The fact is that the best general streaming service is YouTube.

Uses a lot of bandwidth if you just want the music.

NOT if you use youtube-dl with the -f m4a option...

Or the MusicPiped or NetMBuddy Android apps.
Found on: https://f-droid.org/

Streaming is a form of DRM and tracking, which unnecessarily consumes extra resources. You should do it as little as possible.

You can download all the public domain movies on archive.org, you can easily download any youtube videos there's any chance you'd like to watch more than once. You can easily record TV shows broadcast over the air. You can quickly copy to disk any movies you've purchased on physical media, for convenient viewing. etc.

Streaming is a ball and chain, restricting your selection, limiting your options, etc. Never once has a single video, TV show or movie in my collection been taken away from me when the copyright owner decided they could make larger profits by doing so.

And why not? $50 for an iView CyberBox (Android) that includes an ATSC tuner and USB port, and another $60 for a 2TB USB hard drive.

You can quickly and easily build a huge collection of media that actually BELONGS to you, and is at the mercy of nothing but a good electrical supply. In any other kind of major natural (or man-made) disaster, would you really assume you will have uninterrupted internet access? Radio is a nice change, for a little while... but when things are falling apart around you, having your familiar entertainment choices at hand can be a great comfort in unplesant and uncertain times.

I still can't believe they don't have a real competitor.

They do, Intel. You can get REAL, fan-less quad-core Atom mini-PCs that run on 5W of power for under $100, including the case, power supply, eMMC storage, hdmi cables, dual video outputs, 3 real USB ports, everything (those are all extra cost with a Pi).

You can get this box for $110 on Amazon (non-affiliate link) with 4GB RAM, 64GB 100MB/s eMMC, dual output (vga & hdmi) 4K graphics. That'll do almost everything people want a Pi for, and more. Lacking in GPIO pins admittedly, but $2 for a USB gpio dongle on eBay will solve that one, too, or spend a bit more and get even more GPIO than the Pis have.

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

I'd have thought they'd use mild or full hybridization, or even just more advanced actually clean diesels, at least as a transition.

NOBODY will believe VW when they announce they've got a new, clean diesel. In addition, European countries are announcing future, across-the-board bans on diesels, because the soot they produce is so damaging to health and structures. There's no future in diesel cars, and spending any more money on developing a BETTER dead-end technology is foolish. You might as well tell Kodak to make a slightly cheaper film camera, as digital cameras loom large.

Imagine NYC if the sound of engines were taken away.

Engines only contribute about 1/3rd of the noise of a vehicle. Air being pushed out from between the wheels and pavement counts for most of the rest. EVs will help a bit, but wont fix the problem.

We arent even close to the limits of lossy compression

Completely wrong.

MPEG-2 video and audio come very close to the limits of accurate lossy compression... Specifically, much-higher compression, that does not discard perceptible information (as shown by professional ABX testing) is not possible. This has been matemtatically proven, the term is "Perceptual Entropy" and it sets the upper limits based on physiological models of human senses, established in the late 80s/early 90s most significantly by J.D Johnston of ATT Bell Labs.

That's why nobody is trying to improve upon perfect lossless compression anymore. Instead newer codecs willfully discard perceptible information, but try to generate an output that just looks/sounds "good" but is easily distinguished from the source. That's why only MUSHRA tests are popular today, modern codecs (at common/recomended bitrates) would completely fail professional ABX testing.

America tried an almost completely unregulated free market. It gave us the "robber barons" who monopolized incredible wealth for themselves, and used it to either buy-up or destroy all competitors by cutting them off from their markets. Industrialists who would hire private armies to MURDER union organizers rather than risk increasing labor costs. A state of affairs which eventually caused a little thing called the "great depression" which nearly caused a peasant revolt that would have destroyed this country.

If I round up, it makes the game look better than it is. If I round down, I am being giving an inaccurate portray of how I really feel.

You are but one drop of rain in a monsoon. Ratings *should* appropriately dither over the aggregate, so the few who are in the middle will likely half vote up, while half vote down.

While up/down may not be entirely fair, there's really more options for manipulation in a star rating system. By removing zero-star ratings as an option, they can artificially inflate scores. By changing the textual labels (what if 4-stars was described as "Just Okay"?) they can manipulate people into rating higher. And in general, companies are biased to WANT higher ratings, so you'll be more likely to stay around longer, spending more money, so whatever system they design is going to err or the high side.

You know what ALWAYS comes after a merger? Massive lay-offs. There's no reason to merge two companies if they have just as high costs as when they were operating separately, so eliminating now-redundant jobs is the key reason mergers happen. Approving that is going to make Trump look very, very bad.

The merger was always an idiotic idea... Sprint and T-Mobile have no technology in common, nor do their services complement each other in ANY way... Nearly all the company's towers are deployed in proximity to the other's, so they're redundant and most would just have to go. At best, it would be like the MetroPCS buyout... T-Mobile would be buying the brand, stores, and customers, telling them all they need to replace their phones in short order, and shutting off the foreign network they don't want or need to bother maintaining. It really only serves as a legal way to kill-off a competitor.

Of course Sprint just LOVES idiotic ideas. Nextel, WiMax, Clearwire, Tidal, etc. The more obviously idiot the idea, the quicker Sprint is going to jump at it, so they can start burning money even faster.

They clearly think a merger with T-Mobile is a foregone conclusion, because they've completely given-up on improving their network. They announce upgrades, then cut the budget to not just a fraction of what they need to catch-up, but a fraction of what is needed to just maintain parity and avoid falling further behind their competitors. So Sprint's network keeps getting slower and slower.

Some people have been saying it looks like SoftBank is spinning all their valuable assets off to subsidiaries that they control, but which aren't under Sprint, so as the company fails from the lack of investment, the other investors will get nothing, while SoftBank gets to keep or sell-off everything of value. But I believe it's just more of a delaying strategy... Keep Sprint limping along, but perpetually on the edge of failure, in hopes regulators will fear a (too big to fail) bankruptcy, and go along with a merger no matter how bad it looks for every one of the stakeholders involved.

SoftBank made an idiotic investment. Sprint is worth rescuing, but they aren't interested or particularly capable of doing it. They deserve to lose their shirt. Then sell the company to somebody who's actually going to try to build it back up into a viable and competitive cellular carrier again.

Except he's 100% correct that such an order would exceed the authority of the FCC. Congress could do it, but the FCC cannot. And you should be THANKFUL for that fact, otherwise ATSC/HDTV tuners would all implement the "broadcast flag" and DVRs would be all but illegal. How soon we forget.

Neonicotinoids are not particularly persistent. They are already banned in much of Europe.

Right. And yet Europe is experiencing colony collapse disorder as well. The evidence that neonicotinoids have any contributing effect to CCD is... very weak, at best.

Stop naming them after defunct politicians and overambitious military blowhards. The Royal Navy knows how to do it.

They HAVE TO. There's just too many ridiculous British names...

Let's hear it for the HMS Ridgewell Hancock

Yes indeed, I've been using the basic HTML GMail interface for years now, never liking their slow JS version that blocks every time you click on anything.

I've posted instructions to do so before:
http://pipedot.org/2TPQ

Mozilla refused to support h.264 for years - even after it was clear that standard had won the web streaming format war.

H.264 won because Apple belligerently refuse to even ALLOW WebM add-ons in its products. Having Firefox as a stubborn opponent, rather than pragmatically giving-in every time there's the slightest pressure to do so, is immensely useful, and simply the right thing for the public, even if users are briefly inconvenienced.