what is done with the ideas that now live in our memories and culture? Is that... what we want? How far we can we even open such concepts to negotiation? Without any legal protections, would that landscape be better or worse for 'protecting' the content and ideas?

I remember a story from the Before Times, about a first responder who captured photos of a particularly bad car accident. They later released those photos online. There was some Streisand effect that eventually led to a court case where the family was trying to argue that the photos of their deceased loved one should be taken down. The judge ruled that as distasteful as the photos might be, there was no legal protections for the images of the dead.

In March 2008, it was dismissed by a superior-court judge, who ruled that while the dispatchers' conduct was "utterly reprehensible," it hadn't violated the law. "No duty exists between the surviving family and defendant," the opinion reads, because privacy rights don't extend to the dead. "It's an unfortunate situation, and our heart goes out to the family," says R. Rex Parris, the attorney representing O'Donnell. "But this is America, and there's a freedom of information."

Perhaps they should have copyrighted their loved one?

This is not known as the Richard Stallman dilemma. Do you adopt the philosophically pure motive that all software must be free? Or compromise on more philosophically convoluted terms and conditions that are more pragmatic and more likely to accept general usage? Most of us would rather not try and wage a war to make all software 'free' and instead compromise and have some software sorta free. Can and should more work be done trying to build a better license? Certainly! But I don't foresee a future where we can build a license that everyone can universally get behind. And is compromise really so bad?

I don't think you appreciate how big our problems here in the US have become. We elected Trump. This isn't a dictator who has suddenly seized power. The majority of voters wanted him in power more than the other candidate. Which, of course, was a whole other problem, as the DNC initially assumed they could try and ride out Biden for another 4 years.

And we didn't get here overnight. It has been a long slow road of multiple decades to polarize the electorate to the point where we now believe if we don't vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard will get into office. We're all just as scared and angry as you are. But overthrowing the government doesn't seem like a great plan either. Do you really think if half of us walk out of our jobs and demand the orange man step down from power, that it would be a productive and peaceful transition of power? Are the protesting masses suppose to collectively figure out who to install to oversee this transition of power? Or do we just demand a do-over election? And... the biggest issue... if we do have another election... why do you think we will have suddenly got our shit together and make a demonstrably better choice?

Political science and civics aren't popular topics here. I think it's fair to say the majority of Americans get little to no education on either topic. And even if we fixed that problem, it's not like debate, rhetoric, or critical thinking are other core skills we can leverage to collectively improve our situation. In the world post William Hearst, we've become very good at playing with people's emotions and exploiting methods to short circuit decision making. The only solutions I see is to educate the population to better guard themselves against such manipulation and try for political reform to improve the two party deadlock and winner take all elections. Attempting a political coup or another civil war don't yet seem like appealing alternatives. I would currently rather go down with the ship trying to advocate reform rather than advocating for storming the capitol.

Maybe it's just because I started using Agile in its infancy. It wasn't yet a buzzword, no one really knew what it was. My team was largely autonomous and had a good reputation with leadership. So when my manager proposed switching my team to a flavor of Agile, they said sure. And it was great. We got to dive into the different philosophies, compare and contrast the various implementations, and then decided on our own implementation. It was a massive success, and eventually lead to leadership asking us to spread it around to the rest of the company.

And this is because we were previously using waterfall. And waterfall is horrible. But it was the 'done' thing for a long time. And agile was just a manifesto that says, this sucks, here are some ideas to try and do it better. And, of course, since then, agile has been a lot more. There are now companies that sell it and certify it and professionals to come in and teach you how to do it correctly. And a lot of that seems pretty awful and seems to have diluted the term agile into near meaninglessness as it seems to mean whatever you'd like these days.

And having been doing software development for over 3 decades, I've seen plenty of 'bad' agile. Marketroids sold the scaled agile framework to my current employer, and it took us years to purge that nonsense from the business. And since agile is now basically the 'done' thing, it is what everyone seems to be using for software development, and so when they have some horrible process or business practices where they work, they blame agile for it. That makes perfect sense to me. You need to blame something, and agile is an amorphous blob you can heap plenty of hate upon. But... what's the alternative?

No one seems to be proposing a replacement system for agile. The gist is basically just 'do it better' or the no true Scotsman fallacy. Which is really all I have too. If you have agile rituals that don't work or seem a waste of time... change them or get rid of them. I used to call that being agile... but now since that seems a polluted term... call it whatever you want. The point is just to take ownership of your development practices and look at them with a critical eye and collaborate to try and improve. And that's it. I still read the manifesto, and still think it holds up pretty well. But trying to measure software development and grade it and estimate it and plan deadlines has always been a nightmare. No matter the improvements you make to it, it's all fuzzy logic and subjective and rife for stress and abuse. And, sure, you can blame agile for that. But it was all a nightmare long before agile was a thing, and I suspect it will continue if we ever stop using agile. But... really... what's the alternative? What are best practices now and how do you define them as being different than 'agile'?

As an American, I've always viewed the BBC as an interesting anomaly. It is very different than how things happen over here. And I thought it very interesting that it isn't just a straight tax. It's a license fee you can kinda-sorta opt out of, which is a very progressive way to handle a tax... but it doesn't seem a very practical one. As made obvious by their struggle to remain relevant and secure funding. Which is why this move seems very strange and smacks of desperation.

Presumably they could just make a a mandatory across the board tax and force everyone to pay it. Which, at this point, seems virtually untenable, since it seems like that would be a widely unpopular move. Alternatively, they could just completely privatize it as the US has done. Breaking up or selling off the BBC as for private companies. Which, of course, would fly completely in the face of the original premise behind the BBC.

Some of the screwy ways that 'force' people to pay the fee today seem highly bizarre. Such as tying it to YouTube and other services that stream BBC content. But to tie it to subscription fees to private companies completely outside the country makes no sense to me. Is there a British perspective where this makes sense? Or is it as strange to you as it seems to me?

Consider how much has changed in that time. Remember that before Netflix, the content owners were fighting tooth and nail to restrict access to their content and get their pound of flesh. Using DVDs by mail, Netflix was able to perform an end-around on their copyright control. This opened the door to Netflix negotiating a limited license to start streaming a small quantity of titles. To sweeten the deal, they offered to share viewership data with the content owner. Since Netflix didn't own the content, they designed their user interface just around usability, rather than control.

Obviously, this was a massive success. And eventually, all the content owners wanted in on the action. Soon, Netflix became the de facto streaming service for all content. The content owners were getting their cut, and didn't have to do anything other than license their content and collect their paycheck since Netflix was doing all the work of building out the streaming service.

Of course, this quickly came to a head, as the content owners wanted a bigger and bigger slice of the pie with each new licensing deal. Which, of course, forced Netflix to start producing their own content, and for the content owners to start rolling out their own streaming services. This is the miracle of copyright, writ large. Since the content owners can hold their content hostage for their pound of flesh, they are forever pushing the envelope on how much blood they can squeeze from that stone.

I think you're making a mistake if you believe the founders of the Pirate Bay were being naive in flaunting the law while running the website. The website itself was an offshoot of the Piratpartiet pollical party, which not only still exists today, but spawned other similar political parties around the world. I believe they were all idealists, that truly believed in what they were doing. It is still a popularly held belief that it should not be criminal to share copyrighted material as along as you're not making a profit from it.

It certainly wasn't a easy problem for the government of Sweden to deal with, and there was a lot of political backslash with their attempts to shut down the website and arrest the founders. It was not a popular move to be seen as appeasing foreign powers who were overstepping their authority.

The intervening decades have softened the international support they received at the height of their popularity, and, if anything, WIPO seems like it has gained in power. But as much as the copyright cartels would like you to believe it is a solved problem, there are still many today who believe that copyright laws should be reformed.

While I suspect none of the founders were expecting the level of response that they ultimately received, at least one has spoken publicly about being happy with the results of their 'movement'. And I, for one, am looking forward to seeing the series once it's released.

To add some context and history, I would point out that Netflix was only able to open the door to the streaming market because they were sending DVDs via USPS. The copyright cartels (aka the Big Six) had been hording their content with numerous attempts to try and bleed their customers via highly restricted services. Even though the advent of P2P sharing had opened the doors for customers being more than willing to host and stream digital content at their own expense, the cartels wanted to find ways to monetize it via a horde of less than user-friendly attempts. Anyone still remember Macrovision, or UltraViolet, or Movies Anywhere, or Microsoft Movies & TV, or Flexplay?

However, since the courts ruled that the doctrine of first sale upstages the iron grip of copyright, the cartels were powerless to prevent the sharing of their precious content via DVD. So only because Netflix had made that sharing quasi-easy and mainstream, they were finally granted a seat at the table to start negotiating for streaming rights to the content they were already ‘streaming’ just with a lot more latency. Without the leverage of their successful DVD sharing service, they never would have been able to finally secure some digital rights content to start the streaming revolution we now enjoy.

And, of course, then the inevitable happened. Netflix streaming becomes a huge success, demonstrating what should have always been plainly obvious; that there was a ready-made market for people to enjoy digital content quickly and easily. Thus did the cartels all being to offer their own streaming services and making their content exclusive to their own service. Forcing Netflix to become a content creator itself, just like HBO had before it.

Which finally brings us to the environment you now describe. Which, I suggest, would not have been possible if not for the doctrine of first sale loophole allowing for an industry shake-up. And I posit that until we rethink copyright and how our digital culture should be shared, we will never have a reasonable compromise on how content should be enjoyed vs. how content creators can make a reasonable profit.

Seems to be from 2013 in relation to the 2014 budget. I found these links: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.kansascity.com%2Fnew... https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.senate.mo.gov%2Fmedi...

My group definitely enjoyed the changes in 3rd and 4th edition and our fondest memories are probably from 4th edition. 5th edition was harder for us to get into. It still has dice pools, although they work differently. Character building feels a lot more complicated in 5th, even though they tried to make it more 'balanced' to prevent some of the more egregious optimized builds. Hacking definitely seems better in 5th, although all the wireless options was a mixed blessing. We had to house rule a bunch of changes to patch some of the more over-the-top abuses. But overall hacking is more fun in 5th and less complicated We never upgraded to 6th edition as none of the reviewed changes excited us, and none of us felt like it was worth buying yet another edition. And, really, the rules were never the strength of the system. For me, it's all the lore and variety of game play that makes it worth playing.

You have successfully identified the Shadowrun otaku. I've been a huge fan and player of the TTRPG, although the quote itself is from the save game splash screen from the 1994 Sega Genesis game.

My wife and I binged the show over the weekend. I've read the books and found them amazing. The alien perspective really made me think, and I found some of the concepts explored really mind-blowing. My wife has yet to read the books. They did make a number of changes from the book, including breaking up the central characters into a larger cast, they compressed some of the timeline and included some events from book two in the first season, and had a much more western focused perspective. But I didn't really hate any of the changes as they made sense considering the focus audience. It was a little exciting as I slowly caught on to which of the Oxford Five were being given the various plot points, which I thought tied together some of the events in the book more cleanly. My wife did have a lot of questions as we watched, but overall she seemed to be following all the major plot points. The central mystery in the book was very much front and center in the show, and my wife was every bit as perplexed and interested as I was when reading it. It did feel like the big reveals were appropriately flashy. But as with any book adaptation it felt like they were speed running the plot since we don't get as much time or depth with any of it. Overall, we both enjoyed the first season. I wouldn't say it was great as for some reason if felt like none of the really epic scenes elicited a solid emotional response. But a solid 6 or 7 out of 10 for the effort. I think it was a worthy effort over difficult topics, and I hope Netflix will green-light the additional seasons to cover the rest of the books. Even if it won't really carry the same weight as the books, I think it would be fun to see how they adapt some of the more mind-bending scenes visually.

You're certainly right that we are not a precision instrument and hard to calibrate for accuracy. But the 'sense' of the test, is that the only measure we currently seem to have of 'intelligence' is ourselves. Consciousness remains a difficult thing to measure, and even the most recent tests I'm aware of (the Marcello Massimini test) requires a human brain to zap... which doesn't offer much to measure a digital consciousness. The article is basically saying this isn’t good enough, which I certainly agree. But it also doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of options, other than pitch for Alexa.

Um... why would YouTube need to verify anything? Wouldn't anyone with a copyright claim to any component need to prove *their* claim instead?

Do you feel safe? Are you afraid someone is going to come and threaten your life and liberty? Do you believe that if you were ever threatened, your society is already equipped with stalwart heroes to come and defend you? Do you consider yourself such a stalwart hero?

The core belief here is that only by empowering society to keep guns in the hands of 'the people' can a society truly be free. So the self manufacture of guns is the best way to ensure that freedom. They tend to hold strong beliefs that those in power are only held in check by an armed populous. Otherwise, they claim, what is to stop those in power from taking away the liberty of anyone who displeases them?

For some, the philosophy of freedom is that which you can defend. They tend to view the world in a cold and unforgiving light, and believe that self reliance is the only true chance at prosperity. You likely fall closer to the other end of the spectrum where the strength of society is measured by how well people work together. Civics is a rather broad topic, and we all have our own personal political beliefs. Groups like CATI are just trying to stand up for their own beliefs.