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Problem I have with that is people are stupid. A larger portion of the (ignorant) masses than should be acceptable will allow themselves to be bullied around by the (not-so-ignorant, but oh so very arrogant) high-income execs. They'll keep pushing pricese up and up while the average buyer says to him or herself "yeah it seems a bit overpriced, but it's no big deal just this once." And we the knowledgeable, the concerned consumers, get stuck with no reasonable alternative but a) to give in to this inherently unfair system created by a tightly controlled supply of a commodity that we could all do without, but realistically most of us won't just based on how integral a part it is in most of our society, b) to pirate, or c) to actually do without said commodity and look for good music by independent artists. But who's got the time for that?

This same approach could (should!) be used to measure not "did you/would you buy this," but rather "would you like to hear it again?" I get this feeling all the time. Rufus Wainwright's "Oh what a world"

As a fairly grey-haired listener and player and composer, I have to agree with b-b-m: The music is out there. Don't look to commercial radio.

Plug!: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/th e_current/streams.php

Or you use the original URL:
mplayer -playlist http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/kpcc /news/shows/latw/2005/10/20051029_latw

For those of us newer to free software, can someone provide a url (or better yet, a working command and url) for capturing the stream? I've tried mplayer -dumpstream http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/kpcc /news/shows/latw/2005/10/20051029_latw but that redirects to a different url in a browser window, and I can't see the url in the source code of the redirect page.

Any help would be appreciated. tia.

The real question comes in why asbestos causes harm. Is the the morphology (shape) of it that is the key? Or is it the chemical properties? Or is it both?
I must plead my ignorance when I say I don't know if that question has been fully answered yet. I do know that from certain Taconite mining operations they have found non-asbestos minerals that have a similar shape to asbestos, and have found higher rates of rare cancers, of the kind known that asbestos can cause, in the region around the mines. That might suggest the shape itself is important. You can find an example in this article.

Ho hum. It looks like the NPR offerings are the same as in the iTMS Podcast Directory.

Let me know when they offer A Prarie Home Companion in a Podcast.

Exactly. That's why the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed in short order by the collapse of Cuba, North Korea, and China, all of whom also transformed themselves into fledgling if flawed democracies.

Oh, wait...

The notion that all we had to do was sell people Big Macs and then they'd become democracies is, and always was, a lie. It was a fraud perpetrated by those who wanted to take advantage of cheap labor and lax labor and enviornmental laws. There was never any evidence that wanting material goods would lead to wanting democracy. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. You had the Roman's and their "bread and circuses" policy of simply keeping the masses distracted from the government. In China, you have iPods and KFC.

Instead of aching for democracy, they see China as strong, and want to flex that new found power. It's almost nationalistic. When it comes to democracy, they honestly don't care. They believe the party line that any change to democracy would be too disruptive, so the masses are against it. The Great Firewall of China? They don't care. Most never venture outside of it. Even those here in the US spend most of their time visiting the BBS inside the firewall, like sina.com.cn and sofu.com.

China ceased to be a communist economy sometime in the late 80s or early 90s, no doubt ushered in by Deng Xiaoping's statement, "To be rich is glorious." A look around Bejing today shows a shining example of Maoist communism. Privately owned buisness. A rapidly growing middle class hungry for luxury goods. A wealthy investor class. Mao "Great Leap Forward" Tse-tung would be proud. But don't take my word for it, you can read about it here, or better yet hear it from the Chinese yourself. Just talk to any recent Chinese immigrant, they'll tell you all about it. They're quite proud of the rapid changes in China.

Is China communist? Only nominally. Is it totalitarian? Oh yeah. It's that. But it's got more in common with a kleptocracy than Maoist China.

Cuba's economy went in the tank after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath, the shadow U.S. dollar economy became so large, that Fidel had to no choice but to recognize it. It's now a major Caribbean tourist desintation for Canada and Europe. It's a country where restaurants deal only in dollars and have secret back rooms that contain of all things, extra seating, so that they can get around the legal limits on the maxium occupancy of the dollar resturants in order to make more money.

Cuba is more communist than China, and Cuba certainly isn't as well off as China. In fact it's pretty piss poor, but then again it does have the crippling sanctions imposed on it by the United States in order to show Miami that we're tough on communism. Communism is bad and must be defeated. That's why China is a most-favored-nation trading partner.

You're refering to the North Korea, where the people starve because Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, in an effort to prop up his own financial status, has ordered the collective to stop growing rice and instead grow poppies for heroin production, right? Yes. Yes. Truly a vibrant economy, especially in the markets that sell "pork." That why they have pillboxes lining the Yalu river to shoot anyone crossing into China. Truly a beacon for communism the world over.

Even Vietnam is undergoing market reforms.

I disagree that the ACE "did their job well." Several articles -- Google gives me this one and this one -- are pointing out that the construction of the levees directly caused wetland loss, which made New Orleans more vulnerable to big storms. So if the ACE's job was to build levees, then I guess they did good. But if their job was to protect New Orleans, I'd say they did more harm than good.

In St Louis county they reinforced the Monarch Levee and built a 2 mile long stripmall (at the time it was the world's longest stripmall). Yeah St Louis!

Ah, it wasn't CBC, it was American Public Media, Future Tense. http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense

More current:
Hour 25 has interviews with SF authors, all downloadable as MP3.
Prairie Home Companion, in Real format.

Sera

Sera

Sera

Can you see Walmart quitting China? I think not.

In addition to the news, classical, and local/indie/rock flavors of the MPR, we have a very good jazz station , the U of M's station , and a terrific community station .

The great thing about these choices is that they're all non-commercial (in both senses of the word). Depending on my mood, I can almost always find something worth listening to on one of them.

Which is a really good thing. I've developed such a distaste for obnoxious advertising that I simply cannot listen to commercial radio anymore. (No, I don't watch much TV, either.)

Of course, as I've just shown, the Miracle of the Internet allows you to hear these stations anywhere you're connected, not just in the Twin Cities. But for those of us who live here, it's nice to be able to tune in with any radio when you're offline.

I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.

Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.

I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).

Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.

Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball ;-)

Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a

I'm not sure if the trend is continuing, but one thing that has been noted in the past several years is that listenership to public radio has been booming. The decline in commercial radio listeners is probably more than 4%, though I couldn't say how much more. When you see that many commercial music stations only have 300 songs in their playlists but run more than 20 minutes of ads each hour (especially during drivetime), it's hard to be surprised that people are looking elsewhere.

Some people have already mentioned "Jack FM" and other similar formats. "Like an iPod on shuffle" they say. Sure, they bump up the playlist to 1200 songs instead of 300, but you're still stuck in the '80s for the most part. They completely do away with DJs for many of these stations, so if there's a new song, you'll never know who sings it. It's not conducive to learning about new music.

I like to hear new music. All the time. Not just one or two new songs dribbled in each week. Most radio companies seem to believe that very few people are interested in hearing new music nearly as much as I am. Maybe that's true, but I can't say for certain. Apparently at least 50 million people think that they aren't getting enough stuff over-the-air (though obviously some folks are listening to talk, or are using the cleaner online stream rather than a fuzzy AM/FM signal).

Here in the Twin Cities, people had been getting fed up with radio. You might remember that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis even did a "Radio Re-Volt" last year. Sure, there have been a handful of livable or even excellent options in the dozens of stations in the area. The top two cited were usually KFAI and 770 Radio K. Both had problems, though, primarily with weak signals. KFAI adds up to about 250 watts. Radio K is 5 kW, but on AM, and only during the daytime. They both stream online, which mitigates the problem a bit, but you can't trail an Ethernet cable along as you drive in your car.

Minnesota Public Radio launched a new 'eclectic' music service called "The Current" on KCMP 89.3 FM back in January on a big 100 kW transmitter they'd bought a few months earlier for $10 million. Most of my friends listen to it (and even support it), so I think it has a good chance of surviving. No, I don't like all of the songs they play, quality varies from DJ to DJ, the DJs sometimes make mistakes, and CDs sometimes skip. But they actually have DJs, CDs, and even vinyl, and hope to eventually build a library of 50,000 albums. They have a hefty concert calendar and bring musicians in for very-nearly-live performances every day or so. Local music is in frequent rotation, and the DJs have the freedom to go talking about all sorts of random things. Yeah, there are some people who hate it (and The Morning Show is still an oddball ;-)

Online streaming provides a bunch of great options, but it's nice to have something with a local flavor that you can talk to your friends about, and have them know about it and understand. While there are some big notable exceptions, terrestrial radio is meant to be a community affair (well, here in the U.S. where there aren't big national networks). XM can't have that, and it's fairly rare for streaming audio. Admittedly, MPR is a pretty big beast itself and has taken over a

1. No commercials.
2. Clear signal (I haven't tried it but it should be a nice signal...someone with experience chime in)
3. No commercials.
4. More targeted programming.
5. No commercials.
6. Wider Selection.
7. NO FREAKIN COMMERCIALS

Disadvantages:
1. You gotta pay
2. No local news and info
3. Pay to listen.
4. Needs special equipment.
5. You gots ta pay!

Erm, maybe these HTML links to the Marketplace site/story wont be so fscked...

The $200 PC

You can also stream the show (sorry, appears to be Real).

Erm, maybe these HTML links to the Marketplace site/story wont be so fscked...

The $200 PC

You can also stream the show (sorry, appears to be Real).

This unit was also featured on NPR's Marketplace last night. One of the features that they touted in the interview was the units very low power consumption. It's designed to be run off batteries or unreliable (which I assume means varying voltage) power sources. As they mentioned, this will help many more third-world villages have computer access. Remember even at $200 it's still a substantial amount of a year's salary.

See http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/05/1 0/PM200505102.html for more details

Did you mean marketplace.publicradio.org?

The Marketplace has a story online about this pc.

The Marketplace has a story online about this pc.

My philosophy professor said the best time to teach philosophy is to grade school kids when they are rational and constantly asking "why?" But, how many grade school teachers are prepared to take on this task? How many high school teachers? They do more baby sitting now than teaching. Being critical is too difficult. Fortunately there is college where you can study science and philosophy. But, how many people are brave enough to suffer through a Philosophy of Religion class... reading Anselm, Kant, Augustine, etc? The Bible, Koran, Torah has all the answers, right? Here's a link to a good show on religion... http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/

Here's another one that should be interesting to the Slashdot crowd. NPR's Marketplace ran this story yesterday afternoon:

We're about to step back into a time before PDA's and laptops, to an age when the word 'computer' meant something entirely different. No, we're not talking about primitive Commodore desktops. Or even those old vacuum-tubed Univacs that would fill up whole rooms. We're going back to a period nearly everyone seems to have forgotten. A time when computers were - human. David Grier teaches technology policy at George Washington University. He's now written the first in-depth account of a career that no longer exists. Grier describes 'human computers' as people who did the blue collar work of the mind.

...it's a stupid name that's already been taken: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/services/th ecurrent/

Good radio station though. Maybe I should warn them that I slashdotted the site with their web feed...

A few other NPR shows:

Science Friday

Speaking of Faith

To the Best of Our Knowledge

The World

And the most popular hour on public radio:
Car Talk

The Barron retrospective was very good.

There is a wealth of information available on the web now. The previously mentioned Obsolete site has a good history of electronic music instruments, and there are several classic synthesizer sites for gear freaks.

Ohm - The Gurus of Electronic music collects early electronic music recordings, including the Barrons in a three-cd set. This is as good an introduction to early electronic music as you'll find. It's jarring, though, if your only exposure has been to techno and trance!

Synthtopia has a directory of electronic music resources that is worth checking out. The site also has interviews with some interesting electronic musicians. Check out the Kompressor interview!

Electro-music is an active community of people interested in more experimental electronic music. Lots of discussion of computers and programming within the world of music.

American Mavericks is a collection of interesting PBS shows on modern classical music, and it has some good shows on electronic music.

No Place To Hide

It was truely disturbing. Now that we're permanently at war with the Forces Of Evil (terrorists, for now) people should get used to not having any privacy. Sigh.

"I don't see why I should fork out a monthly subscription fee, just because standard radio wasn't able to keep up decent enough quality programming? It's like I'm paying for their mistakes.... I'd much rather put together my own music mixes on CD, take my iPod with me in the car, or whatever - and be my own D.J."

I guess the validity of that sort of thing depends on if you're a good DJ or not. I think I manage to put together a pretty good mix CD now and again, but I still need to hear new music, or my stuff starts to sound stale to me.

Commercial FM is about what other people want you to listen to. That's what commercials are. It's hardly suprising that the songs would be the same way. I don't think that commercial FM will ever again (if it ever was in the past) be about putting the listening desires of the audience above the desires of the paying record companies. It's all about where the money comes from.

If satelite can be about good music for people that want to hear it rather than about corporate rock for people that want to sell it, then good for them. And for their listeners.

Another stab at the "pay a little for good music instead of getting crap for free" is Minnesota Public Radio's 89.3 The Current. Streaming available. It's brand new, so they're still finding their voice a bit - they'll take email suggestions. Have a listen, it's not corporate.

I should also have included some relevant links to Internet based news sources bookmarked in Safari:

Slashdot of course.
CNN of course.
NYTimes for the writing and quality of reporting.
BBC for the big mainstream non American news perspective.
Kevin Sites for on the ground reporting in Iraq.
Dan Gillmor for news grassroots news.
CBS for financial info.
CNET for tech news.
Global Security for political defense news.
Google for a good news accumulator.
Cryptome because John manages to pull some pretty damned interesting articles out.
NPR of course. Don't forget to donate.
Reuters because they have the news.
Washington Post for beltway news.
Wall St. Journal for more financial news.
NPR Marketplace for more financial news.
CBS for mainstream US news.
Technocrat for real science oriented geek news, like Slashdot only with less noise.
Oh, yeah and
Macsurfer for a Macintosh community oriented news accumulator.

No, the media jackals are -- what I'm saying there -- really, the book -- I take shots at politics. I take shots at the media. But ultimately, the book is taking a shot at us, the American public, because we are getting what we are asking for. We are not holding politicians accountable. We are not holding the media accountable.

- Jesse Ventura, Sept 2000, Larry King interview (emphasis added)

October 2000 - Ventura tells radio listeners he drank gin shots with President Clinton at the White House. White House unamused. Ventura says he was joking.

January 2001 - Ventura toys with run for president. Las Vegas odds makers give him respectable 20-1 shot. Ventura doesn't run. He now says he fanned flames for fun.

February 2001 - Reporters rebel at Ventura's plan to make them wear credentials designating them an "Official Jackal." Ventura backs off the plan.

April 2001 - While lashing out at a columnist critical of his natural resources policies, Ventura says "Until you've hunted man, you haven't hunted yet."

May 2002 - The legislative session ends on a low note for Ventura, whose plan for fixing a deficit was ignored. Budget bills were passed over his vetoes. He went fishing while legislators balanced the budget, and golfing as they trudged through the last day of session.

June 2002 - Ventura lashes out at the media over reports that his 22-year-old son, Tyrel, used the governor's mansion as a party pad. A day after the story broke, Ventura announced he wouldn't seek re-election. He said his heart was no longer in the job but also criticized the media for invading his family's privacy.

- Milestones in Ventura administration

Despite the projection by conservatives that the media is liberal, the purpose of the media seems to be more of conserving the status quo, especially with the way mainstream media outlets are owned by a few corporations. OTOH, if blogs want to be more of a legitimate source, then it must take constructive criticism and improve. A story on MarketPlace suggests a candidate may emerge from the internet realm. In order for something like this to happen, bloggers must improve and accept criticism.

"Everyone having guns is NOT a feeling of security" Why not? Check this out. Citizens carrying guns could have saved a lot of lives at that massacre. In fact, this incident helped Texas pass a law allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons. "You people are the only place on the planet where citizens are allowed to have guns." Wrong. Many countries, such as Israel and Italy, allow citizens to own and carry concealed weapons.

In the case of Carnahan's crash it was attributed to a mysterious failure of a single instrument coupled with less than ideal flight conditions, night and marginal weather.

"Also called the artificial horizon, the attitude indicator reports a plane's position in the air, telling whether a plane is banking and whether the nose is high or low. NTSB investigators concluded that the primary attitude indicator "was not displaying properly at the time of impact," although they could not determine what caused the malfunction."

The crash of JFK Jr's plane was disturbingly similar.

Here is an excellent read on the Wellstone crash. One leading suspect was disruption of the VOR which is a radio beacon. They crashed during an approach in marginal weather and again disruption of the instruments or the landing beacon could easily have produced the crash.

If you care about your vote, write a complaint to letters@marketplace.org.

If you care about your vote, write a complaint to letters@marketplace.org.

The Prairie Home Companion is a hoot to listen to, and they have great archives.

Regarding the free market and public radio, one of the best business news shows on radio is Marketplace from MPR/PRI. I listen to it every day.

One problem I've heard about is collusion. You go to a casino or a card club and play for money with people you don't know, and you don't realize that two of them are actually in it together. For instance, they'll have a secret signal so that one knows to drop out when the other is bluffing. Seems like it could be equally bad online.

here's (bottom of page) an interview with Lamo I heard on Marketplace a couple days ago. It's really pretty good, he also rags on the computer security industry. Not entirely justified, but he makes some valid points.

Except for this one he did for NPR's Marketplace that aired Wednesday.

Please call or e-mail Minnesota Public Radio, and let them know why you think an open format should be used for streaming content. Here's some reasons I can think of:

* It's pulbic radio, it's funded by taxpayers and supporters, so it's a public resource. All the content should be freely available using open standards

* Open standards like MP3 are supported by the most applications

* Open standards like MP3 are best supported across platforms

* Free software can be used to implement streaming

* They will support the good will of the technically astute in their audience, who are also a source of funding

* Any other good ideas? Here's the contact info, from their web site:

EMAIL
mail@mpr.org

TELEPHONE
General Inquiries: 651-290-1212 or 800-228-7123
An MPR Member/Listener Services associate will answer your call between 8:30 am and 5 pm CT Monday-Friday. Beyond those hours, you may leave a message and your call will be returned within two business days.

MPR Newsroom line: 651-290-1424
News releases may be faxed to the newsroom at 651-290-1295. News tips may be e-mailed to newsroom@mpr.org. E-mail addresses for individual reporters may be found on the newsroom look-up page.

Midmorning or Midday call-in shows: 651-227-6000 or 800-242-2828
We are not able to include emails to shows in progress. If you would like to leave comments for Midmorning, call 651-290-1171.

MAIL
MPR Member/Listener Services
45 East Seventh Street
Saint Paul, MN USA 55101

MEDIA INQUIRIES
Andrea Matthews, 651-290-1303 or amatthews@mpr.org
Suzanne Perry, 651-290-1276 or sperry@mpr.org

LS

Although I understand the BBC had strong reasons to twist Real's arm in negotiations, I don't understand why MPR cannot wrangle something along the lines of BBC's relation to Real?

Oh, wait. MPR pretty much does ...

MPR Homepage > How To Listen > You can manually download the newest version here.

Am I missing something?

(Real seems to provoke the same thread topics on /. regardless of story context, it seems. This post is no different.)

Although I understand the BBC had strong reasons to twist Real's arm in negotiations, I don't understand why MPR cannot wrangle something along the lines of BBC's relation to Real?

Oh, wait. MPR pretty much does ...

MPR Homepage > How To Listen > You can manually download the newest version here.

Am I missing something?

(Real seems to provoke the same thread topics on /. regardless of story context, it seems. This post is no different.)

More coverage (copied from USF site):
NY Times,
C|Net,
San Jose Business Journal,
NPR,
UK PC Pro
USF News

The 411 on Bill Jankow