You could, but it's a different line on the cost vs. return graph, which has to take into account the entire process, including delivery to the required destination, which may or may not be on Earth. It's entirely possible that, even as finite terrestrial supply limitations push prices up, we could get into a situation it's simultaneously more viable to extract increasingly scarce Earth resources for Earth/LEO consumption and mine the asteroids for extra-planetary consumption. Either way, repeatedly dropping tens/hundreds of tonnes of mostly solid mass (not much chance of breakup, viz. the Shuttle disasters, Mir de-orbit, etc.) from orbit doesn't seem like a wise thing to do to me; it only takes *one* reentry failure, and the ore would need to be packaged to survive reentry by definition, and you're looking at some serious collateral damage at the point of impact/wherever the tsunamis wash up, or worse. The only way I can currently see asteroid mining output shipping to Earth proceeding at scale would be if we had viable space elevators that could handle the load first.
Yeah, I recall reading similar cost arguments about why we couldn't get at lots of the oil that is currently being fracked out of the ground just fine. Environmental concerns over fracking aside, I'm pretty sure they're not extracting the stuff at a loss so time made those arguments bogus and there's no reason to assume it (eventually) won't do the same for asteroid mining. Never say "never".
Also, you're assuming that the mined materials will be returned to Earth. It seems quite probably to me that if we reach the point where it's viable to mine asteroids then it's probable that some - and possibly most - of the material might be processed and consumed in orbit, within the belt, or by potential lunar/Mars colonies, which have much shallower gravity wells and might be able to wait quite some time for raw/processed materials to arrive via a low energy orbit from the mined asteroids.
It's a *dating* site, and they operate in the EU. If you have an account there that's not just for lulz, then they are almost certainly going to have more of your sensitive PII than pretty much anyone other than the likes Facebook and Google - a compromise as a result of negligence and subsequent coverup would be an ICO's wet dream. Most people with a clue have now woken up to the need to secure accounts that have financial links, but a similar awareness over PII is still some way behind, or you'd see a lot more use of 2FA on sites like this.
This foolishness has to be stopped before it gets onto the EU statute books.
Definitely the preferred option. I've been following Julia Reda's site for updates on this and writing to my MEP at key points like votes, etc., but it looks like the EU has finally decided that Brexit isn't worth any more of their time and is looking to its own business, including trying to get at least some bits of EU legislation through in the current session, this included. That they're trying again with Articles 11 and 13, despite heavy opposition to those specific clauses on previous attempts, indicates that this is probably one of those they really want to pass for some reason (e.g. someone has already been paid), so we can probably expect *something* to get through somehow.
Here's the thing though; the EU isn't listening here, and the implications of this for the average citizen are going to be even more visible than all those cookie consent popups. Having a good chunk of the web go dark because the EU wasn't prepared to listen (regardless of how the EU media spins the coverage so it's not the media's fault) might just make more people aware of the growing disconnect between the MEPs in the EU parliament and the voters and businesses that they're meant to be representing. That disconnect has already got them the train wreck of Brexit, several other EU countries in varying levels of turmoil, and a general rise in extremism and nationalism right across the union. They *need* a wake up call, and if a few media conglomerates have to go to the wall that might actually be a smaller price to pay than a few more xxExits, or a collective swing to the far right (by EU standards) rather than the current level of diversity.
Yep, Google didn't blink with Spain, I don't think it'll blink with the EU as a whole either. The EU clearly isn't bothered if a few websites overseas - even if they do include some fairly major US newspapers - decide of their own volition to block EU access because of the GDPR, but they'll absolutely be bothered if it's their own media that's getting cut off at the knees. Google know full well how badly the news sites need them to drive traffic in their direction via search, so I fully expec them to just pull the plug as they did with Spain, wait for the publishers to start screaming and shouting about the lost traffic/revenue, and only then open negotiations on exemptions and workarounds. At that point they'll be doing so from a much stronger position and with an industry that's desperate for a quick solution, so a deal more favourable to Google is much more likely.
Active user figures. Look at the way the stock values of social media companies react in relation to changes to userbase - FB and Twitter evaluations have both taken a tumble because they failed to meet expected user growth targets, not just revenue targets; they're ultimately ad-companies so they *need* as many eyeballs as possible. It's also a risk; those users are going to go somewhere, and what happens if that somewhere becomes the Next Big Thing? Pretty sure Spotify doesn't want to become the next MySpace...
Yes, there is. RFC5322 defines what constitutes an email address, amongst other things. Arguably though, all Google is going is automatically creating every single possible RFC5322 compliant alias of a given email address that you can create by inserting full stops in the bit before the @ sign and assigning them all to the same user, how they do that (almost certainly by stripping out the full stops from the LHS) isn't any concern of RFC5322. They're not actually creating any invalid email addresses or anything; just restricting the number of possible unique email addresses they can assign on their domain.
But we can do all that. There are already floating farms, although clearly open ocean isn't going to be practical even if some oil platforms do come close to the required stability and environmental endurance. We can also recover deserts into arable land, and even the ancient Egyptian figured out large scale irrigation if there's a ready source of fresh water nearby. The sticking point isn't lack of ability, it's the fact that it's still experimental, so hugely expensive, and for de-desertification it can take a lot of time to work through all the stages necessary to turn sand into loam.
He's not only claiming "permanent injury" - which can absolutely include things like the an inability to use a preferred tool in legal terms where it's synonomous with "harm" and can include things like loss of reputation and finances (both of which are mentioned) - but also "physical pain", which seems a lot more more specific. Unless that somehow includes impossible to prove things like mental anguish, stress induced migraines and the like, that does seem to imply an actual injury of some kind, which is clearly not something that software alone can do, no matter how buggy; at the very least it requires some hardware as well. Assuming he is indeed claiming a physical injury of some kind, then rRealistically that leaves some form of client retribution, self-inflicted (maybe he facepalmed a bit too hard?), or it's a crock to inflate the potential damages.
You don't generally include the actual evidence in an indictment or similar, only state the facts that you believe you are capable of proving in a court of law. The crux of this claim seems to be Clause 6 of the Factual Background:
Plaintiff was undergoing a private disposition with a client when the this [sic] defective product breach allowed for the recording of a private deposition."
"Allowed for the recording" could just mean that the possibility was there, or it could mean that an actual recording took place. No way to tell unless Williams has evidence of the recording, which is possible if you assume that was the reason for the harm and loss of living alledged in Clause 30, which seems rather hyperbolic to say the least; this somehow resulted in "physical pain" and "diminished quality of life"? Unless his client got physical upon finding out or something, I'm not sure how that's supposed to work, and if anything makes this sound much more like an attempt at a cash grab, quite possibly with aspirations for class status.
So much this. Using services to capture data and dropping anything that doesn't have an acceptable userbase, regardless of how popular the platform is with any users, Google's modus operandi for services and always has been. If you're using a Google service with low market penetration start looking for alternatives, and once people are cracking jokes about "all users!" on forums such as this it's time to pull any data out and make the switch.
Also, ROFL at certain online tech trend commentators acting all butthurt because they bought into Google+ and got caught out by this - what part of "You are not the user, you are the *product*" haven't you grokked yet? Really inspiring confidence that they actually know what they're about there...
Strawman much? Regardless of Mozilla's market share and what they would/would not do with market dominance the OPs point is clearly more about avoiding a monoculture than abusing market position. However, given they are a non-profit and didn't attempt the kind of abuse you are suggesting when they were peaking at around one third of the browser market I'm going to go with "no" on the willful front, although I suspect some of their innovations would become defacto standards purely because of 99% market share.
The ideal would be for Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, as the dominant browser vendors to each have their own rendering engine and the driving factors being standards compliance and performance. As it is, three of those four (as well as a significant number of the long tail of alternative browsers) will soon be based on forks from a single codebase, and that means a monoculture where Google - an ad company of all things - is more equal than others. That's a horrible position to be in as a user and absolutely that position needs to be resisted if you care about the web. Equally, if the positions were reversed, abusive behavior or not, we should be promoting the use of browsers other than Firefox for exactly the same anti-monoculture reasons.
Of course they're going to be burning at least some of coal they mine - I even said as much. The point was whether they're going to burn *all* the coal from these new mines or whether they're going to export some of it and, if so, how much. They could still go green for power generation by 2038, fuel their existing coal-fired powerplants mostly from existing mines, and export the bulk of the coal from these mines well past 2038 if they want and the mines have enough capacity for it, so your argument isn't valid - A does not follow B. Any exported coal is going to get burnt *somewhere* of course, quite possibly somewhere with very lax regulation on carbon capture too, but if all goes to plan with their power generation switch Germany can claim to be 100% green by 2038 and feel good about it, even if the net overall result is just as environmentally friendly as carbon credits by a different name.
Just because they are mining it doesn't mean that they are going to burn it themselves; while related, one statement does not automatically negate the other. Still, given they're going to be burning coal until some date near 2038 (at least), it does seem likely that the cheapest source of that coal would be locally sourced with the rest going for export. Not necessarily though; you do get scenarios where countries both import and export the same materials depending on specific users' supply chains.
Maybe the two are related? Chances are pretty high that many of those powerstations are running on Unix based SCADA systems that are susceptible to the bug and would need an overhaul. Given typical project costs for such sweeping system overhauls, maybe they've just worked out it would be cheaper to decommission them all rather than refurb them? Factor in the likelihood of an environmentalist outcry over building brand new coal-fired plants to replace them and committing to something else (note that they don't say what those powerstations will be though), is probably the only politically acceptable solution left.
That would be the Meizu Zero or maybe the Vivo Apex 2019. Apple's courage doesn't yet extend so far as to go wireless charging only (no need for a USB port), remove all all the buttons, *and* go eSIM-only so they can dump the SIM card tray! I expect Apple with be copying (and patenting) these "innovations" and making them their own soon enough though, so hardly surprising the SE's sold out so fast.
I think that's also something that many people are aware of and that's leading to the at least some of the negative sentiment towards GMO foods; "fool me once", and all that. People got sold up the river on nutrition over sugars, transfats, and more, all in the name of a quick buck by scientists shilling for firms peddling it, so it's only natural that people are wary of the next big thing in the form of GMO foods, regardless of how clueful they are over the science. Sure, a lot of it is almost certainly 100% safe to consume, but the track record also makes it extremely likely that not all of it is. Since there's no reliable way to tell which is which, let alone if all you have to go on is labelling in a store, even if you do know the science what are you supposed to do?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of this proposal too. It lets people monetize things as long as they like via an exclusive copyright and also encourages the copyright owner to produce new content to help them keep the subject of the copyright profitable through public awareness. Sure, they can produce some dross to do that, but that runs the risk of trashing the franchise before they get the necessary returns on their extension fees. Ultimately though everything is going to cross the threshold of the copyright fees exceeding the returns and enter the public domain, ideally doing so before all examples are lost as seems to have happened with many early recordings.
I think Disney has realised that the writing is on the wall for Mickey. Thanks to the Internet, there's now too much public awareness of copyright and activism is much easier compared to when Sonny Bono helped them screw everyone over in 1998. All is not lost for them though, there's already precedent from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle that it's a progressive process - you'll only gain access to each "version" of Mickey or whoever (and other characters, backstory, events, etc.) as that individual version lapses, and how you define a "version" is a matter of debate. Specific details, like the coloured buttons, will be covered and milked for every last cent until they individually lapse.
Besides, despite reports of "Solo" making a loss, I'm pretty sure that the revenue from the Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar franchises (amongst others) that are under the Disney umbrella is more than enough to make up for any loss in revenue they might have from early versions of classic Disney characters - it's not like they sell much (any?) merchandise based around the "Steamboat Willie" version of Mickey, is it? Unless a miracle happens and we get a reduction in copyright duration, they're going to be under Disney's copyright for many decades before their turn comes to enter the public domain. Trademarks are also valid for as long as you care to enforce them, so expect them to enforce that just as aggresively once the critical copyrights do start to expire.
I would assume so too. In which case this is all potentially moot as no less than 11 states have rejected the amendments proposed by Romania and they're going back to the drawing board. Or maybe even shelving the idea because they'd need to water it down too much to be useful to overcome the opposition, according to some pundits. Hopefully the apparent sanity that resulted in the US not auto-extending copyright to prevent new works entering the public domain last year (Mickey's debut in Steamboat Willie is still a few years off though!) has reached the EU as well.
Abhorent and medieval as I think the death penalty is, China is at least being consistent here. They have the death penalty and use it heavily, especially for drug smuggling where they have executed foreign nationals for smuggling "just" a few kilos previously (for context, anything over 50 *grams* makes a someone eligable for the death penalty in China). Schellenberg was convicted of trying to smuggle more than 222kg of hard drugs to Australia, apparently has prior convictions for drug crimes in Canada resulting in jail sentences, and the claimed evidence against him seems to be extremely damning. Sure, the timing is suspiciously coincidental and China's reputation for fair and open trials is far from exemplary, but within the terms of the Chinese penal code the original sentence of 15 years *is* far too light and a death penalty was the way to go. He also has the right of appeal which, given he is a foreign national, will almost certainly be heard and given due consideration. Realistically though, and barring some kind of diplomatic deal, he's probably going to die in a Chinese prison - it's now mostly a matter of when and how.
It's absolutely the Chinese trying to send a not-so-subtle message about the way US politics and international affairs are at the moment. "We can be grown-ups", "We can co-operate with others", "We don't let petty things like trade wars get in the way of stuff that matters(tm)"; there are any number of such digs they can make. Who can blame them for taking the opportunity though? They've been treated as pariahs in space exploration for decades by the US because "reasons" while other nations who also steal tech, etc. (although they don't use it to compete commercially quite so well) get to work with NASA just fine. Trump's nationalism and other antics in the Whitehouse are really just the cherry on what is now a very large cake that has provided the perfect opportunity to make the point.
Really, I think this is just one small part of China taking one of their proverbs to heart that's been going on for a while now. With much of the Western world seeing the paralysis in US government (and others in the EU) as a crisis; they're seeing it as an opportunity that might just gain them allies/trading partners and help revamp the world order in their favour. Perhaps not enough to knock the US of their perch, but maybe enough to secure the South China Sea, tighten the screws on Taiwan, increase their presence elsewhere around the globe (e.g. building transport links into Pakistan for a possible military presence within range of Africa and the Middle East) while everyone is distracted with other things. Even if they're only partly successful, that's still a pretty good foundation on which to continue trying to upset the status quo even further.
Sure, but if you're in that boat then you presumably have a *lot* of instances and Joomla and WordPress are both open source, no? You could always create a patch to remove the prompt. I used to create custom versions of some RPMs from SRPMs for deployment to a data processing cluster and relatively minor tweaks like this were pretty easy to do with a quick edit of the source files - for most of them I wrote a shell script do all the work for me. Alternatively, if you're VM base and if the prompt is in editable file, then you could just edit the necessary file on the master server image that you are using to virtualise your hosted servers.
[Joomla] already complains about PHP 7.0 being outdated, although that's still the default on current long-time support systems like Debian Stretch or Ubuntu Server 16.04.
Which is still fine for both Joomla and WordPress, because it still hopefully achieves the goal of getting at least some admins to notice there may be an issue and to assure themselves that they are getting any necessary security patches. An incompetent admin will ignore the message regardless, or course, but at least Joomla and WordPress will have led their horses to the water and offered them a drink.
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You could, but it's a different line on the cost vs. return graph, which has to take into account the entire process, including delivery to the required destination, which may or may not be on Earth. It's entirely possible that, even as finite terrestrial supply limitations push prices up, we could get into a situation it's simultaneously more viable to extract increasingly scarce Earth resources for Earth/LEO consumption and mine the asteroids for extra-planetary consumption. Either way, repeatedly dropping tens/hundreds of tonnes of mostly solid mass (not much chance of breakup, viz. the Shuttle disasters, Mir de-orbit, etc.) from orbit doesn't seem like a wise thing to do to me; it only takes *one* reentry failure, and the ore would need to be packaged to survive reentry by definition, and you're looking at some serious collateral damage at the point of impact/wherever the tsunamis wash up, or worse. The only way I can currently see asteroid mining output shipping to Earth proceeding at scale would be if we had viable space elevators that could handle the load first.
Yeah, I recall reading similar cost arguments about why we couldn't get at lots of the oil that is currently being fracked out of the ground just fine. Environmental concerns over fracking aside, I'm pretty sure they're not extracting the stuff at a loss so time made those arguments bogus and there's no reason to assume it (eventually) won't do the same for asteroid mining. Never say "never".
Also, you're assuming that the mined materials will be returned to Earth. It seems quite probably to me that if we reach the point where it's viable to mine asteroids then it's probable that some - and possibly most - of the material might be processed and consumed in orbit, within the belt, or by potential lunar/Mars colonies, which have much shallower gravity wells and might be able to wait quite some time for raw/processed materials to arrive via a low energy orbit from the mined asteroids.
4% of total global revenue?
It's a *dating* site, and they operate in the EU. If you have an account there that's not just for lulz, then they are almost certainly going to have more of your sensitive PII than pretty much anyone other than the likes Facebook and Google - a compromise as a result of negligence and subsequent coverup would be an ICO's wet dream. Most people with a clue have now woken up to the need to secure accounts that have financial links, but a similar awareness over PII is still some way behind, or you'd see a lot more use of 2FA on sites like this.
Definitely the preferred option. I've been following Julia Reda's site for updates on this and writing to my MEP at key points like votes, etc., but it looks like the EU has finally decided that Brexit isn't worth any more of their time and is looking to its own business, including trying to get at least some bits of EU legislation through in the current session, this included. That they're trying again with Articles 11 and 13, despite heavy opposition to those specific clauses on previous attempts, indicates that this is probably one of those they really want to pass for some reason (e.g. someone has already been paid), so we can probably expect *something* to get through somehow.
Here's the thing though; the EU isn't listening here, and the implications of this for the average citizen are going to be even more visible than all those cookie consent popups. Having a good chunk of the web go dark because the EU wasn't prepared to listen (regardless of how the EU media spins the coverage so it's not the media's fault) might just make more people aware of the growing disconnect between the MEPs in the EU parliament and the voters and businesses that they're meant to be representing. That disconnect has already got them the train wreck of Brexit, several other EU countries in varying levels of turmoil, and a general rise in extremism and nationalism right across the union. They *need* a wake up call, and if a few media conglomerates have to go to the wall that might actually be a smaller price to pay than a few more xxExits, or a collective swing to the far right (by EU standards) rather than the current level of diversity.
Yep, Google didn't blink with Spain, I don't think it'll blink with the EU as a whole either. The EU clearly isn't bothered if a few websites overseas - even if they do include some fairly major US newspapers - decide of their own volition to block EU access because of the GDPR, but they'll absolutely be bothered if it's their own media that's getting cut off at the knees. Google know full well how badly the news sites need them to drive traffic in their direction via search, so I fully expec them to just pull the plug as they did with Spain, wait for the publishers to start screaming and shouting about the lost traffic/revenue, and only then open negotiations on exemptions and workarounds. At that point they'll be doing so from a much stronger position and with an industry that's desperate for a quick solution, so a deal more favourable to Google is much more likely.
Active user figures. Look at the way the stock values of social media companies react in relation to changes to userbase - FB and Twitter evaluations have both taken a tumble because they failed to meet expected user growth targets, not just revenue targets; they're ultimately ad-companies so they *need* as many eyeballs as possible. It's also a risk; those users are going to go somewhere, and what happens if that somewhere becomes the Next Big Thing? Pretty sure Spotify doesn't want to become the next MySpace...
Yes, there is. RFC5322 defines what constitutes an email address, amongst other things. Arguably though, all Google is going is automatically creating every single possible RFC5322 compliant alias of a given email address that you can create by inserting full stops in the bit before the @ sign and assigning them all to the same user, how they do that (almost certainly by stripping out the full stops from the LHS) isn't any concern of RFC5322. They're not actually creating any invalid email addresses or anything; just restricting the number of possible unique email addresses they can assign on their domain.
But we can do all that. There are already floating farms, although clearly open ocean isn't going to be practical even if some oil platforms do come close to the required stability and environmental endurance. We can also recover deserts into arable land, and even the ancient Egyptian figured out large scale irrigation if there's a ready source of fresh water nearby. The sticking point isn't lack of ability, it's the fact that it's still experimental, so hugely expensive, and for de-desertification it can take a lot of time to work through all the stages necessary to turn sand into loam.
He's not only claiming "permanent injury" - which can absolutely include things like the an inability to use a preferred tool in legal terms where it's synonomous with "harm" and can include things like loss of reputation and finances (both of which are mentioned) - but also "physical pain", which seems a lot more more specific. Unless that somehow includes impossible to prove things like mental anguish, stress induced migraines and the like, that does seem to imply an actual injury of some kind, which is clearly not something that software alone can do, no matter how buggy; at the very least it requires some hardware as well. Assuming he is indeed claiming a physical injury of some kind, then rRealistically that leaves some form of client retribution, self-inflicted (maybe he facepalmed a bit too hard?), or it's a crock to inflate the potential damages.
"Allowed for the recording" could just mean that the possibility was there, or it could mean that an actual recording took place. No way to tell unless Williams has evidence of the recording, which is possible if you assume that was the reason for the harm and loss of living alledged in Clause 30, which seems rather hyperbolic to say the least; this somehow resulted in "physical pain" and "diminished quality of life"? Unless his client got physical upon finding out or something, I'm not sure how that's supposed to work, and if anything makes this sound much more like an attempt at a cash grab, quite possibly with aspirations for class status.
So much this. Using services to capture data and dropping anything that doesn't have an acceptable userbase, regardless of how popular the platform is with any users, Google's modus operandi for services and always has been. If you're using a Google service with low market penetration start looking for alternatives, and once people are cracking jokes about "all users!" on forums such as this it's time to pull any data out and make the switch.
Also, ROFL at certain online tech trend commentators acting all butthurt because they bought into Google+ and got caught out by this - what part of "You are not the user, you are the *product*" haven't you grokked yet? Really inspiring confidence that they actually know what they're about there...
Strawman much? Regardless of Mozilla's market share and what they would/would not do with market dominance the OPs point is clearly more about avoiding a monoculture than abusing market position. However, given they are a non-profit and didn't attempt the kind of abuse you are suggesting when they were peaking at around one third of the browser market I'm going to go with "no" on the willful front, although I suspect some of their innovations would become defacto standards purely because of 99% market share.
The ideal would be for Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, as the dominant browser vendors to each have their own rendering engine and the driving factors being standards compliance and performance. As it is, three of those four (as well as a significant number of the long tail of alternative browsers) will soon be based on forks from a single codebase, and that means a monoculture where Google - an ad company of all things - is more equal than others. That's a horrible position to be in as a user and absolutely that position needs to be resisted if you care about the web. Equally, if the positions were reversed, abusive behavior or not, we should be promoting the use of browsers other than Firefox for exactly the same anti-monoculture reasons.
Of course they're going to be burning at least some of coal they mine - I even said as much. The point was whether they're going to burn *all* the coal from these new mines or whether they're going to export some of it and, if so, how much. They could still go green for power generation by 2038, fuel their existing coal-fired powerplants mostly from existing mines, and export the bulk of the coal from these mines well past 2038 if they want and the mines have enough capacity for it, so your argument isn't valid - A does not follow B. Any exported coal is going to get burnt *somewhere* of course, quite possibly somewhere with very lax regulation on carbon capture too, but if all goes to plan with their power generation switch Germany can claim to be 100% green by 2038 and feel good about it, even if the net overall result is just as environmentally friendly as carbon credits by a different name.
Just because they are mining it doesn't mean that they are going to burn it themselves; while related, one statement does not automatically negate the other. Still, given they're going to be burning coal until some date near 2038 (at least), it does seem likely that the cheapest source of that coal would be locally sourced with the rest going for export. Not necessarily though; you do get scenarios where countries both import and export the same materials depending on specific users' supply chains.
Maybe the two are related? Chances are pretty high that many of those powerstations are running on Unix based SCADA systems that are susceptible to the bug and would need an overhaul. Given typical project costs for such sweeping system overhauls, maybe they've just worked out it would be cheaper to decommission them all rather than refurb them? Factor in the likelihood of an environmentalist outcry over building brand new coal-fired plants to replace them and committing to something else (note that they don't say what those powerstations will be though), is probably the only politically acceptable solution left.
That would be the Meizu Zero or maybe the Vivo Apex 2019. Apple's courage doesn't yet extend so far as to go wireless charging only (no need for a USB port), remove all all the buttons, *and* go eSIM-only so they can dump the SIM card tray! I expect Apple with be copying (and patenting) these "innovations" and making them their own soon enough though, so hardly surprising the SE's sold out so fast.
I think that's also something that many people are aware of and that's leading to the at least some of the negative sentiment towards GMO foods; "fool me once", and all that. People got sold up the river on nutrition over sugars, transfats, and more, all in the name of a quick buck by scientists shilling for firms peddling it, so it's only natural that people are wary of the next big thing in the form of GMO foods, regardless of how clueful they are over the science. Sure, a lot of it is almost certainly 100% safe to consume, but the track record also makes it extremely likely that not all of it is. Since there's no reliable way to tell which is which, let alone if all you have to go on is labelling in a store, even if you do know the science what are you supposed to do?
Yeah, I'm a big fan of this proposal too. It lets people monetize things as long as they like via an exclusive copyright and also encourages the copyright owner to produce new content to help them keep the subject of the copyright profitable through public awareness. Sure, they can produce some dross to do that, but that runs the risk of trashing the franchise before they get the necessary returns on their extension fees. Ultimately though everything is going to cross the threshold of the copyright fees exceeding the returns and enter the public domain, ideally doing so before all examples are lost as seems to have happened with many early recordings.
I think Disney has realised that the writing is on the wall for Mickey. Thanks to the Internet, there's now too much public awareness of copyright and activism is much easier compared to when Sonny Bono helped them screw everyone over in 1998. All is not lost for them though, there's already precedent from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle that it's a progressive process - you'll only gain access to each "version" of Mickey or whoever (and other characters, backstory, events, etc.) as that individual version lapses, and how you define a "version" is a matter of debate. Specific details, like the coloured buttons, will be covered and milked for every last cent until they individually lapse.
Besides, despite reports of "Solo" making a loss, I'm pretty sure that the revenue from the Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar franchises (amongst others) that are under the Disney umbrella is more than enough to make up for any loss in revenue they might have from early versions of classic Disney characters - it's not like they sell much (any?) merchandise based around the "Steamboat Willie" version of Mickey, is it? Unless a miracle happens and we get a reduction in copyright duration, they're going to be under Disney's copyright for many decades before their turn comes to enter the public domain. Trademarks are also valid for as long as you care to enforce them, so expect them to enforce that just as aggresively once the critical copyrights do start to expire.
Vim? Who needs all that unneccesary baggage? Ed, man! !man ed.
I would assume so too. In which case this is all potentially moot as no less than 11 states have rejected the amendments proposed by Romania and they're going back to the drawing board. Or maybe even shelving the idea because they'd need to water it down too much to be useful to overcome the opposition, according to some pundits. Hopefully the apparent sanity that resulted in the US not auto-extending copyright to prevent new works entering the public domain last year (Mickey's debut in Steamboat Willie is still a few years off though!) has reached the EU as well.
Abhorent and medieval as I think the death penalty is, China is at least being consistent here. They have the death penalty and use it heavily, especially for drug smuggling where they have executed foreign nationals for smuggling "just" a few kilos previously (for context, anything over 50 *grams* makes a someone eligable for the death penalty in China). Schellenberg was convicted of trying to smuggle more than 222kg of hard drugs to Australia, apparently has prior convictions for drug crimes in Canada resulting in jail sentences, and the claimed evidence against him seems to be extremely damning. Sure, the timing is suspiciously coincidental and China's reputation for fair and open trials is far from exemplary, but within the terms of the Chinese penal code the original sentence of 15 years *is* far too light and a death penalty was the way to go. He also has the right of appeal which, given he is a foreign national, will almost certainly be heard and given due consideration. Realistically though, and barring some kind of diplomatic deal, he's probably going to die in a Chinese prison - it's now mostly a matter of when and how.
It's absolutely the Chinese trying to send a not-so-subtle message about the way US politics and international affairs are at the moment. "We can be grown-ups", "We can co-operate with others", "We don't let petty things like trade wars get in the way of stuff that matters(tm)"; there are any number of such digs they can make. Who can blame them for taking the opportunity though? They've been treated as pariahs in space exploration for decades by the US because "reasons" while other nations who also steal tech, etc. (although they don't use it to compete commercially quite so well) get to work with NASA just fine. Trump's nationalism and other antics in the Whitehouse are really just the cherry on what is now a very large cake that has provided the perfect opportunity to make the point.
Really, I think this is just one small part of China taking one of their proverbs to heart that's been going on for a while now. With much of the Western world seeing the paralysis in US government (and others in the EU) as a crisis; they're seeing it as an opportunity that might just gain them allies/trading partners and help revamp the world order in their favour. Perhaps not enough to knock the US of their perch, but maybe enough to secure the South China Sea, tighten the screws on Taiwan, increase their presence elsewhere around the globe (e.g. building transport links into Pakistan for a possible military presence within range of Africa and the Middle East) while everyone is distracted with other things. Even if they're only partly successful, that's still a pretty good foundation on which to continue trying to upset the status quo even further.
Sure, but if you're in that boat then you presumably have a *lot* of instances and Joomla and WordPress are both open source, no? You could always create a patch to remove the prompt. I used to create custom versions of some RPMs from SRPMs for deployment to a data processing cluster and relatively minor tweaks like this were pretty easy to do with a quick edit of the source files - for most of them I wrote a shell script do all the work for me. Alternatively, if you're VM base and if the prompt is in editable file, then you could just edit the necessary file on the master server image that you are using to virtualise your hosted servers.
Which is still fine for both Joomla and WordPress, because it still hopefully achieves the goal of getting at least some admins to notice there may be an issue and to assure themselves that they are getting any necessary security patches. An incompetent admin will ignore the message regardless, or course, but at least Joomla and WordPress will have led their horses to the water and offered them a drink.