Great Blue Heron

I can’t understand how someone hasn’t explained to them that it’s impossible to enforce. I can only see two possible ways:

1. Require every social media platform operating in Australia to do rigorous ID checks on all users to ensure no-one is under the legal age, or

2. Somehow lock down the whole Australian internet so that users must login and then validate the identity, and therefore age, of all users. Then maintain a huge filter table to restrict under age users from social media.

Both of these are clearly never going to happen. Have I missed a simpler way to do it?

I must be old - it’s WordPerfect to me.

No, I didn’t.

But there’s no future profit for Sonos in them providing the ability for us to play music we already own from our own library.

There was an unofficial option for rollback - I’m on Android so I went to apkmirror and downloaded the last good version and turned off auto update. This worked for a while, but then they forced me to update - it literally said I had to update to continue using. I’ve seen someone say this wasn’t actually a forced update, but rather keeping all the parts of your network in sync. I have one Sonos device and my phone is the only things that connects to it??

It blows my mind that they need to do this with physical phones. I would have thought they could virtualise/emulate everything needed.

What’s going to stop you from taking over?

Sane, rational people don’t want to take over anything. We just want to vote for reasonable governments, let said government get on with governing and get on with our lives. We don’t want to be bombarded with all this political bullshit everywhere we turn - MAGA stickers and Fuck Biden stickers, you can’t open any comment thread on any public social media post without some idiot blaming Biden for the most ridiculous things.

Since the growth of the internet and social media these right wing nazi fucktards have figured out they can weaponise their followers to take over anything at any level and with your attitude to this site that’s exactly what I predict will happen there.

You clearly didn’t use it for long enough - I was “stuck” with it for over 20 years. I wouldn’t say I liked it, but it was so familiar I couldn’t dislike it.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real

I used to think that there was hope for humanity. Now, in my late 50s, I’m realising we’re fucked.

We’ve always been fucked by the mega rich that own and control everything but, with more and more people trying to survive here every day, things are getting exponentially worse.

There is no indication at all that any of these rich fucks have any appreciation of the fact that we can’t grow indefinitely and we seem doomed to hit peak population (around the year 2100?) in Mad Max, rather than Star Trek, style.

I’m glad I won’t be here to see it, but sad that my grandchildren probably will.

I’m in the process of replacing all my mp3 (including a lot of V0 and 320) with FLAC. I know that most of the time I can’t tell the difference, but I did some testing and in some scenarios with some music I could tell. And, at the size of music files, disk is cheap.

I assume enforcing the no photography rule?

My son has just signed up to a new retailer where he pays wholesale rates (he understands the risks) and for half an hour yesterday afternoon they were paying him 13¢/kWh to take it!

They tried that years ago in Australia - it didn’t last long.

USB-PD can be used for more than just charging. If you’re running something (a headphone amp for example) from one port of a multi-port brick, you don’t want it to stop momentarily every time you plug or unplug one of the other ports.

Y’know, I don’t think that’s enough to make any significant change. It takes more than money - it takes generations. Nothing will change until things get so bad that the comfortable (I assume they’re comfortable if they’re not engaged) majority get involved at all levels. I’m not pessimistic…

I suggest you learn about the difference between line level and speaker level. This article seems to do a decent job:

https://www.electronicshub.org/speaker-level-vs-line-level/

Your boiling water analogy does not fit - water boils at 100°C (depending on air pressure). It’s like the digital signal - boiled/not-boiled, on/off, 1/0, etc.

The output of a DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter) is a line level analogue signal and this signal has an amplitude (voltage) that can be controlled. I’m not a software or audio engineer so I don’t understand how, but my reading and own testing supports this.

My own simple test: I have a Google Pixel 4a and an Apple USB-C DAC (dongle). If I use headphones connected to either the phone audio jack or the DAC and any “normal” music player I can listen at full volume - it’s loud, but far from uncomfortable. If I use USB Audio Player PRO and configure direct hardware access to the DAC I cannot listen at full volume - it’s too loud.

No - I know the difference between a DAC and an amp. The Android (or, maybe it’s just Google Pixel devices, I can’t recall) audio subsystem limits audio output. My phone max. output is about 800mV. I believe they assume all output is going to earphones and they’re trying to protect your hearing. This happens even if you’re using a USB DAC. But, there is an app called USB Audio Player PRO (the may be others) that can bypass the Android audio subsystem and send output directly to the DAC and thereby get the full DAC output - typically around 2V.

Since you mentioned the “power” of an external DAC I’ll add that my experience has been that android will still limit the output unless you use an app that works directly with the DAC. Last time I checked the only option was paid.

I have some background in tech but admit I’m a long way out of touch now. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they’re working on back end stuff to have personalised ads “baked in”. I know the resource implications of this are huge, but it still wouldn’t surprise me.