https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDU_Txk06tM

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.

Handy note: This is real. Something very much like it, anyway.

Tank Man was never seen again because no one, not even the CCCP, has been able to conclusively prove his identity. He remains anonymous to this very day, which is exactly something what would terrify the current regime. It’s also unlikely any of us would enjoy that luxury.

When it comes time to fight, remember that there can be no half measures this time.

She’s taking a flash illuminated picture through the plughole, which is shining on his face. He is what’s living in her sink.

The problem is that there are very few well built appliances anymore, even among the expensive options. Some catagories just have no option that’s competently designed and manufactured at all, from any brand.

You are correct that adjusted for inflation/portion of yearly average income, appliances used to be proportionally much more expensive, though. Manufacturers could afford to build them to last back then.

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.

Truly, the throne.

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.

Modern ranges/stoves do this also, and some of them even have the concrete blocks bolted to the outside where you can see them. Albeit on the back.

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.)

This sort of thing erodes the government’s protection under the law, though, which is something that the current regime is clearly too stupid to understand. When the punishment no longer fits the presumed “crime,” it incentivizes your opposition to do much more extreme things to you since if they’re caught the outcome for them is the same either way.

You want to go to prison for 50 years for moving a box of magazines, or you want to risk prison for 50 years for grabbing your rifle and fighting to ensure the next guy doesn’t have to?

To get clear ice you have to freeze it slowly, basically just at the freezing mark (32°C/0°F) which is a warmer temperature than most people have their freezer set to. It’s not difficult in an objective sense, it just requires rubbing a couple of brain cells together and a tiny morsel of effort which is apparently more than a lot of people can muster.

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.