Yes. The codec in Windows 7 (ultimate) and its integration with Media Player produces smoother playback with less system load than VLC. The difference grows (up to a point) when other activity competes for resources while playing DVD or Blu-ray video.

You may not realize that, and it may not even occur for your particular collection of hardware. I didn't pick up on it for a long time, but at some point I noticed the difference and since then I've used Media Player. And I'm not some crazy 'phile that obsesses over imaginary minutia; I spend less than average on media gear and I'm not particularly sensitive to minor phenomena. But I can tell the difference between VLC and Media Player, and I can measure the difference in system load.

So yeah, it kinda sucks that the DVD codec Microsoft provides is going away. Will I care enough to not just use VLC? We'll see. I also use VLC frequently; it's better when coping with with random media and does a lot of tricks WMP won't. I have no problem with VLC at all. But if I can get better results with something else then I just might do that instead.

A government with the power to take one right can take the other. The strong preferences of groupthink assholes like you and Tim Cook will see both taken.

They're doing what they always do; drip drip drip out the bad news, a little worse each time. Fifty?!! Wow. 97?? Well, that's only 47 more than 50 so; "no new information," as their spokes-fucks will say.

It's going on right now with the anthrax news. Yesterday the DOD revealed they sent live anthrax into Canada, in addition to the 12 US states they had already admitted to.

The Clintons have been pulling this crap since the 90's. They're dripping out Foundation donor information one foreign turd at a time; timed to run out long before the election. They've got the State Department dripping out their copies of her emails on a published schedule now.

They know there are far more than 50 aircraft. So does the AP. They'll admit to a few more in a couple news cycles. They'll probably fess up to the whole number just before Rand Paul or whomever seats the first hearing on it.

That's a big fleet of planes. Just think, one "not secret" program inside one bureau of one branch of our Federal Government controls 50 aircraft, and we're not even allow to know what this operation is called, as they smother the whole thing under shell companies.

Isn't having a giant government great? Lets give them more money and see what they do with it.

Uh huh.

Art blogs.

Pretty much do exactly the opposite of anything advocated on art blogs and you're going the right direction.

The latest Android has icons are so abstract they are effectively meaningless. The clock looks like a pie chart; they can't even suffer the hour tick marks that might assist in conveying "clock." The "text" app is a huge left double quote — so out-of-context that it has no association with the concept of "communication." The Google Drive icon is a three color triangle that bears zero resemblance to any sort of storage concept. Basically you must read the label of every icon and slowly try to associate these pictorial abstractions to their actual purpose. In reality users are just memorizing the locations of these meaningless icons, and if you were to rearrange their locations they'd be totally lost.

It sucks. It's stupid. And I'm 100% certain there is a cabal of "art" fucks behind it.

No. Don't think of Stop signs. Stop signs aren't trying to convey an association to anything. You can't buy and eat a box of "stops." Many, many road signs use useful pictographs to convey things; a vehicle skidding due to ice; immigrants hand-in-hand running across a road, the silhouette of a bounding buck.... GUI icons need to convey association; storage, trash, communication, people, news, dates and times, etc.

Trying to boil all these things down to abstract vector art is idiot.

Good luck jamming inertia

...and right there you've just narrowed the pool of potential threats. Defense isn't about guarantees. Raising the bar is all you can ever achieve.

Give them "enough resources" and they'll nuke you from orbit.

Yeah, well word #2 in this story's subject is "Detecting," so I went with that. Silly me.

Detecting the "pilot" is actually the hardest part. $200 buys a programmable autopilot that will drop a UAV on any GPS coordinate the batteries can reach — sans pilot. Signals can come from any radio system, including ubiquitous ones like cell towers, so good luck finding that needle in the urban haystack.

You just pull that figure out of your butt?

Not that a 2 lbs craft is harmless, but 2 lbs is light. According to the FAA the upper limit for "recreational" UAVs is 55 lbs. It is easy to get into the 10's of lbs with big, extended range batteries, a high res camera, multi-axis gimbal, etc. Really easy. Whipping along at modest 60 mph you can cover 10-15 miles on today's batteries.

Anyone that can't see the potential of that is a fool.

The typical multirotor "drone" is necessarily built very lightweight; the electronics and motors are not typically shielded much at all. The brushless motors emit stupid amounts of RF energy due to unshielded motors, multiple banks of ESC's covered by nothing but heatshrink, etc. It shouldn't be particularly hard to spot a fast moving, localized source of RF noise at frequencies typical of multirotor motors.

Then there is heat. The ESCs and motors are HOT. Again, mass must be minimized so there is no easy way to hide that heat. A bright infrared spot zipping along at 50' altitude shouldn't be hard to detect.

For things that are piloted with FPV cameras there is a big video return signal coming off the craft. Due to antenna size this is usually some UHF frequency and fairly loud. The range of possible frequencies is vast, but in the real world there are a limited number of cost effective miniature transmitters available, so it isn't difficult to anticipate the likely frequencies.

Seems like there are a number of tell-tails that shouldn't be hard to exploit if you are serious about it have the means...

Clinton giving MFN status to China did more damage to the US than anything else. We have created more surplus working class than we have Fergusons to warehouse them.

No, they are not. They export some commodities, but beyond that they add no value to anything. Their factories are shut because their labor laws and practices make them non-viable. No significant intellectual property is created there, despite their vaunted "free" education. Rampant, endemic corruption keeps investors out.

I understand that people invent strange concepts such as that to rationalize their world view when reality fails to cooperate. Worse, I understand the people of Greece are prone to indulge such falsehoods, which doesn't bode well for their post-Euro future.

Covering your weapons in mirrors is stupid and impractical. The "just put mirrors on everything LOLZ" trope your kind always trots out doesn't become more feasible just because you're naive enough to keep repeating it.

Defense is always more expensive that offence. It's easier to break things. That's why being wealthy is important to self preservation.