> Meanwhile, H.264 has dedicated hardware decoders in world+dog devices, including ancient ones.

Ancient ones, yes, but most devices sold in the past five years have AV1 *decode* support.

Hardware with AV1 *encode* is still pretty rare but a fair number of up-market chips from the past few years have it.

What we mostly care about here is the $20 amtel or mediatek devices sold today, and those are fine.

Netflix can support the older devices with H.264 as long as it makes more sense to pay the patent license fees than to drop support for old devices.

It won't be long before there are no devices that the manufacturer still supports that can't decode AV1 in hardware. Not that most end-users even know their device went EOL and now a potential liability.

Given that Netflix has native apps on most of these systems it should be straightforward to serve the non-patented stream to any device that can play it well.

> They don't do backups at those outfits?

We really need Federal government backups to be centralized at the National Archives.

Both so one expert team can make sure it's done right, instead of hundreds of teams with questionable experience and track records attempting to do it right.

And /also/ so when one agency goes, "whoopise, I guess we deleted the evidence of our crimes!" there is recourse.

Right now, the prosecutor just goes, "shucks, I guess we don't have a case then. Better fire some leaf-node IT contractor."

No, BSOD.

I wouldn't hold my breath ...

My view is: that battle has been lost, for a long time now ...
Bloat is here to stay ...

Don't get me wrong, I wish you were right though.

Steve Lehto has a good video about this.

In Michigan the Lemon Law applies to problems that 'reduce the value to the consumer'.

Some people are attempting to return their cars over these popup ads. IIRC it was GM that was much more aggressive but I might have that detail wrong.

And also, vehicles will become more expensive because car manufacturers will be incentivized to produce larger vehicles that have higher profit margins. And those vehicles are also much more dangerous to pedestrians, though I understand that "being a pedestrian" is considered a subversive anti-American action nowadays.

This pattern keeps re-emerging.

Online payment systems want your bank login details.

Facebook was infamous for scraping your IMAP account for contact information.

etc.

The implications for security are so severe I wouldn't mind if this were illegal, but certainly it should be legal for banks or cell providers to terminate online accounts of people who share their credentials, no matter if - or especially if - they are with other large corporations. How many times has T-Mobile been hacked in the past two years?

If an account holder wanted to download a data export and upload that to another provider I don't really care so much. It's the near mandatory sharing of credentials that is just such a terrible habit to normalize.

And yes, greybeards, we know you've never heard of apartment rental agencies only accepting Venmo for rent.

> So you can drive it but you cannot look at it?

Is there a difference between riding on a rocket and giving Russia the technical knowledge to build a thousand of them?

Personally I think Russia could figure it out if they wanted to but that's not why the rules are in place.

> Was he just being a rocket geek?

90% likely but the 10% difference is why there are rules that cannot be broken.

He signed up for obeying the rules, so it was a dumb move.

> "conserve energy! Ditch your tungsten! Go LED!" ... or the Planet will die in Hellfire!

( "you may be in a psyop when..." )

FWIW I replaced the warm white LED's in one quarter of my rooms with incandescents last week. Turns out current LED's contribute to diabetes.

It's been 20 years since I switched to CFL's and LED's and I was genuinely surprised how different (and really good) it feels to sit under a 200W incandescent.

The crazy thing is 20 years ago my lighting usage was over 2KW for my house whereas my entire house is now 1.4KW, typically, but the electricity bill has quadrupled while the usage fell in half so really it's an 8x.

Hence my investment in solar infrastructure. The society is collapsing in slow-mo; the AI datacenters are just exacerbating the problem of not being able to scale. They framed Nixon for impeachment over Project Independence, so this isn't an accident.

If this were a factory that needed huge amounts of water but there wasn't enough water for the factory the permit would simply be denied.

Notice how AI, datacenters, and electricity gets a special exception to the societal norms.

Partially it's the transhumanists who have a religious fervor in bringing about their AGI God, but part of it is just dumb bureaucrats who can't understand how anything, including Econ 101, works. Or they're just bribed, which happens to be a highly profitable technique.

I live in Ottawa, Canada.

We would certainly be at a disadvantage if Russia was able to copy rockets that constantly blew up shortly after launch.

Now US manufacturers can go even more all-on on the stupidly-large vehicles they sell domestically (because of higher profit margins.)

Of course, it means they won't be able to sell anything in Europe or Asia.

If you can get your AI-powered robots to commit your war crimes for you, I think you get out of jail free?