From what I've heard, they scan for open WiFi networks and auto-connect to upload data. They don't tell you that they are doing this.

My son went through high school having been assigned a total of three whole-book reading assignments. Most of his reading assignments were newspaper articles, short stories, or single chapters of books. When I went to high school, I was expected to read at least two books every summer, then several more per English class.

It's a choice made by teachers. My younger daughter had one teacher had her class read four books throughout the year. It was middle school, so they were shorter young adult books, but she had read more than my son did throughout all of high school in one class.

Best I've ever used is the old Syntrillium CoolEditPro, before Adobe screwed it up in the later versions of Audition.

Second best is Live. It's fairly intuitive for doing basic things. It gets iffy when doing more complicated track layouts, but all DAWs do.

It's competition. Keeps everyone on their toes. So now you have Boeing, SpaceX and Blue Origin all competing for contracts. Having one vendor is how you get Boeing's Starliner budget blowing up by 50% and nine years overdue. Why execute when the government will just keep paying you money as there's nowhere else to go? Keep in mind, most of the companies that built the old space capsules, and the space shuttle, are all part of Boeing now.

Then why support said hardware longer than any other cell phone manufacturer? They could have been just like Motorola or Samsung or Blackberry and provided two years of software updates then abandoned it. Seven years later my 11 Pro is on the latest version of iOS. Crap my 5S got an out-of-band security update a year after they dropped official support for it entirely. That's ten years after it was released, and seven years after they stopped selling it. Here's another fun anecdote. I bought a dirt-old $50 Intel iMac with a firewire port to play with some equally old firewire audio gear. Plugged in a network cable, started up holding CMD-OPT-R, and it happily connected to Apple's server, downloaded and installed the latest version of MacOS X for itself. This thing is old enough to vote and Apple still will install an OS on it.

Let's be honest, you're going to be using a Linux box for that stuff, even if Apple still sold a big tower with a bunch of slots.

It's funny people keep bringing this up. After seven years I'm still using my iPhone 11 Pro and see no need to replace it. In the same time frame my coworker has gone through two Galaxy S phones. The first hasn't had an OS update in four years. The second isn't going to get the latest OS update, so he's looking to upgrade again.

Cell phones used to have a usable life of a year or two. Motorola would completely stop supporting Razers after two years. You might get two years of device support from Blackberry, maybe a bit more if you were using their server software. Nokia was a bit better, Samsung was a bit worse. Apple supporting software updates for five to seven years on consumer devices is unheard of.

And that was a design criteria for JPEG-XL. It's designed to recompress existing JPEGs without loosing much fidelity. I've played around with it and it's pretty good. It's very source-dependent, if a JPEG is already poorly compressed it will look worse. A good quality JPEG, say from a phone, recompresses nicely. You have to blow up the image quite a bit to notice any difference, hence it's fine for general web use. My current standard for lossy compression is AVIF, and I'm seriously considering switching over to JPEG-XL once the format settles a bit.

So "Good enough for general web use" is crap? Do you think everything should be sent as deflate compressed WQUXGA PNGs?

That's what every country does. Al-Jazeera doesn't push content about Brazil. The BBC doesn't push content about Lithuanians. French film companies don't produce movies about Korean ex-pats living in Japan, and Japanese film companies don't produce dramas about winemaking in Bordeaux.

People can watch whatever they like. The "Made in Canada" laws are ridiculous. The CBC wanted SCTV to produce "specifically Canadian" content when it switched to that network, so they cooked up Bob and Doug McKenzie. As if a Canadian-produced TV show featuring mostly Canadian actors wasn't Canadian enough.

Microsoft doesn't care about desktops any more. They barely care about servers. There is no growth in those markets. You can run SQL Server and most of .NET on Linux now, and host the apps on Kestrel. They want you to switch everything over to Linux, then put all of that on Azure, because, even for them, Linux VMs are cheaper to run than Windows VMs.

What really matters is how much air the filter can move. Those little jobbers that sit on a table and run a fancy looking computer chassis fan are almost useless. I saw a guy on Youtube tape four big, square, pleated HEPA furnace air filters into a box shape, then tape a box fan on top of the box facing downwards. It sounds hacky, but he did the calculations on the MERV ratings of the filters and the air velocity of the box fan, and it checked out. After running for an hour in a dusty room, the filters were already pretty dirty. Ugly, but it gets the job done.

I've noticed when commenting on very well run public systems, nobody brings up huge countries. China, Russia, the US, etc... It's always fairly small countries. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but it seems like the best run organizations are generally fairly small. Small startup companies. Small or medium-sized cities. Or, at a national scale, small countries. It seems the answer to bad management is to keep things as small as possible.

But what does that have to do with Disneyland, which is in California?

You put ALL of your data on one cloud provider with no local backup? Loosing that data is YOUR fault. It's a few thousand dollars for a half dozen hard drives to store 50TB. Or heck, 50 100GB M-DISC Blu-Rays for less than that. That's what the Disney Imagineering sound department does - M-DISC backup, live copy on file servers, then secondary cloud backup.

It always sounds like a lot of money to the bean counters until you explain to them the station probably spent tens of millions of dollars producing that content, and all it takes is a corporate meltdown or technical SNAFU and all of it is gone.