Pirating doesn't help sustain the very thing being pirated, if you want a tangible rather than moralistic reason.
4K (Ultra HD) Blu-Ray is likely the last physical home video media generation to be produced. Disney has pulled physical out of the Asian market, Best Buy stopped releasing any physical media beside games, Target stopped selling them beside certain DVDs.
If you want any chance of actually having high quality releases continue it needs to be supported. An issue though is certain less mainstream releases in Ultra HD Blu-Ray can be rather pricey (if they get a release at all). However I still buy those I'm interested in since I don't want lower quality streaming-tier video to be the only option available in the future, apart from concerns about the volatile nature of online-only libraries (various of which have been wholly removed in the past when licensing/ownership changes).
In the longer JEDEC overview document[1] it explains that in the ideal 'direct' testing method retention testing is only performed after the endurance testing. Which is only after the drive has had its max spec'd TBW written to it.
While if the endurance testing would exceed 1000 hours an extrapolated approach can be used to stress below the TBW but using accelerated techniques (including capping the max writable blocks to increase wear on the same areas).
Which is less dramatic than the retention values seem at first and than what gets communicated in articles I've seen. Even in the OP's linked article it takes a comment to also highlight this, while the article itself only cites its own articles that contain no outside links or citations.
Just on the pervasive passive monitoring aspect, I think an under-discussed aspect of the time frame covered in the material of Snowden's leaks is that sites/services by and large wasn't using encrypted protocols (HTTPS).
So much could be intercepted back then because of this. It wasn't until 2010 that various large services—including Yahoo Mail and Facebook—got a kick in their ass by a whitehat browser plugin that allowed anyone on the same network to trivially hijack session cookies of others, stimulating an adoption of HTTPS[1] during 2011-2012.
By the time the Snowden leaks occurred in 2013 the trend was heading toward encrypted-by-default and governments were having to adapt.
I thought these “lawful intercept” organisations had their taps inside the data centers after https tsl to the user had already been terminated. And so the infamous ssl removed here slide from prism.
Like let’s say you have a proxy server like Nginx on a server with a public facing ip address and then it also has access to a private subnet where your application servers are running. A visitor to your website’s browser make a secure https connection the nginx server where https would be terminated and then it would proxy traffic in plain http over your internal private subnet to the app server. And your are in a five eyes country where your intelligence services took it on themselves to follow the nsa or fbis instructions and plug a network device into those private subnets of all the big service providers inside their datacenters that is configured in something like a promiscuous way so it receives all the packets for any device on the network. Then those packets somehow end up in a big nsa datalake.. or something along those lines
That's a fancy of way of saying "not using HTTPS" which may be what average incompetent shops were doing, but isn't using HTTP everywhere which is the security standard.
The fucking start menu used to be an actual windows component that opened instantaneously. It's a web app now, sometimes taking seconds to open.
I also noticed a lot of the time windows just ignores me double clicking on things in file explorer, leaving me to sit there wondering if I have to do it again.
Now that we're ranting, I wonder what's up with the right-click context menu in Windows 11 on my machines. It literally takes a noticeable fraction of a second (in the order of several hundred ms) for the menu with fewer than ten items to appear. (The first time might take around a second, I'd suppose due to disk I/O. But subsequent clicks also have a noticeable delay.)
All the computers with Windows 11 that are available to me are fairly similar so I don't know if it's just these particular software/hardware setups. But it seems absurd that a device capable of billions of operations per second even on a single core somehow takes hundreds of milliseconds to display a few menu items.
On my 5 year old work laptop it was so bad it was nearly unusable. I found that disabling the shell extensions they used to implement the new file explorer UI helped a lot with that.
They made the damned system volume regulator open with a visible delay now. You can click on it and observe it at 0 level, and then after some seconds it jumps to the actual position. After they threw out Win10 taskbar and replaced it with this rejected tablet atrocity in Win11, everything got much slower on it.
It was, and worked well with rtf. I vaguely recall it being better than notepad if you were for example looking at strings in binary files, something like that, I forget...
I often used it to convert unix style line endings to windows. Notepad choked on those, wordpad could load them easily, and just resaving them as a txt file converted them to windows line endings.
IIRC Wordpad was the only always-installed program which could open text files with Unix line endings and display them properly. Until at least Vista, Notepad would treat them as if containing a single line.
It's an amazing technical feat how they managed to introduce a graphical delay to it in Windows 10. I feel it actually took planning to work out how to introduce friction into easily the simplest conceivable app for no reason. It is a microcosm of everything that's wrong with Windows today.
I recall one of their earlier composites of the sun which was comprised of 90k (!) images and feel that's an acceptable approach to represent the detail and scope desired, yet with this skydiver shot I feel differently in that there is an original shot of the event that is an actual through-the-lens capture but it's not being used and instead the foreground element (the silhouette) is being masked and composited onto a much more detailed composite sun. It's effectively artwork now.
Like if a photo of Philippe Petit's WTC wire walking were instead masked and replaced with separately shot towers—it'd represent the event but technically not the actual snapshot in time it occurred, which kind of reduces the connection with the interesting concept at least for me.
I wonder what the venn diagram of end users who disable Javascript and also block cookies by default looks like. As the former is already something users have to do very deliberately so I feel the likelihood of the latter among such users is higher.
There's no cookies disabled error handling on the site, so the page just infinitely reloads in such cases (Cloudflare's check for comparison informs the user cookies are required—even if JS is also disabled).
On the second minute I had the AI World Clocks site open the GPT-5 generated version displayed a perfect clock. Its clock before and every clock from it since has had very apparent issues though.
If you could get a perfect clock several times for the identical prompt in fresh contexts with the same model then it'd be a better comparison. Potentially the ChatGPT site you're using though is doing some adjustments that the API fed version isn't.
> If I had to guess, it’s that some NGO found some UK-based IP addresses which weren’t captured by the block because they weren’t properly geolocated.
Ofcom's clarified contention is that the geoblock is unreliable, while the lawyer seems to be rebutting the original statements that they interpreted Ofcom as claiming no geoblocking was active ('remains accessible to UK users', 'was directly available to people with UK IP addresses (with and without a VPN)').
On Windows at least VLC has had better alternatives for the past 20 years, both feature and UI wise. I had frame-stepping hotkeys back in the mid-00s with Korean video players. These days I use the currently maintained fork of MPC-HC which similarly has this.
On Mac it wasn't until the mid-10s that I found a decent player.
4K (Ultra HD) Blu-Ray is likely the last physical home video media generation to be produced. Disney has pulled physical out of the Asian market, Best Buy stopped releasing any physical media beside games, Target stopped selling them beside certain DVDs.
If you want any chance of actually having high quality releases continue it needs to be supported. An issue though is certain less mainstream releases in Ultra HD Blu-Ray can be rather pricey (if they get a release at all). However I still buy those I'm interested in since I don't want lower quality streaming-tier video to be the only option available in the future, apart from concerns about the volatile nature of online-only libraries (various of which have been wholly removed in the past when licensing/ownership changes).