I think emojis are entertaining. Do we NEED more? No. Will new emojis be used? Yes. Do we NEED optimized fab processes for processors? No. Will we benefit fr optimized fab processes? Yes. Do we NEED bacon? No. Do we love and enjoy delicious bacon? Yes.

SSIM does a pretty decent job though

FTFY

An invasive program has been brought to a screeching halt because the folks in charge of the program didn't know what they were doing.
We should be throwing a ticker-tape parade, not giving them advice on how to get it rolling again.

Funny how this comes on the heels of a high profile event involving Popcorn time.
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I'd put $20 on the complainants not knowing about Popcorn Time until ars' recent article.

It is always comical to read the back-and-forths over topics like this. There are benefits and drawbacks of each medium, but arguing over which one is better is like arguing over which flavor of jam is superior.

That is a difficult egg to crack. It may mean the end of turn-key ready-to-roll websites - but if the 'digital media industry' is genuinely worried about extinction, they should already be looking at ways to make their ads safe and palatable, rather than continuing the ads-arms-race.

I take a lot of comfort knowing that I'm not uniquely intelligent - and honestly, some of the work-arounds advertisers have come up with for getting around ad blockers are pretty clever. Restructuring how a business works isn't the same thing as inserting an ad, but there are plenty of very intelligent people already involved in the industry. I would like to see the 'worried about extinction' folks make some proposals about alternate ways of doing business. Up until this article, most of the ad-blocker news coverage has gone just short of callling ad-blocker users baby-killers.

From time to time, I'll fire up a vanilla web browsers in a VM to see what an unprotected browsing experience is like, hoping to see things calming down (I want companies to be able to monetize their websites! I didn't even opt-out of Slashdot's ads until they started yelling at me), but each foray sans adblocker is more miserable than the last. I would think that an organization would strive to avoid associating their product with misery, but this is exactly the opposite of what the ad industry has done to the web.

Finding a way to get ads in the hands of small website owners is a difficult task. Even more difficult will be convincing content consumers that the ads are safe and unobtrusive again.

Sounds precisely why official govt. correspondence shouldn't be handled on one's own personal email server.

It is an arms race between ad networks and ad blockers. I don't think anyone would fault a site for trying to monetize its content (stuff consts money). Unfortunately, too many sites got lazy and handed over the handling of advertisements to these larger conglomerated ad networks. The ad networks got lazy about who they let advertise/what tech they allowed to be used in advertisements, and now internet ads are yet another vector for the spread of malware.

This is not ok.

I'm willing to chalk up my annoyance with loud flashing pseudo-videos to personal preference, but it seems like everyone else who consumes internet content is also irritated by these things.

Until the ad networks can guarantee (which they can't, now) that they won't deposit malware on my parents' computers, I will evangelize the use of adblockers until I die. Another option, as others have already mentioned, is to bring control of ad content back to the sites' actual owners.

That is all.

(2) changing your own mental approach so you really do understand them better in a good way
Which is also where things get wonky with robots. This is a non-deterministic operation. From the ground up, robots are generally designed to behave in a predictable fashion. The human brain is exceptionally plastic, and our ability to socialize/associate on the fly is still mostly a mystery. We may be able to mock up a sufficiently complex and convincing strategy for the robot to follow, but it is still just running down a list of rules. Empathy (like the CEO wants) is a squishy strange thing that us meatbags are still trying to understand. Then again, I guess if the bot is convincing enough the debate on whether it actually has empathy becomes philosophical.
Step one can be reduced to some regex, look-up tables, and copy-n-paste (active listening is silly like that).

Other posters have already suggested ways to get the video upstairs wirelessly, with the caveat that you'd probably not receive satisfactory performance for HD videos. It is manual, dirty, (sometimes) frustrating work, but so long as you've got the network infrastructure to handle 1080p streams, your most reliable performance will come from a strand of CAT6/7.