The explicit, stated purpose of copyright was to encourage sharing of ideas. When it lasted originally 14 years, it worked. Before that, you might have had a great idea and kept it to yourself because why take years of your life researching a subject and writing a book when a publisher’s going to immediately copy it and pay you nothing? 14 years is plenty of time to get a return on your investment and most importantly, after that, it didn’t belong to you anymore. It belonged to everyone.

For example, that would mean District 9 and Hunger Games would be in the public domain right now.

I don’t understand. Facebook can get data from an open system whenever they feel like it.

I agree for inline code comments, like, “# Save the sprocket”, right above the line that saves the sprocket. Does this include documentation? Because when I see a prepareForSave function that references 10 other functions and I just want to know, “Is this mutating and how is it preparing for save and when should I call it?”, having the author spend 15 seconds telling me is less time consuming than me spending 5 minutes reading code to find out. Anyone who has read API docs has benefited from documentation.

This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.

Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.

I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.

I can’t believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren’t perfect. It’s difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.

I’m a really great person. I’m good at everything. My friends are all tools and won’t ever be as amazing as me.

Congratulations. I bet those friends are absolutely real.

As someone who maintained an API, 80% to 90% of my time was discovering that hackers were attempting an exploit, blocking it, adding monitoring, building abuse prevention. After we shut our API off, we could turn services back on, especially free services that we only took away because hackers.

Not to mention the support volume. More than half of our support calls were, “Why did you suspend my account? I’m a poor old grandpa. I want to appeal.” Okay, yep we looked into activity and you sent 50000 requests in less than a minute and that’s all you ever did with this account. Did you know hackers lie and will spend hours getting tech support? You go to school to be an engineer to build cool stuff and instead field bullshit support requests all day from people trying to destroy the thing you want to build so they can maybe make thirty bucks and cost you tens of thousands. It sucked the life out of me and turned me eternally cynical.

I’ve pirated content and don’t have any issues with it. What has worn me out

• Sites being pirated don’t give a shit that pirates aren’t going to use them anymore. That’s literally why they blocked them.
• Want to consume content without paying? Do it and maybe share with others how you did it, but don’t make the millionth post bragging about how you’re sticking it to the man. Go rob a Tiffany’s and brag about sticking it to that company. And when they install new security measures, post about how unfair it is and you’ll never take stuff from them again. Or don’t. Really. Don’t. I want to see that post about as much as the post about what you had for breakfast this morning.

Thank you.

Ways Lemmy is already feeling like modern reddit: Instead of link to an article, we get screenshot of a post with a screenshot of the article.

I heard an anonymous interview with someone who was sickened by their own attraction to children. Hearing that person speak changed my perspective. This person had already decided never to marry or have kids and chose a career to that same end, low likelihood that kids would be around. Clearly, since the alternative was giving up on love and family forever, the attraction wasn’t a choice. Child porn that wasn’t made with children, comics I guess, was used to fantasize to prevent carrying through on those desires in real life.

I don’t get it, why anyone would be attracted to kids. It’s gross and hurtful and stupid. If people suffering from this problem have an outlet, though, maybe fewer kids will be hurt.

As someone who has worked on free Internet services, it used to be easier to make money from ads. A video ad view was worth nearly a dollar US. Audio ads were maybe 7 or 8 cents a listen. Now, a video ad view makes a few cents and audio ads are worthless. They likely did the math about how many audio ads they’d have to play on the phone in your pocket to break even and decided you’d hate it more than they would. Since content owners get just over half of what YouTube makes, they’d probably be pissed about seeing the drop in income too.

Feel free to hate YT. This was an economic decision at around the time when ad revenue had just fallen off of a cliff.

Censorship is terrible. Except when I want to do it and pretend like I’m the best politician. Then it’s great.

Do you read news? Try it!

Here’s a great article on a site that doesn’t force you to register for an account. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/huaweis-new-mystery-7nm-chip-from-chinese-fab-defies-us-sanctions

This is part of what sanctions are about. China has been hacking companies around the world to steal technology to be able to produce stuff like this.