Especially if the media is readily available elsewhere which is always the case for movies you “bought” digitally.

Except when they aren’t. Especially if located outside the US, it is far from obvious that a given movie is available through another service.

Refunding the sale price is still theft.

What did you lose in this theft?

Is there really nothing in your home right now you would be sad if someone took and just gave you the money you paid for it?

Even a digital copy of a movie may not be so easy to replace on the services I have access to.

Stores are not allowed to go home to people and take back the stuff they sold, even if they refund the price. Neither should a company that advertise “pay this price and own this movie” rather than “pay this price and rent it for an indeterminate time”.

I really wish there were an “adult difficulty” setting to pick instead of ‘easy’. I don’t have hours to waste on hordes of “difficult” enemies that just slows progress and pads the playtime. Nor do I want a walking simulator where the boss just falls over with no need for anything beyond the most basic game mechanics. Give me an option to experience the story with an interesting challenge without wasting my time, dammit!

Here is a DallE rendering of the same setup that maybe is less offensive.

What are you talking about? Amazon’s digital video purchases don’t require any monthly access fee. He paid £5.99 with the idea that he’ll get to keep it indefinitely, just like a physical DVD. I don’t get why you think it is ok for a seller to revert the sale of a digital item at any time for just the purchase price + £5 but (I presume?) not other sales?

Nowhere do they use terms like “rent” or “lease”. They explicitly use terms like “buy” and it’s not until the fine print that the term license even comes up.

This! It really should be illegal to present something with the phrasing “buy” unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn. To “sell” cloud hosted media without having the licensing paperwork in place for it to be a sale is fraud.

Are you fine with me taking anything from your home as long as I pay you the purchase price + £5? Some of us assign a greater value to some of the things we own than the purchase price.

People losing media this way should sue, with the argument that it was presented to end users as a “sale”, and it is not sufficient to merely compensate someone with the purchase price to undo a sale. Companies “selling” digital products should be forced to write agreements that allow them to redistribute content indefinitely.

It’s because the licence holder of the movie decided Amazon can’t show it anymore. Perhaps they were asking Amazon to pay a high fee and it wants worth it.

I get that this is what the license holder wants. But, why can’t we just put into law that a license is not needed for a company to host, retransmit and play copyrighted media on behalf of a user once the license holder has been compensated as agreed for a sale?

“They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” // Carl Sagan.

How the f**k do we have functional AI that speaks like a human and solves general problems on the level of a university student, but somehow household chores are still done with tech that was invented 50-100 years ago?! Why isn’t there just a hole in my kitchen counter where I can dump dirty dinnerware, pots, pans; the machine sorts it out, washes it, and returns it to the cupboard? Why doesn’t my washing machine sort by color, wash, dry, fold, and stack my clothes? Why do I still have to clean surfaces in my house by manually rubbing a wet sponge at them for hours?

I’ll tell you what I think: inequality. Women did house chores, men invented shit that was fun and useful to them. Maybe as the world moves, hopefully, toward more equality we will find that people who shares their time between chores and inventing stuff will start to actually tackle the problem of simplifying boring chores.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.

A few things:

• Unity is still bleeding money. They have a product that could be the basis for a reasonably profitable company, but spending billions on a microtransaction company means it is not sufficient for their current leadership. It doesn’t seem wise to build your bussniess on the product of a company whose bussniess plan you fundamentally disagree with.

• It would be the best for the long term health of bussniess-to-bussnies services if we as a community manages to send the message that it doesn’t matter what any contract says - just trying to introduce retroactive fees is unforgivable and a death sentence to the company that tries it.

https://youtu.be/jI2zxBAIepI

I was incredibly confused why everyone seemed to think the YouTube channel with fun physics videos was the scum of the earth, until I realized they are named Veritasium and not Veritas.

Treating the question seriously, I think it is easy to think the one person is the right choice, because it just seems like less of a mess to deal with. However, I also think the end result is that you will never feel safe in your home again. You will always second guess if every squeak you hear is yet another person who somehow have made it into your house. This is the path towards slowly descending into madness.

Cortana is/was by far the best name of the digital assistants - probably because it was created by sci-fi story writers rather than a marketing department. They should just have upgraded her with the latest AI tech and trained her to show the same kind of sassy personality as in the games and it would have been perfect.

Who in their right mind thinks “Bing copilot” is a better name? It makes me picture something like the blow-up autopilot from Airplane!

I like calling it “x-twitter”, as it is short and makes sense when reading it out.

The replacement for “this is retarded” I’ve started to use is ~ “I guess someone had to leave early for the weekend. ‘Good enough, let’s ship this and go home.’” with me gesturing like Khaby Lame at, e.g., obviously broken email validation field.

It isn’t quite as snappy, but at least my disappointment tend to come across.

No technology actually works, it is all a magical illusion. You may think a steam engine works with heated water and pressure; a computer with circuits and electrons; etc.; well, that is all gobbledygook, and what actually makes any of these things do things that occasionally seem useful is nothing but powerful illusion magic. If the assembly of mages decide to dispell the illusion, we’ll be back in the middle ages. For one thing, it seems they never really got the illusion to work quite right for printers.