I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.
Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)
... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.
Free speech includes lying.
Merit should always consider strictly value.
They can work, but they have major issues.
1)For at least the first 6 months, if not the first several years, it will take more time and money to teach them than they generate. Why would any company do this?
2)As a hiring manager at company B, I see you apprenticed at company A. I have no idea if that means you're qualified. I can't trust company A to tell me, they're a competitor. Schools stand as a neutral 3rd party telling me that they've completed a set curriculum and should know that much. It's not perfect, but it's a start.
3)Some fields just have a huge amount of up front learning before you can be useful at all. Apprentice plumber? You can run and fetch tools and hold things in place while you watch and learn. Apprentice electrical engineer? You have no idea what inductance is on day one. There's literally nothing you can do. So basically at this point you're hoping the company sets up a school.
The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.
Can we add "surprise and delight" to that list of firing reasons?
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.
Probably some of
E) Users are purposefully using privacy blockers that don't leak details of their computer
as well. Why should a website know my OS? It's serving HTML, it shouldn't make a difference to it.
Also notice that zero elected representatives have proposed laws to fix this.
people just didn't think this through beyond "neat, free hosting for my shit"
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.
microwave labotomy
Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.
Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.
Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.
One picture is worth 128K words.
