To both of you: Thanks for the laugh. XD

run!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TuEWtXBT_0

Dumbing down can actually make many things more difficult, especially in the long run. Think of how language classes teach "simplified" pronunciation and grammar rules, which as you learn more, those rules can get you into more trouble when you're trying to apply them in a more nuanced situation, and then when you find the "normal way," it becomes next to impossible to understand, since you got the simplified rules. The effects of english natives learning Japanese via the roman writing system is a classic example of this, and I could go on for hours about how many people i've seen screwed over by this "simplification," to the degree that they'll likely never be able to speak Japanese in a way that could be understood by Japanese people, because they can't unlearn their worst habits.

The idea of the overton window isn't "dumbing down," but making radicals (especially in politics) seem less radical or even rational, by producing more extreme radicals, or you could use the window to make a stance you want "neutral" by "pushing the window" further out. Think of how "box and whisker plots" (Škatla z brki) are done: you make the radicals the outliers, but if you create new outliers, the old radicals become the fringes of normal, and if you extend the fringes of normal, you can move the midpoint as well as the average. Well, he was a furry. We got into it because he didn't believe canines should be on leashes, and chose to rant about it in a facebook post about a situation where 2 dogs almost fought each other (which was prevented by leashes), due to improperly long leashes (the more aggressive dog was actually able to reach into the public sidewalk, and even i almost had an altercation with this dog [he actually tried coming after me] at a later date, because of it). I had talked to the guy before on unrealistic expectations and lying (he has a history of pushing arguments he himself doesn't believe in because he believes the thing he's advocating for is easier to swallow than his actual stances and the ideas are "close enough"), and this was another clear case of him basically bullying my girlfriend who was already upset over the fact that her dog was a bigger dog and got scarred and almost got loose and ran out in front of a car because of this aggressive little dog.

Let's just say, I'm glad we could avoid that.

If someone is in the full right, that doesn't mean he is not an asshole. Making people, who want to play games and are even have potential to become paying customers, to be unable to play without any alternative IS an asshole move, no matter if the action is 100% legal.

Yes, we are not in a position to demant anything. But we still have a right to disagree and to express our disagreement by calling Nintendo out for being assholes. Because in their place a more gamer friendly company would issue explaination - not simply shutting down a source for a part of their player base. Or mabe even allowed fan games some leniency.

For all its sins EA treated older C&C games and those games' fans in exemplary fashion - they made some of those games free and allowed creations of fan projects like Renegade X or OpenRA.

I can't get along with GOG's quoting system, so bear with me.

Response to paragraphs 1:

Let me stop you.
I'm not saying that things should be simplified in general.

"Dumbing down" is a technique I like to use when facing a new concept.
By simplifing it I can see if I'm moving in the right direction in trying to "get it".

So my question was if "overton window" can be simplified to:
"So it's along the lines of making a bad idea more pouplar and then making it more accepted because it became popular?"

Response to paragraphs 2:

"Furry" by itself has a huge potencial to be misunderstood (why I like to avoid it).
"Furries like anthroporphic animals" is the brodest definition. That doesn't make all of them overboard animal rights "maniacs".

I do see how his opinon was extreme and not funcional and why you got rightly upset.
I'm not defending or accusing anyone, I'm just saying that there isn't neccesarly a connection between "furry" and "extreme opinon on anything animal related".

I usually just put the text in a larger text editor (which helps prevents accients) then you can use "quote" without numbers for subsequent quoting, but you want to make sure the first quote has the number in it to ensure someone gets a notification that you quoted them. Notice the first quote will show your name and reference the post i'm quoting, but the quotes below this won't. Just make sure you have "matching /quote blocks" otherwise you can't post. Yeah, but this ends up being the same thing. Many things are actually quite approachable if you try to swallow them in parts, rather than simplifying them so that you loose the resolution in order to swallow everything all at once. Nope, that is inaccurate. It's about changing what is considered reasonable by pointing to something "even more unreasonable." It's kind of like how you might have a friend who quite revealing in their clothing choice and flirts with guys for free drinks. You might criticize this person for playing with the hearts of men, but then this friend will then point to the woman who sleeps with the men and sleeps with a different man every night, and say "at least i'm not like her." In doing so, you will see your friend as more reasonable. Now, if you were to criticize the slut, she may say "at least i don't make them promises of marriage, like that woman over there." So you go to that woman over there to criticize, and she may say "at least I don't marry them, then divorce them and sue for their pension and/or child support." In the end, after hearing all that, the immoral stance your friend takes to get drinks feels "OK" in comparison, even if she's still immoral, you'll sooner criticize the other women before your friend. That is the concept of the overton window. Absolutely, but he also happened to be a furry, and very extreme in it (more than just anthromorphic animals, but this is really none of our business XD). No, but he was both a furry and an extreme activist. What kills me the most about the situation is that he admitted, maybe a week before, that he wasn't particularly fond of animal rights arguments. Since he was into canines, he could accept that canines did indeed eat for food and were even cruel about it, at times, so a strict position on animal rights is untenable. I had a conversation before (which is where his history of lying about stances came from) where he argued on behalf of man-made global warming, but when we got into the science in it, he turned around and admitted he didn't believe that CO2 contributed to global warming, but instead helped cool the planet, but he argued the case with me because he believes that CO2 density correlates with violence (since people are more violent in urban areas where there is more CO2 than in rural areas where there is less). That incident didn't go over well with me (he basically openly admitted he lies in political discussions and supports positions he doesn't believe because the policies are the same), so when the incident with leashes came up I immediately remembered his stance on animal rights and went nuclear on him. I could've understood if he was honestly ignorant about how it works, but he's been around dogs and has done alot of research on them as well, so he knew the position he was making was totally untenable. I don't know for sure what he really wanted, but I think it had something to do with special rights for canines specifically, as he held them to a much higher regard than human beings.

Anyway, this is all totally off topic at this point, but i figured it was worth clarifying.

Quoting:
Thank you, I'll keep it in mind.
I'm not very confident because of several attemps going wrong + I've 0 knowlage of coding.

Overton Window:
Thank you.
I can definately follow that example. :D
*funcional surface definition aquired*
I'll more into in at a later date, for now I wanted to have an aproximate idea what it was about.

Furry vs. activist:
It is off topic, but thank you for clarifying it anyway.

No, "asshole move" implies "assholeness" aka lack of care about other people and unwilingness to put effort into studying the consequences of ones action. That includes lack of clarification in murky affair that will for certain have negavie reception among potential (also former and current) customers. And while I don't have time to search for links to news articles, there wer numerous cases where Nintendo demonstrsated its "assholeness" towards both gamers and developers alike.

Even if my stance is incorrect, making reasons for taking down ROMs clear and transparent would greatly decreased negativity towards Nintendo (or any other company that participated in takedowns). But apparently, no one cares about attitude from gamers until it becomes apparent through already decreased revenue. After all many angry users still pay subscription and buy games and soft, since they have little choice. Or if they will stop paying then... well, only then companies will start to think.

In other words, yes, if someone makes a bad decision on bad information, that makes them ignoramouses. If someone is ignoramous due to their own laziness and lack of care for others - they are assholes.

Emuparadise, like any other site in legal grey area, operates at mercy and good will of IP holders. If they will try to stir too much, this can not only mean legal troubles, but also potentially more strict control in the future. Thus if IP holders, like Nintendo, would want to keep everything under wraps it is not in Emuparadise interest to make any demands.

Nintendo (and other companies, if they were initiators of the lawsuits) is in totally different position. They own IPs totally and if they would want to explain themselves no one will hold them to any responsibility. Thus lack of "any reasonable evidence" about what is going on is on companies conciousness only.

Finally found a use for this gif.

Sega actually became somewhat chummy with the emulation scene since they started allowing romhacks to be uploaded to the Steam Workshop. As backwards as they are about PC gaming, they seem to be learning to take a softer hand with the roms scene. Emulators are legal. Sony tried to shut down emulator development years ago and a court ruled against them even though the actual developer of the emulator (Bleem) ran out of money because of the court costs. So by winning a battle, Sony lost the war for itself and its peers. There are some instances of companies trying to stop emulators but they generally have to appeal to places like Apple to get them to pull the app from being sold. They can't use the law to go after them.
Well, GOG seems to have a more nuanced understanding coming from a region with a long history of piracy. They got that the way you compete with piracy is to offer a better product (Nintendo does not), and when they start selling a classic game that is all over the abandonware sites, they reach to the sites and say "Hey, we're selling this now, would you mind taking down the download link and link to us instead?" Most sites comply. The ones that don't, you just have to shrug and move on because if someone really, really wants to pirate a game, they'll find a way.

The process of making certain emulators, however, wouldn't be. It depends on the target platform and how it's made and how one would go about making it. Something like wine, for example, simply uses MSDN and looks at input and output information to see how a function is expected to perform, then writes it. However, for something like the gamecube, if you don't have a devkit, you'll need to reverse engineer a system (which is considered copyright/patent violation if you implement something with that information), reverse engineer a game, use leaked information, etc. It might be hard to nail the dev themselves, but you could easily nail the product if you've built a special enough system. Well, no, GOG isn't always offering better than pirated products, even if they say that's their philosophy. Most games dn't come with goodes, and many pirated copies come with more. People feel safe about GOG, either legally or from viruses. People also gain the moral highground, and it turns out people actually are interested in doing the right thing every now and then, which is what GOG relies on.

No. Sega v Accolade established that the functional priciples of software is not and cannot be protected by copyright. This was reinforced by Sony v Connectix. So yes - it is considered fair use to reverse engineer a console to see how it works and use that information how you see fit (as long as you don't outright copy the thing). In fact, protecting your system from reverse engineering in certain ways is considered illegal (Sega was found in violation of the Lanham Act and almost lost its trademark as a result - fortunately for Sega they settled before it went to the Supreme Court).

There's where the EULAs come in, though. Now you don't own the software running on it, but to use it at all, you have a license to use it, that is subject to certain restrictions, usually including reverse engineering. Fair use to reverse engineer comes from the concept of actually owning something. Now, you don't. If you reverse engineer, you're in violation of the EULA, thus are now violating copyright if you use the original software for it's intended purpose. In other words, by reverse engineering your wii, you are no longer allowed to play your wii while using their software.

You can put whatever you want in the EULA. The First Amendment gives you that right. Enforcing it on the other hand is a different matter. *You could put that the client must sacrfice their firstborn son on the first blood moon. You shouldn't do that though because if someone did actually do that to fufill the EULA you will be found criminally liable for it. You could try to put in the EULA that reverse engineering is a violation - but functional principles are NEVER protected by copyright, and reverse engineering to learn of them is protected by fair use. This has been determined by the courts already. You could of course sue someone and try to win in court against them - but you would have an uphill battle against precedent (this has been tried several times already - they all lost).

*Okay, I'm being hyperbolic here. Saying to murder someone is over the line for free speech but the point still stands. You can put terms in a contract/EULA that cannot be enforced - for example not selling property to african americans. The First Amendment protects the speech but other laws make it illegal to enforce. And if you do enforce them then your own free speech can be used as evidence against you.