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?

True democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.

You shouldn't get a lock on your front door because a terrorist might lock their front door? Doesn't make a whole lot of sense... It just leaves the whole world homeless.

So AI is going to replace "passenger attendants" aka stewardesses?

That seems silly, the AI is going to bring me a drink without a robot body? I don't see how this makes sense. (also uber drivers?)

Oddly, for this article, with a credit card payment for one thing.

Control of money (credit cards) is one great way to limit that... Steam is probably one of the safer places online. (They at least require payment for full features making alternate accounts harder to gimmick)

Compare that with a web nanny proxy's effectiveness for the internet at large.

> What's more impressive is with a product that's GIVEN AWAY FREE

When's the last time you paid for Windows? (usually comes free on integrated laptop / desktop, or non-activated free ISO installation)

There's a secure web browser?!!! (which engine? I'm so surprised to hear this!)