TwinIon

I hope they offer add-free hulu as an additional option. We still pay for cable, but once I can stop, I'd consider this. ESPN gets me F1 races and a few NFL games, so it's worth something to me.

Going through the wiki, it seems that they kept losing their domain name, so they kept switching TLDs until going to Tor in August of 2017. It was taken offline yesterday with 8chan when that host lost their provider. So I imagine you're right. Going to Tor must have significantly reduced their traffic.

I like Serkis and I'm glad he's getting work as a director, but it doesn't really make me interested in another Venom movie. Still, it's hard to look at Venom's numbers and not imagine Sony salivating.

Yikes.

My understanding is they went back online not too long after. I would be interested to know if they really lost much of their user base.

Sometimes I feel sympathetic towards Yelp. They were one of the early apps that made smartphones feel so useful, and the way Google has eaten their lunch has often seemed pretty unfair. Then they do shady stuff like this and there are all the shenanigans in how they handle bad reviews that makes me wish it would die so something better could take its place.

True. Also, after seeing what the Trump FTC was willing to do to Facebook after their numerous and repeated violations, and their overall willingness to let other tech companies merge, I can't imagine anything with real teeth comes from this. They'll probably just fine them a month or two worth of profits. Maybe they make a fuss about censorship and quickly lose in court.

On the same subject, I just saw this and thought it was kinda funny: Source

I'm in favor of antitrust oversight of these companies, but I also think the actual implementation is supremely hard to do. For example: last year the EU fined Google $5B for how they forced OEMs and carriers to use Android. Basically the concern came down to "your giving this product away for free and using that for leverage, so that's unfair." So Google's first move? Change the licencing so that you have to pay for android, unless you use Google apps. Their next move has been to put up a search engine ballot into the Android setup process, but search engines have to pay to be on the ballot. Now Google isn't giving something away for free and using that as leverage, they're competing on a paid market, so no more foul play! Of course the EU could decide this isn't ok either, but still, it illustrates the inherent difficulty of regulating these kinds of markets. Personally, I still favor the "break em up" approach. Coming up with specific fixes for individual problems that are relatively new and poorly understood seems like a surefire way to bumble into useless regulation on a growing industry. Breaking up companies like Instagram and Facebook or Google and YouTube should help increase the competition that is so terribly lacking in these markets. Also, prevent new giant mergers in uncompetitive markets. There are other issues that this doesn't solve, and it's not always clear how to split companies up (Amazon in particular seems like a challenge), but it seems like a good place to start. There's also the still open question as to if these markets are inherently winner-takes-all, or if there is something about this particular situation that has lead us here. I'm sympathetic to that argument, but I don't quite buy it yet. I tend to think that it's easy for these markets to evolve that way at the beginning, but that there's nothing fundamental about them that will keep them there. Real, effective antitrust could help us get to a much more healthy and competitive state.

Well, at least it seems it's limited to the non-standard implementation of the dock, and not the Switch itself. I plug my Switch into a bunch of different chargers, but my dock just uses the Nintendo supplied AC Adapter.

I get that they're trying to protect their brands or whatever, but the best action heroes are not the ones that never lose a fight. Die Hard and Indiana Jones both really beat up their heroes, and the movies are so much better for it. I guess it's hard to look at the Rock and think "underdog," but Statham could easily play that role if he wanted to.

I don't know anything about him, but according to his wiki he's mostly a good guy? Maybe Coogler wants to go further with this antagonist than he did in the first film and make him someone you can really root for.

I have no idea how it will go, but looking at the stats right now just as Ninja starts his first stream on the platform, Ninja's stream alone has more viewers than the next 15 games on the platform combined. On twitch he was big, on Mixer he's almost the only thing. I know Youtube already killed off their dedicated gaming section, effectively ending their attempt to be Twitch. I think this was probably a smart move for MS. I don't know if this is their last shot, but it certainly feels like an all-in push. If Mixer survives, it could well be on the back of Ninja. I think one of the biggest issues for Mixer, and what killed Youtube gaming, is that people still mostly like Twitch. The problems with live streaming games are more structural than platform specific. People get burned out and have to put in crazy hours and have discoverability issues, but Twitch seems like they're doing a good job of making creators happy with the platform. They get viewers, they get paid. The culture on Twitch, for all it's many issues, is one where people are willing to pay creators directly, and that's a hard thing to replicate. I don't really know what the secondary effects of Ninja moving will be, but my initial expectation is that a few people might try moving over to ride his coattails, but they'll quickly find they don't have an audience and will go back to Twitch.

The plot seems like a clever way to give a sense of urgency to a war that often lacked it. It certainly looks amazing. I'm in.

That trailer did not make me excited for the movie, but the de-aging stuff didn't look too bad. It's easy to see why Netflix was the only one he could talk into giving him the money to do this. It would be quite lucky to hit Departed/Wolf of Wall St. numbers and make $132M/$116M domestic. So it seems like it would be a long shot to even break even. I'll definitely give it a watch on Netflix though.

That looks insane. I love it.

I'm excited that this already got renewed for S5. Amazon is often pretty slow to renew shows, so it's a great sign that they trust in the Expanse. If I can manage it I might have to give the series a rewatch before Season 4.

They haven't been a real competitor, but they have held a consistent ~12% market share. As T-Mobile has grown, they've mostly been pulling customers from the big two. Source. That doesn't include prepaid customers. So yeah, Sprint hasn't been making a big splash, but they are a consistent presence, they have a built out infrastructure, marketing, brand, etc. Even with all their spectrum, what are the odds that Dish will be able to grab more than 10% of the market in any reasonable amount of time? They've been sitting in roughly the same position for years now, and it's not clear to me that this deal makes the market easier for them to enter, or that they get enough out of it to have a much better chance at success.

Does this have to get DOJ approval? Not that they would block anything that will make investors money.

For ~$500 what you'll be looking at is something not dissimilar to the Rebel you had before. The best image quality and value you'll get for that money is from entry level DSLRs. The best bang for the buck would probably be the Nikon D3500. It's been recently updated with a great 24MP sensor, comes with a couple decent zooms, and is compatible with a ton of Nikon lenses. I'm a bit biased as a Nikon shooter myself. If you're already familiar with Canon, their equivalent entry level DSLR is the Rebel T7. It's slightly older than the D3500, but not really any less capable. Both being entry level DSLRs should be familiar to you. They have limited controls, optical viewfinders, but they're pretty sturdy, and have a wide range of lenses available. Especially if you don't want to invest too much, I think this is where your money goes furthest, and gives you the most flexibility to upgrade lenses and bodies over time if you wish. If you want something with a more smartphone like, point and shoot kind of thing, you'll want to go mirrorless. The cameras will be much smaller, you'll have a nice live view screen, and the experience will be overall much more similar to using a phone, just with better image quality. For around $500 one thing you generally don't get is a real viewfinder, so you'd be using the rear screen to frame your shots. The Canon EOS M100 is their entry level mirrorless, and I hear good things, though I haven't used one. Fuji does make a cheaper, smaller camera than the X-T20, the X-A5, which fits right at $500. The Fujis are a lot of fun to use, and their jpeg quality, through their film emulation, is hard to beat. The other brand I'd investigate is Sony. Their mirrorless cameras get a lot of praise, and I've enjoyed the ones I've played with for $500 you'd be looking at an a5100. For a bit more you get a viewfinder and a few other features on an A600. Check out DPReview for the details on all the cameras. Another option that you could keep in mind, would be buying a used, slightly higher end camera. The advantage there is that you can get a more capable camera with a complete set of controls (dual wheels is a personal must-have), which is really great if you want to improve your photography and learn to shoot in manual. When buying used, I've had great luck with LensAuthority, which is the sales arm of LensRentals.com. The gear I've gotten from them has been in excellent shape, and comes complete with all the accessories. You could get something like a Fuji X-T1, which is two generations old, but was their highest end camera at the time. The Canon EOS M5 is a nice upgrade with an electronic viewfinder, if that system interests you. They don't bother to rent a lot of low end gear, so there might be slim pickings in your price range, but what is there tend to be pretty good deals.

I'm still figuring out exactly what I thought of the film, but my initial thought coming out of the theater was that this is QT's Titanic. There's this idea (and I don't know how true it is exactly) that Cameron made Titanic largely because it allowed him to go see the actual titanic and then to recreate the vessel itself. The film was in many ways a mean to these ends. That's not a comment on the quality of the film, but rather a partial explanation of the primary mover behind it. I really felt like this film was QT doing the same, but for a number of different ends. In making this movie, QT got to: write and direct parts of TV shows from the 50s and 60s, both using modern filmmaking techniques and mimicking those of the time. He got to go to a 60's party at the playboy mansion and create all the posters and memorabilia surrounding spaghetti westerns. More than anything else, he got to recreate late 60s Hollywood and lavish himself in the filmmaking of the time. QT is constantly presenting various homages to genres and eras of filmmaking he loves, but never before has he made something so literal. This isn't Kill Bill as a love letter to Hong Kong action films, this is shooting a 50s Western on 8mm, this is creating a complete opening sequence to F.B.I. and putting one of our greatest modern actors into a sequence form The Great Escape. There are plenty of homages in typical QT style, but among them there are complete recreations, and I'm sure he was using period correct film and lenses and whatever else. None of this is really a comment on the quality of the film itself, just my overwhelming impression on why it got made and how it came to be the way it is.

It's a fine little sequence by itself, but I agree that it feels a bit redundant with the funeral. I guess I didn't realize that there was a question about past-Gamora surviving.

Any shrinking of consumer choice in a market this limited is bound to be bad. It's pretty laughable that a fourth option will be created to replace losing that forth option to a merger, when you could just not approve the merger in the first place. Maybe Dish can turn itself into a worthwhile competitor, but you know what is much more likely than that? The fourth option we already have. I don't see any reason that the new T-Mobile will do anything but become another AT&T/VZW, all following in each others footsteps whenever anyone comes up with a new way to screw consumers.

This is such a bad idea. This will be one of those times that we can be thankful that the tech giants have started spending so much on lobbying. Most of the time they probably lobby for things that are bad for consumers, but you can also be pretty sure they don't want this. It's a really terrible idea that is bound to create more harm than good.