Yep, I was all in on Squeezebox too and never regretted going with it instead of Sonos. A major reason I bought all the Squeezebox stuff was the open source backend to it which I knew would keep going even if Logitech disappeared. This is doubly important with a big system made up of a lot of components like a whole house music system or a home automation system. I simply refuse to buy anything in these areas which requires a vendor remain supportive in order for it to function. The investment in a system like this is a long term play and consumer electronics vendors just don't have a track record for long term support.

I will say that I keep hoping for a community rewrite of LMS because it is quite long in the tooth and has some substantial drawbacks these days over other solutions. Alternatively, I hope for some entirely new whole house music project which will still work with my existing Squeeze devices but has a mobile friendly website, better API for integrating with automation, etc. If I was starting over again I would probably look at Music Player Daemon, but I do like having a centralized web control panel which it is lacking and no one has really good open source hardware projects that connect to it to create something usable without an app at all like the Squeeze devices can be...

Facebook is definitely doing this. I'm pretty sure Facebook knows I'm dating someone before I tell anyone about it. I start to see their stuff and name pop up substantially more in my news feed, even without any change in online interaction with them. Pretty sure that location services on both her phone and mine are showing us at the same locations at the same times and their algorithm is putting it all together.

This. Also, standardized pricing is a relatively new phenomenon as far as global history is concerned and even today is mostly true of mass market items only. If you live(d) in a bartering society merchants would absolutely sell you the same thing at different prices different times of the day, etc. Furthermore, in any sort of person to person transaction you are sized up as to what you will pay and that (or a bit more) is probably the price at which it's offered. In dealing with a lot of sales of professional specialized items to small businesses, sole proprietors, non-profits, etc. really anything where you get a "quote" first the price might vary depending on what your ability to pay is.

This type of "big-data pricing" might be doing these things on a larger scale, and it's probably too early say definitively whether this is good or bad for the average consumer (on average it may actually be the same as the current average sales price of a given product), but it's not fundamentally new.

Mea culpa, you're correct that radio stations do pay licensing fees, however when converted to a per song play basis it seems to be remarkably less than what Internet companies are paying.

I think the key phrase is:

It showed that if YouTube were to pay the recorded music industry market rates, similar to what other streaming services pay, its economic contributions to the sector would be significantly bigger.

This is the flaw in the study. The music industry has basically strongarmed and set these rates so that streaming services live on the edge of death and can be killed off at any time. If YouTube (and streaming services) paid what radio stations pay (nothing!) it would be a different story. We won't even get into payola and how radio stations were sometimes paid by the music companies to play their songs...

I don't think that's a general statement you can make. It is true in English, much to the chagrin of English teachers everywhere, but there are absolutely languages where there is a body empowered to decide what the correct grammar is. I believe, France is rather notoriously defensive of it's académie française. That's not to say that everyone, especially in speech, does what they say but that there actually is a correct way to do things.

I would actually agree that how much sense DST makes is very dependent on the latitude at which you live. To clarify, I would also agree DST does nothing to help with the winter and I wasn't saying it did, you simply couldn't shift the clock enough to make any substantial difference when it gets dark at 4:30.

In the summer if it's light where you live until 10pm it doesn't make much sense to have it be light until 11pm. A little further south though and it would be dark at 8pm standard time at the solstice, an extra hour would be nice. It's really the Spring and Fall which benefit the most in the northern US though, when whether is nice and you appreciate having that extra hour of daylight. For example, tonight it got dark at about 6pm. Tomorrow it will be very nice to have daylight until 7pm...

I assume you're being sarcastic, but just to clarify if you live in a norther latitude you get over this idea pretty quickly. No matter how much the clock gets adjusted it's going to either be dark when the children leave or when the get home (maybe both!) and there's nothing you can do about it. You may as well try to get as much evening daylight as possible, which is why I like DST.

IIRC there used to be a difference in observing DST as well so a few counties were always on central time, most were on Eastern time, but in the summer most of them did not observe DST so they were in sync with the central time zone counties that DID observe DST, effectively changing the timezone of the state from the perspective of those of us who do observe DST..

Yes. I know DST is incredibly unpopular on Slashdot and I can certainly understand why changing clocks is inconvenient and seems antiquated to the /. crowd. I don't care whether the sun is out while I'm at work/meetings/appointments but when I have free time in the evenings I would very much like it to still be light outside for as much of the year and as long as possible. If you hide in your house or never interact with others you may not care but for those of us who do need to interact with others it's nice to have off time when it's light out. This is especially important for those of us in northern latitudes in the spring and fall...

This study is so obviously flawed in methodology it's laughable. Clearly this is just a bunch of propaganda. First, if you're surveying people around the world you also need to determine what licensed streaming services the person has access to as not all (or even any) services are available in all countries. Second, you need to consider the differences in the catalogs of licensed services from country to country. Because of antiquated business practices and agreements the catalog of Netflix (for example) varies greatly from place to place. In most places it's much worse than the US, which isn't even that great. Third, the study makes the assumption that simply viewing pirated content is in fact illegal (and they report about this with a leading statement, Did not know that simply watching....). While this may be true in some regions globally there is certainly some disagreement about whether only distribution is unlawful or whether consumption is also unlawful. This really smells like media industry propaganda to me.

The ones that won't show X if the display isn't turned on when the system boots are Intel NUCs. The one that won't show X after the screen has been turned off for a while and turned back on is a Zotac ZBOXHD-ID40.

Perhaps then you would like to explain how to force X Windows/Debian Linux to output over HDMI regardless of the CEC and EDID data (or lack thereof) coming back over the link?

Two of the banes of my existence are 1) that if I power off an HDMI TV attached to a Linux box and then power it back on some hours later (e.g. for use with MythTV) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system and 2) that if I power up a Linux box without an attached and powered on HDMI TV (e.g. digital signage which is off during non-business hours and there is a reboot of the box) I am unable to get any output from X unless I reboot the system.