Is that you, Roger D. Hodge?? If not, well, I would figure the probability of such a precise summary of his excerpt in this months Harper's arising by random chance rather low. I'm always happy to stumble across a Harper's reader (since it is the singular and most incredible source of actual journalism on Earth), and I commend your swiftness in reading and recognition of applicability, with a C for comprehension, but c'mon man! Give credit where credit is due!
"In January, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court held that restrictions on independent corporate expenditures in political campaigns are unconstitutional infringements on the freedom of speech. Much of the judicial literature on the subject, including Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United, simply substitutes the words "speech" and "speak" for the words "spend" and "buy." [...] It is a curious metaphysical doctrine, is it not? Corporations are artificial beings, theoretically immortal, which come into existence by means of state charters and reproduce like amoebas by splitting into subsidiaries; midwifed by lawyers, they combine in bizarre mating rituals called mergers; they are owned, like slaves, by shareholders who buy and sell their chattel daily; and they possess constitutional rights. Oddly, however, our corporate citizens are denied the right to vote. By what logic can a corporation be granted personhood and the constitutional right to speak money, yet be denied the constitutional right to vote? How can our system permit these corporate persons to be enslaved through ownership? [...] The Democratic Party's lamentable DISCLOSE Act, which this summer failed to muster sixty votes in the Senate, would do nothing, if passed, to curb the flow of cash and the further disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the citizenry. It is no great burden for large corporations and wealthy individuals to hire more clerks to file additional disclosure forms, and under current law we already know a great deal about who buys and sells our commodified rulers and their derivative legislation."
I take it back, there's no way you're Roger, his writing is several orders of magnitude better than yours. Moral of the story: everybody subscribe to Harper's, srsly 1 year for ~$17.
Sober Utah isn't as bad as one might think, or at least not for the reasons usually assumed; SLC is 55 to 66% non-Mormon and has one of the highest population of gays per capita in the US. Utah is also the 6th most urbanized state, with the highest proportion of income given to charity and the highest rate of volunteerism. Naturally, however, wet Utah is even more fun. We have a good array of fantastic local microbreweries (Squatters, Red Rock, Wasatch, Uinta, etc.) and access to some of the really excellent wee...err beer coming out of Colorado and California. The liquor laws can be a bit asinine, but mostly end up as minor inconveniences; regular strength beer can still be purchased.
Indeed, I still own my iPhone from 2007, which was used up until a few months ago; I had my iPhone before the app store came into existence. Sure there's the youtube app which will most likely have the video you're looking for, but it's not streaming a video on the full youtube.com page that you'd normally see. Not to mention there's a few other video streaming services that don't have apps.
Not only does my nexus one readily load flash content, the dolphin browser allows one to spoof the browser identity--quite handy for getting around mobile paywalls or into iPhone specific pages. Of course the true power of this new phone probably has more to do with the public existence of what resides at android.git.kernel.org
Have you tried sitting around on the couch browsing the web, watching video, and looking through your pictures on an iPad and on your netbook? Because the iPad is just way better at those things.
Yup, just remember that you wouldn't ever want to browse any web/video/picture/music/e/t/c sites that make use of Flash, like, oh man I can barely think of one... I guess youtube kinda counts, but who really wants to visit a dirty smelly wretched Flash site like youtube? See, that's the point, the iPad is SOOOO amazing because Flash is BAD. It's just so obvious that overpriced, locked down media is better than free Flash-based media, because, duh, battery life and stuff.
The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used.
Clearly then the sample isn't a random subset of 'all torrents' but instead of 'popular torrents on certain trackers.' This does not justify the proposition in the title "Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal."
That aside, fat chance I'm going to trust The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory to keep their science unbiased in this regard. Seriously, for whom would a sample size of 1,000 torrents seem even close to enough?
When most people see my Nexus One they ask if its a Droid. I'm a little tired of explaining that Droid is a hardware series (with an incredibly huge marketing budget) and Android is an OS.
This. I get very frustrated very quickly when I'm forced to use a mouse that doesn't have back/forward buttons. It makes navigating the FS a lot faster too.
Hear, hear! There's nothing to indicate that the reasons for my move from the iHegemony are now part of my mobile Linux experience. In fact, just last night I had an experience that indicates the reasons for my move were more valid than I had anticipated: I discovered a bug in some small corner of the OS, reported it on the public bug tracker, then started digging through the Android git on the off chance I might be able to fix it myself.
Logically speaking, a free and open Linux variant is simply superior to iOS.
Yes, just like how we use way too much oil to begin with--estimated daily US consumption of oil is around 19.5 million barrels. It's kind of logical that utter reliance upon burning about 605 million gallons of fossil fuel every single day is problematic. If only the consequences were as explicit as dead wildlife washing onto our doorsteps...
If it really comes down to an issue of resources, two things: 1. they better get here soon or there won't be much left and 2. given the size of the universe and all the evidence that life is pretty rare, the most valuable resources our planet has to offer is our life, thus it wouldn't make much economic sense to eradicate us. This may just mean that we'll be sold as exotic pets, but at least that's bound to be one hell of an adventure.
Maybe it just took them a while to figure out how to add the name of an unnamed man to the list. Technically he has always been on the list since the empty set is a subset of all sets, it was probably just that the for the first check they made the mistake of querying "Unnamed Man," a different person altogether who has not yet been discovered to be a threat.
Ignoring as much as possible the confounding composition of this summary, there's something very wrong with this bit:
"...but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB..."
Given that standard desktop form factor hard drives with a capacity of 2 TB are readily available for purchase, it doesn't seem that the arrival of the Revamped 1 TB Colossus LT Solid State Drive represents even a slight advantage for SSDs regarding capacity. Furthermore, as others have pointed out, instead of this single SSD, 20 traditional 1 TB hard drives could be purchased with enough budget left for a server board, processor, ram and a few discrete RAID cards.
I'm surprised to see this publicly available, usually such premium-priced products are exclusive to industries with more dollars than sense--film and medical come to mind.
I was sitting in my computer architecture class a few years ago when an article I remembered reading suddenly became relevant. I told the professor about how this article had said that modern processors have gotten so small and fast that they are now subject to a quantum phenomenon which causes an apparent slowdown in operational frequency over the course of a few years.
I generally hate broadcasting incorrect information, regardless of whether I or anyone else realizes it, so, feeling suspicious about what I had just said, I started googling. Eventually I found the article and saw that I had apparently remembered everything correctly, until I saw the date it was published: April 1st. Even then, at least several months and probably more than a year later, the only indication that the whole thing was a farce was the publish date. And a good thing I had my skepticism turned to 11, because April 1 or 4/1 is represented in my mind as a normal date, not a specific date in which the objective foundation of modern society is arbitrarily abandoned by sources otherwise regarded trustworthy.
I'm no physicist, but from what I gather this will happen when decades of experiments that successfully verify relativity are explained by some other theory that allows faster than light transportation of information (quantum mechanics doesn't). Personally I'm not inclined to think this is absolutely impossible for the general notion indicated by something such as Newtonian physics being described as a special case of, and therefore displaced by, relativistic physics. In other words, I think only small minded fools are willing to call a thing impossible (no offense to the small minded fools). There's also some rationally justifiable hope a further layer of physics is available to be found, indicated at least by the problematic rift between classical and quantum mechanics. Otherwise, according to our current understanding of reality, the latency is limited to distance times the speed of light in a vacuum. Given the mean equatorial circumference of Earth, that means either 66.8 ms around the surface or 42.6 ms straight through the middle. Even so, seeing how a blink of an eye is around 300-400 ms, 66.8 ms is pretty ok for going halfway around the planet.
i gotta wunda yzit dey tinkin wedadumwuns wen ryting disway canb far moar efishunt an expresiv. peepol who thro a fit abowt sumdin liek da cowrecked form uv der (they're, their, there) mussb dadumwuns cuz da meenins clear frum contxt... uddawyz der, der, an der woodall sownd diffrnt to. point izat if i sed der sittin ova der on der lawn, yad no wat i meen, so ynot makit da same for rytin.
There are occasions that call for communicative and thus linguistic precision, which demand the correct use of words, syntax, grammar and so forth. However the notion that any non quantitative language can be used with maximum communicative efficacy is foolish. For instance, a studied linguistic prodigy could write a whole story with what was intended to be communicated hidden (but nonetheless objectively discernible) in the etymology of choice words while maintaining a coherent facade--in other words steganography by etymology. Similarly a word might be used such that several of its meanings yield sensible interpretations. The mere fact that many words have multiple distinct meanings is enough to indicate that absolute precision in communication by this language is unlikely. Despite this lack of objective precision, communication is surprisingly robust; people often use words thinking they mean something other than what they actually mean, yet the intended meaning comes across (more often than not, in my experience). The modern paragon of this situation is the phrase "beg the question," commonly used as though it means "causes the question to arise." This usage is unequivocally false: the phrase comes from formal logic as the fallacy of assuming what is to be proven, first defined by Aristotle ~350 BCE.
It's not just the uneducated masses who abuse conventions, a good number of celebrated authors have as well: Emily Dickinson's work is superficially characterized by a distinct misuse thereof, Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature for a book that abandoned all rules regarding punctuation of speech, and for his best known work "A Clockwork Orange" Anthony Burgess successfully discarded much tradition in favor of a largely fabricated and evocative lexicon. Even authors for whom the principle intent is not to explicitly subvert tradition will occasionally see fit a bit of unrestrained expression. Intentional subversion of convention is not necessarily better than the accidental, as the important consideration is efficacy of communication; if technically incorrect writing communicates more effectively than the cowrecked alternative it must be qualitatively superior. Objectively the rules of writing should only matter as much as they aid in communication since it is the primary objective. This is a good thing, as the rules of writing are so complicated that even professional authors require editors to point out all the errors. If technical proficiency is more important than communication then language kinda loses its point, amirite?
Clearly there are cases in which abandoning standards is more effective or desirable than abiding by canonical stricture, thus rendering the concern at hand nebulous. Are we simply to assume that people who replace 'because' with 'cuz' are idiots, or is it possible that certain other people are inflexible pedants unable to realize that 'cuz' is an efficient, effective and unambiguous replacement of 'because'? The truth is that language is evolving, as it has from inception, the only difference being that presently it is happening fast enough for crotchety pedagogues to notice and complain. If it weren't for such odd sociological pressures I think this evolution might happen much faster, at the very least cuz it does (with intriguing results) when distinct languages intersect.
Some portion of people who started reading this won't make it to this point cuz of my possibly disconcerting choice of ostentatious diction (further rent til but a tortuous enigma did remain:P), which is too bad because they don't get to see this part where I expose my erudite articulation to be a Pl
Emphasis on directly, we've been able to coax human adult somatic cells to become pluripotent stem cells since 2007. The "ethical issues" are pretty much old news, bringing it up almost feels like troll bait. TFA suggests that these cells are much less prone to cancer than iPSCs, which seems like a rather important bit the summary omitted.
Electric bicycles are a great idea for advancing fitness and reducing energy consumption and pollution, but Sanyo did a terrible job at realizing this. Like the eneloop, most e-bikes have the electric motor mounted as the hub of the front wheel, and this is idiotic for a number of reasons. For one, this placement fails to utilize the ~21 gears that happen to be on the bike already, failing in turn to utilize the variability in power and speed. Second, having the motor in the front hub puts all sorts of stress on the forks, limiting the maximum power and accelerating wear on one component you really wouldn't want to fail during run time. Proper chain oriented pedal assist systems are fully possible, I guess Sanyo just figured it was safer to copy the same design that many others have been peddling with limited success. Sigh.
I totally agree with you, we Americans are all slaves! But then... doesn't that make us free? Huzzah, Americans are free at last! But wait, that means we're all slaves....
Ok, ok. The real point imo is that there is no such thing as freedom in terms of government, it's just an empty word thrown around to stimulate nationalistic emotions or whatever else. True governmental freedom would be anarchy. Then again I don't think brainwash or mind control is real either; every bit of communication that reaches you is an attempt at mind control, some are just more damaging than others. Suffice it to say, if an argument is convincing and changes ones mind, well then it seems some form of mind control has taken place.
Exactly what I thought... 'sure, they'll steal a whole product without a moment's hesitation, but I'm sure my data will be perfectly private and safe with them."
Not that I'm going to change your mind about any of this, but...
"The wear has occurred assymmetrically, with that part of the stylus which bears against the right-hand wall of the groove (as seen looking towards the cartridge,with the centre of the record to the left) showing more wear than the side bearing against the left-hand wall."
"Neglecting factors such as the elastic deformation of vinyl, the distribution of forces in a V-shaped groove and the accelerations at the stylus tip during tracking, simple calculation based on these figures gives a stylus pressure of 240 grams per square mm, or 340 pounds per square inch. [...] The pressure exerted by a new (spherical or standard elliptical) stylus is even greater than the figure calculated above, as the area of contact of the new stylus tip with the walls of the groove will be less."
from: http://www.micrographia.com/projec/projapps/viny/viny0300.htm
"Since most vinyl records contain up to thirty per cent recycled vinyl, impurities can be accumulated in the record, causing a brand new album to have audio artifacts like clicks and pops. Virgin vinyl means that the album is not from recycled plastic, and will theoretically be devoid of these impurities. In practice, this depends on the manufacturer's quality control."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Vinyl_quality
etc.
I don't have any references for my final point, but who even bothers with cd's anymore? That's like so 90s:P. I've got a few hundred, sure, but I never have to change or handle them, they're all on my hard drive. IMHO, compared to (non-DRM) digital audio files, neither records nor cd's are even a contest.
96khz is major overkill. Find out for yourself, get a tone generator and I can almost guarantee you won't be able to hear 32khz, much less 96. The only reason I know this is because I've done it myself, curious about the whole 32/96 audio thing. Even with a brand new high quality record and a fully capable recording chain I've never seen frequencies much higher than 32khz (even though practically nobody could hear it anyway), in fact they often have considerably worse frequency response than digital audio. By extension, dvd-audio and SACD are a scam (as with most audiophile garbage).
A few years ago I worked in a record store where we actually sold more records more than cds. I own a relatively large number of records, contemporary and otherwise. Despite all this, It's my opinion that this is just a fad, one strangely ambling along at a lazy pace. I think the only reason it has been able to gain traction is because people don't realize all the pitfalls of records. To start, yes, records can theoretically sound better, but there are Many things that can get in the way of that: virgin vs. recycled vinyl, cold pressings, warping, dirty or worn stylus, imbalanced tonearm, etc. Even under optimum conditions the quality advantage of a record is gone after 5-8 plays, as friction heat from the stylus literally melts the signal irreparably; from then on, the sound quality will continue to deteriorate with each play. Most people start out saying that they like records because analog sounds better. Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing.
The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully, clean them often with specific supplies. After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over (don't try putting on a Barry White record, it may set the mood, but only for a few minutes... and hopefully that's regarded as a problem). Some people say they enjoy the whole process involved with records, that by having to do all that work they are able to appreciate the music more. Fine, but personally, having to constantly fidget with the record player interrupts the pleasure I get from listening. Also, consider the weight and space records take up: I estimate about 50 records occupy a cubic foot and weigh at least 25 lbs. On the other hand, you can fit thousands of digital albums in your pocket. Records do have a certain sense of novelty to them, but it wears off fast; digital music is and will remain an incredible thing.
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Is that you, Roger D. Hodge?? If not, well, I would figure the probability of such a precise summary of his excerpt in this months Harper's arising by random chance rather low. I'm always happy to stumble across a Harper's reader (since it is the singular and most incredible source of actual journalism on Earth), and I commend your swiftness in reading and recognition of applicability, with a C for comprehension, but c'mon man! Give credit where credit is due!
"In January, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court held that restrictions on independent corporate expenditures in political campaigns are unconstitutional infringements on the freedom of speech. Much of the judicial literature on the subject, including Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in Citizens United, simply substitutes the words "speech" and "speak" for the words "spend" and "buy." [...] It is a curious metaphysical doctrine, is it not? Corporations are artificial beings, theoretically immortal, which come into existence by means of state charters and reproduce like amoebas by splitting into subsidiaries; midwifed by lawyers, they combine in bizarre mating rituals called mergers; they are owned, like slaves, by shareholders who buy and sell their chattel daily; and they possess constitutional rights. Oddly, however, our corporate citizens are denied the right to vote. By what logic can a corporation be granted personhood and the constitutional right to speak money, yet be denied the constitutional right to vote? How can our system permit these corporate persons to be enslaved through ownership? [...] The Democratic Party's lamentable DISCLOSE Act, which this summer failed to muster sixty votes in the Senate, would do nothing, if passed, to curb the flow of cash and the further disenfranchisement of the vast majority of the citizenry. It is no great burden for large corporations and wealthy individuals to hire more clerks to file additional disclosure forms, and under current law we already know a great deal about who buys and sells our commodified rulers and their derivative legislation."
I take it back, there's no way you're Roger, his writing is several orders of magnitude better than yours. Moral of the story: everybody subscribe to Harper's, srsly 1 year for ~$17.
Sober Utah isn't as bad as one might think, or at least not for the reasons usually assumed; SLC is 55 to 66% non-Mormon and has one of the highest population of gays per capita in the US. Utah is also the 6th most urbanized state, with the highest proportion of income given to charity and the highest rate of volunteerism. Naturally, however, wet Utah is even more fun. We have a good array of fantastic local microbreweries (Squatters, Red Rock, Wasatch, Uinta, etc.) and access to some of the really excellent wee...err beer coming out of Colorado and California. The liquor laws can be a bit asinine, but mostly end up as minor inconveniences; regular strength beer can still be purchased.
Indeed, I still own my iPhone from 2007, which was used up until a few months ago; I had my iPhone before the app store came into existence. Sure there's the youtube app which will most likely have the video you're looking for, but it's not streaming a video on the full youtube.com page that you'd normally see. Not to mention there's a few other video streaming services that don't have apps.
Not only does my nexus one readily load flash content, the dolphin browser allows one to spoof the browser identity--quite handy for getting around mobile paywalls or into iPhone specific pages. Of course the true power of this new phone probably has more to do with the public existence of what resides at android.git.kernel.org
Have you tried sitting around on the couch browsing the web, watching video, and looking through your pictures on an iPad and on your netbook? Because the iPad is just way better at those things.
Yup, just remember that you wouldn't ever want to browse any web/video/picture/music/e/t/c sites that make use of Flash, like, oh man I can barely think of one... I guess youtube kinda counts, but who really wants to visit a dirty smelly wretched Flash site like youtube? See, that's the point, the iPad is SOOOO amazing because Flash is BAD. It's just so obvious that overpriced, locked down media is better than free Flash-based media, because, duh, battery life and stuff.
The summary states:
The total sample consisted of 1,000 torrent files—a random selection from the most active seeded files on the trackers they used.
Clearly then the sample isn't a random subset of 'all torrents' but instead of 'popular torrents on certain trackers.' This does not justify the proposition in the title "Study Finds 0.3% of BitTorrent Files Definitely Legal."
That aside, fat chance I'm going to trust The Internet Commerce Security Laboratory to keep their science unbiased in this regard. Seriously, for whom would a sample size of 1,000 torrents seem even close to enough?
When most people see my Nexus One they ask if its a Droid. I'm a little tired of explaining that Droid is a hardware series (with an incredibly huge marketing budget) and Android is an OS.
This. I get very frustrated very quickly when I'm forced to use a mouse that doesn't have back/forward buttons. It makes navigating the FS a lot faster too.
Hear, hear! There's nothing to indicate that the reasons for my move from the iHegemony are now part of my mobile Linux experience. In fact, just last night I had an experience that indicates the reasons for my move were more valid than I had anticipated: I discovered a bug in some small corner of the OS, reported it on the public bug tracker, then started digging through the Android git on the off chance I might be able to fix it myself.
Logically speaking, a free and open Linux variant is simply superior to iOS.
"New Study Declares 'Uber Ultra Extreme' Gamers Play 48 Hours a Day"
Just stop allowing people to drive already. We'd all be amazed at the increase in fuel efficiency and road safety.
Yes, just like how we use way too much oil to begin with--estimated daily US consumption of oil is around 19.5 million barrels. It's kind of logical that utter reliance upon burning about 605 million gallons of fossil fuel every single day is problematic. If only the consequences were as explicit as dead wildlife washing onto our doorsteps...
If it really comes down to an issue of resources, two things: 1. they better get here soon or there won't be much left and 2. given the size of the universe and all the evidence that life is pretty rare, the most valuable resources our planet has to offer is our life, thus it wouldn't make much economic sense to eradicate us. This may just mean that we'll be sold as exotic pets, but at least that's bound to be one hell of an adventure.
Maybe it just took them a while to figure out how to add the name of an unnamed man to the list. Technically he has always been on the list since the empty set is a subset of all sets, it was probably just that the for the first check they made the mistake of querying "Unnamed Man," a different person altogether who has not yet been discovered to be a threat.
Let me know when the first successful full head transplant takes place.
Ignoring as much as possible the confounding composition of this summary, there's something very wrong with this bit:
"...but mechanical hard drives are still king when it comes to capacity. That was until the revamped Colossus LT series Solid State Drive came along this week. With up to 1TB..."
Given that standard desktop form factor hard drives with a capacity of 2 TB are readily available for purchase, it doesn't seem that the arrival of the Revamped 1 TB Colossus LT Solid State Drive represents even a slight advantage for SSDs regarding capacity. Furthermore, as others have pointed out, instead of this single SSD, 20 traditional 1 TB hard drives could be purchased with enough budget left for a server board, processor, ram and a few discrete RAID cards.
I'm surprised to see this publicly available, usually such premium-priced products are exclusive to industries with more dollars than sense--film and medical come to mind.
I was sitting in my computer architecture class a few years ago when an article I remembered reading suddenly became relevant. I told the professor about how this article had said that modern processors have gotten so small and fast that they are now subject to a quantum phenomenon which causes an apparent slowdown in operational frequency over the course of a few years.
I generally hate broadcasting incorrect information, regardless of whether I or anyone else realizes it, so, feeling suspicious about what I had just said, I started googling. Eventually I found the article and saw that I had apparently remembered everything correctly, until I saw the date it was published: April 1st. Even then, at least several months and probably more than a year later, the only indication that the whole thing was a farce was the publish date. And a good thing I had my skepticism turned to 11, because April 1 or 4/1 is represented in my mind as a normal date, not a specific date in which the objective foundation of modern society is arbitrarily abandoned by sources otherwise regarded trustworthy.
I'm no physicist, but from what I gather this will happen when decades of experiments that successfully verify relativity are explained by some other theory that allows faster than light transportation of information (quantum mechanics doesn't). Personally I'm not inclined to think this is absolutely impossible for the general notion indicated by something such as Newtonian physics being described as a special case of, and therefore displaced by, relativistic physics. In other words, I think only small minded fools are willing to call a thing impossible (no offense to the small minded fools). There's also some rationally justifiable hope a further layer of physics is available to be found, indicated at least by the problematic rift between classical and quantum mechanics. Otherwise, according to our current understanding of reality, the latency is limited to distance times the speed of light in a vacuum. Given the mean equatorial circumference of Earth, that means either 66.8 ms around the surface or 42.6 ms straight through the middle. Even so, seeing how a blink of an eye is around 300-400 ms, 66.8 ms is pretty ok for going halfway around the planet.
i gotta wunda yzit dey tinkin wedadumwuns wen ryting disway canb far moar efishunt an expresiv. peepol who thro a fit abowt sumdin liek da cowrecked form uv der (they're, their, there) mussb dadumwuns cuz da meenins clear frum contxt... uddawyz der, der, an der woodall sownd diffrnt to. point izat if i sed der sittin ova der on der lawn, yad no wat i meen, so ynot makit da same for rytin. There are occasions that call for communicative and thus linguistic precision, which demand the correct use of words, syntax, grammar and so forth. However the notion that any non quantitative language can be used with maximum communicative efficacy is foolish. For instance, a studied linguistic prodigy could write a whole story with what was intended to be communicated hidden (but nonetheless objectively discernible) in the etymology of choice words while maintaining a coherent facade--in other words steganography by etymology. Similarly a word might be used such that several of its meanings yield sensible interpretations. The mere fact that many words have multiple distinct meanings is enough to indicate that absolute precision in communication by this language is unlikely. Despite this lack of objective precision, communication is surprisingly robust; people often use words thinking they mean something other than what they actually mean, yet the intended meaning comes across (more often than not, in my experience). The modern paragon of this situation is the phrase "beg the question," commonly used as though it means "causes the question to arise." This usage is unequivocally false: the phrase comes from formal logic as the fallacy of assuming what is to be proven, first defined by Aristotle ~350 BCE. It's not just the uneducated masses who abuse conventions, a good number of celebrated authors have as well: Emily Dickinson's work is superficially characterized by a distinct misuse thereof, Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature for a book that abandoned all rules regarding punctuation of speech, and for his best known work "A Clockwork Orange" Anthony Burgess successfully discarded much tradition in favor of a largely fabricated and evocative lexicon. Even authors for whom the principle intent is not to explicitly subvert tradition will occasionally see fit a bit of unrestrained expression. Intentional subversion of convention is not necessarily better than the accidental, as the important consideration is efficacy of communication; if technically incorrect writing communicates more effectively than the cowrecked alternative it must be qualitatively superior. Objectively the rules of writing should only matter as much as they aid in communication since it is the primary objective. This is a good thing, as the rules of writing are so complicated that even professional authors require editors to point out all the errors. If technical proficiency is more important than communication then language kinda loses its point, amirite? Clearly there are cases in which abandoning standards is more effective or desirable than abiding by canonical stricture, thus rendering the concern at hand nebulous. Are we simply to assume that people who replace 'because' with 'cuz' are idiots, or is it possible that certain other people are inflexible pedants unable to realize that 'cuz' is an efficient, effective and unambiguous replacement of 'because'? The truth is that language is evolving, as it has from inception, the only difference being that presently it is happening fast enough for crotchety pedagogues to notice and complain. If it weren't for such odd sociological pressures I think this evolution might happen much faster, at the very least cuz it does (with intriguing results) when distinct languages intersect. Some portion of people who started reading this won't make it to this point cuz of my possibly disconcerting choice of ostentatious diction (further rent til but a tortuous enigma did remain :P), which is too bad because they don't get to see this part where I expose my erudite articulation to be a Pl
Emphasis on directly, we've been able to coax human adult somatic cells to become pluripotent stem cells since 2007. The "ethical issues" are pretty much old news, bringing it up almost feels like troll bait. TFA suggests that these cells are much less prone to cancer than iPSCs, which seems like a rather important bit the summary omitted.
Electric bicycles are a great idea for advancing fitness and reducing energy consumption and pollution, but Sanyo did a terrible job at realizing this. Like the eneloop, most e-bikes have the electric motor mounted as the hub of the front wheel, and this is idiotic for a number of reasons. For one, this placement fails to utilize the ~21 gears that happen to be on the bike already, failing in turn to utilize the variability in power and speed. Second, having the motor in the front hub puts all sorts of stress on the forks, limiting the maximum power and accelerating wear on one component you really wouldn't want to fail during run time. Proper chain oriented pedal assist systems are fully possible, I guess Sanyo just figured it was safer to copy the same design that many others have been peddling with limited success. Sigh.
I totally agree with you, we Americans are all slaves! But then... doesn't that make us free? Huzzah, Americans are free at last! But wait, that means we're all slaves....
Ok, ok. The real point imo is that there is no such thing as freedom in terms of government, it's just an empty word thrown around to stimulate nationalistic emotions or whatever else. True governmental freedom would be anarchy. Then again I don't think brainwash or mind control is real either; every bit of communication that reaches you is an attempt at mind control, some are just more damaging than others. Suffice it to say, if an argument is convincing and changes ones mind, well then it seems some form of mind control has taken place.
Exactly what I thought... 'sure, they'll steal a whole product without a moment's hesitation, but I'm sure my data will be perfectly private and safe with them."
Not that I'm going to change your mind about any of this, but... "The wear has occurred assymmetrically, with that part of the stylus which bears against the right-hand wall of the groove (as seen looking towards the cartridge,with the centre of the record to the left) showing more wear than the side bearing against the left-hand wall." "Neglecting factors such as the elastic deformation of vinyl, the distribution of forces in a V-shaped groove and the accelerations at the stylus tip during tracking, simple calculation based on these figures gives a stylus pressure of 240 grams per square mm, or 340 pounds per square inch. [...] The pressure exerted by a new (spherical or standard elliptical) stylus is even greater than the figure calculated above, as the area of contact of the new stylus tip with the walls of the groove will be less." from: http://www.micrographia.com/projec/projapps/viny/viny0300.htm "Since most vinyl records contain up to thirty per cent recycled vinyl, impurities can be accumulated in the record, causing a brand new album to have audio artifacts like clicks and pops. Virgin vinyl means that the album is not from recycled plastic, and will theoretically be devoid of these impurities. In practice, this depends on the manufacturer's quality control." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record#Vinyl_quality etc. I don't have any references for my final point, but who even bothers with cd's anymore? That's like so 90s :P. I've got a few hundred, sure, but I never have to change or handle them, they're all on my hard drive. IMHO, compared to (non-DRM) digital audio files, neither records nor cd's are even a contest.
96khz is major overkill. Find out for yourself, get a tone generator and I can almost guarantee you won't be able to hear 32khz, much less 96. The only reason I know this is because I've done it myself, curious about the whole 32/96 audio thing. Even with a brand new high quality record and a fully capable recording chain I've never seen frequencies much higher than 32khz (even though practically nobody could hear it anyway), in fact they often have considerably worse frequency response than digital audio. By extension, dvd-audio and SACD are a scam (as with most audiophile garbage).
A few years ago I worked in a record store where we actually sold more records more than cds. I own a relatively large number of records, contemporary and otherwise. Despite all this, It's my opinion that this is just a fad, one strangely ambling along at a lazy pace. I think the only reason it has been able to gain traction is because people don't realize all the pitfalls of records. To start, yes, records can theoretically sound better, but there are Many things that can get in the way of that: virgin vs. recycled vinyl, cold pressings, warping, dirty or worn stylus, imbalanced tonearm, etc. Even under optimum conditions the quality advantage of a record is gone after 5-8 plays, as friction heat from the stylus literally melts the signal irreparably; from then on, the sound quality will continue to deteriorate with each play. Most people start out saying that they like records because analog sounds better. Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing. The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully, clean them often with specific supplies. After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over (don't try putting on a Barry White record, it may set the mood, but only for a few minutes... and hopefully that's regarded as a problem). Some people say they enjoy the whole process involved with records, that by having to do all that work they are able to appreciate the music more. Fine, but personally, having to constantly fidget with the record player interrupts the pleasure I get from listening. Also, consider the weight and space records take up: I estimate about 50 records occupy a cubic foot and weigh at least 25 lbs. On the other hand, you can fit thousands of digital albums in your pocket. Records do have a certain sense of novelty to them, but it wears off fast; digital music is and will remain an incredible thing.