As long as you do pass through of the USB device (or USB host controller), it should be fine. The VM acesses it directlty without passing through a virtualized version of the device (like what normally happens with sound, network, graphics) and the VM can even DMA to it. Down side is that the hardware isn’t visible to the host anymore, so if you pass through a GPU, it’s used exclusively by the VM, not the host. If you connect a monitor to the GPU, you see the VM, not the host. So you can only do this with hardware that is intended specifically for use within the VM. Zune management sounds like an ideal use case. See IOMMU if you’re interested in some if the tech side if it.

I had some bad g.skill DDR4 last year. I assumed it was out of warranty. Thanks for the tip!

No reason it can’t be done on 120v (from a technical level). In fact, most solar inverters in the US could do this at a technical level as they basically do the same thing, just on a larger scale (higher current and therefore are wired in to electrical panels rather than through outlet as outlets have lower current limits). All you need is the inverter to synchronize its AC output to match grid. If you had a smaller inverter, you could just connect it to an outlet (ignoring building codes, insurance, and other non technical reasons). So the choice is then to have centralized larger inverters or smaller inverters per panel or 2. If you live in a very densely populated area where you can only pit a panel or 2 on a balcony or you don’t have control of your electrical panel, then the small inverter method makes sense.

You can still bet on near certain events / events in progress, but there’s not necessarily a benefit in doing so as the odds shift. If something is believed to have a 50% chance of occurring then theoretically the bet would cost 0.5 for a payout of 1 (of you win). As the outcome becomes more (or less) likely, the cost of the bet changes to reflect that. In a prediction market, it’s similar to stock market in that in order for you to buy a share / place a prediction bet, someone has to be selling a share/taking the other side of the bet and the prices shift based on perceived value of the underlying thing being traded (stocks or predictions).

I helped some small sites with this lately (friends of friends kind of thing). I’ve not methodically collected the stats, but Cloudflare free tier seems to block about 80% of the bots on a couple forums I’ve dealt with, which is a huge help, but not enough. Anubis basically blocks them all.

I think you’re on to something, but sort of accidentally. A couple replies to you are saying it’s not possible, but I think they’re making an assumption that is not correct in many cases.

The replies is saying it’s not possible because the layers are flattened before passed to the compression, thus the uncensored/unredacted data is not part of the input to the compression and therefore cannot have any impact on its output. This is true assuming you are starting with an uncompressed image.

Here’s a scenario where the uncensored/unredacted parts of the image could influence the image: someone takes a photo of their ID, credit card, etc. It’s saved in a lossy compressed format (e.g. JPEG), specifically not a lossless format. They open it in an image editing tool to 100% black out some portion, then save it again (doesn’t actually matter the format). I feel lile someone is going to think I’m misunderstanding if I don’t explain the different output scenarios.

First is the trivial case: amultilayer output with the uncensored/unredacted data as its own layer. In this case, its trivial to get the uncensored/unredacted data as it is simply present and visible of you use a tool that can show the individual layers, but the general assumption is that this is not the case – that the output is a single layer image, in which we have 2 scenarios.

Second case: lossy compressed original, lossless censored. Consider that this censored/redacted image is flattened and saved as a lossless format such as PNG. Certainly there will be no compression artifacts of the uncensored/redacted data both because it is lossless (no artifacts added by PNG) and that it was flatted prior to being passed to PNG. However, the uncensored/unredacted artifacts remain in the uncensored/unredacted portions of the image. These were introduced by the compression that was applied prior to the censoring (e.g. the JPEG compression that contained the pre censored image). I suspect this is actually a common case.

Third case: lossy compressed original, lossy compressed censored: same as second case, except now you have additional artifacts, in particular you bow have artifacts from the censored portion, and the artifacts of the previous lossy compression are also adding additional artifacts. This is probably more difficult, but the point is that the original uncensored/unredacted artifacts are still present.

Basically what Nintendo did on one of their schemes to prevent unauthorized software (Famicom Disk System, which was a floppy disk drive for the Japanese version of the NES). This was the physical Nintendo logo embossed on to floppy disk and with a flat disk instead, the disk can’t be physically loaded (sort of, you can add extra cut outs). Other game systems required a logo or similar other brand/trademark/IP to be present in the game code in order to boot, so if you wanted to make your own game without Nintendo’s blessing, you had to invlude their IP in your physical disk or in the game code just to get it to boot. This BMW patent seems to be in the spirit of those hard and software protections that prevent people from doing what they want with the hardware (car) they bought.

Yeah and it’d be cool if they threw in a couple other games to show its versatility. HL3 of course, but a multiplayer game and maybe a unique puzzle game would be a good mix of game types.

I think you’re mixing up ME and 2000. ME (consumer) came after 98 (consumer) and 2000 (business) was the NT (business) version. I ran 2000 for a few years. Huge step up from 98/ME in stability and less eye candy bloat than XP.