I know HN comments are generally terrible now, but endorsing theft is a new low.

Words mean things.

If we're going to be super pedantic about exactly what words mean, then a DVD is digital but it's not "digital only". Every single owner has a physical disc with the movie on it. Digital only ownership is a few bytes abstracted into some database somewhere, and the movie files themselves are also very loosely correlated with hardware.

> a DVD is digital but it's not "digital only". Every single owner has a physical disc with the movie on it.

That satisfies the definition of "digital only" - every person who has the movie (conceptually speaking) has a digital version of it. This holds true as long as no one tried to print the movie onto paper as an analog image, or export it to VHS or something like that.

Note that digital does not contrast with physical. A DVD is a physical object that holds digital data. A sequence of pulses on an Ethernet cable conveys digital information via waves of electromagnetic energy.

> Digital only ownership is a few bytes abstracted into some database somewhere

And somebody still ultimately has to store at least one copy of the movie on a physical medium somewhere.

> Digital only ownership

I think we can all agree that if you own some coins/tokens/NFTs on Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc., that is a very pure form of digital-only ownership. There is no intuitive physical object that corresponds to the ownership of a digital token.

Yet, that blockchain database is publicly available and mirrored millions of times; it is not locked up behind a single company. This differs from what you were trying to say, where I interpret your notion of "digital-only" to mean that "the movie studio hosts the file on its server and streams it to you on demand, but you can never download a copy of the movie to keep for yourself".

Ultimately, "digital" just means that the information you wanted is a finite sequence of 0s and 1s, as opposed to some analog signal with infinite variation. "Digital" says nothing about who owns it, how many copies exist, how it is delivered, etc.

> That satisfies the definition of "digital only" - every person who has the movie (conceptually speaking) has a digital version of it. This holds true as long as no one tried to print the movie onto paper as an analog image, or export it to VHS or something like that.

The term "digital only" says nothing about being digital versus analog in particular.

> Note that digital does not contrast with physical.

Sure it can.

> I think we can all agree that if you own some coins/tokens/NFTs on Bitcoin/Ethereum/etc., that is a very pure form of digital-only ownership. There is no intuitive physical object that corresponds to the ownership of a digital token.

> Yet, that blockchain database is publicly available and mirrored millions of times; it is not locked up behind a single company. This differs from what you were trying to say, where I interpret your notion of "digital-only" to mean that "the movie studio hosts the file on its server and streams it to you on demand, but you can never download a copy of the movie to keep for yourself".

It's not that the lockup is a fundamental part, but in the streaming case it helps enforce the idea that the movie you get is never properly embodied and only exists in an abstract data pool.

A blockchain has lots of replicas but they're all still abstract database entries. Even a "physical bitcoin" is just the keys and not the entries.

> Ultimately, "digital" just means that the information you wanted is a finite sequence of 0s and 1s, as opposed to some analog signal with infinite variation. "Digital" says nothing about who owns it, how many copies exist, how it is delivered, etc.

I think other uses make sense and fit this context.

And then 4000 years later people start saying your name again, and find out what a bad copper merchant you were.

I collect Ea-nasir memes as a form of proxy revenge for his deceived customers.

Yeah, he became famous for doing that too.

> And I am all for planned economy. In this day and age it is obsurd not to this.

"Well, did it work for those people?"

"No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... but it might work for us."

This classic reductionist argument is so trivial it could havr been automatically posted by an LLM.

The majority of those people say they regreted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not sure where your fantasy facts of "did not work" come from.

People who still link to it are just trolling.

I'm pretty sure tourists have been getting ripped off since people from Eridu traveled to Ur to see the Ziggurat.

Right? My family knew the name of the ziggurat was 𒂍𒋼𒅎𒅍 (house whose foundation creates terror), but we had no idea it was referring to the quality of the service. Unbelievable.

Must not be any questions about that in Leetcode.

RDF Site Summary.

Ah nostalgia. My text message alert (when my phone is not on silent) is the "incoming IM" sound from AIM.

at maximum gain, of course, to startle you into a heart attack.

The current time is not special just because it's when you're alive.

Conversely, the current time isn't like the past just because it immediately follows the past.