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But your example just proves that the trademark avenue is not a genuine moat for Disney. If dozens of trademarks have been given for logos containing Jesus Christ, then there can be dozens of logos containing Steamboat Willie.

The Wintel coalition was anti-competitive to an extreme degree. It may have faded to the background at this point but they were caught red handed multiple times using their market dominance to utterly destroy innovative alternatives.

It doesn’t excuse Apple’s behavior, but imo they still have a long way to go to challenge the track record of MS and Intel.

The elegance referred to is grammatical, not typographic.

How is it “instead of”?

Can I ask you which alternatives exist at the layer Lucene occupies?

I went looking around last year and couldn’t really find many options, but I might have been looking in the wrong places.

Who is “you”? Are you really conflating everyone in this thread with a handful of mega corporations?

The DMA is barely past the toddler stage. I think it’s a bit premature to claim lids on coffins here.

Source please.

Gas is priced lower when counting for inflation, isn’t it?

Can you name any significant economic fallout of any kind related to this attack vector?

Because I feel pretty confident that it is dwarfed by the volume of money that has been unlocked by tying crypto to ransomware.

That feels like a real stretch considering that Paul is responsible for starting the branch of Christianity that would eventually outlaw any “non-canonical” books about Jesus. Said books would never even have existed if it was true that Paul invented the character of Jesus whole cloth.

It’s worth noting that Google became dominant in the first place specifically because PageRank was deeply superior to the methodologies of other search engines.

Just because search engine quality is now quite low across the board (except perhaps Kagi) doesn’t mean that search engine quality was not once the determining factor to success.

I’m confused. What I read you to be implying is that simply describing current reality is automatically an endorsement of that reality. Am I misreading you somehow?

Mondo 2000 was always a bit too tongue in cheek for me to be able to gauge their intent properly.

ISTR that whatever channel you had set up for your game console to operate needed to be a dead channel in order to work, anyway.

By the early 90s, “cyberpunk” had largely become self parody, meaning that the counter culture was already rejecting cyberpunk as too mainstream. Search around for the Usenet reactions to Billy Idol’s album of the same name.

Or take a look at the opening sequence of Snow Crash, where the deliverator is clearly making fun of ubiquitous cyberpunk tropes. At the time it was considered a tombstone for cyberpunk, rather than some sort of positive signal milestone.

These are only two data points to demonstrate that the “counterculture” era had already expired in the US by the early 90s, as members of that counterculture felt that it had already stopped being counter to any part of American culture.

The claim that there is “not much Japanese counterculture” is too bizarre for me to wrap my head around. The more traditional a society is, the more “counter” any underground culture is —- by definition.

American counterculture hasn’t really properly existed outside of capitalist smother and capture since the early 90s either by the way. Give No Logo a read for more on that.

I don’t recall any real sluggishness with BeOS, in any category.

Come to think of it, I haven’t used an OS that could match the accuracy, speed, or most importantly utility of BeOS’ active queries since 2001.

There are literally thousands of scientific theories that have been disproven over time. What’s your point?

Edit: Also thousands of historical written documents that are disputed or tossed aside.

Thanks for these resources, I look forward to reading them.

My long reply got devoured so for the sake of my own sanity I will reiterate my original point from a quote with the resource you linked:

> In conceptual terms, scholarship on the past should revisit the bibliocentric assumptions of “prehistory,” and pursue, instead, the study of “ancient American history”-an approach that treats oral documents as respectable siblings of written documents.

Ancient oral histories are preserved through constant communication across generational boundaries.

There are too many examples of oral history matching historical events for me to bother being your Google here.

Very little weight has been given to the accuracy of these oral histories until recent times. Meanwhile tribes have been saying “that’s not how it happened” to the Clovis hypothesis the entire time.

I think the point still stands that there has been a desperate clinging to a chronology that denies plenty of evidence and essentially all oral tradition of the people in question.

Laws can have been used and abused and still be important. I know it’s hard to believe but the independent artists who were already struggling need IP laws to survive.

Otherwise Disney and the like can just come in, make copies or derivatives, and profit without paying those artists a penny.

Which everyone usually agrees (or used to) is not a fair outcome.

But somehow giant corporations not named Disney taking the same work in the same extractive mode in order to create an art-job-destroying machine is totally fine because Disney bad?

Maybe most people making this argument are also all for UBI and wealth redistribution on a massive scale, but they don’t seem to mention it much when trashing IP laws.

That’s why the “transformative” argument falls so flat to me. It’s about transformation in the mind and hands of a human.

Traditionally tools that reduce the friction of creating those transformations make a work less “transformed” in the eyes of the law, not more so. In this case the transformation requires zero mental or physical effort.

Really? I would assume that most ranked personnel would be less impressed by a person wearing a uniform that they never earned and don’t deserve.

But then again, pomp and circumstance…

There is a grain of truth but your position is inaccurate. Boeing split off important software systems on the 737 MAx into paid upgrades. That’s not a training issue.

Thanks, I will check this out! The amount of archaeological “fact” that rests on religiously (or culturally) constrained research is pretty astonishing.

That hardly entails that self-driving cars have "arrived". Am I mistaken or is it true that you can't even own and operate one yourself?

In my opinion, it's as similarly off-base as to making claims that 'mach speed consumer air travel' "arrived" just because for a few decades you could catch a Concorde flight between NYC and London.

Excellent link, thank you for sharing this!

I have not ever been in a self-driving car. I've seen a few of them visiting the Bay Area. Only taxis seem to be allowed to use this tech so far.

I've always been a proponent that we would see self driving cars in our lifetime. But they have absolutely not arrived outside of the sheltered enclaves of a handful of tech-centered cities.