This adds to my impression that many, many voters just voted for them because they are fed up with the old parties and system. It may very well be that these voters will leave for greener pastures in the future, causing the PP to fall below 5% again (meaning they won't get seats in state elections). Also, a good percentage of the voters are previous FDP (liberals) voters. The FDP had two positions in the past, neo-liberalism with open markets and freedom for the financial sector, and civil rights. They nearly completely expunged the latter from their party over the years (apart from the national minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger), and now they are paying for it: They are part of the national government, but didn't even get 2% of the votes in the Saarland. Most analysts assume that the voters left for the other bigger parties and the PP.

Dwindling sales of the RIAA labels could have two probable causes:

1. With Spotify and similar streaming services, most people can get all the music they need for 5$ a month. The offers there probably satisfy most users.

2. The CDs that get released by major labels are produced so poorly that I entirely stopped buying any major label releases (also because my taste evolved). It's completely retarded marketing on the majors end. The people buying CDs today are actually not the young people, but rather in their late twenties and thirties. Those actually know how properly mastered music sounds, and current CD releases are far from that. It's totally schizophrenic to still put out CDs, but to treat your own product in such a poor fashion that it's simply worthless.

Ian Shepherd's mentioning that one should avoid 128kbit/s encoded MP3. This is leaving out a critical piece of information. Luckily he mentioned himself that heavily (audio) compressed music (data) compresses very badly. This will be especially evident if you force the encoder to only allocate a fixed number of bits to a section, called "Constant Bitrate" (CBR) in MP3 encoders. "Busy" sections will get the same data allotment as quiet sections. This problem can be diminished by using "Variable Bitrate" (VBR) mode when encoding, which encodes to a specific target quality rather than file size. With that, (LAME) MP3s can still sound good enough around 128kbit/s, since the encoder is free to allocate more bits to critical sections and less bits to non-critical section.

In short, there is no reason to use CBR encoding, unless your target device is unable to decode VBR encoded files, or you absolutely need to know the exact bandwidth requirement of a stream. It defeats the whole point of lossy encoding, which is to reproduce the original with highest possible fidelity, not reach a target file size.

I get it, when you sit in your basement hacking away at code potentially benefiting many people for free you are a socially unacceptable geek. As soon as you put together some graphics and make money from thousands of people you are the sex icon of the new computer era. It's not that perception has changed, but rather the contrary. Money and status derived from money is valued more than the work itself.

Though the ALAC decoder in rockbox is probably not perfect, the codec performance comparison at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison clearly shows that decoding of FLAC is far more efficient in rockbox. Maybe ALAC decoding can close the gap now that ALAC sources are open.

Ludum Dare has been doing this for years now. Every competition has a more or less vague theme or motto, and people are invited to come up with a game of any genre and implement it in a 48 hours time frame. Check out http://ludumdare.com/ for more info.

When I first read the title I assumed that they found out that games with lower scores get pirated more. This would have made perfect sense to me, since I understand the idea of "try before you buy", especially for games which are reported to be flawed in some ways. Then I saw that they didn't weigh the amount of pirated copies by the sales of the specific game, which then only shows that good games are popular.

I will savour the three seconds which I save each half a year.

Also, a 20% decrease might sound like much, but when we're talking about 15 seconds vs. 12 seconds, it's just not something most people will even notice at all.

Funny how you mention wasted bandwidth and 320kbit CBR MP3s in the same sentence, since CBR encoding is the prime example of wasted bandwidth (i.e. virtually no quality gains while needing more bits).

It has already been proven that these machines don't work on german television: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6iBzlXar50 Still german airport security is using x-ray machines now, at least in Hamburg.