but most crypto sites have that same ID checking.

The "Know Your Customer" was forced on the crypto world at gunpoint. The other industries don't have that excuse.

The perpetrators always have financial ties to everyone. They're called banks.

I could've sworn he was her nephew

Newsom's aunt was previously married to Pelosi's brother-in-law.

Nancy Pelosi is Gavin Newsom's father's sister's ex-husband's bother's wife. No blood relation. And the divorce was in 1977. That said, they're still the same slime.

I'm not saying she was plus-sized or anything like that. But compared to many of OP's "teen heartthrob" examples, she was more full-figured. I guess that would be the term? It's hard to even describe body types anymore because so much of the language has been hijacked.

But they would excel at detecting that kind of cancer.
It changes the flavor.

Yes and no. You're right about 1990s to 2000s being forced. But going back further you've got reference points like Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren types. Not fat, but certainly not 90s chic either.

I don't think liking the Christina Hendricks or Sofia Vergara body types is a media trick. But there's no common definition for "thick." Is it curvy? Hourglass? Outright hamplanet? Depends on the speaker.

Probably because Cyberpunk: Edgerunners isn't exactly obscure.

But I don't know why OP thinks this was worth a thread.

without pod-racing

That N64 pod racing game was the only good thing that came out of the prequels though.

Routers: For the purpose of this determination, the term “Routers” is defined by National Institute of Science and Technology’s Internal Report 8425A to include consumer-grade networking devices that are primarily intended for residential use and can be installed by the customer. Routers forward data packets, most commonly Internet Protocol (IP) packets, between networked systems.

It's consumer-grade routers using the proper definition of routers. Does that definition technically also include switches? We'll find out...
But I think what they're really interested in are Internet gateways that have laymen as admins.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-26-278A1.pdf

both men were in the U.S. Army Reserve

You would think if there was anyone who would be used to some asshole telling them to do pushups. /s

I don't think that's a winnable fight. All this stuff about keeping young people of social media's a farce. It's a trojan horse for blanket surveillance and they don't actually want them off electronics. They want to funnel them into spaces that are sanitized and censored. To minimize their exposure to anything that isn't propaganda during their formative years. Public "education" for all, by force.

I'd rather they have unrestricted access to other people's ideas, even if it meant unrestricted device access. Because that's the only exposure they're going to get to anything that questions what they're fed by the media. If I thought there was the slightest chance that reduced usage would return to the, "go outside and play," I'd be there with you. But it's not coming back. They're going to kick them off of social media and try to replace it with passive media. Just watch the slop. You're not legally mature enough to access any conversation where it's being called slop. They will struggle to stop in-person conversations at schools. They'd love to isolate the students from one another, but remote has the risk of parents seeing what they're teaching. I wonder if there will be an eventual push for mandatory individual learning, but only government school sites.

The genie's not going back in the bottle. Might as well fight to keep it as accessible, open, and decentralized as possible instead.

STACY: You could've at least defended me --
CHRIS: I didn't want to take away your agency, babe. You hate it when I dim your light.
STACY: This is so you, trying to weaponize my feminism against me. I'm going home.
CHRIS: Okay well, I'm staying (justifying) It's only preview night!

Yeah. It's that bad.

In a perfect world education would be free.

Education is essentially free already. Certification is not.

We were only forced to use a diploma as a proxy for education because Griggs v. Duke Power Co. made it illegal to test for intelligence yourself. College is not the indicator for intelligence and social character it was in 1971, but the requirement became locked in.

Add it to the list of things the CRA fucked up.

The vast majority of mixed race couples out there are white men with Asian women.

You want to know how I know the statistics you're looking at don't consider Hispanic a race?

White husband, Hispanic wife: 22%
Hispanic husband, White wife: 20%
White husband, Asian wife: 11%
Asian husband, White wife: 4%

Friend, I can't even guess at the state of the world in 3 months.

And I'm pretty sure that is by design. The chaos and constant shifting keeps people from focusing on any topic long enough to do something about it.

But given the push for age verification, government-connected 3d printers, etc. I think I can say that there's a focused effort to clamp down on the decentralization of innovation. We're in the last phase of a long term "embrace, extend, extinguish," campaign where all the once-disruptive tech companies try to pull the ladder up behind them. It's going to be bad. Regulatory capture of highest level immaginable.

Chávez’s most prominent female ally in the civil rights movement, Dolores Huerta, also told reporters that he sexually assaulted her, a disclosure she has never before made publicly, the New York Times article said.

Over-under on them trying to rename all the Cesar Chavez stuff "Dolores Huerta" now? I don't really care which way this one shakes out, but trying to retroactively pinkwash a labor movement and a leftist hero being a child rapist seem equally plausible.

Is "actually, the UFW strikes were always feminists" the new "Stonewall wasn't White gays! It was trans people of color!" We know the left loves historical revisionism and they get less pushback when they stick to revising their own history.

The only issue I see there is they would find some way to still drain money from you while not calling it a "tax" so that they could disenfranchise the middle class and concentrate even more power.

Honestly at what point will they get tired of mining older shows?

Scooby-Doo is such a strange case for this. Including shows, specials, and movies there's been something like a 2 year gap between 1969 and 2025. But the longest running show looks like only 3 years. It's got to be the most remade/rebooted/restarted franchise in history.

Okay? I don't know what this has to do with my post. ...
They see Thing They Know, they pay money to see more of Thing They Know

I thought it was clear, but I'll try again. You weren't born familiar with Mr. Actor. At some point you went to one movie he was in and said, "oh, I like that guy." Which, to your point, drove you to watch other movies with him in it. He became a familiar quantity and people would pay more to see the Thing They Know.

At no point in this process did that require Mr. Actor to be a real person or even based on a real person.

Winnie the Pooh

You're making my point for me here. Winnie the Pooh is a drawing. Completely artificial. No need to have any basis in anything recognizable.

I get what you're trying to say, but you're missing what I'm saying. I know they're doing AI of familiar actors because it will appeal to the people where he is Thing They Know. I'm saying that they can establish Thing They Know going forward with something cheaper, that they have complete control over, will never age, owe nothing to the unions, and it won't embarrass itself on social media.

But you've got a fair point. Dead actors are also free of those constraints and still familiar.

That's fair. I was thinking more about a synthetic "actor" rather than every piece having no real world basis. Being able to fake the delivery is the important part. If you get that far, there's no shortage of people who would offer up face or voice samples for a few bucks.

I'm sure they've already started accumulating real face assets to use for crowds and background extras.

That's an inherent limitation of using actual actors. The appearance, delivery, voice, mannerisms are a package. VFX fuckery aside, if you want Anthony Hopkins' acting or voice, it comes with Anthony Hopkin's face and body. Animated film lessens this. You still have the voice work and delivery, but now the character can look like anything. So you don't need someone who looks the part. And it's not like that's uncommon in live-action movies already. Darth Vader had one actor doing movement and one doing the voice in the 70s. Every damn Marvel movie has someone doing face acting composited onto a digital body. Body doubles were never uncommon. And then there's mocap for CG characters.

There's nothing about current production that would prevent a character from being one person doing the motion capture, another person doing the voice, using the face of another person and the body of another. If you're using AI in the first place, why not use unrelated models for all of them? Especially in adaptations. You don't need to cast, model the "actor" around the descriptions in the source material.

We tunnel vision on how new tech can be used to keep doing the same thing we're already doing because they can't think outside of the framework they're familiar with.

looking at particular people they've come to enjoy

I've never met Tom Cruise. If you told me every movie and television appearance I've seen of him was AI, not a single one of my "interactions" with him would actually change. I'd still like the performances I liked and dislike the ones I disliked. Celebrities exist as a social reference point shared by a large group of people. If all you're doing is watching media, Tom Cruise might as well be as real as Hatsune Miku. It's the expectation of consistency that's important, not the mechanism. And that's not even addressing the bit about how many celebrity's off-screen personas are constructs of PR firms. They're more than halfway to fiction already.

Why do they even bother using existing actors? Just make new actors. Then they won't even be able to whine about it.

The news could say it's ANYTHING when you are anti war. "It's not American" worked great for decades.

The fact they switched the label on dissenters from "unamerican" to "antisemitic" speaks far more loudly about the nature of the current conflict than they intended.

India has 5x the rate of accidental train deaths and the only safety prereq there is not standing in front of them.

If India has a lower rate of accidental firearm deaths, it's because most of them have never been near a firearm.

Why did the Oscar organization stop with that practice back in the day?

It's kind of funny. The whole gift bag thing started in 2001 and spiraled out of control in terms of contents. In 2006 they stopped because the IRS declared it was taxable income and the academy thought giving someone an unsolicited gift that included thousands of dollars of tax burden was more trouble than it's worth.

So these wankers stepped up to fill the "gap" and get free advertising by hijacking media coverage of "this year's Oscars gift bags." In 2016 the Academy actually sued these guys due to trademark infringement. That settlement is why they have that no-affiliation statement at the top of everything. But if the press wants to call them "Oscar's gift bags," then they can't control that, wink wink.