grue @ grue @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

What have you been doing?

I need to study more, I guess!

• Stacklands - a "city building survival strategy card game"
• Moncage - a game where you match objects from different scenes viewed from the faces of a cube in order to progress by changing perspectives.
• Tiny Topia - a city building game, except it's a toy city, you can stack buildings on top of each other, and it sometimes involves having to balance your city on an object so it doesn't tip over.
• Superliminal - a first-person puzzle game where "perception is reality" (e.g. things change size when you move them around based on how large they look from your perspective).

I haven't actually played any of these. I found out about them watching Real Civil Engineer on Youtube, who plays a lot of building and simulation games but also plays weird stuff perhaps more often than the average gaming youtuber.

But we recycle e-waste.

Oh you sweet, summer child.

Everything you wrote is basically the same as how it works in the US, except for that last sentence about never calling four-year programs "college."

Apparently French works the same way ("university" = tertiary, "college" = high school), at least if Duolingo is to be believed.

The kind of place that the US calls "community college" would be called a "polytech" here.

I'm not necessarily doubting you, but I would've guessed "polytech" would be more like a "trade school" (where you go to learn skills for blue-collar jobs, like welding, plumbing, auto repair, etc.) than a "community college" (where you go for two years to earn an associates' degree in stuff like liberal arts or business or nursing, possibly before transferring somewhere else to continue towards your bachelors').

(That's despite the fact that "polytech" around here can also refer to four-year engineering schools, although ones that are lower-tier than research universities. For example, the former "Southern Polytechnic State University" ("Southern Poly") vs. "Georgia Institute of Technology" ("Georgia Tech") here in GA. Ironically, the latter is self-deprecatingly nicknamed "North Avenue Trade School," LOL!)

The most sustainable option would also always be the cheapest option, if regulations were properly designed to correct for externalized costs. We should strive for that.

All hardware is "disposable" in the sense that it becomes obsolete after a few years, and the electricity to keep using it costs more than replacing it with new hardware with better performance per watt.

Maybe once Moore's law is finally dead and buried that'll stop being the case, but it hasn't happened quite yet.

This certainly isn't "green" in terms of disposal, but I'm not sure it's any worse than the status quo alternative of a landfill, either.

At the limit, it could depend on the extent to which adding heat to the ocean has different/worse effects than adding it to the atmosphere. E.g. maybe ocean heat is worse for wildlife or disrupts currents or doesn't radiate away into space as fast, or something like that.

Definitely not a problem to worry about in the short-term, of course. But then again, the same was said about lots of other problems back in the day that we do have to worry about now, so...

I doubt they'd be able to stop it from becoming one, especially if they don't want to spend the server downtime to haul it out for repainting.

I keep trying OpenStreetMaps based mapping apps, but giving up on them because they can never seem to find locations I search for by address.

I want to degoogle, but I also want to keep track of which videos I've watched already across devices. Maybe Newpipe and similar apps need a self-hosted server companion app. Or maybe a plugin for existing server software, like I dunno, Jellyfin or Nextcloud or something. Maybe using RSS? I'm just brainstorming here...

Imagine hearing "hey, hey, we're the Monkees" blaring from a loudspeaker as a mast emerges from a fog bank.

Already happened.

Considering how many Ukranian women and children are being literally raped by the Russian invaders, I'd say the comparison is plenty apt!

Your concern trolling is the thing that's insensitive and inconsiderate.

Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are "fine." They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there's nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.

The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.

See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they're just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there's an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people's property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.

There's a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the "tivoization" exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.

You're correct in your description of what a derivative work is, but this part is mistaken:

The intent is so that artists can make a living for their innovation.

The intent is "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" so that, in the long run, the Public Domain is enriched with more works than would otherwise exist if no incentive were given. Allowing artists to make a living is nothing more than a means to that end.

By the same token, a human can easily be deemed to have infringed copyright even without cutting and pasting, if the result is excessively inspired by some other existing work.

Additionally, "copyright infringement is a moral right" seems fairly wrong. Copyright laws currently are too steep and I can agree with that but if I make a piece of art like a book, video game, or movie, do I not deserve to protect it in order to get money? I'd argue that because we live in a capitalistic society so, yes, I deserve to get paid for the work I did.

No. And it's not just me saying that; the folks who wrote the Copyright Clause (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson) would disagree with you, too.

The natural state of a creative work is for it to be part of a Public Domain. Ideas are fundamentally different from property in the sense that property's value comes from its exclusive use by its owner, wheras an idea's value comes from spreading it, i.e., giving it away to others.

Here's how Jefferson described it:

stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. it would be curious then if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. if nature has made any one thing less susceptible, than all others, of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an Idea; which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the reciever cannot dispossess himself of it. it’s peculiar character too is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. he who recieves an idea from me, recieves instruction himself, without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, recieves light without darkening me. that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benvolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. inventions then cannot in nature be a subject of property. society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility. but this may, or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

Thus we see the basis for the rationale given in the Copyright Clause itself: "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," which is very different from creating some kind of entitlement to creators because they "deserve" it.

The true basis for copyright law in the United States is as a utilitarian incentive to encourage the creation of more works - a bounty for creating. Ownership of property is a natural right which the Constitution pledges to protect (see also the 4th and 5th Amendments), but the temporary monopoly called copyright is merely a privilege granted at the pleasure of Congress. Essentially, it's a lease from the Public Domain, for the benefit of the Public. It is not an entitlement; what the creator of the work "deserves" doesn't enter into it.

And if the copyright holder abuses his privilege such that the Public no longer benefits enough to be worth it, it's perfectly just and reasonable for the privilege to be revoked.

At the end of the day, the artists just want to be able to afford to eat, play games, and have shelter. Why in the world is that a bad thing in our current society? You can't remove copyright law without first removing capitalism.

This is a bizarre, backwards argument. First of all, a government-granted monopoly is the antethesis of the "free market" upon which capitalism is supposedly based. Second, granting of monopolies is hardly the only way to accomplish either goal of "promoting the progress of science and the useful arts" or of helping creators make a living!

Edit: ...copyright infringement is a moral right, it's a good thing. copyright is theft.

Except when it's being used to enforce copyleft.