I suspect Blu-ray playback quality is higher than HD streaming.

Blu-ray is much better quality than HD streaming. In order to fit all those bits in the internet pipes, they need to be highly compressed. Blu-ray is (supposed to be) compressed losslessly, and the HDMI interface has plenty of bandwidth for all those ones and zeros.

I have streamed many movies from different services, and watched plenty of movies on Blu-ray. Streaming is great because it is convenient, but ranges from acceptable to "blurrier than DVD" with HD content. I still buy or rent Blu-rays and actually use them because the quality is significantly better.

Not necessarily true: if you want the system to be able to mount a volume without user intervention (or boot from it), it must know the whole password, a hasj is not enough for decryption.

Why would you password-protect a file or volume to begin with if you want the system to be able to decrypt it without user intervention? The purpose of encryption is to prevent unauthorized access, not allow it.

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

This is a legitimate concern (for the NFL). Fewer children playing will dry up the talent pool in another decade when those children would be at the age for the NCAA and (eventually) NFL. Sure, plenty of children will play, but consider how few of them have the necessary talent to succeed in the NCAA, and how few of those have the talent for the NFL. I did the math once and it is a small fraction of one percent of high school football players actually make it to the NFL, and most of them suck at the sport anyway. At any given time there are only enough good players to make three or four teams in the NFL.

The NFL itself is also really unpopular, with Roger Goodell pissing off the NFL's fans at least once every season and getting booed any time he shows up on TV in front of a live audience (e.g. Super Bowl, NFL draft). I think the only reasons the NFL is still popular are: fantasy football is still a huge thing, even drawing people in that hate the sport (I know people who hate the game but still play fantasy); and some vestigial attachment to one's home team, essentially pride in one's city to include its sports teams.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

I keep hearing these arguments, but have not seen any evidence to back them up. Ratings fluctuate, and are on a general down trend, but nothing massive - it is not like the sport is unpopular, it is just not quite as popular as it was previously. It does seem, however, that ratings have followed the general trend of everything receiving lower ratings.

This makes sense, as sports in general (in the USA) seem to have declining ratings. Cord cutting? Younger generation caring less? Who knows? It is a complex issue and there is likely not one cause, e.g. "the NFL is killing itself with how it changes the game."

After all, if the military could make its own decisions about how to spend money, it'd be "wasted", so it "needs" Congressional "oversight". That's the root of the problem.

Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution has not one but three clauses that enumerate Congress's authority over the military, including this one:

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Back in the 18th century, military coups were more common than they are today. In fact the Articles of Confederation that predate the Constitution were even more restrictive than the Constitution: we barely had any military for the first decade. The compromise was to have a stronger military, but have a bit more oversight, especially with the budget. The goal was to have a military where commanders could focus on doing what they do well, killing shit, while Congress could regulate them (e.g. UCMJ) and pull the plug on relatively short notice and dry up funding if required.

Of course, ever since the end of WW2 and the start of the Cold War, the military budget is just a pork buffet. I seriously doubt there is any risk of a military coup in the USA, or any other concerns that prompted the budget micromanagement that we have today.

I also blame Bush 2 for a lot of the military problems we have, including the one called out in the article. Back in the mid-2000s, he insisted we needed more "boots on the ground" (i.e. Army and Marines) without increasing the overall military size. He gutted the Air Force and Navy. Probably half of those cuts were necessary regardless, the other half hurt. The lack of training called out in the article is a symptom of the larger issue of "doing more with less" - not necessarily a bad idea, but it has to be implemented correctly. Skimping on core training such as "navigating and piloting naval vessels" and "working 100 hour weeks and getting insufficient sleep" is not doing more with less: it is doing less with less. Source: I was active duty in the mid-2000s while Bush 2 was President.

Well then I guess they need to upgrade the encryption used because it's clearly and objectively inadequate, seeing as it's being overridden by hostile signals.

I think you have your news stories mixed up. US Navy ships have had several mishaps the past year due to incompetence of the personnel piloting their ships. Several civilian ships in a very specific part of the sea near Russia have had GPS tell them they are some place they are not (e.g. floating in the water in the middle of an airport, on land) due to Russian interference.

Military GPS is more accurate and secure than civilian GPS. That still appears to be true.

The way it always should have been!

I agree. Why should Oracle (or Sun, previously) be on the hook for providing security updates to five year old versions of Java? That is a logistical nightmare - multiple branches, multiple test configurations for each, and a ton of time and effort. Java updates very rarely break backwards compatibility anymore, so users should update.

360 degree turn? why was he flying in a circle?

To bleed altitude. Commercial airliners make terrible gliders, but still, they technically are gliders when the engines are no longer operational. In this case, the airplane glided to the Azores but had too much altitude and needed to stay in the air a little bit longer while not moving too far away: a perfect use case for flying in a circle.

Captain Piche had to execute one 360 degree turn, and then a series of "S" turns, to dissipate excess altitude.

Of course the government can't admit that the planes were full of chemtrail chemicals because that would reveal the chemtrail conspiracy!

Obligatory xkcd

The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars.

What law? I do not believe there is a US federal law that requires private businesses or individuals to accept currency from the Federal Reserve Bank. We all choose to do so because it is incredibly convenient and there are many laws and statues that encourage it.

You are correct. While it is legal tender for all debts, it is not a requirement to accept it. Furthermore, the word "debt" implies repayment. There is a difference between a straight-up trade (buying something at a register), receiving goods in advance (eating dinner, then paying the bill), and financing a debt (buying a car using a loan). There are nuances between those scenarios that affect legal requirements for payment, and furthermore, an additional consideration is payment in dollar equivalents such as using a credit card to purchase something using dollars, but not physical currency.

The long and short of it is you are correct, most transactions have no requirement to use U.S. dollars, but everyone does so anyway because nobody barters in livestock anymore.

war of Northern agression

You mean the war where the South fired first?

This is precisely why you must always OWN your DNS and Hosting yourself. Never, EVER let someone else register and host your domain for you. Always DO IT YOURSELF or find yourself in the same boat with Snopes.

Never, EVER co-own a company with your spouse, then get divorced, and your spouse sells his or her share to a company (technically, the company's owners, due to the type of company Bardav is) that you now find yourself in a dispute with.

This has nothing to do with the company managing Snopes, they co-own it. Scroll up a bit, there are links to the actual court documents.

What's an "M$"? Is that like a pirated version of Excel for retards like yourself?

Penny Arcade explained this way back in 2002.

It needs to go to the Supreme Court to delineate how state law can limit asset forfeiture on debts owed to the Federal Government.

Civil asset forfeiture has nothing to do with owing debt. It is charging property with a crime so it can be confiscated: by the way, property does not get a day in court, it just belongs to the police now. In other words, it allows police at any level of government to be highway robbers, quite literally. Pulled over for speeding and your brake light was burned out? I think your car is being used for illegal purposes, so I am entitled to all of the cash in your car, including in your wallet, because that cash is guilty of being involved with a crime and it cannot legally defend itself.

This has everything to do with a gross violation of the fourth amendment and nothing to do with paying debts. The fact that when people fight it in court the police decide to settle rather than go to trial is very telling of the fact that nobody thinks this practice will pass Constitutional muster.

You are ignorant about the main causes of disease in 3rd world countries: poor food, filthy water, filthy living conditions, no sanitation. Vaccines don't help this. The money on vaccines would be better spent giving them clean water.

Clean water and not living in filth are certainly important components of healthy living, but are nowhere near the only components.

Remember the Measles outbreak at Disney Land? That occurred in the United States, which has some of the best sanitation and cleanest water on the planet. It occurred because of anti-vax parents who think that life-saving medication is a bad thing.

Eventually there will be few real programing jobs and a bunch of drop in ide code everywhere and it's not far off at all.

If Salesforce is any indication, the "drag and drop" model of designing a system is nowhere near ready for prime time. Even simple implementations require a real programmer to make them work, despite what they promise.