Is this even news? Surely the list of politicians who’ve opposed this or that spending measure, then gone on to demand disbursements from the same pool of money, is very long and bipartisan. I’d go so far as to say it’s his job and responsibility to get as much for his constituents as he can, no matter what his official or personal position on the bill.

For Democrats, the usual culprit is military spending – they’ll speak against it on the floor, then demand contracts and base expansion in their own state.

And when politicians do refuse disbursements on principle, as some Republican-led state legislatures did around welfare expansion and COVID-related spending, we ridicule them.

Currently, PopOS although I’m not really that enthusiastic about it.

What? Why would you choose that over Baptist Church of Missouri SynodOS, you heretic?

Then they would have to remove the various hooks in the Settings app that actually call and open the Control Panel.

How many are there? I can think of several (advanced mouse settings, advanced network settings, printer properties, date & time has a callout back to the old panel…)

Windows 10 came out nine years ago, so they don’t seem in any particular rush.

“Main Quest”. What does that even mean? That’s nonsense.

The idea that anyone finishes a game of Civilization is a myth.

I went through two defective EVGA cards within the original card’s warranty period. On the second card, EVGA tried to deny my warranty.

They eventually made it right, after I shamed them on Reddit.

Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.

So I’m getting a bit fascinated by this question, because I can do practical tests – I’ve owned CD-Rs since the format was invented w/ the original Pinnacle SCSI CD writers circa 1994.

I don’t think I have any CD-Rs that old any more, but I definitely have many from that era. Just for the heck of it, I popped an azo CD-R in my drive that I wrote in 1998, and I happen to have a hard drive copy of these files that I’ve carried forward on hard disks since that time as well (the CD-R was a backup).

I think the files are still in perfect condition – was able to copy w/ verify all 360MB of MP3s (and yes, before you ask, I was making MP3s in 1998 using the Fraunhofer DOS command-line encoder), and compare them to my hard drive copies which show matching SHA512 hashes.

If I’m still around 25 years from now, I’ll try again :-)

What is a sport? Why does it exist?

It exists because people come together to play it. And maybe because some people are willing to pay for tickets to watch it, or sometimes because powerful people want it (to sell product, to train people in national defense, etc).

If you’re not engaged with any of those stakeholders, you can’t change the sport. Ideas about the limited women’s class of sport will only change if the players & organizers want it to change – or in the rarer case, because the ticket buyers demand change. But many of these sports are not driven by ticket sales, so there is limited opportunity to win hearts and minds.

You claim induced me to do a little tidying on my CD collection. I just copied the oldest data CD that I own: the Hugo & Nebula Anthology 1993. It copied & verified no problem.

Unfortunately, that’s probably the oldest proper test I can do. Although I was using CD-ROMs as early as 1986, e.g. in libraries, I didn’t own any music or data CDs until about 1990. I could re-rip some of those old music CDs, I suppose, but I’m not sure it would tell us much as I’m not sure how to do a bit-for-bit comparison and I certainly don’t want to listen to the files.

I have many 30 year old CDs. They’re fine. They’ve just been kept in a typical home storage environment. I just ripped a Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I bought in 93.

Harrison Bergeron

I not telling you to accept or be happy with anything. I am saying that if you want women’s sports to work the way you think they should work, you’ll need to go through their governance bodies.

I kept the CDs for a while, much to my wife’s annoyance, before donating them to a local charity

I took them out of the jewel cases and put them into a binder, 4 CDs per page. It hasn’t exactly been a burden to carry it around for the last 20 years.

I couldn’t tell you how old my oldest MP3s are, except to say that a significant portion of my music library consists of MP3s I made myself with the Fraunhofer DOS command line encoder, and the Cassady & Green SoundJam software for MacOS. Of course, SoundJam is the software that Apple purchased and re-badged it “iTunes”.

The whole process is much less authentic.

I remember reading a letter to the editor in Stereophile magazine 30 years ago, when tube amps were coming back into style after decades of transistor and semiconductor amps. The reader pointed out that the language used in a review to describe the benefits of tube amps was ridiculous, and that calling the output “warm” or “intimate” (or dare I say, “authentic”) compared to semiconductor amps was simply an admission that the tube amps were making a change to the audio output that was not part of the original recording.

The function of an audio reproduction and amplification system, the author pointed out, was to reproduce the audio signal as accurately as possible to capture the content of the original recorded signal. Full stop. Anything else is nonsense.

The fact that CD sales are behind vinyl is a sign that the world has gone mad.

I mean… CD sales are only behind vinyl because vinyl has become collectible, while CDs offer no practical advantage over stored files on a hard drive or high-quality streaming.

And before you say, “but what about compression?”, the fact is that even lossy compression is good enough that most audiophiles can’t tell the difference. Audiophile publications started doing blind comparisons back in the 90s, and it quickly became clear that somewhere around 192kbps MP3 the ability of humans to statistically discern the compressed vs. uncompressed versions started to disappear.

That really doesn’t answer my question, it just splits it up between different bodies.

Sorry, that’s just reality.

I can’t give you a general answer that applies to all of women’s sport, and for a specific answer regarding a particular women’s sport, you’ll need to consult with the governing body of that sport, and recognize that body may pander to interests (commercial, or the preferences of its participants and other stakeholders, etc) that have nothing to do with how you prefer to define “woman”.

The determination of who may compete in limited-class sports must be made by rules.

It’s not a matter of who you or I think is a woman who qualifies. Only the governing body of that sport makes that determination.

He is on the UK Sex Offenders’ registry.