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Comment Re:When Windows 10 ended support (Score 1) 51

If this was about installing Linux ISOs, then yes, Blu Ray would be outdated. In reality, this is driven by the large collections of HD Japanese animation that has historically been sold on Blu-Ray disks. It would be a bit like someone who wants a CD drive reader to play old music they bought, but it's much more widespread in Japanese culture to have these, and it largely hasn't migrated to another medium. Spotify was able to replace music CDs because it's convenient, but anime has a few differences. First, Anime files are much much larger (gigabytes) so you can't store a library on phone storage. Second, the huge file sizes make them inconvenient to re-download every time you want to watch them (like streaming services tend to do). Streaming services will often send lower quality versions e.g. 720p instead of the 4GiB 4K version people are used to watching on the Blu-ray disk.

Lastly, while using a phone might have similar sound quality to a computer or TV, the same cannot be said about the screen size! For watching on laptops, which don't usually have cellular connections, having a physical media can be more convenient when traveling.

In Japan, it's quite common for the so-called "Otaku" to have entire shelves filled with boxed copies of these Blu-ray disks for various anime series. In the west we tend to view the lower quality streaming version or just pirate it, as the culture around buying Blu-ray disks for our anime/movies doesn't exist in the same way, mainly because the prices are a bit too high for our market tastes. (If they were around $3-4 per season instead of $20+, I think they would sell much more in the west.)

Could they use USB? Yes if you pirate them, but almost all the "legit" ones were sold as Blu-ray, not USB sticks.

Comment Maybe (Score 1) 180

Everyone is a bit unusual and unique. It used to be that mental disorders were serious conditions. Now every minor deviation is a mental disorder. I have mixed feelings, it does seem like we overdiagnose, but it also means people have better access to psychoactive medications that can help them. I would rather we admit what we are actually doing, which is to optimize ourselves using psychoactive medications.

Comment Let me explain (Score 4, Interesting) 76

Net neutrality does some important things. 1.), it protects p2p traffic which isps have a history of discriminating against. 2.) It allows hosting a business off a residential connection and for the case of Verizon ib particular 3.) it prevents mobile isps from discrimnating against laptops (which they currently do to boost contract phone sales).

Comment Erm? (Score 4, Informative) 74

If they hold the copyright, they can change the license and offer new versions under a different, non-GPL license. The only thing in the courts opinion that I see as problematic is this: 5. In May 2018, Neo4j USA released Neo4j EE version (“v”) 3.4, which they continued to offer under an open-source license; however, they replaced the AGPL with a stricter license, which included additional restrictions provided by the new Commons Clause. First MSJ Order 3. The Commons Clause prohibited the non-paying public from engaging in commercial resale and certain commercial support services. Id. This stricter license is referred to as the “Neo4j Sweden Software License.” Id. The license is not open source. We have long held that restrictions on commercial use render a license non-open source.

Comment lol (Score 3, Interesting) 67

Instead of admitting that thermodynamics doesn't work at a quantum level, lets just pretend that time flows backwards so we can explain the fact that entropy can spontaneously decrease in a quantum system (which violates the laws of thermodynamics). Thermodynamics arise from a statistical property, it's not an intrinsic rule that that governs the universe, and time is not in fact going backwards.

Comment Re: We know. (Score 1) 163

The problem is that "processed food" is not well defined. There are likely specific types of processing or processes foods that contribute to this effect. We already know that yogurt is ultra processed, but is inversely associated with mortality. Evidence against ultra processed food is extrodinarily weak pseudo-science. Real science requires controlled experiments, not surveys.

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