I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure.

The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.

Some of these video codecs have pathological cases that might be maxing out your video while doing the decoding. If you're only using it as a media server, that might exceed the (possibly age-degraded) capacity of your power supply. Replacing the power supply might help in that case.

It's also possible that something in a particular frame is triggering a bug in your driver and crashing that way. In that case, your best bet might be to transcode the video to a different codec or something.

Maybe your particular video download is from an entirely trustworthy source, but it's not unheard of that untrustworthy folks will modify a file with the intent of causing this to happen.

I don't think it's that independents in general are embarrassed republicans, but that independents who constantly talk about being independents are embarrassed republicans. I know some independents who are to the left of democrats on most things (Sanders types), for example.

Independents who are left of democrats usually just call themselves leftists though.

I've always found it interesting that these tech infra companies' stock tends to rise in the immediate aftermath of these outages. My best guess is that people see the effect of the outage and say "Hey, this company I've never heard of sure seems to have a lot of customers!"

To be fair I've benefited from that in the past; this is an observation of my own that doesn't represent the views of any of my current or former employers.

I mean, sure. The problem is that ignoring Republican agency is seemingly incubated by both parties' philosophies (such as they are). It's a common "conservative" vice to blame problems on those you identify less with (right now, Democrats). It's a common "liberal" vice to put the onus to fix a problem on those you identify more with (also Democrats). Therefore, most people's solution to any given problem involves putting pressure on Democrats. Putting pressure on Republicans "doesn't help", either because they have nothing to do with the problem or because they obviously will never fix it.

Part of me thinks this is fundamental to the human condition, but most of me thinks it isn't. This doesn't seem to have happened in the FDR era, or the Nixon era, for example. I think it's just fallout from the post-Reagan coalitions in the US political system.

Others responding to my speech by exercising their own rights to free speech and free association as individuals does not violate my right to free speech. One can make an argument that corporations doing those things (e.g. your Play Store example) is sufficiently different in kind to individuals doing it -- and a lot of people would even agree with that argument! It does, however, run afoul of current first amendment jurisprudence.

Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.

> Either way, this is categorically different from China's policies on e.g. Tibet, which is a centrally driven censorship decision whose goal is to suppress factual information.

You'll quickly run into issues and accusations of being a troll in the "free world" if you bring up inconvenient factual information on Tibet. The Dalai Lama asking a young boy to suck on his tongue for example.

Pretty sure that event was all over the western web as a gross "wtf" moment. I don't remember anyone, or any organization, that talked about it being called a troll.

It was only surprising to people because he was hyped up as a progressive figure in a liberation struggle, not a deposed autocrat.

This is a failure of imagination. There are plenty of things that are more unjust than that.

This argument has always seemed odd to me. The 17th amendment first took effect in 1915, and the whole Senate had been directly elected by 1919. Are we really going to claim that the late 1910's are when things really went off the rails? For example, to your specific point here, it seems unlikely that this made amending the Constitution harder. Excluding the Bill of Rights and the 27th Amendment (each a special case for its own reason), there have actually been more amendments in the fewer years after the 17th was enacted.

It's also unclear why one would expect that the Senate would be less partisan if its membership were selected by state legislatures. State legislators have a lot more partisan loyalty than the rest of us, both because they tend to be more ideological and because they are deeply dependent on the party for future career prospects.

It doesn't really matter if they're doing that for this purpose, though. Cloudflare (or any other AS) has no fine control of where your packets to their anycast IPs will actually go. A given server's response packets will only go to one of their PoPs. It's just that which one will depend on server location and network configuration (and could change at any time). Even if multiple of their PoPs tried to fetch forward from the same server, all but one would be unable to maintain a TCP connection without tunneling shenanigans.

Tunneling shenanigans are fine for ACKs, but it's inefficient and therefore pretty unlikely that they are doing this for ingress object traffic.

I used to have so much trouble with pants (I need 30-34 in inches, 86.4cm long and about 76cm waist). No store had that size. I once got to the point where I considered leaning into my Scottish heritage and just wearing a kilt.

The internet has alleviated that for me, but if it hasn't for you -- look for pants with a large hem, and learn some basic sewing skills. It's occasionally possible to add an inch or more of length with the right pair.