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Comment Re: If this data is as valuable as they claim (Score 1) 43

They want to show something

And their viewers presumably want to view it.

I think there are a few reasons we have landed on the model we have.

1. People don't like unbounded liabilities. This is scary enough with regular web-hosting but given the huge size of video files, hosting them on your own website was frankly terrifying.
2. Most people (both viewers and creators) don't' want to pay actual cash for messing about online, so ad-driven services rule the roost, it's much easier to do that if you have scale.
3. Many of the major platforms ran at a loss for years and may still be doing so, at least in terms of direct profits. Afaict both Twitch and Youtube post revenue figures but not profit figures.

Comment Re:What else are the pulling in from the environme (Score 1) 44

The problem is we don't have a control group of people who don't ingest microplastics but are otherwise the same as those who do. We can of-course compare the health of people from more and less contaminated areas, but those more and less contaminated areas will likely also differ in other ways, both known and unknown, that may have more significant effects than the microplastics.

Comment Ed Zitron is a hypocrite (Score 1) 140

His podcast Better Offline is squarely targeted at people who are very much online. Indeed his entire gig is the epitome of online living.

If Ed Zitron really felt better offline, he wouldn't be making a living off of a podcast and constant AI bashing.

Not that I necessarily disagree with him though... It's just that the messenger doesn't really befit the message.

Comment Re:Didn't checks disappear before the turn of the (Score 1) 183

Depends where you live.

Here in the UK, most employers started insisting on payment to bank account years ago, and cheques stopped being used at retail when the cheque gaurantee card scheme was shut down in 2011, but they are still used in other contexts, particularly for one-time payments. Traditional high street banks still issue and accept cheques, though I've heard that some no longer hand out chequebooks by default and some of the challenger banks are more problematic.

I understand in the USA, Canada and France cheques are far more widely used than here. OTOH many European countries are much further along the path to getting rid of them than us.

Comment Re:Everyone knows Meta = Facebook (Score 1) 65

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.

Comment Oh yeah, Shutterstock... (Score 1) 19

one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.

I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.

Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.

Comment And that's why (Score 4, Interesting) 42

I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

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