Gotta admit, I did not have "representative of a major corporation getting deeply philosophical as an attempted legal defense" on there.

I did a little better (all the letters were there) and read Shitfall. But that's still in line with the rest of your point. lol.

I really didn't know the US had that many disabled Chinese hackers, but it's good that they're getting to work if they want to!

Except that there are alternatives to give you a theater-like experience there, too, that avoid the size and noise complaint issues you're talking about - like 3d headsets.

I think you vastly overestimate my ability to draw living beings. I'm pretty good with ships and architecture, but my stick figures look like they had birth defects.

Oh! And I didn't even feel like getting into what WB (Max) has been doing to their own catalog of content, because that's a level of stupid that transcends everything else I mentioned.

Consider the possibility... that none of these asshats running the streaming services know what the hell they are doing.

Several of the services are tied to movie studios who cannibalized their own films' box office numbers, in part due to a lack of alternatives during the height of Covid-19, but mostly by pumping beaucoup bucks into many excellent productions for their streaming services that have made people wonder why they would leave their comfortable home theater systems to go back to the hell that is other people. Made those in order to try to secure themselves as a dominant power in the future of streaming, without clear individual profit goals for the programs themselves. And now that they're losing the ability to keep churning those out, they're raising streaming prices and losing market share, not gaining or keeping it.

Paramount Plus - the Home of All Star Trek. Except... Prodigy is on Netflix now and the feature films are all over on Max.

Disney+ - we're a kid and family friendly streaming service except for the part where we now have F bombs in Marvel films, are getting ready to make adult rated Marvel and Star Wars series, and are bringing Hulu under the same roof so we can have their content, a lot of which is not kid friendly.

Netflix - we used the ability to share accounts as a selling point but now are blocking that, treating people who try like criminals, and simultaneously jacking up our price faster than any other service.

Amazon Prime - we hope you won't mind paying extra to not have ads on the video service a lot of you only have because it's included with our increasingly crappy Prime shipping in the first place...

I find it hard to take the idea that any of them except maybe Apple+ and PlutoTV have anything like functional strategies seriously at all.

"We are the centre... and so is everything else."

This annoys the crap out of me. Look, I know what it's getting at, and you could make the same argument using an inflating balloon - and it would be accurate, but it's not *useful*, it's just pedantic as hell.

If you measured the speeds and trajectories of every visible galaxy and drew lines backward along them, then barring a rare weirdo or three where something unanticipated happened in the history of that galaxy's travel, those lines would all intersect at one point in space and time. Fine, I'll give the pedants that by some ways of looking at it, that's not "the center" anymore - but it's almost certainly pretty much where the ultra-dense ball of "stuff" that underwent the Big Bang was when it happened. And if you ignore the part where all the stuff that was in there is now everywhere all over the place out here, that point in space is going to be good 'nuff to refer to as "the center of the universe" for everyone out here not trying to do the math and just trying to enjoy whatever sci-fi movie they're watching. ;)

The plan was to have a second Internet that was intended for business and professional use - everyone on it would have their online presence registered and associated with their actual identity. It would have been pretty great: spam and scams would have been massively reduced, and crimes like cryptoransoms would have been much more easily avoidable, trackable, prosecutable, etc. Internet 1 would have still been there for anonymous social and technical purposes, and general funsies.

So what happened? Bush 43 was the President pushing it and liberals (btw, I lean this way myself) had to say that everything that Bush talked about was stupid (a lot was) and that included making fun of him talking about "the Internets" like he was ignorant and not talking about a real idea. And then there was the crime that everyone should have seen coming, like cryptoransom, still being a problem for Future America from the perspective of the business community of 2001 that would have been footing the bill for building out something they couldn't realize much of a benefit from in the current quarter or fiscal year. And then 9/11 happened, and it was completely off of everyone's radar.

Being a citizen of South Carolina who, left-leaning though I am, thought Gov. Haley did a pretty good job here, I like to *think* that something like Internet 2 is what she has in mind again. But we may be too far down the road to do it now, and I may just be looking for silver linings wherever I can find them in this giant cloud made of turd that I see looming on the horizon.

"Of course, no person would do that"

Except I have, on occasions when I'm manic, in response to very simple questions like that one. So maybe you're incorrect, or, maybe *I* don't pass the Turing test on those occasions?

One could also probably take a fair stab at guessing how DNA would have felt about Musk by looking at how Neil Gaiman seems to - Douglas was Neil's literary idol, and there's a great deal of similarity between the perspectives and attitudes of the two

Neil doesn't seem fond of Musk. lol.

Except that patient-specific drug therapies are a developing technology, so that's not quite true.

They respect them as tools against the countries that honor them, and against companies in those jurisdictions.

And Zork, Wishbringer, Enchanter, Plundered Hearts, Ballyhoo, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Starcross, Nord and Bert, etc, etc, in case Microsoft has some AI combing the Intarwebs for mentions in relevant places. Because they need to know there is interest.

You can also just go ahead and "try to log in" with no@thankyou.com and any password - there will be "an error" and then it will just let you use a local account.