Not true. The more nonlinear the listening environment, the less accurate the assumptions of the psychoacoustic model used by MP3; more of the quantization noise added by the encoding process will be above masking thresholds.

In a good listening environment, given typical material and a good codec, very few people can hear the difference between 256kbit and the original. Vanishingly few can tell the difference at 320kbit. But 192kbit and below, where many people can tell the difference, does not become magically less degraded because you've added nonlinearities to the system--it becomes more degraded, and is more likely to be noticed, not less.

That's nine, not ten!

It's not directly relevant, but you can memorize this fairly easily by breaking it into 3 sets of three, memorizing each set separately, then repeating them in sequence.

What kind of bullshit moderation is this? +1 Informative? And it's not just this comment. Throughout the comments on this story, I see ignorance, racism, and bullshit not only posted but modded up.

I guess I'll be meta-moderating more often.

I'm not lying. You impeach your own character when you throw that word around. Your opinion apparently differs, so I can assume you had quite a fast computer in 1997.

Plenty of people felt E was too bloated to run back then. Certainly my computer was fast enough to handle FVWM, but ran dog slow with E. If you search for opinions from the 90s (since your memory is apparently failing you), you'll find other people had similar experiences and opinions. Being bloated was rather the point of E--adding unnecessary eye candy because they valued prettiness over speed.

Personally, I used DR-0.11, which was buggy and crashy, contained a bunch of amusingly tiled nudes, and was all-around pretty ugly. By DR-0.14, it was still pretty slow and buggy. Clearly it's come a long way since then, and obviously computers are much faster now, but I'm sticking to my assessment of what it was :-P

I still prefer minimalism.

Most people I knew used them for imports. Me, I just got a Japanese PS2.

A store around here briefly sold debug PS2s which were region free but couldn't play DVDs (at least without a memory card that wasn't supplied), but that seemed kind of shady to me.

These days, I'm not interested in a console that's region locked. It instantly halves the value in my mind, and thinking that way, none of them seem like they're worth the money.

For years, I had email notifications on my Youtube account. Then Google changed it over to a SSO model, and forced to associate my YT account with a Google account.

I stopped getting any email notifications. Half a year later, I discovered they were all in my unused gmail account. As it turns out, Google silently discarded my actual email address, and although you can add it back, it's a no-op, as they won't send notifications to the address you add. So you have to receive everything at a dummy gmail account, then forward to your actual email address.

I've had no problems with Facebook doing anything like this, because I have all of Facebook's domains permanently blocked.

Note that MP3 degrades very quickly when you tandem encode.

The basic idea behind MP3 is to add noise where most or all of it will fall below masking thresholds, so either you can't hear the degradation, or you can't hear it very much. When you tandem encode (feed that through a decoder and back into an encoder), you're adding noise again, most likely pushing it well past the masking thresholds. The resulting file, all else equal, will sound quite a bit more than twice as bad as encoding only once.

(This is ignoring other artifacts you're introducing, e.g. most likely a bunch of added digital clipping and the resulting aliasing if the original was anywhere near 0dBFS.)

Short version: if you're going to tandem encode, which you shouldn't, you might as well set the coder to 320kbit to minimize the damage.