Are you trolling? No enterprise would ever compete with free. They will scream for an onerous legislative solution, which will make all our lives more difficult.

I wish pirate streaming operations a speedy death.

Pixel Pirate II Hollywood Trailer https://yewtu.be/watch?v=cdK0RoO5hpY

This is an interesting response. It makes me wonder whether the real risk of piracy to game publishers isn’t so-called ‘lost’ sales, but having their control of the initial impressions window undermined by genuine critical reception*. Marketing efforts are seriously compromised unless they operate in an information void. Denuvo provides that void.

[*] Video game reporting outlets not included for reasons that should be obvious in the year 2024

Cricket Australia has withdrawn.

He’s right.

May I suggest contacting your state’s legal aid service. They could certainly point you to the right resource if they don’t already have the answers.

Stop-and-searches are part of a deliberate strategy of “proactive policing” used by NSW Police. … The idea is to reduce crime by increasing police interaction with the community.

That’s fishing.

Advertisers can pay more to stay in the room than you will realistically pay to have them expelled.

I suspect a lot of users with silly warnings in their profile like OP described haven’t bothered configuring their Upload/Download preferences. The tools for managing slot numbers and queue scheme (round robin v. FIFO) are all there.

I hear you, but with traction comes the corporate interest.

Telemetry, advertising, etc. are ultimately web page elements that I can download or block. The paid offering might have a TOS that requires acceptance of such, but those terms do not bind me as a free, public visitor. I think Youtube is doing its best to have people buy its nonsense argument, as part of a wider campaign to shift the public’s understanding of web site versus web service. For what it’s worth, I don’t see them ever putting their money where their mouth is by pay-walling the whole site.

Alternative frontends don’t fall under piracy by any definition. Youtube’s servers are publicly accessible.

It strikes me as disguising a lack of real hobbies. What an utterly boring person you must be to spend surplus weekday time working for a second boss.

To acknowledge the truth of what you said but offer an explanation. It’s a fly in the ointment, if you like. No one wants to live in a low-trust society.

Public listing of grocery retail is a key cause of these problems. Listed food has the wrong owners, by virtue of being listed in the first place, and they’re pursuing their priorities at the direct expense of shoppers and suppliers.

If you suspect you’re being fucked on a favourite purchase category, direct your custom elsewhere (Aldi, Costco, family run) and review your consumption rate. If I see unreasonable price rises, I know I’m buying less as a rule.

Those traits are pitfalls of being a high trust society.

Banding and blocking are associated with low bitrates. Bitrate is a key consideration in video encoding. Either it is constant, where you set a value of 2000 kbits, 5600, etc. and Handbrake sticks to it, or variable, where you set a quality rate factor, and Handbrake then adjusts bitrate on the fly to maintain quality X. Variable approaches will provide an average bitrate.

Occasionally DVD sources will compress really inefficiently: no matter how much bitrate you throw at it, the encoded result is substantially worse than source. But typically I’ve found 2 to 3 megabits does a good job. I use mediainfo to ascertain bitrates and other information.

Care to demonstrate ‘looks worse’? Are visual artifacts showing up? Are the sources DVD or BD? What encoding speed is in use? What special parameters are specified (More Settings box) in the video tab?