Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

The advertising clause wasn't "non-free" as much as a practical problem that was incompatible with the GPL's ban on additional restrictions. It was largely removed when much popular software switched from the 4-clause original BSD license to the 3-clause or 2-clause version.

The appropriate copyright notice clause remained in 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. This clause is also present in GPLv2 and GPLv3.

In the case of BitTorrent, even the fastest Internet connection won't get you a lot of successful peer connections if your ISP blocks all inbound TCP connections.

Such a new ecosystem already has grown, as I understand it. It's called getting Netflix, HBO Max, Paramount+, Disney+/Hulu, Peacock, Prime Video, or Apple TV to accept your pitch and fund it. These take the place of cable television channels in the pre-broadband economy. And there are still a lot more pilot screenplays than budget to produce all of them.

With the decline of third places, particularly since the pandemic and as online shopping has taken over the functions of malls, how do people usually meet people in 2026?

If only I could get my home ISP to add IPv6...

Would it benefit the public to completely do away with the other 1%? How could something like The Amazing Digital Circus have been produced purely on a hobby budget?

How does the producer of a video go about seeding "word of mouth" and getting onto "curated lists"?

Yes, by excluding a lot of viewers who lack an IP address that can accept inbound TCP connections, unless I'm missing something. It also excludes viewers who have an iPhone or iPad and don't have a Mac with which to build and ad-hoc sign an app because Apple has reportedly banned BitTorrent clients from the App Store.

And how might that have been? I might be misremembering, but this was my recollection:

1. Movie studios and TV channels funded production of videos to be viewed by the public. Very few pitches got funded.
2. Movie studios promoted upcoming and newly released movies through television advertising, and TV channels promoted shows to the channel's own viewers.
3. Movies were paywalled, and TV was ad-supported (in the case of broadcast) or behind the combination of ads and a paywall (in the case of cable).

Also, before YouTube, most end-user devices on the Internet had an IP address, even if dynamic, which could accept incoming connections. Nowadays, a lot of Internet subscribers' devices are behind network address translation (NAT), and if you share your IP address with the whole neighborhood, the ISP is unlikely to forward a port to your device.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Under your proposal:
1. How would the producer of a video cover the cost of producing the video before it even reaches BitTorrent?
2. How would a viewer learn of a video that they are likely to enjoy?
3. How would the system work around users who "leech", or view the video without contributing to its decentralized hosting?

The copyright statute of Slashdot's home country defines a "copy" as a physical object in which a work is embodied, such as a book, ROM cartridge, or optical disc. The statutory license associated with ownership of a copy of a computer program includes making intermediate copies "as an essential step" in the use of the program. Title 17, United States Code, section 117. Historically, console makers and game publishers have lacked power to revoke this license with respect to a particular copy of a game that isn't online-only. With the end of video game distribution on optical disc, this license becomes revocable, and that's the problem.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

I'll have to disagree with you on that. What matters for reproducible builds is that the person performing the build has power to set the seed.

Not once the console maker shuts down the platform's reactivation servers.

Or say the publisher wants to publish a multiplayer game where players 2 through 4 can download a limited-functionality version of the game without charge so long as player 1 is a paying licensee and on their mutual contacts list. This resembles the model used by StarCraft spawned installations, single-Pak multiplayer on Game Boy Advance, and DS Download Play on Nintendo DS. I don't think all consoles support this sort of game sharing.

Correct. The digital restrictions management regime on paid downloads from PlayStation Store doesn't grant rights to a licensee that are equivalent to those that the law reserves for the owner of a copy. The complaint, as I understand it, is that the required notice of inequivalence is not conspicuous enough.

The benefits are not the same if the publisher or the platform gatekeeper retains the ability to remotely disable licensed software.

Or, in the case of certain failure modes of PlayStation Store (such as end of support for a particular platform), the ability to restore your license to replacement hardware.

I never heard of that being the case in the United States, where the lawsuit described in the featured article was filed.