Wasn’t the criticism of photography kind of correct though? I don’t think people think of photography as an art as much as painting is an art.
There aren’t a lot of photographs that a layman couldn’t in principle also take, but only a few people could replicate a good painting.
If you’re outside with a smartphone, why do you actually need that though? If you call someone, their audio will be bad anyways, and when do you need playback and microphone at the same time? Outside multiplayer gaming, I don’t really know any application where high quality audio playback and microphone is needed at the same time.
I can understand people just fine with the voice profiles provided by Bluetooth. Strictly speaking, I don't need anything better than that.
But it sure is nice to be able to make phone calls where people don't sound worse than they did with digitally-switched analog landline telephones in 1995. Bluetooth doesn't get there at all.
The losses of Bluetooth even compound generationally: The inescapable tin-can audio of Bluetooth at one end first gets transmogrified by at least one intermediate lossy codec for transmission across/betwixt the network(s), and then gets tin-canned harder when the far end of the connection is also using Bluetooth.
For perspective: 1995's phone calls were ultimately limited by the G.711 codec, which itself dates to 1972. I'm not setting the bar very high here at all.
Calls on AirPods don’t sound worse to me than on the phone speakers, I don’t think the AirPods noticeably decrease the quality compared to the stuff happening on the phone network.
"The phone network"? As in the usually 8 kHz to 16 kHz quality call typically encoding at ~a quarter the rate of dial-up?
Of course that sounds like a tin can either way, it's coming in encoded with the quality of a tin can! People here are talking about modern VoIP calls (Teams/Slack/Discord/Zoom/etc) which have a snowball's chance in hell of sounding decent in the first place. HSP/HFP will often crank that right back down to traditional phone network quality again. You also lose stereo, which isn't so bad if the only thing you're doing is having a 1:1 call but kind of sucks for a background group call.
The "phone network" nowadays offer high quality sound. Things improved drastically with VoLTE and other technologies which allows much more bandwidth for calls than the old networks could support.
EVS is typically not horrendous, I just wouldn't describe it as the usual VoLTE quality yet. That's still most commonly AMR-WB at 16 kHz, though it'd depend largely on who you're dialing from what where I suppose. One person who dials local cell users on a 5G network will probably tend to get EVS, one who doesn't probably won't.
I mean: I, for one, was definitely talking about telephone calls. :)
But now that you mention it: Yeah, the state of common VoIP (Teams/Slack/Zoom/whatever) is also usually not very good. It's like there's some huge bandwidth crunch here in 2026 that is driven by the strenuous demands of VoIP, except: There isn't.
When I was doing some live streaming with others in a studio a couple of years ago, we worked with some of that. It never sounded very good. (It doesn't sound very good when the big-time acts at CBS or NPR or Fox News do it, either.)
But! When we occasionally had remote co-hosts who had enough technical competence to make it work properly on their end, we were able to use SonoBus[1]. That audio was positively pristine, like they were sitting unseen in the same room as everyone else.
As I mentioned in my comment, I don’t notice the worse Bluetooth quality on calls because the audio itself is already bad, so making calls isn’t really a reason to not use Bluetooth.
Your comment frustrates me! With that said, how about Discord? I have high speed internet 90% of my waking life, high enough for Discord to be high fidelity. I actively avoid using discord to join calls on my phone- because Bluetooth absolutely destroys quality. I use the same pair of headphones to use discord on my PC, with a separate mic, no problemo.
Need? A committee of the dumbest software on your pc/phone will get together to tell you what you need, and they have decided you need tin-can audio quality so that the microphone can be active so that AT&T spyware embedded in the Taco Bell app can listen for off-hand comments about refreshing your phone to opportunistically target you with the spam-cannon.
They mean that the audio quality you hear on the AirPods is better if you only listen to audio compared to listening and using the microphone. I don’t know if that happens on Macs too, but it’s certainly true when using AirPods on Linux because you have to switch the profile when you want to use the microphone and then the audio is really compressed for playback.
It's a little less dramatic than that. They did send a demand letter to automatic.css saying that since 'automatic' and 'automattic' differ by only one letter, are pronounced the same, and are marketed to similar groups the name is likely to cause confusion, hence automatic.css should change its name.
Which is not the same thing as claiming the word automatic generally.
Personally it sounds like a loser if they took it to court since (a) automatic is a common word and (b) they already asked automatic.css to add a "not affiliated with word press" disclaimer (which automatic.css did add). IANAL.
Maybe? But then the parent comment doesn’t make sense either. (There are 2 solved.) Like I said, take the charitable view. To a lot of readers this will be “announcing” the closure of the second of 7 problems so is internally consistent.
Regularly, yes. On a lot of these sorts of products, nothing happens without governments making deals first. Mostly because governments have a need to make sure they get weapons too, not just money for the components they make.
Perhaps should be described as "sale is forbidden by default, but deals are common".
This goes 100% for either completed weapons, or components that can be directly used as a weapon, then you have "dual-use", and the less directly it's a weapon, the more free you are to do what you want.
Can you name any examples? European countries and the EU as a whole don't have an equivalent of the US's ITAR 'See-Through' rule, which lets the US control the usage of a system that has any US components.
I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government. It has been done within Europe, but only for major components, such as Germany's blocking at one point of sales to Saudi Arabia.
But this is the one-component-is-the-weapon, with everything going in one direction version of such a rule. An F35 has 300,000 components from 19 countries, so you can imagine what a maze the agreements for that one are.
It's also not just about the weapons and the danger they pose. It's also about jobs. Know-how (both spreading and restricting know-how). And even the traditional "synergy" (you've designed helicopter blah, hence you make radio component so-and-so, so how about you manufacture NATO standard blah radios and antennas) and the occasional monopoly (it's kind of secret but there aren't many companies that can make the obvious alloy needed for the trust vectoring to name one obvious thing)
Our side is NATO, and we make weapons that are designed to push the global integrated worldview and human rights ("America and it's allies") that we espouse as an alliance. And this view permeates all weapons. For NATO guns, one, you'll never get ridiculous ammo stores (that would enable you to eliminate a population for example), we all work on these weapons together, design them together, and if you try to use your own ammo, everything will fail. Most NATO weapons are defensive. You aim a NATO weapon at a (small) target, it finds that target and either kills it or it disables itself and falls to the ground, essentially intact. Russian weapons are the total opposite: they're meant to kill and if they can't kill their target, they'll just kill whatever and whoever's nearby. Sometimes up to the point they kill the weapon's operators. They will fire "cheap ammo" and literally come with instructions on how to make it. They are meant to kill on a very large scale, without precision and they are most definitely not safe to use. This philosophical difference applies to everything from machine guns to nuclear weapons.
A quick Google search will find you plenty of European legislation. And you should look at those laws like the Belgian laws here, like they were a company "Values" document. That is how the EU/Belgium (and other countries) react "by default", but specific treaties explicitly create exceptions to those rules between specific parties.
So like this: exporting guns and ammo is certainly not something any country allows their companies to do, but most/all countries make specific exceptions in treaties.
This just happens to have the advantage that it makes it extremely easy for politicians to deceive voters about weapons. "Belgian law says it's illegal to export weapons". 100% technically true, and totally misdirects people into believing Belgium doesn't export weapons, which is absolutely false.
Meanwhile, Belgium exports ~50 million euros worth of weapons. But Belgium is just an example, it's not like the Netherlands or France or (definitely) UK, or the EU as a whole are different.
You missed the point. The example asked for was this:
"I'm not aware of any sale of a US weapons system containing European parts being blocked by any European government."
That would be something like "Belgium says the USA can't sell F-35s to Israel because the wings are Belgian-made" similar to how the USA prevents ASML from selling their machines to China.
Oh that's what you want. In the clusterfuck with the Turkey involuntary withdrawal from the F35 program half the treaties were renegotiated (you see, can't have any Turk produce weapons unless he's a "genius", that would not be fair. In other news: the Turkish definition of genius is mostly being the son in law of Erdogan [1])
I believe this agreement is part of the restructuring after that cluster... Note that the agreement is both about production and buying. [2]
"Finland has required extensive domestic participation, with industrial cooperation valued at a minimum of 30 percent of the contract price of procuring 64 F-35A fighters. Under the agreement, Finnish firms will produce the F-35’s forward fuselage structures, including components intended for export aircraft. The agreement also includes ..."
As to how the EU is involved: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/eu-defence-indus... (ie. that's where you go to ask for loans to start a factory for making F35 components, they have a page listing the deals ... somewhere). Note that this is one of the EU institutions that isn't in the budget (well, the loans aren't). They're not spending tax money to make those loans, they're printing money to make those loans.
So the Finnish government is making this deal, including details on export (and this is obviously weapons exports).
How is it an example of European governments preventing American weapons from being sold? Are you saying the Finns unilaterally decided that Turkey can't have F-35s, even if the USA wants to sell F-35s to them?
You misunderstand. Everything is prevented by law, with the purpose to make any change in production involve negotiations with the government, who then negotiates weapons/jobs/local production/... Without those negotiations, and the resulting exceptions to the law nothing can be sold, even dual use items are restricted.
And, of course, the other side of that coin: weapons export regulation is Europe is not something that is meant to actually prevent weapons export. Rather it is used like a company policy: it makes sure everyone regularly has to give the government something they want.
Which is, to put it mildly, not how politicians present those laws.
No, you misunderstand. You keep talking about things irrelevant to the key point.
Look at the political pressure the USA puts on ASML in the Netherlands to prevent them from selling certain products to China because those machines contain some American parts.
The question is explicitly when the reverse has happened, not some general info about European weapon exports or legislation.
Things like Wassenaar Arrangement and MTCR(that applies to a lot of hobby stuffs I'm interested in) are multinational and global. The US implementation is the most painful, but they're like non-Linux unices, sameish in concept and not like first-worlders get free passes.
(And these regs aren't complete nonsense; the technologies regulated by these are useful for guided munitions. It just so happens missile technologies are fully commoditized by now and also happens to be immensely useful for totally peaceful purposes too)
These, again, are export control restrictions at the point of sale and transfer, and the US follows them too. It's not the same thing as what we're discussing regarding the US's changing requirements regarding systems that embed its components.
Note that dual-use items (which Wassenaar regulates) and MTCR are not the same as the US's ITAR 'see through' rule which it uses to block third party sales of systems that contain even small numbers of US components.
For dual-use items, the EU's Directive 2021/821 governs things and broadly authorises exports to the United States through EU General Export Authorisations (EUGEAs) that don't require individual approval.[0]
What does this mean? Isn’t the location header the redirect? Am I not following the redirect by requesting the location header url?
reply