TimeOmnivore

Ironically, a large portion (75%-95%, depending on the year) of why Mozilla/Firefox is still in business is the deal they have with Google to make Google's search engine the default - $1.2 billion as of the most recent deal. One of the main things Firefox does that nearly pushes me away is the constant redesigns that either break functionality or look awful. For example, in a recent update, they made bookmark folders take up nearly triple the vertical space they used to. A small annoyance, and one I eventually solved with about:config and CSS changes (which they also regularly break), but it's a frustrating, recurring problem that increasingly nearly drives me away. I still use Firefox and prefer it over Chrome, but Mozilla aren't doing themselves much of any favors, and I mainly stick with them out of spite for Chrome rather than a love for Firefox.

Looking forward to the eventual Persona 5, Bloodborne, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and the rest of the Uncharted games becoming playable in the future. Now if only they would release an official emulator for their old consoles and games. Or at least make a console with backwards compatibility - as that would be a good new selling point if exclusives completely go the way of the dodo.

Didn't really like the fact that this apology video was basically a bunch of excuses that seemed to want to explain why the game was released in such a broken state, but instead left me wondering why they didn't delay the game if there were so many issues. Also don't like how they brushed aside the PC release as if it was fine, even going as far as to say they were very proud of it despite the many issues it has - even aside from the bugs (of which there are still many even of PC), there's clearly a lot of cut content and underdeveloped core features, such as the police having severe AI problems. Its nice that they at least tried to address the problem as opposed to pretending everything was fine, but actions speak louder than words and only time will tell if CDPR will live up to their promises and are able to restore their reputation to some degree. It would be great if Cyberpunk's blunder of a release makes more consumers stop pre-ordering and wait until the game is fully released, playable, and feature-complete before buying - maybe then publishers would actually release games in a complete state rather than giving us a broken mess and promising to fix it later. But that's probably just a fantasy at this point.

Why? People wanted Cyberpunk 2077, not the broken, buggy mess we got that happens to have the same name. It's entirely on CDPR for making the decision to release the game in an unacceptable state. If they didn't want public pressure to release the game, they shouldn't have announced a release date until the game was actually functional. And aside from the technical issues, looking at past marketing for the game, I'm surprised there aren't more people calling them out for what seems like blatant false advertising and fraud given that many features they advertised are seemingly nowhere to be found. I find it interesting how the gaming industry is allowed get away with so much shit that other industries would be legally raked over the coals for.

You could already go to jail and have the government come after you for what this law describes - it's just that right now, because of technicalities in how the law was written it's only a misdemeanor (max of 1 year in jail); this proposed bill making it a felony just increases the jail time and gives you all of the other baggage that comes with having a felony on your record.

Media companies can't actually do anything to you in a criminal case though, aside from referring the case to the FBI, who simply won't waste the time and money on a streamer who isn't running any sort of large scale operation and will just tell whatever company to figure it out back in civil court.

I think you're confusing civil copyright issues, which is what you're describing and what the vast majority of YouTubers/Twitch streamers have to deal with, and criminal copyright issues, which have much stricter legal requirements and is what this bill is aimed at and what 99% of content creators don't need to ever worry about. This bill is about making the running of websites that stream things like sports, movies, and TV live into a felony, the same way that running websites where you can watch/download those things is already a felony (and I should note that this is only about the people running the streams, not anyone watching them).

This bill isn't that scary and is being blown way of proportion - it's meant to fix a loophole in copyright law where streaming content to others currently is just a misdemeanor compared to other forms of distribution which are already felonies. The only way for someone like a Twitch streamer to be affected by this is if they advertise their stream as for streaming the latest Disney films to their subscribers and that's literally the only purpose of their channel. And even then it would be extremely unlikely for that Twitch streamer to face criminal prosecution, which is a whole other ballgame compared to civil lawsuits for regular copyright infringement. The government simply doesn't go after random people for criminal prosecution for copyright infringement, they save their time, money, and resources on the big operations. Tl;dr Distributing copyrighted works right now, except by streaming them to others, is already a felony - this bill makes streaming them to others a felony as well. And for anyone that isn't running a large-scale piracy operation, nothing changes.

Summary Github has reinstated the YouTube-dl repository after the EFF sent them a letter explaining that YouTube-dl did not circumvent technological protection measures as the RIAA had claimed in their DMCA notice. They also started and donated $1 million to a new developer defense fund "to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims". Github is also changing its review process for these types of claims to make it easier for developers to have their repositories reinstated and to ensure that each claim is carefully scrutinized by legal experts to prevent abuse of the DMCA. Quotes From Github's blogpost: From the EFF's letter: My thoughts Glad to see the EFF joining this fight and Github standing up for its developers and putting its money where its mouth is. They seem to be taking this situation seriously and are going quite a bit beyond what would normally be expected. Hopefully the music industry will calm down with the recent onslaught of DMCA takedowns across the internet, but that is exceedingly unlikely until the DMCA gets a drastic overhaul, which is also unlikely given all of the money entertainment industries bribe lobby politicians with. Sources Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/github-defies-riaa-takedown-notice-restoring-youtube-dl-and-starting-1m-defense-fund/ Github's blog: https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/ EFF's letter: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf

Except Google's default search engine deal with Mozilla is the only reason they're still in business. If this lawsuit goes through and those default search engine deals become illegal, that will only bolster Google's dominance in the browser marketplace by killing off Firefox.

Considering that the default search engine deal with Google is basically the only reason Mozilla/Firefox is still in business, I kinda hope this lawsuit (or at least that aspect of it) doesn't go through. Of course, if Mozilla doesn't find an alternative source of income, it's only a matter of time until it shuts down, but I'd rather delay the inevitable for as long as possible. It's a bit ironic that if Google becomes unable to create default search engine deals then that would still be a win for Google, given that that would push many people over to Chrome once Firefox goes out of business.

Good, exclusivity is bad. The sooner everything is available on every platform and it's completely up to the consumer to choose which platform to use, the better. Now if only Nintendo would follow suit as well.

Makes me think he may have been genuinely trying to do a good thing, albeit poorly. Given that no one seems to have noticed until now, he was likely the only one putting any work into the project. That said, there's still quite a bit of harm that's potentially been done here. General public perception of the language is a notable one, but a more important issue is that Wikipedia is often used to train AI - such as auto-translators - and this could have really messed with any translations to and from Scots, which could hurt the actual language as a whole. Rather than placing all of the blame on the kid (though he deserves some), I think most of the focus and blame should be on the systems Wikipedia has in place that allowed this to occur at such a massive scale.

When Oculus was bought by Facebook, they explicitly stated that Facebook integration would never be mandatory. This just goes to show that you should never trust any company to stick to their word and always assume they will backtrack on any previously made promises the moment they think the benefits will outweigh the negative PR.

Is this sarcasm? The trailer for Far Cry 6 seemed like the most politically charged part of the entire event.