If cross-platform was possible, I wouldn't have an Xbox One. I bought a PS4 first, but friends wound up with XBox One, so I had to pick one up so we can co-op game. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

DVDs are just as obsolete as VHS, and can degrade just as quickly.

DVD is a bad choice. It's another dead format, and uses crappy old Mpeg 2 compression so the data is at least 10x the size it should be. You can convert and compress to a modern format, and play them from PCs and streaming devices. This also makes backup to sites like DropBox possible.

We reached that point years ago, and if you have to buy an eBay VCR when yours fails, your conversions will be lower quality than if played on the machine they were recorded on. VHS sucked that way.

The good news is that Time Base Correctors are inexpensive now, so I was able to fix flagging and color problems caused by playing on a different machine in most cases.

I had a huge tape collection, 75% of which turned out to be worthless because much better copies of the shows and movies are now available, but I did convert the remaining 25% to MP4 files. A few tapes were completely unplayable because time is very hard on magnetic tape.

I can't believe anyone would fail to upgrade home movies to a durable format, and just wait for them to degrade into uselessness while planning to convert them someday. That's destroying things via procrastination that should be handed down to your descendants.

VHS was never a competitor to LaserDisc. Even super-VHS had terrible video quality compared to LaserDisc, which was for people who would spend extra to have the best picture possible. LaserDisc died when better options came along with DVD, BluRay, and 1080p MKVs. LaserDisc became a low-quality format that could only present 500 lines of vertical resolution, but back in the bad old NTSC days, it was the best option available. It could compete with DVDs because there was no over-compression problem, but it could never compete with even 720p HDTV.

That's probably so they can log your click. You can choose to allow them to do that, or just ditch their site.

Adobe still makes great authoring tools, it's just that Flash is now a depreciated technology, so they put little to no effort into it these days.

It's not even just when you click to close a tab, which would be obnoxious enough. Lots of pages announce their abandonment issues as soon as you move the mouse pointer to the tabs to toggle between tabs. This often leads me to close their tab, instead of leaving it to read later.

Without advertisers, there is no Internet, just a small network of subscription sites, so let's not fuck advertisers.

With a decent connection, lag isn't an issue, but malware and obnoxious shit sure are. The big problem with Flash ads is the payloads they deliver, such as ransom-ware. Flash isn't a security hole that you can just leave open because you're unable to change with the times. It will totally screw you eventually.

I think I see the problem here. HBI, for whatever delusional reason, believes that Flash is still useful. I think he was projecting when he talked about killing Flash for religious reasons.

Most people just want things to work out of the box. I find I enjoy tinkering more than actual use of a product, but that doesn't seem to be common.

True, if America was dumb enough to elect a buffoon like Trump, but having a gay man who's self-loathing due to right-wing-faux-Christian brainwashing as a VP candidate is no advance in civil rights.

That's a really dumb interpretation of laws allowing transwomen to use the women's bathroom where they won't be attacked by ignorant Conservative men, and transmen to use the bathroom where they won't frighten women. I mean REALLY dumb, like even worse than the absurd Conservative propaganda in the issue.

The funny thing is that Conservatives don't even really oppose big government, they just want it to be a big, harmful, theocratic government. It's government that helps people that they object to. They're fine with treating The Handmaid's Tale as an instruction manual.

>For all his faults, Newt accepts climate change and calls for "green conservativism",

Which makes him totally unacceptable to Republican voters. They don't care about the hypocrisy, or extremism, but they do care if someone threatens their collapsing delusional worldview.

The wacky things Republicans say and do make a lot more sense if you view them as a failed subculture, desperately trying to hold off the collapse of their propaganda and superstition based worldview for as long as possible. Choosing religion and pandering hoax-media over evidence is a dead-end, and on some level they know it.