The cynical side of me feels all this scaremongering mainly serves to hype up the AI companies in the stock market.

The "American Dream" has served as a good marketing slogan for the U.S.. Maybe that's what the UK needs -- some catchy slogan to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs. But realistically, regardless of your race or social class in the U.S. (or any other country): most big dreamers aren't going to succeed. Only a very few will. Just as most new business ideas will fail. That's not being cynical; that's just the truth and reality. The "American Dream" has done a great job masking over these realities.

ByteDance has implied they're not interested in selling at all. Otherwise, they would have done so already and cashed out with billions. So why haven't they? Sounds like the U.S. may attempt a rapid hostile takeover, kick out TikTok's engineers, and secure the data before ByteDance can shut down this operation.

If the SC takes the case, I predict they'll hold off a decision until Trump returns to office. He can then rescind it, allowing the SC to drop and wash their hands of this matter.

This also happened to my friend. My conjecture: Meta automatically created a "digital profile" of your father based on his email address, phone number, full name, birth date, residence, and other relevant information that all combined would likely identify him. This means that Meta may have permanently banned your father's (and my friend's) overall identity from its servers, which is, of course, very troubling. So here's my advice to your father and everyone else:

My friend got around this by creating an account that doesn't use his real name, doesn't have his real birth date, and he provided no other information (i.e. residence, education, work, dating status, or even specific/preferred gender). Also, create a brand-new email address specifically to use on FB, and do not provide your phone number.

My friend also lost his Instagram account. Both were linked under one Meta account. Do NOT link your Instagram and FB accounts! If Meta disables or suspends one, your other will also go down.

I think the studios that traditionally are in the business to mainly produce shows and movies are realizing it's difficult to make money by setting up their own streaming services to distribute their content (e.g. Disney, Warner Bros, etc.). Traditionally, these studios would produce their content and then license distribution rights for it (theatrical, broadcast, syndication) to others. This could explain why Warner Discovery appears to be on the verge of shutting down most of HBO Max and licensing the streaming rights of their shows and movies to other services and on ad-supported streaming platforms.

But why is it that Amazon and Apple can afford to produce more content? I think it's because their shows and movies are loss leaders -- but they serve as perks to help keep their regular customers loyal to their platforms (Amazon Prime, the Apple platform).

This sounds like a series version of the Roshomon storytelling technique. Each episode tells the same story but from different character perspectives from the other episodes. So you can watch the episodes in any random order. The appeal is that you learn certain details about the story and characters in whichever episode you watch.

I really loved HACF. Lee Pace and the rest of the cast were what keep me watching. Felt like it should have ran for one more season.

I don't know how they've scripted this, but perhaps from the point of views of these characters, they are visiting the planet Baatu in a time period that's six years after Return of the Jedi. So if you try to talk to them about characters and events set in the sequel era, they act like they don't know what you're talking about or ignore it? So you the park visitor are essentially like a time traveler between these two eras of Star Wars canon.

The analogy of reshuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic is no longer apropos. This is more like selling lifeboats to those flailing from the already sunk ship.

So this is 724+ million Android phones compared to 235.7 iPhones.

This is kind of meta. As if Tyler Durden himself censored the movie in order to prevent the Narrator from getting rid of him.

Americans are already divided socially and politically into Red and Blue. And now Green and Blue.

I would also add that this film short needs much tighter editing (my sense is that this could be cut down to 6 minutes), and a lot of the footage is dark, muddy, because there wasn't enough lighting on set.

Veronica Mars is probably an exception here, because Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas both wanted to do a continuation. Secondly, this project has a fanbase from a series that ran for 3 seasons. Third, they weren't asking for much: $2 million is the average these days to fund a low-budget feature film. I doubt that an X-Files 3 or Judge Dredd 2 could be made for this low amount, and I doubt there is a strong enough fanbase to fund at least $20 million (at least at this point) for such a movie.

Additionally, trying to do this with most other TV series would be more difficult, I would think, because either too much time has passed since the cancellation of the series, or the main creatives involved -- actors, producers, writers -- aren't interested anymore, and have moved on with their careers/lives. Joss Whedon shot down the possibility of continuing Firefly through fan-funding because of this reason.