Six more years of budget cuts for NASA.

Nah, it's still not necessarily transformative. This link discusses the distinction. Also, notice the distinction between satire and parody.

I know all that, but I don't care. I'll want to make the point that it's something I care about.

I don't hate ACs, or look down on then. There are legitimate reasons to post AC (including being too lazy to log in).

I look down on anonymous trolls.

Yeah, there's a line that might be somewhat blurry, but I'll worry about clarifying things when it happens. I don't have to decide everything right now.

However, there are some things that are clearly not fair. Will the trial be secret? Absolutely not fair. Will significant evidence be blocked? Also not fair. So there is some clarity.

No, and get a load of that poor fucker's middle name. If my parents gave me a name like that, I'd set shit on fire, too.

No, more like that.

We hate ACs because AC is mostly used for trolling.

All you need to get a slashdot account is a throwaway email address.

If you have an account, then you become accountable: we can tell whether what you say today matches what you said yesterday. Absent that, we have every reason to believe that you are just some malicious asshole.

...and it's lucky I didn't expect it from you, or I might be upset now.

Trolls are naturally cowards. That's why they hide in anonymity.

You seem to have misunderstood my question. That's ok, it wasn't very clear. Specifically, your assertion, "you are not free to create works using someone else's characters even meeting criteria 1-4 above" sounds like an interesting assertion that I have never heard before.

If you have references for that, it would be very interesting. But I'm pretty sure characters can fall under fair use, just like any other copyright.

Do you have case references for this idea? Because if you did, then your post would actually be interesting.

? You already didn't ignore me, and I didn't even have to stand outside.

For almost a decade, I hadn't had a corrupt Visual Studio project file. Start using nuget, and I did. Nuget adds much more friction that it removes.

Snowden seems like a stand-up guy, Assange seems like a moron and a jerk. In either case, focusing on the person distracts from what matters: the problems in the US government.

I don't know about rioting, but I can tell you that if he returns home, and doesn't receive a fair trial, I will be one of the ones out there protesting.

Probably DirectX and C++. And in fact, Microsoft would most likely buy some other game which is close to what they want, then task the studio with making it into Minecraft 2. There are loads of Minecraft clones out there, the trick is finding one which is both technically competent and developed by someone willing to work for Microsoft and sell them their baby.

The existing mods wouldn't work with the new game, obviously. But many Microsoft games have been modded fairly extensively, and Microsoft has even released the sources to one of their games when they were done with it (Allegiance.)