Point #1: now that the authenticity of the laptop has been confirmed, it's prima facie that the Biden campaign knew what was on it, at least in general terms. The Biden family and their associates knew (or at least could find out) what communications they'd sent to Hunter and thus deduce what was likely on it.

Point #2: the FBI -- the nation's most pre-eminent investigative authority, with near-limitless resources to do forensics -- has had this laptop in their possession for roughly two years...and has done nothing with it. Indeed, their utter lack of interest in digging into it is what led to the contents being published via other sources. Numerous sources like Tony Bobulinski offered to cooperate with the FBI to corroborate the laptop contents and those sources were...ignored.

So, on the one hand you have the Biden family being rightly terrified of this information being made public. On the other hand, you have the FBI doing everything it can to do...nothing. The same FBI that vigorously pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax for nearly four years. The same FBI that raided journalists who were investigating the Ashley Biden diary. The same FBI that issued "guidance" on "domestic terrorism" when parents complained to school boards about what their children were being "taught" in school (i.e. Critical Race Theory).

The FBI top brass are all Biden appointees or allies. The pattern here is apparent unless you, like the FBI, are actively trying to not see it. After all, if there is no investigation, it's easy to say "well, you never found any evidence of wrongdoing!"

I'm going to guess some (maybe all?) of this data is stuff these services gleaned from their "free" tax filing services. If that's the case, always remember this maxim: if what you're getting is free, you are the product. With the rise of the information economy, what people know about you is of immense value at the scale of tens or hundreds of millions of "consumers."

MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NYTimes, LA Times, WashPost, Facebook, YouTube, (formerly) Twitter, all of Hollywood, virtually every late-night "comedy" show and college campus versus...Fox News? And the Republicans have a lock on the "media machine"? Seriously?

Your comment is true and hits the nail on the head. However, it overlooks that the Shuttle itself was riddled with engineering compromises. Case in point: the thermal protection system (TPS) tiles were vulnerable to damage by impact debris. Yet the Shuttle design hung the orbiter off the side of a giant tank filled with cryogenic fuel and covered with fragile foam, virtually guaranteeing impact events. There are tens -- maybe hundreds -- of other examples where the overall design was fundamentally flawed. It asked one design to do too much with technology that was both too primitive (by today's standards) and too advanced and untested (by 1970's standards). It was never going to achieve the goal of quicker, cheaper, and safer access to space much like how SLS will never achieve its (ostensible) goals.

The Shuttle is and was a case study on what you get when you design by committee...and when the committee members (i.e commercial launches vs. Air Force) have wildly differing and sometimes conflicting requirements. Add to that a healthy dose of political nepotism and institutional arrogance and you have a very expensive, very unreliable, very dangerous launch system.

Those who do not remember history fail to learn from it. Painful as it may be, this tragedy taught valuable lessons that should not -- must not -- be forgotten.

While you're right about converting various audio streams to PCM is very viable, the same can't be said for stuff like HDR. HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision...there's nothing out there that converts/handles them all. Personally, Dolby's stance on strict licensing and control of Dolby Vision is the main reason I've avoided it. I put all my media on my Plex, played through a Vero 4K+. There is no Dolby Vision support for this setup, hence I stick to the other formats.

You misunderstand the situation. He was hired to be in charge of security. He pointed out flaws that needed to be fixed, flaws that required other parts of Twitter to change how they operated. They refused to change, authorize, or implement what he said needed to be done, hence he quit.

I've been there where you're telling a board or executive committee this stuff needs to be done. If they're concerned about legal and reputational risk, they listen (sometimes). If they don't give a shit about it and see security as an impediment to bigger paychecks regardless of risk, they ignore you. When the latter happens, you can't be held responsible. Indeed, your only recourse is to quit, otherwise they'll put your head on a spike as a sacrificial lamb when the inevitable Bad Thing happens. Don't think that doesn't happen all too often.

Don't confuse company profitability with executive compensation. While Twitter may be constantly burning cash, the folks at the top are pocketing seven- or eight-figure paychecks and stock options. So long as they're making money, the rest doesn't bother them too much.

What's galling is California, in their relentless zeal to zero out carbon emissions, is ignoring how much nuclear power can and is contributing to their ability to decarbonize. It's nothing but stupid anti-nuclear fearmongering that has driven the shutdown schedule of these plants.

Wind, solar, and hydro make poor base load generators. Nuclear is ideal for that scenario yet it's being treated as if it's just as bad as coal, oil, and gas.

A noble ideal that is rarely achieved. Science frequently requires funding. Funding for mainstream theories is much easier to get than fringe ones. It becomes a self-reinforcing bias over time, only attracting adherents to the "settled science" and leaving out new theories. Left long enough, mainstream theories become orthodoxy and anyone questioning them becomes a heretic. For supporters, it is indistinguishable from a religion. For questioners, it is indistinguishable from exile.

This goes on until something big comes along and kicks over the proverbial anthill. Then you get "the establishment" group vehemently and energetically denying the new evidence, using all their clout, political power, and funding to have them put down.

No, they're not. What they're saying is if you question an established theory you must provide your evidence to show why it's wrong and/or why your theory is better. Simply saying, "See, it's wrong!" doesn't count.

That is what they're saying though. JWST is showing us galaxies that, according to current theories of stellar evolution and galaxy formation, cannot exist assuming they were formed within 400-500 million years after the Big Bang. So either stellar evolution/galaxy formation theories are wrong or TBBT is wrong. The latter is much more theoretical since it's not practical to rewind the universe and there are no other universes to observe differences between. The former, however, is something we can observe a variety of and is on much firmer empirical grounds. Or maybe something even weirder is going on like variable speed of light or variable gravity.

If. (to quote a famously laconic response from Sparta to Philip II of Macedon)

Or maybe the CMWB is a completely different phenomena that our theory just happens to more-or-less fit? That's possible, you know. If my refrigerator light is always on when I open the fridge door, it's easy to assume it's on when the door is closed as well. If the event is untestable -- and rewinding the universe certainly fits that description -- then making a wrong correlation is very easy for humans.

Hubble's Law is part of the argument that's being had now as to whether it's correct. That things are receding is fairly obvious, but to conclude they must have been doing so for about 14 billion years and the origin was a singular event (pun intended) is, again, a theory that happens to fit some of the facts. That the galaxies JWST is now spotting are essentially astrophysically impossible on the expected timescales of galactic formation is what's calling all this into question. So either the Big Bang is (at least somewhat) incorrect or our theories for star formation and galaxy formation are incorrect. The latter has a lot more empirical evidence.

I like how you handwave away the "JWST evidence notwithstanding" when it's that evidence that radically alters the argument.

And yet we're unable to match the whole Big Bang origin with several major observabilities. If the universe started out as a single, dense point and expanded from there, why is it non-uniform? The CDM model has been in question for some time and this just adds fuel to the fire vis-à-vis the Cosmological Principle. What about the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem? There's a lot of observable, empirical evidence out there that TBBT does not and cannot explain. Clinging to a theory with such notable deficiencies is not scientific.

Except that it does, especially when you find galaxies that, according to TBBT, can only be 400-500 million years old yet display characteristics that, according to stellar and galactic theory, cannot form in such short timescales.

but it wasn't like they were going out of their way to make men look bad.

Really? Find a positive male role of prominence anywhere in that movie. Fury was a buffoon, totally out of character with his established persona (to say nothing of the lore). Marvel's father was an ass to her. Every male around her in the flashbacks was crude to the point of parody. Every other male character of note was a scheming, snarling, evil, woman-hating, patriarchy-loving, macho jerk. I half expected them to put a line in where Jude Law says she needs to stay in the kitchen in fix him a sandwich. The overarching message is "this is typical male behavior" when, in fact, it is outlier male behavior. It's taking one bad apple and treating it like it's the entire barrel of them.

Now, just for fun, try to find a female character who was painted so broadly and negatively. You won't be able to find one. They're all put forward as flawless paragons, always more capable, more knowledgeable, more "right" than everyone else. The only "evil" female is arguably not even a female but a computer (Benning's role).

You get paid what your skillset is worth on the labor market. If you're not getting paid that, why are you still working for the company?

If you can't get more working somewhere else, guess what? You are being paid a decent salary.

"Woke" and "story was good" are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. Why? Because woke messaging becomes the story. Take, for example, Captain Marvel compared to, say, Terminator 2. Both feature strong, kick-ass female characters taking on roles formerly handled by beefy male actors. Yet Captain Marvel is more or less reviled whereas Terminator 2 is adored. Why?

Because Captain Marvel went out of its way to push "the message" while T2 made the female protagonists actions a natural outgrowth of the character and her development. Captain Marvel herself was smug, condescending, and thoroughly unlikable. There was a conscious effort to paint nearly every male character as either a stupid buffoon or a twirling-mustache evil misogynist. It didn't work because it was so stupid and "the message" was delivered with such an over-the-top sledgehammer that it broke the suspension of disbelief. You weren't watching a movie anymore; you were being preached to by someone who thinks they're better and nobler than you, and if you disagree then you must be part of the problem.

Sarah Connor in T2 was none of these things. You could say the same about any number of other strong female protagonists in successful movies. Their stories worked and the results speak for themselves.

The virtue-signaling crowd will blame it all on people not being ready for strong female leads, or LGBT characters, or minority race characters. Yet how do you explain that when we have fantastic shows like The Expanse featuring all of these things? We don't give a shit about that stuff! We want a well-written, compelling story with characters that feel real in a universe that seems believable. Is that too much to ask these days? If want to be preached propaganda I can turn on the news.