And to the U.K., of all places. It's not like they have a huge amount of international sway these days. I'm no fan of Zuckerberg, but it's honestly not entirely unreasonable of him to decline this. Particularly when the U.K. has not been, shall we say, a particularly adroit negotiator with other power structures.

not for those making a killing. There are tons of people creating great videos (or other works) out there on the internet that are just trying, and often failing, to make a living from it; those people I have a lot of sympathy for. People like the two guys behind Cool Ghosts, who amongst other things have put out perhaps the best video game review 'TV' episodes of all time.

By contrast, people that are making enough they could easily retire and live an extremely comfortable life for the rest of their days? Those I don't have sympathy for. They aren't actually stuck in any real rut, and their artistic output tends to be a lot less laudable anyways.

It's an age-old problem and dichotomy. It brings to mind the song "Coup D'etat" by Sleepless Nights, about the music industry:

Who killed Sam The Record Man?
Music fans with blood-stained hands
"God damn, Celine sold less Greatest Hits this year"
The only hearts that beat close to mind
Are the casualties of the retail line
Part time artists, Scraping bottom and barely getting by

Brace yourselves, here comes the Coup D'Etat
There goes the old dead world
Rebuild, rebuild, rebuild, rebuild, now
Brace yourselves, here comes the shakeup shift
Golf carts are crashing hard
And I could really give a shit

For old Gene Simmons and tin-can Lars
Need their hands on my money like a hole in the heart
Art needs to suffer, not drive expensive cars
Aluminum and plastic, and more plastic still
Making mountains of ephemera in the county landfill
I remember when rare sound wasn't just a ratio kill

Brace yourselves, here comes the Coup D'Etat . . .

In all honesty and respect for him, "but frankly this sounds like something someone who is stoned would start doing" could quite often describe Richard Feynman.

How is this even news? We have a lot of anti-IP folks around here, but even they have to acknowledge that this has been settled law... well, as long as there has been an internet. Longer, I guess.

You nailed it. That I'd personally argue that our worldwide IP laws (particularly regarding copyright and patents) are rather insane and maximalist is in part because of how unyielding things like re-use are, and how narrow and legally perilous the exemptions. And it's why I'm diligent to try to use multimedia under licenses like CC-BY-SA as much as possible, and to put out any media I create personally under such licenses to contribute back. The only thing surprising about this ruling is that it went high up enough for this ruling to be handed down.

A lot of Democrats are actually just basically neocons who don't hate gay people, or for whatever other reason happened to end up on the other 'team' in American politics. The widespread 'liberal' embrace of Frum show how neoliberal so much of the Democratic establishment is, since anyone actually progressive at all would gag at the idea. There's a reason why Hillary Clinton often used the slogan "America's Already Great"; there's a class of rich assholes who claim to be "progressive" but actually love the status quo, income inequality and endless wars included.

Signal is a more secure, similarly phone#-based replacement. Telegram is an easier and more featureful one, and nicely has open-source clients and protocol albeit questionable server infrastructure and crypto. Riot.im on Matrix is philosophically the best (entirely Free Software, and decentralized and federated so it isn't beholden to one entity running a central server but everyone even running their own server can talk to everyone else).

Capitalism Plus is a fun game, but I remember finding a kindof silly exploit back when I played it in the 90s. I was able to build a ridiculously high stock price by targeting the high-end of the market while keeping the shares 100% owned by me, then when I finally sold shares (basically simulating an IPO) at the overvalued price I'd manage to get it to I used the money that I raked in from that to buy up all of my competitors. At that point my business was vast and unwieldy and inefficient, but that didn't really matter since all of my competitors were gone, and any time a new one came around I just gobbled them up too if they started to get too big. It was fun, but it felt like the simulation just wasn't deep enough and I'd found a dumb exploit in it.

I mean, then I grew up and found out that that's an entirely valid real-world business plan. Hell, my flatmate these days works for a company that did exactly that.

So many of the problems here (ex. paying with a credit card and one that has only a single person's name on it? Having no fallback that can be spun up elsewhere?) are foolish if this has never happened before, and utterly, mind-bogglingly idiotic if this in fact has already happened before. It's one thing to be blind of something you should know could be a problem, it's quite another to be blind and wholly unprepared for a problem you've personally experienced! Something seems fundamentally wrong at this company.

Also, if your entire business can die because it takes an unexpected few days off, then perhaps your business is running a bit too raggedly and doesn't have enough meat on the bones . . .

Oh right, this affects Vista users too, all two of them!

I can't even trust the fucking *autocorrect* on my phone, using Google's keyboard.

Can't say I've even heard of the RPL before!

From TFA:

I asked eBay to explain their rationale for suggesting this switch. I received a response suggesting the change was more about bringing authentication in-house (the security key is made by Verisign) and that eBay hopes to offer additional multi-factor authentication options in the future. âoeAs a company, eBay is committed to providing a safe and secure marketplace for our millions of customers around the world,â eBay spokesman Ryan Moore wrote. âoeOur product team is constantly working on establishing new short-term and long-term, eBay-owned factors to address our customerâ(TM)s security needs. To that end, weâ(TM)ve launched SMS-based 2FA as a convenient 2FA option for eBay customers who already had hardware tokens issued through PayPal. eBay continues to work on advancing multi-factor authentication options for our users, with the end goal of making every solution more secure and more convenient. We look forward to sharing more as additional solutions are ready to launch.â

Although that doesn't fully explain why they felt the need to take things in-house. Possibilities that occur to me: 1. The backend they need to use for the old fobs is hellish to maintain. 2. Verisign charges them a lot of money and so some manager decided they should ditch the external methods for the sake of profit. Or some other sort of falling out between eBay and Verisign, but isn't it always about hope for higher profits? Speaking of... 3. It doesn't actually cost them much, but they want to develop their own in-house methods to then re-sell because upper management is still regretting spinning off PayPal and they want to create another such more universal middleman. Consider this the "??? Profit" possibility.

Not only a longtime callback joke, but one that vastly improves on the troll-y original to be used *against* trolls. I heartily approve, Anonymous Sir.

Sounds about as effective as McAfee, certainly...

Once Android has the same desktop dockability, the only advantage of Continuum will be the ability to run legacy Windows apps. Not a small advantage, that - but the keyword is legacy. The market for people that want a pricey phone with crappy phone apps so they can dock it to use legacy X86 Windows apps is pretty small.

But that's the thing, Microsoft's solution doesn't even do that; because their Windows Phone (now Windows 10 Mobile) devices run on ARM, they can't run legacy x86 Windows apps, and people can't even recompile those for ARM even if they wanted to and in the cases where there'd be no issues because Microsoft won't let you distribute and install non-'Metro' (or whatever exactly they're calling it now; UWP, I think?) code on ARM-based versions of Windows. The only stuff you can run using Continuum is Windows Store non-legacy apps, which are actually a far smaller set of applications than those available on the Google Play Store or iOS App Store. Hell, my old Nokia N9, the product left in a ditch as Nokia jumped foolishly on the Windows Phone bandwagon, has a more vibrant developer community with a better selection of applications than Windows Phone managed for quite a while, so leaning on the new-apps side of the strategy wasn't ever going to be a winning play for Microsoft.

Microsoft's mobile offerings floundered for many reasons, and no small part of it was how they completely failed to take advantage of their entrenched positioning in the desktop market.