One of the big reasons IP law exists as it was to encourage people to not hide innovations and keep them secret to themselves. If anything you (not you specifically as a person) spend time and resources to create can be trivially taken away from you if people know about it, you then either have to keep it secret or you simply have no incentive to make anything new. Now if your argument is that current IP law has been totally perverted and abused to extreme levels and should be completely redone, you’ll get no argument from me. Just killing IP laws entirely would pretty much break our current society. Maybe out of that chaos would come something better, but make no mistake, shit would be fucked in the meantime.

At this rate Ted Cruz will just have to move to Cancun full time since he leaves every time the power grid does down there. At least there is one positive.

Apple, Samsung, and any OEMs leaning on this can get fucked.

I don’t believe Telegram desktop needed a mobile connection before and I used it for years and didn’t use a mobile client. I mostly used it as a bridge client for IRC and Matrix as the client itself was superior if you didn’t need privacy or encryption.

This is the main reason I don’t use Signal, so depending on if and how it gets implemented, I may finally use it. Getting other people on board will be its own fight of course.

Yes, I was meaning the companies from the most recent aggressive acquisition period. Some of the older acquisitions weren’t totally wasted as you mentioned, though it is hard to say they were not worse off than if they had been able to succeed on their own. I was really bummed about Obsidian being gobbled up.

tl;dr: Rent seeking cancer of a company got too greedy and screwed themselves.

If Xbox dies, so do Bethesda, Activision, Blizzard, and World’s Edge.

IMO every dev/publisher acquired by MS was already tainted and on its way out. Most of the people responsible for the great games you associate with those companies are long gone. Let them die.

Good point

This was a huge cause of confusion years ago when the media started using “AOC” to refer to her. I was like, damn, their monitors used to be cheap crap, why are they so popular now?

Other con: Unless you have a new home with pristine wires, the speeds of MoCa can vary anywhere from 2.5Gpbs to 6Mps. It also gets very tricky if you have still cable TV in your home because many of the set top boxes use MoCa and they directly interfere with using it for internet (though you can sometimes get it working with filters, my experience was poor). MoCa is still far better than something like Powerline adapters, which are another option for not having to run new cables/lines.

I just manually clean up the tags/directory structure and use rsync. I have tried a few other things, but they always end up being more trouble than it is worth for me.

This is really helpful, thanks. I was especially curious about the power output. I have a specific pair of headphones I use for low output devices (other than IEMs), so I’d be OK, but if it had enough power to handle more of my headphones I’d probably dive in.

I usually find that I can only tell the difference between high quality compressed music (v0 or better) and flacs with specific tracks that I know extremely well and only when using really good speakers or headphones. Some of the streaming services have noticeable lower quality, but it is usually good enough. The main reason I keep flacs around is for being able to burn a cd to transcode to other formats.

I think we just listen to music differently. I found that having too much music on a device, be it a phone, DAP , sometimes just USB drive, was more trouble than it was worth. I was having a hard time distilling down my music collection like that, where with the 100 or so albums it was meant to be a quick sampling that didn’t need to cover all the bases.

I only put around 100 or so albums at a time on my DAP and/or phone, my full music collection is easily 100 times that large. It would be insane to try have that on any portable device since the collection is always growing and being curated/tagged. Also, most of my music listening is from my desktop, not my DAP or phone, so 100 albums that I swap out now and then is ideal.

fiio echo nano

I’ve actually had it on my list for a while, but I haven’t had the best luck with Fiio products, especially their portable dac/amps so i am a bit leery.

I actually had bought an Xperia for exactly that reason and they kept sending me a carrier locked phone. After the third return I gave up :(

Funny enough, it can almost certain hold way more than 8000 songs, my MP3 player in the early 2000s could hold much, much more than that. As I said in another comment, as long as the UI isn’t brain dead it should be fine. It isn’t like any sane person scrolls one by one through all their songs, you usually filter by album, artist, or genre first.

Probably because text search on a tiny device with no keyboard really sucks in my experience.