But they DO have the exclusive right. People want to be told the world is different - that it’s better - but if we want to change it we need to see it for what it is. If we say “They don’t have the right!” before we’ve done the work necessary to strip them of the right, then we’ll never even understand how to start fixing this broken system.
They’re a company - their only purpose is to make money. They don’t hate emulation, they hate not making the absolute maximum amount of money they possibly can. Public use of emulation lowers their profits, while their own use of emulation helps increase their profits. It’s not some weird enigma or hypocrisy - money is the singular driving factor for every company; every action they take traces back to making more money. This is why we need much tighter regulation instead of trusting companies to “be reasonable” or “do the right thing.”
Well yeah, as the owners they have the exclusive right to determine what’s okay. They’re just following the rules as they’ve been laid out by centuries of corporate lobbying for more exploitable copyright laws. Those are what we need to focus on if we want more fair use of intellectual property that the rights holder has already sufficiently profited from - the thing that such protections were initially meant to ensure to a much more reasonable extent.
You absolutely don’t have to have a concrete, well-constructed opinion on everything, or even really anything, but if you plan to spread an opinion you have about something, you should make sure it’s concrete and well-constructed first.
Maybe just this once, for old time’s sake.
I sure hope so, but I don’t see much changing. I guess we’ll see by looking at where Reddit is at business-wise by next year. People were saying it was doomed last summer after the 3rd party app fiasco, and their daily traffic has only gone up since then. I’ve long since lost all faith in the masses making the best choices for themselves.
They’re better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don’t mind the new alternative.
One of the few things I miss from Reddit were the extra small communities like the one for QC. I liked being able to chat with the 30 other people who read this comic daily.
Yeah, my mom used to be upset that I didn’t hold onto my old pokemon cards, but not only did I never have any rare ones that would be worth anything anyway, I used them how I wanted to when I wanted to, and when they stopped interesting me, I gave them to someone who was still interested. I don’t regret that.
My mom died of cancer a few months ago because she was convinced that a combination of sunlight’s natural vibrational frequency and some expensive “medical” herbal teas would cure her. Placebos affect people, but if you let them believe that they’re an alternative to actual science and medicine, then they’ll use them as such.
Again, selective breeding suffers from the same issue of introducing changes that can be detrimental to the organism itself and its place in the balance of the environment. Look at dog breeding as an example. Pugs were bred for a specific look, and that inadvertently caused them to have severe breathing issues. Dachshunds are another example, with many developing spinal issues over time. The difference, as I said before, is the speed; making a change causes unintended side effects - when you make a huge change quickly, it will produce more side effects than making a small change slowly will.
And… again… as I already said… there should be limitations to prevent rolling out new GMOs without specific testing for safety, both in a lab for potential problems to the organism or - in the event of an agricultural product - its consumers, as well as in the environment as a whole, to determine how it may affect the ecology if and when it is introduced. It may take decades to notice changes if the GMO is released immediately after being developed, but if testing protocols are made and followed, we should have no problem quickly spotting any issues before the organism is rolled out into the world.
Just like newly developed medicines need to go through rigorous testing to prevent things like the Thalidomide scandal that caused an immense amount of birth defects due to lax testing, new GMO’s will need to be tested as well. But, just like you likely understand the benefits of medicine for helping people suffering from various diseases, GMO’s can provide the same level of benefit to people suffering from malnutrition, among a wide range of other positive uses. The key is to study new developments to the point where we can spot and address issues. Throwing away the technology as a whole is not the answer.
The speed is substantial, yes. That was my point. They are essentially the same; one simply uses the organism’s own natural genetic variation mechanisms, while the other introduces new variations manually. Yes, that is a difference that requires separation of the two in certain circumstances, but not when it comes to whether or not we’ve genetically modified all strains of modern agricultural corn, GMO-labeled or not.
Claiming selective breeding is the same as producing a GMO is like saying an eagle and a Boeing 747 are both utilizing mechanisms that allow them to fly, which is true.
Sure, but you could selectively breed rabbits for 1,000,000 years and get a glow in the dark rabbit; GFP is just a protein like any other - if you painstakingly selectively breed for a specific DNA sequence, you’ll eventually get it regardless of your starting genetic pool. Classic selective breeding is a form of genetic modification - modern genetic modification methods are just way faster.
I agree that we don’t currently know enough about genetics to utilize genetic modification without unforeseen side effects, and so there should be limitations on what we’re able to genetically modify until we can show that we understand it well enough to meaningfully minimize potential issues, but those same issues occur with selective breeding - they’re, again, just slower.
I realized that later, yeah. That’s not something that a kid would usually realize is bad on their own, though; if it’s something you and everyone you know has always done, most people wouldn’t think to question it.
For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I’d literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?
At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we’re the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we’re young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.
Because if you look closely, there’s some light blue blobs near the top shaped like the great lakes.
Oh, good to know! I hadn’t made that distinction in my mind, but it makes perfect sense. Thanks for setting me straight!
Why look something up when you already know the answer? So long as you make the average person confident enough in their own ability to discern the truth - which isn’t hard, given most people’s desire to feel smart - you can get them to accept an enormous amount of misinformation at face value.
Would you want to enter a legal battle with Nintendo? This system is broken in a lot of different ways, one of which is the incredible expense of legal fees even if you’re in such an open-and-shut case as someone clearly using your intellectual property without your consent. The one with deeper pockets wins regardless of what the law says.