and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.

General Protection Fault outranks Colonel Panic and says drop and give me 20 reboots.

Yeah that happened to me! Turns out the stuck was just a bit loose. After thoroughly cleaning it and reseating, the crashes vanished. Fortunately because DDR5 is stupid expensive now.

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Part of it is probably how inconsistent and confusing Windows group policy is designed and phrased. There are so many policies where the setting is not enable or disable with one of those as default. Rather the options are "do not allow" or "not (do not allow)" with the default unclear as to what it does. I swear sometimes the option has to be read as a triple negative.

This data is coming from workplace computers. Users get whatever the company buys and do not always get many choices. Generally business machines are a little better than consumer versions.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

Crashes you say?

Can't remember the last time I had one of those.

Also the major flaw in this plan is whether the assembly is in the US or overseas does not stop backdoors from being loaded.

It sounds like the person behind this does not understand how manufacturing works. If backdoors are being implanted into these routers, it is not some rogue foreign agent assembling the router. The backdoors are most likely designed in the firmware. Somewhere in the assembly process, a worker or machine will load the firmware. The assembly workers whether they are in the US or overseas do not know what is in the firmware. Their job is to load it. Another workers job may be to test the router by hooking it up to a testing machine.

I think the word that has some wiggle room is "consumer". Business grade routers are exempt however I did not read that business grade meant enterprise. There are business grade routers meant for small and medium sized businesses. They cost a little more than consumer grade ones, have better warranties, and most of the time use better parts. I can see a loophole being exploited by the router manufacturers is to launch a new line of business budget models that are basically the same models as consumer ones with slight changes. "It is in a different housing and the we updated [meaningless metric] to double."

And how will requiring the PCBs be manufactured in the US prevent backdoors from being designed in the system. The backdoors are at the firmware level not during assembly.

The problem is the solution is also shortsighted. Rather than target TP-Link routers, all consumer routers are affected. Business routers are not affected. Also making the router made in the US does not actually remove any back doors. The back doors were placed in the design not the assembly of the router.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.