TwinIon

That letter sends a pretty strong message. I hope he gets his job back, but I'm not really sure what I expect Disney will do.

21 minutes ago, Wild said:

There aren't any left except for Kylo, and he is irredeemable.

This is a franchise where Darth Vader found redemption. Ruling that out for Kylo seems silly.

Half isn't really enough to change much. If the outcry was nearly universal, or at least a significant majority, maybe it's conceivable that something might happen, but about half isn't much considering about half voted against it in the first place.

There's no way that they get rid of their existing multiplayer modes, so I wouldn't worry about them putting in a Battle Royale mode at the expense of something else. I think there actually might be some potential there.

I still find it so weird that they're constantly going after this rule when it's basically not even enforced. It's not like we're jailing every pastor and rabbi that makes some kind of political statement.

I don't remember how the show ended, but I'll be happy to see another season of it.

I imagine that this will be a big talking point for 2020, and a kind of dividing line for Democrats.

I suppose this could make sense if you're a DC comics reader. It doesn't seem like it would be worth it just for the limited video content.

Another interest part of this story is how it might end up shaping the future of Google's mobile efforts. Bloomberg has a new story out about project Fuchsia, an experimental OS inside Google that could end up replacing Android and Chrome OS. For the time being Fuchsia is partly open source, but I have to imagine that if Google does decide to move away from Android that the issues the EU brings up in court will affect Google's decision making. If Google is forced to allow forks and app stores they don't want, and if they're forced to segregate the browser and search from the OS, Fuchsia could end up making those things impossible.

There's a good chance Fuchsia never really sees the light of day as a consumer product, so I'm really not trying to be alarmist or anything when it comes to this ruling. Still, it's worth considering how these kinds of decisions can end up shaping the future of innovation.

Steven Sinofsky (former head of Windows at MS) has an interesting take on all this in this thread. He's admittedly a bit biased, but has a unique perspective on the case.

Something in particular that he brought up is that the EU defined the markets that Google dominates as "general internet search services, licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system." 'General internet search services' seems fair enough, but "licensable smart mobile operating systems and app stores for the Android mobile operating system" is crazy because it automatically defines the market as one that Google created themselves and necessarily leaves out their actual competitors. With ~75% of the EU market you can make a case that Android is too dominant, but when you define the market basically as "Android phones and Android app stores" then it's pretty hard to come to any conclusion that they're not a monopoly.

40 minutes ago, SFLUFAN said:

Absolutely, but this is is the greater of the two evils.

I'm not really sure about that. There's the evil of content consolidation vs the evil of content being weaponized in the service of distribution. The evils of the former are clear, those of the latter have yet to really materialize. Comcast's purchase of NBC/Universal was only recently let off the leash, AT&T only just bought Time Warner (assuming the appeal doesn't change anything), and net neutrality is still freshly in the grave. Disney as a dominant force in content is still reliant on that content to generate revenue, so their incentives will always be to get more people to see their stuff, and you end up with things like Movies Anywhere. These other conglomerates have so much incentive to put up barriers and make their platforms the only or best place to get their stuff.

I don't think it's clear how these mergers of distribution and content creators is going to shake out. It could be that net neutrality is reinstituted, mitigating the worst consequences of those mergers, and the distribution side ends up paying for more and better content. Or maybe AT&T and Comcast end up destroying their media brands in service of their delivery platforms.

Mega Disney is obviously bad, but I think we'll have to wait and see if it really ends up being worse than the alternatives.

There were no good options here.

He's not alone in having been sold a false bill of goods. I have some sympathy for someone that wanted something so much they'd invest that kind of money into it, but at the same time it's hard to feel too bad for someone falling so hard for something that seemed so obviously unlikely to come to pass.

17 hours ago, sblfilms said:

I think FB is either a platform or it isn’t. Opposing curation of viewpoints is not invoking slippery slopes, it’s the entire argument. They have to decide what they are.

But Facebook does moderate it's platform, every platform does. Unless you're talking about 4chan or voat, it's never a question of if you curate content at all, but what content is necessary to remove. Zuck obviously thinks that Holocaust denial doesn't cross that line, I'd personally disagree.

Titans is the first original series for DC Comics' new streaming service, which I didn't even realize was going to be a thing. This is taking the unbearable grittyness of the Snyder-verse, cranking it to eleven. I suppose the real mercy here is that it'll be stuck behind a pay wall where no one will see it.

Joaquin Phoenix is one of our greatest living actors, so I will remain interested in this one. It's just so hard to imagine something good that isn't Wonder Woman coming out of DC right now.

This is one of those things that seems so obviously necessary. Even if you're a hardcore Trumpian conservative, aren't you supposed to be worried about fat guys in basements or organized gangs of immigrants or democracy destroying democrats rigging elections? They're willing to pass bills to make it harder to vote, but they won't help safeguard elections in ways that don't hinder voting?

I know, all the worrying about elections is really just showmanship to depress democratic turnout, but still, it seems like there should be some sense of continuity in your PR campaign or something.

From the abstract:

Quote

Adaptive sampling achieves its exponential speedup at the expense of approximation. In theory, it is guaranteed to produce a solution that is a 1/3 approximation to the optimum

So this is much faster at finding a much worse result. I imagine there are some very good uses for this algorithm, and I can see its output being used as a starting point. However, for a lot of problems, the computing power required really isn't a big deal.

The California Supreme Court decided today to remove Prop 9, which would have split the state into three pieces, from the ballot. The court decided that "significant questions have been raised regarding the proposition’s validity and because we conclude that the potential harm in permitting the measure to remain on the ballot outweighs the potential harm in delaying the proposition to a future election.”

The court didn't rule on the constitutionality of the proposition, but did say that they will issue a ruling. It seems almost inconceivable to me that they'd rule it constitutional. Not that it would be impossible to split the state, but that a state ballot measure could have any such effect.

The amazing thing about that exchange to me is that it's Zuck that brings up Holocaust denial in the first place. I'd be a stupid answer if Kara was the one coming up with hypotheticals, but he just Zucked himself.

Personally, I don't care if Holocaust deniers are intentionally misleading people or if they actually believe it, literally no good comes from giving them a platform. I imagine that he's worried about a slippery slope argument where now people think you need to ban climate change deniers and Sandy Hook truthers and whatever else. That honesty doesn't sound bad to me, but I understand why Facebook doesn't want to have that discussion. I also don't think it's particularly difficult to carve out some special cases like they did in Myanmar, and I'd be fine putting Holocaust denial in that category.

Time to spin the Kola Borehole back up. Only 83-143 miles left to go.

15 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

I think we're in agreement. I like Google, and I'm a huge proponent of open source and having options. What I don't like is the bullying and exclusivity arrangements part is all. You seem to agree there. If the Commissions lack of broadness or inability to penalize all offending companies I would agree with you but to say not going after Google because the Commission didn't go after others, that I'm not so sure about. (if that's what you're saying). 

I think it's fine to go after Google for exclusivity payments, even if they don't go after everyone. I get the impression that (if this ruling stands) Microsoft could sign an agreement with Samsung or Orange to make Bing the default search engine on some or all of their Android phones. I'd  rather the EU just have a law that outlines when something like that is allowed, market leader or not. 

Have you heard Queen's songs? I've heard Queen's songs. Queen's songs are good. This movie features Queen's songs.

Sounds good to me.

2 minutes ago, Jason said:

You can sideload the Play Store to a Fire tablet and it'll work fine.

Yes, but you can't sell a forked device with the Play Store installed, which automatically limits it's appeal. Also, the lack of bundled Google Play Services means that either the maker of the fork or individual developers need to implement their own version of those services (social, location, etc.). Again, if the fork is sufficiently compatible (like the Fire devices), you can sideload GPS and everything should work, but the point is that it's an enormous incentive to use Google's version of Android rather than forking it. I think that's fine, the EU apparently disagrees.