That depends. Are you looking at preserving the music without loss of information? Then you need to use a lossless format like flac. Formats like aac, mp3, opus can throw away information you’re less likely to hear to achieve better compression ratios. Flac can’t, so it needs more storage space to preserve the exact waveform.

You can use a lossy format if you want. On most consumer level equipment, you probably won’t notice a difference. However, if you start to notice artifacting in songs, you’ll need to go back to the originals to re-rip and encode.

There’s talk on the Linux kernel mailing list. The same person made recent contributions there.

Andrew (and anyone else), please do not take this code right now.

Until the backdooring of upstream xz[1] is fully understood, we should not accept any code from Jia Tan, Lasse Collin, or any other folks associated with tukaani.org. It appears the domain, or at least credentials associated with Jia Tan, have been used to create an obfuscated ssh server backdoor via the xz upstream releases since at least 5.6.0. Without extensive analysis, we should not take any associated code. It may be worth doing some retrospective analysis of past contributions as well…

There was a remaster that was put out a few years ago: steam, gog. It was a nice piece of nostalgia finding it. From playing it on arcade difficulty and comparing it against the easier settings, it was pretty obvious this game was meant to suck up quarters. You just had to have everything memorized.

Not sure if it’s related to your story, but a lot of people self indoctrinated through right-wing media. There was a documentary that came out in 2016: The Brainwashing of My Dad.

It’s online if you haven’t seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8

https://piped.video/watch?v=FS52QdHNTh8

We have a very large christian population, and they all don’t behave in a monolithic manner. For surveys it makes sense to ask which denomination or type of christian they are. Some will response Catholic, Baptist, Protestant. Some will respond christian, sometimes non-denominational christian. It improves the survey results. For example, you might find differences between Catholics and Baptists that wouldn’t show up if you grouped them all together under a christian category.

For reporting them, probably not. For trying to opt-out with a STOP reply, depends on them playing by the rules. Do you think they will play by the rules? I don’t. I would assume malice. That they would forward your number to a bunch of other lists. You might not get Nikki’s spam, but you’ll get spam from 3 other PACs that are only 2 months old.

Digging into the FCC’s website reveals that robotexts are illegal without prior consent. However, if they hand enter the message, that’s legal.

That lines up with my experience the one time I kept getting annoying political texts. There was a human at the other end. They happily removed my number from their list after I threatened to vote for the other team if they kept harassing me. But that was the Democrats.

You can try some of the FCC’s recommendations, but I would generally assume malice in this instance. The political entities will probably disappear before anything can be done.

Report Unwanted Calls and Texts

If you think you’ve received a political robocall or text that does not comply with the FCC’s rules, you can file an informal complaint with the FCC at fcc.gov/complaints. If you are receiving texts that you didn’t ask for, report the sender by forwarding the texts to 7726 (or “SPAM”). Campaigns should also honor opt-out requests if you reply “STOP.”

Something something antitrust. Something something browser choice. Microsoft is just asking to be fined €1 billion. Really, someone needs to make a big stink about it in Europe because they’ll act before the US does.