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(Tangentially). On the other side of the coin, there exists individuals who take extreme great pride in their ignorance of current pop culture. Back in the day for some strange reason and/or coincidence, I encountered many such invididuals like this who who were hardcore "classical music...

The first thing I look at is the statistical distribution of the star reviews. If the distribution if heavily skewed to the 5-stars and 4-stars end of the curve, then it is highly likely reading any further is a complete waste of time. I generally only read further if the distribution is...

In practice, I only really read the 2-star reviews with a lot of technical details. Occasionally 3-star reviews with technical details. Otherwise 5-star and too many 1-star reviews are completely useless with no substrance.

Dead wood is inevitable in any large organization with a lot of inertia.

The oddest case I vaguely remember, was a national news broadcast over northamerica which had a semi-regular host that spoke english with a heavy Australian or New Zealand accent. I couldn't point out the subtle differences between an Aussie and Kiwi accent, but someone I knew who was from New...

I'm sure the same be said of the non-local and/or out-of-region broadcasts of CNN, BBC, DW, etc ... featuring hosts which speak english in an "american" accent. ;)

Sounds like a spellcheck function flagging different spellings between different english variants.

Triple standards are even more annoying. ;)

The main thing with a cell phone and/or landline, is that it is an independent (or quasi-independent) "channel" which is much harder to hack, along with the "channel" of an internet connection. Not the sort of thing that an amateur hacker can pull off. This is the entire point of two factor...

This email method would have been fine many years ago for twitter, when nobody really cared about twitter back in the day. Nowadays this would be one of many semi-easy vectors to hack into a "valuable" twitter account.

Sounds like this is done for security reasons, similar in principle to two factor authentication type schemes (such as bank account websites).

The most egregious cases is cracking passwords. In reality for something which is just a random sequence of characters which is not a dictionary word nor a commonly used phrase, it will take months or many years to crack such passwords.

The built-in popup blocker in many browers and additional adblockers (such as ublockorigin), are very effective at neutralizing this type of stuff.

Does this also happen with the dvd versions ?

This seems to have been the case. With an MO of being "famous for the sake of being famous", becoming an international rockstar or movie star was the easiest way to achieve such fame in the 1950s through to the early 2000s. It seems like with the rise of the social media star + influencers...

Back in the day, one would likely had to have followed the porn business news to know who the "stars" were. If you didn't follow such porn industry news, it was basically many faces/bodies which were largely interchangeable with no obvious recognizable names.

(On a tangent). Before the internet + social media was ubiquitous, what was the offline equivalent of a "social media star" or "influencer" back in the day?

Unfortunately 9-11 has not reached the stage of respect similar to something like Yom HaShoah in Israel, where everything in Israel grinds to a pause and takes a 2 minute moment of silence at 10am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_HaShoah...

Same story with many sci-fi / fantasy type movies produced by bottom feeder studios (such as The Asylum). They're not even the "it's so bad, that it's good" variety of lousy sub-B movies.

As annoying as this is, youtube/google knows very well that "Joe Sixpack" and "Jane Q Public" will not know how to block ads. Especially using a youtube app on a standalone box like a roku, or even watching youtube on a bluray player never used to play bluray discs. Youtube/google also likely...

I have a very different perspective on this. When I was young, I lived in places which had very little to no rain and smog was a major problem. Every time it rained however infrequently, the sky was "cleaned out" with no smog for a week or so. With the sky being smoggy from wildfire smoke...

The disconnect between online and offline retail prices for the same item, seems to be very common for few remaining bookstore chains I've shopped at over the years. In the end, it is a waste of time to be shopping for books at offline chain bookstores. The only reason I ever walk into an...

Kinda annoying when everything becomes an IoT device. Recently there was a nasty virus/trojan, which was wrecking havoc on an external hard drive model I have. I haven't used this drive in over the past month, and won't plug it in for now. Apparently if these western digital external drive...

I was definitely like this ^ when it came to shopping for vinyl records and cds back in the day.

Idiocracy is taking over. It was really a documentary where they got the timeline wrong (by 500 years). :ph34r: :emoji_alien:

The nastiest case of inducing "fight or flight", would be somebody who sends a bunch of guys pretending to be cops to your house, and attempting to arrest you. Though something like this would be more of a precise target hit, than something which is general "fishing". For example, if you're...

An example of a con artist or scammer who deliberately induces an extreme "fight or flight" response, are the ones who impersonate an american taxman IRS (Internal Revenue Agency) agent saying that you owe delinquent unpaid back taxes. Another common con which deliberately induces a "fight or...

In a more general sense, the entire exercise of subjecting myself to such extreme nasty (but physically safe) situtations and people, is to have my brain conditioned to immediately recognize such "instant nirvana", "fight or flight", "future buy in", "sunk costs", etc ... type situations and...

A less common type of con job or scam, involves getting something to "buy into" something longer term. Typically this is how "looking for love scams" or non-mainstream political groups work. Typically a new person will be induced into a gradual or "instant nirvana", to the point where there is...

On the other side of the coin when it comes to con artists (or scammers) which attempt to induce a "fight or flight" response, the most insight I ever figured out was speaking and getting to know a person who is a perpetual grump AND is always "giving advice" about how to conduct your life. The...