$40 in 1995 is equivalent to over $85 today after adjusting for inflation.

You learn a lot of other new things about life and what you really believe in by meeting new people with different ideas or participating in activities you never had an opportunity to previously. There's more to university than you what you get in the lecture hall or library (or the modern equivalent). Probably more so if you don't do it from your parent's basement!

Yes, I totally agree, you have to pick a reasonable length of time for depreciation. Three years is clearly too short for a lot of devices now, although I wouldn't suggest 18 years is appropriate either!

Indeed. I learnt recently that one of our GitLab VM hosts for Linux build runners is is hardware from 2012. The dev team discovered this when a vendor sent us an updated library that dropped SSE4.2 support and required AVX2, causing our smoke tests to fail and thus fail the builds. Why throw away hardware that is still working and performant?

The baseline profile of MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) (ISO/IEC 23094-1) is supposed to be the modern MPEG codec that only uses tools made public 20 years ago or have been declared royalty free. It hasn't really gathered traction though either because there's not enough incentive for the stakeholders or because nobody wants to invest in adding another codec to their pipeline that doesn't improve enough beyond HEVC.

Not regardless of any size. An old XDCAM will produce MPEG-2 streams that look better than anything streaming from Amazon Video.

The recent stories of laptops having their decoders removed because of patent frees are infuriating.

Maybe you're referring to this story:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farstechnica.com%2Fgadget...

It says:
Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States ... "This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a 'Pro' line (jabs at branding names are warranted â" HEVC is used professionally) ..."

It's such a small percentage of the price yet some bean counter has decided to make user experience shit. Moral of the story for me is to not buy the cheapest shit on the market.

Indeed. The Germans started strategic bombing of civilian areas about 88 years ago, and in fact, the German president was just in Guernica paying his respects to the victims of that attack: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fwo....

We haven't stopped strategic bombing of civilian areas just because they don't work, it's also because it amounts to war crimes. Britain bombed Germany like that as a response to Germany doing it to Britain and that being the only response Britain could muster at the time, but RAF Bomber Command has always been down played because of the perception that it was wrong; they didn't even get a memorial until 2012.

Russia is behaving like it's still the 1940s. 27 Russian soldiers dead for every square kilometre of Ukraine they've taken. They don't value their own lives, and so they certainly don't value those from other countries.

How long have Airbus known about it? When were the airlines notified versus this report in the media?

Right, and it can improve foreign investment, although exchange rates also tend to reflect the health of the economy and not always about the government actively trying to achieve this. Undervaluation can lead to some problems though, such as loss of productivity due to weaker competition or higher inflation.

Google docs that changes the language of the user interface when you go to another country. WTF?

You left during a recent high point in the currency. I remember well it unexpectedly climbing from 62c to to the USD in 2003 to parity by 2008 because I was living in Ontario and working 1099MISC since 1999 for a Californian company and watched my USD pay diminishing in value. Letâ(TM)s be honest, the exchange rate is back where the historical trend was taking it.

Yes, along with copy and paste and other Continuity features.

Kyiv, not Kiev.

"If I go find an actor/actress that I like the sound of their voice of, and want to create a weird golem of a voice, what I'd do is get several 48khz 16-bit recordings from audio books of that actor, run it through the training (because I have their voice and the book they are reading) and then find a performance style of that actor/actress I want (from maybe a movie or or television show) and thus "skin" that voice to sound like that performance. That will give me a 95% reasonable sounding voice for all the words from the books they read, and a 10% accuracy on words that they never ever said before.

And of course you would contact the appropriate copyright clearinghouse or actors' association and pay the associated fees for using those voices, which the massive IP theft organizations known as "AI" do not.