I don't know maybe just be worried instead about being on the side of justice and what is right and not be so worried if that side has people you don't like on it.
a lot of people determine what is right by who is on that side - the right side is the group that they identify with, and the wrong side is the group they dislike.
And you get the hilarious (if not sad) situations often, where the exact same actions is wrong if committed by one group, and right if done by some other group.
Maybe I dislike a party because they're wrong, not that I think they're wrong becuase I dislike them? I usually don't have any reason to like or dislike a party until I see behaviour.
That's not hilarious or sad. It's valid to oppose your enemies and support your allies. It takes a certain kind of educated liberal bubble to think that is "hilarious"
I'm just so sick of people in our tribe who REFUSE to ever name their enemies. We're doing everything in good faith against people who hate us and want us to die. It's silly, and standing on some principle of equality while we continually lose over and over is sad to watch
It's a matter of integrity. Support or oppose whoever you like, but if you change your principles based on the person in question, then you don't have principles at all.
What happens is that it takes the form of attributing bad things to enemies and good things to allies, such that you are blind to where your allies are not your allies. If your allies are acting opposed to your interests but you like them because they signal to you as an in group, then you are being fooled by them. Thus, it is good to actually evaluate things on their merits once in a while.
The "blind" ones are people like you! doing everything in good faith against people who aren't and fundamentally oppose you and your existence. Foolish!
Sitting down at a table to play poker and refusing to acknowledge the rest of the players are trying to take your money isn't "avoiding cynicism" it's just being a mark
But approaching every social interaction as a zero-sum game where you are competing with others is not only cynical but exhausting and makes one unbearable to be around. If you want to do that, then I guess you will be in good company hanging out with the bad-faith liars you feel are worth destroying your own values to combat.
doesn't that undermine the entire reason to have laws? if they are really just excuse to punish our enemies and reward our friends, why even bother with the pretense of a trial?
It leads to keeping the bad people on your "side" just because they share some of the values
> It takes a certain kind of educated liberal bubble to think that is "hilarious"
No, the hilarious part is that the "educated liberal bubble" will do exactly that thing, and then wonder why everyone else is seeing them as crazies; because they'd rather side with bad actors on their side purely because other side is attacking them, no matter the reason.
And of course, not only them. It's natural human herd behavior. And it leads to absolutely terrible end results
The crime is the crime. No matter the leaning of the criminal
Wow you got my demographics and political opinions wrong entirely! We almost certainly vote for the same people. I'm just so sick of people in our tribe who REFUSE to ever name their enemies. We're doing everything in good faith against people who hate us and want us to die. It's silly, and standing on some principles while we continually lose over and over is sad to watch
Presumably the parent’s objection to ISPs and copyright cartels is precisely that they are so frequently (and to such a large degree) unjust. FWIW, I don’t think the parent’s objection was subtle about that point, I’m frankly not sure how it was overlooked.
Frankly, I don't see how you can't parse that their point, as written, is "I'm on the side of bad guy A because bad guy B is worse than bad guy A" which is completely orthogonal to "A is in the right and B is in the wrong".
If you look at the whole scenario, this will mean that Cox won't pass $1 billion dollars of punitive fines off to their customers, because, after all, the customers generate the money.
In reality, this would have made their innocent customers pay for the crimes of their guilty customers and made both Sony, and in the long run, Cox richer, because once paying an extra $5/month becomes normalized, then there's no way they're going to go back down in price just because the fine is paid off, any more than the government will ever stop charging tolls on a toll bridge that was paid for by tolls no matter how many times the cost of the toll bridge is paid off.
I said "allow it". It was mainly about my feelings. I can feel what I want. It also just so happens that Cox was in the right and Sony Music was in the wrong.
It really has nothing to do with Sony as such though. This is a common finding; 9:0 is also a clear message. If service providers are held accountable then arms producers also have to be held accountable. Or politicians who drive up prices via racket scheme such as a certain guy using orange powder on his wrinkly face. Someone is stealing money from stock exchange - that is also becoming increasingly clear from the trading pattern. Krugman pointed this out not long ago, without naming anyone specifically but I guess we can kind of infer who was meant.
It's always seemed fundamentally flawed to me that the exchange laws are designed to prevent people benefitting from insider information but then the entire purpose of the stock exchange is to make money by leveraging information asymmetry to make choices other rational actors wouldn't make because you have more knowledge or data than they do.
It's a very "leverage your info to make money no wait not like that" scheme. I think I just don't understand what the difference is between an insider who sits on a board (illegal) or has a nephew who's an SVP at the company (illegal) and a politician setting the laws that shape the whole industry (legal apparently?) or gets tips from same (legal apparently?).
> I think I just don't understand what the difference is between an insider who sits on a board (illegal) or has a nephew who's an SVP at the company (illegal) and a politician setting the laws that shape the whole industry (legal apparently?) or gets tips from same (legal apparently?).
This example is just standard issue corruption. Politician gets to exempt themselves, so they do.
> It's always seemed fundamentally flawed to me that the exchange laws are designed to prevent people benefitting from insider information but then the entire purpose of the stock exchange is to make money by leveraging information asymmetry to make choices other rational actors wouldn't make because you have more knowledge or data than they do.
Insider trading laws are designed to prevent people that can affect business outcomes from benefiting by affecting those outcomes. For example, a senior executive screwing up a crucial delivery to gain money from short positions.
The idea is society benefits from the assumption that all executives are ideally holding long positions on their business.
The problem with insider trading is that incentivises people with power to do unlikely things with that power because private knowledge of the upcoming unlikely event is unusually profitable, especially if it is destructive. This ship may have sailed.
That's why i would rather see insider trading made legal, but transparent.
Instead of quarterly filings, if you are considered an insider (or is affiliated with one), you are required to have your trades be instantly reported and be public the nanosecond you make them. You are allowed to make use of the insider info, as long as you adhere to these transparency measures.
> ...you are required to have your trades be instantly reported and be public the nanosecond you make them.
That doesn't do anything at all to remedy the situation. Better would be to require trades by insiders (and the particulars of those trades) to be locked in and publicly announced at least seven calendar days in advance. You need not announce the reason for the trade, but you must announce the amount of whatever it is you're selling and/or buying and the date at which the transaction will happen.
Yes, I'm aware of the whole "scheduled stock sale" thing that folks at a certain level have to do when trading in the stock & etc of the company they work for. IMO, that should be mandatory for all employees and their families.
It makes more sense when you realize that insider trading laws came after it was a problem, not before.
Before the insider trading laws, the stock market was much more volatile and was more akin to gambling for people out of the know. For people in the know, it was an easy way to extract wealth from those on the outside just looking at the numbers and publicly available information.
I don’t think the American right wing has any concerns about being perceived as inconsistent. They will reverse their positions overnight if it suits them, as they have illustrated every week for since the start of 2025 (most recently “no new wars / america first” to cheerleading the war in iran.
Cox cable pays legislators to limit people’s access to wired broadband internet service at their home (by banning government internet utilities), allowing them to charge higher prices due to having a monopoly. And they provide substandard asymmetric broadband because their customers have no choice.
Proof: compare the quality and price of their service in neighborhoods with access to fiber to the home as opposed to just having access to Cox via coaxial cable.
I realize I'm in the minority but I side with whomever I think is right under the law, regardless of my (sometimes extreme) feelings about the parties and even about the law.
A case only reaches the Supreme Court if there is confusion over who is right under the law. The Supreme Court decision itself is not a definitive guide to which side is right under the law, as they’ve overturned themselves multiple times. So how do you decide which party to side with?
Your view on the law seems a bit alien to me. My opinions on what the rules of the law should roughly look like, are largely independent of who specifically is involved in a legal dispute. Sure I guess if Hitler was being sued and the only way to stop him was this lawsuit by Sony, I would probably concede that on balance it's better to have a slightly worse legal standard around copyright. Otherwise, I think having a law that best reflects my moral views and creates the best incentives for society in general, far outweighs how i feel about the plaintiffs.
As for how I arrive on my views, it's obviously not an entirely rational process, but the rules you get from viewing property rights and self-ownership as fundamental seem to lead to the most preferable outcomes to me. If I were forced to adopt a more deontological philosophy, it's also the one that has the fewest obviously absurd conclusions, though not entirely. From this it's, in my opinion, pretty obvious to be skeptical of copyright law more generally (Ayn Rand would disagree) and therefore I welcome any precedent that weakens it.
I just told you: I side with whomever I think is right under the law.
And your first sentence is not remotely true--or rather, it is quite conceptually confused. Whose "confusion" are you talking about? Not mine, generally. There are of course disagreements about which side is right under the law, but often those disagreements are a result of bad faith--take just about every case Trump has ever appealed up to the SCOTUS. And many of the decisions made by the current crop of right wing ideologues on the Court are made in bad faith, especially Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch, in that order of corruption. Many of the "disagreements" are based on bogus "textualism" and "originalism" frameworks that are applied completely ad hoc and hypocritically and were invented by conservatives solely in order to provide them with a basis for making rulings based on their ideology (the historical record is quite clear on this).
Anyway, the point was that I decide based on my view of the law, not who the parties are. Since you seem to completely miss the point, have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle, I won't comment further.
Right. The law is an objective concept, so clear that there can be no confusion, and even apparent disagreement with your objective perception is really just people lying. I’m not missing your point, you’re just disagreeing with mine.
So many strawmen. The only lies here are about what I said.
> The law is an objective concept
I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.
> so clear that there can be no confusion
I didn't say that or anything like it and I don't believe it.
> and even apparent disagreement with your objective perception is really just people lying.
I didn't say that or anything like it, said nothing about having "objective perception", and said nothing about disagreement with this nonexistent thing, and said nothing about anyone lying.
I made no claim to objectivity, said nothing about clarity of law, or anything else that you're dwelling on here, only that I make decisions based on my own understanding--my phrase was "I think". And yes, you did miss or ignore my point and continue to ignore it while inventing supposed points of mine that have nothing to do with me (further instances of
"have poor reading comprehension, and are just adding muddle"). My only point was that who I side with isn't based on what I think of the parties involved.
And what point of yours am I disagreeing with? You said
> A case only reaches the Supreme Court if there is confusion over who is right under the law.
This is factually false, as I and others pointed out. This is all I disagreed with. It's also not relevant to what I had written ... I'll stipulate it to be true if that helps. It's certainly true if "only" is replaced with "sometimes". As I noted, there is typically disagreement about who is right under the law, but "confusion" need not be present. Sometimes SCOTUS--especially this SCOTUS--invites cases from parties they are ideologically aligned with just so they can reinterpret the law to agree with their preferences. Of course, the other party normally disagrees, but even that doesn't always hold, especially with this administration, which is happy to reverse cases brought by their predecessors.
> The Supreme Court decision itself is not a definitive guide to which side is right under the law, as they’ve overturned themselves multiple times.
I agree with the basic point (while not technically accurate ... due to Marbury v Madison, the law is what the SCOTUS says it is), but it's not relevant to anything I said.
> So how do you decide which party to side with?
As I told you: based on what I think. Can I be wrong about the law? Of course. But again, my fallibility and the court's fallibility and whether my thinking aligns with the thinking of the court etc. ad nauseam is not what I was talking about ... what I was talking about was considering the law rather than who the parties were. That's it; that's all. And I made this crystal clear. Whoever it is you think you're disagreeing with, it's not me. You want to have an argument about whether one can make objective decisions about the law, but I never claimed any such ability. All I said is that I side with who ==> I <== think (a fallible process, certainly) is right under the law, NOT WHAT I THINK OF THE PARTIES--not which party I think is more evil, which was the conversation I responded to. That was it---a point about my own behavior. That's all.
JFC ... over and out forever. (If I accidentally see this thread again I shall avert my eyes.)
Yup. The Facebook brand was long dead, and Meta is a good tech name even outside of AR/VR or metaverse. The fact that no one calls the company Facebook anymore shows that the rebrand was successful.
It's very different though. Alphabet was created more for financial book keeping. Google apps have no Alphabet branding. On the other hand, Meta was created because the Facebook brand was down in the rabbit hole, almost every product of it has the Meta branding prominently displayed.
Anecdotal but my parents know about Meta, because they use FB/Messenger daily. They have no idea what Alphabet is.
I’ve heard MANGA suggested as the acronym with Facebook’s new name. Though maybe it should be MAAAN, said in a tone of exasperation at tech company activities
Is it really? Instagram, arguably the most popular (or maybe just behind TikTok, I'm not sure) social network currently, has successfully disengaged from the tainted Facebook name entirely. It may seem like a small thing but I do think that has a deep impact on the average person's perception of the service. Especially in the younger generation, the Facebook name has a definite "ick" to it (is that what the kids say these days?), even if it's just because it's the "boomer social network" and not because of the myriad privacy concerns associated with it.
The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake.
Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).
And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.
> I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.
I'd personally say the EGA portraits look far more uncanny, resembling early CGI, while the VGA version looks like a hand-drawn book illustration. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181 Still, opinions can differ.
> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT
Great video. I think both ega and vga look good, depending on the scene (I prefer ega backgrounds but vga close up).
The music however, floppy is best and the cd version is the worst. I played with the internal speaker myself. The cd music sounds off to me, but cannot pinpoint why exactly.
Cga seems to be 1-to-1 conversion of ega. It only looks bad because of the strong cyan and magenta. But thats a hardware limitation not an artistic choice.
I'm not sure. The dithering is obviously different, not only harsher but in different places in many scenes. Also, the splash screen doesn't have scrolling clouds in the CGA version. And there are other subtle changes.
Call me weird but there's a certain charm to the CGA version, though it's obviously the worst of them. My favorite is the EGA version.
This comparison is a bit misleading, as you are not watching the game full screen, but at 1/4 screen size with video compression artifacts. This helps the EGA dithering tremendously.
In reality, dithering can only help you so much, when you have gigantic pixels and 16 colors... It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
Old CRTs helped blur the image. For that matter, C64 games on TV screens (which is how most people watched them, even though there existed dedicated Commodore monitors) blurred the image so much, the games barely resembled what you can see now with an emulator and a modern screen. Graphics were designed with this in mind.
> It is a remarkable feat what they achieved despite the limits of EGA, but it can't really compare to VGA.
In many cases, especially in the early days, artists didn't know what to do with so many colors, and produced inferior versions. Loom is a good example. The conclusion is that it's less about hardware capabilities and more about artistry, and technical limitations often force artists to be ingenious.
Well yeah, the good old CRT monitors (the worse, the better in this case) also helped with the EGA dithering, while viewing the EGA graphics fullscreen on an 1080p LCD display, you'll have ~30 pixels for each original EGA pixel.
Amiga versions seem the best of all the Lucasarts adventures, music is just much richer and although Monkey Island and Loom are done in the reduced color palette so look more stylistic I think they use a few more colors or better shades of colors than the harsh looking EGA set.
I won't go over the details, but if you look at the website mentioned in the other thread from 2021, you'll see I'm not being hyperbolic.
EGA Loom is a work of art. VGA Loom misread the style and completely obliterated it, in its eagerness to deploy that early VGA "pillow shadow" style so typical of games of that era. (I love the term "pillow shadow", so apt now that I've learned it!).
Every nightly blue gone, light sources broken, every shadow gone, ominous deep-black tree shadows converted into gray/brownish things, etc.
To be clear, I think this is less a limitation of VGA and more a case of the conversion done lazily and/or by an inferior artist.
I must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia.
Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly on.
I even bought the fake retroremake Eternal Castle, which is a loving homage to that era.
I for one prefer the Amiga version, because that's what I played back in the day. The Amiga supported 32 colors (without tricks like EHB and HAM) in 320x200/240 mode, so only twice as much as EGA, but they could be picked freely from a palette of 4096 colors, so IMHO it looked much better than the EGA version with its fixed 16 colors. But if you look at screenshots (https://scummbar.com/game/the-secret-of-monkey-island/versio...) it's obvious that they really put in a lot of work, with custom assets which fully used the capabilities of the various platforms. Of course, the higher the limitations, the more artistry was needed to make it look reasonably good, but I don't think that should be held against the "higher-color" versions...
I was going to say this. I never liked the 256-color VGA game (and now comparing, it does look bland) but Amiga struck the best, IMHO, balance between good hand-crafted pixel art but with realistic enough colors to give sufficient depth and athmosphere in the scene.
For a game like that, while I agree with the Amiga version looks good, frankly the Amiga port still feels like a good example of why there were lots of complaints about "lazy" ports for the Amiga that didn't take proper advantage of what it could do.
For a relatively static display like that EHB would've not been a problem, and the amount of gradual changes would've made it easy to exploit in the palette. Using the copper to modify the palette a few places would've also allowed for more, and switching to 640x200 below the graphics to make the text smoother would've been outright trivial. Even HAM might've been reasonably feasible.
Watching this, neither version seem as good as I remember the Amiga version looking, which was still dithered but looked better than the EGA version. Obviously hard to say without a direct video comparison.
Did you play the Talos Principle Reawakened? They took a great performing game made with their own engine, re-released it with UE5, and now it performs like doggy doodoo.
I did. Was kind of underwhelmed by the graphics too. Although that may be in line with a remake. Ie, I gave it benefit of the doubt since I don't know how much effort they put into it beyond "making it work".
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