Is RSA even a serious security conference, other than to market the latest tools and gee-gaws to willing suckers? Despite the obvious tone of skepticism/sarcasm, this is a serious question from me, not a troll. I just didn't think RSA was much of a magnet for serious-minded security researchers, policy wonks, activists, and the like. I thought folks went to Black Hat and DefCon for that sort of thing, while RSA was pretty much just the security-focused version of Dreamforce or Oracle OpenWorld.

Yeah, buddy, you might be good at reading scientific papers and research, but you're not so good at reading lawsuits. The suit itself is just a bunch of claims. Evidence is the stuff you present in court. So if you're thinking, "But I'm not a party to this suit, so I don't have access to all the evidence attorneys are planning to present" ... now yer thinkin'.

It's a fair point. I use a Mac, but I pretty much automatically replace the functionality of any of the apps it comes with. It bugs me when Apple announces a major OS release and all the "new features" relate to the bundled apps, all of which, for me, rank no higher than "it'll get you there until you get something better." I even use iTerm instead of the built-in Terminal.

Still, the day-to-day use of macOS is still more pleasurable to me than Windows has been for years, and even though there aren't likely to be any showstoppers for me with Linux, I still don't want to deal with it.

As for Final Cut, years ago Apple did something to screw it up and piss off a lot of the professional video editors who were using it. Maybe they reversed themselves or came up with a fix, but the pro editors I know had no patience to wait for that and moved on to Adobe Premiere, which by then had improved by leaps and bounds.

On the contrary; that's exactly how the entire industry of building contracting works.

Doubtless the Amazon delivery franchisees also absorb most of the liability for undelivered/misdelivered packages.

Check his nightstand for books on how to kill your wife.

I used to run IT at a graphic design firm. For years, the joke was that it was Adobe's market to lose, and they were working on it. However, the one crown jewel was always Photoshop. They could (and did) fuck up Illustrator, they could (and did) fuck up Acrobat, etc... but if they fucked up Photoshop, it would be like downing a whole bottle with a skull-and-crossbones label on it.

Photoshop seems to be doing well today, but there are legitimate alternatives. Clip Studio Paint is much cheaper and has tons of tools to suit illustration work.

I understand that a lot of video editing professionals made the move to Premiere after Apple bungled Final Cut Pro, just like a bunch of publishing pros switched to InDesign when QuarkXPress dropped the ball. But none of this is to indicate there's any shortage of resentment and animosity towards Adobe and how they do business.

But how much of that is money the companies have in the bank and how much is money they expect to have when their AI plans raise them to the level of Mount Olympus?

Really? If you told me you spent more than $2 on a checkers set, my eyebrows would raise. I reckon most people get theirs from their parents' attic.

Disney's only real aim is to maximize profits on every project. That means every possible audience segment should have an entry point to the project, from every possible angle. You can't achieve that if you automatically alienate half of the entire world.

However, the idea that Disney promotes "strong female characters" is pretty amusing. I haven't seen any. Rey isn't "strong," she's a classic Disney princess; she wishes and her wishes come true. Padme marries Anakin and even gets pregnant, yet the actors have zero chemistry and we never see Padme so much as kiss Anakin, because that would conflict with the laughable idea that doing that would make her less "strong" and "a Senator."

See, the problem with modern Star Wars hasn't really been Kathleen Kennedy. It's that Disney slop sucks, and the more franchise entertainment it gobbles up, the more of it will suck.

Some may remember that Matthew McConaughey also licensed his voice to Eleven Labs for AI usage.

At the time, I was a little perplexed, but then I figured it must have been an exclusive license. Nothing can stop some clever AI from faking your voice. But if a company has exclusive rights to it, not only do you have detailed accounting (and likely, veto power) over when and where it is used, but if someone is using it in an unauthorized, unlicensed way, the company can file the lawsuits for you. You and your attorneys don't have to do it on your own.

I reckon it's hard to preserve the "commercial appeal" of a game you could play on a desert island with a bunch of rocks.

It's been theorized that Canada's import decline has a lot to do with why Jim Beam, which has a hand in pretty much all bourbon distilling, is shutting down its main distillery in Kentucky for all of 2026.

The nonprofit TFA mentions is "loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement," which is a dubious concept most closely associated with and promoted by uber-crypto-bro (and crook) Sam Bankman-Fried. This affiliation should give you some idea about this organization's motives and operating principles.

I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I can summarize," and it's pretty hard to prove it was your recipe it summarized..