Brussels is the seat of five governments: the city itself, the Brussels-Capital autonomous region, the Flemish Parliament and Government (luckily the Wallon Government seat is in Namur), the Belgian Federal Parliament, and the European Commission and Parliament.
The "Brussels" metonym is probably the most ambiguous reference to a government body on the planet.
In what way was anything "stolen"? The content you refer to came with the original client. They reverse engineered the protocol and let existing clients connect to that. There's as much "stealing" going on here as with the Samba team reverse-engineering the SMB1/2/3 protocols. They weren't deceptively tricking users into thinking they were the real Battle.net servers, were they?
In a sane economy and legal regime, this would be allowed under open competition rules, in the same way that car manufacturers cannot prevent aftermarket mods to be sold and installed on their models. All these online platforms have big digital moats, and projects like these are offering alternatives to an otherwise captive audience. That's why Big Platform doesn't like it, but nothing about this has anything to do with stealing.
Thinking about this some more, from now on I'm going to refer to cases like this as "user rustling". Because that's all it is: guiding users out of some corporation's paddock. And if that's seen as a crime, then that must mean that the corporation views those users as property.
Except that is not at all how the game works and your example is simply and fundamentally invalid. The content is not “included with the game”.
Every quest, every drop, every starting location, every single bit of what makes the game playable is server side. You do not get this by getting the game. This isn’t about the use of some 3d models and textures.
While they may have recreated their data item by item and quest by quest, they quite literally stole that copyrighted material (what is THAT item named, what is THAT NPC named, what is THAT quests text, what is THAT towns name) in order to replicate the classic Warcraft experience. That is, quite literally, copyright infringement for the sake of selling a competing product. I can’t steal your apples and then set up a store to sell them for a lower price next door.
If they came up with their entirely own universe and simply reused the assets but without a single reference to the Warcraft world, maybe your argument would make some sense.
How is a car supposed to pre-empt when it is in a situation that is to challenging for it to navigate?
By anticipating further ahead. If it finds itself into a situation that it can't get itself out of, it means it should have made more defensive choices earlier or relinquish control earlier. And if it doesn't have either the reasoning capacity or the spatial awareness data to do that, it is not fit for general usage and should be pulled.
You don't actually need to physically copy data, just create a view for every table that does a replacing merge between the original read-only data and the developer's own copy. And you can put a trigger on the view to redirect writes to the same private-copy table, making the whole thing transparent to the user.
Not disputing that Oracle might have had something like this built-in, but it sounds like something that I could have whipped up in a day or so as a custom solution. I actually proposed a similar system to create anonymized datasets for researchers when I worked at a national archive institute.
Snowflake uses a similar system with their 0-copy cloning. It starts with the original table's partition, and keeps track of the delta created by subsequent operations. Always found that builtin mechanism pretty neat!
I heard about this feature first from Snowflake but there are similar options around in other ecosystems which may be of interest to someone here and one thing to keep in mind with even Snowflake's implementation...
Snowflake's implementation only works within a single Snowflake account, not cross-account, which implies if you want to clone across dev/qa/prod you must manage those environments within a single Snowflake account.
BigQuery has a very similar "table clone" feature. It works across GCP projects (accounts) but not across organizations.
Redshift and Azure Synapse do not really have this feature at all.
Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and the Iceberg Nessie-only catalog do support something similar, often called shallow cloning.
(Nobody really supports cross-region cloning... which makes sense if you think about it.)
But C-14 decay doesn't start with the tree's death, or does it? I assume that a live tree will also contain a certain amount of C-12. What would the result be if we carbon-dated one of the roots of the giant sequoia's in California, versus one of its branch tips?
It's nearly all carbon-12, yes. So you're asking how long it takes a giant sequoia to pump carbon dioxide from its needles [leaves?] to its nethermost reaches. Something like 80 feet. I don't know, but if it takes a year, I'd be surprised and impressed. Further investigation of plant respiration might show that every cell has to exchange gas with the outside on a daily cycle, but I'm not sure.
that's a little unfair. It really comes down to parsing text and you'll have similar issues even if you use a database or whatever
Feel free to show a real-world example of a database or whatever that takes the input string "IGF1 SEPT2 PRX3 MARCH1" and writes that into storage as ["IGF1", "2026-09-02", "PRX3", "2026-03-01"].
Also with Excel, an inadvertent click+drag can move data between cells, and since the cells are uniform it's hard to see that anything unintended happened. I've seen people lose files in Windows Explorer the same way: double-click with a shaky hand can easily move a file into a subdirectory.
You still have to push and pull from the db. Meaning transforms still need to happen in either direction. I get what you're saying but it's just as easy to screw up a regex in either direction. Or making assumptions about how your language of choice will handle dates etc.
Hardware implementations typically do not like variable-size fields. Not just because the total header size becomes unpredictable, but because it means any following fields no longer have a fixed offset, and that complicates parsing.
How can wifi be a star topology when all clients connect to the base station using the same airwaves? If it really were a star topology, it would also not be possible to use aircrack-ng or other tools to gather data for WPA cracking by passive listening -- that can only happen on a shared medium network.
I think the most accurate classification is that wifi emulates a star topology at OSI layer 2 on top of a layer 1 bus topology.
The "Brussels" metonym is probably the most ambiguous reference to a government body on the planet.
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