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?

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*!

It's not a "non-need", but it's not the end of the world, for several reasons.

First off, everything comes down to time. If one had, say a decade, they could build a full, brand new gas production infrastructure from scratch, designed to produce in different parts of the world and export straight to the EU.

Great, except EU gas reserves aren't that big. They have a max capacity of about 6 months, usually filled to about half that at this time of year, though higher than average now. Russia makes up 30% of EU imports. Basically, reserves provides something like 9-12 months of Russian cutoff.

Next we have instant displacement. Much of the EU has been working to shut down coal power plants, and ones that are in operation are often run at lower and lower capacity factors. In the event of a full Russian gas cutoff, these would be all fired up and used heavily, while NG plants would instead be mostly shut down.

Then we have slower displacement, which can take anywhere from a month or so to a couple years. NG power plants can be converted to other thermal sources. Industrial consumers of NG for heat can switch to other heat sources. Etc.

On the home and commercial perspective, the higher cost of gas will lead to more investment in efficiency on its own. Government efficiency programs can improve this even further.

On the production side, the spike in gas prices will instantly make higher-cost, formerly unecomomical European fields economical. Some of these will be available right away, some will require weeks, some months, some years to bring online. But it does put a lot of new gas into the picture.

On the non-European side, there's LNG. The US is really a read herring on this front, at least for the time being, as Sabine Pass won't come online until the winter after next, and others even later. The Middle East is the primary LNG exporter here, particularly Qatar, whose LNG capacity alone is more than all the gas Russia sells Europe. Thankully, the EU is loaded with largely idle LNG import terminals (nearly enough to replace all of Russian gas as-is), and LNG tanker rates are very low right now, there's a glut. Now, Europe would have to pay a very high price for it. LNG is expensive to begin with, and they'll be competing with the gas's current customers, primarily Asia. Europe, of course, would pay more, leading to all of the aforementioned things - increased production, increased displacement, etc - to occur in Asia to offset their reduced LNG imports. Interestingly, the US actually *can* help there - the US does have a Pacific LNG export terminal that was recently brought back into operation at Kenai, Alaska.

The net combination of these factors is that, no, Europe will not just "run out of gas and freeze to death" or any of those other doomsday scenarios that people throw around. But there's no question that Europe will have to pay more for gas, probably at least 50% more. And nobody's going to like the resumed usage of coal power - but in the short term, they're not going to have a choice.

On the other hand... for the EU, the extra energy costs for gas and oil may represent something like a 5-10% GDP hit. But for Russia, losing all of their oil and gas exports would be like dropping a nuclear bomb onto their economy.

They don't. If they did, they'd have already threatened Russia with them to make them stop. That's the point of having nuclear weapons, after all.

Ukraine foolishly believed that the US and Europe would protect them when they agreed to give up their nuclear weapons after the end of the Cold War. They're paying for that mistake now. If Ukraine survives but doesn't get to become a member of NATO, expect a full force nuclear weapons program on their part (which shouldn't be too hard, they have lots of nuclear power plants, lots of spent waste full of plutonium, and are the world's #9 uranium producer).

Hey, don't call him a dictator. He was legitimately elected! People in the country love him to death. For example, he got 99.89% of the vote with a 99.59% turnout in Chechnya, which is obviously totally legit! In some parts of Grozny, as many as 107% of voters turned out to vote for the "Butcher of Grozny".

Totally legit!

My favorite was when he "found ancient pottery" right by the shore of a heavily trafficked beach. That even beats when he "singlehandedly saved a TV crew from a tiger attack" ;)

The Jim Jong Un/Il stuff is a serious comparison. He doesn't take it as extreme, and Russia is only "way, way down" on the list of global press freedom rather than "at the very bottom". But it's along the same "Great Leader" lines.

I think some people way overestimate him and others way underestimate him. I think he's a human which in some ways has been very strategic and very short sighted. He's a hardcore nationalist and idealist, and is willing to take huge risks toward those goals. But he's also playing a very high stakes game that he could well lose. And I see little evidence that his actions in Ukraine have been anything more than winging it; Russia seems to have been repeatedly caught off guard by many of the events on the ground, including the low local collaboration rate, the willingness of the Ukrainian military to engage in military ops in populated areas, the inabilitity of the small Russian forces and local collaborators to hold ground, the amount of resources needed to successfully resist Ukraine, and whether the EU and US would dare risk Russian anger in terms of punishing Russia or helping Ukraine. In each case, Russia has had to hastily assemble counteraction.

When Yanukovitch fled, Ukraine's military was by all standards broken, the public had no stomach for fighting in their own territory, Russia was still more thought of as a partner than an enemy, joining NATO was a minority position in Ukraine, the EU and US were afraid of doing anything that could antagonize Russia, and so forth. Now Ukraine has been shifting their economy into a war economy, their forces are now veterans (still underarmed, but that could change rapidly), the public by and large fully supports the military action, Russia is by and large hated, joining NATO is a strong majority position, the EU and US have taken direct action against Russia and look ready to accelerate it, and so forth.

So let's say that - as it looks increasingly likely to happen - the US and EU arm Ukraine. Not just a little but, but fully commit to it - tanks, warplanes, antiaircraft, ships, subs, tactical missiles, the works, plus full realtime intelligence data sharing. What's Russia's next play? Ukraine, given enough modern US and EU equipment, could most likely defeat anything but total war with Russia. It's extremely doubtful the Russian public would have the stomach to do what would be necessary to take on and defeat a western-armed Ukraine using conventional weapons. So... nuclear weapons? They could, of course. But they'd instantly become a global paraiah, there'd be so much pressure against them that I don't think even China would leave their doors open to Russian trade anymore. Most Europeans would rather burn trash to heat their homes than pay for a wisp of gas from a nation that's actively using nuclear weapons on an aligned state (and realistically the loss of Russian gas wouldn't actually be that devastating, but it'd take too long to go into why). Not to mention what would happen in terms of internal terrorism/guerilla warfare within Russia, which is already a huge problem among Russia's many ticked off populations, and you can add tens of millions of recently-nuked Ukranians to that list, with pretty much unlimited funding for their actions provided by the US and EU. And Russia is a petroeconomy. Its manufacturing sector is grossly undersized compared to its population, even worse than during Soviet times. There's every reason to think that a fully embargoed Russia would collapse even worse than the USSR.

Putin doesn't want to use nukes, of course. He wants to threaten to use nukes. He wants Ukraine to think that he's actually crazy enough to do it so that they'll drop all future claims on Crimea and turn the eastern portion of their country to be a "federated" (Russian puppet) zone. And you know.... it is a possibility. Raise the fear level enough and people might just give in to the unthinkable.

It's an incredibly high stakes game he's playing, however, with a far from certain outcome.

And did you hear, rvz.ru/~vladimir/bullshit.html is reporting that Ukraine is now working with ALIENS and THE ILLUMINATI to force Russian mothers in the Donbass to eat their own babies! It's TRUE!

Freedom House on press freedom in Russia. Reporters Without Borders's take.

It's one thing if you're dumb enough to take state propaganda outlets of a country that takes #148th place on the press freedom ranking, where even blogs are forced to register with government censors if they get too many readers and where it's standard practice to hire actors to play parts in the news. But it's even more ridiculous when you do so in regards to an event where said propaganda outlets have put forth literally more than a dozen different, completely contradictory reasons why it's not Russia's fault, including but not limited to "we have proof Ukraine shot it down with a surface-to-air missle", "we have proof Ukraine shot it down with an air-to-air missile", "we have proof that Ukraine gunned it down with a fighter cannon", "we have proof that Ukraine rammed it", "we have proof that Ukraine loaded a plane full of dead bodies, disguised it as a civilian airliner and tricked the rebels into shooting it down", "we have proof that Ukraine deliberately tricked the rebels into shooting down an actual civilian airliner", and my favorite - the original reported in the Russian press, before it became clear that it was a civilian aircraft - "we've confirmed that the heroic rebels of the Donbas just successfully shot down a Ukranian military jet!"

Ugh... puns. :( Are you just trying to ruffle peoples' feathers here?

Passenger pigeons were not primarily a grain species, although they would eat grain when other preferred foods were in short supply. Part of the reasons the flocks increasingly turned to grain with time is due to the cutting and burning of many of their native forests to make room for farmland (and with an average lifespan in captivity of 15 years, probably half that in the wild, populations don't readjust right away). They were a migratory species, of course, but the habitat destruction was going on all over their range. If you get rid of the oaks and chestnuts in an area and the only other food option is grain, of course they're going to eat that. They also ate insects, mainly when breeding.

When you're talking about reintroducing a species from scratch, obviously the issues of what to do if a billion birds come into the area is totally inapplicable. The forests capable of supporting those numbers are gone. Birds that primarily consume seeds and grains are a much bigger threat to farmers than birds with a primary focus on nuts like the passenger pigeon.