Hmm, the 4:3 versions did make it to DVD but finding the old version for things is never easy. It’s a common wish however, in Anime circles in particular.

Looking at a predb over scene releases and going back as far as they go I see that the naming standard, as I suspected, didn’t hint at neither aspect ratio or resolution.

https://predb.net/search/south.park.s01?page=1

However if you look for DivX or Xvid releases I’d say it’s fairly likely they’ll be in 4:3 since Xvid by and large had gotten replaced by H.264 / X.264 by 2017 which is the earliest release I can confirm is going to be the remaster since it’s from the Bluray that released then:

https://www.dvdsreleasedates.com/movies/4399/South-Park-(TV-Series-1997-).html

The above is likely not fully complete so the remaster might’ve happened between 2004 and 2017, and this might be readily available information but I’m running out of time…

So basically my tip if you’re lazy is look for Xvid/DivX and cross your fingers. If you’re not then correlate the remaster date/release date to the predb and look for a scene release from before the remaster dropped.

That’s what I’m saying. It’s like everyone knows some college kids smoke pot from the smell in the dorms, but Police can’t legally search room by room to find out who it is, they need a search warrant which they need more than a general suspicion that someone in the dorms smoke to get.

Same with I2P, it’s done in a public setting so from traffic patterns we can be pretty sure someone is downloading a shit ton, and that it’s likely illegal content. Residential IPs have little reason to consistently download several GB files on a daily/weekly basis, streaming and download also look vastly different profile wise and at least no one I know of go to those lengths to try and mask their traffic patterns by trying to make streaming look like download or vice versa.

But as I said and you reiterated, you still need to crack the encryption to actually prove it in court. But given a specific target there are many ways to do that. A generic approach is likely not going to happen. Which means that I2P is secure much like having a secret chat in a crowded place like Grand Central Station in NY. You know that people are meeting there to chat about illegal stuff but you don’t know who. It becomes much easier if you know who to follow and eavesdrop on, but of course still not easy.

It is however nowhere near as safe as communication over channels that aren’t public to begin with. But such of course do not exist outside military and other special contexts.

But at the same time I2P is still built upon TCP/IP so it’s still like encrypted yodeling. Finding out who’s likely yodeling down movies is rather easy. The protection instead lies in the high barrier to prove exactly which movie and when so as to pass the barrier for court admissable evidence.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I2P is great stuff and I’ve used it on and off for years, but it shouldn’t be treated as the holy grail of safe and secure communication. Nothing can truly be that if it’s built on TCP/IP for fairly obvious reasons.

1337x is probably the biggest these days and it just needs a free quick and easy account to upload a torrent. If you’re concerned about privacy then use a mail relay like Firefox Relay which is free.

Yes, which is exactly what I’m stating. Showing a forcibly non-upscaled video (or one where you’ve manually tweaked the upscaling for that matter) is likely not what you want because there are no circumstances where that is what you’d watch on that particular screen. It could perhaps work as an example of how that video would look if you had a 1080p monitor of the same size instead of the 4k one you have, since it scales in a linear fashion, a pixel of 1080p is 4 pixels in a square on a 4k screen. But that’s likely not what you want to test. Instead the thing you do want to test is “does it matter if I download X content in 1080p or 4k? How big is the difference really?” And if that is the question you need to let it upscale.

Not really possible. A 1080p video smashed into a 4k container (so it can actually represent the 4k part) would look worse than a true 1080p video file since that would get up scaled by your TV or monitor in most situations.

Best comparison would be making a playlist of the same video first in 1080p and then 4k.

The switch is very weak hardware wise but also very reliable I feel. For being a handheld device they’re surprisingly tough and cartridges do have a much better chance at longevity than disks so I’d say of all consoles I’d put Switch on the top for longevity and best odds of working well 20 years from now. Do note this is ONLY true of cartridge games. If you have Nintendo eShop games I don’t expect them to work 20 years from now because that eShop might not be around and I’m confident it uses some form of phone home checkin to verify DRM. That is likely fixable but out of scope for this discussion.

As for Steam Deck / other handheld PCs the games are less likely survive 20 years, games have already started to disappear from Steam (unpopular ones) and I very much doubt every game I have today will be available/playable. Because Steam will be dropping support and not every game is DRM free in ways that mean you can run them once they’re dropped from Steam. The PC handhelds also tend to work very poorly without Internet since Steam wants to phone home from time to time. As for the hardware I think the Steam Deck might last 20 years given it’s Linux based. Stuff like the ROG Ally will be hard to make work due to the outdated Windows on it and the likelihood that you can’t upgrade it and games/steam won’t work without an upgrade.

Are you one of those fabled pure Linux virgins the prophecies speak of? Untainted by Microsofts corruption? Or are you a decadent MacOS slut looking to debase yourself even further?

That doesn’t sound right, I’m betting it’s a bug due to some in the series being bought and some on the time limit deal. Reach out to support.

Yeah, unless there are features hidden that are hardware based and doesn’t rely on KIA servers then this is not a problem in the slightest.

It’s vastly different from the paid unlocks of Tesla or subscription for hardware of BMW.

Don’t group them under one banner and muddy the waters because if we do then all it will do is normalize what Tesla and BMW does and allow it to spread. Either that or make it so we won’t get the features listed or the features will have an exorbitant cost attached when new to ensure they don’t lose money from maintaining the service for the service life of the vehicle (or do Tesla shit of not letting the feature transfer when resold effectively impacting resell value negatively which is bad for the original buyer).

Worth noting that for new releases far from everything gets released online, and overall the arr focus is on lossless which is the gap in the market. So if you’re a (digital) Audiophile with high-end DACs and Headphones then yeah sure, but if you’re not and just want to listen to music then no, it’s not worth it in my opinion. It’s harder to share a banger with a friend, you’ll be late to the party when someone new is discovered and you’ll need to curate your own playlists all the time. Not to mention filling up your drive with album tracks you’re going to listen to once at most.

No. Also use at your own risk, read their privacy policy.

FLAC is going strong I’d say. MP3s are a different matter where you can only find the most popular stuff and some incredible niche stuff. The coverage is piss poor. Further I’d say it’s equally YouTube that killed music piracy (in the scene sense). Anyone can just run a YouTube downloader and find just about any song they’re interested in. And if you think they quality of that sucks then you can find most of the lossless stuff in scene releases.

Yes it absolutely is impossible (even though it shouldn’t be) so regulation is needed to make being a bag of dicks illegal or disadvantaged (like say the safety labeling on cigarettes, they’re legal if they’re labeled but no company would willingly label out that their product is dangerous).

Amazon can provide better prices and fuck over their sellers because they’re being major douchebags in ways that shouldn’t be legal and if it wasn’t competing with them would be much more feasible because you wouldn’t have to be just as much of a shitstain to compete.

But. Around the world people aren’t really voting for regulations either, it’s generally neck and neck between forces that wants far less regulation and more power to business and the ones that want more regulation and to reign in companies. So what I state here as obvious and needed is a hot topic for debate which blows my mind. We’re callous fucking beings.

EDIT:

To answer your initial question, because it’s the morally right thing to do to show solidarity with people that are effectively forced to work in shitty conditions in Amazon warehouses and to stop them killing smaller stores and retailers that provide far more jobs, spread wealth far more evenly and generally is vastly better for both the country and the world even though it might cost you 10-60% more on average and will be less convenient to you.

EDIT2 electric bugallo:

Also to clarify I’m not saying you’re a bad person, you’re absolutely not from what I can tell. You’re just human like everyone. I’m not without fault and buy shit I really shouldn’t as well, like stuff out of china when bespoke alternatives exist far closer. It’s just painfully obvious with your story that we, the people, can’t self regulate for the benefit of our fellow humans and the planet we all depend upon. Sorry for ranting towards you, and for any ill feelings I bestowed upon you.

“Couldn’t”

It’s very obvious that consumers are completely unable to “vote with their wallets” for anything but convenience and low prices. Workers rights, equality, morals you name it are for the vast majority waaaaaay down the scale compared to price and convenience.

This is a case study on why regulation is very much needed, even though we really should be able to do with out.

I feel the only thing they do well in my area is provide safer access to random bits and bobs that I buy from AliExpress. But that business is not what makes them rich, of course. It’s people buying everything from them, but that that is even compelling is mind blowing to me due to how atrocious their website and shopping experience is. And I work in e-Commerce as well…

You’re speaking like there literally aren’t any online retailers in the US, is that really accurate? And question free returns are literally the law here…

Are other online retailers so hopelessly sucky that you can’t live without Amazon over in the states? It just blows my mind because Amazon honestly sucks compared to the more local stores where I’m at in the Nordics.

Right, there’s only 2.5" bay ones standard. There are third party cases with 3.5" support. Though I guess 2.5" HDD works fine as well. At least 5 TB drives can be found for that form factor.

DIY is the way to go. Buying NAS hardware makes 0 sense imo unless we’re talking (used) SMB / Enterprise stuff. Used computer parts including a mitx board with 4 sats headers and a case that can hold 4 drives is a perfect starter. With drives up to 20 TB being rather affordable per TB these days you can get 40 TB of usable space on a RAID 10. That won’t fit in the $250 budget of course, but you could start with smaller drives or, as I do, forgo RAID for now because all I store is media I can redownload anyway.

The cheapest solution if you want the most basic of starters is an old cheap used NUC with a 3.5" drive slot that you can slap an as big a drive in as you can afford and then go down the more proper DIY NAS build.