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You may have noticed I don't care how it got there, only why they are acting now the way they are.
Many companies have this immune system response that if something happens that shouldn't have, they will at the same time punish someone internally, and defend themselves externally claiming everything is proper.
They are taking a calculated risk knowing that very few GPL lawsuits actually went to court. They know it takes money to fight a legal battle and hope the opposing side doesn't have it, or will run out of it before reaching a final verdict. And finally, from the fact that they've been at this since 2012 - they probably think that it's a fairly cost-efficient way to buy more time and make business.
To donate funds to Conservancy GPL compliance efforts see here:
It's free, but you are only allowed to distribute through Steam (meaning Valve gets 30-40% of your revenue). For a game that was going to sell mostly through Steam *anyway*, it means fewer parties picking at your revenue, but if you somehow weren't using Steam, it represents a big jump from UE4's 5% royalty.
Source 2 is 'free'..... so long as you ONLY make your content available through Steam. For a lot of developers, this is just accepted, but some games aren't on Steam.
So let's say you use UE4 and don't sell through steam. They get 5% royalties. Or Unity, where you pay a flat fee for the game engine.
If you use Source 2 for 'free', the only way to sell it is through Steam, which gets *30-40%* royalties. Source 2 isn't free, it's a hook to try to get more lock-in to keep Steam as the premiere distribution platform.
Nuclear is expensive. http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Leve... Look at page 11.
Page 11 is talking about capital cost. The figure for nuclear is $7,591/kW, which is a lot more than some (although not the highest). But how does that work out over the lifetime of the plant? Assuming 100% uptime, that's 8,760kWh in the first year, so that's less than $0.90/kWh. If the plant is operating for 20 years, then that's around 4/kWh. Most nuclear plants are built with a 40-60 year expected lifespan, which makes the capital cost negligible over the lifetime of the plant.
The correct page to look at is Page 2, which gives the unsubsidised cost of electricity from all of the generating mechanisms. Nuclear is $124/MWh - that's lower than all of the other fuel sources in their 'conventional' bucket that have a little representative diamond listed (coal doesn't, and has a range that extends both above and below nuclear). Only Gas Combined Cycle is cheaper on average, and that's only when excluding most of the costs. Only utility-scale PV comes out cheaper overall, and you also need to add in storage costs if you want to use PV for a significant amount of grid supply.
You're better off building a containment wall against flooding and keeping the reactor not too far above the water level.
That's fine too. The problem is building neither. The other problem is not fixing the design that was known to cause hydrogen build-up and explosions that breach containment in any problem scenario.
The only way you can have losses that exceed your net-worth is if someone has given you a huge amount of money that they really shouldn't. Typically, it means the banks gave these guys credit beyond even the most loose definition of sanity.
More and more I'm thinking that the fantasy worlds we live in when we play roleplaying or computer games are much closer to reality than the fantasy world of the financial industry.
will run on [...] phones and provide an experience very much like the desktop. [...] repeatedly failed to take the mobile space [...]"
Yeah, I wonder if these two could be in any way related...
MS is a design and UI fiasco and always has been. The only reason few people realize how unusable the crap is, is that we are so used to it that we don't notice anymore - until the next major update, or if you don't use it daily and then suddenly sit in front of it and wonder who the fuck came up with this stupidity.
And everyone who knows anything at all about mobile devices and usability knows that nobody on the planet wants a windows desktop experience on their smartphone. People want a smartphone experience on their smartphone, what's so difficult to understand about that?
Oh, speaking of that: People also don't want a mobile experience on their desktop. They want a desktop experience on their desktop, that's not so difficult, either.
Then you fall into the second category. Or you're just ignorant.
Well, I'm a copyright lawyer, so I doubt I'm "completely and totally ignorant of the law." Have you considered the possibility that your analysis is wrong?
Since we're talking about works that haven't been around long enough to have their copyrights expire, that's totally irrelevant.
Just thought I'd mention it, since you did make a rather broad statement suggesting that works cannot enter the public domain unless deliberately placed there by the copyright holder. While copyright holders can put works into the public domain, it's not true that that is the only way for works to enter the public domain.
"Um, no. That would not be the scenes a faire doctrine."
The scenes a faire doctrine, which I don't have to google for, thanks, permits people to copy without fear of infringement, stock elements from works, which are typical, if not indispensible, for works that have a particular setting, genre, theme, etc.
In this case, where you have a show about teenagers fighting monsters with martial arts and giant robots, it would not infringe if you had a five person team, each member of which had personalities as described above, and where the members of the team were color-coded. It's simply expected of the genre, and therefore fair game, even if you copied it from another copyrighted work.
Now if the specific thing you copied was a very detailed example, and you kept all the details, you might then have a problem. So it depends on how much Power Rangers embellished on this standard device, if they did, and if so, how much of that embellishment, if any, was used in this case.
If you disagree as to my explanation, please feel free to actually say what you think the scenes a faire doctrine is.
I didn't say Disney's Peter Pan. I was talking about JM Barrie's Peter Pan, which Disney's Peter Pan is based on.
A new version of Peter Pan, based on Barrie's, could still tarnish the character well enough (if done right, and if widely published) so as to harm Disney's Peter Pan merely by association. But it would be lawful to do this. Disney's copyright on their version of Peter Pan does not extend to stopping other people from making their own derivatives of Barrie's work, even if they're very unwholesome derivatives.
"Wannabe" is also a negative term that connotes one lacks the ability. It sounds pretty contemptuous! Maybe not what you meant, but that's how I interpreted it as well.
Build a system that even a fool can use and only a fool will want to use it.
