So all of the things that are bad with illegal drugs could be solved if they were treated the same way legal drugs are -- ie, regulation of quality, dosage, distribution, administration? I'm still waiting to hear how the drugs themselves are inherently dangerous in a way that can't be reduced through any means, which was your claim.
Just to add some context here: you are correct that the single test you linked does not definitively prove "MP3 is dead!". But no, it doesn't invalidate my initial statement that listening tests agree other codecs are the future. In the past several years of testing, over a variety of tests with a variety of bitrates, even the LAME MP3 has been usually in the lower range of results (often within the realm of statistical uncertainty, as in the result you linked), but it certainly is not gaining ground on its successors.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
Contrast that with the periodically stunning improvements by some Vorbis devs, or to a lesser extent Nero's AAC team, and you can see that there is a LOT of room to grow dramatically in those codecs. They have a LOT of different ideas left to implement, developers are still trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities yet they already outperform the most mature LAME implementations on a fairly consistent basis.
They are the only company that initially set the default on their audio encoding software to automatically add DRM to all tracks. They also still add DRM to non-DRM tracks when transferring them from their audio player. It seems MS is quite keen to push DRM, even on content the owner has specifically released DRM-free.
Proof please? I've never seen this substantiated. Also, how do you quantify "better audio quality" numerically?
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances. Really the only surprise in the past few years of listening tests is haw amazing the guys at LAME are at adding life to MP3.
The reality is that modern science requires faith. Faith in the scientific method.
No it doesn't, the scientific method works regardless of your level of faith in it. That's the whole point. If you follow the correct procedures for performing or repeating an experiment, you'll get the same results everyone else got. No faith required. If you publish your results, you contribute to a body of knowledge so that others can perform new experiments based on your findings. You don't have to have faith in the scientific method for those subsequent experiments to succeed or fail based on their own factors.
The rest of your criticism has to do with humans and politics. I don't think anyone has ever claimed scientists were immune to peer pressure, mistakes, etc. That's why we use the scientific method, because it takes the proof or disproof of any individual piece of knowledge out of the hands of small groups that can be easily influenced by such human factors.
The concept of there being an origin/creator/architect entity/force/whatever is not unheard of in philosophy.
No, it isn't. In a philosophy classroom, ID would be completely appropriate. But not in a science classroom. Hence the upset by people who give a crap about science.
As for why ID is always conflated with religion, it's because the only people pushing ID are Creationist Protestant Christians, and the last thing they would accept is a philosopher questioning their statements in any classes where ID is taught.
If you read the page you linked to, you'll see that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is the equation Newton came up with. Gravity itself is still a theory (theories).
Why exactly does it require less faith...to believe that the basic rules by which all biological creatures live have not changed?
It doesn't require any faith at all, nobody asks for faith that biology or the rules it follows is constant. That's why we run actual experiments and take actual measurements, to see if they are constant or not. For several thousand years biology has proven remarkably consistent, but if you were to come up with evidence tomorrow that showed biology was different at some point in the past, you'd win the Nobel Prize. No faith required.
Similarity #5: As I don't have the space for a full machine backup I didn't touch Time Machine yet.
You can exclude directories and files pretty easily in the preference pane, definitely give it a spin. TM is certainly 1000% better than any backup app that came before, though I would dearly love for it to be able to do block-level backup and diffs.
the only difference is that the rep from DC doesn't get to vote
Well, gee, why would anyone care about that minor difference in a democracy?
You've convinced me, a republican form of government is a complete waste of time since in your opinion constituents have no ability whatsoever to make their voices heard through any means. We should all lose the right to vote, and simply trust that our representatives will have our best interest at heart!
Exactly. So the same sort of "exclusivity contract" that can be found in every industry.
But not by monopolies. There are many, many behaviors that are allowed by normal companies that are disallowed by monopolies. Having a store go exclusive with one supplier is no big deal when there are twelve other suppliers available, there's still plenty of competition happening in the market as a whole, and that store can switch their exclusivity at some point in the future if they want for their own business reasons.
If it weren't such an important part of their business, they wouldn't "have" to do it. You can not blame OEMs for trying to sell the product the majority of the market is asking for.
Of course not, that's the point. The OEMs have no choice but to accept whatever terms MS offers them, they have no choice but to do so, because they're in an industry dominated by a monopoly. If you don't do business with the monopoly, you go out of business. Nobody blames the OEMs for accepting exclusive contracts when there's only one company to go exclusive with, and refusing to go exclusive with them means bankruptcy.
The purpose of electing a represenative to congress is to have someone at the federal level looking out for your state's interests. Since DC is entirely the responsibility of congress (unlike a state) and have at large representation in congress those folks already have congressional representation.
WTF? They may have "people looking out for them" (though they would argue otherwise), but they don't have representation. Representation requires that you actually have some responsibility to the people you're representing -- nobody in Congress with power has to answer to the residents of DC on election day. They could vote to boil the whole city in oil and the residents wouldn't have any recourse but protest. Congress can vote to raise their taxes through the roof, and nobody in DC can do anything about it.
The only motivation anyone in Congress would have to "look out for" DC's interests is altruism (lol) and concern that if they do something too horrible they'll get killed on their way to work during the few months they spend four days a week in town.
offtopic but because DC is not a state it is not entitled to representation under the constitution. Residents of DC are already represented because it is run by congress as a whole
Your first sentence is completely correct, the Constitution states that representatives come from the States, and since DC isn't a State, nothing Congress does short of a Constitutional amendment can legally give them a Representative or Senator.
Your second sentence, however, makes no sense. Residents of DC don't get to vote for any members of Congress, so I don't see how you can claim they're "already represented" because DC is administered by Congress.
Is Microsoft a monopoly because no one can compete with it, or can no one compete with Microsoft because it is a monopoly?
At various times in the past decades, each has been the case more than the other. Both factors reinforce the other, as well, which is the whole point of placing restrictions on how monopolies may compete.
Monopolies don't require that no choice exists on an individual level, only on a larger marketwide scale. You could chose to live without a computer at all, that's a realistic personal choice but it certainly is not viable marketwide alternative.
The world is moving in other directions that don't rely on MS's dominant products nearly as much. Regulators usually refuse to acknowlege that their work has become irelevent.
Both MS and the government are aware that OSes and browsers as we know them today will eventually pass and be replaced by something else. The whole point of the regulatory oversight is to ensure that "something else" gets to be developed through market competition rather than coercive contracts.
For instance, maybe OS X and Linux don't have a real chance of displacing Microsoft in the OS market, but are they effective competition? By that I mean that they are viable alternatives
There's a difference between being effective competition (on a marketwide level) and being a viable alternative (on an individual level).
Judge Jackson was not evaluating Linux or the Mac OS on their technical merits. He was simply stating the fact that neither competes directly in the primarily OEM market for consumer and business operating systems in such a way that they can, by themselves, counter any anticompetitive actions by Microsoft (ie, bundling, exclusive contracts, per-machine licensing).
A monopoly does not require that no competitors exist at all, only that none are in a position to keep the monopoly company in check.
I think that real crux of the complaint against Microsoft is that
The crux of the complaint against Microsoft is that they have a monopoly on operating systems and browsers, regardless of the reasons for that. It has nothing to do with whether or not other people provide standards-based technologies. The states are saying is that since the market situation hasn't changed, neither should the oversight -- that, essentially, until such time as the market diminishes their monopoly through whatever means, they will have to be monitored to ensure they don't abuse it the ways they have in the past.
Yeah and my mom will reply: "Why do I have to learn this stuff? That's why I paid for your computer engineering degree!" Mom: Infinity Me: 0
And the reply to that is "you paid for a degree in computer engineering so that I could give the correct answer to computer questions, and the answer to your question is to buy a Mac".
Well, I consider it stupid to ask *ME* to pay to receive a call when I didn't even ask the caller to make it. Particularly a problem with SMS, as you can't even look at the CLI and hit Reject.
Don't answer calls and you don't pay for them (or rather, they aren't deducted from the huge pool you've already paid for and probably won't use up anyways, so it makes little practical difference to most people).
Yes, SMS is the problem -- you're being billed for a "push" service you can't reject individually, and I absolutely expect recipients to get SMS free in the future, the current billing system is hurting the providers just as much as the customers. it's baffling why they've stuck with the SMS system as it is for so long.
Isn't that kinda backward logic on the lawmakers side? Why not outlaw [fax|txt]-spamming instead? (And remember to make it opt-in instead of opt-out).
Fax spam wasn't the SOLE reason it is illegal to discriminate on numbers, just one of the earliest practical problems faced by service discrimination. (and making something illegal doesn't make it magically disappear, so having both a legal and a practical obstacle to spamming has worked out quite well for us, unlike email which only has a legal prohibition)
The more economically important reason was that we didn't want to allow people or companies to be treated differently because of their phone number. Making devices and services transparent to the system in theory means more competition among providers, as you have mobile operators (and now VOIP) competing directly with landline operators for the exact same business.
So you are saying that you have one single phone number for every phone you own? The phone at home has the same number as your phone at work and your cellphone?
I have one phone and one number. I use it for work, home and mobile. Because we don't have numbers that specifically identify themselves as mobile, this works fine, since people don't assume I'll answer a work call out of hours, but this way I have the option.
But even if I didn't use one number, it makes no difference to my point -- asking someone to pay extra to contact me because *I* chose to leave work early or go run errands doesn't seem very polite. Whether they called one number or two or ten to get me doesn't make any difference, we have the expectation that if someone is local, we'll just pay for a local call.
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So all of the things that are bad with illegal drugs could be solved if they were treated the same way legal drugs are -- ie, regulation of quality, dosage, distribution, administration? I'm still waiting to hear how the drugs themselves are inherently dangerous in a way that can't be reduced through any means, which was your claim.
Um, how are they any more inherently dangerous than legal drugs?
Just to add some context here: you are correct that the single test you linked does not definitively prove "MP3 is dead!". But no, it doesn't invalidate my initial statement that listening tests agree other codecs are the future. In the past several years of testing, over a variety of tests with a variety of bitrates, even the LAME MP3 has been usually in the lower range of results (often within the realm of statistical uncertainty, as in the result you linked), but it certainly is not gaining ground on its successors.
What the LAME group has done is, quite frankly, amazing. They've managed to extend the life of MP3 to a stunning degree, but they are now refining their very matured technology, saving an extra bit here and there. Unless some other group comes out of left field with an amazing new MP3 theory and implementation, it is not a codec for the future.
Contrast that with the periodically stunning improvements by some Vorbis devs, or to a lesser extent Nero's AAC team, and you can see that there is a LOT of room to grow dramatically in those codecs. They have a LOT of different ideas left to implement, developers are still trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities yet they already outperform the most mature LAME implementations on a fairly consistent basis.
They are the only company that initially set the default on their audio encoding software to automatically add DRM to all tracks. They also still add DRM to non-DRM tracks when transferring them from their audio player. It seems MS is quite keen to push DRM, even on content the owner has specifically released DRM-free.
You quantify it with double-blind ABX testing across large groups of people. Drop by Hydrogenaudio's Listening tests wiki list for a start.
WMA, AAC, OGG, etc are all next-generation codes, it should come as no surprise that they perform better than MP3 for most material to most listeners under most circumstances. Really the only surprise in the past few years of listening tests is haw amazing the guys at LAME are at adding life to MP3.
Not at all. You're confusing faith with issues of epistemology. The debate you're looking for is down the hall.
No it doesn't, the scientific method works regardless of your level of faith in it. That's the whole point. If you follow the correct procedures for performing or repeating an experiment, you'll get the same results everyone else got. No faith required. If you publish your results, you contribute to a body of knowledge so that others can perform new experiments based on your findings. You don't have to have faith in the scientific method for those subsequent experiments to succeed or fail based on their own factors.
The rest of your criticism has to do with humans and politics. I don't think anyone has ever claimed scientists were immune to peer pressure, mistakes, etc. That's why we use the scientific method, because it takes the proof or disproof of any individual piece of knowledge out of the hands of small groups that can be easily influenced by such human factors.
No, it isn't. In a philosophy classroom, ID would be completely appropriate. But not in a science classroom. Hence the upset by people who give a crap about science.
As for why ID is always conflated with religion, it's because the only people pushing ID are Creationist Protestant Christians, and the last thing they would accept is a philosopher questioning their statements in any classes where ID is taught.
If you read the page you linked to, you'll see that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is the equation Newton came up with. Gravity itself is still a theory (theories).
It doesn't require any faith at all, nobody asks for faith that biology or the rules it follows is constant. That's why we run actual experiments and take actual measurements, to see if they are constant or not. For several thousand years biology has proven remarkably consistent, but if you were to come up with evidence tomorrow that showed biology was different at some point in the past, you'd win the Nobel Prize. No faith required.
You can exclude directories and files pretty easily in the preference pane, definitely give it a spin. TM is certainly 1000% better than any backup app that came before, though I would dearly love for it to be able to do block-level backup and diffs.
Well, gee, why would anyone care about that minor difference in a democracy?
You've convinced me, a republican form of government is a complete waste of time since in your opinion constituents have no ability whatsoever to make their voices heard through any means. We should all lose the right to vote, and simply trust that our representatives will have our best interest at heart!
But not by monopolies. There are many, many behaviors that are allowed by normal companies that are disallowed by monopolies. Having a store go exclusive with one supplier is no big deal when there are twelve other suppliers available, there's still plenty of competition happening in the market as a whole, and that store can switch their exclusivity at some point in the future if they want for their own business reasons.
Of course not, that's the point. The OEMs have no choice but to accept whatever terms MS offers them, they have no choice but to do so, because they're in an industry dominated by a monopoly. If you don't do business with the monopoly, you go out of business. Nobody blames the OEMs for accepting exclusive contracts when there's only one company to go exclusive with, and refusing to go exclusive with them means bankruptcy.
WTF? They may have "people looking out for them" (though they would argue otherwise), but they don't have representation. Representation requires that you actually have some responsibility to the people you're representing -- nobody in Congress with power has to answer to the residents of DC on election day. They could vote to boil the whole city in oil and the residents wouldn't have any recourse but protest. Congress can vote to raise their taxes through the roof, and nobody in DC can do anything about it.
The only motivation anyone in Congress would have to "look out for" DC's interests is altruism (lol) and concern that if they do something too horrible they'll get killed on their way to work during the few months they spend four days a week in town.
Your first sentence is completely correct, the Constitution states that representatives come from the States, and since DC isn't a State, nothing Congress does short of a Constitutional amendment can legally give them a Representative or Senator.
Your second sentence, however, makes no sense. Residents of DC don't get to vote for any members of Congress, so I don't see how you can claim they're "already represented" because DC is administered by Congress.
At various times in the past decades, each has been the case more than the other. Both factors reinforce the other, as well, which is the whole point of placing restrictions on how monopolies may compete.
Monopolies don't require that no choice exists on an individual level, only on a larger marketwide scale. You could chose to live without a computer at all, that's a realistic personal choice but it certainly is not viable marketwide alternative.
Both MS and the government are aware that OSes and browsers as we know them today will eventually pass and be replaced by something else. The whole point of the regulatory oversight is to ensure that "something else" gets to be developed through market competition rather than coercive contracts.
There's a difference between being effective competition (on a marketwide level) and being a viable alternative (on an individual level).
Judge Jackson was not evaluating Linux or the Mac OS on their technical merits. He was simply stating the fact that neither competes directly in the primarily OEM market for consumer and business operating systems in such a way that they can, by themselves, counter any anticompetitive actions by Microsoft (ie, bundling, exclusive contracts, per-machine licensing).
A monopoly does not require that no competitors exist at all, only that none are in a position to keep the monopoly company in check.
The crux of the complaint against Microsoft is that they have a monopoly on operating systems and browsers, regardless of the reasons for that. It has nothing to do with whether or not other people provide standards-based technologies. The states are saying is that since the market situation hasn't changed, neither should the oversight -- that, essentially, until such time as the market diminishes their monopoly through whatever means, they will have to be monitored to ensure they don't abuse it the ways they have in the past.
And the reply to that is "you paid for a degree in computer engineering so that I could give the correct answer to computer questions, and the answer to your question is to buy a Mac".
Have you considered checking you memory? No consumer OS runs without problems on faulty hardware.
Don't answer calls and you don't pay for them (or rather, they aren't deducted from the huge pool you've already paid for and probably won't use up anyways, so it makes little practical difference to most people).
Yes, SMS is the problem -- you're being billed for a "push" service you can't reject individually, and I absolutely expect recipients to get SMS free in the future, the current billing system is hurting the providers just as much as the customers. it's baffling why they've stuck with the SMS system as it is for so long.
Fax spam wasn't the SOLE reason it is illegal to discriminate on numbers, just one of the earliest practical problems faced by service discrimination. (and making something illegal doesn't make it magically disappear, so having both a legal and a practical obstacle to spamming has worked out quite well for us, unlike email which only has a legal prohibition)
The more economically important reason was that we didn't want to allow people or companies to be treated differently because of their phone number. Making devices and services transparent to the system in theory means more competition among providers, as you have mobile operators (and now VOIP) competing directly with landline operators for the exact same business.
I have one phone and one number. I use it for work, home and mobile. Because we don't have numbers that specifically identify themselves as mobile, this works fine, since people don't assume I'll answer a work call out of hours, but this way I have the option.
But even if I didn't use one number, it makes no difference to my point -- asking someone to pay extra to contact me because *I* chose to leave work early or go run errands doesn't seem very polite. Whether they called one number or two or ten to get me doesn't make any difference, we have the expectation that if someone is local, we'll just pay for a local call.