Wow, that’s some really invasive stuff. If a gym ever asked for my account and routing number I would just go somewhere else, but I understand not everybody has that option.

Then I just turn off my regular debit card and I’m no worse off than I would have been in the first place.

This is why I use a privacy.com card for just about everything. Anybody gets hacked or tries to pull some shady shit I can just turn off the card and it doesn’t affect anybody but them.

That looks like something that won’t last very long. I could be wrong, but my guess is that, being in the handles themselves, those screens are gonna get busted and they won’t have made nearly enough from ad revenue to warrant replacing them on a regular basis. Here in the US we’ve got them built into the pumps so when you start pumping you get some loud ass commercials.

But that means the original, “real” you died and the person that comes out the other side is essentially a clone with a copy of your memories.

VGA was originally a proprietary technology developed by IBM, though it was later built upon by VESA and is now publicly documented, so while it wasn’t developed by VESA as an open standard from the get-go, it is now considered an open standard that doesn’t require any licensing fees to implement. DVI was developed by the “Digital Display Working Group” and also does not require any licensing fees, though there are licensing terms you may have to abide by and there may be some costs associated with testing and validation to ensure you meet those terms and the spec.

H.265 is not a royalty free standard like AV1, VP9, Theora, etc. It’s covered by proprietary patents held by groups like MPEG LA so in order for manufacturers to build hardware level support for it into their devices they have to pay whatever the then current royalty fees are to those patent holders.

That’s reasonable, people deserve to get paid for their labor. In this situation however, the difference between them is that DisplayPort is a royalty free VESA standard. So while manufacturers have to pay for the materials and such to include it in their devices, they don’t have to pay any additional fees to license the standard. HDMI on the other-hand is a “brand” of proprietary connector/interface (kind of like how “Velcro” isn’t the actual name of a product, it’s a “brand” of hook and pile tape), so not only do manufacturers have to pay for the materials and labor related to physically acquiring and installing the connectors, but they have to pay both per-device and annual licensing fees for rights to use the HDMI product.

“Direct playing” just means the source file is entirely compatible with the client device and doesn’t require any transcoding/re-encoding by the server, it doesn’t really tell you whether the client is using software or hardware decoding to play it. I’m guessing it’s probable that a Jellyfin server could still report “direct playing” even if the client is using software decoding to play it. However, if the client device is something like a smart TV or something with a more locked down OS, and the maintainer/manufacturer removes support for a codec from that device, you may show more transcoding action on your server for things that previously just direct played because smart devices like that may not have support for software decoding, or may not have the horsepower to try even if they still have the codecs installed.

I just set it to downmix to mono in Handbrake and it’s been alright. I’ll definitely do some reading/comparing to see what this setting is all about though.