Thrawn

Most of those kids if things like parks and walkable safe cities increase economic health overall but it doesn't go into the specific pocket of a capitalist in a direct way they can see. Plus the general kick the poor attitude from the same group.

I'm shocked nobody has brought this up yet.

I would absolutely be a town citizen in Phineas and Ferb. Ideally the guy who always has a new fun project and the side effects from the kids just drop everything in his lap.

Every benefit of a cartoon world with almost none of the cartoon downsides. Nearly Culture level tech after a few years once the boys grow up to by adults and actually start taking things "seriously" as shown in episodes where they go to the near my future.

The worst people in the world are so bad at being bad that they are consistently kept in check and even rehabilitated by trained animals.

TIE Fighter. Flying as a pilot for the Empire in Star Wars including flying alongside Vader to save the Emperor. Includes getting pulled into a secret society with a cool glowing force tattoo showing your rank in service to the Emperor.

The game never says your name but in the old expanded universe books you are basically the Empire version of Wedge.

Edit - It isn't open world but the limited story does do well at making you feel like you should in the role.

I'll add that the game came with a manual that did have the character name and a back story. Short version is your character was an illegal swoop bike racer on a world that had been in a multi generation war. Includes your father dying. The empire stops it by basically making it impossible to for the two world to even be able to send attacks at each other. Then recruits all the youth that would have fought in their own war and just sends them out to different parts of the empires wars.

Your preexisting flight skills gets you first a mechanic job on a Star Destroyer and then you save a VIP while testing repairs on a TIE Fighter and get pulled in as an actual pilot with a quiet push to get you up the ranks due to your impressive start.

Oh I have lived outside the USA at one point and I'm well aware electricity isn't magic. There were other places too but Guyana most definitely doesn't have a stable power grid.

I'm not going to starve my kids over that kind of stance on cash only either though.

I can't understand why banks are as stupid as they often are. Why would you refuse money from the federal government. What do you think we successfully stole money from the IRS through a direct deposit?

I have a concrete and very stupid example.

We got a large gift card as an incentive to renew our lease at our current apartment vs moving. The format they sent it in had no physical card and would only work on either online stores or through a service like Google Wallet AKA a banking app on a mobile device as you mentioned.

So to get groceries while waiting on a tax refund (thanks crappy American economy and taxation methods) we had no choice but to connect and use it that way.

I have always seen the soft/hard sci-fi as a sliding scale. I imagine it is like the mohs scale for minerals with diamonds as a 10.

Stuff like 2001 A Space Odyssey is a solid 10 until after HAL is shutdown and even with the bizarre ending it is fully in the "sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" and still something like 8.5-9

Star Trek is pretty good about being internally consistent and having day to day stuff be pretty grounded but there is so much purely nonsense trecknobable that I only consider it a 6 out of 10.

Very different story and world but I would rate Stargate about the same. Maybe actually a bit higher. Mostly because it is a newer series that was better able to track its own weird stuff it had claimed and keep it consistent.

Star Wars something like 4.5. still gets ok because of mostly internal consistency but definitely leans strongly the fantasy elements that are mixed in.

Absolutely. Used to work at a small MSP. Got ultra unlucky in that we got chosen as the rest case target for a zero day that leveraged our Remote Support tools so our own systems and all of our client systems that were online got hit with ransomware in a very short time frame.

Some clients had local backups to Synology boxes and those worked ok thankfully. However all the rest had backups based on Hyper-V. The other local copy was on a second windows server that also got hit so the local copies didn't help. They did also have a remote copy which wasn't encrypted.

So all good right? Just pull the remote backup copy and apply that.... Yea every time we had ever used the service before had either been single servers that physically died and took disks along on the death or just file level restores.

Those all worked fine. Still sounds like not a problem right? Nope. We found both that a couple of the larger servers had backups that didn't actually have everything in spite of being VM images. No idea how their software even was able to do that.

And the worse part was that their data transfer rate was insanely slow. About 10mbps. Not that per server or par client. Nope that was the max export rate across everything. It would have taken literally months to restore everything at that rate.

I hate to say it but yes we did in fact pay the ransom and the. Had to fight for several days going through getting things decrypted. Then going through months of reinstalling fresh copies and/or putting in new servers. Also changing our entire stack at the same time. Shockingly we handled it well enough we lost no clients. Largely because we were able to prove we couldn't have known ahead of time.

If you read through all that I'll even say the vendors name. It was StorageCraft. I now have a deep hate for them.

Also one more is that with the old Apple HFS+ filesystem based time machine backups it would sometimes report as a valid self checked backup even if it had corruption. It would do this as long as some self check confirmed that it could fix the corruption during a restore. However if you tried directly browsing through the time machine backups it would have files that couldn't be read, unless again you did a full system restore with it.

Nearly lost my wife's semester ending before finding it worked that way.

I can't confirm it but seems it is fully fixed with APFS and might be one of the reasons they spent the effort to make that transition.

Also a self reply to add that I don't use the downmix because I got lucky and in addition to free old PC hardware which most people in the USA at least can also get free or cheap if you are creative with old business hardware. The addition is I got an AV Receiver just barely new enough to support HDMI so I do have the full range of channels on very cheap speakers.

Having used Kodi elsewhere the downmix seems to work just fine and a lot of current and still fairly cheap sound bars can interpret surround mixes directly.

Nope although it has that as an option as well. There are two options I use. The first is to boost the center channel on surround mixes since the voice is almost always on that channel.

Then more specifically in Kodi there is both a main volume option and a separate volume boot option that if you look into the documentation says that it is able to increase volume differently by moving up the middle of the audio while reducing the dynamic range. In other words reducing the difference between the lowest and highest sounds so it can increase it without clipping.

I basically change the main volume to what I want and then since both main and boost use the same numbers I reduce it by the exact same number I increase the boost level. End result is moving the bottom and middle of the audio volume closer.

In an ideal setup like a literal quiet audience in a full IMAX or with studio monitor grade headphones etc. the dynamic range is nice. Let's you hear talking normally and then get blown away by the action right at the top of the safe listening range. Or for classical orchestra music the quiet solot small instrument then a full booming with the entire band going.

But in reality I have five kids running around. Even in stuff like Pixar I still like having a fairly aggressive setting for the boost. It lets me set a default fairly aggressive one and then only occasionally need to edit it manually from the default for particular movies.

Every time I see a thread like this I feel the same way.

Sure I have to admit there are downsides to it but oh my goodness the number of benefits from running something like Kodi is huge. If you are willing to take a hit to dynamic range of your audio you can fix all but the most extreme cases of audio level problems. I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways to handle it as well.

Control from a phone app once you have Kodi open works great.

Windows or Linux at your preference.

Only ever used old free hardware too so the complaints about the cost of a PC never made sense to me either.

Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.

Yea it is a case of found it years ago and worked so incredibly well I haven't had the slightest interest in using anything else.