these companies have EVERY right to restrict how that content is used in this instance

You're slightly confused; they do have the right to specify contractual restrictions on how their game is used, however, it has absolutely nothing to do with copyright, it's in the End-User License Agreement that you implicitly agree to when you purchase their product, and the DMCA is not a tool for remedy of a EULA breach. Also, presumably they failed to include it in the EULA in the first place, and in fact explicitly encouraged and allowed the production of such independent content ... because 20/20 hindsight. So now they must either retroactively add some fine print to a EULA that was never signed, or abuse the DMCA for censorship, both are wrong.

That is such a generic line it basically sounds like some corporate manager-bot spent a whole 5 minutes half-heartedly cutting and pasting it from some PR handbook just before going home for the day and proceeding to forget about it. It's so tone-deaf.

What's worse is they had early mover advantage in the market (as they pre-dated most other alternatives), AND when MS bought them they had the numerous advantages of the largest desktop OS vendor in the world backing them (e.g. financial, integration, network effects etc.) ... to fail to make Skype a success under those conditions is a really big fail.

He's not, he's either confused or being disingenuous (I suspect the latter because he's not that stupid). Robots aren't "earning" income, they don't have bank accounts in which they deposit their salaries, they don't use their income to pay for robot kids or beer etc. Robots are presently property ... because they're just machines ... "taxing robots" is not taxing robots, it's taxing the human being that owns the robot (means of production). It's the human owners of the robot who then have less money to feed or educate or get healthcare for their kids.

We're a long way of robots that exhibit the sentience that warrants giving them rights.

They obviously didn't poll me. I would absolutely work less under a UBI, if decent enough. Damn, I am sick of the stress and pressure of working my fingers to the bone to pay for myself and my family's expenses, I would welcome sweet relief in a heartbeat. I long to live a life of moving from one meaningless hedonistic pleasure to the next. Mod me down for being an asshole, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way.

UBI under our current economic systems are a form of theft, but if technological progress allows us to create a post-scarcity society, there is no reason we should continue to toil if large-scale automation etc. can ease our burden.

Trump is showing himself to be the first actually pro-American leader in many years

This is why all the 'opinion pieces' urging impeachment say it must happen 'fast' - because they know if they wait longer, the anti-Trump hysteria whipped up by the media will die down as people realize Trump is basically OK after all, and everyone starts realizing that no, the Russians didn't 'hack the election' or any such nonsense.

Context: There have been a number of articles over the past few days claiming MP3 is dead (and usually 'incidentally' citing AAC as being the 'superior' 'de facto' 'standard' now - AAC incidentally still being patent-encumbered, and for which Fraunhofer still extract licensing fees) ... in other words, FUD claims have been issued to the media, seemingly to try 'scare' people off MP3 by claiming it's "dead" (when in fact it's now completely open), and trying to steer people toward AAC. I'm going to speculate that Fraunhofer are behind the FUD press releases.

I'm also a 'technologist who works with academics' and I find your comments bizarre. That 'three-five minute self-introduction of themselves' is the part where I like to listen most clearly, as understanding where someone is coming from, their context, what they're working on, what they want to solve, is the single-most important thing to ensure I'm giving them effective solutions that they are actually looking for, i.e. that I'm going to be offering something of value to them.

And knowing someone's title is just a trivial, basic matter of respect in the academic. If you keep calling someone who has earned a doctorate "Mister" then yeah, they're probably going to keep getting annoyed about it, because you're being sloppy and disrespectful, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder, and I would never hire you, because that same sloppiness is probably going to translate to the work you do also. If you can't even remember someone's title, you probably can't remember basic things relating to the technical problems at hand.

I'm going to guess that this is connected to the recent Larson Studios hack (https://www.databreaches.net/thedarkoverlord-leaks-upcoming-episode-of-orange-is-the-new-black-after-netflix-doesnt-pay-extortion-demand/); if so, then it doesn't have anything to do with shipping jobs overseas, as they're a California-based post-production company.

That's bullshit, I've been working in the industry in "PC-land" since the early 90's and all the PCs we worked on were being released with USB ports by around '98, and everybody in the industry knew exactly what it was and why it would be beneficial and that it was going to replace the older port types (e.g. much higher speeds, a common peripheral interface etc.), nobody thought it was some "weird" thing, and certainly nobody thought of it as an Apple thing at all, because Apple were virtually-dead-nobodies at that time that nobody cared or thought about. Windows 95 already supported USB by ~'97, and Windows 98 also had USB support in by default, I remember setting up multiple brand new PC's with USB in '98, with WIndows 98. I remember the transition to USB clearly and it's nothing like you describe, you are rewriting history to try make Apple sound like some sort of visionary leaders with USB, when it wasn't like that at all.

Oh and yes, to the idiots who are going to inevitably say this, yes I know the 4th Amendment is a "US thing" while this is the UK. DUh. My point is, the 4th Amendment is based on the fundamental underlying inalienable right to due process, and that underlying natural right, being inalienable, is in fact universal to every individual on earth. Government does not "grant" rights, we have rights by virtue of existing - government can only either choose not to violate them (e.g. 4th Amendment), or violate them.

I believe the legal/ethical principle in question is due process, and whether that constitutes a natural right (hint: yes). The 4th Amendment protects the right of individuals to be free from searches absent of a warrant, which may only be issued on the principled basis that there is reasonable suspicion that you've committed a crime, or preparing to do so in a way that makes you a threat.

Any law that creates the power for a government to blanket search anyone and everyone they please simply for passing through the border (and in the absence of reasonable suspicion), effectively thus either violates the natural right to due process, or must be premised on the flimsy notion that merely travelling constitutes reasonable suspicion. It would be incredibly difficult to argue with a straight face that the simple act of travel alone constitutes reasonable suspicion that you are a criminal/terrorist. Likewise, even travelling to a so-called "terrorist state" seems flimsy to me, as there are millions of innocent people within these nations, and only a small percentage are engaged in terrorist activities.

In the case of pre-existing intelligence sources implicating a specific individual that they may be closely connected to e.g. ISIS (as your example of someone whose brother is a high ranking official in ISIS), then yes, thought the procedure should be, the evidence constituting reasonable suspicion should be used to obtain some sort of special type of warrant targeting that particular individual, which could then be used when they cross the border.

But, that is quite different from a blanket power to search everyone at the border (e.g. force everyone hand over passwords) ..... the latter would be the equivalent of throwing away the 4th Amendment in the US and simply saying, to hell with it, we can now search everyone's houses "just in case" they might be a terrorist.

Will some terrorists slip through if we restricted such searches to cases with reasonable suspicion and applied due process? Yes, likely. But we don't throw away basic human rights for everyone, to make us slightly safer, do we?

Where I live they're almost always higher than market price, so the local government can extract higher taxes

Which will probably trick their algorithms into increasing their estimate of your neighbors' properties.

You are looking at national averages, which is disingenuous: US cities like Seattle and Detroit are covered by the same gun laws and yet vary from safer than European cities, to far more dangerous. Which means, it has almost nothing to do with the gun laws, and has to be something else. What that something else might be, is left as homework to the reader.