Yep. Just had a “discussion” (can’t really call it that because it immediately devolved into ad hominems from their side) with a MAGA the other day. Quoted them some statistics that they demanded sources for, from a US govt site. Their reply was that unless the data comes from the orange turnip’s temu twitter, or some other MAGA source, they don’t accept it.
I mean, the prosecutor (?) admitted it on Fox News that they’re trying to trap him into perjuring himself… the whole thing should’ve been shut down at that very point.
You know wrong.
Even in the early days (97-01), they’ve used venture funding (approx $80mil) for the DVD mailing business.
And the reason they didn’t really go the VC funding way later is because they had an IPO in 2002, which meant instead of relying on VC funds, they took on massive amounts of debt to allow the takeoff of streaming.
Nah, it worked pretty well. Streaming was just more convenient, and came too soon after VOD became widely available.
VOD was a thing before streaming tho
No, that’s the evolution of venture capitalism.
Step 1: groundbreaking service comes in that fills a market hole
Step 2: people flock to service
Step 3: service gets VC funding to continue operations, subsidising the users
Step 4: service gets “copied”, competitors crop up, use VC funding to eke out their own marketshare while making things worse for everyone but themselves
Step 5: expansion plateaus as interest in service generalises (basically, everyone who could be interested, is already using it)
Step 6: VC funding depletes, company has to start making a profit - leading to price hikes, which is followed by other players in the market as that’s how capitalism works
Step 7: price hikes not being enough, service tries to capitalise on their userbase (think restricting features to a higher paid tier, introducing new tiers that strip away features, introducing ads, etc.)
Step 8: market is saturated with plateaud services, user movement is minimal, and everybody hates it because it’s expensive, and reintroduced the same problem the initial innovative service meant to fix.
That’s been obvious for nearly 26 years now
Yep, that position is either kept open for a specific candidate (probably already working at the company), or it’s only there for legal requirements…
If you want a NAS specific case, check on AliExpress - a bunch of $200-300 options with SATA backplanes, EATX support, and your typical 8-16 front-loaded disk bay with disk caddies.
$10 says it’s a “repurposed” sex hot and it would’ve taken a whopping week for a more techy student to hack it and say profanities or something similar…
I think this topic is actually ripe for debate.
On one hand we know that Majel specifically recorded phonemes so her voice can be used for Star Trek purposes after her passing. While not a direct consent of “do whatever you want with my voice”, the intent of similar purposes as OP’s has been clearly present.
There’s also Paramount’s refusal to use her voice in new Trek, aside from a few snippets here and there (mostly Picard for the throwback value). Which kinda goes against the spirit of Trek.
On the other hand, the entire area of voice cloning is gray as fuck. It can very easily be used for nefarious purposes, yes - let that be corporate greed or fraud or propaganda. But if I make my own voice system, do I really hurt anyone by using their voice? I am not profiting off of it, I am not sharing the end result, it lives on my computer and that’s it.
But, let’s say I want to do the same. There’s this TV show from some 20 years ago called Eureka. In it is one of the earliest representations of a smart house with an AI governor, called SARAH. SARAH is voiced by one of the recurring cast members, in fact it’s an ongoing joke that the house is voiced by this guy “talking like a girl”, and that he’s trying to get Sarah Michelle Gellar to do the proper, final voice…
Now, the voice itself is pretty unique, but it isn’t the voice of the actor, it’s been heavily digitally edited. It’s also a pretty unique voice but not something 99.9% of people would recognise. I make my clone from my own BR disk collection, with a set of automated and AI tools to get the right audio, clean it up, split by talker, and process all 77 episodes, manually selecting the right samples, manually tagging and labelling each; and finally, fine-tuning my own model for my own use. It will never leave my home, I won’t sell or share it, and technically, with me owning the BR collection, this would fall under fair use.
Which is still quite different than, say, a corporate entity trying to sell more product by using your voice.
Not weird in its theme but more in its execution, the entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
IMO trying to milk the end users here is the wrong move. People are unsubscribing from the licence because they’re not using it and don’t want to pay £170 a year for something they don’t use. Which is fair.
But one could easily “tax” the other services - TV channels, radio, streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, pushing these companies to provide 1% of their revenue to fund the public broadcasts.
Combine that with the licensing the content abroad and you’ve got a plan going.
If you forgot to write good code and good architecture, in a span of what, at most, a year, then you were never a good engineer to begin with.
It was also fan service delivered well. Which is super important. You can do fan service without delivering anything else, and you can do a good story that ends up being fan service. This was firmly the second category.
Pretty much yes.
Why?
Because all the big media conglomerates are pushing right wing agenda. They don’t want/need your money that bad because they have the financial backing and those “news portals” are not a service, but a tool to spread propaganda.
On the other hand, true independent or left leaning publications don’t have the same financial backing, thus rely on subscriptions, ads and seemingly anti-consumer approaches just to stay afloat.
Remember: if it’s “free”, you’re the product.
There are.
They’ll all have heavy right wing bias though. Is that what you want?
Israel learned from the “best”, don’t worry about the Lebanese, it’s just Lebensraum, it’s literally in the name!
Everything that touches water