Isn't the US Constitution clear on the point of oversight, giving Congress the ability to investigate and even remove the president, but not the other way around?
Or is the US truly near its nadir and soon "el Presidente" will be running everything, unopposed. In a climate White House Counsel Harriet Miers can thumb her nose at a House Judiciary Committee subpoena and get away with it...which by the way, would be like John Dean just deciding he'd rather stay home from the Watergate hearings...I'd say it's apparently the latter.
Ticket brokers will NEVER leave money on the table. I have seen the big guy make 200K on an event and I have seen him lose 70K. It is capitalism at its finest. Want to see the criminals try Ticket master ( Monopoly ) or even worse Colleges that make you DONATE just to buy a ticket or Personal Seat Licenses from professional clubs. While playing the Telephone game with your friend of a friend some of the Fact Packets were dropped!!! Point taken...I imagine someone was exaggerating along the way.
Ticket Master's monopoly is the core of the problem for sure, and the lawsuit is nothing but a PR stunt to shift the attention elsewhere...in this case to RMG Technologies .
This creates artificial demand thus increases ticket price for everyone as well as depriving fans who want to go see these events. Whenever you see bunch of empty seats in a sold out baseball game, it's not because the fan had a change of plans or got sick. It's because these scummy ticket brokers couldn't unload them for huge profit. One of the reason why ticketmaster won't do anything about the situation is because these brokers ensure that events are sold out which works out in their favor. They don't care about actual fans getting hold of the tickets. They simply want the tickets sold. A friend of a friend worked for one of these outfits. He said they will often throw away handfuls of tickets for events with huge demand rather than lowering the price and unloading them. They simply refuse to create the precedent that you can wait them out to get a good deal. Like you said...all major events now, regardless of the real demand, will have several huge empty sections as a result...I've seen it first hand at every major concert I've seen recently.
You're 100% correct in that Ticket Master couldn't care less because they've sold the ticket. The only losers are the fans, and to some degree the artists, who surely would rather play to seats with people in them. It's a godless monopoly that will most likely change around the same time the record industry starts focusing on actually signing some real talent.
Because now that we have so much music, we don't want to manually manage our directory structure any more.
Letting iTunes manage our music libraries is a godsend. Seriously.
You need to start letting computers do the work for you, instead of forcing them to let you do the work. "Forcing them to let you do the work"? Well I'm sorry that I'm so ignorant of the wonders of modern technology that I actually want my USB storage devices to....duh...support USB storage.
Having the database functionality is all well and good, and I never said it was bad. You can't seriously use that as an argument for not supporting USB storage and making me use a piece of software just to move files on and off a player...that's just plain silly. Never mind the fact that the very article we're all commenting on is about all that wonderful functionality being taken away from linux users like myself.
Amen to that...I bought my wife an iAudio X5 some time back. Plain old USB storage as God intended...why would anyone what anything else...much less devices that refuse to act like USB storage, and require a database to do things that, for the most part, can be accomplished with a good directory structure? I also never understood why anyone would want a camera to do anything other than act like a hard drive.
A good part of what she uses it for it bird watching...she has a large number of bird calls plus some images, videos etc. I created all of these on my Gentoo box from various sources in a nice well named directory structure and just copied the whole thing to the iAudio. I can't even imagine what would be involved in doing that on devices that use a database rather than ordinary directories.
When I went to shop for that iAudio, I was shocked at how may units didn't support USB storage mode, let alone how few were DRM free. What really blew me away was when I read about a number if iriver units that, when sold in Asia supported USB storage mode, but when sold here didn't! Unreal.
I can cite a classic example of what the article refers to....and it shows that in times of fear like 9/11, myths can become almost immortal.
On 9/11 a rumour started here in N.J. that Muslims had celebrated and rioted on the streets of Paterson N.J. after 9/11. Virtually everyone I know was sure this was fact even a year or more later. I had never seen any news about it, so I decided to do some research. As it turned out, John Chadwick of The Record (a Bergen county paper) wrote several articles about it.
On 9/11, someone called into disc jockeys 'Scott and Todd' on WPLJ (Scott Shannon and Todd Pettengill) claiming to have seen this happen. They jumped on it without question and gave it legs, and that was it. The more it was denied by everyone, including the mayor of Paterson, the more legs it got. In fact, the only evidence anyone could find indicated that the streets where dead with the possible exception of a few racists looking for trouble after hearing Scott and Todd's show.
I had been debating this with a co-worker, telling him what I had found. He seemed to have an answer for everything I came back with. When I told him the mayor said it never happened, he told me that two weeks after the 'incident' the mayor recanted that denial and admitted it occurred. So...I went back and did a little more research. Turns out that long after this supposed admission by the mayor, he in fact wrote an editorial in Record in which he not only reiterated his denial of the riot, but said that he'd charge Scott and Todd with a hate crime if he could.
When it comes to times of fear, people will believe whatever makes them feel good, even if it means rewriting history, or even their own memories. Scary shit.
What's wrong with the i-tal "nv" driver? Never installed nVidious's closed-source crap, never likely to. It's 2d only. Ie, no Beryl/Compiz. It also doesn't seem to be very stable. ...and even for a lot of 2d use, like MythTV, it's useless due to lack of TV out support.
Having said that, as an owner of an RPCRT TV and a MythTV system, it kills me that the proper output of 1080i content at 1080i in the nVidia drivers has been hopelessly broken apparently since the 8xxx linux drivers...so I'm not about to get too evangelical about them. If the nv drivers, or for that matter the new ATI drivers, could handle that correctly, I'd use them in an instant.
Could this be a reversal of Microsoft's prior stance on DRM, wherein they fellated the movie and music industries despite the consumer electronics industry being far larger and far more consumer-friendly?
Nah. Speaking of DRM and the like...I'd be interested in hearing the official CCIA position on the consumers right to backup CDs and DVDs, especially given that the DMCA frequently seems void fair use in that case. It'd be really disappointing if their position was in support of fair use only when it doesn't violate the letter of the DCMA. That would be pretty hollow at best.
ok, i'll bite. if broadband internet access is not a luxury in your eyes then you must prove to me beyond any reasonable doubt that it is a necessity. try to do it without reverting to profanity or primal "chest banging"
if you can, give me one, just one example of a situation where you cannot survive in this world without internet access. i hypothesize that any daily activity you decree to be necessary involving internet access can, in and of itself, also be considered a luxury.
the majority of things that we use on a daily basis are luxury items...the perception of technological ubiquity in ones daily life does not immediately relegate things to the level of necessity.
dude. Are you going to die without it? Certainly not. Is it a "necessity" in the way that electricity is? Certainly not.
However, you could make the same argument you're making against public education. Broadband isn't exactly drinking water, but it sure isn't a Ford Escalade either.
Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. Sure, if by serious you mean unsignifyingly low. ...and while I'm at it...just how do you plan on reversing compression without even knowing the settings used when compression was applied? Compression isn't like a number from 0 to 10, where they turn it up and you turn it down. How do you know the attack, release, and countless other settings involved? Never mind the use of multi-band compression where different adjustable bands can be compressed in totally different manners.
Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. Sure, if by serious you mean unsignifyingly low. I really wasn't going to reply to this, but given the condescending tone and the fact that you got modded up...
There's a reason that all DAWs used in major studios (and even home studios) use 24 bit audio. The difference in precision during digital processing is significant, even if the end product will be 16 bit. To say you can undo the excessive compression/limiting used in the studio well by processing 16 bit 44.1 KHz audio is just wrong. Even in the studio, I seriously doubt that compressing and then expanding would yield something the same as the original. And again, even if it could be done in theory, what's the point? No listener has any way to do so using their existing equipment.
Wrong, you can. Nothing is lost, only compressed, as in, packed together tightly. What a compressor does, an expander can undo. Let's not forget that the original compression is most likely done on 24 bit, high sample rate digital audio that never leaves the studio/mastering house. Without that, you're never undoing anything without serious loss of quality. The same is true if the compression was done on high-end analog gear before conversion to CD audio.
Consumer's don't want shit, they just accept it. The real problem is that they don't particularly want or care about quality. True, but another factor is that many literally don't know what they're missing, because virtually nobody gets to hear the non-smashed version of anything except the mastering engineers before they destroys it at the bequest of the record company...and this is happening to good music as well, not just the crap.
In case you're talking about hard limiting, you're off topic, since it's not what compression is about (except for extreme compression, but no one actually does that for it's called amplification). Otherwise, you're just wrong, I explained why in a few other of my posts:-) I'm not sure I understand why it's off topic...are we only talking about compression here? Limiters are a huge part of the loudness war and are absolutely used in major studios and mastering houses.
As far as whether or not it can be undone...the point is that it certainly can't be undone on any equipment consumers are using.
Yes, the frequency range is nothing like a CD, but the dynamic range is SO much better. Actually, the frequency range playing the original vinyl would be better than the CD, as 44.1 kHz digital audio is limited to about 22 kHz (as it takes as least two samples to simulate a wave). From this standpoint, vinyl has always been better than CD. The reality of course has been that CDs have been better than most peoples vinyl simply because of the durability of CDs vs the abysmal condition of most peoples vinyl (and the quality of their turntables).
The real factor in any digital recordings you make from vinyl is the quality of the A/D converter you use, and the bit depth and sample rate used. These days however I wouldn't doubt that homemade vinyl to digital recordings like yours would be better than most of the over-crushed CDs being released even using the A/D in a modest audio card.
Which knob do you adjust to increase the dynamic range and re-add the lost information?
Oh that's right, you can't. You're right, it's not a tough choice is it? Absolutely...once you've crushed that peak to average level there's no getting it back.
I have my own Protools based home recording studio. I get to experiment first hand with this sort of heavy limiting. Using a good limiter plugin (in my case a Waves L2) it's easy to make anything sound many times as loud as the original recording without introducing artifacts, but in addition to permanently loosing the dynamics, it becomes almost fatiguing to even listen to...and that's nothing compared to what mastering engineers are doing (against their own wishes by the way) at the request of their customers (the record companies). It really is criminal. The fact is that this sort of stupidity was impossible in the days of vinyl...the needle would have jumped out of the groove if anyone attempted it.
To expect a child to choose a career at that age is ridiculous Especially in a day and age where you're likely to change careers many times. Why do we insist in convincing kids that they should have their lives mapped out so young? I'm 53 and I'm still not sure what I want out of life. I'm guessing the same is probably true for all the idiots who are living vicariously through these kids telling them these fairy tales.
It reminds me of all the people who tell high school kids "these are the best times of your life". For the love of all that's holy, don't tell kids this crap. If they actually believe you most of them would commit suicide.
I have a friend who's an electrician. One of his friends called him saying he was having all sorts of electrical outages around his house. When he went to check it out for him, he discovered that a cable TV installer (don't know what company) had drilled from outside directly into the back of the panel!! He apparently had just gone ahead drilling another hole a foot over and tip-toed away not saying a thing...miracle it didn't burn the place down.
If Bestbuy and Walmart are IE only and, as far as I can see, Rhapsody is subscription only (...and don't get me started on what I think of RealNetworks anyway), will there actually be any option here for a Linux user to buy songs for $.99?
Seriously...I'd like to support this, but I don't see many options here.
and you're compiling from source... don't. Don't compile from source then complain that installing it is difficult. Use a modern distro and install via packaged binaries - which can usually be done with one command (or a few clicks). A few months ago I set up my new MythTv frontend/backend under Gentoo and it works without a hitch. Over time I discovered there were a few patches I wanted that weren't in the current stable ebuild, so I made a custom patched ebuild. This way I got a stable tested version with a few fixes I wanted that works perfectly.
And since when are all "modern" distros binary?
Tom
Actually, I don't think it's at odds with the summary, it's just that the BMI is a pretty useless measure of someone's health.
Absolutely. Any health indicator that looks at height and weight and ignores body fat percentage is pretty useless in my book. Do enough weight lifting and your BMI will probably indicate you're about to croak:
The physical exams some insurance companies use for life insurance for men also include a ratio of your chest and waist size, which compensates for this very well.
Didn't we learn our lesson with Active Desktop? ...and why would anyone want this anyway? The only real reason MS did this sort of thing was to support their legal argument that IE was a necessary and integral part of the OS. This is just as bad as the awful practice of embedding other applications in the browser by default instead of launching the appropriate applications externally (konqueror for example). Why does everyone want to copy all the worst ideas MS has had for browser functionality?
100% correct. The record industry doesn't want the current system, where they control artist exposure through payola, to change. They have absolutely no interest in anything that might help artists get exposure based on public opinion.
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Ticket Master's monopoly is the core of the problem for sure, and the lawsuit is nothing but a PR stunt to shift the attention elsewhere...in this case to RMG Technologies .
You're 100% correct in that Ticket Master couldn't care less because they've sold the ticket. The only losers are the fans, and to some degree the artists, who surely would rather play to seats with people in them. It's a godless monopoly that will most likely change around the same time the record industry starts focusing on actually signing some real talent.
Letting iTunes manage our music libraries is a godsend. Seriously.
You need to start letting computers do the work for you, instead of forcing them to let you do the work. "Forcing them to let you do the work"? Well I'm sorry that I'm so ignorant of the wonders of modern technology that I actually want my USB storage devices to....duh...support USB storage.
Having the database functionality is all well and good, and I never said it was bad. You can't seriously use that as an argument for not supporting USB storage and making me use a piece of software just to move files on and off a player...that's just plain silly. Never mind the fact that the very article we're all commenting on is about all that wonderful functionality being taken away from linux users like myself.
Tom
Amen to that...I bought my wife an iAudio X5 some time back. Plain old USB storage as God intended...why would anyone what anything else...much less devices that refuse to act like USB storage, and require a database to do things that, for the most part, can be accomplished with a good directory structure? I also never understood why anyone would want a camera to do anything other than act like a hard drive.
A good part of what she uses it for it bird watching...she has a large number of bird calls plus some images, videos etc. I created all of these on my Gentoo box from various sources in a nice well named directory structure and just copied the whole thing to the iAudio. I can't even imagine what would be involved in doing that on devices that use a database rather than ordinary directories.
When I went to shop for that iAudio, I was shocked at how may units didn't support USB storage mode, let alone how few were DRM free. What really blew me away was when I read about a number if iriver units that, when sold in Asia supported USB storage mode, but when sold here didn't! Unreal.
Tom
I can cite a classic example of what the article refers to....and it shows that in times of fear like 9/11, myths can become almost immortal.
On 9/11 a rumour started here in N.J. that Muslims had celebrated and rioted on the streets of Paterson N.J. after 9/11. Virtually everyone I know was sure this was fact even a year or more later. I had never seen any news about it, so I decided to do some research. As it turned out, John Chadwick of The Record (a Bergen county paper) wrote several articles about it.
On 9/11, someone called into disc jockeys 'Scott and Todd' on WPLJ (Scott Shannon and Todd Pettengill) claiming to have seen this happen. They jumped on it without question and gave it legs, and that was it. The more it was denied by everyone, including the mayor of Paterson, the more legs it got. In fact, the only evidence anyone could find indicated that the streets where dead with the possible exception of a few racists looking for trouble after hearing Scott and Todd's show.
I had been debating this with a co-worker, telling him what I had found. He seemed to have an answer for everything I came back with. When I told him the mayor said it never happened, he told me that two weeks after the 'incident' the mayor recanted that denial and admitted it occurred. So...I went back and did a little more research. Turns out that long after this supposed admission by the mayor, he in fact wrote an editorial in Record in which he not only reiterated his denial of the riot, but said that he'd charge Scott and Todd with a hate crime if he could.
When it comes to times of fear, people will believe whatever makes them feel good, even if it means rewriting history, or even their own memories. Scary shit.
Having said that, as an owner of an RPCRT TV and a MythTV system, it kills me that the proper output of 1080i content at 1080i in the nVidia drivers has been hopelessly broken apparently since the 8xxx linux drivers...so I'm not about to get too evangelical about them. If the nv drivers, or for that matter the new ATI drivers, could handle that correctly, I'd use them in an instant.
Nah. Speaking of DRM and the like...I'd be interested in hearing the official CCIA position on the consumers right to backup CDs and DVDs, especially given that the DMCA frequently seems void fair use in that case. It'd be really disappointing if their position was in support of fair use only when it doesn't violate the letter of the DCMA. That would be pretty hollow at best.
if you can, give me one, just one example of a situation where you cannot survive in this world without internet access. i hypothesize that any daily activity you decree to be necessary involving internet access can, in and of itself, also be considered a luxury.
the majority of things that we use on a daily basis are luxury items...the perception of technological ubiquity in ones daily life does not immediately relegate things to the level of necessity.
dude. Are you going to die without it? Certainly not. Is it a "necessity" in the way that electricity is? Certainly not.
However, you could make the same argument you're making against public education. Broadband isn't exactly drinking water, but it sure isn't a Ford Escalade either.
There's a reason that all DAWs used in major studios (and even home studios) use 24 bit audio. The difference in precision during digital processing is significant, even if the end product will be 16 bit. To say you can undo the excessive compression/limiting used in the studio well by processing 16 bit 44.1 KHz audio is just wrong. Even in the studio, I seriously doubt that compressing and then expanding would yield something the same as the original. And again, even if it could be done in theory, what's the point? No listener has any way to do so using their existing equipment.
Consumer's don't want shit, they just accept it. The real problem is that they don't particularly want or care about quality. True, but another factor is that many literally don't know what they're missing, because virtually nobody gets to hear the non-smashed version of anything except the mastering engineers before they destroys it at the bequest of the record company...and this is happening to good music as well, not just the crap.
As far as whether or not it can be undone...the point is that it certainly can't be undone on any equipment consumers are using.
The real factor in any digital recordings you make from vinyl is the quality of the A/D converter you use, and the bit depth and sample rate used. These days however I wouldn't doubt that homemade vinyl to digital recordings like yours would be better than most of the over-crushed CDs being released even using the A/D in a modest audio card.
Tom
Oh that's right, you can't. You're right, it's not a tough choice is it? Absolutely...once you've crushed that peak to average level there's no getting it back.
I have my own Protools based home recording studio. I get to experiment first hand with this sort of heavy limiting. Using a good limiter plugin (in my case a Waves L2) it's easy to make anything sound many times as loud as the original recording without introducing artifacts, but in addition to permanently loosing the dynamics, it becomes almost fatiguing to even listen to...and that's nothing compared to what mastering engineers are doing (against their own wishes by the way) at the request of their customers (the record companies). It really is criminal. The fact is that this sort of stupidity was impossible in the days of vinyl...the needle would have jumped out of the groove if anyone attempted it.
It reminds me of all the people who tell high school kids "these are the best times of your life". For the love of all that's holy, don't tell kids this crap. If they actually believe you most of them would commit suicide.
I have a friend who's an electrician. One of his friends called him saying he was having all sorts of electrical outages around his house. When he went to check it out for him, he discovered that a cable TV installer (don't know what company) had drilled from outside directly into the back of the panel!! He apparently had just gone ahead drilling another hole a foot over and tip-toed away not saying a thing...miracle it didn't burn the place down.
If Bestbuy and Walmart are IE only and, as far as I can see, Rhapsody is subscription only (...and don't get me started on what I think of RealNetworks anyway), will there actually be any option here for a Linux user to buy songs for $.99?
Seriously...I'd like to support this, but I don't see many options here.
Tom
Absolutely. Any health indicator that looks at height and weight and ignores body fat percentage is pretty useless in my book. Do enough weight lifting and your BMI will probably indicate you're about to croak:
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/public/heart/obesi ty/lose_wt/risk.htm#limitations
The physical exams some insurance companies use for life insurance for men also include a ratio of your chest and waist size, which compensates for this very well.
100% correct. The record industry doesn't want the current system, where they control artist exposure through payola, to change. They have absolutely no interest in anything that might help artists get exposure based on public opinion.