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Towing in space has been done before. Grumman sent North American Rockwell an invoice for towing their crippled spacecraft home. The rate per mile seems pretty reasonable too.

All joking aside, this is going to be a bear to fix. The best scenario would be that the drive gear was munching an insulation blanket. The debris would be friendly to space suits, and should only be labor intensive to clean out. If the gears are grinding on each other, the debris will be sharp and hard. That would be "bad" and I'd expect NASA to seriously consider returning the entire assembly to earth for repair. Expensive, but much less likely to kill someone.

I'm of the opinion that the drive system on this beast is probably over-engineered. It should resemble a Ford F-150 differential - loose tolerances, and designed to run for many millions of rotations without much maintenance. There's absolutely no need for the solar array to have precision pointing capability. I really do hope that the problem isn't due to over-engineering, but I wouldn't place a bet.

In the time I've lived here in Cambridge, the average police uniform has gone from the friendly, lots-of-white Police Service garb to the almost-all-black Police Force look of today.

1) http://www.dubyasworld.com/dubya-quit-thinking.jpg
2) http://www.geocities.com/calann@sbcglobal.net/dubya.jpg

As I see it, you don't understand the tradeoffs that went into the Titan IV, hence you don't understand my remark. The Titan IV was the Department of Defense's emergency workaround for the Space Shuttle after the Challenger disaster. They had to duplicate all the infrastructure that NASA already had in place. Further, they put into place various expensive innovations like a mobile launch platform, wheeled out on rails, that only made sense with high launch volumes (the Shuttle experienced the same problem of lower than expected launch frequency). Also, they used hypergolic propellants which would have been unnecessary for a NASA vehicle. As I mention earlier, there apparently were other complex and expensive payload integration issues. Since there were only 22 launches, the economics wasn't there to justify the program.

The point is that NASA had most of the necessary infrastructure in place for the Titan IV and the extra launches would have driven the price of the vehicle down naturally. Come to think of it, if NASA had been involved from the begining and the Titan IV had a proper development cycle, we'd probably have ended up with something similar to either the Atlas V heavy or the Delta IV heavy.

This sentence is poorly worded. You awkwardly used "actual" twice, so it sounds awkward.

You missed a comma after "but" and you put a preposition at the end of the sentence above.

Another comma splice, you've really got to stop doing that.

non-restrictive element: a portion of a sentence that is not grammatically necessary to complete the meaning of the sentence.

Now you're not maintaining parallel form with the "it's" construct, you meant "concordance" instead of "concordation," and used incorrect supplementation of the phrase with a period.

If you write a complex sentence, then you shouldn't put a comma between the two parts.

However you need commas after words like "Rather," but not after "science".

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Or this guy :^) (and for those who like Lego).

Moreover, if someone like Ron Paul gets any sort of influence on all this technosocialism, there is still hope that commercial space will make the whole thing moot with lunar materials exponentiating manufacturing and human presence in orbital solar power satellite habitats as Jeff Bezos discussed in his Valedictorian speech during his senior year at Miami High School.

I can't imagine where the got that idea.

He'll pick a bunch of SMART guys and they'll solve our ENGERNY problems and they'll do it all in ONE WEEK or he'll... uh... he'll uh... give them MORE TIME and MORE MONEY because its REALLY REALLY HARD to solve our ENGERNY problems! And then if they don't do it before they die then... uh... he'll pick some MORE SMARTER GUYS and let THEM solve our ENGERNY problems!

Nothing like incentives!

-FL

"Japan entered World War II with the intent of conquering Asia. They invaded China (without ever formally declaring War since both China and Japan feared it would cause their trading partners to stop supplying them) for it's resources and eventually The Philippines which was an act of war against the US."

Its true Japan was engaged in a long and brutal war with China but they invaded Manchuria in 1931 long before there was anything resembling a World War. They were seeking to gain control of a resource rich area to fuel their industrial and military expansion, in much the same way the U.S. seized the American Southwest from Mexico and the Philippines from Spain. All the European colonial powers seized their empires from someone else and use them to propel their economic success. Japan was just a little late joining the club, stepped on the toes of the old school colonial powers, and were especially brutal about it. All of the western colonial powers, including the U.S. and Japan had been carving up, exploiting and abusing China for the better part of a century prior to 1931. This exploitation of China led to the Boxer Rebellion in 1899 for example when the Chinese tried to drive out all the foreign devils who were exploiting them, German, British, American and Japanese alike,

There is some irony if you look at modern Manchuria because Japan has returned there in a huge way today, and is doing basically what it wanted to do in the 1930's but today its regained control of the region just by spending money and building factories there.

The point everyone, especially in America, seems to forget is that the U.S., the U.K. and the Dutch provoked Japan in to expanding the war in China in to the World War in the Pacific, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was anything but a surprise. They did this by embargoing oil supplies to Japan, Roosevelt on July 21, 1941, followed a few days later by the British and the Dutch. The Dutch and British oil fields in what is now Indonesia were of particular importance to Japan and the spigot from them was shut off. The Japanese basically considered that the opening salvo in the war in the Pacific. The embargo left Japan with no alternative but to seize all the oil fields in the Pacific otherwise their military and their economy would have been starved for energy, or they would have had to submit to demands from the U.S. British and Dutch which would have been capitulation in their book which is something they would never have considered. So they drove the British, Dutch and U.S. out of the eastern Pacific by seizing Singapore, the Philippines, the East Indies and its oil fields. Once again the U.S. had seized of control the Philippines itself in the Spanish American war, a war largely fabricated by the U.S. and the Hearst newspaper enterprise, to fuel an American expansion just like Japan invading Manchuria. The U.S. had also been fighting an insurgency in the Philippines for several decades early in the 20th centure, a war full of American atrocities, including torture. Japan's atrocities in China were probably on a larger scale but America didn't really have any moral high ground to stand on after what it had done in the Philippines in the early 20th century and all the western powers had done in China in the 19th century.

I think mostly what I'm saying is your post is a little bit steeped in anti Japanese propaganda originated from World War II. The allies had a lot of skeletons in their closets too and they weren't the champions of freedom and goodness their propaganda painted them to be. They won the war and it just so happens the people that win wars always paint themselves as good and right, and the people that lose usually get tarred as monsters. Stalin killed more innocent people than the German holocaust or the Japanese in China ever did but the Soviet Union wasn't on the losing end of the war so we choose to forget it.

As for Japanese brutality much of this perception ca

The warriors of Islam are responsible for the deayth of ~60 million East Indians over the centuries not to mention the enslavement and rape of many millions more.

Check out:

http://www.geocities.com/akhandbharat1947/ISLAM.html

Ed

The GNAA was a good four years or so after the start of sid=trolltalk and its subsequent successors, sid=k22320inchfan and sid=10gramspoppylatex, which served as a place for trolls to link to their accomplishments and talk crap with each other. Sadly after a couple of years crapflooding started, and proper trolling became much more difficult and pretty much died out.

I did just find that my /. trolling HOWTO is still online though :)

There are only two hidden directories, but if you want to see what's inside them you might want have a look at this...

http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/mscement_hires.png
Hard as a rock and dumb as a brick?

If you don't know what anarchism is, please at least google for it before making a fool of yourself.

You may want to look at this: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html

And maybe even this: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/

A quick google code search later, and it looks like it's from Sig2Dat. The code in questions starts around line 393 of sig2dat.c

I've just briefly looked around, but so far I haven't had any luck finding any kind of license for it.

Thanks for the link to my page, but please note that since I graduated, I moved the list to http://www.geocities.com/dronak/smileys.html. I haven't made many updates for a long time though, so the two versions are probably nearly identical. Also, my note that the original "smiley" is Copyright 1984-85 by Stephen R. Cohen was included on the page because I was contacted by Mr. Cohen and told this was the case. I don't know the detailed history. I just started collecting everything I could find in undergrad, to avoid people passing around multiple emoticon dictionaries that typically had most of the same content. This was my attempt to help by reducing that duplication and combining all symbols and meanings I could find into a single file. I hope some people have found it useful, or at least fun.

hello anonymous coward. Why don't you download the explosion generator that I used for my early games that I made freely available to anyone with no license whatsoever:

http://www.geocities.com/starlinesinc/

or perhaps you want the entire source code to my first game, freely available for anyone to learn from:

http://gpwiki.org/index.php/Files:AsteroidMinerSourceCode.zip

Maybe you should do some basic research before you launch into a diatribe against someone for their views on copyright?

Well, Ben, there's nothing that rises to the level of courtroom proof in the way of evidence excavated yet no, but the concept is not exactly new.

Basically, the Haida band, who are the indigenous First Nation of Haida Gwaii (the archipelago which you non-PC foreigners are probably more familar with as "the Queen Charlotte Islands") display such a number of cultural similarities to the Norsemen that many reasonable people find it less of a stretch to presume that there was contact between them than to assume a remarkable cascade of coincidences. Let us take an example, boat design.

""Yakutat," or "Northern-style" canoes include a variety of design forms, including a characteristic curve and swelling near the bow. The prow of the canoe gracefully curves up from the water and can be adorned by elaborate carvings."
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/treasure_fossil/Treasures/Haida_Canoe/canoe.gif

Now, contrary to the learned discourse above, these are not actually characteristic of Haida design. There is one other culture that designed its ocean-going vessels with those same "characteristic" traits. Care to guess what that culture was?
http://www.geocities.com/dragar.geo/WSP/Pix/longship.gif

Those are just the first two images Google search came up with for each; if you look into it further, you'll find that the similarities are more striking than those two make apparent. Striking enough that when Haida/Tlingit take their canoes on cultural exchanges to Europe, they constantly get questions along the lines of "why did you make a longship out of a single tree trunk and paint it funny?", as Europeans just assume that the design is a conscious imitation of the Norse, not their own.

Also, the Haida are physiologically distinct, rather dramatically so in fact, from every other American aboriginal culture; they are taller, whiter, grow facial hair, and produce significant quantities of brunettes and redheads.

"Marchand also described the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands whom he visited in 1791. He found them not differing materially in stature from Europeans, better proportioned and better formed than the Sitkans and without the gloomy and wild look of the latter. Their color he found did not differ from that of Frenchmen, and several were less swarthy "than the inhabitants of our country places' (Edward L. Keithahn, MONUMENTS IN CEDAR: The Authentic Story of the Totem Pole, Bonanza books, New York 1971:19-23, emphases supplied)."

This is not consistent with Haida mixing with Asian genetic pools, or any other Western North American genetic pool, or hell any other race bordering the entire Pacific for that matter. On the other hand, this is remarkably suggestive of significant admixture with a Scandinavian genetic pool, yes?

Anyhoo, if you'd like to look further into the theory that the "Vinland" of the sagas is actually British Columbia, specifically the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, here's a page for you:

http://www.spirasolaris.ca/sbb4g1ev.html

Actually living in British Columbia, I can attest to the plausibility of all the little details. The one that really struck me was his identification of the Oregon grape with the always-problematic 'grapes' of the sagas. As pointed out on this page, the presentation in the sagas does seem facially invalid:

"As for the grapes in the Sagas, James Robert Enterline wrote in VIKING AMERICA (1972):
In the Saga of Eirik the Red, after Thorhall the Hunter went off by himself, some writers have inferred that he found grapes and ate of them, becoming intoxicated, for he was discovered on a steep crag where:" he lay gazing up into the air with wide-open mouth and nostrils, scratching and pincing himself and muttering something ."
The corresp

Zealots abound. I've personally witnessed hostile anti-creationist myself:

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/evozeal.htm

Excerpt: "Plus, they were extremely rude, calling me every name in the book and even registering email accounts in my name to try to intimidate me."

(I'm not anti-evolution, but did present an idea that rubbed some anti-creationists the wrong way.)

Or where Megabyte lived.

Easy to read papers here

The only reason I don't develop this myself is that it'd take too much time for me to code. What is the point in spending 40-50 years of your life behind a computer so you can make the last big thing? Anyway one thing I've noticed is that the first thing you hard code is like a CAD imagination space. The first amazing thing this software could do is turn books into movies because it will allow you to watch its imagination. And you could change the book up some yourself to give scenes and actors different qualities or get more details.

The thing I like the most is that the problem of making AI is almost solving itself. We're getting faster and faster 3d cards which is a prerequisite for this technology. Also if someone made a CAD interface using a human language, we'd almost be there.

Anyway I may get back to the problem of AI after I finish my current project and have the resources to work on AI. You have to admit that all the previous attempts at human+ intelligence have failed. My idea of adding a 3d imagination space makes a lot of sense because we've never tried this before! Anyway to answer the funny AI problem of "will machines take over?" is "only if someone issues a bad command to the bots." which someone would want to try because we have punks that write viruses today. Finally the nice thing about this imagination space AI is that it could train itself to learn any hardware that it is placed in given that it has the bare minimal sense of sight.

I should be writing papers on AI or coding it, but I found some business opportunities I should pursue to gain capital in the meantime. There is no sense being a madman locked in a stuffy room doing this by myself when I can hire some good help, and we can all work together. Hey that is another idea. I could make this open source.

Once again, sir-

You are thinking of JESUX!

Do NOT let it happen again.
-YG

PERL lacking bloat? You've got to be kidding!

If you want minimal, try out UnLambda or Pax. Unlambda is so minimal the functions (except a few built-ins) don't even get names. As a purely functional language, it also lacks variables. Despite this, it's Turing complete, so it can do anything you can do in such bloated messes as C++, PERL or Python. Pax is also Turing complete, and the page referenced above includes complete source code to its implementation, in a total of 175 lines of code (including white space, nice indenting, etc.)

What's truly sad is that even though it was apparently invented with the specific intent of being obfuscated, Pax programs are generally much more readable than most PERL. Oh, and just to address a couple of your other points: Pax doesn't need a library to do pattern matching -- in fact, the language is basically built entirely around pattern equations. The tutorial and reference manual together work out to just over 200 lines of text. Most of that is the USTL reference manual mentioned above.

Much as I hate to, I have to admit that even compared to PERL, programs in UnLambda are somewhat obfuscated -- though once you get used to its syntax, they're not quite as bad as they initially appear (rather the opposite of PERL in that respect).

Truth is strange than fiction

BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly!

GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.

BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!

FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah!

I wish they were. But unfortunately, you see a lot of this every time they try to fix transmission capacity issues.

You're right, off-peak is a big part of the equation, but there's more to it when it comes to getting all of that extra capacity to where it's needed. There's a fair amount of excess generation capacity sparsely populated regions, but there isn't always a way to get enough of that power into denser megapolises when it's needed, such as during a heatwave. The dynamics of energy consumption are such that you need to have a certain amount of extra capacity to account for periods of peak demand and lack of transmission capacity that would move power from areas with a generation surplus to those that are temporarily deficient.

As a "baby boomer" my life has basically spanned the "space/computer/indoor-toilet age"...

Hello Bennett Brauer!

Netscape Communicator 4.5-4.8 had roaming profiles which sync'ed your bookmarks with a LDAP server and your address book, cookies too. This feature kept me using Netscape long after it was really dead, for some reason people seem to have forgotten about this great feature. http://www.acns.colostate.edu/aspx/www.acns/bulls/ nsroaming_whatsroaming.html http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1411/LWD990901netsca pe/ http://www.geocities.com/petru2/netscape_roaming.h tml

All the administrations have been lockstep since Reagan fell to Tecumseh's Curse in 1981 (while he didn't die like all the other presidents elected at the decade mark, the rogue elements of his administration [led by V.P. George H.W. Bush] took over while he was recovering from the coup attempt).

George H.W. Bush had his speech about the New World Order and negotiated NAFTA. Clinton pushed NAFTA implementation through the congress.

I never really learned to read at teh government schools, and do much better listening to Chomsky's talks. Found Class War via bittorrent, and have borrowed a couple other cds from the local library. Definitely recommended listening.

Thanks for expanding on my much too short comment. I whole-heartedly agree. My "grandparents" reference was just meant in the sense that at that time, the pro-state leftists were the much stronger element.

The chances of libertarianism can maybe be deduced by the success of the anti-state left ;) Just to toss a few names out there (without an overarching sense or order, Google is your friend) for those who don't want to remain on /.'s level in this matter: the already-mentioned Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, Operaismo, Deleuze/Guattari (Mille Plateaux), the Anarchist FAQ http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/

There's a lot of so-so OO in academia. (A lot of what I see is downright horrific!) And just because you've been doing Java, doesn't mean you've been exposed to good OO. Heck, I've seen plenty of procedural programming in Smalltalk. (I even saw guys who tried to use a Smalltalk image build process like they'd use make and a compiler. Just wrong!)

http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm -- this guy is a bit of a nutter. Seen his stuff and traded posts with him before.

If, as you say, there are *times* Perl had a better object model, and *times* where delimited strings and hashmaps reach their limits, then you are on the right track. Trust me, there is more!

What is "good OO" in the wrong context can be pernicious, just like good procedural programming in an OO project can be. Just about the only good way to learn good OO is to be mentored in a project where it is being practiced. Again, trust me, there is more. Go and search. Read the beginning of Martin Fowler's Refactoring book and go through the video store example. That's one of the things that made the light bulb go off for me.

Took a look at Rails. Clever, but couldn't really wrap my head around its use beyond CRUD...

The "foggy idea of what OO" is is a fairly damning accusation. I've had a decent academic background in the early 90s, and have been doing Java since 2001. So if I don't know it by now... it's also a hard charge to refute, because even a demonstration of an understanding of the basics can lead to "well sure you know that, but you don't REALLY get it"-- and once the other person claims that high ground, they never have to give it up.

(Again, I think http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm makes the case that OO *is* oversold -- but the idea "more OO is better than less OO" becomes a matter of faith, and so jsut saying "OO is OK" doesn't seem like enough, and you seem like some kind of cretin who just doesn't get it.)

And the thing is, it's not like I think Perl is the end all and be all, and there are times I desperately wish it had a stronger object model... even the syntax for nested arrays etc ain't great, and there are definitely times where delimited strings and hashmaps will reach their limits.

Yeah.

Sometimes I worry that I come up with my philosophy about languages to suit my personal gripes and history, and that ultimately that limits me as a developer, but...

Anytime you borrow someone else's toolkit that adds some kind of organization/abstraction over an existing technology... well, either you're losing bits of the functionality of the lower level, or what you're learning is about as complex as the lower level.

My strong personal preference is to write your OWN, app-specific organization.

The counter argument comes from people who are heavily OO in their outlook. (more specifically, I think a gap tends emerge between people who cut their teeth on simple CGI-wrapping things, and got used to using a HashMap mentality for most client/server interaction, and people who cut their teeth on apps and applets, for whom the gap between Java code and what's physically displayed onscreen seems weird and in need of being abstracted away.) Anyway, these folks say that, look, the organization I want is OO, writing this kind of Object->screen element->response mapping ls a repetitive task, so I'm willing to buy into someone else's approach to do that work. That's where something like Wicket comes in.

My recent semi-revelation for this kind of tool-kit was this: "text" is amazing. It has been the lifeblood of programming for decades, ever since we could get away from punched cards I guess, despite attempts at cutesy visual languages. It's just so powerful, concise, easy to manipulate, easy to automate that manipulation, and in its own way visual (hence the wars over the one true brace style etc) that it will be around for a long long time. But text is, by the way we use it, rather procedural, and while you can do OO in it, that's a new level. But sacrificing the ability to adjust HTML and CSS and Javascript in TEXT on the alter of Objects just seems like too big of a sacrifice to me.

Of course, taking an anti-OO stance is a heresy (see http://geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm ) and you have to be careful so you don't seem like a crazy nut job who hasn't worked on large scale projects. But my latest take on it is this: "People and Programs are both best defined by what they DO, not what they ARE".

Another way of looking at it: in Java, when stuff goes wrong, what's your stack trace like? There's always that boilerplate JVM/Server engine at the bottom, but if the core of what's at the top ain't your code, your debugging is going to be a lot harder, because your mistake is in how you set up the other guy's objects to do the work, not you doing the work yourself. (Assuming the other guy's stuff is solid.)

reduce the work day to 4 instead of 8 hrs.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/2528/br_idl e.htm

How much does a shuttle launch cost: $400-$500 million

How much does a shuttle weigh: 165,000 lbs

Which comes out to anywhere from $2,424.25 / lb to $3,030.30 / lb.. Assuming the light saber weighs one pound... and averaging the costs... sending the saber will cost $2,727.28.

http://es.geocities.com/midithebeatles/video/yello w.htm

Actually, Proxomitron is a perfect substitute for Adblock plus. It's essentially a personal web proxy that uses regular expression rules to rewrite web pages before you see them. It comes with a set of filters that'll drop most ads. If you want a better list of rules for it, you should get Sidki's filter set. Using this along with proxomitron gives me more ad protection than Adblock plus offers, along with *much* more flexibility on exactly what to filter and rewrite in web pages.

Imagine the fun he'll have tweaking Linux. I suppose he'll have to learn how to do some coding, too. That might just be necessary to get some of those tweaks to work. I enjoy reading PC Magazine, even though I know they favor Microsoft's products. They did have something nice to say about GIMP once.
So the magazine is not all just about Microsoft. They were trying to point out that there was some good free software alternatives.

I want to be fair, but today I am finding out that the Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse has a little bug when I run it on a PC with my Knoppix 3.4 remaster. Sometimes the cursor will jump around, all over the screen, but soon settles down. My Dell (Logitech) optical mouse does not do that. I tried it on two PC's same thing happens. Probably the knoppix driver, but it does correctly identify the mouse on boot-up. I'll reboot this machine into Fedora Core, and see how it performs there. Just an occasional bug, but makes me wonder if I would have had better luck with a more expensive mouse. I have two of these mice, and both react the same.

Rapidweather

Absolutely... obviously the Wall Street Journal was just a stepping stone before moving on Fark for Rupert Murdock.

MurdocH is this guy. MurdocK is this guy.

It's okay; I get confused by that, too.

Although I'm not a doctor or medically trained in any way, I would like to share something with you I stumbled upon a week or two ago:

http://www.emofree.com/

...and after you read that site, please read this one:

http://www.geocities.com/pseudoscience_2000/

Good luck!

As a quick test, I unchecked Javascript in the preferences, and then clicked on some common news web sites. Seems to speed up the loading of the page quite a bit. I'm not missing anything, the content I wanted, shown in RSS feeds in Firefox, is shown.
I can't use Adblocker since I have to restart Firefox to get it to work, and my
Security and Control script will just delete ~/.mozilla when I close Firefox. That would remove the extension.
I can run Firefox without the S&C script, but would have to configure all of the preferences, add some extensions, then on the next startup, use the menu item to run Firefox w/o the S&C active, rather than the toolbar icon for Firefox, which would use the S&C setup. If that's used, my custom-made ~/.mozilla gets deleted at browser startup, then any ~/.mozilla made while running Firefox gets deleted once again as Firefox is closed. Saves /ramdisk memory for those running off the CD.
I do find it somewhat reassuring to automatically remove the ~/.mozilla in the system when Firefox is closed, especially after visiting sites requiring usernames and passwords, such as online banking, bill paying, and the like.
I don't have any extensions for Firefox enabled by default in my knoppix remaster, screenshots below:

Rapidweather

Ahah!

I see you've played Rolemaster (Arms Law, especially) and Aftermath! What can beat 40 different hit locations on the body and a separate table for shotgun shell types?

[1] One 'competition' that pitted serious self-described audiophiles against modern codecs is described in detail here: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccla ssical/mp3test.html. While well-trained ears could discriminate between 128kbit MP3s and PCM, they could not reliably tell the difference between 256kbit and PCM, on average. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The C't (German IT magazine) test from 2000 was great: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccla ssical/mp3test.html

It's just whining. There have been numerous double-blind ABX tests, many done by the folks over at Hydrogenaudio.org, comparing MP3 files to AIFFs, and with the right codec and right bitrates (depending on the type of source material), it's possible to get an MP3 that only the most refined ears can discriminate from the original. [1]

Of course, it's quite possible to make an MP3 that sounds like a tin-can telephone with one end held underwater, and I'd argue that many of the consumer-ripped files floating around the P2P networks fall into this category, but these files only exist *because* there aren't legitimate, professionally-made, DRM-free MP3s. (And because some people like getting stuff for free and don't much care about the quality when they do. But I do think there is a market for and profit in digitally-delivered music, for the people who can do it right.)

As more music begins to be distributed as MP3s, sound engineers will doubtless (if they have not already) begin studying the codecs and encoding procedures in order to wring the most quality out of a particular bit rate. Many amateurs and enthusiasts have already done this, and there is a sizable body of work devoted to the topic -- including the LAME encoder itself.

Also, looking towards the future, while CDs have pegged the standard for digital music as 2 channel, 44.1kHz, 16-bit PCM, there is no reason why an appropriately-crafted MP3 file cannot *exceed* it in terms of quality. The Apple iPod already supports (slightly) higher sample rates, I believe, and if consumers desire it [2], there's no reason why modern digital formats cannot encapsulate very high-definition audio.

The only people who I hear whining about MP3 are those with either an ulterior motive and a desire to try and keep the industry from moving away from a distribution model that revolves around physical objects, or those who just don't understand the technology. (There are a very small core of audiophiles and techies who seem to dislike MP3 because they prefer some other format, usually either for ethical/political reasons or technical ones, and there certainly is an argument in favor of using lossless formats in lieu of MP3 for distribution, but overall MP3 strikes a good balance between quality and portability. [3])

[1] One 'competition' that pitted serious self-described audiophiles against modern codecs is described in detail here: http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusiccla ssical/mp3test.html. While well-trained ears could discriminate between 128kbit MP3s and PCM, they could not reliably tell the difference between 256kbit and PCM, on average. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

[2] Which is a big 'if.' The buying public, to date, has shown little interest in high-definition audio as such. The only exception to this is multichannel audio, but that only in movie soundtracks for surround sound.

[3] This does raise the question, though, of why the legitimate music-download sites don't take a cue from the late, great, AllOfMp3.com and just allow the *customers* to choose their format of choice for their downloads. There's really no particular excuse not to at least offer a few different quality/size options, particularly for popular music that is going to be enjoyed in a variety of settings (automobiles, portables, home stereos -- each lends itself to a slightly different EQ and compression).