Unfortunately, while block lists were just about adequate to keep the signal to noise ratio high enough back in the day, I fear it would be a losing battle at the scale of today's internet.

The handful of newsgroups I still follow actually don't have that much spam posted to them. It isn't nonexistent, but my email server easily sees orders of magnitude more spam (most of which is nuked before I see it, but more gets through than I'd like). comp.sys.raspberry-pi, comp.misc, and comp.sys.apple2 see moderate amounts of traffic and not much in the way of trolls.

Neither is FOSS, neither have Kodi's playback abilities, and Plex at least is pissing off its user-base left and right.

I'm not sure what Plex is doing that's pissing off its userbase, but I'm doing OK with it. I've run Kodi on things from old nettops to most versions of the Raspberry Pi to the Rock Pi X, but I'm getting to where I don't want to keep rebuilding software for my STBs. Plex runs on Roku and Fire TV sticks, and the Fire TV stick even has a web browser I can point to my Invidious server to handle my YouTube viewing. Since it's basically an Android device, I can sideload most Android apps onto it (and Apps2Fire makes it easy).

I'm leaning toward just putting Fire TV sticks on everything. Roku's missing a web browser, and AFAIK there's no way to add an ad blocker to it to clean up YouTube (and I can't get it to talk to an Invidious server instead of YouTube).

And here's the thing: I shouldn't have to look for a solution at all. I don't use IE for anything except customer support, and only because the camera maker supports IE only.

...and why did you (or whoever it was, if it wasn't you) buy a bunch of cameras that were only supported by one particular browser? Surely there were better choices available at the time.

I have some old IP cams (GeoVision GV-BX110s, if it matters) sitting in my desk that were primarily supported by some wonky browser interface, but a bit of digging revealed a port from which I could direct VLC to pull a stream for playback. If you're lucky, that might be an option if you can find information on your cameras.

I thought Edge had a "compatibility mode".

It does. I maintain some computers in a department at work where that feature is enabled for a state-government website our people need to access that still needs IE and Silverlight (!) to run. We keep a copy of the Silverlight installer on hand because you can't download it from Microsoft anymore, and there are some registry hacks involved in keeping this site running in "IE mode" (otherwise, the override to do so expires every 30 days). It's a royal pain in the ass, but expecting competence from the state is a fool's errand.

Are any of the people asking for this even Native American?

Magic 8-Ball says "very doubtful." These complaints are nearly always driven by AWFLs and other white shitlibs with too much time on their hands, and not the allegedly aggrieved.

no, the US Military isn't terribly interested in culture wars

O RLY? They seem to have jumped in up to their eyeballs in all sorts of toxic woke bullshit. Plug "woke military" into your search engine of choice for more examples than you can handle.

The AH-64 belongs to the Army, not the Air Force. ("Air Force," BTW, is two words.)

I'd rather buy a dumb TV too, but I settle for a smart TV where I never touch the smarts.

I was pretty much resigned to doing that when I spent a couple of days leveling up my parents' tech. The ancient non-HD flat-CRT TV in their bedroom got replaced with a 40" Vizio (largest that would fit the cabinet). For what it's worth, the TV wouldn't even connect to their network (couldn't get a DHCP lease), so it's effectively a dumb TV. A Roku stick was also purchased with the TV; it had no trouble tethering off their new cellphones until the cable company could come out to set up their stuff so Mom & Dad could shitcan all of the AT&T VDSL gear for which the service had crapped out two days before Christmas. The Roku is now on the cable-powered WLAN, pulling in TV through the service provider's Roku app (look Mom, no cable box!). Other than some cabling issues between the demarc and the street that were resolved with a second truck roll, the new setup is running like a champ.

BTW, AT&T needs to die in a fire. Their customer service is stuck 40 years in the past: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." A 5-day outage with no idea when service might be restored is inexcusable.

To do that, they'd have to port it from Java to something that works properly.

In the meantime, you could switch to PlatformIO on VSCodium. It's worked for all of my embedded coding needs across multiple platforms, including Arduino.

expensive sewing machines seem to lag what a reasonable person would expect by a decade or more

Could it just be that floppy disks are still big in Japan? My mom has a sewing machine (think it's by Brother) that does embroidery. I think it runs Windows CE or something similar (it has a small LCD touchscreen through which it's controlled), and I'm pretty sure it has a floppy drive for moving data in and out...don't recall if it also has a USB interface or not.

It never really stopped being a thing in the UK

One Christmas morning (can't remember if it was '84 or '85), it got cold enough overnight that there was a light dusting of snow outside...and the milk bottles started freezing before we brought them in. We were buying non-homogenized milk, where the cream floats on top until you shake it back in. The cream was freezing a little bit faster than the rest of the milk underneath, and the bottles were close enough to full that the foil caps were getting blown off. Good times. :)

Diagramming sentences is a distinctively US thing

I also suspect it's dropped out of use in more recent (and not-so-recent) years. It may have still been a thing when my boomer parents were in school, but I never encountered it in school in the '80s and have only the vaguest idea what it might be. I still managed to swing a 630 SAT verbal when I was a junior, and before that, the 430 I'd gotten when I took the SAT in 7th grade was said to be above the average score for college-bound high-schoolers. That would suggest that an alternate method to teach the same material is in more common use today.

Glass milk bottles have been out of the public consciousness for long enough

Milk delivery in the US has never been a thing in my 50 years, but when my family moved to England in the mid-'80s, they were still delivering pint bottles in the wee hours. We usually bought two pints daily, unless there was a reason to order more or less...you set a dial on the basket that you put out with the empties that said how many you wanted. Given the slow rate of change over in that part of the world, it wouldn't surprise me if milk delivery is still a thing even today.

But ballistic missiles work for that.

Ballistic missiles can't be recalled once they're launched, if it's determined that there's no longer a threat. Maybe you can tell it to self-destruct, but even doing that over enemy territory is likely to have consequences. With a bomber, you tell the crew to RTB, they do a 180, and sometime later, they're back on the ground.

Knock off the gaslighting already, Mr. Fauci. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together believes you anymore.