No 3rd either, so the king can even do that in time of peace!

Nobody is laughing about the movie "Idiocracy" now, as it has become the most accurate piece of science fiction that was ever published.

It is almost a documentary now.

And you will find that in the most diverse cities of the West, Spotify will list the simplest possible songs as popular in the area. Imagine Maslow's pyramid. And you're at the bottom, forever.

60%+ of the webs logic runs on PHP. It may be way less necessary to build massive new systems with any language, be it PHP or anything else. But as a runtime PHP is as popular and required as ever. The top ten of the webs systems run almost exclusively on PHP, all other technologies are dwarfs in comparison.

He mentions why it looks old on the home page, point number 12.

If Cox is liable for user's copyright infringement then Tesla is liable for drivers speeding.

Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.

You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.

This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt to make it more like your common sense value judgements. And it's really hard because these are issues that your congressional candidates probably aren't talking about at all, because they're talking about someone else's "important" [eyeroll] issues instead. We needed to stop DMCA in 1997/1998 and we failed.

The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement

However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.

The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could have been made in GIMP for all we know). And then the jury might have ruled based on "preponderance" of evidence.

Kind of like 3 cops saying "the perp resisted arrest" and the perp saying "no I didn't" and a criminal jury (where the bar is much higher) still deciding that the perp resisted arrest. Sigh. You know that happens.

Had Cox ratted their customer out (or gotten a DMCA counternotice from them), then the customer could have been sued instead, and raised doubts by saying "I have an open wifi" or something like that. But Cox didn't, and they certainly aren't going to say "we have an open wifi" since they're in the network business so of course they don't offer free networking to strangers. It sounds like a difficult situation for Cox.

The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).

So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after them instead of you." And if that's what happened, then it sounds like Cox said no (didn't make it stop and also didn't pass the buck to their customers. So they sued Cox instead of Cox's customers.

But that's based on assumptions and speculation, hence my question. But yes, I know what a DMCA notice is and I think that mechanism was likely in involved at some point in the story.

I consider Theo-Fascism the worst type of fascism, because it abandons reason even way earlier than regular fascism. Both have a quasi-religious perversion of government, but at least with regular fascism religion is more of a sideshow. In Theo-Fascist regimes its front and center which turns it evil way faster and harder. On top of that, because its religion at the center, reason has been abandoned at the onset of fascism and not as a final result, making it much harder for a society to turn around or find "justifiable" ways to make life work.

Religious fanatics are the worst and these days its the Islam variants are the most ridiculous, are causing the most damage and are the most dangerous. Somebody needs to off the troika leading that country.

It's unclear from the articles whether or not this happened: did the record labels send DMCA notices to Cox, which Cox blew off (thereby becoming liable in place of the original suspected infringer)? Or did the record labels just sue 'em first?

Prior to 1998 they wouldn't have been liable (just like Western Digital and Seagate aren't liable for whatever I may be suspected of doing) but DMCA makes hosting services (and networks? hmm...) a special case, unlike power utilities, computer equipment manufacturers, etc.

Early April, close to 30ÂC here in Germany. This isn't normal. I'm in western Germany where April weather lasts months. This year it was like a few days, maybe 2 weeks if you're generous. We had weeks of 35ÂC+ last year and the year before I was driving back from Portugal through the Toulouse Area and it was 37Â+ even as the sun was about to set behind the Pyranees. The Mediterranean last year was so warm the tourists stayed away. And we're taking about water temperature. The _water_ was so warm the tourists stayed away. This year's skiing season didn't happen in Germany. .... What we where warned about is happening: Cascading runaway effects of man made climate change are kicking in and we're headed for a new global equilibrium. Let's just hope that that will be survivable for modern civilization.

We are screwed. The chance to avoid that has passed. How hard we are screwed however is still up to us.

Part 1 was made without part 2 being greenlit (they wanted to wait for the boxoffie numbers) and apparently part 2 was made more or less the same way. This is a tad annoying to say the least. Are movies going to be like video-games where I wait 18+ months for the fixed, debugged bargain deal gold edition to come out? Or will movies be crowdfunded in the future? Probably a mix of both. We see larger streaming serials becoming flaky and unreliable that way, now movies seem to go there too. ...

All that aside, Villeneuves Dune is _really_ good. I really liked part 1 and part 2 doubles down on the quality. Villeneuve didn't screw this one up and Dune is easy to screw up. He's proven once again that he can take a premium setting, _not_ botch it _and_ take it to a new level, as with Bladerunner 2049. His eerie brutalist visual style and "Lyonel Feininger Lighting" that he's know for hit the nail on the head when it comes to capturing the vibe of the Dune novel and the cast is top-of-the-line with good to very good performances all the way through. I also like the way he picks up and even quotes some elements and inspirations from the 1984 David Lynch version of the movie. There are obvious visual style-quotes from Gigers awesome set design present in the new Dune and some other details are clearly closer to the Lynch-Dune than the book. And all of it in a very good, awesome way. Hans Zimmers soundtrack is almost as iconic as Totos Dune theme from 1984 and is yet another grand masterpiece in movie scores.

Bottom line: I highly recommend the new Dune movie interpretation. Definitely a premium SF movie experience.

Roku needs to add Keyboard support before they try adding Ads.

There is no reason to not support a keyboard for entering search

Improving quality of jpegs by improving its compression is a good thing. I still use jpegs a lot and I prefer them over PNG because PNG files usually are notably larger for the work I do. I hope GIMP ads this algorithm to their codebase ASAP.