@WALFTEAM Just remembered/learned about Night Media and Dave Wiskus/Standard Broadcasting LLC, and that MCNs have functionally merged with management companies in the past 15 years. I now believe that's why most have an acute antipathy towards VTubers, for making the structure of management more visible, thanks to agencies being directly modeled after the japanese&korean idol industry.

Imagine if people talked about management companies as if they were Nijisanji/ANYCOLOR or Hololive/COVER.

Every year I occasionally check up on how the patent pool is holding up for both CDs and DVDs, like my personal spin on Public Domain Day.

Some good news: enough CD and DVD patents have lapsed that now all of Hitachi's (now HGST?) DVD-ROM patents have expired. The same happened to DVD-Audio last year. Much like CDs and cassettes, I don't see DVDs immediately vanishing just because Blu-Ray discs already have a much larger capacity overall. Plus a *new* factory just for manufacturing more ferrofluid in ~2018 was partially because of cassette demand growing.

I may as well list out what *hasn't* expired by the longest patents in each category, because some have had less corporate priority than others *cough* DVD-RW *cough*.
8. DVD Video Recorder - JVC/Kenwood, 2029-01-06
9. DVD-R Drives - JVC/Kenwood, 2027-12-13
9. DVD-RW Drives - JVC/Kenwood, 2029-01-06
10. DVD-R Encoding - JVC/Kenwood, 2027-12-13
11. DVD-R Disc - JVC/Kenwood, 2027-12-13
12. DVD-RW Disc - JVC/Kenwood, 2029-01-06

Basically paruse https://www.dvd6cla.com/list.html and look at the older patents. I say this because I seriously doubt that the patents listed above contain the silver bullet to cure all of the format's real flaws.

Also going to point out that pic related is the last stated MPEG-4/AVC Attachment 1 patent in the VIA-LA (formerly MPEG-LA) patent pool to expire, which may technically mean that MPEG-2 will have a longer patent regime thanks to Malaysia granting 2 patents around 2020 (MY 163465-A, MY 177139-A). All of this information is very loosely gathered together, more for a core point: this stuff is expiring sooner than people realize because time doesn't stand still.

Called it!

10 Barrel Brewing Co Pub Beer Lager ALCOHOL REVIEW:::::::::::

I don't get it. It really is just an IPA microbrew company doing "cheap fun (beer).(com)", except it's not that much better than the macrobrew companies. In fact, I could probably name a few macros that tasted better than this.

4/10, no silly wordplay 4 you. Not 4 long, but 4 sure.

Forgot that I had some screenshots of Quake 4.