Merit should always consider strictly value.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

You can switch back to the "Advanced" or "Standard" models by clicking on your user icon then settings, voice. There is now a drop-down list with: Live, Advanced, and Standard.

Each one is worse than the previous.
Basic:
* Good, monotone

Standard:
* Too much inflexion, uncanny.
* Knows how to pronounce foreign words in the correct accent. So you can use this to practice another language. It can fluently switch back and forth even within a sentence.

Live:
* Overly strong accents, like a young actor hamming it up.
* Doesn't get language accents right, so it is useless for language learning.
* Adds "Hmmm..." and "uh huh" and "Interesting..." as you speak. Sometimes it sounds like a Minecraft villager or Yoda thinking.
* Starts every response with boisterous exclamations and thinking sounds. "Ohhhh... Hmmm uhhhh, oh yeah that's (complex | interesting | fascinating)!"
(The text version does this too, but not nearly so hard and overdone)

I love how the technology advances, but I think OpenAI is overdoing it and the voices get cheesier and more annoying with each version. If a human being talked to me like this I would assume they are being an ass and making fun of me. Or maybe they were high?

Another effect is that "apps" integrate support for cloud services. So if you take a picture, your phone app is likely to have a "share" button with Instagram / Facebook / Threads / whatever, but it isn't like to have an "SFTP" button. Companies went out of their way to remove standard protocols.

Yes, most of the difficulty with wine is installing the windows applications, not wine itself. There are many knobs and compatibility options to adjust. Proton has done that for you for a huge number of the games in steam.

Also notice that zero elected representatives have proposed laws to fix this.

As of 2026, I bet most people don't even know there is another way. Web sites are perceived as things that big companies do, not individuals. Nobody registers powercntrl.com and hosts their own site any longer. They don't even know that is possible!

But The-Ixian is right: You can't stop someone from using your online image anyway, even if you self-host it. But at least it would be illegal for them to do so. Maybe. Possibly.

do programming languages count?

"The very point of intellectual property laws is that they protect only against certain specific kinds of appropriation....All creators draw in part on the work of those who came before, referring to it, building on it, poking fun at it; we call this creativity, not piracy.... Intellectual property rights aren't free; They're imposed at the expense of future creators and of the public at large.... This is why intellectual property law is full of careful balances between what's set aside for the owners and what's left in the public domain for the rest of us....It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of a creator's labor may be used by others without compensation. But this is not some unforeseen byproduct of our intellectual property system; it is the system's very essence. Intellectual property law assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely on the ideas that underlie it. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate: It is the means by which intellectual property law advances the progress of science and art...."

- [Vanna] White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing).

Children? Really? You accused me of being a bot. It would be childish of me to accuse you of being an ESA shill.

Creators are under no obligation to seek statutory monopoly protection from the state either.

It is *literally* part of the patent bargain, and implicit in the idea that copyright terms are limited.

I'm finding fewer and fewer of your posts to be factual at this point.

Why constrain this to games? Why not software as a whole? The entire internet (and technology as a whole) depends largely on open source code, unencumbered protocols, and standardized, royalty free document formats.

Would the internet exist if only IPX and NetBIOS were viable?

A monopoly is literally the antithesis of a free market. A statutory monopoly doubly so.

What is the marginal cost of reproduction of information?