There is a large company getting bought by a huge company, but definitely no monopoly.

Not at all.

It can be. In those cases, yes Microsoft was found guilty of violating various antitrust laws.  

“Imagine listening to the same album over and over and eventually getting tired of it and then getting mad at the artist.”

“Microsoft promised to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo platforms.”

“Hi, rather than compete, we’re going to just buy out our competitors. Then when someone has something worth competing against us with, we’ll just buy them before they can get market share.”

Monopolies *never* benefit consumers. 

This is like the crack dealer telling you not to buy too much crack, while also offering a limited-time crack sale on the side, and also threatening to cut you off of any if you don’t buy some crack.

So basically the Battleship script?

and to run to that.. even if you *DID* want on offline, downloaded copy for perpetuity because you liked it.. you can’t do that, since streaming services will nuke the downloaded copy.

I never said it was a repair issue.

I wouldn’t call it a catastrophic failure, but definitely a structural one.  Catastrophic usually means you cannot undo it - this can be repaired. (Whether or not the repair would be strong enough on it’s own is a different matter).

Well, IMO, the perfect solution should be retroactively going after all the largest recipients of such waivers.

That’s like going back and saying “Oh, well, Leia was always his sister”, even though the plot in Episodes 4 and 5 very much do not read like a brother/sister relationship between the two.

How do so many people get the redacting wrong? There’s tons of good, free (and not-free) solutions to properly hiding these things. That the data still gets out shows a lack of competence or effort.

Don’t discount Sony Entertainment which includes Sony Pictures and Sony Music.  Both of those are still pretty solid performers, though not as big as SIE.

Nah the fucking began with Windows ME (My Erection).

Since the Emperor heads the Empire, the Empire really wasn’t allied with us then

Some users, like myself, are retroactively editing and removing their advice across the platform to make even googling reddit pointless.

Because Windows runs a *lot* of IoT-connected devices.

I think the nuance is Sony doesn’t buy sources of content to make them exclusive, but instead buys individual products the publishers/studios push out.  Consider it akin to Sony paying by the boatload from each fishing trawler coming in from the lake, and Microsoft just buying the whole lake outright.