... or we could discuss how you got tricked by an obvious scam.

Finely, a reasonable criticism of Windows 8.

This is false. Decoding for modern video formats is strictly defined, and all decoders must produce bit-perfect output. You can add as many filters as you want after that, but that's a postprocessing step in the video player and has nothing to do with the decoder. Things like in-loop filters are strictly defined as part of the decoding process and must be there for the decoder to be considered correct.

Nope, they just crash, lag, or play it with severe artifacts (the latter happens with some hardware codecs and 10bit files).

Basically no modern video codecs are designed to gracefully degrade given limited decoder features, because they rely on bit-perfect output to be used as a reference for future frames. Any error accumulates in the decoding loop and becomes significant artifacting until the next I frame.

You sirDrama queen.

0x80 is just a null byte with odd parity. What she apparently missed is that this is bog-standard Bell 202 AFSK (1200 baud) with 7 data bits and odd parity, and the data is ASCII. By throwing away the top nybble, she was throwing away the parity bit and the top 3 bits of the ASCII encoding of decimal digits. The fact that it was a parity bit should've been pretty obvious, since the top nybble flips between 0x3x and 0xbx in the pattern that you'd expect for a parity bit.

You can decode it with off the shelf software, throw away the top bit, and get back mostly ASCII:

$ ./minimodem --rx 1200 -f ~/helicopter.wav | tr '\200-\377\r' '\000-\177\n'
### CARRIER 1200 @ 1200.0 Hz ###
  282 0002.3
#L N390374 W09432938YJ
#AL #NA 282 0002.3
#L N390374 W09432938YJ
#AL #NA 283 0002.3
#L N390372 W09432928YJ
#AL #NA 283 0002.3
#L N390370 W09432918YJ
#AL #NA 283 0002.3
#L N390370 W09432918YJ
#AL #NA 283 0002.3
[...]

I'm actually surprised that she missed / didn't mention this, considering her experience with signals analysis and demodulation. This is pretty much as basic as telemetry data modulation gets! Then again, as a reverse engineer myself, sometimes we get caught up doing deep analysis of something that later turns out to be totally trivial :)

I see what you did there.
I don't see just why you did it, though.

Or, we might get knock-off models at half the price (and half the durability)?

I'm not a big gamer anymore, so I actually would like to try a knockoff next-gen console. Who cares if it breaks in 2 weeks if it cost me peanuts?

Oh yeah, then environment :|

You may be thinking of Sen. Mitch McConnell.
https://twitter.com/McConnellPress

Goodbye 1 problem. Hello 20.

Meanwhile, I've been running the same Gentoo install for ~9 years now (having migrated through 5 different machines). Rolling upgrades are awesome.

(It would be >10 years, but I did have to reinstall early on to migrate from x86 to x86-64).

I don't know about the streaming sites, but I know the blocking of torrent sites has had little effect or the more (or less) tech savvy people who use them. People get around not being able to browse for their torrents by subscribing to torrent RSS feeds (for TV), and by using things like Tor if they absolutely need to browse the Pirate Bay or other sites.

The trackers are not blocked, and therefore the torrents still work fine.

Kinda pointless.