We've been collecting physical movies for a long time, far longer than streaming services were a thing. For a long time my collection was predominantly Laserdisc of all things and my wife's was mostly VHS as her family had been recording off of TV for decades.

At this point DVD and Blu-Ray comprise most of our movie and TV collection but I still have well over 500 laserdiscs.

The only annoyance is physical storage. But with something like 2700 titles that isn't exactly surprising.

We got into physical media because for all intents and purposes once we have it, it's ours forever. Clearly the studios and content owners didn't like not being able to make money off of us again and again, but that's fine, we are not interested in being their ongoing revenue stream.

I have a feeling that streaming is going to backfire. People are going to become weary of trying to find a source for something and either they'll choose to go without or else they'll switch to physical media, and a lot of programming that was only on streaming will end up being essentially lost films. Lost in part because no one cares enough to try to find them, no fanbase. Sure, some will survive because they were good enough, but a lot of stuff that was entertaining but not renowned will just disappear.

I'm curious how road conditions will affect this. EVs are generally far heavier than their combustion-powered counterparts, and road conditions can play hell on cars that are heavy.

On top of that if charging infrastructure is slow to be built-out or if it's more easily damaged in conflicts, it may be hard to get drivers off of gasoline as a fuel that only requires a jug and a funnel to refuel with out in rural areas.

And it's actually more straightforward with courts. The systems for courts are regulated at the state level, even for county and municipal courts, at least in my state. That means pretty strict compliance with state-level rules and regulations and authorization by state-level officials for things like auditing and inspection. If a lower court fails to comply, that state entity can compel that lower level jurisdiction to install an entirely segregated computer network entirely air-gapped to the local entity's LAN, meaning that court employees would have to shuttle data between their local org's PC and the court PC, with the court PC connected to a court access switch and court firewalling router with a court private network link back to state resources. And historically they've been very behind the times, still using friggin' T1 lines in the 2020s, where 1.544Mb will cost as much as a 10Gb metro ethernet circuit.

State courts allow local entities to have court PCs that can be on the local org's network with connectivity back to court resources without that special air-gapped network only if the local org accepts auditing and building that connection out to specifications. Pen testing is not an unreasonable thing to do, and if it's too easy to break into the building to gain access to PCs or network equipment and too easy to get onto the court's network then there's going to be a problem.

No, but I would download a car.

There was also a time when Main Street business buildings featured business on the ground floor and residence on the next floor up, where the small business was a sole-proprietorship and the owner lived above the store. In other configurations it was a front/back divide, with the shop on the front facing the boulevard and the home on the back facing the side-street or the alley.

The modern shopping-center doesn't generally seem to cater to that, and cities don't seem to zone for that kind of arrangement much anymore.

It stuck me as someone watched Snowpiercer and saw the class-divide among the length of the train and thought, "that's a good idea, we should build a city like that!"

And in some ways for social control it makes sense, basically if no one is allowed outside without express permission and oversight and subject to summary execution if caught out there, then any attempt at revolution from the unwashed masses at the bottom of society would be very difficult to bring to bear. The city itself makes it difficult to advance from their end to the elites at the extreme other end, and if the elites maintain sufficient forces to attack anyone outside then there's not a practical way to get to the other end without outside assistance.

Because it's just so damn easy to commit that much law enforcement time to irresponsible electric bicycle riders.

I don't have a problem with this. Where I live, there are engine displacement and horsepower rules for older moped-type gas powered bicycles, laws that need to be updated for the e-bike phenomenon. Honestly I would class anything with the equivalent or more power of a typical 100cc moped as a motorcycle and start mandating registration.

Did you ever consider that perhaps police wanted much more definitive laws that cover things like licenses to make enforcement actually work?

Because AI doesn't require anything more than a text-prompt, while other methods of producing images or videos require individuals to apply their own creative efforts to the process.

There are lots of situations where a post-event or post-display scrutiny reveals something to fail to comply or to otherwise be in-violation.

The simple solution is to blacklist the individuals or companies that violate the rules if their violations are discovered, and to enable to event organizers a reasonably wide latitude in responding to complaints made and making their decisions based on how a given accused violator responds.

I have to disagree with this sentiment.

As an example, John Cage's 4'33" is not music. Even structured under the trappings of music, it is not music. There is no musical performance. To even call it music is laughable. Likewise Cage's As Slow As Possible is also not music. The latter is at least purposefully-made sound, but it the timescales of what a human being can directly observe to appreciate (and given that it was written by a human being for human beings) it is not music. Likewise duct-taping a piece of fruit to a canvas or paving a floor of a room with peanut butter isn't art either. Of course people are free to do these things but we should also be equally free to reject their works from even the set of what constitutes art.

We do seem to have hit a perfect storm, employers were basically insisting on college degrees for jobs that should not have required or even preferred a college degree, prices spiked because suddenly even to be an ordinary office worker or admin assistant or the like one basically had to have one, to the spiking prices dooming many who went to school with debt that their work would not readily let them pay back, to a revulsion against the system itself.

And this is all in the last say, 30 years. This happened very fast.

What poor schmuck of a ma-and-pa computer company did Acer include in their lawsuit within the Eastern District of Texas in order to bring their lawsuit in that particular court?

District-shopping has been a thing for a long time and that particular district has been popular with IP trolls.

It was probably invented by the mail-clerks at Exact Sciences. They were tired of the mishaps when receiving Cologuard return-samples whose patients didn't understand the packaging instructions.

I wonder if anyone's going to revive that old hacking tool, "back orifice".

Cheech and Chong could have benefitted from this technology.