You can't pave the earth with detectors

Can too.

I'm not lying, that's the actual size, something like 420k. It may have been a bit shorter playtime, perhaps 20 seconds (I didn't time it), but still, it was quite small.

Nobody said videos on Facebook are Blu-Ray quality. But you seem to have weird concepts about how big videos need to be to be good enough quality for a web page. Just as a test, I took an original high quality full-motion video of a concert, reencoded it with ffmpeg, audio codec aac, vbr audio quality 0.5, video codec x264, preset veryslow, cf 33, resolution 512x288 (half original size), 20 seconds. File size? 420k. Of course the video from facebook was darker and quieter, so one would expect it to compress better. If we give my sample concert clip an allowable size of, say, 550k, then I can up audio quality to 0.7 and cf down to 30. Either way, the resultant clip was fine, the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a Facebook wall.

Anyway, the key point is, Facebook feeds aren't loading you down with 50 meg videos, they're little couple-hundred-k clips, the same size as animated gifs. And while I haven't measured it, they don't appear to start streaming until you scroll down to them, and look to stop after you scroll away.

1) I just went and pulled the first anim-gif I saw off 9-gag, a fairly simple thing of Ralph Wiggum with little motion, so it should compress quite well for an animated gif. Size: just over 400k. I then pulled the first video that showed up on my Facebook feed, a 30 second full motion clip, and downloaded the entire thing (including the audio stream, full quality). Size: just over 400k.

So....?

2) Are you actually sure that it is downloading the audio stream when it does muted autoplay? Not saying that it oes or doesn't, but do you actually have evidence either way?

3) See the reply below.

There's really no argument. If you're going to allow animated gifs, you should allow autoplay videos. So that we can finally put the nail in the coffin of the awfulness that is gif by removing the last common use of it.

And FYI, 400k is not that much. Slashdot is a pretty simplistic website compared to most, and I just measured how much data is downloaded just to read the front page: 1.4M.

lol-ing at your comment, and your .sig :D

MOOOOOOM!!! The curiosity team won't share their awesome rover with me!!!!

Does he endorse the workers owning the means of production? If not, then he is not a communist. End of discussion.

Whatever Sunni state emerges there, I think that the descendents of that state don't want to have their entire ideological history tainted by ISIS and ISIS's barbarity. It will be a difficult legacy to live-down, and it will be hard for such a state to grow into a modern nation and world-citizen.

The Iraqi government lost control over those arms, because they were never a legitimate government in the first place. The US propped up the best puppet they could find (Maliki); and in fact, they originally tried to install Chalabi - who was so obviously corrupt that it failed; but they could at least get enough support for Maliki to get him elected - but the fact is, the entire government, and army apparatus that was erected to support it, was simply a way to channel bribes to the most-connected people.

When you have a government and administration that's composed of incompetent, but well-connected people, it falls over as soon as it is tested. They were only interested in their cushy positions, and covering their own asses. They didn't give a flying fuck about "Iraq".

A power vacuum can only be filled by anything, when there is power left sitting around. In the case of these "latent extremists" - the question is: who armed and empowered them in the first place? It's not a case of latent extremists filling a power vacuum. It is a proxy-war, and war-profiteering.

Why is it any more evil than animated GIFs? Both play automatically, neither happen with sound, and compression on x264 is *way* better than with animated gifs.

I was initially opposed to autoplay on FB, but after thinking about it, I changed my mind. We already see tons of animated stuff on web pages, and the videos from people who show up on my page about are usually things I'd find interesting (if the user posting them didn't usually post interesting things, I'd have stopped following them). There's no unexpected sounds to bug me, and the quality to size ratio versus animated gifs is, what, two orders of magnitude better?

Or a live badger. That would just be awesome. Franklinator 2.0.

It both scares me and pisses me of that the government can do whatever it wants with nuclear weapons, while my ability to use them is very, very restricted.

Who do they think they are, claiming the right to use things that the general public can't? Let me use my nuclear weapons!

Until I can be sure things are as safe as they reasonably can get I'd rather not have drones delivering packages yet

But that's exactly what drone proponents are asking for - a permitting standard that gives them the right to fly in these conditions and for these purposes in exchange for meeting a set of safety standards. Passive or automatically-engaged active safety features that ensure that "death by falling drone" is effectively an impossibility, whether that things like be cowled propellors, parachutes, an inherently low terminal velocity, fully independent backup propulsion, or whatever the case may be.

And in case you didn't notice, massive objects weighing hundreds of tons loaded with massive amounts of fuel and capable of taking out whole city blocks and/or skyscapers already fly extensively over your head. But you're worried about little plastic helicopters?

A meaningful distinction, but have you tried getting hired in Europe as an American? It's kind of intense. I'm still working on it. :b

(Still, certain it's far better than the other way around).