Near as I can determine, the only thing about this that I'd consider "news" here is that Microsoft is pushing a Yet Another Feature Phone rather than building a cheap Windows-based smartphone.

I feel like there should be more to the story. Is there some background, or just a press release and some specs?

And the reason is ... because the stuff used to be BUILT by people.

Well, no.

The reason a lot of things are hard to repair now is because they are built by people.

The problem is that people are (relatively) expensive, so things are designed for manufacturing efficiencies that reduce the amount of time people have to touch them.

One of the most obvious consequences it that complex assemblies are typical built from the inside-out, because it's way faster to install an engine if the suspension, fenders, bumpers, and hood aren't already on. A good designer will try ensure that things which tend to break are as accessible as possible, but repairability is only one constraint in a whole list of competing requirements.

The guy on the assembly line can reach the bolt, but that bolt is as good as gone once the next guy on the assembly line glues a part over it.

Everybody wants to see the latest thing now, know all of the spoilers before going in, have a huge box office weekend, and fad fast.

That's pretty much the premise of the article.

It's hard to put my finger on it, but something seems to be missing from that argument.

I think if you replace "Everybody" with "The people who still care to see movies in theatres", it clarifies the problem. Yes, there does appear to be an interesting trend in that demographic which concentrates opening earnings to a much narrower time window.

But... I dunno. It's like the article (and the industry as a whole) can't look much outside that narrow time window of box office revenues.

I think another major factor is that people no longer consume content according to the strict and narrow release windows that content producers prefer.

DVD, DVR, on-demand streaming, binge watching, etc have immunized us against the hype industry that got people to line up for the midnight showings of new blockbuster releases.

As soon as we got comfortable with "we'll see it... whenever", well, game over.

Now the interesting thing is going to be (if this ever gets challenged in court): who owns the copyright over those e-mails?

A better question, if this ever gets challenged in court, is who registered the copyrights?

IANAL, but my understanding is that for a copyright lawsuit in the USA to go anywhere, the "work" has to be registered with the copyright office. No registration, no lawsuit, do not pass "Go".

Which, practically speaking, means a DMCA complaint on something like an e-mail (which is unlikely to be registered) is mostly just a bluff. Admittedly, even having to get such a lawsuit dismissed is too much for the average DMCA complaint recipient to fight and most of them would cave.

Moving production to Africa won't be a trend until honest government prevails in Africa.

I'm fairly confident that a Chinese business might know a thing of two about working with a corrupt government.

I'm pretty sure that if I ran a business and I misrepresented a $4 million deal to my business partners, investors, and/or the general public as being 20 times larger, either my ass would be in jail or I'd be sued into oblivion.

Burning flags is free speech.

You'll find that there's a lot of people who don't think it is free speech or should be. And in places that don't put a value on freedom of speech, it isn't.

A real head-scratching conundrum about the universe is explaining why it's not already overrun with self-replicating robots.

Because the need/urge to reproduce and expand your territory is a biological imperative which would have to be taught to robots?

Because an biological lifeform smart enough to make immortal intelligent robots might just be smart enough not to also make them infinitely self-replicating?

Because the universe is big enough and hostile enough to make unbounded expansion less than a sure thing?

My question is whether a Hollywood B movie is a cause worth anyone -- our military and diplomatic people, civilians movie goers -- risking their lives?

I hate to quote celebrities, but George Clooney makes a good point:

"With the First Amendment, you're never protecting Jefferson; it's usually protecting some guy who's burning a flag or doing something stupid."

Why is this any different than counties that don't allow the sale of alcohol adjacent to counties that do?

Applying logic to the War On Drugs is a lot like bringing spaghetti to the beach.

Yes, I'd go to the mall. I have a better chance of being killed in an accident driving to the mall.

I will bet your chances of being killed in a mall go way up if there are specific threats against that mall.

Absolutely. If there's specific threats against that mall, there's going to be a fuckton of heavily armed law enforcement types swarming the place. Anybody with a grasp of statistics and/or current events should know that's a situation to avoid.

The ONLY people in the whole world who really care about this two-bit movie are the North Koreans. They're not going to pull off any real terrorist attacks.

Sony is a Japanese corporation. Japan is, if you glance at a map, within spitting distance of North Korea. North Korea is well known for being collectively batshit insane, and for pulling some bad stuff on Japan with less cause.

I wouldn't be making bets either way on this one...

Unfortunately, many (small) websites are hosted on a shared server with one IP for multiple domains. The name is required in the URL else it simply does not work.

It's required in the HTTP Host header, but close enough.

I'm aware that it won't work for everyone, but in this particular discussion we're talking about sites that nobody in their right mind should ever be sharing a server with, nor do I believe a site like the Pirate Bay would want to get pinned down to a specific server.

In any case, if Sony decides to have a go at a small website, they're pretty much screwed irrespective of web server configuration.

A huge number of people already barely use DNS. They go to places like "The Pirate Bay" by entering "The Pirate Bay" in the Google Search window, and following the first link or two that they find. So, if Google indexes 194.71.107.27 or there's a Wikipedia link to it (since, you know, that'd be newsworthy), the effect of a DNS ban has little impact on the original discovery of the site URL.

Some (stupid) ISP's already take care of this search mechanism... enter a bad URL, go right to a search page. Most browsers will also be more than happy to help out.

It'll break bookmarks, but once you know something exists, has value to you, and you know how to find it, it's nothing more than an inconvenience.

In other words, delisting doesn't work for longer than it takes a new URL to propagate.

Taking over the hostname would last a little longer, but news travels fast.