Laic
I don't care about religion or beliefs. It's irrelevant to me in my day to day life.
I have a personal code of ethic, developed through personal experience and reading several philosophy proposals, taking from each what I find useful and discarding the rest.
Predator is from 1987; that's a classic.
Meanwhile, when, as a little more than a basic user, I look at my system, feeling as if I'm dealing with a dumpster fire just to have that nagging recurrent insight: "I actually have a brain and can learn!"
We had an assembler in Portugal (JP Sa Couto) that assembled Intel-only machines. They marketed the Tsunami brand, both laptop and desktop, and even had a line of computers shipping with Linux, either with Caixa Magica (then based off SUSE Linux) or Ubuntu.
They pulled such a stunt with a public tender they managed to get involved in a serious corruption case that led the company to bankrupcy. The company won the tender to supply EeePCs to schools, both ASUS branded and a local remix of the EeePC called Magalhães. The shit was they trampled over the then legitimate ASUS representative here, going over their head and making a deal with another european representative of the brand. It was a veritable shit show and cost the bankrupcy of two large companies.
Being grown doesn't imply we can't be silly. Or that we are implicitly serious just because we're grown.
How much time can we credibly risk that military complex will be sustainable, if such scenario unfolds?
Food for the troops, fuel for machines, parts, ammunition cost money. It's one thing to be North Korea but the US have a too sophisticated military complex.
And I risk at some point civil unrest would begin.
Again, this is horrible from me to say this, but if that was to happen, the US would turn into another Venezuela. Not Russia, Venezuela. But with too many corporations trying to make business as usual. And when politians mess with money, they get annoying. And less valuable.
Horrible from me to state the next but, hopefully, that country crashes so fast and hard, the people will stage the French Revolution, Second Edition, Revised, Updated and Improved.
That alone would speed in not only a substantial shift for the country but for entirety of humanity, forcing extremely fast cultural and political change.
Highly influential culture? It's a fantasy work, not the cure to cancer. But I'll agree on one thing: corporations are not people; they should be paying to the original creator(s) an efty cut of their profits, from their derivative works.
So you create whatever work. You have exclusive rights to it, let's say for the sake of the argument, 10 years. During that time you never get any return from your work. But after you can no longer claim your rights, someone, perhaps even a company, stumbles on it - or perhaps they just carefully and patiently waited for it - takes it and capitalizes off it, with you watching and sucking your thumb.
No.
If you, an individual, creates something, you have the right to hold your intelectual property. What should be repelled is how easy it is to exploit artists, of any medium.
The ancestors part always brings a smile to my face.
You being alive is proof enough of the later. No room for judgement there: they've been there, done that.
If the person paying respect to past figures is concerned over such petty parts of life, that person is concerned over the wrong things.
Will you be bothered over petty things or be concerned with your descendants living well and happy, like you wanted, tried and wished for others?
I do enjoy the notion of teverence towards the ancestors. It's like having a personal roster from which to choose and say "not doing what they did" or "they had worst and made it". Or a personal fan club.