So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.

I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.

If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.

But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.

The shame of it is... someone knew what they were doing, because they got a usable product out the door. It kinda sucked at certain things, but that's generally true of every first release. So with a reasonable business plan, they might have actually benefitted from their success. Now they're broke, just somewhat later than if they'd not bothered at all.

I've now confirmed the ASUS M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 motherboard has no TPM, and did not even include a socket for adding it after the fact. Would you care to be condescending again?

Nope, Athlon II x6. Don't have SSE 4.1 or 4.2 either, can't run Cyberpunk 2077. I don't even have UEFI! I'm pretty sure I don't have any TPM at all.

If you're wondering why so many recent telescopes seem to be wide-angle survey telescopes, this is why. We've gotten to the point where the precision of incoming data is sufficient for first-order analysis. Now the priority is on collecting such data from huge swaths of the sky -- basically anywhere our own galaxy isn't screening us. The problem used to be that there wasn't time to analyze that much data, but then we started to realize how much more information is still in unprocessed raw data, even decades after the event, and we knew Moore's Law would eventually catch up, and here we are. The new hotness is staring at everything at the same time and letting computers sort it out.

I was at a security presentation, oh, about five, maybe seven years back, by a company trying to sell, basically, SS7 firewalls, and advocating for basic security ideas that the Internet went through thirty years ago. "Hey, maybe do the equivalent of filtering your routes so people can't use phone numbers not actually registered to your network" and things like that.

The response you point out was exactly the ones that all of the big boys had; 'we don't need security, we just need to get back to closing SS7 to everybody that isn't one of the big boys.'

And the point the presenters were trying to make was 'that ship has sailed, you can get access to the network and start spamming SMS about as easily as you can get a gym membership these days, so stop living in the past.'

This is the point that I keep coming back to; imagine if the anorexia craze back in the 80s and 90s had been treated with 'affirmative care.'

"Oh, sweetie, yes you ARE fat! HUGE! Lets get you some ozempic right away, and schedule your middle surgery. No, we don't have to tell your parents, sweetie, but if they find out and object, we'll just tell them that you'll kill yourself without this treatment to affirm your belief that you're disgustingly fat."

What an odd take to say that the first Matrix movie wasn't 'woke' when it was clearly and explicitly a metaphor for gender transition.

There's a reason that both Neo and Trinity are androgynous. There's a reason they're being chased down by literal personifications of conformity.

The only way they could have made it more explicit was the original plan to have Switch be one gender in the real world, and a different gender in the Matrix, instead of just also androgynous.

My dude, you have violated Wheaton's Law.

Don't be a dick.

This looks like a good time to roll out the new sig.

Twelve songs and counting that are about the current war and the overall state of affairs in and around Russia.

Agreed, I just thought the money spent on your distortion pedal might have gone toward recording equipment which you could then abuse to produce your distortion effect (and still have a recording device).