Even if electric power, water, sewer, trash pickup, and gas for indoor heating (in areas that get snow) are included in your rent, other services with recurring payments include home and mobile Internet access, renter's insurance, car insurance, and health insurance.

A lot of shows on streaming services are never released on DVD.

That's not what a cancellation fee does, though. By definition, when you pay a cancellation fee, they are no longer providing service.

Makes me glad I gave up on TV. (OTOH, it makes me worry about the next time I need to replace a monitor.)

It's a combination of training data and rewards. Chatbots are trained to never admit that they don't know, and to always be willing to be convinced that the person talking to them is correct. This makes them more popular, and enchances engagement, but at the cost of accuracy.

I think that if they're actually generating feature length films, they'll probably be decent...well, not much worse than what they've been doing. Films are expensive not just to shoot, but also to make, so I expect there'll be lots of steps where "editorial judgement" is applied.

OTOH, I'm not a movie goer. I don't know the current quality. And Ed Wood is a level it's pretty hard to go below.

No. The scam callers speak English. Perhaps not well, but it's English that they are speaking.

To repeat a point I made earlier, information is not knowledge. Knowledge may be either true or false (i.e. it's a signed quantity). Information is most densely contained in (at least apparently) random noise.

IIUC, the chinese ideograph system is common between all those languages, and therefore would count as one common language...until the computers started audio processing. (FWIW, it's my understanding that many of the Chinese ideographs even have approximately the same meaning in one of the Japanese writing systems.)

A point, but (and this is admittedly a quibble) I wouldn't call languages a "vast body of human knowledge". The data encoded within that language might qualify, but not the language itself. Unfortunately, without understanding the language there's no way of reasonably estimating the size of the contained "human knowledge" that isn't contained in sources already covered.

FWIW, I think treating "the internet" as a body of human knowledge is foolish. Parts of it are, but much of it is negative-knowledge (i.e. learning it makes you stupider). The internet *is* a body of human information...but some information is garbage.

Now I admit that, say, Tamil may contain encoded large amounts of history and large amounts of myth. Whether they are clearly enough separated to be called knowledge isn't something I can tell. (Actually, Tamil should contain much of the history of the development of math...but it's not clear to me that this would be readily distinguishable from the related myths even by a careful historian, much less by a current LLM.)

Loans always have such vile terms that I do my best to avoid them. I've been pretty successful, but sometimes there is no real choice. But whenever I bought a car it was cash down, no interest.

As far as I am concerned, the importance of this law is that the person writing the contract has to make the terms clear to the person accepting it. "fine print" has always been a despicable legal tradition.

So the faster we help them develop, the slower the world population climbs.

When I've asked others what has improved about GitHub over the past seven years of ownership by Microsoft, people have told me free private repositories are the big one.

Let's face it, many evangelical Christians have voted for an administration that would instantly deport Jesus to El Salvador if he appeared today.

Because that $2,000 is consideration for the other party providing something. If the penalty clause is the entire remainder of the contract fee, then the other party should also be compelled to provide service for the remainder of the contract term, or some equivalent consideration. Otherwise, it isn't really much of a contract.

If they get out of providing service, then you should get out of paying, except for some penalty to make up for sunk costs, e.g. the prorated cost of provisioning initial service, the prorated cost of a phone that was free with contract, etc., plus some *reasonable* amount to discourage people from pulling out of the contract on a whim.

Also, understand that the company providing the service had way more power over the contract than you. You were almost certainly told "take it or leave it" when presented with the contract. That's why putting limits on what contracts of adhesion can do is generally considered to be a critical function of government.

The part you're missing is that contracts like this are contracts of adhesion, and there may or may not even be an option to sign up one month at a time. And even if there is, having a penalty clause for canceling a contract is reasonable, but having a penalty clause that massively exceeds any plausible damages isn't, particularly when one of the parties in that contract has dramatically more power than the other, and that party is the one writing the contract and demanding the penalty clause. That's why it is reasonable for governments to limit the amount of those damages through statutes. It is just compensating for that inherent power imbalance.

Also, real-world companies aren't typically selling bonds against their subscription revenue, and unless this is a very small business and the contracts are among equals (which a customer relationship almost never is), a bank isn't going to care about the difference between 1,000 subscriptions and 1,001, nor do stockholders. They care about the difference between 1,000 and 100,000. Orders of magnitude matter. A few cancellations around the margins are noise. So although you might be correct in theory, in practice, single cancellations don't matter, and if the cancellation numbers are high enough to matter, there's something much more seriously wrong with the company, and locking consumers in to a long-term contract likely serves no one's best interests, including the company's, because that just reduces the pressure on the company to fix those structural problems.