One more thing. Another Manila user wants to statically render his sites per my query yesterday. I'm sure we'll figure it out.

Hope you're having a happy holiday. Scripting News will resume tomorrow, Murphy-willing.

This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Jason Koebler, writing for Motherboard: Emperor Palpatine is back with a fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers, the masses are scared to fight the Final Order, and the last glimmer of hope for the rebellion is nearly stamped out by ... overbearing DRM? The Rise of Skywalker is an allegory for the dystopian nightmare we are quickly hurtling toward, one in which we don't own our droids (or any of our other stuff), their utility hampered by arbitrary decisions and software locks by monopolistic corporations who donâ(TM)t want us to repair our things. In Skywalker, C3PO, master of human-cyborg relations, speaks six million languages including Sith (spoken by the Dark Side), but a hard-coded software lock (called Digital Rights Management here on Earth) in his circuitry prevents him from translating Sith aloud to his human users. Presumably, this is to prevent the droid from being used by the Sith, but makes very little sense in the context of a galactic war that has relied so heavily on double agents, spies, and leaked plans and documents. The only explanation that makes any sense is a greedy 3PO manufacturer that sells the Sith language pack as a microtransaction and a galactic Congress that hasn't passed strong right to repair laws for the junk traders, droid mechanics, and droid users of the galaxy. C3PO's software lock is a major plot point in Skywalker as he's unable to translate a Sith passage that could lead our heroes to the Sith planet that the aforementioned Palpatine is hanging out on.

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Technology giants are increasingly designing their own semiconductors to optimize everything from artificial intelligence tasks to server performance and mobile battery life. Google has the Tensor Processing Unit, Apple has the A13 Bionic and Amazon.com has the Graviton2. What the titans all lack, however, is a factory to build the new chips they are dreaming up. Enter Samsung Electronics, which is planning a decade-long, $116 billion push for their business. From a report: The South Korean company is investing heavily in the next step in miniaturizing semiconductors, a process called extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). It's by far the priciest manufacturing upgrade Samsung has ever attempted, a risky bid to move beyond its established business of cranking out commoditized silicon and to leapfrog the incumbent leaders in the $250 billion foundry and logic-chip industry. "A new market is opening up," Yoon Jong Shik, executive vice president of Samsung's foundry business, said at a forum recently held in Seoul. "Companies like Amazon, Google and Alibaba, which lack experience in silicon design, are seeking to make chips with their own concept ideas in order to boost their services. I think this would bring a significant breakthrough for our non-memory chip business." Samsung is a relative underdog in this growing field. The foundry business -- as the manufacturing of chips for companies like Google and Qualcomm Inc. is known -- is dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. with more than half the market, according to TrendForce data that puts Samsung at 18%. TSMC also took over Apple's A-series processor manufacturing from Samsung, which was the original production partner. Samsung plans to spend about $10 billion per year on equipment, research and development over the next decade, but TSMC is even more ambitious with capital expenditure of around $14 billion for this year and next.

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Arundhati Roy

Prospect of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah heightens after the discovery of oil and gas reserves in waters disputed by the two sides.

Lisa Murkowski says McConnell's approach of working with White House on impeachment trial 'further confuses the process'

theodp writes: Over at Polygon, games journalist Colin Campbell remembers the late Silas Warner in The Man Who Made Wolfenstein. Before Doom, there was Warner's Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), which counted id Software's legendary John Carmack and John Romero as fans. After completing his degree in Physics at Indiana University, Warner found work at IU installing a new system called PLATO, which he used to fork John Daleske's Empire (1973), which is sometimes credited as being the first multiplayer shooting game. Ultima creator Richard Garriott called Warner's Escape (1978) a major inspiration that "changed my life." Warner's Robotwar (manual, pdf) also did double-duty as a stealth learn-to-program tutorial. Sadly, Warner was plagued with bad health and passed away at age 54 without receiving the proper credit or rewards he was due.

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Turkish leader says visit was aimed at finding ways to establish 'a ceasefire as soon as possible'.

Hassan Diab will likely oversee Lebanon's final political, social and economic collapse.

Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo has managed to automate 90 percent of its flagship Tokyo warehouse, the Financial Times reports, adding that the facility includes a two-armed robot that can fold and box T-shirts, a job previously reserved for human staff. From a report: The industrial T-shirt folders come from Japanese robotics startup, Mujin. Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing, partnered with Mujin to equip its flagship Tokyo warehouse with the robots, reducing its reliance on human labor in the process. FT says the innovation could enable the factory to completely automate production.

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Rector says Paris Landmark is so fragile that there's a '50 percent chance' the structure may not be saved.

Amid mass protests, acclaimed writer and activist tells Al Jazeera why she calls India's new citizenship law dangerous.

In the age of social media, the snail-mail holiday photo card is taking on more significance. Permanent, physical photos stand out, and families are realizing they can be used to convey important life changes -- without having to put them into words. People are using the images on cards to signal major transitions, including divorce, illness and adoption. From a report: "The holiday card gives you a chance to put out the one version that you feel good about. It gives you editorial control," says Allen Adamson, co-founder of Metaforce, a branding and marketing consultancy. "And it has permanence. People hold on to them. They post them on refrigerators." The average person takes about 1,000 digital images per year, driven largely by cellphones, according to Keypoint Intelligence-InfoTrends. Sharing pictures with family and friends is the top reason people say they use social networks, according to an Adobe survey of about 4,000 people conducted in July. "Social media is this constant rolling letter," says Brad Kopitz, chief executive of Artifact Uprising, a Denver maker of custom photo gifts including cards. Sometimes, digital photos get lost in the shuffle, he says. The holiday card is a "pattern interrupt," he says. "It's like when you get a handwritten note in the mail. It's saying, 'You're part of my life and not just part of the digital noise.'" Fewer people are sending physical cards, making the ones that do go out more noticeable. Seventy percent of consumers said they planned to send greeting cards this year, down from 77% five years earlier, according to a National Retail Federation survey of nearly 8,000 adults conducted in October. That can give a printed card greater significance.

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For decades France has had one of the most well-organized anti-advertising movements in the world, ranging from guerrilla protests with spray-cans to high-profile court cases. But now the boom in what is artfully called "digital-out-of-home advertising" -- eye-catching video screens dotted across urban areas, from train platforms to shopping centres -- has sparked a new spate of French protests, civil disobedience and petitions. From a report: High tech video billboards are multiplying in city spaces across the world, woven into the fabric of everyday life, from ribbon videos down escalators on the London underground, to French metro corridors, New York taxis, bus-shelters, newspaper kiosks, and -- increasingly -- broadcast from shop windows onto the street. They are becoming more sophisticated and interactive, with the potential to collect data from passersby; increasingly bright and inescapable -- impossible to click off or block like you can online. But in France, there is fresh debate on how urban planners and local councils should limit them in the public space for the sake of our overloaded eyes and brains. The trend to squeeze every bit of city downtime into an opportunity to place people in front of screen has become a political battle on the left. Francois Ruffin of the French left party, La France Insoumise, recently tabled a French parliamentary amendment to ban video ads above urinals and toilets. It was dubbed the "Pee in Peace" motion. Ruffin said he was horrified when standing at a Paris cafe urinal to be visually "assaulted" by a video advertising Uber, a bank, and the book and tech store Fnac. "Who doesn't enjoy that rare moment of calm: having a piss?" he wrote in the amendment, warning that since 2015, over 2,000 of the screens had "colonised" 1,200 urinals in 25 French towns.

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