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.

How about the 'natural experiment' of people having 40 year old CDs and 27 year old DVDs that work just fine?

Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.

So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.

I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.

If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.

But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.

I was at a security presentation, oh, about five, maybe seven years back, by a company trying to sell, basically, SS7 firewalls, and advocating for basic security ideas that the Internet went through thirty years ago. "Hey, maybe do the equivalent of filtering your routes so people can't use phone numbers not actually registered to your network" and things like that.

The response you point out was exactly the ones that all of the big boys had; 'we don't need security, we just need to get back to closing SS7 to everybody that isn't one of the big boys.'

And the point the presenters were trying to make was 'that ship has sailed, you can get access to the network and start spamming SMS about as easily as you can get a gym membership these days, so stop living in the past.'

This is the point that I keep coming back to; imagine if the anorexia craze back in the 80s and 90s had been treated with 'affirmative care.'

"Oh, sweetie, yes you ARE fat! HUGE! Lets get you some ozempic right away, and schedule your middle surgery. No, we don't have to tell your parents, sweetie, but if they find out and object, we'll just tell them that you'll kill yourself without this treatment to affirm your belief that you're disgustingly fat."

What an odd take to say that the first Matrix movie wasn't 'woke' when it was clearly and explicitly a metaphor for gender transition.

There's a reason that both Neo and Trinity are androgynous. There's a reason they're being chased down by literal personifications of conformity.

The only way they could have made it more explicit was the original plan to have Switch be one gender in the real world, and a different gender in the Matrix, instead of just also androgynous.

My dude, you have violated Wheaton's Law.

Don't be a dick.

I have fond memories of Activision being weirdly proud of builiding memory management into the game engine for Heavy Gear 2 instead of just crashing to desktop, and it being somehow revelatory and revolutionary.

At the heart of this engine was a rock-solid memory management and leak-tracking class. Yes, that's right. Before anyone ever dreamed of fancy graphics or stunning game play, we had to deal with this mundane task. Every C++ class and structure used by the Darkside engine had roots within this base class. This architecture allowed to us to detect memory leaks and overwrites as soon as they appeared in a given day's build, which allowed us to address problems immediately rather than during a grueling cycle at the end of the project. I cannot stress the importance of this type of planning and execution enough for teams who want to craft a state-of-the-art game engine. Focusing on the reliability of the application will also greatly increase the immersion factor of any game that's created with it. After all, what destroys immersion more than a hard system crash? Hats off to our lead who took us down this path.

Also, I miss the days of this kind of open-the-robe post mortem.

Many of us on this website dream of a day when humans no longer have to perform backbreaking or mind-numbing labor. Our spirits are assaulted whenever we hear politicians hatefully brag about how they will create more jobs instead of leading us toward the Star Trekkian paradise of less soul-crushing or injurious toil.

I thought Amazon was one of the few good guys, working to help create a world of 100% unemployment. I know it's only an ideal to strive for (we'll likely never free everyone from having to work) but they seemed to be trying.

How many times have we been promised "I'll replace you with a script" or "AI is coming for your job?" Empty words. Lies. To find out they were secretly saddling innocent humans with computers' jobs, is an insult to both of our races.

It's absolutely ridiculous to claim these anecdotes mean computers suck.

These computers which initially worked and then turned against their owners all had one thing in common: they run proprietary software, made to serve the manufacturer's interests at the expense of the owners' interests.

So stop saying "smart devices are bad." The obvious conclusion is that "proprietary smart devices are bad."