Sadly while your logic sounds spot on, the reality is, that TV still does ACR (basically hashing each screen sometimes multiple times a second) and builds one hell of an accurate profile of everything you watch. Even if the source is HDMI. And it's still sold.

Food for thought, that HDMI cable to your dedicated device, it likely supports networking, so the TV has a path to the internet even if you don't connect an ethernet cable directly to it, or add in your wifi creds.

I've heard of traffic 'accidents' where a diabetic went hypoglycemic, passed out, and drove into other cars, pedestrians, etc. For some reason the news always reports it as a 'medical event', but the point is, people are killed by diabetics due to their diabetes way too often. It is an apt analogy. An idiot decides to drink and drive an puts people at risk. An idiot with diabetes fails to control their blood sugar and decides to drive, putting people at risk.

Yeah, it's easy to add more code to fix stuff that should be deleted. Just have the launcher code call your new code which bypasses all the old code. The old code can happily remain, it'll just never be called. No special skills required. If you look at the windows codebase, you'll see this technique everywhere.

Triggered or flamebait?
Hard to tell says Poe.
Either way you are dragged kicking and screaming into the present.

Welcome, friend.

Do not feed the troll.

Just like the raspberry pi foundation and arduino, companies will use open source to build and make their product popular. But they will throw those same developers in a ditch when commercial interests come knocking.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

And she's probably still a threat to national security!

Agreed, I had a 486DX2-50 from Dell. At best, I got it to boot into windows 3.1 on Dos 6.22 in about 25 seconds. That was with the HDD in DMA mode, and a heavily optimized config.sys and autoexec.bat. Unfortunately just the POST ate up 10 seconds.

The OP's claim of 3 seconds is ludicrous. Maybe on a modern VM emulating a 486?

They just sell direct
I mean they've got all the data they've got a brazilion computers to store and process that data.
What do they need flock for in the first place?

What's really scary is that we've reached a point where I can't tell if this is a legit suggestion or sarcasm... and that says a lot.

You had me until you said you live in the UK. As a Canadian, it pains me to say, but the UK is even stricter than Canada on this surveillance and violence prevention crap. Even if Ebay didn't demand you prove your age for wanting a pair of scissors with less than an inch long blade, the UK Post would likely demand ID before delivering the 'dangerous goods', to track the movement of 'nefarious instruments'... lol

In case my sarcasm wasn't evident. I feel your plight, and share in it. This nonsense needs to end.

I'm not seeing a paywall on the site. uBlock Origin must be doing something.

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.