I actually tend to lean more to the right than otherwise, but it seems lately I've had too many functioning brain cells for the rest of the party to appeal to me.
The credibility of the collusion allegations hasn't really changed. There have been ongoing developments as more Russian operations have been uncovered, but there has never been much direct evidence of Trump's involvement. However, once Comey was fired and Trump started applying pressure to end the investigation prematurely, the question of obstruction became relevant, and it's been reinforced by his continual comments slandering the investigators. The concern hasn't so much "pivoted" as it's been overwhelmed by a much more serious allegation. If the obstruction allegation bears fruit, it's shown that Trump isn't just the hapless benefactor of a crime, but rather he's actively and intentionally breaking the law.
So - here's the deal:
Yes, Trump is the president. He will remain the president until he leaves office, regardless of how that happens, and he'll be succeeded by either Pence or a newly-elected candidate. Until then, he has sworn to execute the Office of President, which means he is expected to follow the nation's laws. So long as he does that, I have no objection to him being the president. I disagree with most of his opinions, but I don't object to him holding the office.
I've regretted that sentence since writing it, so I'll take this opportunity to rephrase:
The Trump campaign (and administration afterward) has since countered that there's nothing to see, no undue outside influence, and no willing participation from his campaign. He's also advocated shutting the whole investigation down, to the extent of firing people involved in the investigation.
I agree that Trump's campaign is probably correct in that they didn't knowingly seek to break any laws during the campaign. I think that after his inauguration, though, Trump's meddling probably is obstruction, though I'm not sure there's enough evidence for an indictment against him. I expect there's also a lot of negligence involved, some criminal, but most of those accusations will go away to gain cooperation during the investigation.
I'd argue that ultimately, the charges and accusations don't matter nearly as much as just letting the investigation run its course. Our justice system, including the FBI, is founded on the belief that the written law is more important than any person or organization. Since the written law says that the FBI will investigate such matters, that's what they must do, regardless of the outcome. To do otherwise is literally un-American.
However, Trump has built his campaign and administration around an image of disrupting norms and ignoring processes he didn't like. Even if he is correct about the facts of Russian collusion (or absence thereof), he's still butting heads with the written law of the land, and it will fall to the other two branches of government to decide whether they'll allow it or not.
Now, that may be the moral obligation, but the legal concept is much more difficult to define.
How dangerous is dangerous enough to warrant a recall? Sure, this may leak some data, but now that the vulnerabilities are known, they can be mitigated... or do we also claim that software vendors who don't implement mitigations are making a "dangerous" product?
Who's responsible for the recall? I've rarely purchased directly from Intel. More often, I buy CPU/motherboard combos from vendors. Are they going to support the recall? My mother isn't qualified to take apart her computer and replace the chip, so who's paying for the tech to come out and do it?
Just like we ticket every driver who's going over the speed limit.
Yes, it's illegal. No, it's usually not worth the effort to pursue, unless you do something really bad, like cause a collision or act knowingly on behalf of a foreign government intelligence agency.
In this indictment, yes. The events detailed here did not include willing participation by Trump's campaign. Unfortunately for Trump, there are some crimes that don't require knowledge to be committed... For example, being negligent in one's duty to investigate a financial source can be a crime.
As has been the case for a while, the bigger concern is Trump's behavior after the investigation started. If he's shown to have been actively working to obstruct the investigation, that could be what gets him.
Cynic that I am, that's really what I expect is the case... Trump tried to run an honest campaign, but he's so easily manipulated and so quick to overreact that he ends up causing his own downfall, without any direct foreign involvement.
You're missing the point, and veering rather far from reality, as well.
The original concern (I won't even say it was a "claim") was that Russians may have influenced the election process. That doesn't invalidate the result, and nobody credible has claimed that it would.
The Trump campaign has since then countered that there's nothing to see, never any outside influence, and the whole investigation should be shut down.
With these indictments, there is now an official accusation, backed by a nice pile of evidence, that there was in fact Russian interference. That's it. No, it doesn't indicate on its own that Trump knew, or his campaign officials knew. Those questions are still open. What has been resolved at this point is the question of whether something illegal happened (yes, it did), and whether there was foreign involvement (yes, there was).
This could be the end of the indictments. If Trump's campaign was as honest as he claims, it will be. However, those open questions still need to be answered, which means the investigation needs to keep going. By making statements opposing the investigative process, Trump has made it worse for himself and his administration, because now the investigation needs to answer the question of whether anyone is trying to obstruct justice.
This has nothing to do with whether Americans are unfit to vote. That's always been a risk, echoed in Benjamin Franklin's famous response when asked what kind of government we would have: "A republic, if you can keep it." It has always been known that people are subject to manipulation, and that's why interfering in the election carries severe consequences. If the indicted Russians ever find themselves on American soil, they'll have a chance to find out exactly how harsh those punishments can be.
I'm fine with passing ownership of local assets to local jurisdiction... it's the option of private purchase that worries me, combined with expecting states to pay 4:1 to match what the federal side "invests".
I'm cynical enough to expect that an asset will start to go to a state, and as they start estimating the transfer costs, the state realizes they can't afford to buy it... but they've already paid for a lot of the estimation work, and probably even started preparing to move. Then a private enterprise comes in and "helps" the state by buying the asset instead, probably in exchange for extremely low taxes. It's spun as a winning move all around: The federal government reduced its holdings, the state got out of a deal it couldn't afford, and the private company is saving or creating jobs by investing in the local infrastructure.
That spin lasts just long enough for the current politicians to leave office, by which time the federal government has lost control of the assets it built, the state is still broke, and the private company is pulling in all the revenue from the facility. Once the contract obligations expire, the private company can then shut down and sell off the government-built assets in a liquidation.
The scenario is a standard corporate raid with asset stripping, but with the government as the target.
In other words, government agencies are now expected to put a dollar value on their historic icons, landmark infrastructure, and carefully-controlled limited-development areas, and sell them to the highest bidders, then turn around and give that money to the federal government to cover tax cuts for the companies who just bought our society.
On the design end, yes, those all come into play, and I appreciate your efforts, but on the listening side, very little of that matters.
To start, let's assume we're not building our own enclosures. Frankly, all prebuilt consumer gear is already engineered by folks like you to meet a basic level of quality, or it never makes it to market. These days, even the cheap $20 speaker sets have sufficient engineering to pass muster.
Once assembled, the biggest influence on the system's overall sound is indeed the EQ. To use my aforementioned test, I'll take the Star Wars theme, play it loud through a speaker, and listen for the distortion. If it rattles and sounds like rhinoceros with a bad case of gas, the speaker isn't worth the time to tweak further, regardless of the price tag. Pack it up and RMA. If the chimes are missing or distorted into a buzz, same thing. From a consumer standpoint, it's not worth measuring the THD across the spectrum or analyzing the precise response. While testing, I'll walk to the far end of the coverage area, and make sure the system is loud enough (without unreasonable compression or distortion) to cover my needs.
If a system passes such basic tests, it's at least trying to be a quality product, and I can safely assume that my music will sound just fine through it. Then I can put in the time with an EQ to fix the issues of the room and speakers. I keep a nice playlist of other clips that I'm familiar with to test and adjust as needed. After that small amount of work, it's certainly good enough for normal purposes. A note might be a bit off, or maybe a drum solo isn't quite as punchy as it would be on another system, but that's not going to diminish my experience significantly, nor that of the vast majority of listeners.
To abuse analogy, I'm not suggesting that all grape juice is fine wine. I'm suggesting that if a $5 bottle of port tastes good, drink it, and don't worry about whether its notes are nutty or fruity.
I used to be a sound tech. I've tested more speakers than I care to count, and set up enough audio rigs that I can typically pinpoint sound quality problems in a few seconds with the right test clips.
Pro tip: It's almost never the speakers' problem.
I know it annoys the "audiophile" crowd, but a speaker is, for the most part, just a speaker. The response curve doesn't matter much, if you can equalize it to suit your taste. Yes, I said that evil nasty word: taste. No, you're not usually going to get objective measurements of a "good" or "bad" speaker that are worth anything*, because listening to sound, especially music, is a heavily subjective experience.
If I'm setting up a sound system for a classical piano concert, the whole system is configured for that goal... There is still reinforcement, but it's only to boost what's naturally echoed by the room, not to push anything unnaturally. For a rock concert, I usually arrange the sound differently, boosting instruments to match the band's desired sound profile. Generally, my best advice is to figure out what kind of mood the music is supposed to inspire, and adjust to fit that.
If the HomePod includes an automatic equalizer, that's great, but I'd just as soon spend 15 minutes doing proper configuration on my own. Frankly, a flat response sounds boring. I prefer a thumping (but not rumbling) bass, with clear vocals. In other words, I like a fairly deep low-end disco scoop. Is the HomePod for me? Eh, perhaps not, unless I can tweak it or pull the output to my own system. After all, I'm the one listening to the music, so I should enjoy it, no?
* There are actually bad systems out there, but (barring mechanical failure) they're usually because somebody put too much work into fine-tuning to meet a particular response curve spec, rather than making things that sound good. Such systems can be identified (and rejected) in about 30 seconds by playing the Star Wars main theme.
Private corporations aren't interested much in scientific research, they're interested in return-on-investment, and at the moment anything that isn't a productive satellite being launched into LEO isn't profitable.
There's a fine detail that I'd like to add. It isn't so much "return on investment" as it is "expected return on investment". Rather than knowing (within statistical likelihood) the return for a given investment in an industry, the notion of industrialized spaceflight is still extremely risky, so all calculations of that ROI necessarily must include the risk of the whole thing exploding on the launchpad.
We can't really mine asteroids, because there's still a good chance that the investment cost of the mission will double, making the whole mission unprofitable. We can't go space-prospecting, because we can only fly by at most one or two targets per successful launch. We can't start an interplanetary imports business, because there's no colony to buy the imported goods.
That's how SpaceX may end up opening new markets for commercial spaceflight. Once the reliability and cost of space travel drops, it opens up a new frontier for new enterprises, hopefully making the whole process safe enough that the investment costs can be reasonable estimated.
It's a trade secret, or it contains third-party licensed specs, or it has a few security flaws... or there's just a slim chance of any of those, so the whole proposal requires review by at least 15 engineers and a small army of lawyers, plus all the senior management.
I'm as much a fan of Linux as the next guy, but even discussing something outside the original scope is an unexpected cost. At least they were open about that and provided a response.
I have often suggested treating Wikipedia as you would an interview with an expert in the field.
It will get the broad strokes correct, and it will give you the jargon and key concepts to go research on your own, but it cannot be considered infallible or accurate of its own accord. It has pet theories and political bias. It has some gaping holes in its knowledge that aren't obvious to newcomers. It will even contradict itself, and it would be considered terribly impolite to draw attention to such problems.
If that were the case, expect an SEC investigation next month.
Realistically, the investment branches of such firms are kept completely separate from the advisory branches, but they both work off of the same data from the analysis branches. If indeed Goldman were shorting something they advised against buying, the two actions would have come from separate interpretations of the market analysis, and would not come from knowledge of what the other branch was doing. As I understand, that would still be perfectly legal, as any other investor could see the same data, perform the same analysis, and also choose to short.
For your consideration, I submit the following (hopefully sarcastic) theory:
By enacting the most ridiculous federal policies while projecting a personality of being complete and utter assholes, Trump's administration is opening the political path for states to invoke their own contrary policies while their governors are hailed as heroes, thus ultimately fulfilling the Republican stated goal of empowering states.
The only question, then: Is Trump intelligent and self-aware enough to pull off such a plan?
Personally, I log in to Facebook about once a year or so. I get the emails of things other folks are doing, and a few asking me nicely to return, but nothing that looks like phishing.
Yes, the test needs mass. Other folks would be quite happy to use a block of concrete, or sandbags, or even a weighted mock-up of their intended load... but Musk uses a sports car, and gets more headlines and more front-page pictures. Those are what he'll be remembered for.
If it's in the contract now, it becomes much more difficult to take it out later. In this round, the argument can be framed as "the union is demanding new protection", but if it's in there for one cycle, the next round will be "the company wants to take away this existing protection".
More likely, it'll be the coordinators who (from a central location) make sure the automated fleets are available where they're needed, when they're needed, and in good repair to function as needed.
With automated transport, the basic challenge of logistics changes from having transportation at a given place to having a large enough pool of transportation in a given area to provide a level of service. Computing services went through the same transition over the last decade, as we've moved from having colocated dedicated servers to cloud-hosted virtualized data centers. The same ops engineers who used to manage racks of servers for one company are now managing racks of servers for the cloud provider, just using different tools and being much more efficient.
In the end, this higher efficiency has led to a huge boom in demand for hosting services, in turn raising the demand for computing infrastructure. It's a perfect example of the old adage "if you build it, they will come". I expect that with automated transport, we'll start seeing huge fleets of delivery vehicles roaming the streets - even to the scale of having multiple delivery vehicles on the same street at the same time - and the workforce that used to drive will then move towards maintaining and managing the vast fleet.
I expect he'll ultimately be remembered for taking generally-dismissed technologies, building PR campaigns styled after P.T. Barnum, and creating reasonably-successful companies using excitement to offset the extremely-high risk that led to the technologies being rejected the first time around.
Musk's PR stunts are exactly that. There is little scientific value (besides a dead-weight test) in launching a car into orbit... but by doing so, he can inspire another round of news stories and keep his name in front of the upcoming generation of engineers. Similarly, of course he's going to sell branded flamethrowers, because every reckless idiot (myself included) is going to think "Gee, I could probably spare $600 for that" and start clearing space in the living room next to the life-size Boba Fett statue. It'll be a great conversation piece, and a piece of history if/when the tunnels become successful.
I'm not going to opine on whether showmanship is a good or bad thing for investment purposes, but I am happy to see the public eye turning toward the real challenges to progress. Yes, the rockets blow up, the permits are a hassle, and building new manufacturing factories requires obscene amounts of money... but those problems are not insurmountable, with enough persistence (and funding). Don't worry about how hard your math homework seems, little Timmy... just give it another try, like your hero Elon Musk!
The last thing nVidia wants is a reputation as being unobtainable, the way most folks looking for a new family car don't even consider a Ferrari or Rolls Royce. Currently they enjoy being the default choice for new builds, and have made their business plans from such a position, so a change to gamers' buying habits would have a huge impact for them.
Of course, nVidia does have other offerings more suitable for the mining crowd, and I expect we'll see more products aimed that way soon. The current currencies may be investment bubbles, but the concepts requiring huge amounts of GPGPU will be present for years to come. It makes sense for nVidia to steer the market into a nice segregation.
Taking advantage of a current windfall might make for nice short-term profits, but it comes at the cost of longer-term success. I, for one, am quite happy to see nVidia holding steady.
At the risk of sounding like I'm dodging the issue, I'll say that none of that matters.
To be clear, I think your analysis is certainly accurate, but the question is still open whether self-centered music is "good" or "bad". That question has to be answered before we can say that today's music is "better" or "worse" than previous music.
In short, music is still art, even if it's mass-produced formulaic noisy art, and the paper author is trying to use statistics to prove that this new art is worse than that old art. It's no different than an impressionist complaining about the expressionists. While the statistical analysis can certainly objectively show that music is steadily changing, the claim that there is a "steady decline in music quality" is subjective.
I'd beg to differ. These measurements only show that the selected qualities are different, but their importance is certainly not objective.
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
Why is slower a problem? Is this in contrast to the high-speed style of the 90's and 2000's, where speed was itself a goal?
2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes
Or to rephrase, pop music has become more minimalist, preferring to maintain chords through the whole song.
and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
Ah, the oft-maligned Loudness Wars. This is probably the closest to a universally-bad quality, but there are certainly some valid reasons to increase compression. Compressing a song changes a lot of the feeling from percussion, which also changes the projected mood of the music. That can very well be what the artists intend, regardless of whether you feel it is bad.
3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word "I" in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
To rephrase again, pop music has started emphasizing individuality and self-actualization, rather than a dependency
on others. I would also be very interested to know how they're evaluating "anger", since so much of the lyrics of the 50's through 70's made extensive use of metaphor to avoid the censorship of the day.
4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all -- all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst.
This is almost certainly the Sturgeon's Law and survivor bias TheRaven64 mentioned. Dating back as far as ancient Greece, new music has always been polled to be worse than the "classics". This statistic is utterly meaningless unless the survey is repeated for the next century or so, with the results weighed accordingly.
5....song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s.
What's objectively wrong with repetitive music? Personally, I tend to prefer repetition, as it provides consistency through the song. One of my favorite pieces is Fur Elise, precisely because of the repetition of a simple phrase. Yet again, this can be rephrased to sound better: The use of voice and lyrics as an instrument has led to repeating the lyrics just like melodies.
In summary, this study is the epitome of the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" idea. By analyzing music, the author turns art into numbers, then points to changing numbers to confirm their own bias, and that of all the cranky old Slashdotters who want kids (and their newfangled music) off of their lawn.
We don't know. The text of the orders hasn't been published. However, there are some details on the White House website:
The first of these two orders instructs the Department of Interior to dedicate a portion of its assets for rural broadband installation. The second order will streamline the installation process by requiring agencies to use standardized forms and contracts for installing antennas on federal buildings, thus improving process efficiency.
According to the White House, it certainly sounds positive. However, there is still room for speculation, and certainly cause to be concerned.
The first order could be anything, from allocating funding for connection projects to forcing the DoI to sell off chunks of land for corporate use. There's so little detail in the descriptions I've seen that it's very difficult to determine exactly what the President is doing.
The second order seems benign enough as described, but the devil's usually in the details. Standardized forms that are too detailed actually become a barrier for those without dedicated resources to handle them. A small ISP may not be able to afford the manpower to fill out every detail of the request form, effectively shutting them out of the opportunity presented to larger companies. On the other hand, documents that are not specific enough can hide uncertainty in a design, which leads to increased costs as problems arise.
As amazed as I am at Slashdot's timely reporting, we seem to have jumped the gun to actually have an insightful conversation.
The decision to prosecute would be in the hands of the local law enforcement, as always. I'm suggesting that an AI be able to recognize illegal activities (like threats of physical harm, for example), and concerning behaviors ("What street do you live on?"), and be able to intervene before anyone actually commits any crime. Such interventions might include a temporary ban, silence, or even just triggering a warning that the conversation appears to be hostile.
A gentle nudge is often enough, if applied early enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually tend to lean more to the right than otherwise, but it seems lately I've had too many functioning brain cells for the rest of the party to appeal to me.
The credibility of the collusion allegations hasn't really changed. There have been ongoing developments as more Russian operations have been uncovered, but there has never been much direct evidence of Trump's involvement. However, once Comey was fired and Trump started applying pressure to end the investigation prematurely, the question of obstruction became relevant, and it's been reinforced by his continual comments slandering the investigators. The concern hasn't so much "pivoted" as it's been overwhelmed by a much more serious allegation. If the obstruction allegation bears fruit, it's shown that Trump isn't just the hapless benefactor of a crime, but rather he's actively and intentionally breaking the law.
So - here's the deal:
Yes, Trump is the president. He will remain the president until he leaves office, regardless of how that happens, and he'll be succeeded by either Pence or a newly-elected candidate. Until then, he has sworn to execute the Office of President, which means he is expected to follow the nation's laws. So long as he does that, I have no objection to him being the president. I disagree with most of his opinions, but I don't object to him holding the office.
I've regretted that sentence since writing it, so I'll take this opportunity to rephrase:
The Trump campaign (and administration afterward) has since countered that there's nothing to see, no undue outside influence, and no willing participation from his campaign. He's also advocated shutting the whole investigation down, to the extent of firing people involved in the investigation.
I agree that Trump's campaign is probably correct in that they didn't knowingly seek to break any laws during the campaign. I think that after his inauguration, though, Trump's meddling probably is obstruction, though I'm not sure there's enough evidence for an indictment against him. I expect there's also a lot of negligence involved, some criminal, but most of those accusations will go away to gain cooperation during the investigation.
I'd argue that ultimately, the charges and accusations don't matter nearly as much as just letting the investigation run its course. Our justice system, including the FBI, is founded on the belief that the written law is more important than any person or organization. Since the written law says that the FBI will investigate such matters, that's what they must do, regardless of the outcome. To do otherwise is literally un-American.
However, Trump has built his campaign and administration around an image of disrupting norms and ignoring processes he didn't like. Even if he is correct about the facts of Russian collusion (or absence thereof), he's still butting heads with the written law of the land, and it will fall to the other two branches of government to decide whether they'll allow it or not.
Now, that may be the moral obligation, but the legal concept is much more difficult to define.
How dangerous is dangerous enough to warrant a recall? Sure, this may leak some data, but now that the vulnerabilities are known, they can be mitigated... or do we also claim that software vendors who don't implement mitigations are making a "dangerous" product?
Who's responsible for the recall? I've rarely purchased directly from Intel. More often, I buy CPU/motherboard combos from vendors. Are they going to support the recall? My mother isn't qualified to take apart her computer and replace the chip, so who's paying for the tech to come out and do it?
Just like we ticket every driver who's going over the speed limit.
Yes, it's illegal. No, it's usually not worth the effort to pursue, unless you do something really bad, like cause a collision or act knowingly on behalf of a foreign government intelligence agency.
In this indictment, yes. The events detailed here did not include willing participation by Trump's campaign. Unfortunately for Trump, there are some crimes that don't require knowledge to be committed... For example, being negligent in one's duty to investigate a financial source can be a crime.
As has been the case for a while, the bigger concern is Trump's behavior after the investigation started. If he's shown to have been actively working to obstruct the investigation, that could be what gets him.
Cynic that I am, that's really what I expect is the case... Trump tried to run an honest campaign, but he's so easily manipulated and so quick to overreact that he ends up causing his own downfall, without any direct foreign involvement.
You're missing the point, and veering rather far from reality, as well.
The original concern (I won't even say it was a "claim") was that Russians may have influenced the election process. That doesn't invalidate the result, and nobody credible has claimed that it would.
The Trump campaign has since then countered that there's nothing to see, never any outside influence, and the whole investigation should be shut down.
With these indictments, there is now an official accusation, backed by a nice pile of evidence, that there was in fact Russian interference. That's it. No, it doesn't indicate on its own that Trump knew, or his campaign officials knew. Those questions are still open. What has been resolved at this point is the question of whether something illegal happened (yes, it did), and whether there was foreign involvement (yes, there was).
This could be the end of the indictments. If Trump's campaign was as honest as he claims, it will be. However, those open questions still need to be answered, which means the investigation needs to keep going. By making statements opposing the investigative process, Trump has made it worse for himself and his administration, because now the investigation needs to answer the question of whether anyone is trying to obstruct justice.
This has nothing to do with whether Americans are unfit to vote. That's always been a risk, echoed in Benjamin Franklin's famous response when asked what kind of government we would have: "A republic, if you can keep it." It has always been known that people are subject to manipulation, and that's why interfering in the election carries severe consequences. If the indicted Russians ever find themselves on American soil, they'll have a chance to find out exactly how harsh those punishments can be.
I'm fine with passing ownership of local assets to local jurisdiction... it's the option of private purchase that worries me, combined with expecting states to pay 4:1 to match what the federal side "invests".
I'm cynical enough to expect that an asset will start to go to a state, and as they start estimating the transfer costs, the state realizes they can't afford to buy it... but they've already paid for a lot of the estimation work, and probably even started preparing to move. Then a private enterprise comes in and "helps" the state by buying the asset instead, probably in exchange for extremely low taxes. It's spun as a winning move all around: The federal government reduced its holdings, the state got out of a deal it couldn't afford, and the private company is saving or creating jobs by investing in the local infrastructure.
That spin lasts just long enough for the current politicians to leave office, by which time the federal government has lost control of the assets it built, the state is still broke, and the private company is pulling in all the revenue from the facility. Once the contract obligations expire, the private company can then shut down and sell off the government-built assets in a liquidation.
The scenario is a standard corporate raid with asset stripping, but with the government as the target.
In other words, government agencies are now expected to put a dollar value on their historic icons, landmark infrastructure, and carefully-controlled limited-development areas, and sell them to the highest bidders, then turn around and give that money to the federal government to cover tax cuts for the companies who just bought our society.
On the design end, yes, those all come into play, and I appreciate your efforts, but on the listening side, very little of that matters.
To start, let's assume we're not building our own enclosures. Frankly, all prebuilt consumer gear is already engineered by folks like you to meet a basic level of quality, or it never makes it to market. These days, even the cheap $20 speaker sets have sufficient engineering to pass muster.
Once assembled, the biggest influence on the system's overall sound is indeed the EQ. To use my aforementioned test, I'll take the Star Wars theme, play it loud through a speaker, and listen for the distortion. If it rattles and sounds like rhinoceros with a bad case of gas, the speaker isn't worth the time to tweak further, regardless of the price tag. Pack it up and RMA. If the chimes are missing or distorted into a buzz, same thing. From a consumer standpoint, it's not worth measuring the THD across the spectrum or analyzing the precise response. While testing, I'll walk to the far end of the coverage area, and make sure the system is loud enough (without unreasonable compression or distortion) to cover my needs.
If a system passes such basic tests, it's at least trying to be a quality product, and I can safely assume that my music will sound just fine through it. Then I can put in the time with an EQ to fix the issues of the room and speakers. I keep a nice playlist of other clips that I'm familiar with to test and adjust as needed. After that small amount of work, it's certainly good enough for normal purposes. A note might be a bit off, or maybe a drum solo isn't quite as punchy as it would be on another system, but that's not going to diminish my experience significantly, nor that of the vast majority of listeners.
To abuse analogy, I'm not suggesting that all grape juice is fine wine. I'm suggesting that if a $5 bottle of port tastes good, drink it, and don't worry about whether its notes are nutty or fruity.
I used to be a sound tech. I've tested more speakers than I care to count, and set up enough audio rigs that I can typically pinpoint sound quality problems in a few seconds with the right test clips.
Pro tip: It's almost never the speakers' problem.
I know it annoys the "audiophile" crowd, but a speaker is, for the most part, just a speaker. The response curve doesn't matter much, if you can equalize it to suit your taste. Yes, I said that evil nasty word: taste. No, you're not usually going to get objective measurements of a "good" or "bad" speaker that are worth anything*, because listening to sound, especially music, is a heavily subjective experience.
If I'm setting up a sound system for a classical piano concert, the whole system is configured for that goal... There is still reinforcement, but it's only to boost what's naturally echoed by the room, not to push anything unnaturally. For a rock concert, I usually arrange the sound differently, boosting instruments to match the band's desired sound profile. Generally, my best advice is to figure out what kind of mood the music is supposed to inspire, and adjust to fit that.
If the HomePod includes an automatic equalizer, that's great, but I'd just as soon spend 15 minutes doing proper configuration on my own. Frankly, a flat response sounds boring. I prefer a thumping (but not rumbling) bass, with clear vocals. In other words, I like a fairly deep low-end disco scoop. Is the HomePod for me? Eh, perhaps not, unless I can tweak it or pull the output to my own system. After all, I'm the one listening to the music, so I should enjoy it, no?
* There are actually bad systems out there, but (barring mechanical failure) they're usually because somebody put too much work into fine-tuning to meet a particular response curve spec, rather than making things that sound good. Such systems can be identified (and rejected) in about 30 seconds by playing the Star Wars main theme.
I'll build a bit on your point.
Private corporations aren't interested much in scientific research, they're interested in return-on-investment, and at the moment anything that isn't a productive satellite being launched into LEO isn't profitable.
There's a fine detail that I'd like to add. It isn't so much "return on investment" as it is "expected return on investment". Rather than knowing (within statistical likelihood) the return for a given investment in an industry, the notion of industrialized spaceflight is still extremely risky, so all calculations of that ROI necessarily must include the risk of the whole thing exploding on the launchpad.
We can't really mine asteroids, because there's still a good chance that the investment cost of the mission will double, making the whole mission unprofitable. We can't go space-prospecting, because we can only fly by at most one or two targets per successful launch. We can't start an interplanetary imports business, because there's no colony to buy the imported goods.
That's how SpaceX may end up opening new markets for commercial spaceflight. Once the reliability and cost of space travel drops, it opens up a new frontier for new enterprises, hopefully making the whole process safe enough that the investment costs can be reasonable estimated.
It's a trade secret, or it contains third-party licensed specs, or it has a few security flaws... or there's just a slim chance of any of those, so the whole proposal requires review by at least 15 engineers and a small army of lawyers, plus all the senior management.
I'm as much a fan of Linux as the next guy, but even discussing something outside the original scope is an unexpected cost. At least they were open about that and provided a response.
I have often suggested treating Wikipedia as you would an interview with an expert in the field.
It will get the broad strokes correct, and it will give you the jargon and key concepts to go research on your own, but it cannot be considered infallible or accurate of its own accord. It has pet theories and political bias. It has some gaping holes in its knowledge that aren't obvious to newcomers. It will even contradict itself, and it would be considered terribly impolite to draw attention to such problems.
If that were the case, expect an SEC investigation next month.
Realistically, the investment branches of such firms are kept completely separate from the advisory branches, but they both work off of the same data from the analysis branches. If indeed Goldman were shorting something they advised against buying, the two actions would have come from separate interpretations of the market analysis, and would not come from knowledge of what the other branch was doing. As I understand, that would still be perfectly legal, as any other investor could see the same data, perform the same analysis, and also choose to short.
For your consideration, I submit the following (hopefully sarcastic) theory:
By enacting the most ridiculous federal policies while projecting a personality of being complete and utter assholes, Trump's administration is opening the political path for states to invoke their own contrary policies while their governors are hailed as heroes, thus ultimately fulfilling the Republican stated goal of empowering states.
The only question, then: Is Trump intelligent and self-aware enough to pull off such a plan?
Yeah... I'm thinking this isn't much of a story.
Personally, I log in to Facebook about once a year or so. I get the emails of things other folks are doing, and a few asking me nicely to return, but nothing that looks like phishing.
I agree fully on both points.
Yes, the test needs mass. Other folks would be quite happy to use a block of concrete, or sandbags, or even a weighted mock-up of their intended load... but Musk uses a sports car, and gets more headlines and more front-page pictures. Those are what he'll be remembered for.
If it's in the contract now, it becomes much more difficult to take it out later. In this round, the argument can be framed as "the union is demanding new protection", but if it's in there for one cycle, the next round will be "the company wants to take away this existing protection".
More likely, it'll be the coordinators who (from a central location) make sure the automated fleets are available where they're needed, when they're needed, and in good repair to function as needed.
With automated transport, the basic challenge of logistics changes from having transportation at a given place to having a large enough pool of transportation in a given area to provide a level of service. Computing services went through the same transition over the last decade, as we've moved from having colocated dedicated servers to cloud-hosted virtualized data centers. The same ops engineers who used to manage racks of servers for one company are now managing racks of servers for the cloud provider, just using different tools and being much more efficient.
In the end, this higher efficiency has led to a huge boom in demand for hosting services, in turn raising the demand for computing infrastructure. It's a perfect example of the old adage "if you build it, they will come". I expect that with automated transport, we'll start seeing huge fleets of delivery vehicles roaming the streets - even to the scale of having multiple delivery vehicles on the same street at the same time - and the workforce that used to drive will then move towards maintaining and managing the vast fleet.
I expect he'll ultimately be remembered for taking generally-dismissed technologies, building PR campaigns styled after P.T. Barnum, and creating reasonably-successful companies using excitement to offset the extremely-high risk that led to the technologies being rejected the first time around.
Musk's PR stunts are exactly that. There is little scientific value (besides a dead-weight test) in launching a car into orbit... but by doing so, he can inspire another round of news stories and keep his name in front of the upcoming generation of engineers. Similarly, of course he's going to sell branded flamethrowers, because every reckless idiot (myself included) is going to think "Gee, I could probably spare $600 for that" and start clearing space in the living room next to the life-size Boba Fett statue. It'll be a great conversation piece, and a piece of history if/when the tunnels become successful.
I'm not going to opine on whether showmanship is a good or bad thing for investment purposes, but I am happy to see the public eye turning toward the real challenges to progress. Yes, the rockets blow up, the permits are a hassle, and building new manufacturing factories requires obscene amounts of money... but those problems are not insurmountable, with enough persistence (and funding). Don't worry about how hard your math homework seems, little Timmy... just give it another try, like your hero Elon Musk!
That's my take as well.
The last thing nVidia wants is a reputation as being unobtainable, the way most folks looking for a new family car don't even consider a Ferrari or Rolls Royce. Currently they enjoy being the default choice for new builds, and have made their business plans from such a position, so a change to gamers' buying habits would have a huge impact for them.
Of course, nVidia does have other offerings more suitable for the mining crowd, and I expect we'll see more products aimed that way soon. The current currencies may be investment bubbles, but the concepts requiring huge amounts of GPGPU will be present for years to come. It makes sense for nVidia to steer the market into a nice segregation.
Taking advantage of a current windfall might make for nice short-term profits, but it comes at the cost of longer-term success. I, for one, am quite happy to see nVidia holding steady.
At the risk of sounding like I'm dodging the issue, I'll say that none of that matters.
To be clear, I think your analysis is certainly accurate, but the question is still open whether self-centered music is "good" or "bad". That question has to be answered before we can say that today's music is "better" or "worse" than previous music.
In short, music is still art, even if it's mass-produced formulaic noisy art, and the paper author is trying to use statistics to prove that this new art is worse than that old art. It's no different than an impressionist complaining about the expressionists. While the statistical analysis can certainly objectively show that music is steadily changing, the claim that there is a "steady decline in music quality" is subjective.
I'd beg to differ. These measurements only show that the selected qualities are different, but their importance is certainly not objective.
1. Pop music has become slower -- in tempo -- in recent years and also "sadder" and less "fun" to listen to.
Why is slower a problem? Is this in contrast to the high-speed style of the 90's and 2000's, where speed was itself a goal?
2. Pop music has become melodically less complex, using fewer chord changes
Or to rephrase, pop music has become more minimalist, preferring to maintain chords through the whole song.
and pop recordings are mastered to sound consistently louder (and therefore less dynamic) at a rate of around one decibel every eight years.
Ah, the oft-maligned Loudness Wars. This is probably the closest to a universally-bad quality, but there are certainly some valid reasons to increase compression. Compressing a song changes a lot of the feeling from percussion, which also changes the projected mood of the music. That can very well be what the artists intend, regardless of whether you feel it is bad.
3. There has been a significant increase in the use of the first-person word "I" in pop song lyrics, and a decline in words that emphasize society or community. Lyrics also contain more words that can be associated with anger or anti-social sentiments.
To rephrase again, pop music has started emphasizing individuality and self-actualization, rather than a dependency on others. I would also be very interested to know how they're evaluating "anger", since so much of the lyrics of the 50's through 70's made extensive use of metaphor to avoid the censorship of the day.
4. 42% of people polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music since the 1970s voted for the 2010s. These people were not from a particular aging demographic at all -- all age groups polled, including 18-29 year olds, appear to feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music became worst.
This is almost certainly the Sturgeon's Law and survivor bias TheRaven64 mentioned. Dating back as far as ancient Greece, new music has always been polled to be worse than the "classics". This statistic is utterly meaningless unless the survey is repeated for the next century or so, with the results weighed accordingly.
5. ...song lyrics from today compress 22% better on average than less repetitive song lyrics from the 1960s.
What's objectively wrong with repetitive music? Personally, I tend to prefer repetition, as it provides consistency through the song. One of my favorite pieces is Fur Elise, precisely because of the repetition of a simple phrase. Yet again, this can be rephrased to sound better: The use of voice and lyrics as an instrument has led to repeating the lyrics just like melodies.
In summary, this study is the epitome of the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" idea. By analyzing music, the author turns art into numbers, then points to changing numbers to confirm their own bias, and that of all the cranky old Slashdotters who want kids (and their newfangled music) off of their lawn.
We don't know. The text of the orders hasn't been published. However, there are some details on the White House website:
The first of these two orders instructs the Department of Interior to dedicate a portion of its assets for rural broadband installation. The second order will streamline the installation process by requiring agencies to use standardized forms and contracts for installing antennas on federal buildings, thus improving process efficiency.
According to the White House, it certainly sounds positive. However, there is still room for speculation, and certainly cause to be concerned.
The first order could be anything, from allocating funding for connection projects to forcing the DoI to sell off chunks of land for corporate use. There's so little detail in the descriptions I've seen that it's very difficult to determine exactly what the President is doing.
The second order seems benign enough as described, but the devil's usually in the details. Standardized forms that are too detailed actually become a barrier for those without dedicated resources to handle them. A small ISP may not be able to afford the manpower to fill out every detail of the request form, effectively shutting them out of the opportunity presented to larger companies. On the other hand, documents that are not specific enough can hide uncertainty in a design, which leads to increased costs as problems arise.
As amazed as I am at Slashdot's timely reporting, we seem to have jumped the gun to actually have an insightful conversation.
The decision to prosecute would be in the hands of the local law enforcement, as always. I'm suggesting that an AI be able to recognize illegal activities (like threats of physical harm, for example), and concerning behaviors ("What street do you live on?"), and be able to intervene before anyone actually commits any crime. Such interventions might include a temporary ban, silence, or even just triggering a warning that the conversation appears to be hostile.
A gentle nudge is often enough, if applied early enough.