dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

No, no no. That’s only if you do it. If a huge corporation does it, see, that’s different. Corporations are “people” for the purposes of free speech (with money) or even voting (example), but when it comes time to throw somebody in jail for overtly criminal behavior, all of the sudden the legal system can’t find anyone to target.

It certainly is not. As administrator:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers *WindowsStore* | Remove-AppxPackage

Luckily for me at least, like so many of us dweebs here, I drive my TV with a little media center PC anyway. So I couldn’t care less which of their services they disable. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. The real annoying part is that these don’t work (presumably), but you still can’t remove the icons from the thing’s home screen.

Not only that but my old LG smart TV (47LM8600, I think manufactured in 2012) has literal suicide timers in its built in apps. Mine has never been connected to any network and yet it mysteriously informed me after approximately three years of ownership that all of its player apps such as Youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. would stop working because they were “no longer supported,” all of them within the time frame of the same couple of weeks. It knew this somehow, apparently via magic, or quantum fluctuations, or psychic brain waves. Without internet connectivity.

Obviously I don’t use any of those features so I didn’t give a rat’s ass and I still don’t. But I still find that deeply suspicious.

While we’re on fashion, I will see your JNCOs and raise you Iori Yagami’s pants complete with straitjacket strap connecting both legs:

…Because when the hell else am I ever going to be able to trot out that piece of trivia? You know, perfect for a guy who kicks people for a living.

I still miss my JNCOs, though. Imagine my surprise to learn that they’re apparently still around.

Meanwhile if you put a couple of solar panels on your roof without filling out nineteen different forms in triplicate, providing a notarized drawing by a licensed architectural firm, paying $2000 in fees plus enduring the eleven month processing time, your local code authority will put a lien on your property and send a SWAT team to your house.

Sceptre U435CV-UMRD. One of the new non-portable “dumb” TVs left on the market. It’s just a TV. It tunes to digital channels, or it takes whatever you feed its inputs and puts the picture on the screen. That’s it. It’s a 43" so close to but slightly below your size target. They do a 50" and a 65" version as well.

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.

I make knives. I write about knives.

What? Those are totally some of my professions.

I briefly worked at a place where our new CEO’s claim to fame was purportedly that he was either the CEO or some other big muckety-muck (I don’t precisely remember the title he was claiming) at Circuit City. Notably, this would have been perfectly aligned with the time frame in which Circuit City tanked if this were true.

I mentioned during an all-managers conference call that this did not, in fact, provide a sterling endorsement for either his reputation or business acumen. Do you know, that observation didn’t exactly make me popular among upper management.

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.