So in the rest of the world if a past subordinate accused the president of sexual harassment they can not expect an investigation including current similar behavior?
In some parts of the world, sure. But in the civilized parts of the world, it means that if somebody accuses the president of sexual harassment, it will be investigated quietly, and only made a big deal out of it, if the president is actually guilty.
that does not say much for the resot of the world.
You mean it's bad that the rest of the world puts the best interests of the country, the president, and his past lover, above the interests of political opponents trying to create a scandal?
We're talking in the neighborhood of $5,000 and a minimum of 40 hours of flight time to get that license. Getting a driver's license is NOTHING like that.
NAK (Norwegian pilot association) gives the cost of a typical pilot license for a small motorplane at 45 hours flight time, total cost NOK 55655, or USD 9566. The local driving school advertises an intensive two week driving course with theory, exams, all required courses, a total of of 30 hours driving time (most of it is required by law), and all state fees, at a grand total of NOK 26865, or USD 4617, assuming you pass (most people don't). It seems a Norwegian driving license is EXACTLY like that.
It's actually possible to build a small plane that'll fold up into roughly the form factor of a car and 'drive'.
While I agree that such a contraption can be called a flying car, it's not what most people imagine when they want a flying car. They want something that is as useful as a car, that can fly. What you described is something that is totally useless, but can still (technically) be described as a "flying car". We've seen these cars with wings (or planes with car chassis), and we're not impressed.
We've been able to build flying cars since the 50's. Technology isn't the problem.
Oh please. If that was true, Michael Jackson would own one in Neverland, and ride around in it all the time (at least until he was arrested). Rich people are already lining up to get a flight on a commercial space plane. Where are their flying cars? Don't tell me they aren't interested, because everybody else is. And why doesn't other organizations with money use them? Such as the military, rescue service, etc?
Yes, it was a witchhunt, but the President, of all people, should be expected to tell the truth when under oath.
Only in America. In the rest of the world, nobody would have asked the president that question. It was a personal matter, and has absolutely nothing to do with his politics. Lying about it was a sensible move, and something just about any sensible person would do.
On the other hand, deliberately deceiving the entire world that you are invading Iraq because they are hiding WMD (and they are somehow "evil" and related to 911), when in reality you do it to satisfy your buddies who are executives in oil- and arms-companies, is not something I find very presidential (or human, for that matter).
If you will only have presidents with perfect façades, you are only going to get presidents who are perfect liers, and experts at covering things up. So either choose people who are human, or expect to be lied to.
Getting a pilot's license is no easy task. It's expensive and it takes many many hours of training.
In Norway, you have to be 18 to get a drivers license. You have to be 17 get a sailplane pilot license. At 16, you can get a license for a hangglider or a paraglider. Very few people can afford their drivers license, unless their parents pay for it. All of these pilot licenses are much cheaper than getting a car drivers license.
In order to get a license for an ultralight motorized plane (microplane), you have to be 18, but it's still about half the price of a car drivers license. The cost of a pilot license for a small motorplane (i.e. Cessna, Piper) is about 1 1/2 - 2 times the cost of a car driving license.
Getting a car drivers license is neither particularly easy nor cheap. But most people need a car drivers license, which means that they will put up with the studying and the economic cost. Pilot licenses are viewed as a luxury thing, and are therefore perceived as more difficult and more expensive, even though they're not.
I'm not sure how these numbers compare to US numbers, I would expect getting a drivers license is at least a bit cheaper there, but I believe the numbers are still somewhat representative. Of course, most pilot licenses mentioned would be more expensive if the people involved in training viewed it more as a job than a hobby, but the numbers would probably still be correct within a factor of two.
It's nothing like getting a driver's license, and that will certainly prevent Joe Sixpack from owning one.
If Joe Sixpack can afford his brand new SUV, he can afford to get a pilot license. The problem is that pilot licenses are not useful to the average person, it's a hobby, or for some very few: a profession. A flying car would change that, but we haven't got flying cars, and that's the main problem, not the FAA.
Once you can come up with a low-noise, cost-effective, small-footprint, safe, VTOL plane with useful payload, I can assure you that the FAA would respond to that. But it doesn't exist, and there's no reason for FAA to change regulation in order to make it easier for people to imagine a future with flying cars.
Last time I checked, FAA was standing for Federal Aviation Administration. And I can assure you that they will never make any hindrances for you in creating a car that isn't driven by a person. Now, if you are talking about planes, they might become more interested. But if you can show them that your way is better, I'm sure they'll change their minds. So what was your solution again?
Arguing that we haven't got flying cars because of FAA restrictions on who is allowed to pilot a plane, is about as stupid as arguing that we haven't got teleportation devices because of ethical concerns about what happens at the transmitting end. We haven't got flying cars because nobody has succeded in creating something useful that can be described as a flying car, and we haven't got teleportation devices because it's just too hard for our current understanding of physics.
Perhaps even the idea of flying cars is silly. 100 years ago, people were used to driving horse-driven carriages. And while it's possible to create a contraption that looks like a horse, and make it look like it's pulling a car, we don't do that. Flying is not the same as rolling on a flat surface, and perhaps it's only natural that the two take different forms. There's a reason planes have wings.
"Where's my flying car? Damn it - it's still in the labs."
To be fair, that's not strictly a technical problem. I'm amazed they even let people drive their own personal cars.
To be fair, that is a technical problem. There's no reason (beyond technical) for letting people drive their own cars. If you can come up with a technical solution that is better, please do!
And if one of the four platters goes, there's no way to replace just it.
As if we even care anymore. This can be said of just about any consumer product, whether it is a HD in a RAID, a battery in an ipod, or a surface-mounted component on some circuit board in just about any electronic toy. Just toss it away. Economies of scale makes it cheaper to just replace the whole thing. The only ones crying, are the environmentalists.
If all four platters are in the same HDA, one going could contaminate the other three and cause them to fail too.
This happens in normal RAID too, it's just that people running RAID now either has a clue, or think they have a clue, so they don't talk about their miserable failures too loudly. In a pre-made RAID-disk, one sane default (for naïve consumer applications) would be for the disk to revert to read-only once a platter has failed. In professional settings, where the disk is monitored by people with a clue, and people complain louder when they can't save their TPS-reports just because a disk fails, other settings can be used. The operating system can be used to configure this.
But anyway, this will make a disk almost doubly expensive, and it will not halve the failure rate. So I doubt it's worth the money. Periodical backups are a better solution (and could also be built into the drive by adding extra platter(s) and some logic that periodically mirrors stuff at various intervals (in periods with low disk-usage), a log of new sectors written, and a small cheap CPU). The main advantage of periodical backup, is that the wear and tear on the backup-platter will be different from that of the main drive, and thus, they are less likely to fail at the same time.
If this is done, please put a big "THIS IS THE FAILED DRIVE" led on the outside
Why? In a typical home or office PC, there are between 1 and 2 harddrives, which are only replaced when powered off. LEDs won't solve many problems there. The only people it will help, are people with many disks, that hot-swaps them, but are too stupid to keep their disks in an orderdly fashion. Well, ok, perhaps there is a use for this anyway...
Re:The battery is not replaceable by design.
on
Apple iPhone Dissected
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My list of why I won't buy one now, and maybe not ever:
Here is mine:
I already have a phone
My phone is not broken yet
My phone doesn't look like it's going to break soon
Even if I needed a new phone, I'm not convinced it would be my first choice
If by "animal", you mean "any life-form that as a zygote look sufficiently similar to what you started with, as a zygote", and if you by "turned into" means "(through a hypothesized theoretical process) replace genetic code inside zygote with genetic code from zygote of wanted result", then the answer is obviously "yes". If you mean in practical terms, the answer is "no". And if you believe that you theoretically can change the zygote of a flatworm into one of Tyrannosaurus Rex, I doubt that it can be done, even theoretically, as the Tyrannosaurus has bigger egg-cells than the flatworm (and probably some other important differences as well (such as internal micro-structure to support a different number of chromosomes, etc), apart from the purely genetic difference)
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
I highly doubt it. Think of the relative complexities of a computer capable of simulating the human brain (and by that I mean capable of running several hundred million threads, each of which runs an interruptable O(2^n) algorithm quickly enough to respond to external stimuli) to the relative simplicity of a single cell.
Two counter-arguments
Moore's law is (still) exponential
Either field (computing, biotech) is not up to the task (ai, life-from-scratch) at present, and it's hard to judge progress towards something we presently can just hypothesize can be done. It's like asking whether we will first get light-sabers or hooverboards, where we have no idea what exotic physical principles either would use, and no way to be sure any of them will ever exist in a practical form.
Prolog? An obscure programming language whose greatest impact was that people generally realized that knowledge representation was hard, and that calling something "fifth generation computing" didn't necessarily make it so?
Compared to quantum computing, exploiting totally different physical principles in order to perform hitherto intractable calculations reasonably fast?
The answer can't be anything but NO. Quantum computing would be a revolution, whose importance would probably lay somewhere between the invention of the programmable computer, and the invention of integrated circuits. On the other hand, Prolog was a somewhat amusing parenthesis in the history of programming languages.
Man made brain - Depends on your definition it's either already done (Insect brains) or far away (we don't know how the human brain works?, we only know how neurons work)
Would you care to show me an example of a computer software/hardware combination that is comparable to an insect brain? That means, given control of an insect body (or a simulation of an insect body in a simulated world) it must be able to fly during windy conditions, avoid obstacles, and orient well enough to seek out food sources, eat (and/or mate, lay eggs, etc...), before finally returning back to the hive. I may be mistaken, but this sounds like science fiction to me. Current robots are not that autonomous. (And certainly not within the weight constraints of an insect, but that's a different story)
Quantum Computer - again depends on your definition - It's either already here (in a very basic form) or far away (or maybe even impossible) depending on which variant of quantum theory is true?
There's no reason to start exploring various definitions to see whether quantum computing is or is not here. It is not. Quantum computing means that you use quantum mechanical physics in order to make the computers perform calculations that would be intractable using computers whose mode of operation depends upon a classical understanding of physics. That current computers depends upon quantum-mechanical phenomena such as e.g. tunnelling (in order to model classical constructs, such as gates), doesn't mean that they are quantum computers, any more than the name "microwave" makes the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation in that part of the spectrum microscopic.
the economy fails to acutely punish their manic spending as harshly as it would have in the past (death, prison, slavery, etc).
Ever been in a situation where you do not have enough money to pay your bills? Ever been afraid to even look at your bills, because you know there's no way you can afford to pay them out? Ever been evicted from your apartment? Ever had to sell your car? Ever been ordered by a court to give every cent you earn (except what the court determines covers your living costs) to the people you owe money? Ever been through the social stigma of never (and by "never", I don't mean one or two months) being able to afford even the slightest bit of luxury? Even for your kids? I think todays punishment is adequate. It is not fun to be a debtor, and people who get into this situation often get severely depressed, making it an evil self-amplifying circle. The likelihood of death, prison, or slavery creating fewer debtors, is about as high as that of death, prison, or slavery preventing heroin (or even alcohol) abuse.
On the other hand, a combination of prosumer quality hardware, and a good ear for mixing, produce audio indistinguishable from that produced by the best studio at some big record company, which is quite different from the shit you can produce with an inexpensive 12-track mixer and a tape recorder.
Mixers are either expensive or not good. That's why recording it track by track on a PC and mixing digitally is so attractive. And old tape recorders are no match for modern sound-cards. If Bob Dylan said this, he may have been right, at the time he said it. But that must have been before y2k. Today, the only thing keeping the home studio musicians from producing professional quality music, is talent.
Given that the only decent song Belafonte ever made, was that banana boat song, I tend to agree with the record company producers in that cutting down the concert by one hour would improve the quality of the recording immensely. Besides, live recordings is an oxymoron, and should be avoided in favour of going to real concerts, and enjoying studio albums. Cheers!
Why do they sample for a frequency twice as high as a dog could hear?
Because higher numbers === higher quality (unless you know better). Also, 192 kHz is popular among professional audio people (but that's because they use digital effects, and 192 kHz is so high that most aliasing artifacts will be outside the audible frequency range). So, for whatever reason, people have started associating 192kHz with quality, even though it's completely overkill for any consumer application.
44.1kHz is enough for just about any final mix delivery format, but it's also fucking close to the theoretical limit of what the human ear can hear. While digital filters these days are pretty good, using 44.1kHz means that in order to get the highest frequencies (around 20kHz) onto the CD, your highpass filters needs to be pretty damn good. The is probably what makes (or at least made) digital sound "sound digital". In retrospect, it would probably have been better and cheaper to use a higher sampling rate, and accept a little bit of inaudible aliasing (at the risk of really annoying our pets). 192kHz is way too much overkill for a final mix delivery format, though...
Now, if we were all information-based entities teleporting about using quantum entanglement would be highly feasible.
We are information-based entities. You'd still be you if your mind was teleported in to another body
That is your opinion, but that doesn't make it so. Since nobody has performed the experiment yet, we just don't know. Or to be more precise, we don't even have a fucking clue, as we haven't even succeeded with brain-transplants yet.
Maybe a robot body. With breasts.
I believe my personality is determined more by my dick, than my brain. So I must disagree.
I believe the parent poster was talking about a demand among end-users. Your client was not an end-user, he was simply a client with too much money, and too little brains. Something which, unfortunately, is not so rare in these Intarweb-times.
There's a difference between saying "quick, shoot that guy over there" and "death to group X".
Sure, there's a difference. Actually there are several different statements that one could discuss whether to allow or make illegal
I hereby declare that I am going to kill Joe Q Public
I wish Joe Q Public was dead
I wish Joe Q Public was killed
I will reward the first person who can bring me proof that Joe Q Public is dead
I will reward the first person who can bring me proof that Joe Q Public is killed
Please kill Joe Q Public (addressed to a specific person)
Please kill Joe Q Public (addressed to everyone listening)
I will pay you to kill Joe Q Public
I will pay anyone that kills Joe Q Public
I order you (a specific person) to kill Joe Q Public
I order you (everyone listening) to kill Joe Q Public
And of course lots of other variations with respect to "any member of group X" or "all members of group X" instead of "Joe Q Public"
Personally, I don't think it matters very much whether the death threat is made towards an individual, or members of a group. You still feel very much threatened.
I can certainly see situations where even #2 would be problematical, such as when a person with great influence (e.g. a company executive, priest or clergy, politician, celebrity) states it publicly. Similarly, if someone watches TV, and sees a bad actor, and then says "Joe, please kill that lousy actor!", it should be legal, because the statement is not intended to be taken literally.
In other words, intent matters more than what is actually said. If the intent is to scare the victim(s) or incite somebody to actually kill, it should be illegal. Wording doesn't matter much. And people with great influence, by necessity, have to weigh their words better. If we view the above-mentioned sentences with respect to intent, I am of the opinion that only #2 should be legal. But this is up to the courts to decide, and probably varies with varying legislation around the globe.
And if Swedish law is such that one can get in trouble for having someone comment on your blog something that you yourself disagree with, then Swedish law is, of course, fucked.
I think that I should warn you that everything eventually decays. Nothing lasts forever. And film, just like fruit, is best served fresh. If you really want to continue using Velvia in, say 600 years, I would recommend that you try to come up with some way of getting it fresh in the future. Just because Fuji stopped producing it, shouldn't mean that they won't be able to produce a small batch of it (at ridiculous high prices) if you make a special order. A different option, is to simply ask for the "recipe" (possibly by signing an NDA or similar contract), and get an independent laboratory to produce it when you need it. The last (and the only sane) option, is to try to find something else that fits your need. Such as analysing sample pictures, and coming up with a photoshop color filter that does the same thing.
fully half* the phone users outside the USA would have no idea what a "cellular" phone is. It's a mobile phone.
And 100% of people in Austria have no idea what a "mobile phone" is. They call it a "Handy."
Yeah, and most people I know, just call it a "phone". There are cases where a landline phone is acceptable, but mostly, it is viewed as an archaic technology that can only be used for two-way voice communication, and only when you are near it. In other words, about as hip as telex, CB-radios, or snail-mail.
...no problems so far.
Oh, by the way: A keyboard costs less than two pints, so I don't know why you couldn't just try yourself, instead of asking everybody on slashdot.
It's like masonry. At a glance it looks like you've put a bunch of rocks on top of each other. But if you study it closely you realize you've just made a castle.
Slashdot Mirror
In some parts of the world, sure. But in the civilized parts of the world, it means that if somebody accuses the president of sexual harassment, it will be investigated quietly, and only made a big deal out of it, if the president is actually guilty.
You mean it's bad that the rest of the world puts the best interests of the country, the president, and his past lover, above the interests of political opponents trying to create a scandal?
NAK (Norwegian pilot association) gives the cost of a typical pilot license for a small motorplane at 45 hours flight time, total cost NOK 55655, or USD 9566. The local driving school advertises an intensive two week driving course with theory, exams, all required courses, a total of of 30 hours driving time (most of it is required by law), and all state fees, at a grand total of NOK 26865, or USD 4617, assuming you pass (most people don't). It seems a Norwegian driving license is EXACTLY like that.
While I agree that such a contraption can be called a flying car, it's not what most people imagine when they want a flying car. They want something that is as useful as a car, that can fly. What you described is something that is totally useless, but can still (technically) be described as a "flying car". We've seen these cars with wings (or planes with car chassis), and we're not impressed.
Oh please. If that was true, Michael Jackson would own one in Neverland, and ride around in it all the time (at least until he was arrested). Rich people are already lining up to get a flight on a commercial space plane. Where are their flying cars? Don't tell me they aren't interested, because everybody else is. And why doesn't other organizations with money use them? Such as the military, rescue service, etc?
Only in America. In the rest of the world, nobody would have asked the president that question. It was a personal matter, and has absolutely nothing to do with his politics. Lying about it was a sensible move, and something just about any sensible person would do.
On the other hand, deliberately deceiving the entire world that you are invading Iraq because they are hiding WMD (and they are somehow "evil" and related to 911), when in reality you do it to satisfy your buddies who are executives in oil- and arms-companies, is not something I find very presidential (or human, for that matter).
If you will only have presidents with perfect façades, you are only going to get presidents who are perfect liers, and experts at covering things up. So either choose people who are human, or expect to be lied to.
In Norway, you have to be 18 to get a drivers license. You have to be 17 get a sailplane pilot license. At 16, you can get a license for a hangglider or a paraglider. Very few people can afford their drivers license, unless their parents pay for it. All of these pilot licenses are much cheaper than getting a car drivers license.
In order to get a license for an ultralight motorized plane (microplane), you have to be 18, but it's still about half the price of a car drivers license. The cost of a pilot license for a small motorplane (i.e. Cessna, Piper) is about 1 1/2 - 2 times the cost of a car driving license.
Getting a car drivers license is neither particularly easy nor cheap. But most people need a car drivers license, which means that they will put up with the studying and the economic cost. Pilot licenses are viewed as a luxury thing, and are therefore perceived as more difficult and more expensive, even though they're not.
I'm not sure how these numbers compare to US numbers, I would expect getting a drivers license is at least a bit cheaper there, but I believe the numbers are still somewhat representative. Of course, most pilot licenses mentioned would be more expensive if the people involved in training viewed it more as a job than a hobby, but the numbers would probably still be correct within a factor of two.
If Joe Sixpack can afford his brand new SUV, he can afford to get a pilot license. The problem is that pilot licenses are not useful to the average person, it's a hobby, or for some very few: a profession. A flying car would change that, but we haven't got flying cars, and that's the main problem, not the FAA.Once you can come up with a low-noise, cost-effective, small-footprint, safe, VTOL plane with useful payload, I can assure you that the FAA would respond to that. But it doesn't exist, and there's no reason for FAA to change regulation in order to make it easier for people to imagine a future with flying cars.
Last time I checked, FAA was standing for Federal Aviation Administration. And I can assure you that they will never make any hindrances for you in creating a car that isn't driven by a person. Now, if you are talking about planes, they might become more interested. But if you can show them that your way is better, I'm sure they'll change their minds. So what was your solution again?
Arguing that we haven't got flying cars because of FAA restrictions on who is allowed to pilot a plane, is about as stupid as arguing that we haven't got teleportation devices because of ethical concerns about what happens at the transmitting end. We haven't got flying cars because nobody has succeded in creating something useful that can be described as a flying car, and we haven't got teleportation devices because it's just too hard for our current understanding of physics.
Perhaps even the idea of flying cars is silly. 100 years ago, people were used to driving horse-driven carriages. And while it's possible to create a contraption that looks like a horse, and make it look like it's pulling a car, we don't do that. Flying is not the same as rolling on a flat surface, and perhaps it's only natural that the two take different forms. There's a reason planes have wings.
As if we even care anymore. This can be said of just about any consumer product, whether it is a HD in a RAID, a battery in an ipod, or a surface-mounted component on some circuit board in just about any electronic toy. Just toss it away. Economies of scale makes it cheaper to just replace the whole thing. The only ones crying, are the environmentalists.
This happens in normal RAID too, it's just that people running RAID now either has a clue, or think they have a clue, so they don't talk about their miserable failures too loudly. In a pre-made RAID-disk, one sane default (for naïve consumer applications) would be for the disk to revert to read-only once a platter has failed. In professional settings, where the disk is monitored by people with a clue, and people complain louder when they can't save their TPS-reports just because a disk fails, other settings can be used. The operating system can be used to configure this.
But anyway, this will make a disk almost doubly expensive, and it will not halve the failure rate. So I doubt it's worth the money. Periodical backups are a better solution (and could also be built into the drive by adding extra platter(s) and some logic that periodically mirrors stuff at various intervals (in periods with low disk-usage), a log of new sectors written, and a small cheap CPU). The main advantage of periodical backup, is that the wear and tear on the backup-platter will be different from that of the main drive, and thus, they are less likely to fail at the same time.
Why? In a typical home or office PC, there are between 1 and 2 harddrives, which are only replaced when powered off. LEDs won't solve many problems there. The only people it will help, are people with many disks, that hot-swaps them, but are too stupid to keep their disks in an orderdly fashion. Well, ok, perhaps there is a use for this anyway...
Here is mine:
If by "animal", you mean "any life-form that as a zygote look sufficiently similar to what you started with, as a zygote", and if you by "turned into" means "(through a hypothesized theoretical process) replace genetic code inside zygote with genetic code from zygote of wanted result", then the answer is obviously "yes". If you mean in practical terms, the answer is "no". And if you believe that you theoretically can change the zygote of a flatworm into one of Tyrannosaurus Rex, I doubt that it can be done, even theoretically, as the Tyrannosaurus has bigger egg-cells than the flatworm (and probably some other important differences as well (such as internal micro-structure to support a different number of chromosomes, etc), apart from the purely genetic difference)
Two counter-arguments
Prolog? An obscure programming language whose greatest impact was that people generally realized that knowledge representation was hard, and that calling something "fifth generation computing" didn't necessarily make it so?
Compared to quantum computing, exploiting totally different physical principles in order to perform hitherto intractable calculations reasonably fast?
The answer can't be anything but NO. Quantum computing would be a revolution, whose importance would probably lay somewhere between the invention of the programmable computer, and the invention of integrated circuits. On the other hand, Prolog was a somewhat amusing parenthesis in the history of programming languages.
Would you care to show me an example of a computer software/hardware combination that is comparable to an insect brain? That means, given control of an insect body (or a simulation of an insect body in a simulated world) it must be able to fly during windy conditions, avoid obstacles, and orient well enough to seek out food sources, eat (and/or mate, lay eggs, etc...), before finally returning back to the hive. I may be mistaken, but this sounds like science fiction to me. Current robots are not that autonomous. (And certainly not within the weight constraints of an insect, but that's a different story)
There's no reason to start exploring various definitions to see whether quantum computing is or is not here. It is not. Quantum computing means that you use quantum mechanical physics in order to make the computers perform calculations that would be intractable using computers whose mode of operation depends upon a classical understanding of physics. That current computers depends upon quantum-mechanical phenomena such as e.g. tunnelling (in order to model classical constructs, such as gates), doesn't mean that they are quantum computers, any more than the name "microwave" makes the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation in that part of the spectrum microscopic.
Ever been in a situation where you do not have enough money to pay your bills? Ever been afraid to even look at your bills, because you know there's no way you can afford to pay them out? Ever been evicted from your apartment? Ever had to sell your car? Ever been ordered by a court to give every cent you earn (except what the court determines covers your living costs) to the people you owe money? Ever been through the social stigma of never (and by "never", I don't mean one or two months) being able to afford even the slightest bit of luxury? Even for your kids? I think todays punishment is adequate. It is not fun to be a debtor, and people who get into this situation often get severely depressed, making it an evil self-amplifying circle. The likelihood of death, prison, or slavery creating fewer debtors, is about as high as that of death, prison, or slavery preventing heroin (or even alcohol) abuse.
On the other hand, a combination of prosumer quality hardware, and a good ear for mixing, produce audio indistinguishable from that produced by the best studio at some big record company, which is quite different from the shit you can produce with an inexpensive 12-track mixer and a tape recorder.
Mixers are either expensive or not good. That's why recording it track by track on a PC and mixing digitally is so attractive. And old tape recorders are no match for modern sound-cards. If Bob Dylan said this, he may have been right, at the time he said it. But that must have been before y2k. Today, the only thing keeping the home studio musicians from producing professional quality music, is talent.
Given that the only decent song Belafonte ever made, was that banana boat song, I tend to agree with the record company producers in that cutting down the concert by one hour would improve the quality of the recording immensely. Besides, live recordings is an oxymoron, and should be avoided in favour of going to real concerts, and enjoying studio albums. Cheers!
Obviously, I meant lowpass, not highpass.
Because higher numbers === higher quality (unless you know better). Also, 192 kHz is popular among professional audio people (but that's because they use digital effects, and 192 kHz is so high that most aliasing artifacts will be outside the audible frequency range). So, for whatever reason, people have started associating 192kHz with quality, even though it's completely overkill for any consumer application.
44.1kHz is enough for just about any final mix delivery format, but it's also fucking close to the theoretical limit of what the human ear can hear. While digital filters these days are pretty good, using 44.1kHz means that in order to get the highest frequencies (around 20kHz) onto the CD, your highpass filters needs to be pretty damn good. The is probably what makes (or at least made) digital sound "sound digital". In retrospect, it would probably have been better and cheaper to use a higher sampling rate, and accept a little bit of inaudible aliasing (at the risk of really annoying our pets). 192kHz is way too much overkill for a final mix delivery format, though...
That is your opinion, but that doesn't make it so. Since nobody has performed the experiment yet, we just don't know. Or to be more precise, we don't even have a fucking clue, as we haven't even succeeded with brain-transplants yet.
I believe my personality is determined more by my dick, than my brain. So I must disagree.
Microsoft does that? I've always imagined Microsoft Research to be a cool place researching cool stuff, whereas Microsofts products...
I believe the parent poster was talking about a demand among end-users. Your client was not an end-user, he was simply a client with too much money, and too little brains. Something which, unfortunately, is not so rare in these Intarweb-times.
Sure, there's a difference. Actually there are several different statements that one could discuss whether to allow or make illegal
Personally, I don't think it matters very much whether the death threat is made towards an individual, or members of a group. You still feel very much threatened. I can certainly see situations where even #2 would be problematical, such as when a person with great influence (e.g. a company executive, priest or clergy, politician, celebrity) states it publicly. Similarly, if someone watches TV, and sees a bad actor, and then says "Joe, please kill that lousy actor!", it should be legal, because the statement is not intended to be taken literally.
In other words, intent matters more than what is actually said. If the intent is to scare the victim(s) or incite somebody to actually kill, it should be illegal. Wording doesn't matter much. And people with great influence, by necessity, have to weigh their words better. If we view the above-mentioned sentences with respect to intent, I am of the opinion that only #2 should be legal. But this is up to the courts to decide, and probably varies with varying legislation around the globe.
And if Swedish law is such that one can get in trouble for having someone comment on your blog something that you yourself disagree with, then Swedish law is, of course, fucked.
I think that I should warn you that everything eventually decays. Nothing lasts forever. And film, just like fruit, is best served fresh. If you really want to continue using Velvia in, say 600 years, I would recommend that you try to come up with some way of getting it fresh in the future. Just because Fuji stopped producing it, shouldn't mean that they won't be able to produce a small batch of it (at ridiculous high prices) if you make a special order. A different option, is to simply ask for the "recipe" (possibly by signing an NDA or similar contract), and get an independent laboratory to produce it when you need it. The last (and the only sane) option, is to try to find something else that fits your need. Such as analysing sample pictures, and coming up with a photoshop color filter that does the same thing.
Yeah, and most people I know, just call it a "phone". There are cases where a landline phone is acceptable, but mostly, it is viewed as an archaic technology that can only be used for two-way voice communication, and only when you are near it. In other words, about as hip as telex, CB-radios, or snail-mail.
...no problems so far. Oh, by the way: A keyboard costs less than two pints, so I don't know why you couldn't just try yourself, instead of asking everybody on slashdot.
It's like masonry. At a glance it looks like you've put a bunch of rocks on top of each other. But if you study it closely you realize you've just made a castle.