By 'pictures' they obviously mean 'porn'.

"TLOs report not only illegal but legal activity, such as bulk purchases along Colorado’s Front Range of up to 150 disposable cellphones. TLO supervisors said these bulk buys were suspicious because...[they] can be re-sold to fund terrorism"

TLOs in New York have recently reported bulk purchases of stocks and bonds in the city's financial district, which are suspicious because they can be re-sold to fund terrorism.

Kanye West is the anti-Niggy Tardust.

This post was so much cooler when I misread the title as "teaching neural-net bots to love (and dance to) Daft Punk music"...

Alternate title: Dispatches From Dubai, 2030.

No OpenArena, the open-source version of Q3Arena?

Iron Man's been a fascist dickhole for a year or two now, since Civil War.

Sorry, that first sentence should read 'radio stations' rather than 'record companies'.

Talking about licenses that apply to record companies is missing the point entirely.

Firstly, those licenses are performance licenses. They're not about acquiring music or playing it, they're about performance, distributing the music over the airwaves. That's generally all they cover. They don't allow radio stations to copy music, or release their own albums, or anything else. This proposal is talking about an arrangement to cover the acquisition and distribution of content, as well as this 'license to play' the music that the industry would like to be selling you instead of (or as well as) the music itself. The radio station licenses and this proposed arrangement aren't really comparable.

Secondly, the reason the radio station licenses exist is because the people whose music is being played get promotion out of being played. That's the added value of the license, and the reason those licenses are made available, and for non-absurd cost. In order for the licensors to make arrangements like the one being discussed, there'd have to be similar value involved, or an extraordinary cost, because essentially the license would grant most of the rights that the licensor has. What then is the licensor to make a profit from, if not the cost of the license?