YouTube's DMCA counter claims process is seriously broken.

In both this case and in the reverse it hurts the little guy.

A lot of people steal my youtube content, and normally it's not an issue to keep this in check with their automated matching system. 99.99% of the offenders take it down and don't try to perform a counter claim. Usually because they are copying the video wholesale like they are with many others and if one gets taken down they just move on.

But one time someone used my video as part of a top 10 list. It was most of the video, for commercial purposes and not within any of the usual fair use parameters and would fail a fair use test in any court. But when I sent a takedown notice he filed a counterclaim, and it was then that I found out that the only way to proceed to the next step would be for me to initiate legal action and provide proof of that action to youtube. Youtube pointedly will not become the decision maker in these processes as they don't want to be liable. The problem is if you are a little guy and you can't afford to file a legal case, you are stuck and the offending video remains up. So they guy made thousands of dollars off my video and I have no recourse. This guy stole everyone else's content as well and that was his racket. The complete DMCA process only works if you are a big company with lawyers. If someone posted a clip from a Universal film, it would get taken down and stay down because they have a huge legal department that can spend all day doing this stuff.

I wish there was a legal collective for individuals where everyone pays in and then gets to use a filing service whenever they have trouble, up to a certain number per year. Like having a AAA Auto Service membership.

Also, for a little guy, having youtube send your contact info to the other party whenever there is a counter claim is very dangerous, anyone could abuse this system just to get your contact information. Always use a google voice number and a PO box....

It would actually be less suspicious to leave the phone on but at your home rather than to place it in airplane mode. Although they are not likely searching for phones that suddenly stopped pinging in the wider area rather than just a geolocation report, but I wouldn't put it past them to do that if they wanted to be very thorough.

The main issue is that they also have cameras and facial recognition, which still requires additional steps to frustrate. The fact that they are protesting in such large numbers is the biggest help. Once it reaches a tipping point, individual safety actually increases.

Many popular tourist areas have ENORMOUS hotel taxes. Not also including those is disingenuous. It makes a large difference on the final bill. Sometimes 10 - 20%.

I still have not found an AirB&B that was a good deal compared to a hotel.

While we're at it 'resort fees' need to be banned as well. At least one state is considering it. They have the exact same effect as the cleaning fees in the AirB&B world. The hotels use them to advertise one price and get you with another. You have to look very closely during booking to spot them. This is especially pernicious in Las Vegas.

Lately I've been missing my previous ride, which was a stick Mazda Protege5. When I bought the automatic Mazda3 to replace it, I couldn't find a stick version anywhere, I had to go with what was available because I needed a car quickly. It does have paddle shifters which helps on occasion but it's a standard automatic transmission, not a DSG.

I was recently thrilled to find out that the new generation 3 is one of the few cars available in the American Market that is offered in a manual version.

What I was less thrilled about is that you have to order the 'premium' (mid-tier) trim package to get it. As most people over 40 know, back in the day the manual version of any car was the cheapest version. Now it's a premium feature they want to make you pay for by upselling a trim package you might otherwise have no interest in.

The post hits close to home because I was thinking that I'd like to have a fun, fairly inexpensive manual transmission internal combustion car as a weekend driver. Mostly for the sound and the feel. Yes EVs can now out-perform internal combustion cars, the power is all there all the time, no shifting. That's a different kind of fun, on the order of lightcycles. But the SOUND of a nicely tuned engine with a custom exhaust... the shifting experience...those things, to some of us, are desirable and will be dearly missed.

I will also miss cars that don't track you every move and sell your data without your permission. The EV industry has decided to go in the radically connected direction - I'd like an EV that is radically un-connected - just batteries, motors and a motor controller, and a charge controller. It seems one will have to DIY it to get something like that...

Ever since the Mugabe 'lets print more money' era of the mid-2000s, sticking to a currency with a stable, known value has been a god-send for anyone just trying to get by.

I visited in 2017 when the US dollar and the South African Rand were the most accepted currencies and everything worked very smoothly. Locals and visitors alike benefited. There were many grey market and black market exchanges that allowed the country to function. The only problem was a shortage of physical currency which meant that you needed to bring a lot of small bills to make exact change.

In 2019 they tried to reintroduce a Zimbabwean dollar, but that lasted only about a year before they started accepting multiple currencies again on an official level. I think they're missing some critical prerequisites to create and maintain an independent stable currency.

Ironically, hyperinflated zimbabwean dollars from the 2009 era now sell very well as collector's items. Somewhere here I have a 10 billion dollar note. The 100 trillion dollar notes regularly sell for above $45 on Ebay.

I know fully functional people that smoke pot occasionally, and I also know some lazy deadbeats that smoke pot. In the latter case, it's unclear whether the pot is a contributory factor or if it's an extension of a lifestyle that was already there to begin with. I am guessing that pot use will exacerbate a certain personality type already prone to addiction and lethargy. It's hard not to make that assumption because that's what it looks like when you see it.

The other night I was adding a credit for myself for a film I actually worked on (and was credited for on screen) and I wondered what the vetting process was. Was there really a human somewhere looking at every submission? It seemed to indicate that the addition would be vetted somehow, and it appeared the the next day.

One popular (and legitimate) use is many cast extras and crew use it to add themselves when they appear in uncredited roles. And it will note it as (uncredited). This helps their portfolio when they would otherwise be invisible. It would be good to crack down on gaming the system but somehow still allow for minor actors or other crew to add their roles when they don't automatically appear. Vetting uncredited roles would be very difficult. You basically have to take their word for it.

Credit lists for major films appear to be submitted by the studios the day of release, and others seem to fill in the rest.

I too remember when IMDB was a student project, and you would download the database file and run it through a parser. Then it went permanently online. I actually designed a set of icons for IMDB back in the 90s on an Amiga. They used them until the next site revision a few years later.

Today IMDB on the professional end markets itself as an industry tool for actors, crew and filmmakers to pull up information in a centralized place. (not without some controversy - to avoid age discrimination female actors were unhappy about having their real age listed - they lost on first amendment grounds)

It's owner Amazon also targets consumer users to drive ads and sales. It's frankly amazing it's lasted this long as a stand-alone site. You have to dig a bit deeper in the UI but my favorite features are still the trivia, goofs and other informational features. As a cinema fan and occasional participant, it's a useful tool. Wikipedia seems to have film listings but I don't know how complete they are in comparison.

I used insteon a long time ago (15+ years now) before any cloud connectivity was a thing. I liked that the logic could be programmed and stored in the switches themselves so they were not server dependent for basic actions. This was long before they offered any cloud connectivity options and it was all local. I never did get around to playing with a home automation server but there was one good option at the time, the name is escaping my memory. Now there seems to be afew number of good open source / cloud-independent packages out there.

I stopped using Insteon because the power in that home was unreliable and the Insteon units tended to fry themselves in low voltage conditions. After that happened a few times I pulled all of it out and gave up.

In our present house there is definitely a need for automation in terms of gang-switching a bunch of floor lamps and other fixtures with one button, so I'm going to look into it again in the future. But it definitely needs to be strictly local. I have an Asustor file server that will also run a variety of packages including security cameras and home automation software, so I hope to integrate that into the setup at some point.

Why does Hollywood (and just about everyone else) continue to kowtow to China, in light of ever worsening human rights records every year? Everyone is so addicted to the money that comes with accessing the chinese market that no one will take a moral stand.

Can you imagine any studio making '7 Years in Tibet' today?

In a few years ago took a trip to China as I had done a small amount of business with a company there and was looking at doing more. It was fascinating, but since then I completely swore it off due to their worsening human rights record and censorship. It didn't affect anything that I was doing there, but I don't want to be a part of directly doing business with China in any way. And yes I know most of the personal electronics and consumer products I own come from China. That's not easily avoided at this point.

Visiting China is a bit like being in Silicon Valley in the 90s...everyone running around non-stop all the time in a booming economy. The combination of a communist government and a capitalist economy is scary. It gives them much more clout with which to throw around their weight and the reality distortion field under which they operate. The only reason they get away with the stuff that they do is that no one will take a unified stand against them. Many countries have too much to lose. The devil's bargain of China being the world's workshop - everyone relies on them too much at this point.

This didn't pass the smell test, so I gave the article to a friend who ran some numbers.

If you take the 165 feet height, call that the 1/3 scale diameter, then the full scale radius is about 75m. At 1 km/s speed, V^2/R is over 13,000 m/s2, or about 1350 gees.

Sideways.

And that gives you about 1.5% of the energy needed to get to orbit. Spinlaunch is a stunningly stupid idea.

After the first successful launch at Virgin Orbit, a surprising number of employees called it a day and moved on. A lot of people are invested in their job just enough to want to see some success but not necessarily happy enough to see it through a longer haul.

The best analogy for timelines in NewSpace is the pharmaceutical industry developing a new and difficult to make drug or treatment. It can take decades to achieve any kind of real and lasting success. Most people want more variety out of their careers and are happy to move on to the next thing with a bit of vested stock and some success under their belt. This is also true of the tech industry, where there is a lot of attrition after an IPO.

I am completely unsurprised at people bailing on Bezos given the fact that he is unlikely to ever catch up with Musk, which he is oddly trying to compete with despite his total lack of competency and experience in the orbital sector. He is presently trying to sue his way to success which is a bad sign. Jeff is hyper competitive and is used to winning at any cost.

NewSpace has devoured many a billionaire who previously thought they could accomplish anything. Here is the one industry where you cannot win by simply having more resources. Without the right team you are dead in the water, and those teams are incredibly hard to find and put together. You cannot bullshit your way to orbit.

Space is completely unforgiving, but very rewarding for those who do succeed. I spent 15 years in that industry and that was enough. It was a great street education in just about everything you could imagine. Wouldn't trade that time in my life for the world.

What would you use that low end spec for? I mean technically, the requirements say you can, but in reality the performance is miserable with lots of paging and slowdown. It should start at 8GB and go from there.

Anyway, seems like a totally raw deal all around unless you're an enterprise client where the cost scaling and economics makes sense. But you still need a thin client on the user end to interface with this virtual PC, that cost has to be factored in as well. the one time I could see this being useful is for a short term contract where you need to scale up to do FEA type calculations on some powerful virtual machines, and those need to run Windows.

It's becoming harder and harder with each version to claw back some sense of ownership over my own PC. I spent a lot of time disabling a lot of 'call home to mama' stuff on Win10 short of blocking microsoft's servers at the router level (I don't push my fanatical beliefs on the rest of my family's computers, it's not worth the trouble) and I now have a reasonably updated, beautifully stable Win10 installation with no adware or excess junk on it and I control when or if updates happen.

Microsoft is struggling to catch up with the horrible 'everything is a service' model and it's like a frog slow boiling in a pot, eventually they'll creep far enough over that it will be like a smartphone OS on your PC and you won't really own it.

In the mean time I have a wonderful custom built gaming + productivity computer that I will be using for some years to come with Win10.

I spent the early part of my life, from teens to twenties being an intense computer enthusiast, and parlayed that into a career in motion graphics and visual effects. When you're young you can take that kind of sitting all day and not even think about it. But by the time I hit 40 I noticed I couldn't do it anymore. I had back pain all the time. I had already quit my visual effects career for something with more task variety, and now in my mid-40s I absolutely hate sitting at a computer for more than a few hours at a time. My back won't do it, even in a really expensive, comfortable chair. I still do all manner of things on the PC, including CAD design, photo editing, office tasks related to my business, but I have to break it up into shorter stints and go do something standing or moving around in the mean time. I now work mostly outdoors or in a shop and my body and mind are much happier doing that.

Richard Branson got bamboozled by hybrid rocket technology that worked just enough to win a prize, but is totally unsuitable to recurring revenue operation. It was a big shortcut that allowed Burt Rutan and Paul Allen to win the X-Prize. Richard did not understand the nuances of the industry (like many people who enter it with a big wad of cash and end up failing spectacularly) and went with "the team that won".

The feathering operation, another clever shortcut for avoiding development of a more advanced re-entry TPS (Thermal Protection System) also resulted in the death of a co-pilot. Any time you introduce a configuration change for the vehicle you introduce a failure possibility.

I wish them the best of luck trying to innovate their way out of it. So far it hasn't worked out very well.