Now I sail the high seas myself, but I don't think Paramount Studios would buy anyone's defence they were only pirating their movies so they can learn the general content so they can produce their own knockoff.

However, Paramount, itself, does pirate content specifically to learn its content so it can produce its own knockoff. As do all the other major studios.

No one engages in IP enforcement in good faith, or respects the IP of others if they can find benefit in circumventing it.

That's part of the problem. None of the key stakeholders (other than the biggest stakeholder, the public) are interested in preserving the interests of the creators, artists and developers, rather are interested in their own profit gains.

Which makes this not about big companies stealing from human art.

Yes, Generative AI very much does borrow liberally from human art, yet the artists mostly signed away their rights log ago, just to get published in the first place, and artists routinely their art stolen by their own publishing houses at length, and notoriously cheated out of residuals. They are screwed before AI ever came around. (With a small but growing number of — usually pirate-friendly — exceptions.)

Instead it's about IP-holding companies slugging it out with big computing companies, a kaiju match that is likely to leave Tokyo (that is, the rest of us, creators and consumers alike) in ruin.

The opening scene to Apollo 13 (1995) features a party in Houston with NASA dudes as they gather around the television and Walter Cronkite announces as Neil Armstrong takes his first step on the moon. ( On YouTube )

I was not at that party, but I was at a party in Houston with NASA dudes as we watched the very first moon landing. My dad was a mission control guy with the black horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt and black tie, but Apollo 12, not 11 (Neil Armstrong) or 13 (the one that blew up and barely made it home).

I couldn't walk yet, and I got that the space man on the screen was super important, but at the time I was missing a whole lot of context. The blanks would fill in with time, since the US was super proud of that moment. It's my very first memory.

I totally do this to my cat and I don't have to be drunk or wear lipstick.

Can't say you're wrong, however the forseeable future is less than two centuries, and our failure to navigate our way out of capitalism towards something more mutualistic figures largely into our imminent doom.

I personally am down for this punch-up between Alphabet and Sony. Microsoft v. Disney.

🍿

🤓 In the 1915 air war the Allies didn't yet have their own version of the mechanical interruptor gear, which fueled the Fokker scourge. Early allied planes used metal deflectors on their props, though the Airco DH2 solved the problem being driven by a push prop behind the pilot and the guns.

Synchronization of the guns was solved by the deployment of the Nieuport 17 and Airco DH5, both biplanes that brought an end to the Eindekker scourge. /🤓

PS: You are right, that the mechanical synchronizers weren't perfect, and there was like some periods of both used on the same plane. Eventually, props were made that spun at consistent rates and the synchronizer was electric and worked very well.

Well, it depends on whether you believe everyone is, to borrow from the US Declaration of Independence, endowed with inalienable rights.

Here in the States there's actually a legal defense, Necessity . This is the same category under which self defense lies, that if a crime committed is necessary to preserve life and well being it may be justified or exculpable.

Usually the justifying life and limb cannot exceed the harm done by the crime. So in the case of cannibalism (which was mentioned elsewhere in this thread) one isn't justified to kill someone else to preserve their own life, but if they happen to be dead already, it's justified to eat their remains to live (as per the Donner Party incident -- though in that case, they decided to eat their fallen after considerable deliberation)

It gets weird when, say, a mother breaks into a pharmacy and steals very expensive medicines in order to keep her kids alive because the price of the medications raises questions as to the value of a human life.

Now in the US, the courts are terribly corrupt, and thanks to prior incidents exculpation based on circumstances (e.g. Dan White's twinkie defense) federal and state courts in the US are less likely to actually consider circumstances without some top lawyer guns making a big stink (usually hiring expert witnesses to painstakingly explain why those circumstances make a difference). So if you're poor enough that you need to steal bread to live, you're probably not going to benefit from a necessity defense, even when it should be valid.

Licenses are a wrongdoing against the state, and behaviors are licensed by the state allegedly in protection of the interests of the public. Licensed driving is to assure one is qualified to drive, so the wrongdoing against the community doesn't happen until the driver is involved in an incident that brings harm to others (or to other public interests, such as the environment -- driving into a lake would count).

But where this goes under necessity is that her occupation, and thus her survival may depend on her capacity to drive, and if the state is going to strip her of license, it has to take that into consideration, or deal with the consequences of motivating more crime.

Rail works at the inter-county scale, but not in local distribution, and self-driving AI is not limited just to trucks, but also extends to couriers that can follow pedestrians (at least to include ramps and elevators. I'd be interesting if little dogs -- the robots -- are used for couriers.) So it's not just truckers but all mail and delivery occupations that are threatened in the coming decade.

For now, the pinch seems to be getting autonomous cars to interact with human-driven automotive traffic, as we already have clerical robots that can be tolerably not-annoying to fellow pedestrians and clerks in a work environment.

If we were actually striving for post-scarcity communism, this would be a major step in letting common workers become artists (with the free time they have after partitioning out jobs that cannot yet be automated) but instead our ownership class is looking for a blast furnace by which to direct the workers they no longer need for their vanity projects.

Have you thought about why public transit is poorly funded and developed?

Because the automotive industry actively dismantled it in the early twentieth century and then lobbied ever since to redirect funding to highway maintenance? The largest single government project in existence in the US National Highway System.

Since the publishers are also trying to suppress out-of-print media, abandonware and public domain material (also fair use) and the courts are favoring the publishers over the good of the public, we know it's no longer about promoting science and useful arts or building a robust public domain.

The companies and courts alike are breaking the social contract, hence the trmporary monopolies enstated by the agencies of the same state are invalid. Piracy is no longer a valid crime since the state licenses are no longer valid.

(They will still enforce the will of the state — ICE does a lot of raids to enforce commercial interests when it's not massacring refugees— but that doesn't legitimize the will of the state. It only shows they are willing tyrants glad to use violence to oppress.)

We have nothing to lose but our chains!

I think it's the seven months of winter every year that informs the Scandinavian metal scene as well as the rich and complicated mythical history, also the brewing and drinking traditions.

Slightly off topic, I coined a new term Potterlike which describes a game that features enough wizarding school hallmarks, including character and plot expies from Harry Potter to adequately scratch those itches without supporting a neonazi billionaire that is in turn supporting a hate-driven purge movement.

I have recently been playing Spells & Secrets a German potterlike rogue-lite that has good play, if daft localization. There are some decent potterlikes out there.

To be fair, I never got Quiddich, other than it's supposed to be a team sport with magic, and Rowling took the design of a team sport as seriously as she did video games, and the affect games have on house point values (in that they heavily outweigh rewards from good behavior, penalties from bad behavior and bonuses for keeping the end of the world and rise of He Who Shall Not Be Named) reflects how school athletics is overprioritized in IRL academics, often over STEM or basic educafion.

And Griffindor are the jocks.