Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
This General Chat area started off as a place for people to talk about things that are off topic, however it has quickly evolved into a community and has become an integral part of the GAW experience for many of us.
Based on its evolving needs and plenty of user feedback, we are trying to bring some order and institute some rules. Please make sure you read these rules and participate in the spirit of this community.
Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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Avoid long drawn out arguments. This should be a place to relax, not to waste your time needlessly.
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Personal anecdotes, puzzles, cute pics/clips - everything welcome
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Please do not spam at the top level. If you have a lot to post each day, try and post them all together in one top level comment
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Try keep things light. If you are bringing in deep stuff, try not to go overboard.
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Things that are clearly on-topic for this board should be posted as a separate post and not here (except if you are new and still getting the feel of this place)
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If you find people violating these rules, deport them rather than start a argument here.
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Feel free to give feedback as these rules are expected to keep evoloving
In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Tonight on “everything’s f****ed,” streaming services. (Sorry no post last week.)
At first glance it appears that watching whatever you want without commercials is great. Time for some research.
Commercials Breaks are not entirely bad. The commercials themselves are generally bad. Most likely it’s not a product or service that you need. The idea of taking periodic breaks to take care of bodily functions is good. Does any streaming service have an option to automatically pause and tell you to get up and move?
A streaming service provider can monitor viewing habits in detail never possible before. They use that to suggest new shows. It can also be valuable for marketing. When renting a tape, all they knew is what movie. Now they what time of day you watch, for how long, how many breaks you take…. This also applies to modern cable boxes.
Even in the old days of analog TV it was possible to remotely monitor viewing habits. This could be done by detecting the TV’s local oscillator leakage. That’s how the TV detector vans for the BBC license fee worked. There is a fixed frequency difference between the local oscillator and TV signal being received. That makes it possible to determine which station is being watched. The limited detection range of the LO signals made it cost prohibitive to monitor the viewing habits of thousands of people.
Most services try to autoplay the next episode. I would rather not be sucked into binge watching a bunch of episodes. Why do they care? I’m paying the same amount of money and putting less load on the servers if I watch less. Are they making money for each episode watched? If there’s ads, I think autoplay is scamming the advertisers. In the beginning, you had to get up and walk to change the channel. Later, you had to get up to change the tape. Now there is no need to get off the couch at all.
The bottom line is that we should seek less electronic entertainment, not more. The content and messages of movies is another dead horse to beat. Even educations programs can sneak ideas like climate change and vaccines good into minds.