It depends a huge amount on what you're listening to. For about 90% of my music, I can't tell the difference between the original CD and 128kb/s MP3. A few things have noticeable artefacts that don't go away no matter how high you put the bitrate. Substitute 128kb/s AAC and that changes to over 95%. At 256kb/s AAC, I can't tell the difference for anything I own, but I've heard some recordings that hit pathological cases in the algorithms used for AAC and sound terrible at any bit rate (usually orchestral pieces with a single voice and only for short samples). With FLAC, you can 100% reconstruct the original, bit for bit, so you won't suffer from any unfortunate coincidence between your choice of music and the CODEC of choice.

The big advantage of a lossless compression though is for recompressing. For a long time I had a DVD player connected to my living room speakers that could play back MP3s, but not AAC. If I wanted to burn a CD-RW or DVD+RW to play on it, I had to recompress, which usually sounded noticeably worse than if I'd gone straight to MP3 from the source material. If I'd ripped everything as FLAC, then that recompression would not have introduced any new artefacts.

Sounds good.

I was happy to re-buy DK and DK2 from GOG when they were on special offer for $2 each: for that price, it's worth not having to find the CDs. The fact that they had pre-packaged Mac versions and I didn't have to futz with WINE myself was a bonus.

You don't have to lower the math standards any, you just have to fail to raise them for the next 20 years. Even then it won't matter, because so many people are so bad at statistics and estimating, even when they know better.

Gerrymandering has a long, proud tradition in U.S. politics. I wouldn't be surprised if it resulted in advantage to one side about half the time.

It seems that political power is self-limiting. One side will occupy Congress for a while, until the other side gets fed up and makes a switch. As long as one party doesn't control the whole Congress plus the presidency, gridlock keeps us safe from most of the excesses of either side. It's only when one side runs the whole show that it's time to worry.

They created an algorithm that constructed constituency boundaries randomly, but in such a way that obeyed the rules. They constructed 100 such random maps. The average of these had 7-8 Democrat seats, 5-6 Republican seats. The actual results were 9 Republican, 4 Democrat, using maps drawn up by the Republicans (note: TFA didn't say what the results would have been with the previous set of maps, which had been drawn up by the Democrats). This means that, although the Republicans lost the popular vote in the state, and they lost the geographically weighted vote according to 100 randomly drawn electoral maps, they still ended up winning the state overall.

I'm trying to read this site, but it's quite difficult as they pop up an obnoxious banner that doesn't go away when I click the red close box. Their figures are 7,900,000 birds killed for coal, 330,000 for nuclear. So your citation directly refutes your point: coal kills 24 times more birds than nuclear.

Would have loved to be there instead of here when in was +42C over the weekend, and I'm not even in the tropics.

Sorry, misunderstood, and good point about infrastructure being neglected in the UK apart from a few major cities.
Another thing is there's some form of heat pump electricity generation technology that can only work in the niche of a cold place with a lot of tunnels underground filled with water - which is anywhere in Scotland where coal has been dug up. I forget the name of the project.

Read review 3 as to why I use the warez version despite having a legal copy. That isn't me that wrote it but it may as well have been.

Yes. Of course, at some point you'll start getting the material from asteroid mines, because at a few million dollars per kg it's actually worth doing that. Generally, the demand slows as the price increases too though. A roof paint that costs a few thousand times the value of the house probably isn't going to be that popular...

You've got it backwards. Decentralisation is pretty well the holy grail of grid stability. When things go down you are left with a hole instead of losing half the grid.