Maybe they like this particular game? I'd love the chance to play City of Heroes or Earth&Beyond again. I wouldn't mind paying for that opportunity, either.

Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore.

Dictating what other people have to consider "fun" is ridiculous. This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.

They could keep a server running. Or charge for the server module. Their choice.

That's bullshit. The code belongs to the copyright holder to do as he/she sees fit during the copyrighted phase, they should not lose it.

Sorry, copyright law was supposed to beneficial for both the public (which profits through the promotion of, er, the sciences and useful arts) and the creator of the work (who has an easier time monetizing it). Using copyright to force the public to stop using the old stuff and spend money on the new stuff is flat-out abuse of copyright law and should not fall under its protections.

The 1700's are about a few thousand years after authors started producing works in writing, and about a really, really long time after the first cave paintings (which, under todays copyright laws, would absolutely qualify as protected works). So, copyright laws are a recent phenomenon compared to the type of activity they apply to.

... printing privileges date back to the 1400's in Venice.

Printing privileges were more about using a certain technology and less about the intellectual property of the produced works. Copying a work by hand wasn't covered by printing privileges.

That's roughly 500 years of precedent.

Really short when compared to more mature laws, e.g. laws against theft and murder. Those have been around for thousands of years. Or are you somehow saying that laws more recent than that lack validity?

They lack maturity. And, had such laws been in place during the time of the Roman Empire, we'd still be stuck in the Dark Ages. That's obviously not the case for laws against theft and murder.

This must be from an American perspective. The history of copyright law is, compared to other types of law, so short that it really doesn't have much history.

If copyright laws had history, we would have lost a lot more works of authors from antiquitity to, say, Mozart, than we actually did. Had the concept of copyright existed 2000 years ago, building up culture (for lack of a better word) would have been impossible.

Also, copyright laws should promote the sciences and useful arts, at least that's how it's worded in the US. Using them to deprive the public of (commercial or noncommercial) access to the work is against the spirit of copyright law.

Photon. Time is nonexistent.

Or $TIMELESS_DEITY. Time exists, but has about as much meaning as the time index of a video. It makes more sense to watch everything in proper order, but you're free to watch the thing in reverse if you like.

But time-ordered sequences of events are only possible after t=0.

Imagine you're a CPU and your perception of time is in clock cycles. Would you be able to give an ordered sequence of events of all the things that happen before your clock generator starts, e.g. voltage ramp-ups, etc?

Considering that entropy might decrease leads to some fairly strange scenarios, e.g.:

• Time travel. Not in the usual sense, but the state of the universe becoming identical (with exceptions) to an earlier state. For anyone but an outside observer (another spooky concept) or someone who is, in fact, different in both points in time, the effect would look like time travel.
• There could be multiple "incarnation" of one and the same person at various points in time, maybe billions or even trillions of years apart. In fact, there might be a version of you that remembers reading this paragraph, at a time where slashdot did not or will not exist. Mind-boggling? Yep.
• On the other hand, there would be nothing that has a lasting effect, as negative delta-S allows complete reversal of any process.

And if time is mentioned, it's always interesting to ask "in what frame of reference"?

If there are any photons left over from shortly after the big bang, they would state that the universe just began seconds ago.

I wanted to ask the same question, but then I remembered asymptotic functions. Going back in time, entropy would decrease, but the rate this decrease could become smaller smaller as one regards points that are farther back in time.

However, this would imply that for most of the previous eternity, the universe wasn't doing all that much.

tl;dr: The second law requires delta-S to be positive, but it can be arbitrarily small.

I'm aware of that. I'm just wondering why a damaged nuclear reactor is considered a smaller problem. It's probably a short-term vs. long-term thing, and long-term doesn't really matter.

If you want railguns and lasers, you'll still have to carry the energy required to fire them aboard the ship.

For chemical combustion, maybe. I was talking about nuclear fusion. Any civilization capable of interplanetary or even interstellar travel has probably already developed the technology to harness artificial nuclear fusion as an energy source.

So, terraforming a Neptune-like world would merely be a matter of building enough reactors and waiting long enough.

Of course, if we start receiving Radio Alpha Centauri, things might be less indifferent.