Sigourney Weaver battling the queen alien in that loader is one example that often pops into my head when this sort of question comes up.

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So glad I completely gave up on MS after Windows 7.

Unpaywalled: https://archive.ph/REGoa

I still use a Roku that was gifted to me, but only thanks to also having a pihole. The amount of logging & ads it blocks on the Roku is insane. If that ever stopped working I would ditch the Roku in a heartbeat.

I used to be on a team of 10 people that installed & managed roughly 3,000 servers and associated networking gear. We got hit hard in the early 2000’s by the Capacitor Plague and it fell on me to identify around 700 faulty motherboards and manage their replacement.

I don’t miss that at all…

Part of the problem is how insanely complex modern cars are. Modern cars can have 30+ different ECUs, and knowing which ECU does what can be difficult to figure out. Programming ECUs is also a bit of a dark art, and a model line of cars can go through a number of ECU versions over time.

I used to own a car that the battery regularly died on. Eventually, after multiple dealer visits, a couple replaced batteries, and hours of internet research, I found two service recalls that described my cars symptoms perfectly. The problem for me was my cars VIN fell outside both recall notices. But I took printouts of both recall notices to a dealer and they agreed to look into it. They confirmed my car had buggy firmware, annd ended up installing updated firmware on two different ECUs. I never had a battery problem again after that. I’ve worked in tech for 30+ years and I wouldn’t have wanted to tackle that on my own…

Bluetooth? I got mine from a dial-up BBS via a 1200 baud modem.

I see no reason not to believe the official story in this case. Bringing him back alive would have served no useful purpose, and would have led to him getting a ton of publicity that would have only inspired his followers. Most Americans were likely happy to see him die the way he did given the 9/11 attacks.

The water softener & filter in our house has built in monitoring & alerted me when one of our toilets wouldn’t stop running. Very helpful feature.

This. I’ll happily buy an 8k TV only if it’s a dumb TV/monitor.

Definitely make sure all of those are set up properly. I would also look up the IP address of your mail server on services like this. It’s possible your ISP/provider has a bad email reputation, and if that’s the case then there’s not a whole lot you can do short of switching providers or using a third party SMTP relay that has a good reputation, like smtp2go.com.

Excellent idea. I have AAA and it’s saved me a number of times over the years, from jumping dead batteries to helping with flat tires, to a 100 mile tow after my transmission failed…

Don’t be afraid to make detours. My wife & I have done a few such trips, and on one of them we passed a sign for a memorial & museum of the Tuskegee Airmen. We took a detour to check it out and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My dad was an avid boater. I grew up on the water, and loved it. I learned pretty quickly just how expensive it is to own & operate one. There’s an old adage that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into, and it’s pretty accurate. Despite my love of boats & the water I never considered getting one myself when I grew up, mainly due to the expense.

Especially if you need to rake them up etc.

Painting is of a river in Pennsylvania. The artist painted it while there, then displayed it in the UK. Many who saw it, not being familiar with the fall colors of the northeast US, thought it was fake.

Leaves.

Yes, tree leaves.

Each fall when they start changing color flocks of tourists come up to gawk at them.

In some states an obscured/unreadable license plate is all a cop needs to pull you over…

I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.

We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.