Sounds like the computer did the audience a favor.

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

And modern music is no exception. Some songwriters have more of a way with words. "Around The World" is one extreme to great effect - it's a neat song. Then there's song verses like:

Dive bar on the East Side, where you at?
Phone lights up my nightstand in the black
Come here, you can meet me in the back
Dark jeans and your Nikes, look at you
Oh damn, never seen that color blue
Just think of the fun things we could do...

You Know Who at her (IMHO) best. The notion that the only good music was performed in the 1970s by men with guitars is, at best, circular reasoning. De-valuing Taytay's music because her music and persona appeal primarily to women is nothing more than misogyny.

...laura

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.

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 couldn't tell you exactly what kids use computers for, but I spent 20 years in IT for a K-12, and spreadsheets were not part of the curriculum for K-8 grades. High school students used spreadsheets for proper spreadsheet things (ie, not as a glorified database flat-file) as a primary function only in business-applications classes.

It would be difficult to type a term paper on a device without a keyboard, but we've already seen keyboard dock solutions for other tablet devices including those that don't run Windows or Apple's OSes.

I have to disagree for one very important reason, this device could have potential in the education market specifically because it's not a full-featured computer.

One of the problems with general purpose full-featured computers in the hands of students is the ability to get off-task. The student may have one assignment that they're supposed to do, but that student may have dozens of things that they would like to do for their own entertainment on said device. It requires self-discipline for the student to stay on the required task, and many students simply don't have that discipline.

When the electronic device has only a very limited number of functions then this makes it harder to go off-task due to the nature of the device itself.

And for those who are skeptical, think back to the days of using a simple calculator or even a scientific calculator versus switching to a Texas Instruments graphing calculator. After typing in 5318008 a few times there wasn't a lot of off-task use of the simpler calculators, but for the graphers we had even rudimentary text-based computer games as far back as the mid-nineties.

A color e-ink reader with some basic applet capability that doesn't support side-loading could make for a useful educational tool if textbooks are loaded on it and if it can do basic worksheet editing and submission.

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.

The trouble is there are a lot of truly terrible human drivers on the roads as well, and those terrible drivers' issues driving end up manifesting when traffic is most congested. Sure, there are occasional single-vehicle accidents or accidents between vehicles in uncongested areas from time to time, but it's usually when tensions are highest due to the stress of traffic that bad human driving results in collisions.

What they're going to need to work out is how to handle situations when the 'correct' process isn't possible, and how to determine if a technically-incorrect process would still be safe, and if that would be the way to solve it. Because in-practice we see this sort of thing frequently, things like going around double-parked vehicles by crossing a double-yellow for a short time, or determining when a failed signal means one should proceed after some waiting period, that sort.

I would like to see autonomous driving on highways and freeways where the limited-access nature of the road or long stretches without cross-traffic or pedestrians might make it simply safer and easier on the human operating the vehicle.

To pay a living wage to a cab driver would cost around $75,000 per year accounting for payroll taxes, benefits, and other employer-born costs, if the drivers are employees of the taxi firm rather than true independent contractors that basically rent the cabs and then receive dispatch from the company as part of the cab rental.

If the cab company can do away with the drivers then that's a huge amount of money that they're giving up. That's why they're pushing for autonomous vehicles.

The whole point of reintroducing the Cruise cars with human drivers is to get us used to seeing them operating again, where we're not instantly thinking of them as dangerous road hazards. Likely the intent is to try to shift back towards autonomous driving again, slowly as their developers actually get the software to work properly.

And since bribery is assured under the guise of "campaign contributions", that system is always going to be flawed.

Liberty is the common problem.

https://www.mudbots.com/

Looks like you can get into this business pretty cheap. A 15x15x15 foot printer is only $39k