nsns

There's a certain common expectation one has from any UI. This doesn't exist for me with anything Google - be it search, Youtube, Android, etc. - my first thought is always 'I'll need to fight it to get the results I'm looking for.' That's how they roll.

Firstly, on a personal note, I must say getting heavily downvoted on a factual statement and not an opinion is a new and confusing experience for me.

My comparisons were made several years ago using LAME 320 CBR, LAME VBR, OGG, lossless (WAV) 16bit 44.1kHz and lossless (WAV) 16bit 48kHz. I believe at least most professional musicians and sound engineers would be able to identify the difference between all of these; while they might not always be "worse", their sonic character is certainly different.

It all depends on how sensitive you are to these things, I've done such blind tests, and to my ears the fall in quality was significant, even painful.

Doesn't work anymore. At least not outside the US.

Perhaps we could, by adopting the way Firefox, Wikipedia, Internet Archive et al. operate.

Unless, of course, they are aware of it and try to subvert it by consciously modifying "their body shape characteristics and motion patterns".

    I have a taste for the secret, 
    it clearly has to do with not-belonging; 
    I have an impulse or fear or terror in the 
    face of a political space, for example, 
    a public space that makes no room for the secret. 
    For me, the demand that everything be paraded in 
    the public square and that there be no internal 
    forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization 
    of democracy. [. . .] if a right to the secret is 
    not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.

(Jacques Derrida, in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., II, p. 599.)

Well, I think there's something deeper going on here; the strength of the nation as a juridical entity has been seriously weakened; rich multinationals - corporations and individuals alike - are no longer bound by it, refugees are an obvious exception to it, and since the neo-liberal revolution, legislation also tends to be mostly global-minded; which leaves the normal citizen - now a "prisoner" of his or her place of birth - with few options. It seems only natural that new forms of existence in a post-national world would slowly come into being (instead of a naive populist, nostalgic ultra-nationalist turn).

Farm animals

Slightly OT: out of curiosity, anyone knows what's being used for legal Euthanasia, e.g. in the Netherlands?

You could call it the "Sunday effect".

From the Reddit comment linked by rybosome below:

>Some have questioned why no companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or SpaceX have attempted to investigate the device, but regardless of how likely these companies find the results so far, the largest reason is almost surely that the devices are both patented by their inventors.

Aren't votes supposed to be anonymous?

I've learned there's always a(n associative) trail of comments (sometimes from more than on thread) leading to such apparently random posts.

But what if the common folk in each nation finally realizes its national leaders have become, in essence, multinationals, just like Google and Amazon, with all that this entails regarding their actual agendas and worldview?

I think all this talk about the legality of using such services misses the point. It's about legitimacy, especially that of state leaders. While the western media might try to use it to delegitimize some non-western leaders, the leak actually works both ways.

Any country leader who'd make a speech to tell her (or his) people she doesn't care about them or their country, would do nothing illegal, but would probably loose her power. It's the same here - the leak serves as proof that the national Elite in many countries is no longer "loyal" to its imagined community (aka nation).

Strange, nothing about it on NYT.

    In the end, it still takes a single election to take him and his party down, 
    I have faith in Turkish people, 
    they did it before to others, they will do it to him as well.

But didn't this just happen? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_general_election,_June... )