The Warner Brothers/DC film Birds of Prey "is proving not to be the February box office success industry observers had hoped," according to The Wrap: After grossing $13 million on Friday from 4,236 screens, the film is now estimated to earn an opening weekend of $34 million, which would be the lowest start for a DC Comics adaptation since the $5.3 million opening of the box office bomb Jonah Hex in 2010. Heading into the weekend, trackers had been projecting an opening weekend of $55 million while Warner Bros. was more conservative with a $45 million start... Reports on the budget for "Birds of Prey" have varied but have tended to be around $85-95 million.
"Oof. That's not what was wanted or expected," writes Cinema Blend. First of all, the title probably didn't help... Second, Birds of Prey is rated R. Suicide Squad, which gave Margot Robbie's Harley her big showcase, was rated PG-13. As Deadline noted, a lot of young Harley fans -- who loved the animated series and Suicide Squad -- may have been shut out by that rating...

People are also comparing Birds of Prey to Deadpool, which opened to $132,434,639 in February 2016. It may seem like apples to oranges, but they are both R-rated comic book movies opening in February.
Here's a humorous sidenote. At one point in the film, Harley Quinn asks herself what she could've done to offend Ewan McGregor's narcissistic character -- with one possible reason appearing for a split-second on the screen: "Voted for Bernie."

"We just snuck it in there," director Cathy Yan told the Washington Post.

The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it was moving its Thunderbird email client to a new subsidiary named the MZLA Technologies Corporation. From a report: Mozilla said that Thunderbird will continue to remain free and open source, but by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product and pay for its development easier than before. Currently, Thunderbird is primarily being kept alive through charitable donations from the product's userbase. "Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation," said Philipp Kewisch, Mozilla Product Manager. "The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services," Kewisch added.

The US film industry may have generated revenues somewhere in the region of $40 billion last year, but it seems Hollywood still has plenty of work to do if it wants to compete with that most hallowed of American institutions: the public library. From a report: According to a recent Gallup poll (the first such survey since 2001), visiting the local library remains by far the most common cultural activity Americans engage in. As reported earlier today by Justin McCarthy: "Visiting the library remains the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far. The average 10.5 trips to the library U.S. adults report taking in 2019 exceeds their participation in eight other common leisure activities. Americans attend live music or theatrical events and visit national or historic parks roughly four times a year on average and visit museums and gambling casinos 2.5 times annually. Trips to amusement or theme parks (1.5) and zoos (.9) are the least common activities among this list."

New submitter SysEngineer shares a report from HuffPost: A new protein made from air, water and renewable electricity could revolutionize our food system within the next decade. Developed by the Finnish company Solar Foods in a lab just outside Helsinki, the protein -- called Solein -- is made using living microbes that are then grown in a fermenter in a process similar to brewing beer. The microbes are fed with carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen all taken from the air. This fermentation process, which takes place in huge vats, produces a liquid that is removed and dried to give the final product -- a yellow flour-like powder with multiple food uses.

If the electricity comes totally from renewables -- the aim is to use solar and wind -- the production process could produce virtually zero greenhouse gas emissions, the company says. It would also require far less land and far less water than traditional agriculture. Solar Foods says just 10 liters (2.1 gallons) of water is needed for every 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of Solein. To produce 1 kilogram of soy requires 2,500 liters (550 gallons) of water, a figure that rises to more than 15,000 liters (3,300 gallons) for 1 kilogram of beef. The scientists say Solein has three applications: it can be used as a protein additive in existing foods; it could work as a way to help ingredients bind together; and it could also be used as an ingredient in plant-based meat alternatives.

Amazon is building a homeless shelter on its Seattle campus. From a report: The proposed shelter, which is being co-created by nonprofit Mary's Place, will live in Amazon's Seattle headquarters and is set to open sometime in the first quarter of 2020. The new shelter will have the capacity to serve approximately 275 people each night. This is only about two percent of the estimated 12,500 homeless people in King County, where Seattle is located. While this is certainly a minor fix overall, the size of the new space will actually make it the largest family shelter in Washington state. The shelter is also expected to make upwards of 600,000 meals per year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: One of the big challenges of making 100 percent renewable energy a reality is long-term storage," says Julian Hunt, an engineering scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Hunt and his collaborators have devised a novel system to complement lithium-ion battery use for energy storage over the long run: Mountain Gravity Energy Storage, or MGES for short. Similar to hydroelectric power, MGES involves storing material at elevation to produce gravitational energy. The energy is recovered when the stored material falls and turns turbines to generate electricity. The group describes its system in a paper published November 6 in Energy.

"Instead of building a dam, we propose building a big sand or gravel reservoir," explains Hunt. The key to MGES lies in finding two mountaintop sites that have a suitable difference in elevation -- 1,000 meters is ideal. "The greater the height difference, the cheaper the technology," he says. The sites will look similar, with each comprised of a mine-like station to store the sand or gravel, and a filling station directly below it. Valves release the material into waiting vessels, which are then transported via cranes and motor-run cables to the upper site. There, the sand or gravel is stored -- for weeks, months, or even years -- until it's ready to be used. When the material is moved back down the mountain, that stored gravitational energy is released and converted into electrical energy. Not only is the system more environmentally friendly than pumped-storage hydropower and dams, but it's more flexible to meet varying energy demands.

"Hunt estimates that the annual cost of storing energy via this system will vary between $50 to $100 per megawatt hour (MWh)," the report adds. "And he says that the energy expended to transport materials to the upper sits will be offset by the amount of gravitational energy the system produces."

Researchers at Australia's Deakin University say they've managed to use common industrial polymers to create solid electrolytes, opening the door to double-density solid state lithium batteries that won't explode or catch fire if they overheat. Tangential writes: Dr. Fangfang Chen and Dr. Xiaoen Wang from Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials claim to have made a breakthrough with "the first clear and useful example of liquid-free and efficient transportation of lithium-ion in the scientific community." The new technology uses a solid polymer material, weakly bonded to the lithium-ion, to replace the volatile liquid solvents typically used as electrolytes in current battery cells. The liquid electrolyte is the part of the system that becomes flammable during the kinds of infamous battery fires Samsung would rather forget. "If industry implements our findings I see a future where battery reliant devices can be safely packed in airplane baggage, for example, or where electric cars don't pose a fire risk for occupants or emergency services like they currently do," Dr Chen said in a press release. In addition to making batteries safer, the team believes this solid polymer electrolyte will finally allow batteries to work with a lithium metal anode. That would be big news in the battery world, where the lithium anode has been recently described in Trends in Chemistry as "critical to break the energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry" -- the bottleneck that's stopping electric vehicles, aircraft and portable electronics from developing at the pace they should be.

ted_pikul writes: Penn State University researchers report in the journal Joule that they've designed an electric battery that can charge an EV for 200 miles in about 10 minutes. The key to their approach is quickly heating the nickel foil-covered battery to a high temperature and more slowly cooling it to ambient temperatures. The researchers report that in addition to the fast charging time, this approach mitigated performance-draining "battery plaque" that can build up on batteries.

If you plan on streaming content from the new Disney+ streaming service on Linux devices, you'll likely be greeted with Error Code 83. Fedora Linux package maintainer Hans De Goede from the Netherlands first made the unpleasant discovery. gHacks reports: De Goede noticed that Disney+ would not work in any of the web browsers that he tried on systems running Fedora Linux. He tried Firefox and Chrome, and both times Disney+ threw the error "error code 83." Disney+ Support was not able to assist de Goede. It replied with a generic message stating that the error was known and that it happened often when customers tried to play Disney+ in web browsers or using certain devices. Support recommended to use the official applications on phones or tablets to watch the shows or movies. Other streaming services, e.g. Netflix, work fine on Linux.

A user on the Dutch site Tweakers dug deeper and uncovered the response code that the site returned when a device or browser was used that could not be used to play streams. According to the information, error code 83 means that the platform verification status is incompatible with the security level. Disney uses the DRM solution Widevine to protect its streams from unauthorized activity. Widevine supports three different security levels, called 1, 2 and 3, which have certain requirements. The supported level determines the maximum stream quality and may even prevent access to a stream if the requirements are not met. It appears that Disney set Widevine to a more restrictive level than its competitors. The decision affects Disney+ on Linux devices and on other devices that don't support the selected Widevine security standard.

Pacific Gas & Electric should give rebates or credits to each of its nearly 800,000 customers affected by last week's power shutoffs, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said, demanding that the utility "be held accountable." CNN reports: The utility intentionally cut power to almost 800,000 customers in Northern California last week in an effort to prevent downed utility lines and equipment from causing wildfires amid dry and windy conditions. Some customers were without power for days. Newsom is urging PG&E to give credits or rebates of $100 to each residential customer and $250 to small businesses as "some compensation for their hardships," a release from the governor's office said Monday. "Californians should not pay the price for decades of PG&E's greed and neglect," Newsom said in the release. "PG&E's mismanagement of the power shutoffs experienced last week was unacceptable."

PG&E CEO Bill Johnson responded by saying it had carried out the shutoffs in accordance with a plan that the California Public Utilities Commission had approved, under the commission's guidelines, and pointed to the fact that no wildfires were started. "While we recognize this was a hardship for millions of people throughout Northern and Central California, we made that decision to keep customers and communities safe," Johnson said in a statement. "That was the right decision." Californians blasted the utility for the move. While PG&E has been blamed for deadly wildfires in the past, critics said it should have invested in improving its infrastructure instead of just cutting off power for days.

BuzzFeed says they've identified two firms which "misappropriated names and personal information as part of a bid to submit more than 1.5 million statements" pretending to oppose net neutrality regulations: The anti-net neutrality comments harvested on behalf of Broadband for America, the industry group that represented telecommunications giants including AT&T, Cox, and Comcast, were uploaded to the FCC website by Media Bridge founder Shane Cory, a former executive director of both the Libertarian Party and the conservative sting group Project Veritas. Cory has claimed credit for "20 or 30" major public advocacy campaigns in recent years, including, he says, record-setting submissions to the IRS, Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, and "probably a handful of others." On Media Bridge's website, the company has described itself as having expertise in "overwhelming government agencies" with avalanches of public submissions, and has publicly dubbed its approach to marshaling comments the "Big Hammer." In the FCC campaign, Cory was working for Ralph Reed -- a high-powered political strategist and titan of the Christian right who himself was working for Broadband for America. Cory, in turn, enlisted LCX Digital to find the commenters...

BuzzFeed News ran large samples of the email addresses in those files through Have I Been Pwned, a website that identifies whether an address has been exposed in any of hundreds of major data breaches. The results were stark: In one particular group of 1.9 million comments, according to BuzzFeed News' analysis, 94% of the email addresses belonged to people who had fallen victim to a hack known as the Modern Business Solutions data breach, in which millions of people's personal information, including full names, birthdates, home addresses, and email addresses, had been stolen... All these comments were uploaded by Cory, using his Media Bridge email address. (Some of the comments were full duplicates; after removing them, there were just over 1.5 million comment-and-email combinations.)

In its letter to BuzzFeed News, Media Bridge contested the idea that email addresses showing up in breached databases were a sign of improprieties. In fact, it said, a "high match rate" is a sign of validity, since most Americans appear in breached databases....
Two of the commenters were named Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett -- and yet mysteriously "the names and street addresses were exactly as they appeared in that breach... A separate spot check by BuzzFeed News of 100 randomly selected Media Bridge comments revealed a similar pattern -- even down to a street address that used underscores instead of spaces."

In addition, Buzzfeed found that "almost all" of the remaining 6% appears to just be "recycled" identities drawn from comments left in 2016 when the FCC was considering a new rule that would allow cable consumers to use their own set-top boxes -- a regulation that the cable industry opposed. "One year later, 99.9% of those exact same names and addresses appeared on the FCC's website, weighing in on an entirely different policy debate -- net neutrality. They were uploaded by Media Bridge."

Lucas123 writes: Like Apple and Intel, Amazon is piloting an in-house program for employees that in addition to healthcare insurance affords workers access to telemedicine and at-home visits from a contracted provider. While growing in popularity, in-house healthcare programs, which even include corporate clinics, are seen by some as an example of the growth in fragmented care or mimicking corporate care during the industrial era when factories had worksite clinics to get employees back to work faster. "[Corporate-based virtual healthcare programs, like Amazon's] is yet one more example of fragmented care," says Cynthia Burghard, a research director with IDC's Health Insights. "Back in the day, manufacturers had worksite clinics to take care of workers injured on the job mostly so they could get back to work sooner. The difference with what Amazon is doing compared to what the [Deloitte] survey shows is that the Amazon offering is disconnected to other care providers rather than under the supervision of an employee's providers." [The Deloitte survey found that 66% of physicians said telemedicine improved patient care access and 52% said it boosted patient satisfaction.]

Vik Panda, lead of operations for French sleep company Dreem, had this to say: "The news is that Jeff Bezos' company, and others like it, don't need anyone's permission to start building and paying for their own parallel healthcare systems, little by little. If Amazon replaces the existing health care system bit by bit, and employees of self-insured companies migrate to this new digital health system, do we all get to come along?" Amazon Care, Panda said, represents a wake-up call for providers, payers and employers because telehealth is not just about video chats with a doctor or wearable fitness trackers. "...It's a new operating system for health, and big technology companies are not going to wait for everyone else to figure it out."

According to a newly published support document, Apple says the new iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max will present customers with a warning if the devices are unable to verify a genuine display after a screen repair job. "If you need to replace your iPhone display, it's important for certified technicians who use genuine Apple display parts to repair it," the page reads. "Replacements not performed by Apple, authorized service providers, or certified technicians might not follow proper safety and repair procedures and could result in improper function or issues with display quality or safety." The Verge reports: Apple goes over a laundry list of problems that could arise if your display is swapped the wrong way or with a non-genuine part, such as multi-touch problems, issues with screen color accuracy and brightness, or True Tone failing to work properly. "Additionally, repairs that don't properly replace screws or cowlings might leave behind loose parts that could damage the battery, cause overheating, or result in injury." The company isn't afraid of nagging customers about this, either. Apple says that a notification will appear on the affected iPhone's lock screen for 4 days after a problem is first detected, then it'll move to the main settings menu for 15 more days. After all that, it gets pushed away to Settings -> General -> About. According to Apple, this new measure only applies to its brand new iPhones and not previous models. Even if it can't be verified as genuine, the display isn't prevented from functioning normally by iOS.

The FCC's multi-year effort to kill media consolidation rules at the behest of giants like Sinclair Broadcasting has been rejected by the courts, who ruled the agency failed to seriously consider the negative impact unchecked media monopolies have on the public at large. Motherboard reports: In a 2-1 new ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit forced the FCC to go back to the drawing board in its quest to make life easier for media giants, arguing the agency "did not adequately consider the effect its sweeping rule changes will have on ownership of broadcast media by women and racial minorities."

In 2017, Pai's FCC voted to eliminate a cap preventing any one broadcaster from reaching more than 39 percent of the nation, a 77-year-old rule requiring broadcasters keep a local studio in the towns they service (to encourage community participation), as well as rules preventing broadcasters from owning more than two TV stations and one radio station in the same market. These changes were intended to help companies like Sinclair Broadcasting, whose proposed $3.7 billion merger with Tribune Media would have given the company ownership of more than 230 broadcast stations, reaching 72 percent of the American public. That deal was scuttled last year after Sinclair was accused of misleading the FCC to gain regulatory approval. The court said that FCC analysis justifying its decision was "so insubstantial that it would receive a failing grade in any introductory statistics class."