Yes, exactly. Best Buy got Napster because they bought Roxio - the CD-Burning software company. LOL. "Roxio Toastt". Roxio was the first vulture to pick the bones of the original Napster, buying branding assets when the feds shut it down.

Invented virtualization.

AI ethics

Vibes and snake oil

Hmmmm

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

"Perhaps if it had adequate funding"

LAUSD has about half the number of students they had 20 years ago. They have more than double the number of administrators and about 20 more teachers over that same time scale -- and the budget of LAUSD is over $18 billion -- up from $8 billion 20 years ago. The number of students in that time also went from closer to 800,000 to about 400,000 now.

What this doesn't include are the various city, county and state bond initiatives that added additional funding (which came at increased per dollar spent due to interest on the loans).

The amount of money we're spending is not justified based on the student population. The number of administrators is not justified by student population.

And "oh". Student performance have continued drop.

It's not a funding problem. It's a gross mismanagement problem along wtih turning LAUSD jobs in to "rewards" for both union employees and political supporters.

When are advertisers going to learn that too many ads run people away from their product. That has been a great deal of technical market research that proves that. The bottom line after increases in ad spend also proves it. I guess the people buying ads haven't collectively figured out that the only people who are falling for the ad agency's BS is the ad buyers, not the end customers. There is plenty of data showing only 2 commercials in a typical sitcom work which is the 1st one past the end and the one before it starts. The rest of the commercials in a sitcom decrease brand value.

The Aussie ABC has a show called Gruen which is about ads and covers the technical and psychological details behind advertising while making fun of bad ads. The show was named after the well studied psychological technique of confusing customers with shop layout.

Awesome! Professional puzzle solvers wont be collecting unemployment in the short term. The bad news is that unemployment will likely be broke when toasters can solve puzzles 5 or 10 years later...

" I watched some old episodes from the 70s recently and they were pushing feminism back then but it was never the focus of the show."

THIS! Very much THIS!

Which has been a problem for the last several years. It's focus!

Seriously, Joy to the World would have been a decent Christmas show but again, even in TINY areas, the focus is obvious, annoying and can take you out of the moment. In the train exchange when the Doctor is asking "Ham and Cheese on toast with a pumpkin latte" to a lone woman in the 1950-60s train car" Later in the show while doing the Drs victory lap the woman on the train car indicates clearly she's going to break up with her girl friend. She makes a strong point of it! To a stranger at a time when it was something people didn't talk about.

Why? I'm sorry, but it's forced and it's constant. Very annoying. In my daily, every day life I've don't encounter people who either are vocal about being gay (or straight) or are clearly in a relationship with someone of the same sex (or different sex) as often as the Doctor seems to lately. It's a distraction when it's in pretty much every episode and it's NOTICABLE. It's like seeing a boom mic in the corner of the screen, or catching a misplaced prop where it shouldn't be -- only worse -- because it's deliberate.

Don't even care that 15 was gay -- or black. Didn't matter. It shouldn't be the showcase of the show. The writing was horrible most of the time (Boom was good and there were maybe 2 OK episodes) and this constant redirecting everything to "Oh, look -- a gay couple!" or "I need to break up with my lesbian lover" or SOMETHING.

Besides, before River Song, the Doctor really had no "romantic life". And that arc did not dominate the the show or get mentioned in some way or another in every episode, yet the Doctor in just a single episode met and apparently fell head over heels with a a guy who was a space bounty hunter. That had never happened before and was out of character.

I watched every single episode of Dr Who since Pertwee and all the episodes that predate him that still exist. What's happening now started "full speed ahead" with 13 -- enough that they brought back Dr12 for a short run as Dr14. Looks like pushing the "gay focus" "over-drive" button on Dr15 didn't help the ratings at all -- and now we got Doctor-Rose for 16 to pull another "save" attempt after just 17.5 episodes of Dr 15!! 2 short seasons, the last 20 mins of Dr.14 bi-regenerating to 15 and 1 xmas episode). Haven't seen that short a run since Dr. 9.

The Disney deal was hoping to get Disney dollar$ to cover the production costs now that BBC is totally changing their "business model". That plan was for 2 seasons and 1 Whoniverse mini-series (about to air). I've heard nothing about anything beyond that from Disney so far so far... so I'm thinking Disney is out of the picture now and Doctor Who will, if we're lucky, still have an occasional Xmas special (hopefully with Moffet writing without any RTD influence). And this had nothing to do with Disney -- this was ENTIRELY RTD.

Look! AI has reproduced the Slashdot effect! Something that's been mostly unheard of for at least a decade!

Awe... all the good feels of days gone by. What old is new again.

"you got me bud."

You "got" yourself. Sigh...

Disney has pleasantly surprised me with how they're dealing with Star Wars. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

LK

"I'm glad you know my intent more than I do."

I know what you wrote -- it's still there. Read it yourself if you don't recall. I know that you moved the goalpost (changing "strong correlation" to the far more benign statement calling it "a component") and called me "presumptuous".

Your full quote: " I said it's a component and silly to pretend otherwise"

Me after pointing out your goalpost re-location: "It's silly to pretend otherwise, to quote some guy on /."

Then you called me rude and suggested I was self-righteous and had a huge ego -- and THEN you played the "victim" card rather than addressing my argument which actually material to back it up!.

This is all kinds of awesome. Thank you for the entertainment.

Just a helpful hint: It's fairly common to get treated as you treat others.

Go ahead and tell me again "how silly it is" again. Please.

"...the sky is ALWAYS FALLING. Always!"

You know that similar warnings play a strong role in other tales, right? Not just chicken little... Remember, the boy who cried wolf was eventually right -- there was a wolf.

"But it appears that the reason for the darkening, especially far away from land is unknown."

Most reasons for "dark waters" is life. A lot of little life. Clear waters would strongly suggest very low nutrients. Like the "crystal clear" waters around some islands? They're mostly missing a LOT of nutrients in the water to support microscopic life, but hey! At least you can see the bottom clearly!

I'd bet dollars to donuts there's a lot of "bloom" going on.

" I said it's a component and silly to pretend otherwise"

Did you really say that?

"Don't try to pretend there isn't a strong correlation between poverty and race"

Nope. You said something entirely different with "strong" implications. The correlation is meaningless, which is what I claimed, strong or otherwise. It's silly to pretend otherwise, to quote some guy on /.

Now, regarding your citation: Where did I indicate that having a diploma was a key to staying out of poverty?

The nutshell of my list are DO NOT HAVE A KID BEFORE FINISHING YOUR SCHOOLING AND DO NOT HAVE A KID BEFORE MARRIAGE. (caps to make it clear, because you seemed to have missed that). Any education will be helpful in the long run.

Simple stat look up just looking on families in poverty:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fojjdp.ojp.gov%2Fstatisti...

"In 2021, 9.5% of children living with two parents lived below the poverty level, compared to 31.7% of children living with a single parent.
Children living with only their mothers in 2021 were more than twice as likely to live in poverty than those living with only their fathers (35.0% vs. 17.4%)."

Note: Most single families are living with their mothers by a long shot.