Yes, the Rhodes is really an "electric piano" in the way that a Fender Telecaster is an Electric Guitar. they convert physical vibration to electrical signal using a magnetic pickup. And the big driver of recreating real instruments is cost, space saving, and portability. Because a Hammond B3 organ is only "portable" in comparison to a pipe organ, and a Rhodes is lighter and smaller than a piano, but it's still heavy as hell.
Too true, the recording industry has been eating it's own since the beginning. Sure, it gives the opportunity to make a tiny fraction of musicians well-off, but where there used to be a string quartet or a piano in a nice resturaunt there is a stereo. Dance clubs almost universally have a DJ, and you may be able to argue that the DJ is a sort of musician in his own right, he is nothing without the original artists that recorded the songs he will sample or the breaks he will play over. The bars that used to have bands playing on weekends now mostly have Karaoke. It's becoming more and more difficult for young musicians to find places to get the experience that only playing live will give you. Not only that people don't get exposed to good live music as much anymore, which is a shame, because until you have seen a *really* good live performance you really have no concept of what music is really about. It's like thinking you know how good sex is just because you've had a bunch of dates with Rosy.
In general technology keeps improving, but it isn't really improving music, it's making some aspects of a musician's life easier, for instance you can get decent gear that is much lighter now, but most of that gear is trying to replicate the sound of gear that is 40-50 years old. Keyboards have gotten closer to being able to replicate the sound of say a grand piano, or a Hammond organ, or a Fender Rhodes, but once you have been around the real thing, you know that closer is still not very close. Electronic Drums still sound like caricatures of real drums, they are ok for applications where you want that sound, and they are easier to transport and control levels in relation to other instruments in small venues, but I will take a skilled drummer with good dynamics over a set of electric drums any day of the week.
Realizing that China is *already* a "Communist Country", a hopeless situation for the general populations of other countries has led to problems for the U.S. over and over again. Look at the rise of Nazism after the crushing reparations of WWI and the great depression. Or the Communist Revolution in Russia. Everything and everyone is connected more closely than they may seem, and Isolationism isn't really a viable foreign policy for the US.
Mark Helprin has written some of my favorite books. Both "A Winter's Tale" and "A Soldier of the Great War" are some of the best novels IMHO written in the last century. Unfortunately his politics do not in any way align with my own.
I think I understand what you are saying, but, my point is that although the internet and computers are everywhere it wouldn't be unreasonable for a person to say, "that looks interesting, but there are many other things that are more interesting to me, or there are other things that I would be better served by learning about, if the need arises for me to know more about computers, I will learn about them then."
I see your point, but perhaps its not a lack of curiosity, but a matter of time. He might feel that his time is better spent than learning about computers, and perhaps justifiably so. If he needs to have a cursory knowledge about every possible technology that comes in front of his bench, he would nearly need to spend the rest of his life in school. Medecine, Computers, the Automotive Industry, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, just to name a few, and that is in addition to whatever changes the legal world may be undergoing. Computers do amazing, powerful things but they are just another tool, and it seems to me that what a person has or hasnt done, and what the intent of doing so was is going to be more important to a judge than the tool they used to do it with.
The article is pretty light on details, but if they are being tried for disseminating hate speech, does it really matter if they used a website, or sent out a newsletter with photocopies? I suppose that there is a matter of scale, but that could simply be addressed by "Your Honor, we have have these logs that show that X number of people visited the site and read the material"
To not understand the concept of a website in 2007 is, to my mind, reason enough to force a judge's retirement. Being that out of touch with modern life simply can't be conducive to making good justice. I don't agree, I think that it shows a lot of wisdom for him to have made it known that he didn't understand something about the methods used to commit the alleged crime. The technology in this trial is really beside the point anyways outside of the evidence that it provides to either prove guilt or not. If the judge can be given enough of an understanding to make a ruling based on the evidence that is all the understanding he needs.
How is an American worker supposed to compete with the fact that it simply costs more to live here than it does in many other places in the world? Maybe *I* would be fine with the same salary that someone in the 3rd world takes home, but my landlady is going to be pissed when I can't pay the rent. I realize that in the long term, competition is better for everyone, we raise the standard of living in the rest of the world, they have to be paid more, we become are better able to compete again, blah blah blah. The problem is that that all takes time, decades in fact. Which blows if someone is going to have to spend 1/2 of their entire career starting out half as competitive as someone in a 3rd world country simply because of the cost of living there.
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Yes, the Rhodes is really an "electric piano" in the way that a Fender Telecaster is an Electric Guitar. they convert physical vibration to electrical signal using a magnetic pickup. And the big driver of recreating real instruments is cost, space saving, and portability. Because a Hammond B3 organ is only "portable" in comparison to a pipe organ, and a Rhodes is lighter and smaller than a piano, but it's still heavy as hell.
Too true, the recording industry has been eating it's own since the beginning. Sure, it gives the opportunity to make a tiny fraction of musicians well-off, but where there used to be a string quartet or a piano in a nice resturaunt there is a stereo. Dance clubs almost universally have a DJ, and you may be able to argue that the DJ is a sort of musician in his own right, he is nothing without the original artists that recorded the songs he will sample or the breaks he will play over. The bars that used to have bands playing on weekends now mostly have Karaoke. It's becoming more and more difficult for young musicians to find places to get the experience that only playing live will give you. Not only that people don't get exposed to good live music as much anymore, which is a shame, because until you have seen a *really* good live performance you really have no concept of what music is really about. It's like thinking you know how good sex is just because you've had a bunch of dates with Rosy. In general technology keeps improving, but it isn't really improving music, it's making some aspects of a musician's life easier, for instance you can get decent gear that is much lighter now, but most of that gear is trying to replicate the sound of gear that is 40-50 years old. Keyboards have gotten closer to being able to replicate the sound of say a grand piano, or a Hammond organ, or a Fender Rhodes, but once you have been around the real thing, you know that closer is still not very close. Electronic Drums still sound like caricatures of real drums, they are ok for applications where you want that sound, and they are easier to transport and control levels in relation to other instruments in small venues, but I will take a skilled drummer with good dynamics over a set of electric drums any day of the week.
Realizing that China is *already* a "Communist Country", a hopeless situation for the general populations of other countries has led to problems for the U.S. over and over again. Look at the rise of Nazism after the crushing reparations of WWI and the great depression. Or the Communist Revolution in Russia. Everything and everyone is connected more closely than they may seem, and Isolationism isn't really a viable foreign policy for the US.
Mark Helprin has written some of my favorite books. Both "A Winter's Tale" and "A Soldier of the Great War" are some of the best novels IMHO written in the last century. Unfortunately his politics do not in any way align with my own.
I think I understand what you are saying, but, my point is that although the internet and computers are everywhere it wouldn't be unreasonable for a person to say, "that looks interesting, but there are many other things that are more interesting to me, or there are other things that I would be better served by learning about, if the need arises for me to know more about computers, I will learn about them then."
I see your point, but perhaps its not a lack of curiosity, but a matter of time. He might feel that his time is better spent than learning about computers, and perhaps justifiably so. If he needs to have a cursory knowledge about every possible technology that comes in front of his bench, he would nearly need to spend the rest of his life in school. Medecine, Computers, the Automotive Industry, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, just to name a few, and that is in addition to whatever changes the legal world may be undergoing. Computers do amazing, powerful things but they are just another tool, and it seems to me that what a person has or hasnt done, and what the intent of doing so was is going to be more important to a judge than the tool they used to do it with. The article is pretty light on details, but if they are being tried for disseminating hate speech, does it really matter if they used a website, or sent out a newsletter with photocopies? I suppose that there is a matter of scale, but that could simply be addressed by "Your Honor, we have have these logs that show that X number of people visited the site and read the material"
How is an American worker supposed to compete with the fact that it simply costs more to live here than it does in many other places in the world? Maybe *I* would be fine with the same salary that someone in the 3rd world takes home, but my landlady is going to be pissed when I can't pay the rent. I realize that in the long term, competition is better for everyone, we raise the standard of living in the rest of the world, they have to be paid more, we become are better able to compete again, blah blah blah. The problem is that that all takes time, decades in fact. Which blows if someone is going to have to spend 1/2 of their entire career starting out half as competitive as someone in a 3rd world country simply because of the cost of living there.