Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.
The best part is the random bill.
The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.
Or another variant.
The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.
Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?
It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.
Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.
I bought SUSE Linux once upon a time. It was a physical CD and the packaging that I paid for. Maybe a little support was bundled, probably not. That was a time when the internet was slow for most and not an option for others, wifi wasn’t ubiquitous (and if it existed, good luck getting the proper drivers loaded without internet), live distributions weren’t really a thing yet, booting from usb was finicky and unreliable, and the install CDs would have the entire OS and basically all the software you could want to install bundled. These would have been the days before the fall of Napster and the rise in other “Linux ISO sharing tools”. Ubuntu would even mail you like a half dozen physical CDs and some stickers just for asking and promising to share them in your community.
There’s nothing wrong with buying the physical things or paying for support. That’s not what this meme is showing though.
Classic Microsoft Business Strategy
Hardlinking files to their new destination and your normalized naming schema. Using symlinks would be madness.
It’s a lot easier to setup and get non-techy family to join. Setting up Jellyfin is easy until you want access outside your LAN. Setting up TLS or a VPN is a hassle I don’t want unless there is no other option. Plex has features I (and my family) use that jellyfin doesn’t support by default yet. Last I checked syncing of files for offline viewing in the official app wasn’t very good yet. Plex has a bunch of ad supported live streams baked in that aren’t too bad. There is a “How It’s Made” channel, a Mythbusters channel, and Top Gear channel. PlexAmp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than any of the Jellyfin options I’ve seen.
I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.
Ah yes, the modern day equivalent of recording radio broadcasts to magnetic tape. Made a few mixtapes that way myself. They were absolute garbage quality and I never listen to them anymore, but it was an interesting exercise and my only option for some stuff at the time.
Now I just buy as directly from the artist as I can for things that are rare enough that they are difficult to pirate.
Calling anything bad weird seems a little judgemental for my taste. I like bad weird. Good weird is boring.
Ya basic.
Getting weirder and weirder is the only viable direction a Master of the Universe movie can go for success. Don’t you remember the last movie?
Fair? What’s fair about how they hand out Oscars? Seriously. One example, I thought it has been pretty well established that awards are often handed out because of a person’s history of work and not only the current thing they are being awarded for this year. I’m sure this could be hotly debated, but I’ve never heard anyone accuse the Oscars of being fair.
Jokes on them. Batman is fighting crime in a failing empire. I might have fun writing a paper about how the comic series is actually about the fall of empires like the Roman empire. I’d footnote and meticulously cite the shit out of that paper just to code clues that I knew exactly what the Professor was trying to do.
Short simplified answer: nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. Especially in the last mile. There’s probably a Planet Money episode about it. If not, there should be.
Why are you bickering with me about it? I don’t appreciate people asking questions in bad faith just so they can make a spicy comment. Think I like it?
There are choices, it’s just they all suck unless you’re willing to move. Nobody’s arguing that it is a local semi-monopoly.
There’s other options, but they’re all MUCH slower. If you want a different ISP with comparable or faster speeds, you need to move. In my case, internet is bundled with HOA fees. And there is no other fast option available at my address anyway.
It’s not a full monopoly. You can choose another ISP, but it’s just that in practice you’d need to physically move to a new location to make that change of vendor.
Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.
I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.
I see you’ve never played “Dragon’s Lair”, where every scene was cell animated and the player “chose” the path that the animation would take.