There's a certain common expectation one has from any UI.
This doesn't exist for me with anything Google - be it search, Youtube, Android, etc. - my first thought is always 'I'll need to fight it to get the results I'm looking for.' That's how they roll.
Firstly, on a personal note, I must say getting heavily downvoted on a factual statement and not an opinion is a new and confusing experience for me.
My comparisons were made several years ago using LAME 320 CBR, LAME VBR, OGG, lossless (WAV) 16bit 44.1kHz and lossless (WAV) 16bit 48kHz.
I believe at least most professional musicians and sound engineers would be able to identify the difference between all of these; while they might not always be "worse", their sonic character is certainly different.
I have a taste for the secret,
it clearly has to do with not-belonging;
I have an impulse or fear or terror in the
face of a political space, for example,
a public space that makes no room for the secret.
For me, the demand that everything be paraded in
the public square and that there be no internal
forum is a glaring sign of the totalitarianization
of democracy. [. . .] if a right to the secret is
not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space.
(Jacques Derrida, in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., II, p. 599.)
Well, I think there's something deeper going on here; the strength of the nation as a juridical entity has been seriously weakened; rich multinationals - corporations and individuals alike - are no longer bound by it, refugees are an obvious exception to it, and since the neo-liberal revolution, legislation also tends to be mostly global-minded; which leaves the normal citizen - now a "prisoner" of his or her place of birth - with few options. It seems only natural that new forms of existence in a post-national world would slowly come into being (instead of a naive populist, nostalgic ultra-nationalist turn).
>Some have questioned why no companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or SpaceX have attempted to investigate the device, but regardless of how likely these companies find the results so far, the largest reason is almost surely that the devices are both patented by their inventors.
But what if the common folk in each nation finally realizes its national leaders have become, in essence, multinationals, just like Google and Amazon, with all that this entails regarding their actual agendas and worldview?
I think all this talk about the legality of using such services misses the point. It's about legitimacy, especially that of state leaders. While the western media might try to use it to delegitimize some non-western leaders, the leak actually works both ways.
Any country leader who'd make a speech to tell her (or his) people she doesn't care about them or their country, would do nothing illegal, but would probably loose her power. It's the same here - the leak serves as proof that the national Elite in many countries is no longer "loyal" to its imagined community (aka nation).
In the end, it still takes a single election to take him and his party down,
I have faith in Turkish people,
they did it before to others, they will do it to him as well.
Well, a community needs certain borders to become one; these may be implicit, but they certainly exist here. What's special in this forum, imo, is the level of discussion and the willingness to listen carefully and to react thoughtfully, and not its realization of some utopian ideal freedom (which probably would have destroyed it as a community).
Yet again, an online community is obviously not a nation-state: one has chosen voluntarily and consciously to participate in it, and could always decide to leave and go elsewhere.