It looks like the law requires every blog owner to implement an omniscient version of Youtube's much hated ContentID system to insure that nothing uploaded bears any similarity to any past work. It would basically be impossible to run a site like Slashdot under that requirement. The false positive rate would undoubtedly be incredible. Big media cartels were tired of having to do their job and want everybody else to do it for them.

If this goes through about the only solution for every comment section will be to just geoblock the EU until some gigantic content clearinghouse is created. Even then such a service would be too expensive for most message boards so only players like Facebook and Google will be able to run blogs.

It's an empty gesture because he's not Bill Gates. His contribution wouldn't amount to more than a few weeks of relief on the problem.

I've been waiting for a couple of years for a manufacturer to bring back the flipphone, but this time with a screen on both halves. It makes a lot of sense now that we have ultra-thin bezels and ever expanding phones. Women can't even fit half of the Android phones on the market into a standard pocket. Plus the phones are so thin now that doubling the thickness isn't a problem. IMHO phablets have significant usability problems that could be solved if you could just fold the thing in half when you put it away.

Because it has lots of jobs crammed into tiny areas with heavily restrictive building requirements?

Wouldn't that be the wrong example? Unless his amazing display of charity causes billionaires around the country to suddenly become far far more charitable it is an empty gesture. Working to fix the systemic problems is a lot more effectual.

Are you seriously making the argument that Bernie is being a hypocrite because he doesn't use Medicare--a system he does not qualify for? This has been a dumb thread, but that post takes the cake.

No doubt -- and what do you do if you set up a very strong passcode, and later forgot what it was? Rot in jail for the rest of your life, because you can't convince the police that you genuinely forgot it and aren't just trying to stonewall them?

Yes. Amazingly enough the courts have gone along with this.

Even a strong passcode isn't much use against a search warrant unless you're willing to go to jail indefinitely to maybe prevent the feds from unlocking your phone.

Yes Boondoggle. The Patriot missile sites out in Europe are in no way the SDI that Reagan tried to sell to the American people. They completely fail to achieve the stated goal of the SDI of protecting from intercontinental ballistic missile threats. One can argue that it was one of the many factors that caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, but you can not argue that it was a primary factor. It did cause a lot of international tension over the possibility of losing MAD, but in practice it never got close enough to deployment to actually matter.

This was a giant boondoggle in the 80s, and it's just as stupid today. I have no doubt Trump has visions of X-Wings flying around protecting America from space Muslims but it's completely divorced from the reality of the world. Is he worried that he's not building up debt fast enough? That's absolutely not a problem thanks to his disastrous tax bill.

I like how Wordpad never comes up in this discussion. In theory it can do everything notepad can do but even better, but it has one deadly misfeature that prevents me from using it regularly. In notepad when you drag a file onto the window it opens the file. In Wordpad it embeds a link to the file in your document, a feature that nobody has ever found useful. It means you need to use the File->Open dialog and navigate to your file, which is much clunkier than dragging and dropping it into the window, so we continue to use notepad even though it isn't very good.

The big problem with Notepad++ is that it is not installed by default. I'm not downloading a package on someone else's machine just so I can edit a file. Updates to the default apps are a big deal for me, because I often don't have anything else.

They've been letting the DVD rental part attrition over the past few years. It's really sad. I've been getting lots of broken or badly scratched disks too.

My first thought was that this is a net loss for Netflix, but in practice the reviews have a disappointingly low signal to noise ratio. So many "Only watched 5 minutes before I turned this garbage off, worst movie ever!" in between the blatant shills calling it some kind of masterpiece and downvoting anyone who dared to point out that it's garbage. There is nothing so bad in the Netflix catalog that its first 10 reviews aren't all 5 stars and talking about how brave the director is for putting up 90 minutes of white noise interspersed with some irrelevant stock footage and how it got a standing ovation at their film festival.

Wait, nevermind, it's 15%. Still surprisingly low.