That should have been done 20 years ago. Back in the 70s-90s, it made sense. Cable companies were given monopolies to incentivize them stringing cable all over the place so they could recoup their expenses. They have made back their money. Now, they're just milking the people.

LK

The issue isn't agreeing to arbitration, although that is a bad choice. I know pretty much every company throws this into their EULA.

The issue is that they won't let me use my physical hardware that I purchased, for anything, regardless of whether it's using their services or not, until I agree to some random new terms that they're pushing.

I've got 2 Roku soundbars that were $180/each. A Roku subwoofer that was about $180, and a pair of surround speakers that were about $150. All rendered useless, unless I click the OK button.

Yeah that's a risk that I took buying into a proprietary system, but I never imagined that they'd physically brick the device like that. I'd figured that even if they went out of business I'd still be able to use the soundbar as a bluetooth speaker, but no.

Lesson learned, Roku will not get another cent from me even if they fully reverse this decision.

Which is great, until you get a big popup that won't let you do anything with your Roku until you click accept.

Which is what I had this weekend, on both of my devices, without any warning.

Slashdot's crack team of editors would let a dupe through? When did this start?

Based on this law, it sounds like I already commit a full on genocide in the shower every few days.

Curious naming choice... When I think of Spirit in relationship to flying, I don't have good thoughts.

It's kind of like Ford spinning off their engine manufacturing to a company called Yugo Manufacturing.

This. They can't fix their busted-ass "random" algorithm or pay musicians properly, but they can pay this idiot a quarter of a billion dollars to spew ignorance?

I've got a great podcast app that doesn't tie me to any single provider. I don't need or want spotify to provide this service.

You laugh, but this happened to me several years ago. Commuting from Los Angeles to Orange County, the Metrolink I was on had a 10 minute delay at one of the stations. The conductor announced that they were "Rebooting the locomotive and we'll be moving again shortly". I had a sensible chuckle over that.

I also worked for a transit company in So Cal years ago, all of our busses ran Siemens Transitmaster, which was running on a small DOS computer in a rack directly behind the driver.

I'm surprised waiting for reboots isn't a more common delay, TBH.

The market belongs to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. The studios need to make peace with that.

Produce shows for one of those three and negotiate your deal. Standing up all of these new services is not going to work.
I'm not paying for something new. I cut the cord to save money, not just because I hated cable. Having to pay for 8 different streaming services is going to be more expensive than cable and I'm not doing that.

LK

It could be useful. In my house, the kids are responsible for doing their own laundry. Everyone getting a notification when the washer is free or the dryer is done would be helpful. It's not a game changing technology, and shouldn't use more than a few kb of traffic per day, and it's certainly not something that I'd pay extra for, but if a machine I was buying anyway had that feature it could be useful.

I suspect that there's a financial incentive for them to keep playing the same stuff over and over. Like maybe they only pay an artist per person who listens to a track in any given month. So if they play the same track twice, they only have to pay once maybe? So they limit the number of unique songs that they present to a listener? That's the only reason I can think of that this is still like this, and apparently is this way on other services too.

I'm about ready to just download all this shit via torrent again and just listen that way like I used to.

Hey Spotify, before fucking around with AI can you please just make the random function actually be random? My playlist of roughly 2,500 songs is on a repeat of around 100 songs. It's annoying as hell. I don't want the shuffle feature to be smart. It doesn't need AI. Just make it random.

Once you've got that wrapped up, feel free to add the AI playlist, along with all of the other features taht you've implemented that I'll also ignore. Be a music streaming service. Not a podcast provider, not a tiktok clone.

Get rid of fines completely in any cases involving cars. Parking tickets and moving violations.

Replace it with community service, which MUST be done by whoever is in control of the vehicle. If that's uncertain, it's the registered owner's responsibility to either do the community service, or provide proof of who was driving.

As it is now, a $300 ticket will financially devastate a lot of people, and will be such a minor inconvenience it's simply a cost of driving to many others. Give everyone a community service fine instead. If a guy worth millions has to spend a few weekends out picking up trash off the side of the highway because he was going an unsafe speed or ran through a red light, he might think twice next time. If a guy who can't afford to feed his family and pay the fine gets a ticket, he'll think twice the next time and won't have to worry about how he's going to make rent in addition to paying.

In your example, make the corporate board of Waymo responsible. If they don't think their vehicles are advanced enough to drive around without committing traffic offenses, then they're not ready to be on public roads.

It earns no interest but inflation serves the purpose of interest for a precious metal.

I just go back to the example of the 1964 silver quarter.

In 1964, the minimum wage was $1.25 per hour. If you had 5 1964 silver quarters today, they'd be worth over $21.

That's just under 5% annual return over the past 59 years.

By no means is that exemplary but it's also not just a dead asset either.

LK