It actually is when you don't pay You Tube for premium access or whatever they call it. If you don't pay for that, every attempt to click ahead is likely to pull up a commercial or two before you see any video. In a 3 hour video, I can see how it's just not worth it. Crap, there are a few content providers I actually like and I'm not even willing to watch their 30 minute videos because those are that long just to maximize advertising money as others have said.

So I'm Gen X, which is important to what I'm going to say. My best friend from high school worked for the post office after graduating college and he retired a few years ago. USPS is essentially a government job and for those who don't know, US government employees are allowed to retire earlier than those who work in private industry do. I have to go to my local post office sometimes and the older employees are all gone now, having retired. Those guys cared. And it's not a case of "Blame the lazy Gen Zers" like everyone does now. The employees now are often Gen Y or Gen X and they don't care like the previous employees did. I see horrible delays all the time in packages both that I send and are sent to me. I ordered a CD from Amazon and they had it in a warehouse on the opposite side of the USA from me, so they used USPS to send it to me. It got misrouted to another major city in that state where it apparently sat for one month before someone could be bothered to find it and get it to me. I've sent documents via Express Mail which were said to be able to be delivered in 3-4 business days that in fact took almost 2 weeks to be delivered. I found out from tracking that one such attempt just sat at a local main post office for almost one week before anybody could be bothered to deliver it to the business it needed to go to. They aren't even trying any more. Yes, when private industry eventually takes over it will be horrifically expensive to send anything but I've used Fed Ex and UPS too and they also suck at times with unexplained delays in delivery and they cost a lot more than USPS does. It just seems like having anybody who can reliably deliver anything on time and at a decent price is an impossible ask.

It's worth noting that New York is run by the Democrats and North Carolina has recently been Democratic Party leaning. This is likely why they are targeted and Texas is ignored. Trump probably knows there is no real future in fossil fuels, but he'll be dead when nobody can deny that in the USA and his idiot sycophantic followers are huge "Drill baby, drill" people, so this plays well to their belief that solar and wind power are evil.

Well, my manager at a Fortune 500 company about 8 years ago assumed/believed that. He was a good manager and had real IT experience. He wasn't a paper pusher who got into IT management. I was floored when he told me he believed accessing stuff via an iPhone was much safer than using a PC. I told him my assumption was the exact opposite. I asked him why he believed that and he said he just assumed various app makers simply had to make their apps more secure because people were moving away from using PCs to doing everything on phones. I still don't agree with him.

Two years ago, somebody I went to high school with posted on Facebook trying desperately to sell some concert tickets the day before a show. Her husband got sick and they tried to dump the tickets. To the best of my knowledge, they didn't sell the tickets because she was trying to get full value. I made a screenshot of her post showing the cost of the tickets. I'm not going to name the band because if I did, people would post "I didn't know they were still around" or "I can't believe they paid that much to see them". Here are the details.

Venue seats 10,000 to 12,000. Located in a town with over 100,000 residents, so not a major metro area.
Seats located roughly 20 rows from the stage.
Cost of 2 tickets:
Tickets: $398.00. (2 x $199.00)
Service Fee: $117.42. ($58.71 per ticket - that's 29.5% of the cost of the tickets with no explanation as to what it's for)
Delivery Fee: $9.95 (These are mobile tickets so that's a fee for sending it via email/text)
Taxes: $42.03
Total: $567.40. or $283.70 per ticket.
I will give you a hint - The group's last top 40 US single was in 1977.

I have an old Yahoo email address. Why is it not Gmail? Well, I have one of those too, but at the time I got the Yahoo email address, Google limited who got Gmail addresses and it took a while to get one. Yes, it was like 30+ years ago. For years now, on the rare occasions that I need to send email to someone at outlook.com or hotmail.com, I find out that almost every time my email from Yahoo is marked as spam. Usually I have to follow up with the recipient and ask them to check their spam folder for my message. So not really surprised at this article.

Will audiences go? No they won't, but the Mandalorian and Grogu movie will be an exception to this.

Bear with me. Back in the 1990s, I was on Slashdot and you know what Sci Fi series has the most toxic fans of all? It was Star Trek. There were only 3 Star Wars movies then, so there wasn't much Star Wars content and they were pretty well behaved. Trek "fans" were bitching about how they loved The Next Generation but hated Wesley Crusher. They hated Deep Space 9, Voyager and they really hated Enterprise. It's kind of hilarious to me that now Wil Wheaton is some kind of honored figures in Trek circles because the same (now older) fans who fawn all over him absolutely hated him back in the day.

Then Star Wars movies started coming out. With all the negativity towards Trek, CBS/Paramount pulled the plug on Enterprise and there was no more TV Trek for a long time. Trek fans calmed down. Then Star Wars fans lost their minds over the Lucas directed sequels and it's most been downhill since then. I know "fans" who absolutely hate Rogue One, which was a great movie. They hated Solo, which I wouldn't call great, but it sure as hell was much much better than the reviews say it was. Other than the Mandalorian series, all I hear from Star Ward fans is bitching. They've remained toxic. A few years ago, Jon Favreau said there was no reason The Mandalorian couldn't continue as a series as long as the actors involved wanted to keep doing it. Now Disney has hinted that it's DONE after this movie comes out, no matter if this film grosses a billion or not, because that is just how streaming works today. Star Wars fans remain toxic, as I said, and while I think they will probably like the movie, it wouldn't shock me if I'm wrong and they just act like asses and complain about how "terrible" it is and that is the end of the series.

Not to be outdone, Trek fans have once again become super toxic themselves. My guess is that after 2027 there will be no more new Trek on streaming because of this and it will stay off for probably at least a decade. "Fans" seem determined to engage in a cut your nose off to spite your face battle with the current producers because the producers didn't give them the show they wanted (a proposed Star Trek: Legacy show featuring Capt. Seven Of Nine and Geordi LaForge's daughters) and did give them a show nobody asked for (Star Fleet Academy). This will only end like it did last time with CBS/Paramount heads flipping a middle finger to Trek fans and canceling everything.

I've been on Slashdot a long time. So back in the 2000s when iphones came out, we kept constantly seeing posts from Slashdotters saying "I just want a phone that's a phone". This lasted for several years. It was really annoying. So based on the posts here, now I know what has replaced it. Now it's "You need a cheaper phone if you can't buy it outright". Geez.

It's a long story I will condense somewhat, but in the early 2010s I worked for a Fortune 500 company where we had a similar stupid "How did this happen?" problem. We had assigned an H1-B guy to write the code for a new feature on our department's main product. The manager guy in charge of our product stopped doing code reviews because they took time. So new guy wrote code that sort of worked in that the new feature did work, but it never freed up the memory it used after the user stopped using the feature. We tested it by letting 10% of our customers use it and had no problems because those 10% of the customers never used up enough memory with the feature to cause our DBs any problems. When we made it available to all customers, it quickly starved our DBs of memory when some big customers used it and we crashed hard. Took us 5 days to find it and fix it. So my guess on personal experience is that Microsoft assigned it to an H1-B guy who mostly hired because he was cheap and nobody cared enough to check his work.

I really think you're blaming the wrong person here. Lucas made the 3 prequel films. He's not a good writer. He deserves the blame for what people don't like in films 1-3, meaning the prequels. The "classic" original Star Wars trilogy is films 4-6. The final 3 films, 7-9, have J.J. Abrams to blame. What you object to is his fault. Somehow, nobody ever holds him accountable but here is how he works. His basic premise is that he claims to be a "fan" of Star Wars, Trek, etc. but he clearly thinks that those things are somehow broken and only he can fix them. And part of his "fixing" is to remake a previous film and pass it off as new. Abrams is terrible. I blame him for the interesting mess that Star Trek: Discovery season 1 was, which caused the people actually running Trek to have to spend all of season 2 fixing the season 1 problems and plot holes. On paper he was supposedly just a producer, but somebody either let him have too much input into it or they simply bought into his basic premise that Trek is horribly broken and only by changing everything can it be "saved". His 3 reboot movie were entertaining enough, but honestly if they never make a fourth film in the series, I'm fine with that. I don't want him involved in anything Star Wars or Trek related going forward.

All reliable sources say that they didn't meet until after she came to the USA, so it's not correct to say Donald Trump got her the visa. The USA has been doing bs like this with those types of visas for many decades now. I'm not going to name the guy or his wife as they no longer live in the USA, but one famous NHL player met his wife in the USA when she was somehow given one of these visas. I would give almost anything to see what the hell her application said to justify getting it, but as best I can tell, if good looking white women who can or could model applied for these visas, they were often if not always approved.

This is wrong. It's A Wonderful Life was copyrighted. The copyright wasn't renewed in 1974 by what is called a "clerical error" (probably means somebody forgot to do the paperwork) by the company that bought the rights to the film some time after it was released. Stuff like this played a role in why the somewhat infamous Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act had a provision to automatically renew copyrights for free since various things had entered the public domain because somebody forgot to do some paperwork. I would argue that if the copyrights are so valuable then they shouldn't be renewed for free, but that's beyond the scope of why the film entered the public domain.

Not ruling out that it's a way to manipulate the changing H-1B visa rules for this job. Maybe Altman has some guy in mind from India for it but he feels like he needs to publicly "try" to fill it with an American by offering a salary and job description almost no US citizen actually qualified for the job would accept. Then when no US person wants it, he can shrug and claim he tried and "reluctantly" fill it with the guy from India he wanted anyway. I worked all of the previous decade for a US company in the bottom part of the Fortune 500 (meaning a lot closer to being company #500 than company #1) and my company used to do this kind of thing. One time we put out a job description with a requirement for a master's degree in chip design and some rather exotic and rarely used computer language coding experience (I remember having to look up like 3 or 4 programming languages to find out what they were) and all the guy was going to do was write Java code for a specific product we sold. That salary is a joke for the job. But it's not a joke for an H-1B guy.

I actually hate Southwest Airlines and refuse to fly them because I don't like how they run their airline. And I have had enough of their fans who get screwed over by them (We bumped you - ha ha ha!) and act like all their bs is somehow "normal".

US auto manufacturer General Motors became infamous in the 1990s when it got out that their various divisions were mostly trying to outdo each other and viewed corporate siblings with more disdain than they did actual outside competitors like Ford, Toyota, etc. "Sux to be YOU, Samsung Electronics" can't be the correct reply here. Where is the CEO to step in and fix this?