Telaneo

I want to say I was online by default earlier, just because I preferred that life to my offline one, but online clearly hadn't become 'real life' yet. Sure, your online life could affect your offline life if you really wanted to make it happen or were just really dumb, but whatever did happen online, it could be brushed off and you could Just™ wash your hands of whatever happened and go and do something else, be that play a different game, browse a different forum, or just log off.

Saying that what happens on the internet doesn't actually matter nowadays is clearly untrue given even just the most cursory look at the state of the world today.

Who said it needed to happen without a fight?

I'm DuckDuckGonna look that up for ya.

It absolutely does not. It's marginally better then the full word, but it's the same number of syllables.

Just google it with Bing.

It pains me that DuckDuckGo has the name that it has, since you can't even pretend to want to use that as a verb. You can use generic terms, and that's what I tend to do (usually just 'look it up (on the web)', alternativly 'search the web'), but there's good reason google entered the common lexicon and functionally replaced those terms, and finding a replacement that is as good is very, very hard.

Many, many people who are on that level of literacy are in fact working with computers. Ask anyone in L1 tech support what kinds of tickets they get. Many involve people not reading the text directly in front of them.

> It'd be strange and irresponsible if there are - reasonably functional - countries that don't ensure students get certain skills to be able to function in a modern workplace.

A non-zero percent of students come out of school not being able to read or write. A double-digit percentage of Americans are seemingly only being able to read at a level just barely above the absolute bare minimum level that could actually count as being able to read.[1][2] I know Americans are special, but I'd be surprised if the rest of the world is drastically different in this case (it's probably better, but my lived experience tells me many, many people are really bad at reading, and actually getting them to engage or try to extract information beyond the exact words that are on the page, is a really heavy task for them they have real trouble with). Going by the averages of the 2024 results of the PIAAC survey,[3] many places are better, but I doubt they've managed to eliminate that large bottom part which is close to illiterate.

If we already have trouble teaching kids to read, then there should be no surprise we're having even more trouble teaching them to use computers.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...

[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/do-adults-have-the-skil...

> The idea that you have to be able to play something for it to count as being preserved is not accurate.

You're being wilfully obtuse if this is your genuine opinion about video games. Your opinion is bad and you should feel bad.

Law and morality are two different things. When the law stands in the way of good, it should be ignored in the moment and reformed to be better.

As I said, we can do better.

You'd be surprised. There are still quite a few 40-60 year olds working who never actually learned computers to begin with, and are still working by rote. On the other end of the scale are the 20~ year olds who never learned learned computers so much as they learned a tablet and a phone, and that trend doesn't seem to be turning.[1]

I had computer lessons in school, but I don't think those are universal any more, and that part of the curriculum has just been swallowed up by other lessons always using a tablet or Chromebook, meaning the kids never learn the foundation (to the extent there ever was one. It's not like I learned about common UI elements or anything back then. I figured those out by being interested in computers), but just learn what they have to by osmosis. This obviously varies depending on country and curriculum.

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems

> I'm not sure which is more morally wrong: preserving works of art for future generations, or destroying them for profit.

Between:

* preserving works of art for future generations

* destroying them for profit

The first is an obvious good to me, and the second is an obvious bad. I'm assuming you meant to say 'not preserving'.

> It's okay for software to be unavailable or be lost.

We can do better than that.

The DMCA is absolutely not copyright reform. It was brought to us by the same mindset that brought us the Bono act. It's a bad piece of legislation that should have been replaced 20 years ago.

> What I do not understand is why that process is not being followed here. Why is Google not insisting that the big media companies follow the law and use the process laid out by the DCMA?

Because the DMCA and copyright in general proved to be a massive hindrance in actually having Youtube be workable, so they made their own system which functionally bypasses it, by giving in to the corps. The corps can either misuse the DMCA and make life hell for Youtube, or they can get in on the system with Youtube and make some cash on the side. There is no middle ground where the DMCA isn't misused, Youtube gets to exist and the corps don't get paid.

> But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

I've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.

Are you missing a 'not' in your second paragraph?

One of the more annoying parts of this to me is that, surely, a high quality version of the original must exist somewhere in the archives of the publisher, right? And if not that, surely the original footage must still be there, so one can recreate the edit frame by frame, as was done with TNG?

The good stuff is out there, just behind lock and key. You can't have it, because screw you.

It could also be that it genuinely isn't. The source code of Silent Hill 2, one of the best horror games of all time, is lost. It's clear from cases like that that publishers can't be trusted to preserve their media. We have to do it ourselves.

Doing God's work.

It was bound to happen with Star Wars, given how big a series it is. I wish we could have the same with more, but the amount of effort is huge in many cases, and literally impossible in others.

It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.

That kind of works with smaller players (a random thai TV channel dinging people incorrectly is probably going to get some sort of time-out, and even if not, going to court against a smaller player like that is probably within the realm of possibility), but the big players have too much leverage. If Sony gets threatened with even minor punishments, they can simply say 'Fine. But then you have to remove all videos featuring gameplay from Sony Interactive Entertainment's games, or else we'll sue you for copyright infringement'. Even that example is fairly narrow and something that Sony is clearly allowed to do within the current bounds of copyright. They could go full nuclear and demand anything even vaguely related to Sony and its cultural hoard be taken of Youtube, and Youtube would have to comply, if nothing else, while the fight in court goes on.

Youtube has very little leverage, and Google/Youtube is very invested in not ending up in court over this kind of disputes, and the corps making claims know that.

The only actual fix is reforming or abolishing copyright.

> Isn't that one of the whole points of copyright? So the authors can print new copies and not have to compete with other people releasing copies they made?

The more important point of copyright is 'to promote the progress of the useful arts'. The 'securing for a limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their writings and inventions' is just the means. Do the means in this case seem to work well in achieving that goal?

> Nothing is stopping people from keeping an archived copy until copyright expires.

Except the 70+ years it takes before you're legally allowed to publish it, or even just adapt it. If I'm going to play things by the book, even if I archive it when I'm 10 years old, sales stop on day two of the copyright period, and the rights expire the day after it's 70 years years old, I will be 80+ years old when I'm legally allowed to let people download it, or I myself can publish an adaptation (or more likely, I'll have died and my archive version will be lost in the estate sale).

Wait til you hear it's (or at least was) possible to get dinged for 0.00 seconds.[1] That particular issue's probably solved by now, since Youtube requires claims to include a time stamp showing where the problem clip is. Nevermind the fact that wasn't a requirement to begin with. No wonder the corps ding every creator out there. It's free money with no downside to them. Nevermind the fact they're actively destroying culture.

[1] https://youtu.be/VvFGumd_esg?&t=685

Those also read the exact same to me, unless you mean to imply the latter also includes 'being an knobhead to the person you're asking'.

What's the difference between 'Texting your friends for factual information' and 'Simple factual queries with not intention of connection'? You've said they're different, that second is reasonable and the first is not, but they read the same to me.

I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.

I've witnessed the same social dynamic happen in certain groups, but thankfully not in my own friend group. I'm unsure why. In my own friend group, that kind of question would either be answered legitimately, either by someone knowing the answer, by looking it up whereever, or it's not actually important enough to whatever point is being made that we can skip past it to continue whatever discussion is actually happening.

> Texting your friends for factual information doesn't seem reasonable to me. If I got that text and someone only wanted the info I'd be annoyed (and I had friends who genuinely did this pre-google. Still annoying).

I don't see this as unreasonable? I've had friends text me questions about grammar, since they were learning the local language and I knew theirs, so they knew I'd be a good sanity check. Similarly, I'm the go tech support for my friend group for anything that a cursory Google search can't solve (and I assume a lot of people here are in the same situation with friends and family). I've also been asked to find 'that one image' that similarly didn't show up on Google image search for whatever reason.

Neither of these cases seem unreasonable to me. Are they to you, or do you have other cases in mind? Or is the problem that this happens too often?

Sounds like it's working exactly as intended.

I like the idea of taking a (couple of) shot(s) of vodka every time you sign up for a service or otherwise click accept on a EULA.

Most of the programs I use require the mouse often enough that this isn't really a workflow I'm interested in. And even if those edge-case actions can be done without a mouse, it's usually some arcane keyboard shortcut to do so, which isn't actually any faster than just using the mouse unless you've already optimised your way to only using the keyboard.

YMMV indeed.