There will always be a crisis though. As one ends, another begins.

Wordle creator upset that people are making clones of his game? But Wordle is really just a slight variation on Mastermind, a game from 1970. If you have a really good idea, people are going to copy it. Sometimes they'll copy it as-is, sometimes they copy it with a new variation to try. That's just how things work.

New stories are a risk. Making a movie is very expensive, and it's only getting more so - audiences want a big name superstar lead actor. And if it's a more fantastic movie they will want good effects too. If you don't have that, you'll have a hard time even getting cinemas to show it. Low-budget movies only get very limited distribution, generally.

But a franchise comes with a ready-built audience. A large and measurable fanbase that are almost guaranteed to watch the movie, even if it turns out to be crap.

I share your view on the golden age of TV, and I can name a few factors that contribute to it:

- Visual effects got cheaper. Not of much benefit to your suburban drama, but a real boon to sci-fi, fantasy or historical settings. Now it's affordable to have a proper alien planet or medieval castle. No more making do with the BBC quarry.

- Streaming and on-demand opens up the possibility for series with real continuity. Before that became common, it just wasn't an option for anything more than a mini-series: If viewers missed an episode with important story arc that couldn't be summed up in the recap, they would have no idea what was going on and just stop watching. And it messed with syndication as well, having to always show the episodes of a complete season and in order. That's why so many classic series follow the same format: A self-contained single episode story, and a few elements of something ongoing. The protagonists visit a new planet, solve a new murder, visit a new place, fight a new monster - but always wrap it up neatly at the end of the episode. Before the introduction of DVRs, streaming and on-demand there could never have been a Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or Witcher.

- There's been a marked cultural change in children's TV. Back in the 90s it was very condescending - almost everything for children was heavily content-restricted by the studios to ensure it was utterly inoffensive - not just by toning down the violence, but also making the villains not-too-scarey. And continuity was right out - both because kids were assumed incapable of such an attention span and because syndication is everything in that genre. There were very few exceptions, like Gargoyles, which are remembered because of how unlike everything else they were. But today? We get things like Trollhunters, Dragon Prince... Shows that actually respect the audience, to the point that adults enjoy them as well. Shows where main characters can actually die. We have proper 'young adult' shows now.

Nothing is truly new in writing, really. Avatar is a skillful blend of many well-established tropes fitted in to a classic save-the-cat framework. When the story is well-written, the audience doesn't realise how cliche it is.

The Last Smurf Dances With Pocahontas In Fern Gully.

Half-works. But there's a technical issue. A simple hash wouldn't work because it's trivial to circumvent - all the pirate needs to do is alter a byte in the metadata, and you have a new file. So you need to use a perceptal hash, or some other sort of file signature. That works, but also brings the problem of false positives. Even if your false positive rate is an unrealistic one-in-a-million, when you're comparing an upload against a million different songs most uploads are still going to register as infringing. It's a viable avenue to explore, but needs a lot of care of it is to produce a workable solution.

Andy Warhol is one artist who would be very happy to see his art shamelessly commercialised long after his death, and doubly so if it is in a form that is arguably completely worthless.

But it will impact his career. China is a big market, and every hollywood studio wants in. It's very hard to convince China to approve an American movie, and it takes a lot of jumping through regulatory hoops, but that effort is worthwhile: The potential revenue is in hundreds of millions, with the potential of one day soon breaking the billion-dollar box-office mark - and that's just for the theatrical release, before you get in to streaming and disc sales.

And now every studio knows that if they put Keanu in their upcoming movie, there is zero chance of them getting a slice of that Chinese pie - and they may even see their entire company blacklisted, locked out of potential future revenue.

So Keanu is now toxic. No studio is going to dare cast him in their blockbuster for a long time, unless they have already given up any hope of a Chinese release.

There's a game theory problem. Pacifism is a great thing - if everyone does it. But if you choose pacifism, and another country does not, then their leadership is free to march over and invade unopposed any time they want. The only smart move in this game is to raise an army, even if you only intend it for defense.

The famous quote comes to mind:

          “Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

        — Herman Goering, Nuremberg trials

There are two types: The Tesla connector, used by Tesla. And the CCS connector, used by everyone who is not Tesla. There's also the older CHAdeMO, but that's been mostly displaced as the industry (except Tesla) standardises on CCS. But it gets worse: CCS comes in type 1 and type 2, which are sort of compatible-ish... and then there is J1772, which is what CCS is based on, but J1772 doesn't support DC power.

But electricity is electricity, so with an appropriate adapter cable it is possible to convert between these - you can charge a CCS car on a Tesla station or vice versa, but only if you carry an adapter somewhere in your car. And you probably won't be able to get the full charging speed - you'll likely be limited to slow charging. Also, that doesn't work on Tesla superchargers.

You can pin some of the blame for this mess on Tesla. Not all of it, but a good part. They are the one manufacturer that refuses to adopt an open standard charging connector, in order to keep their network of Tesla chargers (And especially superchargers) as something exclusively available to Tesla customers. They don't want to built infrastructure that would benefit their rivals - that's hardly good business sense.

Yes, but those ways all require expense - and it's hard to justify that. Even when prices are high, there is no assurance that they will stay that way - by the time the pipeline is finished it may well cost more to run that the value of the gas it can transport.

MNG was really a failure, because APNG got there first.

Google is pushing WebP as the PNG replacement. And it's a good format: The lossless compression is far superior to PNG, the lossy compression is better than JPEG, and you can even combine lossy image with lossless alpha mask. And it does animation.

WebM is intended to serve a slightly different role. It's a video-first format, rather than an image format with video capabilities. It's got the option to us much more sophisticated lossy compression, and sound, and all the other things you need for video - but it doesn't have a lossless mode, and it doesn't have transparency support. You wouldn't want to use WebM to embed a little animation in a webpage.

And Discord uses Opus too. The codecs do have adoption, but they lack public awareness. Ask any random person about MP3 and they will know it. Most people looking to pirate some music casually will just google 'youtube save mp3.'

And Vorbis is better than AAC, and Opus is better than Vorbis. Technology advanced, but just because there are better codecs available doesn't mean people will use them.