Worse than that. You bought software licenses specific to that Wii, not to an online account. If it died, you lost all your purchases.

“.9…” is repeating, but rational. So it’s actually “1” . Let’s do the math.

.9… / 3 = .3…

.3… = 1/3

1/3 x 3 = 3/3

.9… = 3/3

3/3 = 1

.9… = 1

Still not convinced? We’ll use algebra instead of fractions.

0.9… = x

10x = 9.9…

10x - 0.9… = 9

9x = 9

x = 1

But the “…” matters.

For me it’s been “I see you bought this specific laser engraver. Would you be interested in buying that exact model?”

No. I already bought it, and it’s not a consumable. If I decided I needed a new laser a week into ownership, it wouldn’t be because I was thrilled with that exact model.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

I work for a municipal government where we all receive a phone stipend because of 2FA.

If we use our personal phones for city business, they become searchable in Open Records Requests.

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It shows how important having a charismatic person is to make any venture a success. We’re all humans with limited time on the earth. We can’t possibly experience everything. All we see and do is filtered out of necessity. A charismatic advocate of a product/movement/idea can get people to pay attention.

The best musician in history is probably unknown because they didn’t have a good manager/agent.

The greatest painting ever made was probably thrown away because nobody ever knew about it.

Hype men are necessary.

Jobs was an asshole.

Also, he got shit done. He wasn’t a technical genius, but he and the team he built could pitch the shit out of products. Apple’s value has rarely been in its technical superiority, but in branding.

“Bullshitting” is an essential skill, not a distraction. The greatest idea in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about it.

Marketing, scmoozing, etc gets a bad rep. But no matter how good your output, product, research, etc is, it has very little value or impact if people don’t get on board.

If you can’t play the game, team up with someone who can. And don’t forget that while that schmoozer may not have your technical skills, they have a skillset you do not.

It wasn’t Woz or Jobs. It was both.

That’s like somebody saying in 1912 that fax machines could never be invented because no printouts were magically appearing on their desk. The technology had to be invented before it could be used. If a time traveler has to step out of a machine, that machine has to be invented first. The idea is that backwards time travel would only be able to travel as far back as the invention of backwards time travel.

That being said, from a physics standpoint I can absolutely see backwards time travel as being impossible. We can’t move negative distances across spatial dimensions, so why would we be able to move backwards in time?

I’m on the Municipal side. City Council ain’t gonna raise taxes to hire more people.

I’ll get burned out and leave soon enough. The longest-serving person in the development department has been here just over a year, and we pay nearly double what other cities in the area do.

I work on the City side of the development world. We’re always getting screamed at for taking 3 weeks to review a plan set by the same developers who want to meet with me every minute of every fucking day.

I’ve got 40 projects in my review queue and all of them are demanding a weekly meeting. When am I supposed to do the fucking reviews?

“Crimson Lepids”

They should have blood-red wings and be familiars of Psyche cultists.

It’s neat seeing someone learn about Mt St Helen’s for the first time. It was such a big deal in the 80s that I can’t remember not knowing about it. It makes me excited to discover major events I know nothing about…

Anyway… The thing with it wasn’t necessarily the size of the eruption. There have been much, much bigger eruptions. It’s that it was one of the first with really good footage (since it was one of the earlier predicted eruptions), it occurred in the US, and it blew out sideways instead of the top.

Texas is nearly 4,000 miles tall. We just hang out on the surface.

Data-mine the information you intentionally did not put on the cloud.

I work in an enclave city for the ultra-rich. We have lots of celebrities and billionaires. There are fewer than 1000 homes and the taxable value of residences in town is nearly 4 billion.

Anyway: it’s hard to know who owns what because most of them put their property under an LLC named after the address to protect their privacy.

Yeah - it was awesome from my yard!