Mostly because its difficult to knock off the patent trolls that nobody wants, without also inadvertently harming the big patent holders such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc who all hold hundreds if not thousands of patents that they don't actually practice in addition to the hundreds or thousands that they do practice.
So you can't just add a law like "non-practicing patents are not actionable" or anything like that without pissing off those big campaign contributors and you end up in kind of an "I know it when I see it" scenario where its usually pretty obvious when someone is a patent troll, but writing it up in legal language that's both strong enough to matter and still specific enough to only harm the abusers.
Of course the real solution is to just not issue shitty patents in the first place, or at the very least be more willing to invalidate them when its shown that they're shitty. That has the same issue of inadvertently harming the big political contributors though so its even less likely to happen since its basically the same solution just kicked up the line a bit.
I wouldn't be surprised per se, but at the same time this is entirely unnecessary to drive the project.
If a game is released on multiple platforms, people will buy it for whatever platform they have and will play against people who are also on that platform. That is, under the current model Microsoft makes near zero revenue from non-XBox users for non-exclusive titles. The number of people who would go out and buy an XBox just to play with a friend when they've got a perfectly good PS4 is very slim -- groups of friends who really want to play together will generally already be using the same console.
Now of course, paid or not, MS will be tracking your gaming habits -- at least of games which support this new functionality -- because its 2017 and we collectively volunteered to give up our privacy years ago. But I would almost hazard that requiring an additional XBL subscription (on top of each console vendor's own XBL-equivalent since they all have one by now) would actually be detrimental in the sense that nobody (or at least very few) would bother. Expect it to be more along the lines of XBL for Windows or EA's Origin where its just a second level of login (and data tracking) but otherwise tries to stay out of the way.
My guess though: This is more of a ploy to beat down Sony a bit. After the recent news with Minecraft's "Better Together" update, and in particular the part about basically everyone except Sony signing on for it, MS is probably looking to be in a favorable leadership spot when it comes to cross-platform tools (and again, cross-platform data tracking.) And again in that light, charging extra for the service would be kind of detrimental to the goal.
That's a pretty strong claim. I'm not sure how many countries have ever brought a EULA to trial.
Certainly parts of a EULA that contradict local laws are generally invalid in pretty much every jurisdiction, and almost all EULAs include a clause stating that when that happens, it only invalidates the contradictory parts rather than the entire EULA (so that they don't have to write a separate one for every town and hamlet that has their own local bylaws on the issue.)
But they almost certainly tailor EULAs to the level of a country (in the EU's case maybe there's just one for the whole EU? Unsure.) And unless your country has explicitly said EULAs in general are not valid in any situation, you should operate under the assumption that any EULA you agree to (by whatever means) is at least going to have to be argued in front of a judge if you want to claim that its unenforceable. Which means if you're planning to fight something like the Windows EULA, you'd best be prepared to battle Microsoft's army of lawyers.
They probably won't have to. Unless MS has a dazzling, amazing plan for bolstering their store offerings, Win10S is likely to be close to DOA. Windows' main ability to keep users is the fact that so many users are already running Windows and won't (or far more often, can't) switch all of their apps to a competitor.
If MS kills their own compatibility benefits, it undermines a lot of the reason people have stick with their platform through all of the shit they pulled with Vista's compatibility disaster, Win8's UI disaster and now Win10's privacy concerns (not quite to disaster level like those other two since it doesn't really affect day-to-day work for the most part, but there's still a lot of awareness and distrust of it.)
I don't know if MS is just so egotistical that they assume all developers would rebuild all of their apps with UWP, or if they're so naive as to think their users don't care about non-UWP apps, or if they're so blind that they think their store has wide enough app coverage, but in any of those cases my guess is that they're wrong and they're risking their core business on a walled garden without many flowers.
Basically, if I'm going to be essentially switching to a new platform and forced to give up all of my apps anyway, why would I choose Windows over Apple or Linux? Sure some people will stick with Windows purely out of familiarity even if they lose access to their non-Store software, but that's not nearly as big of an incentive to stick with MS as you know.. not losing access to that software.
They have your consent -- its buried in that EULA you didn't read but still clicked Accept on.
GWX was perhaps questionable. I'm not sure if the win7/8 EULAs were expansive enough to cover a full upgrade to the latest version, but they all cover MS' butt with regards to downloading and installing updates, and I'm sure the win10 EULA is even more stringent on that given that MS no longer gives you an opt-out to their updates. They're just forced on you whether you like it or not (and I totally wouldn't mind that to be honest, if it wasn't for the automatic reboots. I've actually set my active hours to when I'm not working so that I can maximize my chance of telling windows to fuck off before it arbitrarily reboots itself and loses everything I had going at the time.)
Being a/. reader, I of course haven't read the details.. but I suspect a lot of that hinges on what the courts consider to be a "new version." Is the anniversary update or the creators update considered new versions? They're both fairly massive updates (both in terms of download size and feature changes.) Or does it only count as a new version when the marketing department decides to change an already-arbitrary number to a new arbitrary number? Or does each build count as a new version and this blocks legitimate security updates from being pushed as well?
Taiwan is.. in a questionable status. They want to be an independent nation and do their best to act as one, but China believes and claims that Taiwan is a Chinese territory.
The US officially recognizes Taiwan as a Chinese territory (though apparently they still unofficially treat Taiwan as a separate state in some situations..)
So claiming that a Taiwanese company is actually a Chinese company is.. unclear. It depends entirely on who you ask at the moment. In terms of international politics, the debate hasn't yet been settled. For the short term at least though, its probably safe to claim that Foxxconn is a Taiwanese company and leave it at that since Taiwan still mostly retains their independence. Who knows how long that will last though. Could change next year, or next century, or never.
Its a little bit different from North Korea. Nobody's going to shoot you if you badmouth Trump. Nobody's stopping you from moving to another city or another state if you can scrape together the funds for a car and some gas. Freedom might not be cheap in America, but it at least still exists for the most part.
Of course none of that has anything to do with the joke that is the US electoral system, nor with the government complaining about "socialist" programs for the people while simultaneously handing out billions of dollars to companies that don't need it, but that's still not even close to comparable with North Korea.
So that's a half dozen managers each making $500k+, and a few thousand workers barely scraping past the poverty line. But hey the average is high right? Winning!
WTF are you talking about. If you have an idea you think is worth developing, you go talk to a bank or a venture capitalist or something. You don't talk to the government.
You talk to the government when you're looking for a place to build a giant factory, and you shop around for the best deal. The primary difference is that Foxxconn could easily fund the project on their own, but they're taking a handout because.. why not.
Foxxconn is doing exactly what they should in this case. Its Wisconsin (and whoever was competing against them) that are absolutely moronic for taking such a bad deal purely to boost their rather abstract "jobs" number (abstract in the sense that it relates zero information about the quality of said jobs, what skill sets they require, how much they pay, etc -- its just an arbitrary number that counts a $100m CEO position as equal to flipping burgers.)
But but but.. capitalism! America's gift to the world! You know, where you're given a giant chunk of money by the government that you neither need nor deserve!
Not like those silly socialist states where people have to earn their money. Geez.
Oh wait did I say people? I meant "persons" in the corporate sense only, of course. Humans don't belong in that category anymore.
This is a case where the company was choosing the state, not the other way around, so your argument isn't really relevant. The Wisconsin government was the competitor not the judge.
I have no idea what Foxxconn is offering to justify a 3 billion dollar handou^Hinvestment.. though I'd be willing to bet that whatever the offer is, it benefits the voting politicians more than the taxpayers who are now on the hook.
Women also have other, better paying jobs. Maybe not as high as men get paid in the same position, but still better than a dental hygienist.
And there's plenty of men who have shittier paying jobs who, by your logic, should be endeavoring to become dental hygienists.
Your argument might explain a few points difference.. maybe even 10 or 20 points. But 99%? There's something going on beside simple pay differentiation.
That's kind of my point: Few of those new individual services that each distributor wants to make for themselves solve the second problem that Netflix solved, and if Netflix no longer solves that problem either.. people will just go back to piracy.
My suspicion is that they do realize Netflix solved a problem, but they're not looking at the right problem because Netflix solved at least two:
1) A good amount of content that people wanted. 2) Lots of content that people didn't care about (or didn't know they cared about until they tried it,) but gave them something to put on when they were bored.
All of these companies think we'll happily pony up $10, $15, maybe $20 per month to each of them in order to continue solving problem #1. But that's not the real problem that Netflix solved. Problem #1 is already solved sufficiently well by piracy. Netflix addressing it as well makes for good press, but doesn't really sway subscribers to any large extent.
Netflix' big selling point is that they solved #2. None of the walled garden approaches will fix that since almost by definition, they will have small content libraries. To some extent cable solves #2 as well, but since 90% of the cable channels are useless filler, there's many times where there's plenty on but absolutely none of it is worth watching -- that is, the minute-by-minute "library" on cable is also extremely limited. (And of course with Netflix, you aren't getting blasted with commercials on top of your monthly payment, though that's a smaller issue in the grand scheme of things as most people are well adjusted to ignoring commercials by now.)
I'm pretty sure there's a difference between paying $1-2 per channel per month, and paying $10-20 per "channel" per month. Someone paying $150 for cable might be happy to get their bill to drop to $100 by only subscribing to the channels they care about.. but they're not going to be happy if the bill went up to $1000 for them to go a la carte.
That's not even counting the paying multiple entities aspect one of the other replies mentions.
Its the other way around. Netflix started doing originals because the other distributors were either unwilling to play ball at all, or were asking for licensing fees that Netflix was unwilling or unable to pay.
Now those of you in the US might not see it that way, because the original problems were (mostly) not US-centric -- it started during the time that Netflix was trying to grown their global markets and US-based distributors were asking for stupid things like equal (or greater) licensing costs for a show coming to Canada as they charge for it in the US -- even though Canada has 1/10 the population and therefore generating 1/10 the revenue (give or take depending on the exchange rate at the time.)
Though to some extent you're right. Netflix starts offering their originals -- which were often significantly better than much of the crud the other producers were offering (especially their early shows/seasons) -- and therefore Netflix felt less inclined to pay high rates for effectively inferior shows and therefore lost more catalog as companies took their balls and went home rather than lowering their licensing feed, and 'round and 'round we go.
Who knows where this will settle. Hulu always had some market share even before this whole mess started crumbling. Amazon's picked up a little bit. HBO's got a little bit that will probably die out quickly after the Game of Thrones final episode.. almost nobody else who's tried to build a streaming service to compete with Netflix but in their own walled garden has succeeded to any real extent.
Netflix runs on practically everything, usually works pretty good (though as with most internet services each new iteration of their UI seems to remove useful features in a race to appeal to the dumbest people possible.) But most importantly, they still have a huge catalog -- especially if you're willing to watch shows not produced in the US. And at the end of the day, beyond a few extremely good shows (such as GoT,) variety is the biggest selling point, which is why none of the walled gardens will ever take off. Hulu and Amazon have at least a chance specifically because, like Netflix, they're a clearinghouse for anyone who's willing to license content to them at a reasonable price rather than being locked into a single studio's works.
Disney owns a lot more than cartoons about princesses. As others have noted already, Star Wars and the Marvel movies come to mind. I'm sure your late teens are kind of interested in those (especially if they're boys, though there's no shortage of girls who like action movies either.) They own the distribution rights to many (maybe all?) of the Studio Ghibli movies in the US. And thousands upon thousands of other titles you probably wouldn't even think of as being Disney properties (R-rated movies and the like.)
Disney is huge. If you're wanting to stay legitimate, you'd be losing a large chunk of culture if you avoided them.
Of course what they'll find is that few people are capable of paying for every single distributor's own walled-garden crappy site and all the piracy reduction that trended with the rise of Netflix' online service will start spiking upward again. Not that the media companies will acknowledge the correlation of course (at least not publicly) because why would you need more than just their service and their service is (individually) reasonably priced right?
Not if its done well. There was a 30 sign someone scratched out to be an 80 near my old house. You couldn't actually see the difference until you were maybe 20-30 feet away and the light started reflecting off the scratched part.
Missing a stop sign is a bit silly though. The shape and color of those is (intentionally) universal in pretty much all of the world, even when the actual text is written in the local language. That said, the stop sign symbol is used for many other things as well as actual stop signs (think of say a "Stop! We ID if you look under 100!" type things in liquor stores, for example.) So even with the red octagon being so universal, the algos probably still have to do some deduction to rules out cases where its been used a bit too universally. And any time there's an exception, someone will be able to figure it out and abuse it.
But you know what? The people who design these systems know what they're doing and whenever someone comes up with a new abuse, they tweak the algorithm (or train it a bit more or whatever) to avoid it in future. Self-driving cars are still (even with current incomplete development) significantly safer than human drivers. Software at least has to be tricked -- people do stupid things of their own volition.
Men really can't choose to be involved in early childhood education (and its getting more difficult even in middle and high schools) because of the child molester stigma. They would have to really really want to teach kids in order to risk putting themselves in a situation where even a false accusation will almost certainly end that career and potentially can ruin their entire future.
Of course that's quite a special case where there's potential legal ramifications to the stigma. On the other hand, there's no reason why more men couldn't be say, dental hygienists, except for the stigma (well and the fact that women tend to keep themselves up more than us guys due to other social factors, and that's something most people kind of prefer when their hygienist is practically nose to nose with them while digging around in their mouth.)
Slashdot Mirror
writing it up in legal language
... is difficult.
Mostly because its difficult to knock off the patent trolls that nobody wants, without also inadvertently harming the big patent holders such as Microsoft, Intel, IBM, etc who all hold hundreds if not thousands of patents that they don't actually practice in addition to the hundreds or thousands that they do practice.
So you can't just add a law like "non-practicing patents are not actionable" or anything like that without pissing off those big campaign contributors and you end up in kind of an "I know it when I see it" scenario where its usually pretty obvious when someone is a patent troll, but writing it up in legal language that's both strong enough to matter and still specific enough to only harm the abusers.
Of course the real solution is to just not issue shitty patents in the first place, or at the very least be more willing to invalidate them when its shown that they're shitty. That has the same issue of inadvertently harming the big political contributors though so its even less likely to happen since its basically the same solution just kicked up the line a bit.
I wouldn't be surprised per se, but at the same time this is entirely unnecessary to drive the project.
If a game is released on multiple platforms, people will buy it for whatever platform they have and will play against people who are also on that platform. That is, under the current model Microsoft makes near zero revenue from non-XBox users for non-exclusive titles. The number of people who would go out and buy an XBox just to play with a friend when they've got a perfectly good PS4 is very slim -- groups of friends who really want to play together will generally already be using the same console.
Now of course, paid or not, MS will be tracking your gaming habits -- at least of games which support this new functionality -- because its 2017 and we collectively volunteered to give up our privacy years ago. But I would almost hazard that requiring an additional XBL subscription (on top of each console vendor's own XBL-equivalent since they all have one by now) would actually be detrimental in the sense that nobody (or at least very few) would bother. Expect it to be more along the lines of XBL for Windows or EA's Origin where its just a second level of login (and data tracking) but otherwise tries to stay out of the way.
My guess though: This is more of a ploy to beat down Sony a bit. After the recent news with Minecraft's "Better Together" update, and in particular the part about basically everyone except Sony signing on for it, MS is probably looking to be in a favorable leadership spot when it comes to cross-platform tools (and again, cross-platform data tracking.) And again in that light, charging extra for the service would be kind of detrimental to the goal.
That's a pretty strong claim. I'm not sure how many countries have ever brought a EULA to trial.
Certainly parts of a EULA that contradict local laws are generally invalid in pretty much every jurisdiction, and almost all EULAs include a clause stating that when that happens, it only invalidates the contradictory parts rather than the entire EULA (so that they don't have to write a separate one for every town and hamlet that has their own local bylaws on the issue.)
But they almost certainly tailor EULAs to the level of a country (in the EU's case maybe there's just one for the whole EU? Unsure.) And unless your country has explicitly said EULAs in general are not valid in any situation, you should operate under the assumption that any EULA you agree to (by whatever means) is at least going to have to be argued in front of a judge if you want to claim that its unenforceable. Which means if you're planning to fight something like the Windows EULA, you'd best be prepared to battle Microsoft's army of lawyers.
They probably won't have to. Unless MS has a dazzling, amazing plan for bolstering their store offerings, Win10S is likely to be close to DOA. Windows' main ability to keep users is the fact that so many users are already running Windows and won't (or far more often, can't) switch all of their apps to a competitor.
If MS kills their own compatibility benefits, it undermines a lot of the reason people have stick with their platform through all of the shit they pulled with Vista's compatibility disaster, Win8's UI disaster and now Win10's privacy concerns (not quite to disaster level like those other two since it doesn't really affect day-to-day work for the most part, but there's still a lot of awareness and distrust of it.)
I don't know if MS is just so egotistical that they assume all developers would rebuild all of their apps with UWP, or if they're so naive as to think their users don't care about non-UWP apps, or if they're so blind that they think their store has wide enough app coverage, but in any of those cases my guess is that they're wrong and they're risking their core business on a walled garden without many flowers.
Basically, if I'm going to be essentially switching to a new platform and forced to give up all of my apps anyway, why would I choose Windows over Apple or Linux? Sure some people will stick with Windows purely out of familiarity even if they lose access to their non-Store software, but that's not nearly as big of an incentive to stick with MS as you know.. not losing access to that software.
They have your consent -- its buried in that EULA you didn't read but still clicked Accept on.
GWX was perhaps questionable. I'm not sure if the win7/8 EULAs were expansive enough to cover a full upgrade to the latest version, but they all cover MS' butt with regards to downloading and installing updates, and I'm sure the win10 EULA is even more stringent on that given that MS no longer gives you an opt-out to their updates. They're just forced on you whether you like it or not (and I totally wouldn't mind that to be honest, if it wasn't for the automatic reboots. I've actually set my active hours to when I'm not working so that I can maximize my chance of telling windows to fuck off before it arbitrarily reboots itself and loses everything I had going at the time.)
Maybe he works in a data center that didn't bother with updates. Nuke a whole server farm at once!
Being a /. reader, I of course haven't read the details.. but I suspect a lot of that hinges on what the courts consider to be a "new version." Is the anniversary update or the creators update considered new versions? They're both fairly massive updates (both in terms of download size and feature changes.) Or does it only count as a new version when the marketing department decides to change an already-arbitrary number to a new arbitrary number? Or does each build count as a new version and this blocks legitimate security updates from being pushed as well?
Pfft. Real men ask for the guillotine. If you gotta go, may as well go in pieces!
Taiwan is.. in a questionable status. They want to be an independent nation and do their best to act as one, but China believes and claims that Taiwan is a Chinese territory.
The US officially recognizes Taiwan as a Chinese territory (though apparently they still unofficially treat Taiwan as a separate state in some situations..)
So claiming that a Taiwanese company is actually a Chinese company is.. unclear. It depends entirely on who you ask at the moment. In terms of international politics, the debate hasn't yet been settled. For the short term at least though, its probably safe to claim that Foxxconn is a Taiwanese company and leave it at that since Taiwan still mostly retains their independence. Who knows how long that will last though. Could change next year, or next century, or never.
Its a little bit different from North Korea. Nobody's going to shoot you if you badmouth Trump. Nobody's stopping you from moving to another city or another state if you can scrape together the funds for a car and some gas. Freedom might not be cheap in America, but it at least still exists for the most part.
Of course none of that has anything to do with the joke that is the US electoral system, nor with the government complaining about "socialist" programs for the people while simultaneously handing out billions of dollars to companies that don't need it, but that's still not even close to comparable with North Korea.
So that's a half dozen managers each making $500k+, and a few thousand workers barely scraping past the poverty line. But hey the average is high right? Winning!
WTF are you talking about. If you have an idea you think is worth developing, you go talk to a bank or a venture capitalist or something. You don't talk to the government.
You talk to the government when you're looking for a place to build a giant factory, and you shop around for the best deal. The primary difference is that Foxxconn could easily fund the project on their own, but they're taking a handout because.. why not.
Foxxconn is doing exactly what they should in this case. Its Wisconsin (and whoever was competing against them) that are absolutely moronic for taking such a bad deal purely to boost their rather abstract "jobs" number (abstract in the sense that it relates zero information about the quality of said jobs, what skill sets they require, how much they pay, etc -- its just an arbitrary number that counts a $100m CEO position as equal to flipping burgers.)
But but but.. capitalism! America's gift to the world! You know, where you're given a giant chunk of money by the government that you neither need nor deserve!
Not like those silly socialist states where people have to earn their money. Geez.
Oh wait did I say people? I meant "persons" in the corporate sense only, of course. Humans don't belong in that category anymore.
Most of what's happened under Trump are things Trump campaigned against. He drained the swamp of swamp water and refilled it with toxic waste.
This is a case where the company was choosing the state, not the other way around, so your argument isn't really relevant. The Wisconsin government was the competitor not the judge.
I have no idea what Foxxconn is offering to justify a 3 billion dollar handou^Hinvestment.. though I'd be willing to bet that whatever the offer is, it benefits the voting politicians more than the taxpayers who are now on the hook.
Women also have other, better paying jobs. Maybe not as high as men get paid in the same position, but still better than a dental hygienist.
And there's plenty of men who have shittier paying jobs who, by your logic, should be endeavoring to become dental hygienists.
Your argument might explain a few points difference.. maybe even 10 or 20 points. But 99%? There's something going on beside simple pay differentiation.
That's kind of my point: Few of those new individual services that each distributor wants to make for themselves solve the second problem that Netflix solved, and if Netflix no longer solves that problem either.. people will just go back to piracy.
My suspicion is that they do realize Netflix solved a problem, but they're not looking at the right problem because Netflix solved at least two:
1) A good amount of content that people wanted.
2) Lots of content that people didn't care about (or didn't know they cared about until they tried it,) but gave them something to put on when they were bored.
All of these companies think we'll happily pony up $10, $15, maybe $20 per month to each of them in order to continue solving problem #1. But that's not the real problem that Netflix solved. Problem #1 is already solved sufficiently well by piracy. Netflix addressing it as well makes for good press, but doesn't really sway subscribers to any large extent.
Netflix' big selling point is that they solved #2. None of the walled garden approaches will fix that since almost by definition, they will have small content libraries. To some extent cable solves #2 as well, but since 90% of the cable channels are useless filler, there's many times where there's plenty on but absolutely none of it is worth watching -- that is, the minute-by-minute "library" on cable is also extremely limited. (And of course with Netflix, you aren't getting blasted with commercials on top of your monthly payment, though that's a smaller issue in the grand scheme of things as most people are well adjusted to ignoring commercials by now.)
I'm pretty sure there's a difference between paying $1-2 per channel per month, and paying $10-20 per "channel" per month. Someone paying $150 for cable might be happy to get their bill to drop to $100 by only subscribing to the channels they care about.. but they're not going to be happy if the bill went up to $1000 for them to go a la carte.
That's not even counting the paying multiple entities aspect one of the other replies mentions.
Its the other way around. Netflix started doing originals because the other distributors were either unwilling to play ball at all, or were asking for licensing fees that Netflix was unwilling or unable to pay.
Now those of you in the US might not see it that way, because the original problems were (mostly) not US-centric -- it started during the time that Netflix was trying to grown their global markets and US-based distributors were asking for stupid things like equal (or greater) licensing costs for a show coming to Canada as they charge for it in the US -- even though Canada has 1/10 the population and therefore generating 1/10 the revenue (give or take depending on the exchange rate at the time.)
Though to some extent you're right. Netflix starts offering their originals -- which were often significantly better than much of the crud the other producers were offering (especially their early shows/seasons) -- and therefore Netflix felt less inclined to pay high rates for effectively inferior shows and therefore lost more catalog as companies took their balls and went home rather than lowering their licensing feed, and 'round and 'round we go.
Who knows where this will settle. Hulu always had some market share even before this whole mess started crumbling. Amazon's picked up a little bit. HBO's got a little bit that will probably die out quickly after the Game of Thrones final episode.. almost nobody else who's tried to build a streaming service to compete with Netflix but in their own walled garden has succeeded to any real extent.
Netflix runs on practically everything, usually works pretty good (though as with most internet services each new iteration of their UI seems to remove useful features in a race to appeal to the dumbest people possible.) But most importantly, they still have a huge catalog -- especially if you're willing to watch shows not produced in the US. And at the end of the day, beyond a few extremely good shows (such as GoT,) variety is the biggest selling point, which is why none of the walled gardens will ever take off. Hulu and Amazon have at least a chance specifically because, like Netflix, they're a clearinghouse for anyone who's willing to license content to them at a reasonable price rather than being locked into a single studio's works.
Disney owns a lot more than cartoons about princesses. As others have noted already, Star Wars and the Marvel movies come to mind. I'm sure your late teens are kind of interested in those (especially if they're boys, though there's no shortage of girls who like action movies either.) They own the distribution rights to many (maybe all?) of the Studio Ghibli movies in the US. And thousands upon thousands of other titles you probably wouldn't even think of as being Disney properties (R-rated movies and the like.)
Disney is huge. If you're wanting to stay legitimate, you'd be losing a large chunk of culture if you avoided them.
Of course what they'll find is that few people are capable of paying for every single distributor's own walled-garden crappy site and all the piracy reduction that trended with the rise of Netflix' online service will start spiking upward again. Not that the media companies will acknowledge the correlation of course (at least not publicly) because why would you need more than just their service and their service is (individually) reasonably priced right?
Not if its done well. There was a 30 sign someone scratched out to be an 80 near my old house. You couldn't actually see the difference until you were maybe 20-30 feet away and the light started reflecting off the scratched part.
Missing a stop sign is a bit silly though. The shape and color of those is (intentionally) universal in pretty much all of the world, even when the actual text is written in the local language. That said, the stop sign symbol is used for many other things as well as actual stop signs (think of say a "Stop! We ID if you look under 100!" type things in liquor stores, for example.) So even with the red octagon being so universal, the algos probably still have to do some deduction to rules out cases where its been used a bit too universally. And any time there's an exception, someone will be able to figure it out and abuse it.
But you know what? The people who design these systems know what they're doing and whenever someone comes up with a new abuse, they tweak the algorithm (or train it a bit more or whatever) to avoid it in future. Self-driving cars are still (even with current incomplete development) significantly safer than human drivers. Software at least has to be tricked -- people do stupid things of their own volition.
Disney in an uproar as piracy soars. Demands Congress increases copyright protection to life of the universe + 100 years.
Men really can't choose to be involved in early childhood education (and its getting more difficult even in middle and high schools) because of the child molester stigma. They would have to really really want to teach kids in order to risk putting themselves in a situation where even a false accusation will almost certainly end that career and potentially can ruin their entire future.
Of course that's quite a special case where there's potential legal ramifications to the stigma. On the other hand, there's no reason why more men couldn't be say, dental hygienists, except for the stigma (well and the fact that women tend to keep themselves up more than us guys due to other social factors, and that's something most people kind of prefer when their hygienist is practically nose to nose with them while digging around in their mouth.)