FermiEstimate

This is tough to answer, because a lot of pirated stuff is literally priceless, i.e., can't be bought at all.

I'd be happy to pay for the recent Ace Combat 5 and 6 upscaled ports, but they were only available briefly with preorders for AC7 on consoles I don't have. They haven't been sold outside of that brief window several years ago. Even if you tracked down unopened copies from 2019 and bought them from third parties, the license codes they contained expired long ago.

Fortunately, the Ace Combat community has put a lot work into making emulation work. The older games are playable, just not in a way you can pay money for.

No, not least because almost nothing in this area is self-evident due to the state of caselaw at the moment.

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether "generative" implies "transformative" in the specific sense under discussion in copyright law, the definition of "transformative" in this context is highly contentious, and courts have avoided defining it in an unambiguous way. Even here, the courts will probably avoid answering these questions if at all practical.

This is a big part of why fair use is in such a bad state right now: no predictability in how courts will rule on it as a defense, plus no way to keep you out of courts in the first place.

The Art Deco Bob Semple

We can ask this question from the other direction: why doesn't everywhere else have a flamethrower helicopter?

"It's a safety feature to reduce spalling!"

For sure. It's kind of fascinating, in a grim way, to contrast Haiti's revolutionary course with the US, where basically every major power was cool with them a few years after their revolution.

One wonders how history would be different if the nations of the world had spent centuries screwing the US with debt and propping up their worst leaders and left Haiti to do its own thing.

Right? Most of this stuff was already the case in 2012, so it barely even counts as a prediction.

China's lead in rare earth production doesn't exactly come out of nowhere, nor does Haiti having a crisis of some sort or terrorists being called freedom fighters. And having AI do the targeting work in place of humans has been floating around as an idea since what, when The Forbin Project came out? 1970 or so?

It's a good idea, but we can go even further. Just think of what we could fit into a spinal mount!

See also Brigador: apart from the various lasers, exotic ballistics, and nightmarish chemical weapons it includes, there's also the prosaic "Mãe Dois." The tech entry leaves no doubt about what it is:

My understanding is that this weapon not only predates the colonies, but space travel entirely. If that is the case then it's a truly venerable design, and one I'm told will continue to serve for the foreseeable future.

I laughed at first, but then I realized I'd have found Starfield vastly more interesting if weird stuff like this happened all the time on purpose and they leaned into it with small quests. This one bug delighted me more than any of the actual quests I can remember at this point.

It almost feels like Starfield was ambitious in the wrong ways. Bethesda trying to aim for Disco Elysium-ish oddness might not have turned out great, but I think it would have made more of a lasting impression.

I'm just going to pretend that's one of the researchers from Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.

If they're really lucky, they'll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.