“I’ve created this amazing program that more or less precisely mimics the response of a human to any question!”

“What if I ask it a question where humans are well known to apply all kinds of biases? Will it give a completely unbiased answer, like some kind of paragon of virtue?”

“No”

<Surprised Pikachu face>

After checking that you can open port 53 udp yourself with, say, nc (which you tried), strace the binary that tries to open port 53 and fails, and find the system call that fails. You can compare it with an strace on nc to see how it differs.

If this doesn’t clue you in (e.g., you see two attempts to listen to the same port…) Next step would be to find in the source code where it fails (look for the error message printout) and start adding diagnostic printouts before the failing system call and compile and run your edited version.

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”.

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to present something with the phrasing “buy” unless it is provided to you via a license that prevent it from being withdrawn.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?

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.

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!