It’s not unheard of, though. Modern Warfare 2 had only a 70MB file on its disc, basically a license, and required you to download the actual game.

Note I’m not defending this. It’s a nightmare for game preservation and pushes us ever further in the direction of never owning anything. I’m just saying Nintendo isn’t breaking new ground with this particular outrage.

For “listened to a boombox outside,” does it matter whether you did so voluntarily or just heard it because someone else was playing one too loudly for you to ignore? In other words, I’m either 0 or 1.

As kids my sister and I found a set of old 1950’s World Book Encyclopedias that a family in our neighborhood was throwing out. We brought them home on a wagon. We used them for years. They were definitely kinda dated–like, in the article about guinea pigs, it claimed they were the perfect animal for scientific research because they don’t feel pain, which is obviously bullshit and/or propaganda. But that was actually kind of eye-opening for me at the time, because I didn’t have a lot of experience of seemingly authoritative things that were also in error. It still had a lot of useful info, too.

Hubris is a kind of boastful pride–like a sense of invulnerability. It also implies a kind of dramatic irony, that this sense of invulnerability will eventually prove false. (The term comes from ancient Greek theater, where it’s often the Heroic Flaw that will eventually be the undoing of the tragic hero.)

Chutzpah is more…audacity, nerve, gall. A person with chutzpah doesn’t believe they can’t be harmed; they’re just willing to bald-face it out in the hopes you won’t actually call them on it. In English it can have a positive connotation, the way “cojones” tends to, but it can also have a negative connotation, like “cheek” or “gall.” It comes from Yiddish, where apparently it’s more uniformly negative. (Leave it to us Americans to interpret a condemnation of shameless effrontery as somehow laudatory.)

I guess I would say the key difference is that someone with hubris thinks they are invulnerable, whereas a person with chutzpah is aware they are vulnerable and absolutely refusing to act like it.

They’re definitely kind of related, but they just have really different feels to them

Funny thing about that–the authors had no significant ties to West Virginia and were instead inspired by a road trip through Maryland. https://www.baltimoreexaminer.com/john-denver-country-roads/

The one I thought was a good compromise was 14 years, with the option to file again for a single renewal for a second 14 years. That was the basic system in the US for quite a while, and it has the benefit of being a good fit for the human life span–it means that the stuff that was popular with our parents when we were kids, i.e. the cultural milieu in which we were raised, would be public domain by the time we were adults, and we’d be free to remix it and revisit it. It also covers the vast majority of the sales lifetime of a work, and makes preservation and archiving more generally feasible.

5 years may be an overcorrection, but I think very limited terms like that are closer to the right solution than our current system is.