Back in the day I saw people making attempts at this with gimcrack setups involving household irons. Your method is probably better.

finds themselves in a social circle or job environment hostile to Linux.

Ugh. Tell me about it.

I haven’t tried to run the latest Corel graphics suite in Wine recently, but the last time I did it exploded in my face so spectacularly I think my eyebrows still haven’t fully grown back. I really need that to work for… work. Basically everything else I already use is FOSS anyway.

That is patently false.

…Sometimes we also complain about Facebook or Tesla.

You’re conflating the tuner with the antenna. The person you replied to, however, is correct including the comment about the digital tuner boxes (which convert to an analog signal for old TV’s) being available for free during the analog to digital changeover back when.

Any piece of metal will work as an antenna, even for receiving digital broadcasts. It might not work well, but there is no magical difference between a “digital” antenna and an “analog” one, and since digital television is transmitted over pretty much the same original frequencies as analog was, old analog antennae are already quite well tuned in size and shape to pick up modern digital signals.

You just have to plug your 1940’s antenna into a 2009+ or so television. The antenna itself doesn’t “decode” anything. It just catches radio waves and passes the waveform along to the TV or tuner box. I still use the old 60’s era rooftop antenna that cane with my house, but plugged into my modern TV and it receives digital channels just fine.

His glasses are different in every scene. No consistency. It’s subtle in the first few, but in the last shot they’re a totally different style and shape and have a crossbar over the bridge that wasn’t present in any of the previous scenes.

I was sitting in a diner the other day and one of their TV’s was apparently, for lack of a better word, tuned to that Samsung TV Plus service. I watched it play the same Kia ad four times, back to back. Not in separate commercial breaks. All in one commercial break where the same ad was played four times consecutively.

Just like you, I have to say they found no success in making me want to buy a Kia.

Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they’ll never live it down.

“But we need your generous donations and tithes to continue to operate our house of god!!!”

God, huh? The all-of-creation in 6 days guy? The water to wine guy? All the fish that swim in the sea and beasts that roam on the land and birds that sing in the sky? That guy? Seems to me he’d have no trouble magically causing a church to spring forth out of the ground for you if you’re so damn devout, then. At the very least he could keep all his bisops and deacons and popes in clean vestments without having to put it on the congregation’s dime.

No? How curious.

Carefully watch the kid’s glasses.

Now you can’t unsee it. You’re welcome.

Well, they’re MSRP’ing for $199 at the moment if you don’t spring for the AMS Lite filament changer thingamadoo. To be fair that’s less than several pocket knives I own are worth. I’m not a fan of Bambu at all, but I think you could wind up with far worse for not much less money…

Retailer who offers one of those 0% financing schemes, here. TL;DR: It’s from processing fees paid by the retailer and punitive interest after the 0% promotional period lapses.

The lender makes money in two ways. One, a percentage fee is charged on the financed amount, but it’s not paid by the customer. It’s paid by the retailer. For us it is a little under 2%, similar to the fees most credit card processors charge. So as soon as you make your purchase, the bank instantly skims 1-point-whatever percent off the top. You don’t see this, though. It affects the retailer’s bottom line, not yours.

Two, the 0% interest rate is a promotion which provides specified limited time in which to pay off the balance. If you do not pay the outstanding balance in full by the end of the promotional term, the bank whacks you for a monstrous interest rate on the entire original transaction amount – not just the remaining outstanding balance. In our case this is damn near 30%. Look carefully at the promotional signage and literature. It will always say “0% INTEREST FINANCING!!! _{for 12 months.}” That 12 months is important. That’s the end of the promotional terms, after which you pay aforementioned buttload of interest.

And then, the minimum payments on the bills they send you are obviously deliberately structured to trick you into failing to pay the entirety of the balance by the deadline at the end of the promotional period.

If you’re talking 0% introductory rates for general purpose credit cards, the answer is right there in the name. Those are introductory rates designed to entice you into signing up and using the card, but they’re never permanent. Eventually that introductory rate will expire and you will be left with an interest bearing credit card. Possibly a lot of interest. Even if you pay your bill 100% on time every month without fail, the bank still makes money in percentages and processing fees taken on every transaction from every single retailer where you’ve swiped that card. The bank issuing the credit card can continue to comfortably make money even if no one pays any interest, ever.

Oh boy. I can’t wait for this to backfire in a spectacular and completely predictable manner.

If you got in an actual taxicab, you are correct that the driver would not care about your Uber PIN. Uber is replacing, or trying to replace, the usual pool of taxi drivers hanging around outside the airport terminal with their own herd of “contractors” waiting to do the same thing, only with the totally unnecessary layer of their stupid app being in between.

a lot of people end up using atheism as a an excuse to have shitty values

Citation needed. This is a total straw man argument.

“Morals” are a completely man made concept. With or without religion, it is immaterial. They did not and do not have to come from somewhere else. They come from us.

And what is and isn’t “moral” changes over time as society evolves. As I am positive you know, quite a few things in Judeo-Christian scripture were considered “moral” in their time but are now viewed as unquestionably heinous. Have you ever stopped to think why that is?

You’ve said absolutely nothing of substance, here. Just platitudes. You haven’t explained why Yahweh is legit but, say, Zeus isn’t.

Because Jesus or any other mythical figure is not required for anyone to have the same or similar values.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Evidence for the existence of Jesus and god – either the Yahweh or any of the other ones – is scant (in the case of Jesus) or nonexistent (in the case of his dad). Sharing similar values to what Jesus allegedly had is not evidence for his existence, nor that of any gods. In this context, the “real” Jesus is as he is depicted in scripture. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was a real person in reality, so don’t get that part twisted. What the poster you’re replying to is interpreting a character as he was written.

It’s exactly the same thing as claiming, “Captain Picard would not do XYZ, because it is inconsistent with how he was written in every single episode.” That may be so, and maybe we all know who Captain Picard is and what he does, but that still doesn’t make Picard a real person. Having a taste for tea, Earl Grey, hot does not require that any person actually believe that Picard physically existed, nor that his published actions were anything more than the fancy of some scriptwriters.

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

This means that we may face a situation where hobbyists, small businesses, and aerial photographers who make a living with drones can suddenly no longer fly them, but cops will.

That was always the goal.

China (and probably Russia still) have satellites that can read the headlines on your newspaper from orbit. The notion that they’d need or use noisy, unreliable, and easily noticed commercial hobbyist drones for this purpose is laughably absurd. Even if they are planning on secretly snooping on the feeds of privately owned fliers, which is probably not actually feasible at scale anyway. How is the data supposed to be transmitted back to China? Magic? Through the cloud via the user’s cell phone data, with no one noticing? Gigabytes and gigabytes of it per flight? I’m not buying it.

The real reason the US government is so scared of drones is because it will allow the citizenry (i.e., us) to document abuses and authoritarianism in a manner that’s pretty tough to stop with the usual billy clubs/guns/tear gas/water cannons method. Think BLM, Occupy, future climate protests, and all of those sorts of things. Unchecked aerial photography and video that contradicts the Official Narrative from whatever today’s incident happens to be making it out to the internet and going viral would be highly inconvenient, wouldn’t it? Someone can be capturing video of the police shooting protestors or whatever and easily be half a mile away from where the drone itself is located.

It speaks volumes about the pathology and mindset of American legislators and law enforcement that they inherently see drones as a “spy” technology. That’s because this is exactly what they plan to use them for, and are terrified that someone else might do the same thing to them.

Well, tough fucking titty.

The Legend of Zelda… & Knuckles. I like it.