It’s like eleven Floridas crammed into the space of Michigan.

Yeah, “generating your own Marvel movie” was considered high art for most human cultures before copyright: from traditional epics to Greek dramas and even Shakespeare’s “serious” plays, audiences were already familiar with the characters and stories and valued the art of the re-telling. Novels (so-called because the characters and stories were “new”) were considered low-brow trash for people unfamiliar with the myths and stories that “real” literature was based on.

Now, that primal human urge to build on and re-tell familiar stories is relegated to unlicensed fan-fiction and to franchises like Marvel who only permit certain sanctioned creators to build on their “property”.

Trademarks should be good as long as the company is in business.

Patents should be determined by weighing two factors: 1) how much sooner will the invention be produced than it would have been without the incentive of a patent, and how much will the public benefit from that earlier introduction; and 2) how much will the public be harmed by the monopoly resulting from the patent? The patent should then expire before the second factor outweighs the first.

Copyrights have been a scam since they were first introduced: the original intention (when printing was first introduced) was to police the printing of politically or morally objectionable works, but the authority appointed to do so abused the power to sell monopolies on printing specific works. Authors were originally opposed to this practice, and actually got it overturned for a time—the idea that copyrights are needed so publishers can compensate authors was a post-hoc justification publishers came up with to get authors to withdraw their objections. But it’s never been a good deal for the actual creators.

So copyright needs to be re-thought from the ground up—the amount of time that works remain under copyright is a secondary issue.

I have little hope that Biden, Harris, or (obviously) Trump will actually change course on the US’s Israel/Palestine policy—but to be fair, we shouldn’t expect the current vice president to openly say she would reverse the current president’s foreign policies even if she intended to.

“The boat suffered a series of indescribable, unreasonable errors, the impossible happened on that boat … but it went down because it took on water.” […] The CEO ruled out any design or construction errors, which he called unlikely after 16 years of trouble-free navigation.

This sounds like an out-take from the “front fell off” skit.

The difference is that OpenAI’s competitors and open-source projects can also use fediverse posts.

Star Wars at the video arcade.

The Shaggs, but I enjoy them anyway.

I’m left-handed myself, but I never notice if others are.

It seems like it used to be a bigger thing a few decades ago, when writing by hand was more common.

According to the article, there were restrictions imposed three years ago to pressure the Saudis to reduce civilian casualties in the Yemeni war, and (according the to administration), the Saudis complied.

Garlic.

You know someone messed up when the Saudis feel obliged to defend Iran.

After ruling for ten years he was overthrown, had his nose cut off, and was exiled to the Crimea. Suspected of conspiring to return to power, he was summoned back to Constantinople for additional punishment; but instead he escaped to the Russian steppe where he married the sister of the Khazar kaghan. The usurpers bribed the kaghan to extradite his new brother-in-law back to the Byzantines, but Justinian was warned by his Khazar wife and killed the kaghan’s officials sent to arrest him. Then he escaped in a fishing boat to the Balkans, married his daughter to the Bulgar khan, and convinced the khan to lend him an army to defeat the usurpers. So after a ten-year exile he returned to Constantinople at the head of a barbarian army, but the city refused to surrender. Finally he used his knowledge of the city’s infrastructure to crawl in through the sewers, re-took the palace by surprise, and ruled another six years before being killed in a second rebellion.

If we’re going for “cool story” rather than “admirable person”, then the Byzantine emperor Justinian II.

The only time I prefer physical books to ebooks is when there’s a heavy focus on maps, diagrams, or other illustrations. In those cases I generally want the physical book to be as large as possible, which usually means hardcover.

I’m all for removing the influence of money from politics. But as long as money remains the main medium of influence, people not donating to political causes as a matter of principle is effectively removing the influence of people from politics.

Does it need to be accessible via API (e.g. SQL) or just a spreadsheet-style web interface?

You can use any port for SSH—or you can use something like Cockpit with a browser-based terminal instead of SSH.

Ok, but protests need to be done “without distraction”? That kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

The US Navy will convert its surplus oil rigs in the Pacific into active mobile military bases

The Navy has its own oil rigs?