1. Yes, tens of millions were killed. Many millions were innocent, yet WW2 games don't mention those. That would be too sad, so they gloss over those killed by the errant shell your tank just launched over into the adjacent farm, or those killed when your bombs go off course. In war, accidents like that ended in the misery of millions more we don't hear about. Of course, you can say that there were so many to get upset about, but then that's to say human suffering doesn't matter to you if it's in sufficient quantity.
That is a misinterpretation of my argument.
The question here is not if these games are an accurate portrayal of history. They are not. They never claimed to be. They're history-based fiction.
The question is: Is this fiction disrespectful to the victims? I don't feel they are because they do not depict specific victims. How can you be disrespectful to an anonymous entity?
My grandfather's brother fought for the Axis in the war. But I do not feel games depicting the killing of Axis soldiers are disrespectful to his memory. A game which depicted the killing of him, personally would however be offensive. Do you see the difference here? That was my first point. If you don't agree with it, fine. But don't try to turn it into something completely different.
2. Yes, two generations. However, as there are still MANY people alive now who saw WW2, that point is quite irrelevent.
No, it is relevant. Wouldn't you agree that making a joke about a person the day after their funeral is disrespectful? Yet the same joke, told ten years after the funeral may not be.
It's not about 'does anyone remember', it's a question of how fresh the memory is.
3. Centering on the military deaths and glossing over the civilian ones is the biggest injustice you can do.
It would only be an injustice if you presupposed the game to be an accurate account of history. It is not.
I wasn't defending the war in itself. What is there to defend about war? War is an awful thing.
A life is a life you say. And this apparently includes fictional people. Because what you are doing here is equating a fictional portrayal of fictional persons in a much larger historical setting with a fictional portrayal of an actual person in an specific historic place, time and moment. A person who would likely be alive today had he not been killed.
I guess people read in whatever they want to read in.
I didn't mention Vietnam, nor did I defend Vietnam games. (I don't personally know of any, much less played any, so I don't really know what exactly you're referring to.)
So how am I hypocrite? I would find a game re-enacting the My Lai massacre every bit as abhorrent as, for instance, one re-enacting the Holocaust. (which I did mention)
In my opinion there *is* a significant difference.
1) Tens of millions of people were killed in WWII. The sheer number of deaths depersonalizes the victims. (Unfair as that may be) So you can't compare it. AFAIK most WWII games do not center on specific named individuals either.
2) Time, WWII was two generations ago, the Kennedy murder was one.
3) Morality. All but the strongest pacificts would agree that killing another armed man in war is one thing and murdering an unarmed civilian is another. WWII reenactment games usually center on warfare, not the Holocaust, for example.
I don't see that being a 'historical event' is much of a mitigating factor. So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it.
And that would be because of the reasons stated above.
"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."
So what the researcher here is actually saying, is that sex is addictive, and therefore bad.
Um.. let's try to take a rational view here?
Sex is a normal and healthy thing. (For some of you, yes, that includes masturbation.)
So, some people get obssessed about sex. True. But most people don't. Heck, there are obsessive bingo players out there.
But as long as the vast majority of people aren't getting hurt, why would the solution be to stop engaging in the addictive activity?
It's amazing how they can't ban smoking, which is directly harmful for everyone who uses it, and even those around them, but pornography is obviously fair game.
But let me guess: This isn't really about public health at all, is it?
The directing, especially the camera work, is pretty bad. For instance, far too much time is spent in the beginning showing off those mechanical cargo-moving whatevers.
The first time I saw the dang thing, I was saying to myself why are they showing me this? Oh, that must be what she kills the last alien with. The point gets over-established.
The acting is pretty bad. 'Game-over man!' The Marines are, to me, complete stereotypes. Comic book figures driven completely by machismo. You know immediately the one with the toughest mouth is going to die first, screaming. Another example of overestablishing the point.
Personally I didn't relate to the Marines at all. I frankly didn't give a s-t about them, because it was obvious from the outset that they were only really there to serve as Alien fodder. Perhaps if they showed some emotions other than 'being tough' and 'being scared' I could have.
Memorable quotes? Sure, I guess so. So are advertising slogans. It's not any kind of measure of a film in my book.
Actually, (having done a little historical research myself) those kinds of things are relatively easy to find. (church and public records)
In general, the most interesting stuff is often the stuff which was the least interesting when the newspaper was published, such as advertisments, expressions and figures-of-speech in the articles, opinion pieces, the style of reporting, the biases.
All these little things that generally convey the atmosphere and mindset of an age. It's easy to find out facts, like the construction date of a factory. It's more difficult to find out what people were thinking about the new factory.
One thing many Western societies lack right now, is widely accepted basis for producing legitimate knowledge.
There is such a method. It's called Science.
I think it's worth highlighting how Science works versus how Wikipedia works.
Science, like Wikipedia, is an open game. Everyone who wishes can participate. You don't need to have a degree, you don't need to work at a university to do research. (Although certainly, most research is done by academics.)
Einstein worked at the Patent Office when he wrote some of his most revolutionary papers. Yet his ideas were accepted immediately into the physics community on the weight of their merit.
This is how Science works. It's a meritocracy. But with an important distinction. Peer-review. Those who review the research of others are people who themselves are qualified in the subject.
On Wikipedia, on the other hand, everyone is a reviewer, regardless of their knowledge. I believe this is a crucial difference, detrimental to Wikipedia. When special relativity was created, allegedly only a handful of people on the entire planet understood the paper.
One can only speculate as to how many thought they understood it, but didn't.
This is the kind of situation where false information can easily propagate. In fact, I believe this is usually were most false information comes from.
The solution to this problem, in Science, is the peer-review-system.
Wikipedia does not provide any solution to this problem. The best an informed observer can do when he sees such a misunderstanding (short of educating the world) is to say 'Trust me, I know this stuff, and X is wrong, Y is right.'.
But in that case, you're back at the subjective opinion of the individual again, and have gained nothing.
And, firstly: that's not exactly a proper test. (Supply does create demand. Why do you think stores like building big pyramids of merchandise, and so on.. Hint: It's not just because it looks pretty.)
Perhaps you should read my comment again and try to get the point. I wasn't neccesarily being sceptical about pop-tarts. I was being sceptical about the method in general.
Obviously some of the correlations they'll find are real too. That's not what I was referring to.
What I was referring to, was that it's very easy to become blind to the statistics. To fall into the trap of seeing correlations where there are none. The human brain has a remarkable pattern-finding ability. Unfortunately that ability does lead us astray sometimes. (For instance reading human faces into natural formations, and so on)
Besides this, the Wal-mart people probably aren't very interested in talking about the times their fancy new method failed, are they?
Basically, the more data you have, the more likely you'll find weird coincidental correlations.
I guess these kinds of 'statistical finding' will become more and more prevalent in the future, given that we're living in an age where we're collecting ever-larger amounts of data, and have the resources to process all this data automatically.
It would be a good thing if people were a bit more sceptical of this kind of stuff. Correlation isn't causation.
Instead of stating 'no enforcement technique can control them', perhaps you should be asking 'Why has the government failed at enforcing existing anti-trust laws'.
Should politics really have the control they do over the enforcement of laws?
And should business have the control it does over politics?
The fact that a single business can make a big contribution to a political party and then get away from federal procecution is nothing short of a scandal. The fact that it's not is one of the biggest things which irritates me about US politics today.
The american people seem to have reached a kind of point where they've completely quit looking forward and outward on ways to improve their society. Any long-term issue in US politics is treated as if it was insolvable. When the international perspective shows that the problem is actually US-specific, and that it has been solved elsewhere, we shrug and say 'Ah, well that's over there. The US is different.'
The USA is not fundamentally different. It's yet another democratic market-economy in a world with dozens of them. Sure the USA is unique in ways. Sure there are cultural differences, and political differences and so on. But that doesn't mean that there are no solutions.
It means that people are disregarding them, because, ultimately, they don't want things to change.
Ooops my attempt at precision failed. That should read 'analytic a priori', not 'synthetic'.
('synthetic' a priori is, in simple terms, the kind of knowledge you gain from making observations about the world and drawing general conclusions. That part they kept.)
Um, I don't quite recognize that description though.
To be precise, the very heart of logical positivism is rejecting the 'synthetic a priori' (Kant's concept), which is what you described with 'starting with cogito ergo sum and deriving every crumb of human knowledge using pure logic'.
the now-discredited logical positivists of the 19th century
You mean 20th century. 1920s. The Vienna Circle. (or are you thinking about classical positivism?)
Discredited? How? Logical positivism (and Popper's closely related falisficationism) are still alive and very well, especially among natural scientists.
I still think logical positivism is still an attractive philosophy. It's certainly not without its flaws, but all philosophies have flaws.
Logical positivism's harsh criticism of and complete refusual to acknowlege metaphysics provides a useful and 'down-to-earth' kind of standpoint which to me is still refreshing today.
(especially given the rise of postmodernism, which is a revival of old scepticist ideas in a new phenomelogical packaging, in my opinion.)
It's all distorted science to keep share prices up.
It's not necessarily distorted science. You have to keep in mind that science is not done with the 'big picture' in mind. You don't generally study the complete effects of something, but rather a single effect at a time.
And if you read the actual reseach in question, it doesn't usually make broad claims like 'wine is good for you'. Those claims are usually made by businesses and journalists, not scientists themselves.
If you do a study which shows that wine lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. Then that's what you've shown and all you've shown. The fact that wine also causes alcoholism and liver cirrhosis is completely outside the scope of the study.
However, when journalists then go and make a broad claim like 'wine is good for you', then the scope is broader. But that's not what the scientists were saying.. So who's really at fault here?
This filing seems to be a little over-hyped here on Slashdot. It most clearly says what Novell's board of directors thought they were agreeing to... but is that what they actually got themselves into?
Aaa.. You see this is exactly the point!
SCO didn't file suit against Novell for breach of contract with respect to the alleged copyright transfer.
What SCO sued for was Slander of Title for saying nasty harmful things about SCO, namely that they owned the Unix copyrights.
The problem here is that.. it's not slander if you actually believe what you're saying. And Novell has proved that they have had every reason to believe that they owned the copyrights.
(The Judge himself has indicated that it does not at all appear clear who does own the copyrights. But the copyrights aren't what's in dispute here, even if SCO says otherwise)
"If part of the license or contract is void, it defaults to what you are permitted under law to do."
Just to be rigorous, I'll point out that this is an oversimplification. There are other things which come into consideration as well. A contract or license is not strictly 'valid' or 'invalid'.
But if you want to know exactly how this works, go study contract law.
No, the GPL does not explicitly "COVER" this. Please point me to where it does so?
This is a feature of any license or contract. If part of the license or contract is void, it defaults to what you are permitted under law to do. Since this is a copyright license, you are entitled to do what you would be entitled to under copyright law, which is your 'fair use' rights only.
In the same way, if part of a sales contract were to be ruled void, the applicable portions of retail law would come into effect instead.
The GPL does explicitly cover that a single section does not render the whole license invalid:
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances.
Although this portion is just a precaution, because this is how the law works anyway.
It's hypothetical because neither you or the grandparent poster have given any argument whatsoever for why the GPL would be found to be unlawful.
Tell me: Do you usually go around assume things are illegal? Even things that you have every reason to believe are legal? And do you think up contingencies for these situations?
It's only wrong if you don't know your geek-etymology.
Long ago there was a machine from Digital Equipment Corporation named the VAX ("Virtual Address eXtension").
The plural of VAX became informally 'VAXen', for reasons unknown but probably simply because it sounds nicer than 'VAXes'.
Later, people started referring to any computer as a 'box'. And in reference to the VAX tradition the plural of 'box' was 'Boxen'.
The Xbox name, in turn, played on the slang term 'box' for computer.. so in turn referring to the Xbox in plural form as 'xboxen' is completely in line with computer slang traditions.
I fully understand the GPL requires US copyright law.
Then you don't fully understand since the GPL does not require US copyright law. It requires international copyright law and some basic contract law. This would cover the majority of the countries of the world and certainly most western states. The GPL has already been found valid by courts in several European countries.
If the GPL is non-functioning, cpyright kicks in, and all 3'rd parties have 0 rights.
You're saying that as if the there isn't an already existing copyright on a GPLed work. That's wrong.
What would you do if PARTS of the contract requiring source being shown was found to be unlawful by the courts?
I don't know, what would you do if your grandmother spontanously combusted inside an ice-cream truck?
You are just throwing around hypothetical situations without any substance. Despite what you might think, courts aren't random in their judgements. They do operate on certain principles.
Do you understand the concept of 'contractual freedom'? That basically means you can agree to anything in a contract which isn't prohibited by law.
Please point out to me where in existing contract or copyright law an argument for how this would be illegal. And you better make it good, because the arguments in the other direction are pretty good.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Yes, tens of millions were killed. Many millions were innocent, yet WW2 games don't mention those. That would be too sad, so they gloss over those killed by the errant shell your tank just launched over into the adjacent farm, or those killed when your bombs go off course. In war, accidents like that ended in the misery of millions more we don't hear about. Of course, you can say that there were so many to get upset about, but then that's to say human suffering doesn't matter to you if it's in sufficient quantity.
That is a misinterpretation of my argument.
The question here is not if these games are an accurate portrayal of history. They are not. They never claimed to be. They're history-based fiction.
The question is: Is this fiction disrespectful to the victims? I don't feel they are because they do not depict specific victims. How can you be disrespectful to an anonymous entity?
My grandfather's brother fought for the Axis in the war. But I do not feel games depicting the killing of Axis soldiers are disrespectful to his memory. A game which depicted the killing of him, personally would however be offensive. Do you see the difference here? That was my first point. If you don't agree with it, fine.
But don't try to turn it into something completely different.
2. Yes, two generations. However, as there are still MANY people alive now who saw WW2, that point is quite irrelevent.
No, it is relevant. Wouldn't you agree that making a joke about a person the day after their funeral is disrespectful?
Yet the same joke, told ten years after the funeral may not be.
It's not about 'does anyone remember', it's a question of how fresh the memory is.
3. Centering on the military deaths and glossing over the civilian ones is the biggest injustice you can do.
It would only be an injustice if you presupposed the game to be an accurate account of history. It is not.
I wasn't defending the war in itself. What is there to defend about war? War is an awful thing.
A life is a life you say. And this apparently includes fictional people. Because what you are doing here is equating a fictional portrayal of fictional persons in a much larger historical setting with a fictional portrayal of an actual person in an specific historic place, time and moment. A person who would likely be alive today had he not been killed.
I guess people read in whatever they want to read in.
I didn't mention Vietnam, nor did I defend Vietnam games.
(I don't personally know of any, much less played any, so I don't really know what exactly you're referring to.)
So how am I hypocrite? I would find a game re-enacting the My Lai massacre every bit as abhorrent as, for instance, one re-enacting the Holocaust. (which I did mention)
And which of these was a victim of WWII?
Out of those, only Rommel died during the war, and that was after being ordered to commit suicide. He was a victim of the Nazis, not the war.
In my opinion there *is* a significant difference.
1) Tens of millions of people were killed in WWII. The sheer number of deaths depersonalizes the victims. (Unfair as that may be) So you can't compare it. AFAIK most WWII games do not center on specific named individuals either.
2) Time, WWII was two generations ago, the Kennedy murder was one.
3) Morality. All but the strongest pacificts would agree that killing another armed man in war is one thing and murdering an unarmed civilian is another. WWII reenactment games usually center on warfare, not the Holocaust, for example.
I don't see that being a 'historical event' is much of a mitigating factor. So was 9/11, and I think most people would be quite offended if someone were to make a 'hit the twin towers flight simulator'-type game out of it.
And that would be because of the reasons stated above.
Forensic proctologist
Well, I'm not sure that exists. But one which actually exists is forensic entomologist (entomology being the study of insects).
Think about that one. Uh-huh. These are people who study the maggots in decaying corpses for a living.
Forensic proctology sounds quite nice to me by comparison.
"Pornography really does, unlike other addictions, biologically cause direct release of the most perfect addictive substance," Satinover said. "That is, it causes masturbation, which causes release of the naturally occurring opioids. It does what heroin can't do, in effect."
So what the researcher here is actually saying, is that sex is addictive, and therefore bad.
Um.. let's try to take a rational view here?
Sex is a normal and healthy thing. (For some of you, yes, that includes masturbation.)
So, some people get obssessed about sex. True. But most people don't. Heck, there are obsessive bingo players out there.
But as long as the vast majority of people aren't getting hurt, why would the solution be to stop engaging in the addictive activity?
It's amazing how they can't ban smoking, which is directly harmful for everyone who uses it, and even those around them, but pornography is obviously fair game.
But let me guess: This isn't really about public health at all, is it?
I disagree.
The directing, especially the camera work, is pretty bad. For instance, far too much time is spent in the beginning showing off those mechanical cargo-moving whatevers.
The first time I saw the dang thing, I was saying to myself why are they showing me this? Oh, that must be what she kills the last alien with. The point gets over-established.
The acting is pretty bad. 'Game-over man!' The Marines are, to me, complete stereotypes. Comic book figures driven completely by machismo. You know immediately the one with the toughest mouth is going to die first, screaming. Another example of overestablishing the point.
Personally I didn't relate to the Marines at all. I frankly didn't give a s-t about them, because it was obvious from the outset that they were only really there to serve as Alien fodder. Perhaps if they showed some emotions other than 'being tough' and 'being scared' I could have.
Memorable quotes? Sure, I guess so. So are advertising slogans.
It's not any kind of measure of a film in my book.
A copyright holder can sometimes get further rights by means of an EULA
Really? How? Do tell.
Actually, (having done a little historical research myself) those kinds of things are relatively easy to find. (church and public records)
In general, the most interesting stuff is often the stuff which was the least interesting when the newspaper was published, such as advertisments, expressions and figures-of-speech in the articles, opinion pieces, the style of reporting, the biases.
All these little things that generally convey the atmosphere and mindset of an age. It's easy to find out facts, like the construction date of a factory. It's more difficult to find out what people were thinking about the new factory.
One thing many Western societies lack right now, is widely accepted basis for producing legitimate knowledge.
There is such a method. It's called Science.
I think it's worth highlighting how Science works versus how Wikipedia works.
Science, like Wikipedia, is an open game. Everyone who wishes can participate. You don't need to have a degree, you don't need to work at a university to do research.
(Although certainly, most research is done by academics.)
Einstein worked at the Patent Office when he wrote some of his most revolutionary papers. Yet his ideas were accepted immediately into the physics community on the weight of their merit.
This is how Science works. It's a meritocracy. But with an important distinction. Peer-review.
Those who review the research of others are people who themselves are qualified in the subject.
On Wikipedia, on the other hand, everyone is a reviewer, regardless of their knowledge. I believe this is a crucial difference, detrimental to Wikipedia. When special relativity was created, allegedly only a handful of people on the entire planet understood the paper.
One can only speculate as to how many thought they understood it, but didn't.
This is the kind of situation where false information can easily propagate. In fact, I believe this is usually were most false information comes from.
The solution to this problem, in Science, is the peer-review-system.
Wikipedia does not provide any solution to this problem. The best an informed observer can do when he sees such a misunderstanding (short of educating the world) is to say 'Trust me, I know this stuff, and X is wrong, Y is right.'.
But in that case, you're back at the subjective opinion of the individual again, and have gained nothing.
I did RTFA.
And, firstly: that's not exactly a proper test.
(Supply does create demand. Why do you think stores like building big pyramids of merchandise, and so on.. Hint: It's not just because it looks pretty.)
Perhaps you should read my comment again and try to get the point. I wasn't neccesarily being sceptical about pop-tarts. I was being sceptical about the method in general.
Obviously some of the correlations they'll find are real too. That's not what I was referring to.
What I was referring to, was that it's very easy to become blind to the statistics. To fall into the trap of seeing correlations where there are none. The human brain has a remarkable pattern-finding ability. Unfortunately that ability does lead us astray sometimes.
(For instance reading human faces into natural formations, and so on)
Besides this, the Wal-mart people probably aren't very interested in talking about the times their fancy new method failed, are they?
The Law of truely large numbers.
Basically, the more data you have, the more likely you'll find weird coincidental correlations.
I guess these kinds of 'statistical finding' will become more and more prevalent in the future, given that we're living in an age where we're collecting ever-larger amounts of data, and have the resources to process all this data automatically.
It would be a good thing if people were a bit more sceptical of this kind of stuff. Correlation isn't causation.
They're called anti-trust laws.
Instead of stating 'no enforcement technique can control them', perhaps you should be asking 'Why has the government failed at enforcing existing anti-trust laws'.
Should politics really have the control they do over the enforcement of laws?
And should business have the control it does over politics?
The fact that a single business can make a big contribution to a political party and then get away from federal procecution is nothing short of a scandal. The fact that it's not is one of the biggest things which irritates me about US politics today.
The american people seem to have reached a kind of point where they've completely quit looking forward and outward on ways to improve their society. Any long-term issue in US politics is treated as if it was insolvable. When the international perspective shows that the problem is actually US-specific, and that it has been solved elsewhere, we shrug and say 'Ah, well that's over there. The US is different.'
The USA is not fundamentally different. It's yet another democratic market-economy in a world with dozens of them. Sure the USA is unique in ways. Sure there are cultural differences, and political differences and so on. But that doesn't mean that there are no solutions.
It means that people are disregarding them, because, ultimately, they don't want things to change.
Ok, end of rant.
LOL.
You think you can compare business by their revenue between markets?
You can't. The profit margins are completely different.
Last year, Walgreens had a profit margin of 3.6%. Microsoft had a profit margin of 21%. That's a 6-fold difference.
Microsoft has 37 times the cash on hand that Walgreens has.
IBM has a profit margin of 8%.
And so on. Sure there are bigger businesses than MSFT. But not very many richer ones. Get hte picture?
Ooops my attempt at precision failed. That should read 'analytic a priori', not 'synthetic'.
('synthetic' a priori is, in simple terms, the kind of knowledge you gain from making observations about the world and drawing general conclusions. That part they kept.)
Um, I don't quite recognize that description though.
To be precise, the very heart of logical positivism is rejecting the 'synthetic a priori' (Kant's concept), which is what you described with 'starting with cogito ergo sum and deriving every crumb of human knowledge using pure logic'.
Gödel was a member of the Vienna Circle!
the now-discredited logical positivists of the 19th century
You mean 20th century. 1920s. The Vienna Circle. (or are you thinking about classical positivism?)
Discredited? How? Logical positivism (and Popper's closely related falisficationism) are still alive and very well, especially among natural scientists.
I still think logical positivism is still an attractive philosophy. It's certainly not without its flaws, but all philosophies have flaws.
Logical positivism's harsh criticism of and complete refusual to acknowlege metaphysics provides a useful and 'down-to-earth' kind of standpoint which to me is still refreshing today.
(especially given the rise of postmodernism, which is a revival of old scepticist ideas in a new phenomelogical packaging, in my opinion.)
It's all distorted science to keep share prices up.
It's not necessarily distorted science. You have to keep in mind that science is not done with the 'big picture' in mind. You don't generally study the complete effects of something, but rather a single effect at a time.
And if you read the actual reseach in question, it doesn't usually make broad claims like 'wine is good for you'. Those claims are usually made by businesses and journalists, not scientists themselves.
If you do a study which shows that wine lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. Then that's what you've shown and all you've shown. The fact that wine also causes alcoholism and liver cirrhosis is completely outside the scope of the study.
However, when journalists then go and make a broad claim like 'wine is good for you', then the scope is broader. But that's not what the scientists were saying.. So who's really at fault here?
This filing seems to be a little over-hyped here on Slashdot. It most clearly says what Novell's board of directors thought they were agreeing to... but is that what they actually got themselves into?
Aaa.. You see this is exactly the point!
SCO didn't file suit against Novell for breach of contract with respect to the alleged copyright transfer.
What SCO sued for was Slander of Title for saying nasty harmful things about SCO, namely that they owned the Unix copyrights.
The problem here is that.. it's not slander if you actually believe what you're saying. And Novell has proved that they have had every reason to believe that they owned the copyrights.
(The Judge himself has indicated that it does not at all appear clear who does own the copyrights. But the copyrights aren't what's in dispute here, even if SCO says otherwise)
"If part of the license or contract is void, it defaults to what you are permitted under law to do."
Just to be rigorous, I'll point out that this is an oversimplification. There are other things which come into consideration as well. A contract or license is not strictly 'valid' or 'invalid'.
But if you want to know exactly how this works, go study contract law.
This is a feature of any license or contract. If part of the license or contract is void, it defaults to what you are permitted under law to do. Since this is a copyright license, you are entitled to do what you would be entitled to under copyright law, which is your 'fair use' rights only.
In the same way, if part of a sales contract were to be ruled void, the applicable portions of retail law would come into effect instead.
The GPL does explicitly cover that a single section does not render the whole license invalid:
Although this portion is just a precaution, because this is how the law works anyway.
You conditioned your own sentence with "If".
It's hypothetical because neither you or the grandparent poster have given any argument whatsoever for why the GPL would be found to be unlawful.
Tell me: Do you usually go around assume things are illegal? Even things that you have every reason to believe are legal? And do you think up contingencies for these situations?
Quit wasting your time.
It's only wrong if you don't know your geek-etymology.
Long ago there was a machine from Digital Equipment Corporation named the VAX ("Virtual Address eXtension").
The plural of VAX became informally 'VAXen', for reasons unknown but probably simply because it sounds nicer than 'VAXes'.
Later, people started referring to any computer as a 'box'. And in reference to the VAX tradition the plural of 'box' was 'Boxen'.
The Xbox name, in turn, played on the slang term 'box' for computer.. so in turn referring to the Xbox in plural form as 'xboxen' is completely in line with computer slang traditions.
I fully understand the GPL requires US copyright law.
Then you don't fully understand since the GPL does not require US copyright law.
It requires international copyright law and some basic contract law. This would cover the majority of the countries of the world and certainly most western states. The GPL has already been found valid by courts in several European countries.
If the GPL is non-functioning, cpyright kicks in, and all 3'rd parties have 0 rights.
You're saying that as if the there isn't an already existing copyright on a GPLed work. That's wrong.
What would you do if PARTS of the contract requiring source being shown was found to be unlawful by the courts?
I don't know, what would you do if your grandmother spontanously combusted inside an ice-cream truck?
You are just throwing around hypothetical situations without any substance. Despite what you might think, courts aren't random in their judgements. They do operate on certain principles.
Do you understand the concept of 'contractual freedom'? That basically means you can agree to anything in a contract which isn't prohibited by law.
Please point out to me where in existing contract or copyright law an argument for how this would be illegal. And you better make it good, because the arguments in the other direction are pretty good.