I don’t usually post these memes on Tumblr, but this one clearly belongs here rather than on Facebook where I found it.
Only a white man deals in absolutes.
I thought not, it’s not a correlation the Jedi would tell you.
So the right-wing has shifted pretty visibly into clearly being the
no-fun police right now (like literally, they are mad at pretty much
everything fun right now, including Star Wars, Star Trek, and the NFL),
and I think this gives the left an opportunity to show that while we are
critical of media for its more problematic or pernicious aspects, we
aren’t critical of the people that enjoy the media just for enjoying it.
Like we have to admit that general fun is the most widespread form of
resistance to capitalism, and we should embrace that shit. I think that some of the 2014-2016 rise in right-wing bullshittery was due to the left coming across as the “no-fun” people, and that was wholly undeserved, and I think the shoe has firmly landed on the other foot at this point. Which gives us an opportunity to show that that idea was always bullshit. We embrace fun as fucking praxis.
Boredom is always counter-revolutionary
Eh, I don’t think that you can sell me on bad tofu and shitty music as fun, essentially with no fast cars, makeup, cool clothes, fun media, or personal hygiene. I mean, I guess the weed is “fun” if that’s your thing, but the fucking Libertarians have weed too, and weed’s not my thing anyway.
If you check the op’s blog with the Internet Archive’s Chronoglow browser, it’s deactivated by August 3rd, 2021 after they got harassed off the site for liking an indie game where one of the developers was friends with a man whose wife was the cousin of someone who was once in the same room as JonTron.
You know what?
I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
Here, have a fun romp through the world of industrial and military/aerospace electrical technology vendors!
A big point of this stuff: Making it extremely rugged (because enviroments are harsh, having it break is bad, and if you’re in the military people are shooting at you), making it extremely reliable (because you’re dead if it breaks, imagine the equivalent of having an arrow key get stuck down on your computer), and making it easy, or at least possible, to field repair. You might not be able to see the screws and bolts that hold the connectors together, but they are there. No molded-blob-of-plastic USB connectors or featureless monolith ipod cases allowed here.
(A specific thing that irritates me: The exclusive use of touchscreens or holograms for controls. These are great ways to make a complicated system easier to use or let lots of functions be controlled with a simple panel. However, they can’t be used blind and they lack tactile sense, so they are not good for important stuff like flight controls or turning your engine on and off. Modern fighter jets have a lot more big screens (”glass cockpit”) but flight controls are still your classic joystick with buttons on it. Also, in the military, often instead of a touchscreen you have a row of buttons around the edge of the screen, and the labels for these buttons appear on the screen.)
(This can lead to problems. The USA’s main battle tank contains several tons of copper that’s just carrying weak electrical signals, on a tank that only weighs about 70 tons in the first place. That’s several tons that can’t be armor, ammo, engines, or the gun. There’s a plan to upgrade to fiber optics. One of the reasons that Elon Musk is able to eat the lunch of all the other rocket vendors is by taking a much more liberal approach to this kind of thing. All computers in any military ever are dreadfully obsolete and NASA sometimes needs to lurk Ebay for spare parts. An awful lot of this equipment has been updated to have some basic computer control and internet connectivity but with zero security.)
Okay, but consider this - the entire crew of the Enterprise should be paramilitary cyborgs able to manipulate all this machinery with their thoughts, with manual controls built throughout the ship as a backup.
if copyright was abolished in Libertarian Paradise, it could be quickly replaced by an equivalent contractual scheme whereby major conglomerates require you to enter into an agreement before accessing their products, with penalties for breaking the agreement.
anyone who wished to access Star Wars, Pokemon, Harry Potter, or any other popular franchise would need to agree to copyright or find someone willing to break it, and experience suggests that most people would go along with it.
Depends.
To start with, I will say that I agree with the general gist of your post. However, I suspect we would still end up with a licensing scheme much different from current IP law.
Imagine going into a store to buy a CD with software (I know, so nineties, I work with what I know) and at the cashier, before paying, you’re handed a 200-page contract (That is, the EULA plus all currently applicable IP law) that you must (a) read and (b) agree to before they will take your money.
A couple of things would happen
1) Some people would not purchase the software
2) Others would purchase equivalent but license-free software from your competition
3) In an effort to capture some of that market, publishers would create an extremely streamlined contract; the main difference - looking at what has happened in other fields - would generally be that a lot of cruft would get cut out.
3A) The hard-to-enforce cruft (E.g. “not allowed to resell”) would be cut out because: If the state subsidizes your enforcement you might as well have as many terms as possible and put the burden on the customer - they cannot really go to a competitor because that competitor will have the same burdens because it is law. If you have to pay for your own enforcement, you might as well cut it out - the contract will be less confusing to your customer and that might give you a leg up over the competition.
3B) The hard-to-understand cruft would also be cut. E.g. “Not allowed to modify this software” You see this in e.g. the CC license - in an effort to make people use that license, it is very easy to understand. A private court of arbitration could create an equivalent Easy To Understand IP Contract, a service they do not provide today because they’re in direct competition with the government enforcement monopoly.
You’d end up with licenses that individual people could make educated decisions about. You’re absolutely right that people would still agree to these contracts, but I expect the contracts to be much better. And it is easier to explain to the customer “you’re not allowed to sell or give away copies of this because we needs to get paid” than “you aree allowed to create copies of this for backup purposes only unless we have used copy-protection, unless that copy protection is easily automatically circumvented by standard software in which case it doesn’t count” which is the current state.
I expect that a proliferation of licenses would quickly congeal together into a single conglomerate, which you could opt into once via an easy process.
Then you really would just walk into the store, pay your money, and walk out.
People negotiating hundreds of little contracts on an individual basis seems much less likely than the convenience of a standardised option, much in the same way as you would expect people to standardise on a small number of currencies and other common standards.
Honestly, I find ShieldFoss’s response here to be a bit naive.
If all the record companies and movie studios get together (and it makes sense for them to do so), they can make their standard contract include those supposedly-hard-to-enforce clauses, and their standard contract will be harsher than real IP law.
They simply setup the situation such that any breach which would cause the copyrighted item to escape the containment field means someone violated the contract, and pursue people the few who didn’t and who did not immediately turn over who was responsible under the contract for some kind of conspiracy.
They don’t need to enforce it perfectly, just enough to scare people, and they can flat-out specify the prices in ways that courts will not dispute.
“This contract says you agreed to pay a $1,000 fee for every song you copied,” and oh hey, it’s civil court, so the standard of evidence is still not “beyond reasonable doubt”.
And since everyone will have to sign the contract to participate, it doesn’t really matter if a few copyright freegans on the edges of society don’t.
So no, the contracts will not be much better. In fact, they will be worse.
star wars queens are democratically elected and term limited
Not sure if rap lyrics or extremely concise explanation of Madonna-Whre.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit.
Watching these videos of people keeping exotic animals on the Internet.
Then you look it up, and it’s like…
