I want you to know this is the first comment on here which sparked my “I have to give this comment gold” itch left over from the old place. Nicely done!

My baldness sufficiently prevents me from using them.

Died on its birthday, poor thing.

He has four children and seven grandchildren. Source

Together, the research team developed a process to convert human waste into a thick, black liquid that looks like crude oil and behaves like it. Using fractional distillation, the team can then derive the fuel of interest, much like oil refineries do.

Based on the (almost no) data available here, this does seem likely to be a lot of steps and a lot of energy required just to turn the poop into the substitute for crude oil, and then do all the standard further refining of that into jet fuel. I’d be very dubious about the actual real-world value until some magical further data is shared, because this innovation surely won’t help anyone if the fuel it makes is more expensive than regular jet fuel.

Hey bot, maybe don’t help with this one. Read the room.

Somebody once told me, raw input’s gonna roll me…

I know that school, they have a pool on the roof.

http://web.archive.org/web/20231228002154/http://www.engadget.com/the-first-ev-with-a-lithium-free-sodium-battery-hits-the-road-in-january-214828536.html

I’ve eaten at Popeye’s three times, and gotten food poisoning from them three times. Don’t let it be said I can’t take a hint. 🤮

It’s such a shame, because I’ve always liked his cartoons.

Pets of almost all kinds.

Any sufficiently advanced satire of fundamentalism is indistinguishable from sincere fundamentalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe’s_law

Imagine someone writing a story where, for example, Christopher Robin kills someone, and profiting from it? Would you be happy having your childhood memories of reading Winnie the Pooh tainted like that?

Interesting that you chose this example, because it has already happened in a commercially-released horror film. The result wasn’t in any way damaging to the legacy of the original work; all the books, adaptations, and such that kids love are still available. All that ended up happening was that people who like that particular sort of thing gained a new movie to watch, people who don’t like it can ignore it, and pop culture as a whole keeps chugging along undamaged. All our childhood memories of Pooh are still the same ones we had before this movie came out.

We are already seeing this in the real world, where Disney cartoons are public domain, but the characters, having been used in consecutive works, cannot be used by anyone other than them.

This is incorrect. When a Disney cartoon becomes public domain everything in it is also public domain, including the characters as used in that cartoon. The most famous example of this will happen on January 1 when the first Mickey Mouse cartoons go into the public domain, and so will that version of Mickey Mouse. You can read more about what that means for Mickey, and for Disney, in this post by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law.

Nobody’s legacy is “tarnished” or otherwise damaged by things other people create. The original is still there, while new things get to express their take on the characters and/or the rest of the material. Derivative works add to the sum total of culture, they don’t subtract from it, and the Public Domain denotes the part of culture we all own together and can develop new works about freely. The freedom to do so is a good thing for everyone including cultural creators (who get to enrich their own work using our shared property) and consumers (who get more stuff they might enjoy, and if they don’t the original is still there regardless) and everyone wins. Your scenario would make nothing better for anyone.

If you restrict reuse of the characters in new work, the original would not be in the public domain. Something is either one’s property or it isn’t, and something in the public domain is everyone’s property. You can’t have the original as part of the collective repository of freely-available information and culture while still trying to make bits of it (such as its characters) not part of that.

The public domain period is when the law has agreed that the original authors no longer have exclusive rights to the material they put into the world. Trying to still, after that period has elapsed, declare the characters are still that author’s property but only if they turn up in other people’s work is a truly bizarre suggestion and I fail to see what would be gained by society in that scenario.

The original work becoming public domain, sure, but write your own characters.

I don’t understand what you’re suggesting here. How would you reconcile the original work being public domain with still wanting to restrict the use of its characters?

See you in twelve days, Tigger!

It remindsh me of the heady days of Shputnik and Yuri Gagarin, when the world trembled at the shound of our rocketsh.

There was a diving team outside.

This motherfucker mailed me the same blu-ray box set smashed to shards twice in a row before he finally put the third copy into some goddamn bubble wrap, and he wants me to trust his space station with my life!?