> The real risk is not that Grandma is going to catch a polymorphic worm

Wait! WHAT is Grandma going to polymorph into?

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the one.

> The ability to verify who you are should be fundamental.

If I wanted to be identified I'd cryptographically sign my emails...

I'm not sure that it should be necessary to identify myself to buy a candy bar or download the latest version of pokemon. Pikachu I spy you!

Freedom: The freedom to identify yourself when you want to or the freedom to force someone else to identify themselves even when they don't want to. Or the freedom to force users to "sign" a click-wrap agreement, effectively writing your own half laws...

You mean the AC post showing a pattern? (I didn't even know you could still psot anonymously on Slashdot but I digress...)

Don't you mean Bwandi-chlorians? Stardiocrawars !

A long time ago in a galaxy dumbed down for television...

> So there are people are literally, anti-human?

People? I think you're using that term pretty loosely here. Since when are the take me to your leaders with absolute power corrupting absolutely actually "people" anymore?

> Just a soltuion. Whatever that means.

I thought we learned all about final solutions in WWII ?

To the best of my recollection, Opus is absolutely better than AAC, according to the blind tests done by hydrogenaudio, among others. Vorbis was very slightly worse than AAC, but much like all benchmarking, sometimes it did better, sometimes worse.

HE-AAC, the "High Efficiency" branch, has proven to provide higher quality than Vorbis at low bitrates (ie. 48-56 kbit, IIRC). That said, I don't know exactly how Opus fits into comparisons with HE-AAC. I seem to recall Opus is better than HE-AAC in the general case, but much like Vorbis vs AAC, the performance is similar.

Either way: I think it's kinda nuts that HEVC has been out since 2013 (nearly 12 years), has been succeeded by VVC in 2020, and HEVC still hasn't settled its patent wars. I don't keep track by any means, but I gotta wonder how many of the HEVC cases end up being tossed as "moot" because the patent expired...

Maybe we could start by limiting the sale of these things based on age somehow... If only there we some technology at the location of sale that could identify purchasers of products...

> this article is about age verification.

Through individual biometric identification.

Let's kill every human, then no one underage can smoke. There's a sentence "about underage smoking" for you.

Isn't Win32 written in C in any case? Does anyone really USE all that COM+ stuff for anything useful? It's hard to imagine even an AI could write a worse COM layer than what is currently in Windows.

I kind of welcome a new version of Notepad.exe written in Rust as long as it doesn't have tabs. Maybe it'll only have half as many bugs as the original version?

PS - Sorry if I'm just skimming the surface here, I was never smart enough to understand much C++. I barely managed to get my head half-way around Java where everything was descended from java.lang.Object instead of some mix of new char[] and void* using RAII.

PPS - Can I PLEASE hope for a web-browser that wasn't written by Google (like MS Edge)? (No offense to that one company but I can only put so many eggs in one basket)

How is this not hilarious? I mean I know someone who's favorite Christmas Greeting is "Merry Bah-Humbug." But Still !!!

ROTFLMAO (BBQ)

Mod Parent Up! Informative.

If you want a credit card with great rewards but a chance at not being carried, don't they already call that American Express? Or Discover.

Diluting your own standard seems like a great way to endanger your core business. But, I guess arrogance, greed and incompetence is the current business trend.

Shouldn't it be Flo's fault for mis-using the API rather than Facebook's fault for just writing a general purpose API?

Or was Facebook untruthful in telling Flo how the data would be used?