6mbps is about as good as it gets. That's what Youtube and Netflix use for 1080p stuff. So that is the standard you need to worry about for streaming in general. Yes, I know that Blu-ray is higher bitrate, but little if anything streams at that rate. For the web, 6mbps is "high quality". You might not care for that definition, but it is what it is.

If you asked them not to change the definition because "broadband" technically refers to how data is transferred (10gbit ethernet is not broadband, despite the speed, it is baseband) then ok, you can be cpt pedantic.

However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet. Currently I find the breakpoint to be about 20mbps. That is the point after which normal users won't notice much, if any, improvement. As such, that is my baseline for recommendation to people. 10mbps is serviceable I guess, but is a pain for video streaming. 4mbps would be a real issue, even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.

The minimum needs to keep rising. We keep finding more to do with our net connections. These companies are just whiny because they don't want to have to roll out FTTH, they want to keep doing DSL and pretending like that works.

The way they design their CPUs it is easy to have pretty much any number that is divisible by 2. It isn't a big deal to have something that is any particular amount more or less. So then it comes down to power, thermal, and die size limits.

Apparently 18 cores is what they cap out at, this time around. I'm sure you'll be able to get 16 core, and less, chips, that is just the most they could stuff in there before exceeding whatever design limitations they'd set.

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.

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?

There's no choice. There isn't a "little bit better" choice on domestic flights, even international flights on the same continent. When I fly up to Canada to visit my parents I have two options: Coach or First Class. The prices are VASTLY different, first class is over double the price of coach. Now it is much nicer, wide seats, plenty of legroom, and all the booze you'd like if you are the sort of person who likes to drink. But it is really expensive.

There's no mid-range option. I can't pay 1.2x the coach price for something a bit better. If I could, I would.

So how would they know? I've never seen it tried. If they offered the option and those seats always sat empty, or were full of people who had been given upgrades for no money, then ok, remove them. But they aren't available. Your only options are "cheapest possible" or "waaaaaay more expensive."

Look at the military hardware the Saddam era Iraqi army used: It wasn't American make, it was Russian/Soviet. Now look at Egypt, a country the US does arm, they are using US equipment.

Unsurprisingly, when countries arm other countries, they do it using their stuff. It is not only convenient, but it is one of those nice political things where you can help your own industries because you are buying from them.

The issue is he may never have had the right to release the derivative he did. So the original decompile/redistribution of Micecraft's code is not legal. That people said it was GPL doesn't make it so. It was an illegal distribution of copyrighted code. Mojang didn't care and didn't stop it, but it was illegal all the same. Well what that means is that if you then made a derivative of that, it wasn't legal either. He didn't have a license to distribute a derivative work and thus he can't go and declare it to be GPL.

So now the issue comes down to the part of the code he wrote. Well that is his... maybe. The problem is that his derivative was never legal in the first place. So a court could, and probably would, award control to Mojang. This has happened in music before. Someone makes a remix without permission and the work then gets granted to the original copyright owner.

If this kid pushes it, it is likely to end up badly for him. He would likely lose rights to the code, have to pay court costs and then, if they were feeling evil, could go after him for the illegal derivative work.

Basically if you make a derivative of someone's work and you don't have explicit permission to, either from them directly or via a license like the GPL, you need to be ok with them making use of that derivative if they want to, because you aren't going to win that fight. Maybe you don't think that is how it should be, but that's how it is. Copyright owners maintain control over their work, even if they choose to overlook a given violation. It isn't "protect it or lose it" like with trademark.

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?

*Happy spices!* We *happy bubbles* second Star Control II; only *silly cows* do not enjoy *smelling* *pretty colors*!

I deny all knowledge about the epson fx spontaneously catching fire.

The short circuit that blew up two power transformers and an embedded computer had nothing to do with me. And you didn't see me. And I was in disguise anyway.

Nobody saw me insert the radio direction finder valves into the R1155, switch it on and jam all televisions in the neighbourhood.

So, no, I've no knowledge of using technology to get into trouble. None whatsoever.

Well, it would appear that she may have used sex for personal gain. She had sex with people in positions to help her career, and did so while in a relationship with another person without his consent, which is immoral according to her. While that isn't direct monetary payment for sex, I can see how some people would consider it a form of prostitution.

There is a difference in the minds of many between having sex with a person because you want to for physical/emotional pleasure and having sex with a person because you wish to gain something from it. Also these is the issue of being in a relationship that has been set out as monogamous and then not adhering to that.