Fiber optic cable is just glass or nylon, sealed with a thermoplastic. It really is one of the cheapest kinds of cables to make, maybe ever. It’s really not worth anything when anyone who needs to run fiber can just buy a brand new spool for the same price as a spool from four guys in a shitty pickup truck who can’t describe why they even had it to begin with.

I dunno who is even still stealing copper considering that a lot of yards are asking for proof of ownership before they accept it. Copper-nabbers are opportunistic, and won’t take the time to forge an original invoice.

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

in that case, mewtwo is basically just a ripoff of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” what other public domain classics did Pokémon manage to repackage and resell to us?!

Hank: “Bobby, when I was little, we had 151 Pokémon, and that was plenty! We didn’t even have confirmation that Mew existed until maybe a decade later, and we were all so happy that we threw a party! Remember, Boomhauer?”

Boomhauer: “Well I tell ya what man igottagetyaonthepokemonromhacksbecausebackthentheydidntknowgaddumnallaboutjapaneseso (chuckling) theyjustchangedthejapanesecharacterstoenglishones man andnobodycaredtheydjustsitthereonno$gbandmakeuppokemonnameslike ‘turt’ or ‘hors’ andwe’dalljustlikestumblethroughthebarelytranslatedgames tryingtofigureoutwhattodoman it was a joy to be included”

Hank: “Yeah.”

POV: you are the first Zubat that a player using gameshark sees

Hank Hill recognizes 152 Pokémon total. The first 151, and then Stunfisk.

Hank, suddenly intrigued: “Wait, there’s a ‘grass type’ Pokemon?”

Bobby: “Dad, everybody knows they can’t catch Rayquazza… it entices .”

me, a person with a college degree: tries clicking the little heart