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.

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.

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.)

Number of downloads ≠ number of users. People with multiple devices, people who replace devices, and people who have to wipe and reprovision borked devices all inflate the number. I’d guess that, over the period that total has been running, we’re looking at 4-5 downloads per user, if not more. Still a ridiculous number, but not that ridiculous.

Hard to do well—too much tone whiplash. I suppose it could work as very black comedy, with the right script and director. 🤔

New film plot: the airport’s facial recognition system can’t tell the difference between the intended copilot and their identical twin, a terrorist. Question is, is it a comedy about bureaucracy or an edge-of-your-seat thriller?

Fictional ones don’t have to be cheap to manufacture in the real world. The weirdest things can add to costs when you have to take into account the constraints of injection molding and press-fit assemblies (and that’s just for the outer shell).