I bought a garbage bag full of audiophile cables from an estate sale for something like $30. I replaced the Monoprice cables on my stereo with them. I notice no difference, but they do look nice. It's also amusing to me having the $30 Logitech Bluetooth audio receiver hooked up to my stereo with $200 Tara Quantum IV cables. One of the cables weighs more than the receiver itself.

The only thing I've noticed about cables is that RCA ended cables tend to fail eventually. The cheap ones are glued on and, after time, the glue dries out and they'll loose connection. I'll shell out a couple extra dollars for a balanced Neutrik ended cable. Not because they sound better, but because the ends are soldered and clamped onto the wire. I've never had one fail, while I've had a half dozen RCA cables fail.

A sci-fi fan Youtuber posted a video a few months ago about how the streaming version of Babylon 5 are pretty bad. Apparently, most of them have been upscaled to HD, and stretched to make them widescreen, which the originals were not. The only original 4:3 versions are the DVDs, which were mediocre transfers.

So your options are tracking down an old DVD copy and putting up with the soft desaturated transfer, or watching it on Blu-Ray or streaming, poorly upscaled and artificially stretched to a widescreen aspect ratio. The live shots are passable, but the CGI shots now look terrible.

Some ski areas have bathing suit days for charity. You do as many runs as you can in your bathing suit, each run gets a donation. There are a few hot tubs at the bottom of the hill to warm up. Of course, when falling at those speeds the snow won't sandpaper your skin off like a ski jump would :)

You're right in that Vegas casinos are designed to keep people in and playing, but that has nothing to do with addictive design. The loud "winning" noises play into that, but not the confusingly laid out floor plans.

At any rate, the trend is away from that style of casino floor. The Bellagio and Wynn casino floors are clean and neatly laid out. The Wynn even has windows. Ditto the Aria.

Ah, that makes sense. My disconnect is that, while flipping through pay TV channels which I have access to them, I don't find any more programs to watch than when flipping through the free IPTV channels. The sports-heads I know just spring for the streaming package for whatever local team they want to watch.

I don't quite understand the purpose. Most smart TVs come with a free IPTV bundle. My LG came with LG channels, that has a few hundred free streaming channels to watch. Tubi does the same thing on any smart gizmo, you can plug into a TV, the cheapest of which is around $40.

I can understand the logic for Teams, which only works using the 365 cloud infrastructure. However, Zoom still lets you run a local server.

https://support.zoom.com/hc/en...

Apparently, "eroding nuclear control frameworks" are much, much more dangerous than JFK directly threatening to go to war with the USSR over nuclear missiles in Cuba. After that the clock actually rolled back. I guess we need more threats of nuclear war to roll the clock back some more.

Sentencing? This is her initial arrest. She's charged with violating the FACE act, which prohibits interfering with church services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In 2017 NYC opened a brand new 400 square foot public bathroom in a public park in Brooklyn. It cost $2 million. That's roughly $5000 a square foot. You could walk across the street and purchase a larger home for a quarter of that price. Nobody can account for it's cost. The official response is - shrug, yeah stuff costs a lot.

It should be an ongoing, continuous, strictly enforced law that any project over a few hundred thousand needs an independent audit conducted. A 10% cost overrun is understandable. A 200%-400% cost overrun is criminal. It happens all the time, continuously, everywhere.

I like watching court cam videos, and Youtube is *constantly* recommending clone channels that clearly download someone else's video, slaps on an AI generated thumbnail and summary, then re-uploads it. I think the entire thing is automatic. I keep reporting the channels and Youtube keeps recommending more.

So, saying they are "cracking down" is kind of funny, as they aren't even doing the bare minimum enforcing their existing policies.

Which reviews are those? All the reputable sites (Rtings, AVSciencce) report that, while expensive, the high-end Sony sets generally have the best picture under most conditions. LG is up there with them, then Samsung.

I bought a TCL Android TV set for the basement on Wirecutter's recommendation, and it's a piece of junk. Sometimes it takes half a minute to turn on. There's always a two or three second lag from pushing a button on the remote to something happening. Streaming applications can take minutes to load. I thought there was something wrong with my set, but others report the same thing, and I went to a showroom and tested out one of their higher end models, and saw the same thing.

My LG, that's four years older than the TCL, still runs fine. No hiccups or issues at all. It cost twice as much, but you get what you pay for.

I'm ambivalent one way or another, but the way these standards generally work is the companies get together and hash out a standard based on various patents they hold, then form a pool to license them out under FRAND rules (Fair, Reasonable, Non-Discriminatory.)

I almost guarantee Acer's patents are "submarined," meaning they waited for the standard to come out, didn't say anything about their patents, *then* asked for licensing. I don't think they were included in developing the original 5G spec and are trying to shoehorn their way in.

That sounds like a lot.

That is not a lot.

The very first flat-screen TVs were plasmas that came out in that time frame, and they were super-expensive. Miles Finch brags about having one in Elf, that came out in 2003.