Depends where you are. In the UK the BBC implemented a shared bitrate system, where all their HD channels share a pool. I think it's only about 20Mb or so for several channels, with bits dynamically allocated based on the content.

The result is very, very poor quality video. Detail is lost, making skin look pasty and hair look like a bad wig. They seem to run films through some sort of filter that removes grain too, presumably to get the bitrate down.

I haven't subscribed to Netflix for many years, but it used to look a lot better than broadcast HD TV here. YouTube used to be okay, but a few years back the bitrate was reduced and now it looks crap. I upscale everything to 4k before uploading, just to get a half decent bitrate.

It's going to be expensive, due to the rate of changes. Places that can't cope with a large amount of rainfall will flood, and be very expensive to fix. Places that were moderate will get very hot or cold, and it will be expensive to retrofit heating/cooling systems and insulation. Places that built roads out of cheaper materials for moderate climates will find them cracking up and disintegrating.

I set up Navidrome on my home server, and Cloudflare Zero Trust so I can access it from anywhere. On Android you can use Symfonium, or just access it with a web browser.

So I have all my music available for streaming, anywhere, and I own all of it. No ads, no enshittification, nobody can delete it.

It depends. Some older stuff was badly mastered at the time, so the re-mastered CD can be better. On the other hand, around 1990 the Loudness War really kicked off and so vinyl became the preferred format again due to it physically not supporting so much distortion.

There's a database of how dynamic various releases are, so you can find the best one: http://www.dr.loudness-war.inf...

Used CD albums are in the $1-2 range anyway. Easy to find on eBay, or used shops if you have them where you live. Might as well get the whole album.

I've bought a few digital tracks, but only where there wasn't a physical release.

Is the low accuracy due to the MoJ or the database operator or someone else?

This won't spare them much embarrassment. The data still exists and statistics on their failures will still be published. We are moving away from jury trials to judge trials for many offences, to try to clear a years long backlog of cases that the previous government allowed to build up by cutting funding to the system.

There is little incentive for the current government to hide anything, because their measures haven't started yet, and when they do they will probably reduce the backlog and make things better, so they will want that out there.

What the summary fails to mention is that this is in response to them selling the data to an AI company, including a large amount of personal and private data.

Legal data like this is protected in the UK, and in Europe thanks to GDPR. Access to it is intentionally harder than just googling someone's name, and there are things like the Right to be Forgotten. For example, if you are applying for a job, an employer should not be able to put your name into Google and see that you were bankrupt 12 years ago. Same for your bank when you apply for a mortgage. That information is on record and findable with the right tools, but should not affect these kinds of interactions 12 years after the fact.

Feeding it to an AI is what the summary is alluding to when it talks about requesting a referral to the Information Commissioner's Office. It's a massive breech and they cannot recover trust to administer this database now.

Some EVs are already cheaper than an equivalent ICE. Take something like an MG S5 Long Range. Can be had new for £23k, and a similar size and spec level fossil is going to be at least that much, plus the much higher on-going costs for fuel and maintenance.

The issue is that the US only allows expensive, shitty cars to be sold there at the moment. Canada has the right idea.

EVs are a bit heavier than an equivalent fossil, but there are also a lot of very heavy fossils on the roads. Especially in Africa where the roads are poor, so small trucks are preferred. Lots of used Toyota Hylux ones get sold there.

For rural areas they have problems with fossil fuel distribution already. It's actually easier to charge an EV, you can use the same solar panels that you use for your house (because the grid hasn't reached you, and/or is unreliable). There's also the maintenance issue, with fossil vehicles needing a lot of it. Fluids, belts, spare parts.

I keep thinking "surely not" with Trump, and then he proves me wrong. I think the chances of him leaving office without violence are getting more and more remote now. Last time it was just his MAGA mob, but this time he has his brownshirts (ICE). They have a strong interest in keeping him in power, because once he's out the legal repercussions for their actions will start to kick in.

Lots of people who get harassed by the cops don't commit crimes either. They tend to have certain attributes that seem to make cops suspicious of them.

Anyway, you know the old saying, give me 10 lines written by any man and I'll find something in them to hang him. With a camera pointed at your house 24/7 I'm sure they can figure out some reason to bother you.

One bright spot .. Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction

This just goes to show: we need more terrorism and hurricanes, so that the resulting injuries and destruction can further brighten the spots of health care and construction labor.

If you're a patriotic American, then please do your part to increase GDP and employment, by breaking a window today! And if the glass shards hurt someone, so much the better. Economic growth is economic growth!

I have a couple of USB drives for ripping discs and for backup. A few years ago you could get 100GB discs for around 100 yen (50 cents) each, which made them a decent option for cold storage backups. Now the prices have shot up on good quality discs, because they are out of production as well.

Moving to LTO now.

LTT looked at it and it does seem like a shitty deal. The cost isn't far off buying a new laptop every two years, and of course if you do that you can probably sell your old one.

IM needs to become a fully P2P (and non-proprietary) thing, so that there is no central authority (other than maybe DNS itself) to be coerced. Of course, that brings up NAT problems so that laymen are going to have connectivity problems, and a lack of any sort of commercial advertising and other pressures to get people to come over. (And I'm casually glossing over other problems, such as authentication.) No wonder it hasn't taken off yet.

But if we can get there, the holy grail is a lack of any particular party being a provider of the IM service. We'd just have providers of the lower-level services (i.e. ISPs), who can't really interfere with individual applications unless encryption gets banned, which would mean no more e-commerce, so there should be strong lobbying (e.g. rich people like Bezos) on The Peoples' side.

The goal is to have it such that whenever a law says users are required to avoid certain topics, it'll be the users themselves who are expected to comply with it. (e.g. If you discover that you are sometimes choosing to set the Evil Bit, then you are expected to report yourself.)

Until we get to this point, IM cannot be secure or resistant to censorship (same thing).