ares35

a lot of it is just using the name via licensing.. not made by them.

i half expect a hung jury. there's bound to be one maga on the jury that won't budge.

ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that's not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse... a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could 'shuck' it because i'm short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven't. hell, i haven't even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

these clowns have shifted so far to the right, they're in danger of falling off the edge of the earth.

tmobile (and sprint when it existed) and att suck around here. they are only built-up along the interstate. verizon (through acquisitions) and uscc were the legacy cellular providers. towers everywhere, in every small town and every other farm field in between. it'll make tmobile better here, but at the expense of higher prices across-the-board with one less player in a game with far too few left.

ting hasn't been the same since dish bought it from tucows.

star trek iv and v is what firmly cemented the idea that the even numbered trek films were better.

i kinda expect google to go all 'new coke' here and unveil a 'classic' search experience as their experiment in 'new google' to be more like ~~pepsi~~ bing continues to fail spectacularly. they've already got the 'web' tab, it just has to be rebranded and made the default on a clean page with a link to 'google ii' which will quietly vanish from existence in a few years and nobody will notice.

i remember getting my first one. it was an amazing time. played a lot of games back then. not so much now. i just can't keep up with the upgrades, so i just play older ones every now and then.

a modern equivalent would be moving from an old pc with hdd to a new one with nvme ssd.

small town, middle of nowhere in the upper midwest. an hour away from basically anything other than walmart and a few fast food joints, and more than our fair share of climate change-denying maga morons.

we have multiple locations with chargers.