A garage door opener, thermostat, dishwasher, surveillance camera, vacuum cleaner -- or whatever other home appliance you care to name ABSOLUTELY NEEDS a cloud connection... really?
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but christ alive .. getting really sick of this ad-fueled fuckery.

Depends, Maybe you are receiving a package and would like the delivery person to leave it in the garage where it will sit until you get home rather than on the patio. This would require you to be able to remotely open the garage and then close it again.

Thermostat you might want to control with an app and it needs cloud if you want to remotely access it (think normal user here).

Heck, sometimes you have HVAC and hot water systems that need to be remotely controlled as part of load management. Most utilities have found that such devices generally are no longer reachable after a year to the point my old company made a product for utility companies to use that didn't depend on the user having WiFi - it stuck to the meter box and provided WiFi for those devices. If the customer switched ISPs it didn't matter since the utility retained control.

That was because the original QuickTime codecs were proprietary. It was the Sorensen video codec developed by Sorensen and licensed exclusively to Apple.

You have to remember QuickTime refers to many things - the MOV container format, the video playback architecture of MacOS, the video codec itself, and more.

The MP4 container file format is a subset of the original MOV QuickTime format - Apple submitted it as part of the MPEG4 standard. If you've used cellphones for a long time, you might remember 3gp as well - which is an even smaller subset of QuickTime. Any player capable of opening MOV files can open MP4 and 3GP files as they are upwardly compatible.

Sorensen was retired as QuickTime started to adopt more "standard" video and audio codecs turning it into a proper media framework.

Microsoft wanted to kill it because they were introducing Video4Windows (V4W), a framework to compete for Windows. But since QuickTime was popular and available sooner, Apple ported it to Windows. One should note that Apple's Windows ports are really ports of Mac to Windows, so early QuickTime For Windows were really containing ports of MacOS libraries. The continued on with iTunes containing a good chunk of OS X libraries and runtimes when running on Windows.

These days, Video4Windows is pretty much dead - it was replaced by DirectShow which is the media playback architecture in use today on Windows. The QuickTime media framwork is now just macOS only while the format is something the industry pretty much has standardized on for everything. I don't think Sorensen video even plays on anything now, FFMPEG being the only thing having support nowadays.

This was the era of DOGE. Half of Elon's "elite" team were of questionable origin having criminal records that basically would disqualify them for government work.

Heck, maybe they were DOGE bros - the chaos of what was happening basically let it happen. Even Musk's elite team were copying data off sensitive servers and putting them on on publicly accessible clouds.

The real reason is these guys somehow must've insulated Musk or Trump because they likely could've gotten away with it like DOGE did of slurping up the databases.

First, h.264 has been around for close to 20 years now, and hardware support for at least 15 years of that. The licensing for it is stupidly cheap and easy and to stream it even more so. That's why it retains the status as default codec.

h.265 was supposed to be licensed the same way as h.264, but many patent holders disagreed and broke off forming their own licensing group. Arguably, they saw the success of h.264 as leaving money on the table because of how it's the de-facto standard and they don't wan to do that again. Hence with licensing a mess, only one product uses h.265, and that's physical media because it was baked into the standard.

AV1 was created as a protest against the greed being expressed by h.265 patent holders but it was only standardized just before the pandemic hit. It takes 2-3 years for silicon makers to incorporate it into their products, so it started appearing in chips around 2022-2023 and devices in 2023. The devices supporting it are all newer smartphones, smart TVs and media boxes using the later SOCs with it built in. Luckily a flood of cheap streaming boxes from the likes of Amazon and Walmart (Onn) mean support is baked in, and devices with programmable GPUs like nVidia Shield and VideoCore (Broadcom) added it as a firmware update because decoding video is one of those things GPU hardware is really good at.

It's such a great movie, and predicted so much. Short news updates that trivialize important events, decades before Tik Tok, for example.

Many people don't realize that Verhoeven is a brilliant director and his movies are all about social commentary. RoboCop is one, as is Starship Troopers. They're social commentary dressed up as other films.

RoboCop is about corporate takeover of government, the militarization of police and juxtaposed with what life is like - the SUX 6000 representing the crass consumerism. He was arguing that the world would turn into that if nothing was done.

Of course, if you take it at face value, it's also a really good action movie, interspersed with funny interstitials. That is Verhoeven's craft - a movie with real subtext, without the overbearing nature of it - or how to be "woke" without being "woke". It's why he refused to do the sequels and why the sequels are lacking something.

Verhoeven's work is enjoyable on many levels - you can take it at the surface and it's a great movie (well, maybe Starship Troopers suffers somewhat, because budget didn't allow for a lot of things to be done), but there's a lot of deeper meaning to it all - namely how the military starts taking over life and the jingoism involved.

Fact is, his work is just enjoyable at the same time carrying satire, social commentary and much more. Though I think he was also hoping the world of RoboCop wouldn't actually come out the way it has.

Yeah, look at how Disney's and Hulu's prices came down after that merger!

Oh, wait...

I can't speak for Europe / England and their repair laws, but everything in America is required to be approved by the FAA for use in aviation, and usually you can't change things after the aircraft is certified

In theory, you are correct.

However, in practice, you are completely wrong. Uncertified parts are everywhere and in the 70s/80s, a huge scandal arose because counterfeit parts were found all the way into Air Force One - the aircraft part supply chain was full of counterfeit or uncertified components that it made its way onto the most secure aircraft in the world. The FAA cracked down heavily, but it happens more often than you'd think.

NorthridgeFix has a series of videos where they repaired a Cessna icing controller circuit board, and they got a visit from the FAA. The FAA said everything he did was legit, but they wanted to look into his customer to make sure they were properly certifying parts because people still put cheaper counterfeit (uncertified) parts in. The circuit board he fixed may cost only $300 or so in parts, but after certification and documentation it's probably at least $10,000.

And the FAA notes there are exceptions to the rules - privately operated aircraft well, they have far less oversight. Even the FAA admits it. It's only when transactions happen do they start getting involved (i.e., you sell an aircraft with uncertified parts in it).

Finally, there is also the homebuilt exception - not all aircraft are certified. You can certainly build your own aircraft, and the rules are really lax in that regard - as in, you are pretty much free to do whatever you want.

And that is actually the problem with this "story": Self-driving cars are held to a much higher standard. That is neither rational nor useful.

Delivering equipment to the 3rd Reich to aid in the killing of jews. Funny how history repeats itself.

You do realize where you are, do you? This is not a classroom and some basic understanding is required to play. You clearly lack that.

Don't be a (mentally) lazy fuck. There is a large body of literature on this question.

Indeed. The difference is that everything you assume (not believe) to be a fact needs to come with evidence and need do be falsifiable (i.e. evidence that proves it is wrong could be obtained if it is wrong). Obviously, you, personally, cannot verify everything. But you can verify some things and it is expected that you did, usually in school. The only assumption that you need to be able to make is that all the other facts were verified by somebody.

In contrast, with faith/belief, there is no verification. Nobody has ever successfully verified that God (which ever one) does exist. There are some plausibility arguments, but they are all weak and many are basically not even argument but just serve to confuse the question by adding complexity. None of these meet scientific standards. And that claim is not falsifiable either: You cannot disprove God exists. What ever proof you have, it would be limited, because in some dark corner of the universe, God could be hiding away, ignoring everybody. Hence "God exists" does not even need the requirements for a scientific claim, regardless of whether that statement is true or not. This is the reason why Atheists say things like "God does almost certainly not exists".

In short, you can "believe" scientific facts (or not), but in doing so you do not participate in Science and you are not using the scientific method. Any claim to Science being about belief is simply a direct lie though.

PLA is also not very durable. In hot and humid climate, PLA can decompose in a few months. PLA is, in some sense, a great prototyping material but not suitable for most other tasks.

Yep, that nicely sums it up.

...when a state doesn't like national Democratic party priorities.