This feels like something that could be brought up on Lower Decks.

Kligon kids.

I’m not a raccoon!

This is a joke, right? This feels like a very dumb solution. I don’t know much about UTF-8 encoding, but it sounds like Roman characters can be encoded shorter than most or all others because of a shorthand that assumes Roman characters. In that case, why not take that functionality and let a UTF-8 block specify which language makes up most of the text so that you can have that savings almost every time? I don’t see why one would want it to be random.

Lower Decks is like if Rick and Morty didn’t make me sick.

The ending bits that imply a darker vision of this future suggests a very different direction for the show. Still, there are Star Trek episodes that do consider the holodeck from this angle. Maybe we need a mirror universe holodeck episode.

My head cannon is that moopsies were invented by Section 31 as weaponized tribbles.

That last bit is important here. Ops, Security, and Engineering all wore red shirts. If you break down redshirt deaths by division, almost all of them are Security, while few are Engineering or Ops. Since Security is a position likely to involve combat, it shouldn’t be surprising if it’s the most dangerous.

Q. No question.

Moopsy wins. Section 31 tried to use them to win the Dominion War, but their agents kept getting killed by them.

Sabotage starts blasting on all subspace channels.

Someone actually emailed Valve about this back in 2013. Here’s their response: https://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg

Thank you for contacting Steam Support. In the unlikely event of the discontinuation of the Steam network, measures are in place to ensure that all users will continue to have access to their Steam games.

It seems like Valve wants us to think they have an EoL plan. With the goodwill they’ve built over the years, I want to believe them.

I’d say in your case piracy was 1000% justified. You bought it, you should be able to play it.

I think piracy is acceptable if one of these two conditions are met:

• You already own a copy of the game
• The game is no longer sold as new, such that any legitimate copy would have to be secondhand.

identifying legitimate problems with the best available option

Being closed source and using DRM aren’t necessarily problems. In Valve’s case, they aren’t at all. Valve’s DRM doesn’t hurt performance, and doesn’t stop you from playing their games offline.

So?

Closed source isn’t necessarily evil, neither is DRM. It’s all in how you implement it.

Valve’s launcher/drm are so much less intrusive than their competitors. They’ve demonstrated more openness to user customization and modding over the years than just about anyone else. If we didn’t have Valve, we would have more EA and Epic Games, do you really want that?

This could be so much longer.

Killing children, class systems, so many programming language names, the ridiculous ways equality and order-of-operations are done sometimes. Plenty of recursion jokes to be made. Big O notation. Any other ideas?

Lost Lemmings?

I think the rest of the Q continuum would prevent it entirely. At worst, the assimilated Q just becomes human, lacking all typical Q abilities. However, the assimilated Q would probably still have knowledge well beyond what the Borg have, so even the knowledge gain alone is a huge help to the Borg.

You’re right, this would be some good lower decks.

Obligatory I am not a lawyer, this is just my opinion.

A let’s play is a derivative work. You can claim fair use, but that’s hard to do. Fair use often boils down to a question of ‘does the derivative work compete with the original enough to cause a loss in sales?’ Think of when people film themselves watching a movie for YouTube, without cutting anything out and barely commentating over anything, meaning that someone could watch their video instead of the movie and get almost the same content.

In this case, he filmed himself playing the entirety of a visual novel. I think it’s fair to say that for a lot of people, his let’s play could absolutely substitute for playing the game, thus losing sales for the developer.