All of those things are possible, but statistically, being distracted is far more likely than any of them… More likely than most of them combined, even.

You just want to legalize murder!

/poeslaw

DVD is better than Blu-ray in that regard - I’ve ripped DVDs that look like they fell off a truck and got run over multiple times and had no problem, meanwhile about 1 out of 5 Blu-rays I got from Netflix would have problems despite looking pristine. It has to do with the data density, Blu-ray packs so much more in the same amount of space, one microscopic scratch wipes out so much data…

Of course some DVDs suffer from bad materials. I was re-ripping my collection recently, and I have a few that have sat in a closet untouched for years, not a scratch on them, but the drive won’t even recognize there’s a disc. Probably oxidation of the reflective layer.

Way back when I used to copy movies to .avi files, my computer was in one room, my TV in another, I had a video card with TV out and a long set of cables, I’d preserve the copyright warning because it gave me time to start the movie then walk to the living room to watch it…

VHS was kind of 2.5 thanks to macrovision…

Yo ho!

That’s just single layer - dual layer is something like 8.4 if memory serves (which it often doesn’t…)

Wow, I don’t even remember that. I’ve been playing DVDs on a computer basically forever, which rarely obeyed such restrictions…

I’ve been doing this since 2008 - although I only recently setup Plex in 2017, before that I just ran a web server and played movies in a browser on various smart TVs, but around 2017 was when my main TV got an update that rendered its browser mostly useless… Fuck Sony by the way. And before smart TVs I just had a video card with TV out and long cables… Or burning VCDs, I still have my 5-disc DVD changer that could play VCDs as long as they were burned to CD-RW discs, though it’s just gathering dust now.

Tell that to my employer… We moved to a bigger office a little over a year ago. The old office was cramped, but it was reasonably quiet. Those of us who are on the phones were in a corner pretty well shielded from everything else. The new place is one huge continuous expanse, and we’re right in the middle of it. And it’s what I would call cheap and unfinished, but a commercial realtor would call it “modern industrial” meaning you can see all the wiring and ductwork and such- and bare concrete. Which makes sound carry throughout and echo. Just the other day my boss had to go hush a gaggle of developers that were congregating 20 feet away and laughing uproariously.

a more useless application of electrons

Microsoft is worse… Have a problem, google it, find a link that has a promising summary, click it- “try Windows 11!” Because that’s what dead links do.

under the age of 40

I’m pushing 50 and I won’t call if there’s a website…

My wife… She will never stop buying from Amazon no matter how shitty they become. She was refusing to go to Wendy’s for a while because they were considering surge pricing, she swore up and down she would not reward a company for doing that - so I said what about Amazon? How often does prime get you free shipping anymore? And with streaming, now you have to watch ads when you didn’t before… But of course that’s all “different”.

Surely nobody would go on the internet and tell lies…

No shit?

I live in Phoenix, our airport is called sky harbor…

If people kept setting fire to your house with a flamethrower, would you care about the quality or effectiveness of the flamethrower?

I’m not forced to drive a car either - but if I try to ride my bike someplace, I’m likely to get run over by someone else’s car, so…

Lololololololol. No, they do not. I support a product that gets updated roughly quarterly, and the number of times people complain about their vulnerability scanner finding something when they’re on a 4 year old version is too damn high.

Yeah, this was in Boston, Beacon Hill to be specific, not known for wide sidewalks… I was in good shape in those days, I could cruise all day at 15mph, for my half hour commute I could maintain 20mph easily, I would pass cars pretty much continuously in downtown areas, the street was where I belonged…