Streaming is a form of DRM and tracking, which unnecessarily consumes extra resources. You should do it as little as possible.

You can download all the public domain movies on archive.org, you can easily download any youtube videos there's any chance you'd like to watch more than once. You can easily record TV shows broadcast over the air. You can quickly copy to disk any movies you've purchased on physical media, for convenient viewing. etc.

Streaming is a ball and chain, restricting your selection, limiting your options, etc. Never once has a single video, TV show or movie in my collection been taken away from me when the copyright owner decided they could make larger profits by doing so.

And why not? $50 for an iView CyberBox (Android) that includes an ATSC tuner and USB port, and another $60 for a 2TB USB hard drive.

You can quickly and easily build a huge collection of media that actually BELONGS to you, and is at the mercy of nothing but a good electrical supply. In any other kind of major natural (or man-made) disaster, would you really assume you will have uninterrupted internet access? Radio is a nice change, for a little while... but when things are falling apart around you, having your familiar entertainment choices at hand can be a great comfort in unplesant and uncertain times.

I still can't believe they don't have a real competitor.

They do, Intel. You can get REAL, fan-less quad-core Atom mini-PCs that run on 5W of power for under $100, including the case, power supply, eMMC storage, hdmi cables, dual video outputs, 3 real USB ports, everything (those are all extra cost with a Pi).

You can get this box for $110 on Amazon (non-affiliate link) with 4GB RAM, 64GB 100MB/s eMMC, dual output (vga & hdmi) 4K graphics. That'll do almost everything people want a Pi for, and more. Lacking in GPIO pins admittedly, but $2 for a USB gpio dongle on eBay will solve that one, too, or spend a bit more and get even more GPIO than the Pis have.

A Sprinter is a tradesman's van. Outside the US, Mercedes aren't a luxury car maker, they are a general vehicle maker who also makes luxury cars. Aside from normal white vans, they also make buses, trucks, and cheaper cars that are popular as taxis.

The box is small and cheap, and is much easy to change when some new codec comes along making it obsolete, and you can keep the existing display.

If data can be charged (not something I've heard of) no one is actually charging for it. I can roam anywhere in the EU with no roaming charges on Vodafone.

How much does it cost for the user, though? Is it metered? If it is metered, you'll want a good proxy setup in front of it to block things like requests for ads, block the operating system's "phone home" and software updates while connected, block videos etc. as these can chew through gigabytes without the user really knowing.

How does having kids the responsibility of the employer?

British cars from the 70s maybe. But there is no British mass-market car industry left - the last British manufacturer went out of business years ago, so you don't have anything to worry about.

Incidentally, Audi use Lucas electrical parts (that Lucas, as in Lucas prince of Darkness). So you better cross German cars off your list too.

I don't disagree. I think crimping gets a bad rap because people are used to cheap crimp tools and cheap connectors which do a terrible job (which even un-strain-relieved solder joints will actually outlive). People see that a moderately decent crimp tool will set them back £100, so go for the cheap Chinesium non-ratchet one that costs £6, and the connector fails after 3 months because the wire just falls out the improperly crimped connector, so conclude that crimping is rubbish.

Since the login page is going to come from at least the same organisation (and likely the same server), if it's been compromised then that won't help - it just means the attacker has to do marginally more work adding a bit of code to the stuff sent to the browser to harvest the plain text password there instead.

Serial and parallel doesn't refer to the amount of signals, but how they are clocked. If you took 16 RS-232 ports and split your data into 16 parts and transmitted them, it would still be serial as each port is independently clocked. With a parallel port there's a single clock for all the signals. Every separate signal (there's 4 of them for USB-C super speed) is independently clocked, so it's not a 4 bit parallel link, but 4 separate serial links.

The red blue and yellow crimp connectors are actually very reliable (we use them in aviation) - if:

- you have the proper crimp tool (and a good crimp tool is quite expensive - at least as much as a mid-tier soldering iron), a proper ratchet tool with a properly made die, not the cheap Chinesium things you get for £6 at Halfords
- you don't get the cheap crap crimp connectors (good ones aren't really that expensive either)
- the person crimping them knows how to use the crimp tool - which isn't hard, you can probably teach a chimp to crimp.

Do all that stuff and you have connectors that take 1/10th of the time to install vs. soldering, and there are far fewer things to go wrong.

If the connection has proper strain relief and the cables are properly supported, a soldered joint will outlive the car.

However, crimping is faster and easier and needs a lot less skill to make a good connector. Making a good solder joint and doing all the things to ensure it will last takes a modicum of skill and it also takes time. But you can teach a chimp to crimp. (That's assuming you have the correct crimp tool, and a good one, not a cheap one made from Chinesium).

No, most people do NOT agree with that. Maybe most people in your circle of friends, but not most Americans at least.

The problem IS the loans. You loan 100k to an 18 year old who doesn't have the understanding of the long term ramification. The colleges love it because it is easy money for them. Little Johnny gets a degree in Women's Studies and doesn't understand that he has to pay the loan back, even though he has a job as a waiter. Some kids have it together, most have been so utterly coddled for so long, they've never had a job and simply can't comprehend the numbers they are dealing with.

The solution is to stop government funding of loans, which will lower the price of college (they will hate this), and MORE privately owned education choices, not fewer. Half the kids are getting degrees in crap that will not provide them a career in ANYTHING. The colleges don't care, they get paid regardless.

No, scientists aren't getting constantly "surprised" or even "baffled". These are words journalists are putting in their mouths as a way of making a story more interesting.