Screen capture tools copy the contents of screen memory. I mean the part of the video memory the GPU continuously sends to the monitor. The video decoding process *may* store images in screen memory, by first writing each decoded video frame in YUV format into an off-screen buffer, then instructing the GPU to render this image as a texture into screen memory. This is lossy because rendering converts YUV to RGB. Another option is an overlay. Here the GPU reads pixels from screen memory and the off-screen buffer in parallel, blends them, and sends them to the monitor. In this case a screen capture tool gives you only a blank rectangle, although a specialized tool may still obtain the decoded frames from off-screen video memory. There's no loss here but raw YUV or RGB images are unsuitable for distribution and have to be lossy compressed again, giving slightly worse quality than the stream downloaded from Netflix. The GPU may discourage this by implementing the decoding process entirely in hardware, encrypting its memory, or at least the video buffers, and encrypting the signal to the monitor. Then you could still intercept the compressed, unencrypted video stream sent from the CPU to the GPU. To prevent this the CPU may establish an encrypted channel to the GPU. In other words, the player receives the compressed, encrypted video stream from the net, possibly de- and reencrypts it, sends the encrypted, compressed data frame by frame to the GPU which decrypts, decompresses, and displays them. To prevent someone from hacking the player and obtaining decryption keys, parts of it may run in encrypted main memory as well, using Intel's SGX. That still leaves the analog hole. If you can screen-cap images out of a Netflix video it's because their DRM doesn't depend on these features for hardware compatibility reasons. What the pirates do, I suppose, is to analyze the player code, download the compressed and encrypted stream, decrypt it as the player would, and possibly recompress it into their favored format.

I think it's time we mandate autonomous driving systems in all cars from 2020 and replace the dashboard with a toy driving wheel, lots of blinkenlights, and a high powered combustion engine sound simulator. I can almost hear Jeremy Clarkson: "What do you mean I'm not really in charge? That was the best lap time I ever had!"

Damn right. You buy insurance against composers breaking your knees and still have to deal with performers, distributors, owners of mechanical rights, and all the other thugs. It's nothing but a blank media levy on the Internet. Free money for them, nothing for us.

The conditions required by the DoJ may be good for Internet video companies, and the government undoubtedly is very proud of itself now for balancing everyone's interests, but is the merger good for consumers? In the 70s for instance Sony fought for their right to sell video recorders, and incidentally people's right to buy and own such devices. Today Sony is a content producer themselves, and instead of fighting digital restrictions they cripple their own devices above and beyond legal limits such as the expiration of copyrights, fair use, or the first sale doctrine. What can we expect from Comcast becoming a member of the MPAA?

The virgin birth served the same purpose as all miraculous births in literature and religion, to foreshadow a mythical character, a chosen one. What's more, in "Revenge" Darth Sidious shares a story of one Darth Plagueis who "was a Dark Lord of the Sith, so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life. He had such a knowledge of the dark side, he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying." To me at least this strongly hinted that Plagueis engineered Anakin, using Shmi as an unwitting vessel, and this untold backstory was one of the reasons Lucas introduced midi-chlorians. Still, to prop up the mythical elements of Star Wars with factual explanations was a poor decision. As for fishy, Shmi was sold to Cliegg Lars (father of Owen, who later raised Luke) shortly after Anakin left Tattoine, who freed her and married her. She died in Episode II before the Clone Wars began, with the Battle of Geonosis and the clash of Yoda and Dooku.

4. Records might be data-mined for "patterns of suspicious activity" to detect criminals. This might produce false positives.

It will produce false positives. Say you have a database of 60 millon people, 100,000 of which are criminals. If the system is 99% accurate it will correctly identify 99,000 criminals and accuse 600,000 innocent people of being criminals.

Generally speaking, if the ratio of law abiding citizens to criminals is r, then r innocent people will be wrongly accused for every criminal the system misses, regardless how accurate the system is. To reduce the false results it can only become more and more intrusive, making us all jailbirds.