I saw them a couple of times in Firefox, but it seem uBlock Origin has had its definitions updated.

They already give you a big, scary warning if you try to open a .lnk file downloaded from the Internet. People do it anyway.

I'm not talking about media container formats. The MP4 container format is based directly on the MOV format and covers the most common cases, and as you mentioned, the EBML-based MKV container format deals with a few corner cases.

The Quicktime framework let you do media decoding, encoding, transcoding and playback, as well as stuff like bitmap scaling, sample rate conversion, and all sorts of other stuff. And you could use "Quicktime components" to add support for additional codecs or other functionality to every application that used the Quicktime framework. If you had a Quicktime Pro license (fairly cheap, or you could use one of the well-known Apple Sales keys if you didn't want to pay), you could use Quicktime Player to do a bunch of basic video editing tasks.

Microsoft DirectShow was probably the closest equivalent, but it never got the same market penetration and third-party support. Now there's no real replacement.

Quicktime used to be the standard framework for media playback, transcoding, etc. It had a complex API, but it held up pretty well for at least fifteen years. But Apple just lost interest in it, stopped updating it, and it sort of fell into obscurity. There's no real modern replacement that covers all the same cases.

Dog-eat-dog company culture is a trademark feature of the USA. Everything has to be a competition, you have stuff like stack ranking where you sack the bottom 20% every year, so everyone does their best to try and push someone else down to avoid being the bottom of the stack. This cancer started at GE and spread from there. You can't blame India for that.

Canadian content can be good, too. I loved watching Corner Gas.

Yeah, there's also a feature for automatically restarting unresponsive instances that depends on US-East-1 no matter where you deploy. It basically works by regularly sending heartbeats between a service running at US-East-1 and your instance. If it doesn't see any heartbeats for a while, it thinks your instance is unresponsive and restarts it. When US-East-1 went down, every instance with this feature enabled was constantly being restarted, no matter where it was deployed. That contributed to a lot of web sites going down.

US-East-1 is the original AWS region, and they just keep hacking stuff onto it and never clean it up properly. The networking is a mess that no-one understands. On top of that, it's the default region when creating an instance, so a lot of people don't change it and end up with their stuff running there for no good reason. Never deploy anything to US-East-1 if you want it to be reliable.

If it's attached to a university, it can still be useful for people to learn to write software targeting supercomputers. Dealing with the distributed memory and extreme parallelism requires a different approach to designing software. You don't need the fastest supercomputer in the world to use as a training setup.

Does it not ever occur to you that we in the US might actually LIKE/ENJOY the transportation system we have?

There seems to be plenty of demand for more transport alternatives in the US. For the project in California, that we're talking about here, two thirds of the population are in favour. The issue isn't that people don't want it, the issue is that you're seemingly incapable of building it.

You prioritize the 'state'. And we prioritize the person.

No you don't, you prioritise profits over everything. This is demonstrated by your incredibly weak worker protection, weak privacy laws, insane healthcare system that just funnels money into the insurance cartel, and numerous other things. You don't prioritise people at all.

Isaac Asimov wasn't trying to design a blueprint for the future when he wrote The Fun They Had.

NeXTStep did allow you to write image filters to add support for image formats to all applications. Mac OS X inherited this feature, although I think it stopped working at some point. I released free Mac OS X image filters for HP 49G GROB and Sony PlayStation TIM formats back in the day.

Because the US is either uniquely corrupt or uniquely incompetent.

High-speed rail was pioneered by France and Japan. Well, you can say they're both countries with proud engineering culture that felt they had something to prove. Then Germany got on board. Well they're another country known for engineering. Fair enough.

But now you have China, known more for bureaucracy and corruption than anything else, with the most extensive high-speed rail network in the world. Spain also has an extensive high-speed rail network, and they aren't one of the first countries you think of when it comes to capital works, either.

The US has no excuse. The only reason the US can't do it is corruption and/or incompetence.

Blocking the sun to counter environmental damage is the plot of Highlander 2, not the Matrix.

I would have thought it was more because Prometheus gave people forbidden knowledge. They're trying to imply that the AI will reveal things that people wouldn't otherwise know.