Personally, I think what's more scary is how unsafe a lot of small aircraft are because the maintenance is so shoddy. It's this way because the owners don't care (they're frequently not flying them) and don't want to spend the money, and the FAA doesn't actually do any enforcement of aircraft safety.
The problem here, however, is safety. There's nothing stopping pilots from flying around in jalopies that are leaking oil all over the engine. And I'm not talking about just private pilots, but commercial operators too. My ex-wife flew for a guy who did exactly this; one of his pilots made an emergency landing in Manhattan because his helicopter ran low on oil: it was leaking in the engine compartment. The owner knew about this and refused to fix it. The FAA has no way of dealing with stuff like this. My ex-wife ended up reporting him to FSDO and they inspected and "tagged out" some aircraft. She was never able to work in the area again after that. The helicopter ended up catching fire one day (because of the oil leaking on the engine) and burning to the ground. The owner went out of business and just declared bankruptcy (he didn't own his aircraft anyway--they were leased). It's very fortunate no one died, but they came close: the helicopter caught fire in the air, and the pilot was just barely able to land safely as smoke was filling up the cabin with some German tourists inside.
It's no better for cabs: lots of cabs are rolling heaps of garbage. But when a car fails, it just stops on the road and you can get out. When a helicopter fails, you probably die.
The government has no way of ensuring safety. They do not do any kind of inspections, not of cabs, and not of commercial aircraft. Everything in this country is based on liability. If your cab or aircraft fails and you get injured or die, you or your family can sue--that's the only recourse. That's not much help when you're dead.
The economics of such a system prevent it from being an effective commercial sky taxi service. If the pilots are going to be doing the trip anyway then what's the difference as to whether or not there's a passenger?
The difference, as you point out yourself, is that you can recoup some of the cost by having a paying passenger. That's it.
No, it's not going to ever be as successful as Uber. The economics and the scale just aren't there. But why does every new business need to become a multi-billion-dollar company in a few years to be considered "successful"? If the business has customers and makes enough money to pay the salaries of its ermployees, that's good enough. And this flight ride-sharing service sounds like a decent enough idea, when you consider how much it costs per hour to fly a private aircraft. A typical Cessna is $155/hour to rent, so if you can get someone to tag along and pay part of your cost, that's a pretty good deal for someone who just flies on the weekends and has a middle-class job. $50 for a 2-hour flight would be about 1/6 the total cost, but that's still a decent chunk of money for just putting up with someone riding along.
Those studies can't be trusted. There's no way that they actually managed to track every single person to make sure they died. You don't know that there isn't a 40,000 year old caveman out there somewhere.
Have you seen how much drama is on a typical person's Facebook page? Many people feel the need to share everything and this often results in pissed-off associates for one reason or another. We know that public performers (musicians, actors etc.) can suffer greatly from stress, but we're now expecting the entire population to put on a 24/7 public performance on social networks.
I don't have much sympathy here. No one is forcing you to have a Facebook account, or to put any effort into using it. I have a FB account (mainly because other people I know do), but I don't actually use it for much. I don't follow peoples' inane posts of inspirational captioned pictures, or nutty right-wing political crap, or obnoxious photos showing off their kids and families, or anything else. I really don't even log in really; main primary use for it is for Tinder, as Tinder requires a FB account for authentication.
If people are getting stressed out about their lives being on display 24/7 on Facebook, then they need to stop using Facebook that way. It's that simple.
This is absolutely true. Hispanics and blacks, and really all non-whites, with a few exceptions here and there, are generally extremely socially conservative compared to white people. White people are the most socially liberal worldwide, with the possible exception of Thais. Think about it: in what parts of the world is it legal for women to walk around topless or nude? In what parts of the world is it socially acceptable for people to have casual sex with multiple partners? What countries/places have legalized marijuana? What places are the most irreligious? What places are the safest and most accepting for homosexuals? I'll tell you which places aren't on this list: any place in Latin America, any place in the Middle East, China, Philippines, India, Russia, and the American South which is heavily populated by African-Americans. Black people in the South are famous for being extremely religious and conservative, and Hispanics are famous for "family values" and being Catholic and having a lot of kids. These are not traits of socially liberal people.
Now of course, there's plenty of ultra-conservative white people too, particularly in the South and the Midwest and the "heartland" and also Utah. Also in Russia, where the Russian Orthodox church has become very powerful after the fall of the USSR.
But you're exactly right: these minorities are generally rather conservative. They only vote Democratic because the Republican party panders to white racism and blames them for the nation's ills, so they happily vote for right-wing Democrats like Hillary who insist that "marriage is between one man and one woman" (up until it's too politically expedient to change that opinion), and who are completely against legalizing marijuana, and who take "campaign contributions" from the private prison industry and payday loan industry.
I'd prefer an all-out ban. Pieces of shit like him are toxic to a community when allowed to stay; decent people simply leave over time unless these people are cut out like the cancers they are. There's a reason that every successful discussion site isn't a free-for-all anarchy, but instead has a moderation system of some kind, and usually has moderators who have the ability to ban truly toxic individuals like him. This site does a poor job with both, and we've seen the quality devolve immensely over the last 15 years as a result.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting in a McD's, and there isn't a worker here under 30. That's pretty typical.
As people who were once higher on the economic ladder move down, they are taking the jobs that teenagers may once have enjoyed. As well, they are collecting food stamps, getting housing assistance and daycare assistance. Funded by our tax dollars.
Meanwhile the top two hedge fund managers are making the rough equivalent of 300,000 minimum wage workers. Is this system supposed to be working? It has long ago transcended normal ideas of fairness of wages or taxes and reached full potato status.
Hillary Clinton thinks everything is great. Her daughter is married to one of those hedge fund managers and lives in a place in Manhattan worth tens of millions of dollars, but rest assured, Hillary is one of us!
Tell her now, with current news articles in hand, that this is the risk you run by using Windows. If she won't listen and move to Linux, then too bad: she was warned.
I've bought 3 Galaxy S4 phones (1 for me, 2 for other members of my household) in the past year, even though these phones are already a couple years old. They work great. The carrier updated them to Android 5.0.1, and if I get some other project out of the way I'll try installing CyanogenMod on one to see how that works out. For ~$100, I don't see how you can get a better deal on a phone: they're well-built, have great screens, excellent Otterbox cases available, and still pretty speedy.
But of course, at this age the batteries are going out. But these phones have easily replaced batteries, with $8 OEM replacements on Ebay, so that was easily fixed.
AFAIC, not having an easily-replaced battery is a deal-breaker. There is no way I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on something that has to be thrown away in 2 years because they didn't want to make limited-lifetime parts replaceable.
The real story is that the "single payer won't fly with Republicans" idea was made up to sell to the Democratic voters as an excuse as to why they couldn't do it. In reality, the Democrats never had any intention of pursuing single-payer, because the Democratic Party is a actually right-wing party that is in the pocket of the health insurance industry, and single-payer would put that whole industry out of business.
This is why we're seeing a huge nasty fight between the Bernie and Hillary sides of the party now. Bernie represents the left-wing side that wants stuff like single-payer, while Hillary represents the right-wing side (which is the dominant side by far) that wants stuff like more private prisons, more payday loan stores, more IP laws, and more wars in the middle east.
And yet there are large tracts of the planet which are not uninhabitable and yet have very low population densities. There is plenty of land, plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of fresh water.
Like where? There's plenty of land in northern Canada and Alaska, but it's frozen tundra, and definitely not arable. There's plenty of land in the Sahara desert; I don't think I need to explain the problem there. There's plenty of land in North Dakota, but who wants to live where it's -40 in the winter?
The reason the population is uneven and "concentrated into pockets" is because people generally like to live places where the weather is mild (not too hot, not too cold), and where there's enough freshwater (becoming a big problem in the American southwest). They also tend to like to live on coasts. Part of this is because we naturally like water, but there's a good reason for it too: the weather is better. There's a reason places like Kansas are known as "Tornado Alley": the entire middle section of the country has very extreme weather that you don't find on the coasts, either extreme heat (TX), tornados, or extreme cold.(MN, ND).
Maybe if we started building cities which were more insulated from the environment (such as the domed cities seen in sci-fi), then more of these places would be habitable. -40 in the winter isn't so bad when the summer is nice and mild, and you can just stay inside your domed city in the winter. But we're nowhere near that point yet, so unless you really like living someplace where the oil in your car's engine literally freezes overnight, you probably want to live in one of the mild climate locations, which is why all those places are crowded.
We *are* overpopulating the planet, with the way we're living now. It doesn't have to be this way. We could move our heavy industry into space like Bezos suggests, do most of our mining in the asteroids and on the Moon, and then work on making our cities more livable. Get rid of cars, and instead have good subway systems and SkyTran for getting people around quickly and cheaply. We waste a massive amount of land in our cities to cars and all the infrastructure to support them (roads, garages, parking lots). We also build our buildings much too small: build a city that's basically one giant cubic building, 200 stories high, and you could house an incredible number of people in a rather small space. If you want everyone to have their own 1/2-acre yard and separate house for 1-2 people plus 1-2 kids, and a garage and a car for driving everywhere, and you want the housing districts located far from workplaces, then yes, we are absolutely overpopulated.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
It's not just Germany; the USA is filled with small towns like this, all over the place. The population here is urbanizing, so all the young people are moving to cities. The big cities are growing bigger, as are the medium-sized ones. The towns are all shrinking and dying, and are full of people who never left and are now retired.
How is this +5 insightful? It's just plain dumb. Have you never heard of asteroid mining? You don't bring up all the raw materials from Earth, you get them from asteroids or the Moon. Bringing them up from Earth would be stupid. Anyone who's been paying any attention at all to these kinds of proposals for the past few years would already know this.
other than an "enhanced advertising experience", which no consumer wants.
You don't know that. I'll bet there's a few losers out there somewhere who really like watching ads. It's just like some other weirdos, like people who enjoy being physically abused. We'll never understand them, but they are out there.
What are you going to do with the tuner? Watch OTA TV? Why? What a waste of time?
The remote is useless too, except for simply turning the power on and off and adjusting the volume, because there's no way for the TV's remote to control the add-on devices (namely the media center PC you should have connected to it).
What we really need is a media center PC which can store and view all your downloaded programs, and Netflix too, and which has a remote which controls power to the monitor, and can also interface to a stereo amplifier and control that too.
It's an even release, so it sucks. Wait until Windows 11 is out.
Um, I thought that was never supposed to happen, and that the plan was all future versions of Windows would be "Windows 10", much like all versions of MacOS have been "MacOS X" for a very long time. Isn't Windows 10 just supposed to be a rolling release?
I have 3 Galaxy S4 phones as well, but on Sprint (with Ting), and they were all updated to Android 5.0.1 by the carrier. Not the most-current Android version, but not "woefully behind" either, and newer than the version they originally came with.
I do plan to try out Cyanogenmod on one of them sometime and see how it goes.
The Nexus devices suck as far as I can tell: no removable battery or SD card slot, and probably no Otterbox Defender case either. Samsung's hardware is excellent (well, it was up to the S5 at least; the S6 sucked and the S7 isn't much better). Great software isn't that useful if the hardware is crap and there's no good case with holster available.
Why should I have to spend all my time learning about all kinds of unsupported 3rd-party software and unauthorized hacks and tweaks to make a Windows machine work so that someone else can use some shitty proprietary software they insist on using? If they insist on that crap, and using Windows, they can hire Geek Squad when they have a problem. It's not my job to become an expert on Windows, just like it's not my job to be an expert on Oracle database administration; just because I "do computers" for a living doesn't mean I'm an expert on everything computer-related.
This is why, when family members/relatives ask for computer help, I offer to install Linux for them. When they take me up on it, I install Linux Mint KDE, and rarely do I have to provide any support. It "just works". As long as they just do web browsing, document writing, video playing, and other basic stuff like that and don't have some stupid proprietary software they insist on running, it works great for them. With Windows, you'll have to spend huge amounts of time being their IT support.
That's why DLNA is dumb: the client device should be able to handle the format. If it can't, it's broken. With open-source software, this isn't a problem; you just download the new codec and everything works.
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Personally, I think what's more scary is how unsafe a lot of small aircraft are because the maintenance is so shoddy. It's this way because the owners don't care (they're frequently not flying them) and don't want to spend the money, and the FAA doesn't actually do any enforcement of aircraft safety.
The problem here, however, is safety. There's nothing stopping pilots from flying around in jalopies that are leaking oil all over the engine. And I'm not talking about just private pilots, but commercial operators too. My ex-wife flew for a guy who did exactly this; one of his pilots made an emergency landing in Manhattan because his helicopter ran low on oil: it was leaking in the engine compartment. The owner knew about this and refused to fix it. The FAA has no way of dealing with stuff like this. My ex-wife ended up reporting him to FSDO and they inspected and "tagged out" some aircraft. She was never able to work in the area again after that. The helicopter ended up catching fire one day (because of the oil leaking on the engine) and burning to the ground. The owner went out of business and just declared bankruptcy (he didn't own his aircraft anyway--they were leased). It's very fortunate no one died, but they came close: the helicopter caught fire in the air, and the pilot was just barely able to land safely as smoke was filling up the cabin with some German tourists inside.
It's no better for cabs: lots of cabs are rolling heaps of garbage. But when a car fails, it just stops on the road and you can get out. When a helicopter fails, you probably die.
The government has no way of ensuring safety. They do not do any kind of inspections, not of cabs, and not of commercial aircraft. Everything in this country is based on liability. If your cab or aircraft fails and you get injured or die, you or your family can sue--that's the only recourse. That's not much help when you're dead.
The economics of such a system prevent it from being an effective commercial sky taxi service. If the pilots are going to be doing the trip anyway then what's the difference as to whether or not there's a passenger?
The difference, as you point out yourself, is that you can recoup some of the cost by having a paying passenger. That's it.
No, it's not going to ever be as successful as Uber. The economics and the scale just aren't there. But why does every new business need to become a multi-billion-dollar company in a few years to be considered "successful"? If the business has customers and makes enough money to pay the salaries of its ermployees, that's good enough. And this flight ride-sharing service sounds like a decent enough idea, when you consider how much it costs per hour to fly a private aircraft. A typical Cessna is $155/hour to rent, so if you can get someone to tag along and pay part of your cost, that's a pretty good deal for someone who just flies on the weekends and has a middle-class job. $50 for a 2-hour flight would be about 1/6 the total cost, but that's still a decent chunk of money for just putting up with someone riding along.
Those studies can't be trusted. There's no way that they actually managed to track every single person to make sure they died. You don't know that there isn't a 40,000 year old caveman out there somewhere.
Have you seen how much drama is on a typical person's Facebook page? Many people feel the need to share everything and this often results in pissed-off associates for one reason or another. We know that public performers (musicians, actors etc.) can suffer greatly from stress, but we're now expecting the entire population to put on a 24/7 public performance on social networks.
I don't have much sympathy here. No one is forcing you to have a Facebook account, or to put any effort into using it. I have a FB account (mainly because other people I know do), but I don't actually use it for much. I don't follow peoples' inane posts of inspirational captioned pictures, or nutty right-wing political crap, or obnoxious photos showing off their kids and families, or anything else. I really don't even log in really; main primary use for it is for Tinder, as Tinder requires a FB account for authentication.
If people are getting stressed out about their lives being on display 24/7 on Facebook, then they need to stop using Facebook that way. It's that simple.
This is absolutely true. Hispanics and blacks, and really all non-whites, with a few exceptions here and there, are generally extremely socially conservative compared to white people. White people are the most socially liberal worldwide, with the possible exception of Thais. Think about it: in what parts of the world is it legal for women to walk around topless or nude? In what parts of the world is it socially acceptable for people to have casual sex with multiple partners? What countries/places have legalized marijuana? What places are the most irreligious? What places are the safest and most accepting for homosexuals? I'll tell you which places aren't on this list: any place in Latin America, any place in the Middle East, China, Philippines, India, Russia, and the American South which is heavily populated by African-Americans. Black people in the South are famous for being extremely religious and conservative, and Hispanics are famous for "family values" and being Catholic and having a lot of kids. These are not traits of socially liberal people.
Now of course, there's plenty of ultra-conservative white people too, particularly in the South and the Midwest and the "heartland" and also Utah. Also in Russia, where the Russian Orthodox church has become very powerful after the fall of the USSR.
But you're exactly right: these minorities are generally rather conservative. They only vote Democratic because the Republican party panders to white racism and blames them for the nation's ills, so they happily vote for right-wing Democrats like Hillary who insist that "marriage is between one man and one woman" (up until it's too politically expedient to change that opinion), and who are completely against legalizing marijuana, and who take "campaign contributions" from the private prison industry and payday loan industry.
I'd prefer an all-out ban. Pieces of shit like him are toxic to a community when allowed to stay; decent people simply leave over time unless these people are cut out like the cancers they are. There's a reason that every successful discussion site isn't a free-for-all anarchy, but instead has a moderation system of some kind, and usually has moderators who have the ability to ban truly toxic individuals like him. This site does a poor job with both, and we've seen the quality devolve immensely over the last 15 years as a result.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting in a McD's, and there isn't a worker here under 30. That's pretty typical.
As people who were once higher on the economic ladder move down, they are taking the jobs that teenagers may once have enjoyed. As well, they are collecting food stamps, getting housing assistance and daycare assistance. Funded by our tax dollars.
Meanwhile the top two hedge fund managers are making the rough equivalent of 300,000 minimum wage workers. Is this system supposed to be working? It has long ago transcended normal ideas of fairness of wages or taxes and reached full potato status.
Hillary Clinton thinks everything is great. Her daughter is married to one of those hedge fund managers and lives in a place in Manhattan worth tens of millions of dollars, but rest assured, Hillary is one of us!
Tell her now, with current news articles in hand, that this is the risk you run by using Windows. If she won't listen and move to Linux, then too bad: she was warned.
I've bought 3 Galaxy S4 phones (1 for me, 2 for other members of my household) in the past year, even though these phones are already a couple years old. They work great. The carrier updated them to Android 5.0.1, and if I get some other project out of the way I'll try installing CyanogenMod on one to see how that works out. For ~$100, I don't see how you can get a better deal on a phone: they're well-built, have great screens, excellent Otterbox cases available, and still pretty speedy.
But of course, at this age the batteries are going out. But these phones have easily replaced batteries, with $8 OEM replacements on Ebay, so that was easily fixed.
AFAIC, not having an easily-replaced battery is a deal-breaker. There is no way I'm going to spend hundreds of dollars on something that has to be thrown away in 2 years because they didn't want to make limited-lifetime parts replaceable.
We don't need any penalties at all for this. If people would stop running Windows, this wouldn't be a problem.
Yeah, there's a really easy technical solution: stop running Windows!
Nope, you got the whitewashed story there.
The real story is that the "single payer won't fly with Republicans" idea was made up to sell to the Democratic voters as an excuse as to why they couldn't do it. In reality, the Democrats never had any intention of pursuing single-payer, because the Democratic Party is a actually right-wing party that is in the pocket of the health insurance industry, and single-payer would put that whole industry out of business.
This is why we're seeing a huge nasty fight between the Bernie and Hillary sides of the party now. Bernie represents the left-wing side that wants stuff like single-payer, while Hillary represents the right-wing side (which is the dominant side by far) that wants stuff like more private prisons, more payday loan stores, more IP laws, and more wars in the middle east.
For anything that old, emulators are the way to go.
And yet there are large tracts of the planet which are not uninhabitable and yet have very low population densities. There is plenty of land, plenty of potentially arable land, plenty of fresh water.
Like where? There's plenty of land in northern Canada and Alaska, but it's frozen tundra, and definitely not arable. There's plenty of land in the Sahara desert; I don't think I need to explain the problem there. There's plenty of land in North Dakota, but who wants to live where it's -40 in the winter?
The reason the population is uneven and "concentrated into pockets" is because people generally like to live places where the weather is mild (not too hot, not too cold), and where there's enough freshwater (becoming a big problem in the American southwest). They also tend to like to live on coasts. Part of this is because we naturally like water, but there's a good reason for it too: the weather is better. There's a reason places like Kansas are known as "Tornado Alley": the entire middle section of the country has very extreme weather that you don't find on the coasts, either extreme heat (TX), tornados, or extreme cold.(MN, ND).
Maybe if we started building cities which were more insulated from the environment (such as the domed cities seen in sci-fi), then more of these places would be habitable. -40 in the winter isn't so bad when the summer is nice and mild, and you can just stay inside your domed city in the winter. But we're nowhere near that point yet, so unless you really like living someplace where the oil in your car's engine literally freezes overnight, you probably want to live in one of the mild climate locations, which is why all those places are crowded.
We *are* overpopulating the planet, with the way we're living now. It doesn't have to be this way. We could move our heavy industry into space like Bezos suggests, do most of our mining in the asteroids and on the Moon, and then work on making our cities more livable. Get rid of cars, and instead have good subway systems and SkyTran for getting people around quickly and cheaply. We waste a massive amount of land in our cities to cars and all the infrastructure to support them (roads, garages, parking lots). We also build our buildings much too small: build a city that's basically one giant cubic building, 200 stories high, and you could house an incredible number of people in a rather small space. If you want everyone to have their own 1/2-acre yard and separate house for 1-2 people plus 1-2 kids, and a garage and a car for driving everywhere, and you want the housing districts located far from workplaces, then yes, we are absolutely overpopulated.
2) Declining population can also trigger massive problems with economy: You'll have to divest in a controlled and smart way. Example: real estate values are likely to drop if head count goes down. See former East German towns: some of them have become almost ghost towns, many with only retirees living there. This triggers business closings, which in turn makes young people move away. A self enforcing negative trend.
It's not just Germany; the USA is filled with small towns like this, all over the place. The population here is urbanizing, so all the young people are moving to cities. The big cities are growing bigger, as are the medium-sized ones. The towns are all shrinking and dying, and are full of people who never left and are now retired.
How is this +5 insightful? It's just plain dumb. Have you never heard of asteroid mining? You don't bring up all the raw materials from Earth, you get them from asteroids or the Moon. Bringing them up from Earth would be stupid. Anyone who's been paying any attention at all to these kinds of proposals for the past few years would already know this.
other than an "enhanced advertising experience", which no consumer wants.
You don't know that. I'll bet there's a few losers out there somewhere who really like watching ads. It's just like some other weirdos, like people who enjoy being physically abused. We'll never understand them, but they are out there.
What are you going to do with the tuner? Watch OTA TV? Why? What a waste of time?
The remote is useless too, except for simply turning the power on and off and adjusting the volume, because there's no way for the TV's remote to control the add-on devices (namely the media center PC you should have connected to it).
What we really need is a media center PC which can store and view all your downloaded programs, and Netflix too, and which has a remote which controls power to the monitor, and can also interface to a stereo amplifier and control that too.
There's supposedly some new smart TVs now that will not work - at all - without being connected to your network so they can phone home.
It's an even release, so it sucks. Wait until Windows 11 is out.
Um, I thought that was never supposed to happen, and that the plan was all future versions of Windows would be "Windows 10", much like all versions of MacOS have been "MacOS X" for a very long time. Isn't Windows 10 just supposed to be a rolling release?
I have 3 Galaxy S4 phones as well, but on Sprint (with Ting), and they were all updated to Android 5.0.1 by the carrier. Not the most-current Android version, but not "woefully behind" either, and newer than the version they originally came with.
I do plan to try out Cyanogenmod on one of them sometime and see how it goes.
The Nexus devices suck as far as I can tell: no removable battery or SD card slot, and probably no Otterbox Defender case either. Samsung's hardware is excellent (well, it was up to the S5 at least; the S6 sucked and the S7 isn't much better). Great software isn't that useful if the hardware is crap and there's no good case with holster available.
Mod up. This is exactly right.
Why should I have to spend all my time learning about all kinds of unsupported 3rd-party software and unauthorized hacks and tweaks to make a Windows machine work so that someone else can use some shitty proprietary software they insist on using? If they insist on that crap, and using Windows, they can hire Geek Squad when they have a problem. It's not my job to become an expert on Windows, just like it's not my job to be an expert on Oracle database administration; just because I "do computers" for a living doesn't mean I'm an expert on everything computer-related.
Exactly right.
This is why, when family members/relatives ask for computer help, I offer to install Linux for them. When they take me up on it, I install Linux Mint KDE, and rarely do I have to provide any support. It "just works". As long as they just do web browsing, document writing, video playing, and other basic stuff like that and don't have some stupid proprietary software they insist on running, it works great for them. With Windows, you'll have to spend huge amounts of time being their IT support.
That's why DLNA is dumb: the client device should be able to handle the format. If it can't, it's broken. With open-source software, this isn't a problem; you just download the new codec and everything works.