Because 99% of the time, the simplest solution is the best one, and the simplest solution never involves blockchain in any capacity. In this case, the simplest solution involves money. Currency exists for a reason, whether you like it or not.

Also, for real-world use, not being able to alter information in the system is a bug, not a feature, because it prevents the correction of mistakes. And there will always be mistakes, because humans.

I suspect this is going to pull in two directions.

On the one hand, people are already developing some level of warning label fatigue, where they skim over the labels without registering the content just like they do on-line ads. (Both practices are doubtless known to cause cancer in California.)

On the other hand, there's a type of personality who may, in fact, change their minds about buying if presented with a short, sharp "this is bad for you" reminder on the way to the checkout.

Putting the labels on is, overall, a harmless experiment to try, so we might as well see if it does any good. Personally, I don't think we're going to see much change until we spend a couple of decades broadcasting and reinforcing the "no amount is safe" message, and even then many people will keep drinking. Just as there are still smokers today, even after many decades of "you will die horribly if you do this" messaging.

There are a few open-source games that appear to work already, yes, including supertuxcart and nethack. And someone will surely port Doom to it soon if they haven't yet.

Not in the way you're hoping for. Proton is a wine offshoot, which means it's exclusive to x86 and x86_64 arches. You could perhaps get it to run by installing qemu and setting it up to run x86_64 binaries, but even if that worked you'd likely end up with single-digit FPS in most games.

Based on what Gentoo currently has keyworded, you should be able to get a solid useful desktop—KDE or Gnome (or sway, if that's your preference), Firefox, Libreoffice, Gimp, VLC, and other popular basics—but I wouldn't expect games or other proprietary software for a while yet, if ever.

Huh. Thought they did. Maybe I'm wrong—it isn't my distro of choice, after all.

Yes, it runs Linux (you didn't hink they were shipping it with Windows on it, did you?). Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo should all have support. I don't know about Arch.

Of course it is (as long as it's "tries to promote", with no expectation it will always succeed). But no one's interested because it won't make as much money as the current outrage farming.

True, alas.

One problem with your idea is, what constitutes a "work" for the purpose of renewing copyright? Currently, a single photograph and a two-hour movie that cost $$$ to make are both "works". Charging $5000 to renew the copyright on an individual photo will bankrupt people who make a living doing stock photography, but it's peanuts for a large movie studio. You could create a category of "small works", like individual photographs or short stories, that can be batched together so that you pay only one fee to renew a group of them, but flat-fee-per-work under the current definition will cause problems for some classes of individual creators.

Personally, I think we need to tear the whole thing down and start over. Base copyright on individual works on a "use it or lose it" system—as long as copies of a work remain available for purchase (not rental—streaming or DRM-gated access is not sufficient) from the copyright holder at a reasonable price, they have exclusive rights to it. Stop publishing the work, and it lands in the public domain within 5-10 years. This needs to be accompanied by substantial reforms on how derivative works and trademarked characters are handled—we need a universal mechanical licensing system with a central clearinghouse that allows anyone to create a derivative work for a flat fee or percentage of revenue, and an official, legally-binding system for indicating "this derivative work was not created by the trademark holder". (Figuring out how rights on unpublished works function in this schema is something I still need to work through, but they're not a major concern for 99% of people.)

We've known this was coming for a while now . . . but I suppose not everyone reads tech news.

Not that long gone—the last relict population on Wrangel Island only died out about 4000 years ago. That's (barely) within historic time. There are probably islands in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic that could still support them (and have no or few human inhabitants).

I see two big issues. First of all, not all knowledge among elephants is transmitted genetically, and I expect mammoths were the same. Who will the new ones learn from? They'll have to redevelop best practices for dealing with their environment from scratch.

Secondly, global warming. This seems like about the worst possible time to bring back an ice-age-adapted critter. We'd be better off transferring the effort spent on this project into de-extincting the thylacine, a more recent loss which doesn't have that specific issue.

Would everyone who is surprised by this please raise your hand? . . . That's what I thought.