These guys know how it works. They don’t “fly” anyone anywhere. They have low paid lackeys available in any and all of the areas they operate whose job it is specifically to hang around in courthouses and defend their tickets. It’s not like they drop everything and bundle an executive on a plane to go to Podunk, Missouri or whatever to argue about a one-off ticket.

In my case this outfit only operates in our state, to my knowledge. They wouldn’t have to go far.

It doesn’t have to. They send a representative from the camera company whose job it is to show up in court and rationalize their bullshit at the judge. I know this because I actually had to go through this process once, many years ago, to fight a clearly fraudulent ticket from one of these damn fool things in our local downtown.

The weird brand names are because Amazon requires the products you sell to have a “brand” in order to provide them plausible deniability that your product is not generic OEM stuff from China. So the sellers of generic Chinese OEM stuff have adapted by making up nonsensical brands and registering the letter jumble they come up with as a trademark. Now Amazon can claim everything on their site is a “brand name” product, see? It’s all totally above board.

What you’re describing is the LTSC IoT editions, which are what I run on my Windows boxes.

https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links

Clarkson was a step ahead of us this time.

Contacting Meryl shortly before that fight requires getting her CODEC frequency, which is not told to you directly in-game. It’s on the gameplay screenshots on the back of the box.

Lest we forget, this is the man who infamously required you to have access to the CD case in order to progress the plot in his game.

Consumer burnable CD and DVD disks often have an astonishingly short storage life, especially if they are not stored very carefully. They’re not an archival medium. Competently pressed commercial (aluminum) disks meanwhile have a storage life that is near as makes no difference to infinite provided they are not physically damaged in some way.

I’ve got tons of burned disks of pirated old games from the early aughts that don’t read anymore. This is highly annoying from a preservation standpoint as I can’t get them to play despite possessing them on disk, and they’re now unpopular enough that they’re likewise difficult to impossible to pirate again.

Who the hell has a built-in CD player or even a BD-player in this time and age?

The answer is nerds. The specific answer is the type of nerds who would buy this sort of thing.

You’re looking at one right now, in fact — I have an internal 5.25" Blu-Ray burner in the lone singular bay in my current case. (The machine with the conga line of nearly every type of floppy drive ever created down the front of it lives in the basement.)

Which problems would those be, exactly? Because I can still play Combat or Yar’s Revenge or even history’s most godawful version of Pac Man on my Atari VCS right now if I wanted to. That’s a 44 year old game at the time of writing, for anyone not keeping score at home.

Go try to play, I don’t know, Babylon’s Fall on your PS4 right now and let me know how that works out for you. Or try to track down a copy of Demons Age if you missed it when it came out.

Just so long as you stay away from modern TCGs, anyhow.

For similar reasons I just flat out haven’t bought a console since the PS3, except for the Switch. And even that I kind of regret. I really don’t see any appeal anymore. The PS4, PS5, and various 'Bones are just cut down, locked down and DRM laden PCs anyway. There are no interesting architectural quirks anymore, the content and even input methods are all basically interchangeable now, and thus there’s no reason to not just play on the PC I already have aside from exclusivity pigheadedness from Sony or Microsoft.

You can warm your hands until you reach thermal equilibrium, and/or use the boiling water to cool your system by allowing the water vapor to escape into space!

*Rocket fuel and other launch costs not included.

And do what with it? You can’t use heat to do work without there being temperature differential in the system. Maintaining that differential requires keeping your cold side cold, which means it still must dissipate its heat. In space you would have exactly the same problem doing that as just radiating that heat in the first place. Once your system reaches equilibrium between its hot and cold sides, no work could be done with that heat energy. It’s just a radiator with extra steps.

If capturing heat energy to do something with it did not require sinking the waste heat from that selfsame process someplace, every satellite in orbit would already be covered in Peltiers or similar.

No. In the vacuum of space there is no convection. The only maintenance free(ish) method of discharging waste heat is to radiate it as infrared, which is not terribly effective compared to terrestrial heat management systems where we have the benefit of a big old atmosphere to dump heat into.

Radiative cooling into space is seriously weaksauce. The amount of heat an object can dissipate in such a manner is described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Law. It would take nearly a square meter (0.84 m² according to my admittedly possibly shaky math) of perfectly ideal thermally conductive black body radiator material to dissipate the 640 watts of waste heat from just one datacenter style GPU at 70° C.

A square meter of heatsink. For one GPU.

Your radiator heat sink can’t be shaped like a terrestrial one, either, with stacked fins providing a high surface area in a small volume. That’s because a black body radiator is not only an ideal emitter of heat into a vacuum, such as it is, but also an ideal receiver. Your heat sinks will have to be wide and flat so they don’t radiate most of their heat right back into other parts of themselves, and this also precludes putting your equipment near other pieces of equipment so they don’t radiate their heat into each other.

A single server rack in an AI data center will consume and thus have to dissipate something like 80 killowatts, i.e. 80,000 watts, which even if you had access to some type of physics-experiment-land totally ideal radiator material with an emissivity of exactly 1 would require a 102 square meter radiator just to dissipate that same 70° C. And no part of it could be baking in the sun, nor be influenced thermally by any adjacent servers. In reality it’d have to be even larger, because such a perfectly ideal material does not exist.

TL;DR: Getting rid of heat in space is extremely difficult and in fact is one of the biggest challenges of spacecraft design. Thus putting massive heat generating computers in space is a self-evidently moronic idea as cooling them would be effectively impossible.

Lifetime = console maker lifetime. What happens when a console maker is bankrupt?

In a sane universe, the law would be arranged such that when the rightsholding entity for a piece of media no longer exists and/or is no longer distributing it, copying and redistribution of it for personal and private use (i.e. what the industries have conditioned us to believe is “piracy”) would be legal. Anything out of print, so to speak, should be fair game. Notably this is already how it works with things like trademarks. If a company doesn’t actually exercise their ownership of them, they lose them.

This is more or less the basis of the abandonware movement, the current legality of the situation be damned.

Corpos: “Hey, you can’t copy that. We own it! If you just copy it, we won’t be able to profit from it!!!”

Okay, so sell me one.

Also corpos: “No.”

Not without taking the phone apart, which is probably beyond the capabilities and/or motivation possessed by most people.

This was possible with my old Galaxy S Relay, for instance, because all the keycaps were the same size and shape except for the space bar and a couple of the modifiers. Once you got the keyboard separated from the bezel you could fiddle around with it as you saw fit. But not, just to name one example, with my Blackberry Priv because the keyboard had that godawful capacitive touch capability and the keycaps were bonded to the switchboard somehow.

Yes, but then manufacturers switched back to LCD screens for cost purposes but the notification LED remained conspicuously absent.

Textra can still flash your LED (if you have one) in custom colors depending on which contact just texted you.

I mean, sure. I have tons of rare knives, too. But a PC is a commodity item; it’s easily susbtituted with any other which is really the whole point of the architecture to begin with.

I think the Steam Machine is neat. I’m still not paying $3000 for one.

Correct. They’re not even selling you a physical machine at that price. They’re just allegedly selling you their place in the preorder lottery for the opportunity to buy one.

I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly be that desperate.