It was from AliExpress indeed, but to be clear, it was a Blu-ray reader and CD DVD writer.

This explains why my kids always compliment me on my age.

To be more exact, they typically say: "dad, grow up!"

Having German in-laws through my wife's mother's side, and having been in Germany often, I think you're confounding the English of people in service jobs and alike with the general population. Especially the elderly don't have much practise with English and will thoroughly appreciate foreigners who (try to) speak German.

The worst are the French though, even though it has changed somewhat in this millennium, their dubbing is keeping them quite strongly away from the English track... Contrary to the Scandinavians, Portuguese and Dutch, for instance. Italians actually tend to speak English better than the French, perhaps it's because the French know they can holiday on a nice tropical island where the population speaks French (DOM/TOM), the Italians, not so much...?

If you want to communicate with others around the world, you should go for Spanish or Chinese. I have no idea why you picked German. I'd have never invested more time in German after school if it weren't for my wife and her family.

But you do know that for about 20 bucks you can get an external USB 3 Blu-ray RW drive, right?

First: they don't want to be associated with you for posting that? Showing true colours indeed.

Second: let's be honest, they did you a favour.

Then there's a person called Spac Eman born in March 75 who's sad their IRL name seems to be taken, even with their birth month and year tracked on...!

And what about all real name collisions like Don Johnson? Or this Michael Rowe who does software, is typically known by this first name abbreviation and can't take the name MikeRoweSoft anywhere...?

Close enough to the real deal for me is the Android hp48 emulator. Which I still can't do much more with then regular calculator stuff, because I didn't have (the money for) one during my studies, so never learnt to program it. RPN is practical though.

Thanks for the info and the link, that was well worth the read, veel interesting!

Are you saying that when this bubble bursts, we'll have crypto bros hype crypto again, so they can make a buck with their cheaply gotten but energy hungry GPGPUs? Fsck what a nightmare...

In Switzerland, there's very little corruption, similarly, because it's all legalized...

Philips Semiconductors are now called NXP, also spun off. And Philips also founded TSMC. How the mighty have fallen...

In England, crossing a road with a safe middle section, he'd look to the left, see nothing, walk into the street and get instantly hit by a car from the right... His last words might well be: Scheibe! I hat to haven looking ze ozer wey, und ze Car was right to run me over...

Switzerland won't ever get that far in the near future, because electricity generation is around 60+% hydro and 30% nuclear. (Plus 5 percent solar / renewable.) From that point, getting 50% of electrical power from nuclear would require tremendously increased consumption for the Swiss to enter into the green side of your list, which isn't desirable for obvious reasons. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

During my engineering classes, the example was made time and again, that NTSC was accumulating a specific drift, which got cancelled on PAL. Now I was too late to the States to see any NTSC TV in action, it was all already digital, but plenty of acquaintances have, and all agreed that "our (analogue) TV is better than their (analogue) TV" which may or may not have been the case, for this and or other reasons.

What I do know of a friend who worked in video editing, back in the day for MTV, was that for broadcast, everything had to be smashed such that all TVs could show the image. He gave me a VHS of Aerosmith once, saying the quality of that was going to be way beter... He couldn't bear to watch his work on broadcast TV.

Redhat makes money selling support. They pushed Systemd. Makes sense. No one could push back well enough. Here we are.