Why would you allow OS updates to your TV at all? At this point we should expect that any "updates" are anti-consumer, and their main reason to exist is adds, tracking and basically any extra monetization of their captive audience they can think of.

I bought a Samsung TV a year or two ago, and never allowed any firmware updates; nor do I see any need for them. The TV isn't plugged in to the internet and doesn't have the wireless network's password. It wanted to connect to the mother ship for activation, but my TV installer activated it using his phone, so Samsung hasn't got any info about me - besides, I guess, my name, address, credit card number, maybe phone number, the TV model I bought, the date when I bought it and anything else they may have received from the store :( .

All video to the TV comes from a little HTPC or a non-internet connected Bluray player. The HTPC lets me get all streams I'm interested in, with ad blockers and at least a modicum of control. I also use the HTPC to play my content from the NAS, so there is no risk that an update stops supporting some older file format or stops working with Netflix or Youtube or whatever.

For people complaining they get distracted by what's behind the screen: just tape a piece of cardboard to the back of the laptop! As a bonus, if you use a printed photo, your screen will have a colorful background, and you can even change the photo from time to time!

Will marvels never cease?

I don't know... I've seen Sandman on Netflix and i learned that about half of England's high society in the early 20th century were black.

Robots are also becoming more and more capable, together with AIs - I don't see why robots can't replace humans for server maintenance.

Hasn't the theory that engaging with those "sort of fledgling democracies" been tested already, with China and with Russia itself after the fall of communism? The West tried to open to them, help them grow their economies, hoping that improved standards of living and Western influence will lead to their democratization. The assumption has proved false, and has ended up creating stronger, more assertive dictatorships.

Without a radical change of Russia's state/societal structures any "Marshall plan for Russia" would be a "Marshall plane for oligarchs". And I don't see how the state structures could be changed without a lot of trouble/destruction.

This is a dishonest argument. Breaking somebody's arm is is an act of violence, and calling it so is correct. But the discussion is about nude photos, not arm breaking. Calling nude photos "acts of violence" is demeaning.

The equivalent fallacy would be for you to hyperbolically call your arm breaking "genocide" or "a crime against humanity". That would be demeaning to real victims of genocide.

Haven't you ever seen somebody in a wheelchair?

I can't, but I'm sure there are people who can. There are also musicians who can reproduce a musical piece in its entirety after only listening to it once - Mozart was famous for that, for example. Would this capability entitle random composers to claim ownership of the entirety of Mozart's work just because Mozart had listened to one of their pieces once?

I guess this depends on the size and shape of your eggs.

If you have smallish independent files (say, a collection of pictures), then yes, spreading them over multiple smaller disks ensures at least some of them would still be usable if a disk crashes. However, if your data needs more bytes than can fit on a single disk to be usable, then multiple disk increase the probability of failure. For the second case, consider the installation kits of yesteryear that came on multiple floppies: after spending a couple of hours feeding floppies to the machine it was particularly frustrating to find out disk 24 of 30 isn't readable.

This point is not as meaningful as you seem to think it is. Yes, some of the electricity used by EVs comes from "dirty" sources, such as coal and gas. However, even when using dirty energy, an electric vehicle is still more efficient than an equivalent ICE. And let's not forget that refining crude oil is in itself an expensive and polluting process: it uses about half of all feedstock energy used by all manufacturing in the USA.

Another factor is that the grid is becoming cleaner and cleaner as new renewable sources become available and technology improves. This is not happening with ICEs - I don't see real progress on renewable fuels, like green hydrogen or maybe biofuel. Even the nuclear plants you seem to love so much would benefit EVs, but not ICEs.

Salt of the earth programmers; we use line numbers like our grandfathers and their grandfathers before him!

Perhaps, but writing BASIC without line numbers is like eating an egg without salt...

Too bad nobody told that to Marx and Engels. They teach that dictatorship (of the proletariat) is a necessary, unavoidable step in the transition to communism. In their opinion, only this dictatorship provides the force needed to violently expropriate the owners of the means of production - and therefore, it's a good thing. Engels even admired the Paris Commune, which he saw as a real life example of a dictatorship of the proletariat - and we know how well the Paris Commune worked out, and we know its human cost.

You may try the "no true Scotsman" gambit again, and say that this type of dictatorship isn't real dictatorship. But in truth, that's what it is. It's not really "of the proletariat", except in name. The real dictators are the various leaders, and Marxist theory fails to explain how they can be convinced to renounce their power after the goal of expropriating the means of production is complete. Instead, those dictators will keep the power to themselves, and use it for their own purposes. This is what happened in real life again and again. All communist countries that ever existed have gone through the step of dictatorship (more or less of the proletariat). None of them have exited this state to evolve towards full-fledged real communism. Either the dictatorship continues to this day (China, North Korea), or the system was completely overthrown (Eastern Europe, Russia - and as we can see in the later case, the communism system being overthrown doesn't mean the society becomes democratic).

The point of all this is that, contrary to your affirmation, communism is not the opposite of dictatorship. The opposite is true: communism is born from dictatorship and ends in dictatorship. That is the "real" communism - the only communism that has yet been seen anywhere, and IMO the only one that can exist, given its premises and human nature.

I haven't actually watched Two and 1/2 Men, so I haven't seen with my own eyes how the switch was justified. I was somehow under the impression that Kuchner was supposed to be the same person, and surgery was involved. Maybe somebody told me about the switch, but I didn't pay enough attention, since I didn't really care? Anyway, if that's not how it happened, my apologies and please ignore this example.

I agree that many shows that pull a switch end up failing, but this is not always the case: M.A.S.H. for example replaced quite a few of the initial roster - Trapper John, Lt Col Blake, Frank Burns - without faltering.