Here is the fundamental issue:

People for the most part value security and community far more than privacy.

Even in old days - most people lived in a village with zero privacy than lived out in the wilderness all alone.

People passed the income tax which gave far more information to the government than other ways of taxation.

What is the downside to limiting all movie and software copyrights to 10 years?

Source code and materials etc can remain trade secrets if desired?

And all IP with a movie as well - including characters. This would stop a studio from forever milking the same piece of IP forever.

No, the opposite. To be protected by copyright, sources must be uploaded to a Library of Software.

Downside: Movies will be made to not last; Software will be made to be incompatible with everything on a 10-year timeframe; and the country who enabled this open mindset will displease its copyright owners who will move to the other countries.

One downside is it would motivate companies to get intellectual property registered under a trademark with indefinite protection rather than copyright. Even with our current lifetime + 70 year protection we have companies like Disney getting characters registered as a trademark.

That is called being on the other side of an airtight hatch (h/t Raymond Chen)

The US has troops, tanks, aircraft, even nuclear weapons stationed in German.

Sovereignty vis-a-vis the United States is not something on the table.

I think we can go further.

Human attention is the determinant of monetary value.

Gold is expensive because it takes a lot of human attention to find and refine it.

Food became cheaper when it required less human attention to make it.

There aren’t that many places out of America’s orbit where you would want to live.

If by failure you mean fascist and authoritarian, America could still reach you.

Agreed, the problem is that in many scenarios where the US becomes a failed state.. you probably want to be IN the US rather than living under our security umbrella (Canada/Europe/Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Australia). Or worse, in a nation we might end up in a shooting war with (Russia/China).

Either enemies are going to make moves in our absence, or we are going to pray upon former allies (next orange man takes his trade wars kinetic).

So I'd rather still be in the exponentially larger (population & land) isolated continental power surrounded mostly by water and smaller states.

> still reach you

Yeah but the effort just went up 10x

Besides I don’t think they are moving to resist the fascism. It’s to seek an alternative and carry on living.

To me VB 6 was the height of RAD IDEs

You could throw together a CRUD app in under an hour interactively.

VB was the GUI equivalent of Dataflex - you could design the screen and it would automagically create the data structures under it. I also remember, from the same period, Mantis (from Cincom Systems) that did the same for 3270 terminals and IBM mainframes.

I often say Deteflex is Ruby on Rails for the VT100.

I would agree the anti-monopoly action had far more to do with that.

Basically, if you you think you can leverage your R&D into maintaining your monopoly and extending it to other areas it makes sense if for nothing else to keep the smart people who might otherwise disrupt your monopoly connected to you.

But if you are going to get broken up, just take as much short term profits as soon as you can

Anybody remember the heartbeat scanner in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six?

Yep. But my first thought on usage was "man this will make detecting home occupancy simpler" (till it turns out you can't distinguish from pets I suppose).

Pet heart-rates probably fairly different and “quieter”.

Only if they are small pets. A Mastiff for example is going to have a heart rate extremely similar to a human.

After reading this, I don’t feel bad about using AI to generate art anymore.

The main problem is that a complex spreadsheet is just code. Its a bundle of logic and data. That's code.

If the business stakeholders can edit said spreadsheet, they can code. Not well probably, but they can.

So, theoretically, they should be able to open a python script or whatever and hack away. A lot of calculations are actually much easier and straightforward in a real language as opposed to Excel.

But they won't, partially because developers would never let them.

> even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders

You can do that in a spreadsheet-database hybrid such as Airtable.