Blizzard IP started off from failing to acquire a license with Games Workshop, and did infringement-avoiding changes to release their own games. StarCraft is a subset of Warhammer 40k, which is an expansion of influences from Starship Troopers.
Edit: The IP story seems unsubstantiated (albeit likely), but regardless the similarities between terrans/empire, zerg/tyranid, protoss/tau, etc are certainly there.
I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.
Maybe I misunderstood something at the time, but the mga X11 driver was weird. My understanding, at least at the time, is that it is/was possible to provide an X11 driver that would work regardless of the underlying operating system, providing features such as dual-head support.
This feels intuitively wrong to me now and I doubt that's how it worked. In any case I dutifully copies the Matrox provided X11 driver to OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.
Looking at a few old mailinglists agrees with you. Apparently the mga_drv and mga_hal_drv could just be copied to any system running XFree86, at least Linux and the BSDs, and would let you utilize dual-head support.
Earlier this year, a few weeks before the price hike, I bought an MacBook Air M5, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Long battery life and silent. The last part is important for me. I've gotten so fed up over the years by Wintel (Windows/Intel) machines where the fans are always running, even when idle.
My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things.
Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.
Let us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.
All the books being destroyed are modern enough to have deposited copies, or they wouldn't be still under copyright. The destruction is happening to satisfy judges that no illegal copying is happening, only a transformation of medium.
> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things
This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?
Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?
Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.
It is a shit idea. But that's copyright law for you - if you want to digitise the work for yourself, you according to latest precedents have to destroy the copy you digitised ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
I don't blame the companies for either wanting digitised works, nor following the law. I blame the absurd court ruling, and I blame the publishers for not having digitised the old works themselves, in which case they could just sell e-books to the labs... They are after all the only ones who can legally do it non-destructively.
But why do they have to do this at all? If it's a shit idea, and you cannot do something without negative side-effects of it, can't you just not do it? Why these companies absolutely have to do this?
Maybe it's as simple as for the people making the boxes, it didn't contain Tetris from the start. And when they got the license, in their head, it now did have Tetris.
Nope, not a reference! Just being silly and pretending that the sticker is accurate because at some point before the box was packed, it did not contain Tetris (or any other games), and then once it got packed, only then did it contain Tetris. Technically speaking, the contents of almost any box can be accurately labeled "now contains X!" because few boxes are constructed with their contents in them; stuff gets added to them after, which means at some point they did not contain whatever they're holding.
It's a long time since I used Facebook on a regular basis, but Instagram is a weak spot where I have had to set the phone to give me just 10 minutes per day, then shut it off. Now I can go days without opening the app, and I usually manage to exit before the time is up.
I can highly recommend the book "Carless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams if you want to know just how bad it really is/was. Just remember that this is just one side of the story. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (no longer at Meta) probably have a different story.
> Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg (no longer at Meta) probably have a different story.
Safe to assume anything Zuckberg says in relation to his actions being positive are either an outright lie or so inflated by his arrogance, greed and ego that it's completely unreliable information (still a lie)
Zuck has his pipes and wires hooked up to a bullshit image management unit. I'm surprised there's not some mini operator inside him punching in FWD 10, LEFT 90, FWD 5.
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