@directhex This is extremely interesting to learn

I wonder what happened to the inventor of Xenia
*checks*
The only information I'm finding is that his fursona is a moose and he has drawn a very large amount of furry porn. It is unclear if this is actually his most significant accomplishment or it's just that the furry community has been more meticulous at documenting his activities than the community for whatever he does when he's not drawing erotic furry art

@BigEatie Ye gods, I don't mean to imply that my presentation of the concept of "theory" is comprehensive or complete. Or even if there is any such thing. I know practically nothing about the philosophy of science at the current state of the art.

This is a discussion in a general education course for non-science majors. We can't do everything. But it makes for great questions (like yours!) in the hallway after each meeting....

also libraries allow you to try out tons of books, i can't imagine without libraries how people would even decide what to purchase, simply going in blind based on reviews like movies except way more expensive and with a much larger time commitment which means people would be even more selective

but then publishers don't actually care about that, they want to turn digital books into a streaming model, where all works are just "content", a featureless sludge to be pumped into the machine to drive subscriptions :\

the other thing is libraries are one of the few remaining public spaces that people can go to that serve people and not profit or landowners. the reason I read so much as a kid? I hid in libraries to escape bullying. Sure, there's some bookstores that allow people to sit & read, but they're still private stores, and they'll kick you out if they think you're "loitering" or the wrong kind of person. and they're not a place unattended children can just go into & stay.

Libraries provide access to information and access to the wider digital & analog world for so many people, but also, they're run for a completely different purpose than almost any other kind of "public" space left. The death of libraries would hurt more than even the lack of ability of people to read free books. :\

"Tragically, the Court then undermines the important ruling in the Betamax/VCR case that found “time shifting” (recording stuff off your TV) to be fair use, even as it absolutely was repackaging the same content for the same purpose. The Court says that doesn’t matter because it “predated our use of the word ‘transformative’ as a term of art.” But that doesn’t wipe out the case as a binding precedent, even though the Court here acts as though it does."

It's also really bad and is going to hurt a lot of other things about digital preservation and being able to copy/backup/record stuff if the courts now start to decide that recording TV never should have counted as fair use :\