No… it’s like picking up those apples, shipping them across the country, and then charging customers a delivery fee. Which is perfectly reasonable because time and fuel cost money.

Plex helps you (and others) stream from your library pretty brainlessly. Sure there are other options, but all of them are more complicated.

#2 ;)

There are 4 models of minivan being sold currently. Anyone trying to fit 3 car seats or 7 people into a vehicle and looking for a new car pretty much gets those 4 options and that’s it.

Generally you’re right but Logic 101 and Obi wan Kenobi should’ve taught us by now that absolute statements like yours are bogus.

In addition to the curtain being torn away “cultural events” like GoT would require people to feel connected and everyone in charge seems to be doing their level best to tear us all apart.

… and exactly 2 weeks later modders will have figured out how to get their hands on the yummy free unlimited data inside it.

Has no one mentioned shucking yet? I’ve had 8 shucked drives in my server for 5yrs now and the motherboard died before any of my drives did.

Buy western digital external drives (MyBook and Passports) to tear them apart for the white-label drives on the inside. No warranties after you start using them (unless you save the enclosures to send them back) but they’re essentially the same drive as the red label NAS drives for about half the price.

All storage prices are insane in the current market but if you’re careful and test the drives before you use them (since that’s when you usually need the warranty) then you shouldn’t have a problem. Just be aware you’re either going to need to use the “kapton tape trick” or buy “SAS drive adapters” from your online store of choice for about $10 apiece to allow the drives to power on outside of the enclosure.

lol how much have you been paying them?

Ah, you’re right. Don’t know how I missed that part but it at least means my statements were a bit myopic compared to the point he was trying to make.

Garbage in, garbage out. COVID and screens were just accelerators that could’ve been managed and incorporated if we hadn’t been cutting the education budget to the bone for the last half dozen decades.

Teachers are worse quality, infrastructure is worse, and now the products of that steady decline are sending their kids (or their kids) back into a degraded system to show its “value” once again.

Anyone with sense saw this coming when they did the same thing in Australia and the UK but I otherwise agree with your point. I think this is a very calculated move.

When the deadline gets here in a month, 80% of the group that would’ve migrated out of disgust won’t be affected because they just use Discord for group voice chats anyway, and the competition isn’t ready. The rest have been trained to put their personal info out there to anyone who asks for it. And, when (not if) they eventually roll out “IDs for Everyone”, the outrage won’t be nearly as detrimental to their bottom line because it’s already happened before.