Errr no, they very much do make technology. Quite a bit of it actually. Lots of what is marketed under Dolby Vision and Dolby Audio was developed by themselves and they spend a quarter of a billion dollar every year on R&D. Heck even the noise cancelling ability in video conferencing software along with music detection was largely developed by Dolby.

Just because you don't see their products on the shelves at Best Buy doesn't mean they don't make those either. They produce reference monitors for colour grading Dolby Vision content, they have an entire line of cinema audio speakers, and they make the rest of the cinema audio stack as well as a first party product, including multichannel amplifiers and audio pre-processors for Atmos content - a codec they also developed from the ground up.

The fact they sit on a bunch of related patents is just the nature of any R&D development.

Unfortunately, from a legal point of view, AOMedia hasn't done anything against Dolby. It's simply created a video compression codec. It doesn't use the codec, it just publishes documentation on how to use it.

It's arguable, I guess, that by claiming their codec is royalty free without mentioning Dolby's patents, AOMedia may have caused harm to Snapchat. But that would mean Snap would sue AOMedia, not Dolby.

Does this suck? Yes. But unfortunately you can't just sue someone on the basis of "who's the bad guy", you have to prove they caused damage to you in some way. And in AV1's case, not only did AOMedia not harm Dolby, they actually helped them, by creating a new patent royalty stream for them. Sucks, huh?

And he is a known idiot so there is good reason to doubt anything and everything he says and by extension the FBI.

If you look at the credentials of the people in charge of the country right now it's a who's who of has been bloggers and TV show hosts. This was on purpose. The voters gave us Trump and Trump wanted yes men.

Privately every single person in Trump's administration is terrified he's not going to get a third term because if he doesn't then they don't have any of that sweet sweet supreme Court granted presidential immunity and they're all wrong prison.

It's one of the things that makes the right wing so effective. The centrists are really just looking to put a feather in their cap and run some committee meetings. Keep things going smoothly. The right wing is so full crooks and lairs every single one of them is fighting for their freedom because if we ever start enforcing laws again they're all going to prison. Steve Bannon for example has been bailed out twice now by Trump and the Republican party.

Not just hardware, but drivers and software as well. How many Mac users run software with kernel level dumbfuckery like easy-anti-cheat or some anti piracy crap? How many Mac users update to a new GPU driver every two weeks? (Multiple of which have been subject to a recall / downgrade advice over the past few years).

What problems? If your system is going down every week then something is either fundamentally broken (maybe a good time to reinstall) or you have some dodgy hardware. Windows is by far less stable than the others, I'll give you that, but not to the "every single week" level of unstable.

Not dubious, just run of the mill, but also it goes beyond that. Most crashes you get are driver / hardware related. Apple does hardware qualification, users don't. Heck half the time not even the likes of Dell or HP test their systems properly, nor release proper drivers.

Also how many of those crashes are related to fast paced update of graphics drivers? NVIDIA releases a new game ready driver every few weeks, often buggy. Games are released in a dodgy state that often crash and due to their inclusion of kernel level fuckery frequently take out the system with it, or worse, have dodgy shit running in the background.

Apple doesn't just not have a mix of hardware, it avoids an entire subset of the most OS screwing field of PCs: Gaming.

Yes and no. Often it's driver related. That thing that users are doing may be as simple as running a set of buggy NVIDIA drivers, or a game with kernel level anticheat shit close to release date.

Its easy to blame the user here, but ultimately the user is doing normal user things. There's a lot of blame to be given to developers if a user is able to crash their system doing something they are supposed to be doing and should be expected to do.

(My last had crash to a forced restart was on a Helldivers II loading screen. That game is infamously buggy, and developers have patched quite a few crash related issues over the past year.

Nah, literally something that hasn't happened to 99.99% of users in the past 20 years.

Well there's your problem. Stop using Windows ME. It's very clear that if your windows is breaking to the point of needing a reinstall / repair and it's a "frequent occurrence" then my unfortunate sir, *you* are the problem. Not even TFA is talking about that.

The real world is full of all kinds of things that are harmful to kids, too. There's roads full of cars that can run you over, bodies of water you can drown in, poisonous plants and dangerous wildlife (oh, that says "Austria", not "Australia", I digress), etc. Seems kind of weird that when it comes to the internet though, parents' brains seem to shut off and they no longer realize it's supposed to be their responsibility not to give their kids devices with unrestricted internet access.

I suppose the difference is that it was never feasible to make real life child-safe, but since the internet is all computer, it can't be any harder than pressing a few buttons, amiright politicians?

We tried this with alcohol prohibition; it didn't work out so well. Turns out some people don't take too kindly to the government deciding which addictions they need to kick.

The iMac in that era was objectively a pretty awful computer. I had one of the indigo blue ones back in the day and it was dog slow running OS X. It came in pretty colors though, so there was that.

iOS is like this, too. It rarely completely crashes, but often just starts acting a bit squirrely and you've gotta reboot the device to clear up the issue.

I run my home media server on an old ASRock DeskMini (connected to an external hard drive array, obviously) that's running Windows 10. It literally is more reliable than our power company, because the only time it gets rebooted is during outages (and I'm too cheap to buy a UPS for it). Granted, that's doing nothing more than running the OS and a server application, but the belief that Windows isn't stable enough for such use cases is rather outdated.

I upgraded my gaming PC awhile back from 10 to 11. I honestly haven't noticed any difference in game performance. I get that around these parts Windows 11 is the devil (and I have a also friend who absolutely refuses to use anything newer than 10), but I really don't feel one way or the other about it. If anything, I'd say Windows 11 is kind of boring as far as OSes go - it's just kind of there.

And how do you plan to enforce this? If it's just a toothless guideline, you may as well skip the disingenuousness and say that no new legislation is necessary.

It did change with the internet, because unless your state firewalls off everything that doesn't follow the local laws, you're going to run into situations like with 4chan. Ironically, 4chan could possibly end up getting blocked in the UK for exactly this reason.

Now, this time I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt this time and not assume that you believe having a firewall blocking non-compliant sites is somehow a superior solution to placing age gates at the OS level, but damn if that's not the impression you're giving.

I didn't think anyone even still played with that vestigial feature held over from when this site was trying to be more like the social media big boys. This feels more like an honor than an insult, actually.

I'm laughing at one the highest ranking law enforcement officers in the USA getting his personal email hacked. Who is rooting for Iran?