This. As far as I can hear, compression is the main difference between vinyl and digital, and that's something that is caused by the guys doing the mastering, not by the medium. For fun, compare a recording of an album like Californication on vinyl against the CD, and marvel at the difference. Now, rip that vinyl to your computer and turn it into a file using a lossless codec (or even use MP3 at a higher bitrate). You'll find that the audio file will faithfully reproduce the vinyl recording, pops, crackles, "warmth" and dynamic range and all.

It's sad that masters made for vinyl are not available as digital downloads, but perhaps ther ecord companies prefer to serve the long tail of the market with physical vinyl exclusively. Because selling proper masters might well eat significanly into that market, social factors and album art notwithstanding.

Memberships and influence. Greenpeace have repeatedly shown to put those before their stated goals, before simple integrity and truth, and before their own volunteers. Greenpeace's real mission is Greenpeace.

Maybe the CIA are thinking the same thing. They send the "artist" and his helpers into the embassy to make a cast of Assange, freeze him in carbonite instead and smuggle him to the USA that way. He'll end up as the favourite decoration in John Brennan's office.

Recommending people to learn how to code because computers play an ever-increasing role in our daily lives is laudable if you're a tech writer and open source advocate, but if you do so as a tech billionaire, you motives are immediately suspect? That's nice...

Besides that, the difference between coders and non-coders in any profession is remarkably apparent; people who have learned coding at some point in their life seem to be the better troubleshooters and analysts. There are other ways to acquire those useful skills and some people will have a natural aptitude for them, but apparently coding is a very good exercise to impart them. I'd say that coding is a useful subject in school even for people who will never code professionally later in life.

But you're not just selling widgets, you are also building roads to be able to bring those widgets to your customers, and paying for those roads with the sales of those widgets. If your customers are making their own widgets but are still using your roads to buy and sell them, your loss not only consists of the 1 cent net profit per widget; the average per-widget cost of that road is a loss as well. This means that you have to start charging the cost of the road separately instead of rolling it into the cost of each widget, and that is the problem: utilities will have to change their business models but in a lot of cases regulation prevents them from doing so.

No, and that's part of the problem. I pay a small fixed fee and a per kWh charge to my utility. Presumably, the fixed fee doesn't pay for the infrastructure, but what they make on the power they sell me on average lets them operate at a profit. If people are buying a whole lot less power because of domestic solar installations, the utility won't be able to cover their costs.

The other problem is that solar power is competing at consumer level prices, which often include an hefty tax. That makes solar attractive to consumers, but it also means that when you are generating a surplus, the utility is effectively buying that power back from you at consumer prices as well. Even if they can sell that power elsewhere and perhaps shut down a generator or two, it means that instead of generating power at a marginal cost of €0.02/kWh and selling it at €0.19/kWh, they buy and sell at the same price and make nothing.

Don't Comcast allow subscribers who have turned on the Xfinity service in their on router access to all other Xfinity hotspots? That's how my ISP sells its customers on the service (it's opt-out, but they did provide easy instructions on how to disable it).

True, advertising does serve a useful purpose. The problem is with the people who think it's a good idea to make their ad just a little bit louder, brighter or bouncier than the rest, so it gets noticed more. And then of course the rest of the advertisers, even the well-meaning ones, are forced to make their ads a little louder still. Yes, even the "regular" advertisers do this: television ads have been normalized in terms of dBs and often in compression as well. But those same exact same ads do not behave so well on unregulated channels, such as broadcasters' websites showing repeats of their shows with ads in between. Some of those ads fairly blast out your eardrums, and that's not just laziness on the webmaster's part for failing to adjust the volumes properly; those ads also have extreme compression (for higher perceived loudness) that is absent from the televised versions.

I agree that the patch is silly. However, the use of "they" or "them" in the singular, gender neutral sense has a very old history in the English language, more than a century at least.

From the Joyent guy:

This is about replacing "he" with "they" somewhere. Noordhuis' single response in the comments section to this change was "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.", and a flamewar that is as stupid as it is predictable ensues. Joyent then jumps to the conclusion not just that rejecting a trivial change like this constitutes an insistence on principle that pronouns should be gendered, but that such insistence springs from the notion that masculinity is inextricably linked to software. And this is a sacking offense? MikeRT called it right when he used the term "SJW tools". To me, this would at most be cause to remind the employee of whatever Diversity policies the company has in place.

Yes!: http://www.bestbv.nl/article/s...

So far the evidence seems to weigh in favour of us being top dog in our immediate surroundings (earth, the solar system at least, perhaps nearby interstellar space as well). It is possible that superintelligent stuff exists near us, invisible to us, but very unlikely that this intelligence would leave no trace or mark that we can perceive yet not fit in our simple theories of physics and nature (indicating existence of another intelligence). And as far as the universe is concerned, we may well be near the top of the intelligence spectrum; superintelligence may be extremely rare or even impossible.

Gods or superintelligent beings, I'll believe in them when I see them, or at least when we see something inexplicable, clearly artificial or some phenomenon far outside our models that would require superintelligence to pull off.

Pretty much anything having to do with Dutch euthanasia laws or cannabis use.

Since they "are still in early stages", how would you want them to differentiate themselves? I can think of a few things that can set it apart from a site like Wikinews which is based on vanilla Mediawiki:
- Multiple, personal, compound filters (subject, region, country, town, breaking, highest ranked)
- Rich feeds (mail, RSS)
- A personalized front page based on your filters with some "suggested reading" thrown in
- Article ranking based on moderation and reputation (of both source site and submitter)
- Comment section (we need our flamewars)
- A mobile app (yes, you can go with a mobile theme, but some newspapers and news aggregators have apps that actually make finding and reading stuff a lot easier)

Pretty much this. The only place where I could see such a catch-all work is to ensure that mandates given to government agencies are interpreted as narrow (or as explicitly) as possible. And even there, the same danger exists i.e. constant challenges of that mandate could cripple essential and legitimate government functions.