I'm not saying that they can't do it, it's that they can't legally do it.

No. And if you watch a cabinet meeting, and it's not hard to see why it's an apt comparison. But feel free to replace "Dear Leader" with "Trump", if it makes you feel neuter, and finish reading the comment.

Let's not lose perspective here - we're talking about entertainment companies. These aren't airlines, ISPs, or grocery stores, it's boob tube fodder.

If you can't afford it, you don't have to subscribe. When I was a kid, we didn't have premium cable TV channels because my folks thought it wasn't worth the money. We still went to the movies occasionally and rented tapes from the local rental joint (before they all became Blockbuster Video).

There's absolutely no reason that the government should be involving itself in entertainment industry mergers. It's as absolutely non-essential as non-essential businesses can get. The sun will still rise tomorrow if you can't afford to watch Game of Thrones, or whatever the current crap is that HBO is putting out these days. And... there's always piracy.

I don't think it's really about any of this. This smells to me like a pump and dump scheme. Get investors thinking this idea is hot shit because it's based on a well-established brand, and then make off with the money before anyone realizes the world didn't really need yet another microblogging service.

That Dear Leader is a vile human being with generally unpopular policies being implemented in arbitrary, capricious, haphazard, and sometimes illegal ways? And, outside of right-wing echo chambers, is being covered in a way that reflects that? Maybe, just maybe, he's being covered in a negative way because an ever growing percentage of the population views him and his administration negatively?

What country do you live in and ill point out the people who are "forced" to keep society functioning and we can argue if we are "entitled" to it.

And another thing. Fuckin Benny Johnson, a private media figure, gets a death threat and then he appears at a press conference with fucking Attorney General of the United States

The fucking Vice President of the United States hosted Charlie Kirk's podcast for like weeks.

Unreal.

That is completely false in 2025. There definitely is bad engagement these days. There's a reason they pulled the advert rather than let it run its course. I don't think anyone here reading this has a sudden urge to go get a BigMac. Simply having a name doesn't make marketing in any way affective or positive.

The problem is it looks like AI slop. It would be a perfectly fine advert if it didn't look like uncanny valley rubbish.

It's more fundamental than that. The problem isn't that they generated AI slop and curated it, that's literally an aspect of creative processes. The real problem is that the final result still looks like AI slop.

Well Netflix makes crappy shows on purpose and by policy directly dictated by the CEO that their movies should be a "second screen" able to be understood by people who aren't watching or paying attention. So I'd go with the scumball. It's an unknown that may be better than the known alternative. No the devil we know will fuck this up.

So you're not going to get any new A/V purchases? The reason DisplayPort is virtually non-existent is that it lacks a chunk of livingroom specific features. E.g. eARC, CEC-Passthrough, those are all things you need in your TV to communicate correctly with receivers, speakers, and bluray players (If you're a physical media kinda gal) There's no Displayport alternative. In fact without HDMI it's not possible to route Dolby TrueHD, Atmos, or DTS:X to a receiver as the alternate audio connections don't have the bandwidth for it which would limit your sound options, and that's before you consider the point of ARC in the first place, without it you're back to a million cables between your pieces of equipment and reaching for the remote to change audio and video channels independently.

Displayport is superior for anything video related. But there's a reason it borderline doesn't exist in the A/V world.

I'm not sure what you think Europe is, but it is in no way illegal to have a closed spec over here. Never has been. Hell I remind you the Germans were instrumental in the development of MP3. Look how well the open source community did with that spec, a default Linux install didn't ship with an MP3 decoder for 2 decades.

This is a licensing issue, nothing more nothing less. Europe isn't a magical place where everything is forced to be open source. It's a magical place where cheese tastes good.

This has literally nothing to do with piracy or DRM which literally did not change in the slightest between the 2.0 and 2.1 spec, but ... sure whatever you say.

Everything? Displayport supports sending CEC remote codes between devices? It offers eARC for receivers and speakers? No DisplayPort has provided higher resolution and bandwidth for display. That's it. There's far more to these protocols than simply electrical signalling and the DisplayPort spec lacks some features that are virtually essential in the living room now.

There's a reason no TVs use display port.