Was fleecing the dumb and rich, laundering the money and maybe a little tax evasion on the side.

Nobody said zebras are alone. I certainly didn't. Your google search certainly doesn't establish a causal relationship.

I agree, and that's why we aren't all artists. But that doesn't make a calculation based on a set of inputs 'art'.

1080p is also easier, cheaper, and less time consuming to rip. Pretty much any machine (even one from the early 00s) can rip a DVD offline. Hell you can find one just going to your local dump. Just download Handbrake and be done with it. (Well that and libdvdcss2.) You can get a pretty good .m4v or .mkv under about 2GB without loosing much quality. (Even less if it's not live action.)

Blurays on the other hand, require much newer hardware. Most OEMs dropped the optical drive as a standard include on their systems around the time cheap Bluray drives hit the market. So that means you'll need to buy a reader and install it. Some readers are incompatible with newer blurays, so you'll need to do your research before committing to one. You'll also need to buy a large SSD as even the smallest Blurays above 1080p quality are around 20GB in size. Then you'll need an internet connection to use the ripping software, which will take hours to do it's job. You'll also want to re-encode the resulting video file to shrink it's size. (Assuming the ripping software didn't do that for you.) Which will take even more time. The encode times can be reduced if you have a modern GPU with hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding, but that costs even more money.

Add to all of this that yeah, most studios don't put out quality content above 1080p on streaming / broadcast services to cut costs. As a result most people, (especially younger generations), don't realize that a better quality version exists. Or have been bitten by the studios giving too much quality, beyond what their editors and post production were targeting. (Being able to see people's skin pores, and breaking the movie magic by "seeing the wires" or the green screen in the background of a shot.) It's no surprise that higher quality video on expensive equipment and media is something that the public will pass on. Especially when good enough is cheaper, and going beyond it bites you in the butt.

I've never had a properly maintained engine go on an ice. Any one i have had to get rid of was due to rusting components. In a BEV the battery will degrade below a useful range before it rusts out.

when it's unseen, a slow drip can become a flood

Once it's ratified by the dictionaries, it IS proper English. There's no need to make yourself look like a fuddy-duddy by complaining about such trivia. The world moves on.

Worked really well in Europe and Australia.

I applaud Google in this case. There is already too much monetary influence on internets. If they have to pay for any news, inevitably we will have. And such law and complying to it would just expand ad influence. Ads shpuld be banned in 90% of current cases. If I go to a news site today, more than 50% of my screenspace are ads, no, just no. So Google just says, ock you, we will not popularize your content. And that is ok for me and also for news sites, as their own sites would be watched directly, not somewhere else.

..had a Meccano set.

They were the favourite xmas gift of dads and grandfathers.....

They were metal, and solid. Motors and gears and bearings and everything....

Chinesium.

How did he stop the Red Wave? Trump stopped the Red Wave by being Trump.

SBF bribed Republicans and bankrolled their campaigns.

You gotta repeal Citizens United.

That was a question a former colleague of mine used to ask new hires. The answers ranged from confusion to a detailed analysis of the merits of each.

...laura

Eventually questionable usage does tend to get ratified by the dictionaries. It doesn't make you sound any less juvenile to use it though, like you are too lazy to use proper English or follow long standing linguistic conventions.

Depending on your location and choice of show, there might not be any availability whatsoever aside from piracy.

Itâ(TM)s not 2006, raspberry piâ(TM)s arenâ(TM)t going to mine anything.

They are 'minting' NFTs for "recovered physical artifacts from the Titanic". Maybe you should try reading the summary for once?

Spend is a verb and a noun.

From https://dictionary.cambridge.o...:

spend
noun [ S ]
    ECONOMICS, FINANCE

the amount of money that is spent on a particular activity:

Kids, thinking they've realized something new and not bothering to type in "images striped hooved animals" and finding out equids aren't alone.

We had Meccano in Australia, so maybe it's a Commonwealth thing. Our trainsets were mostly Hornby, another English brand. But I'd never take Marmite over Vegemite.

While banning this one app is a good thing, it's hard to call them "absolutely 100% right" on the issue of device security, considering all the staff are still conducting state business on consumer-grade smartphones. All of it's made in China and loaded with the standard suite of Big Tech spyware from the US. Doubtlessly riddled with security holes on top of that.

TikTok is 1% of the problem. The rest remains unaddressed.

This was discussed in the Assange case,

"[...] because of extradition practices, any such superseding indictment would most likely need to come soon, before Britain formally decides whether to transfer custody of him."

He said today: âoeThe New York Times report is wrong and understates the dangers to Assange. What it states is normally the case in extradition treaties, but itâ(TM)s not the case in the relevant U.S.-British extradition treaty.

https://accuracy.org/release/c...

Apparently there could be more to it than just "Nope, once he's out, he's the property of the US Injustice System," but... didn't he already get extradited? he agreed to it months ago.

dude shoulda used SBCs, maybe Pi Zero 2s. TFS doesn't say exactly where the crawl space was. I reckon overspend on some good quality WCs and install them in there.

It ticks me too. When writing any-damn-thing other than a note to a familiar, be specific and kill the friggin' jargon.

Type another four seconds.

I get the feeling we're going to see the same thing with car prices. There is a more competition in the car market, but the price spike wasn't so extreme, and it's easier to hide the cost from Joe Average through financing.

Tell me where I can stream it. Now you know why I only do physical media rentals. Until they fix the licensing clusterfuck and make everything available for a reasonable price through a single service, fuck streaming.

"For the children" is a favorite cheap tactic used by both the right and the left.

Right. If that's not an example of Trump-derangement syndrome then I don't know what is.

When Trump says it metaphorically; it's because he meant it.
When everyone else says it metaphorically; your argument is that only an idiot would take them seriously.

Only an idiot would take either side's call metaphors as literal statements. Yet here you are taking them seriously, just like the 12 unarmed morons who were let into the white house, which democrats thought would take over the nation somehow or start a revolution. Lots of morons in this picture all over.

What makes you think that graph would look anything less than sky high piracy regardless of other criteria? This is the media industry we're talking about here. There's never been "low" piracy numbers.

The 4k torrents of The Last Of Us look amazing.

You obviously missed the point. You can't tell what is "good enough" just based on the resolution alone. High-bitrate 1080P can look amazing and better than most 4k streams. Low-bitrate 1080 can look horrible. Unfortunately most streaming services know that the majority of people probably don't even know what "bitrate" is, which is why they use the lowest bitrate they can get away with, and why streaming often looks much worse than it should at a given resolution.