Guess you really got blind sided, huh?

I bought a bunch of games after the news of the closure and I guess many others must have done the same for them to take notice of the sudden revenue. Good that the store is staying up, you'll have to pry my Vita out of my cold dead hands.

I'm one of those weirdo's who buys vinyl without owning a record player. It's mainly because I get something that is a beautiful large collector's item, it costs a tiny bit more than the CD and I already have the digital version so vinyl represents a distinct version of the music. I fully intend to one day buy a record player and listen to all my records, but I'm in no rush.

Completely agree, I love Bandcamp and it feels really connected to the artists. There's been 2 times now where I've found a new artist through something like Pandora and then bought their discography through Bandcamp and had them email me personally thanking me!

I've heard Helium is a finite resource that we are rapidly depleting? I wonder how the use of it on such a large scale will impact the worldwide supply.

I suspect the proportion of the population who would be truly content to live off the meagre basic income earnings is low given that it won't be enough to do much of anything. You will still have to work to be able to afford anything that makes like worth living. Advertising and basic human comparing yourself to others will ensure that most people will not be content with the basic income.

Highly recommend gandi.net

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Flattr which was made to address this exact problem. Of course, the issue with Flattr remains that it is opt-in so only those that really care will use it, and a low user base will mean content creators don't put Flattr buttons on their websites.

$60 USD = $73 NZD. Given that we pay $110 here for new games, I would kill for $60 USD games.

Hi there, the iTunes encoder was set to a single bitrate (i.e. not VBR). This was so I could compare what a 128kbps vs a 192kbps sounds like, since with VBR they may just sound the same. I agree entirely that there are better methods of encoding these samples which would have likely made them indistinguishable. I was more interested in the worst case regarding how someone might rip a song since the majority of people would just stick it into their computer and rip with iTunes. It was the easiest place to start :) I would definitely like to re-do the test with the same samples using modern codecs and see if there is any difference. I also think that you could tell the difference, for the ones where I nailed it all the way through, it was clear as day. I described the exact thing I was latching on to in each sample in the blog and I'm sure anyone could hear it. Whether these samples extend to all music in general is another question though... Suffice it to say I rip all my music in Apple Lossless or FLAC.

I heard the difference between an iTunes-encoded 320kbps MP3 and FLAC in 2/7 samples I used. This is through ABXing and using statistics. Granted, these samples were chosen as good examples that show differences between lossy and lossless. I wrote up a series of blog posts on it here: http://www.vel.co.nz/vel.co.nz/Blog/Entries/2009/8/21_ABX_of_Lossless_versus_MP3_-_Part_3_-_Results_and_Discussion.html