Not sure. Just when you think you've found it the line slants up again. But humans have limits and Donald Trump is old. His hey day seems to have been in the 80s and 90s. Now he's slowed down and is taking more naps, plus a bunch of his old friends have died or gone to live in group housing. I suppose you could argue that he's taking dirty old man to new heights in his mind.

You contradict yourself. A product that isn't easy to use or setup in one or two clicks fails in the market. Hence cloud.

Ah, you have a personal definition of "necessity." I'm sure what follows is going to be good.

Enshitification and dumbing down of everything is done because quite frankly most people are frigging useless when it comes to technology.

the more rope you gave idiots

Most products are unfortunately designed for the commoner, not the techie in mind.

Etc.

I always find it quite ironic when "the techies" on here complain about how it's impossible to change the battery in a phone and bitch about problems that can be solved with an ESP32 and a bit of solder (like the one in this story). Guess there are multiple levels of "frigging useless when it comes to technology."

VPNs are pretty hard when you don't know the name or address to connect to.

This time seems to be post-Discovery acquisition pain, and they're going to be selling off a bunch of stuff before they let Netflix acquire the rest. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens to a few more media companies too. They've all been spending money like mad to try and buy streaming customers and also make something they want to watch.

Bullshit. Selling property is selling property. You seem to be distracted by the idea that a corporation is anything other than a group of co-owners. I'm not saying sometimes rights need to be restricted for the common good. They always do. But come out and say it, don't weasel around it with but but corp....

For all their "losses" they were also able to pay down their debt in 2024 with $4.4B in cash flow

WB lost more than $11 billion in 2024, although their debt did go down from $70 billion to a mere $46 billion.

Don't be silly. Trump hasn't experienced any ethical decline.

boils down to security and being able to punch through firewalls and NAT... Really there should be a protocol to solve this problem that is industry wide.

There is. It's called IP forwarding. Your router almost certainly supports it because without it and its auto-configuration friends UPnP and NAT-PMP you wouldn't be able to play lots of online games.

That's not the problem. The problem is, how do you tell your phone what your home IP address is? That also has standard solutions but ISPs don't like giving out static IPs and dynamic DNS requires that you have a domain name. Used to be you could get a free one, but those services seem to have died off so now it's $15 a year.

Like it or not the cloud is a necessity for anything that extends beyond a few meters from your home.

It's not a necessity, but it certainly makes it a lot easier.

There is a problem with things that are not a few meters from your home requiring cloud access though. Like a garage door opener. Optional cloud integration so you can control it remotely, fine, but the base functionality should be local. The problem with cloud stuff is that it's an ongoing expense. If you're not paying a subscription eventually the provider is not going to be able to keep it going.

Assuming you live in a society with property rights, you do in fact have the right to both buy and sell that property. Like all rights, it's not absolute and can be limited in special circumstances. Corporations are just legal mechanisms for multiple people to share certain of their individual rights, most prominently property rights.

Warner Brothers is heavily in debt and has been posting big losses since the beginning of 2022. Their financials certainly look like they're in dire straits.

The deal hasn't closed yet. US regulators will be looking at it pretty carefully.

> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

There are five. DNA and RNA each have four but not the same four. RNA uses uracil instead of thymine. The basic five can be modified after the nucleic acid is formed, methylctosine being the most common.

There are also a bunch of other nucleotide bases that aren't normally incorporated in DNA or RNA, some of which have been found in space, and artificial ones we've engineered to fluoresce or kill cancer.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

They also didn't start delving into DEI madness in 2010...neglecting the engineering to chase the "diversity" ghost

Doctors are not memorization machines.

That's exactly what they are, and most of them are very good at it. Medical school is heavy on memorization.

The good ones know they can't memorize everything and look stuff up when it's not something they see regularly. Medical school tends to discourage this for historical and placebo effect reasons.

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.