The hacked entity in question was an out-of-date ColdFusion website. As late as 2015, ColdFusion was not a good idea for this subject matter.

Exactly this.

The DVR setup using TCP/IP tuners like the Silicon Dust HDHomeRun series (which I have) is very easy, not quite 1-button, but close. It scans for the Tuner, creates a "DVR" and then scans for over the air channels and populates a list automatically. Then, it downloads the guide data automatically. The quality of the guide data so far as not been bad, not too many errors, but it only goes about a week into the future so far.

The Plex Pass might give you more than you expect, free lifetime DVR guide data as mentioned above is but one of the things the Pass gets you. Here's a quick list off the top of my head:

1. Registration with their proxy servers in case forwarding is needed for double-NAT situations, a nice feature every now and then.

2. Free OTA DVR guide data (as mentioned above, probably what, a $20.00/year value or so?).

3. Access to paid client binaries like for phones or tablets (such as iOS or Android). Some clients are free, like PC/Mac clients.

4. About 200-300 streaming TV channels, IPTV like HULU/FUBO/Sling, etc. It's the same slop you get on cable TV besides the premium stuff HBO, etc and live Sports, mostly. You know, 24-hour History Channel (but not the actual History Channel, like a "best of" thing.

So, the "Lifetime Plex Pass" gets you IPTV, worth about $50 a month, and Guide Service, worth about $20 a year, you're saving about $620 per YEAR. For IPTV and/or DVR service, that's not too bad comparatively. But now, it looks like the new price point is right up there - it looks like they have priced it so that unless things get more expensive (a likely possibility!) you're just about at the break-even point.

Also, just so no one thinks I'm a biased rabid drooling fan, here's a few of the things I DON'T like about Plex:

1. Seems to go "offline" or have internet connection issues related to the server being available. Sometimes the proxy bridging servers (mentioned above) help this situation, but not always.

2. Transcoding and speed issues related to that. Unfortunately, it seems like Plex tries to aggressively transcode EVERYTHING, even when it shouldn't or doesn't need to. There are some settings that affect this or are supposed to but there are still some issues with it (there are some good Reddit threads on this).

3. Customer Service just seems mostly like a search engine for some things that people have had issues with, and somehow never got responses or resolutions to. I hate tech support threads or forums that exactly describe the problem that I am having, but don't have a solution or any published answer or followup. "At that point the poster suffered a fatal coronary?"

OK, that's about it. I just wanted to comment about the mixed feelings I had since the price was going up. FWIW, I bought mine back in 2021 and back then it was just under $100.00, I show $95 and change, probably with tax. As I recall it went to $100, $110 or $120, then $150. Then I think it jumped to $250 where it's at now. It's still a VERY good deal until July 1, 2026, at which point it will become a FAIR deal, unless things change.

Note: I am not an employee or affiliated with Plex in any way, but I'm a reasonably happy customer. I've been using it now for about 6 years with my own local video server, a local TV Tuner (Silicon Dust HDHomeRun QUATTRO) and TV viewing PC, which will record 4 OTA channels at once. I have had very few issues, as I said it was beguilingly easy to get set up initially, very simple configuration and maintenance, and most things seem to work pretty well in general.

Mr.T

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.

At least it's not more Star Wars slop.

Apparently, the elite also own all the newline characters.

Pica FTW!

*glances at Enron

Actually, that sounds truly brilliant. Let's raise the legal requirements so that happens...

Only if you say it's OK elsewhere.

To train an LLM during flight.

a) Don't be a dumbass

b) Keep multiple copies of your password and critical files

c) SEE A

VeraCrypt is a particularly strong full-disk encryption, although you don't hear much of companies using it. However, BitLocker security issues keep getting mentioned and it looks like VeraCrypt fixed a number of theirs. However, code quality seems to be listed as unclear on some sites. Not sure how true that actually is though.

BestCrypt is another, but I'm not happy they permit fragile encryption schemes, as those could potentially be used by the software as standard for something important. Being commercial software, that wouldn't be easy to check.

BitLocker seems to be a typical Microsoft failure in terms of what it does, used only because it's Microsoft and that gives CTOs and CFOs someone to blame.