partial_accumen

If you’re torrenting, then there’s no risk of watching ads from what you download, which was your primary argument for not subbing. If that’s the case then there’s no risk to subscribing to the service to pay for the content, and simply never log in.

Its a monthly subscription, and if they sell you a no-ad product you’d have strong grounds to ask for a refund for that month. Otherwise simply cancel the month you see ads.

There’s a fantasy series that has part of this as a plot point. A normal person becomes god with all the godly powers but only for a very short time do they get ALL the power. Its overwhelming in the first few moments and they almost destroy the planet with a mere thought. They realize their mistake a few seconds later, but only have half the power by then, so they put in an ugly workaround, before most of their power runs out. Now that ugly workaround is just “life as we know it” on the planet for the people that live there.

This is a deep spoiler for a popular book series so I don’t want to post the series name and I don’t think we have a spoiler tag yet.

I dunno. I think the animals should worry. The Anthropocene is going to mean millions of species of things cease to exist because we’re changing the global climate.

Sticking to the old model of “pay for cable TV and watch commercials” is never going to work, be it cable or streaming. I don’t think I’m in the minority here, either; I’ve heard this sentiment from plenty of others.

As much as wish I could agree with you, the previous ad-free streaming services now almost all offering an ad-supported tier disagrees with your conclusion. Price conscious consumers are choosing ad-supported subscriptions in large enough numbers for streaming services to offer them profitably. I’m okay with this. Not everyone has the money that I do, but I’ll almost always choose the ad-free version of a streaming channel instead of the ad-supported.

One of the few exceptions to that is Hulu. I don’t watch enough on Hulu to make it worth $18/month, and the ad-supported version can be had for $1/month-$2/month.

Cable companies have seen the writing one the wall with Cable TV for quite awhile. They had the perfect product to pivot to with broadband. Had they offered a great product with great customer service, they’d have had the market forever especially how much consumers felt burned by telecoms abusing their market dominance with with early broadband.

Instead, cable companies doubled down on the lock-in and bundle model with deceptive pricing and horrible customer service ceding ground to wireless providers and even the same telecoms that were hated before.

Our household cut the cord on cableTV/satellite about 14 years ago, but kept cable modem service since then. Now that the local telecom has laid fiber at 500Mb/s for $49/month we dropped any relationship with the cable company. Two months before the fiber came in, cable suddenly dropped the price of our 100Mb/s service and increased the speed to $300Mb/s. At $80/month it was still better for us to ditch the cable company and go with the telecom fiber connection.

I googled a cheap Intel NUC and saw power consumption numbers of 15w to 40w. Thats quite a bit of juice (and heat) for small applications.

GenX here. Kids enjoying doing kid things even if we don’t understand why they do that hurts no one? Keep it up, kids. You’re doing fine. No cap.

Might be helpful to have this hardware if you want to develop malware targeting systems in China.

But somehow I wonder if kids may find it more boring than adults, because I would probably not get this movie as a kid.

I think it was aimed more toward tween and teen on the young side, and the “kid in all of us” on the older side.

I’ll agree that’s a good thing, but that depends on there being assets (likely in this case), but it also means workers may have to wait months or years before the bankruptcy proceedings are complete. That shouldn’t be a burden lower wage workers have to shoulder.

Start with Short Stories or novellas. A whole story from beginning to end in as short as 3 pages or as many as 30 or so. There are entire books of short stories (anthologies) in every genre you can imagine. You say you don’t have the patience. However, in the time its taken you to read this entire thread, you could have finished a short story. You’ve proven you have the patience.

Thats a very good point.

I’m not sure that was much of an issue for DVD. Historically VHS had those huge licensing terms for new releases ($90 for VHS), but the same rules didn’t apply to DVD (new releases $20). This was one of the main reasons VHS rentals died so fast after DVDs came out.

Also at least at one time, I remember Redbox was simply buying DVDs at retail stores instead of buying from retail stores for their disc inventory. I see that Walmart is listed as a creditor. That makes me think perhaps Redbox still was.

Sad to see this for two reasons:

1. Physical discs and the rental model have always been a fallback against oppressive streaming licensing, and with so few video rental stores left it Redbox was the last one standing.

2. It sounds like they missed payroll for their workers. No worker deserves to have their finances thrown into chaos because an employer can’t manage their books.

Thats no officer. That officer is made of cake.

The cake that is made twice as sweet lasts only half as long on the dessert table.

This was a shockingly good result when compared to the cost of producing this with a set, film crew, actors, costume/makeup, and post production.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be good enough to get your attention between the latest streaming show you or your kid is watching. It will absolutely do that for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost businesses had to pay before.

Just don’t fuck like a monkey and you will be safe

You can keep your slut shaming to yourself.

Among other things your advice isn’t an option for victims of rape, and in some parts of the world HIV is as widespread as rape.

Toy ‘R Us is alive and well in Canada too. There’s a Toy ‘R Us store 6 miles from Detroit in Windsor Ontario in Canada, as an example.