Or, you know, just make it possible for people to participate in a self-sufficient agrarian economy outside of the mainstream "get a job with the man" one. Only problem with that is that people would have to be responsible for their own welfare, and that doesn't fit with your (american) liberal ideas.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's a workable idea.
What happens when someone in your self-sufficient agrarian society gets sick/injured and needs medical care? How much arable land will you require per person? Who pays the property taxes on the land?
I can think of other objections (e.g. farming equipment is not cheap), but many of the other objections are at least theoretically solvable with enough of a DIY ethic. The objections listed above... I don't see how you can DIY your way out of those.
I'm not an acoustical engineer, but I seriously wonder whether you can "compensate for room geometry" in any meaningful sense just by adding a bit of digital processing. You can notch the EQ to compensate for the resonant frequencies of the room itself, any competent sound guy can do that, but I'm not sure what else you can do. There's a reason that studio owners spend thousands, or sometimes tens of thousands, on room treatments.
It's a good point, that a "comparison to the average" test can tell us something about inflated self-regard, although even that is fraught with multiple problems. (Let's say 75% of the meditation group assess themselves as being better at yoga than the average student in their class. Are they comparing themselves to the entire class, or just to the subset that did meditation? Was the meditation subgroup randomly selected, and did they ensure that the average skill level of the meditation subgroup was similar to that of the other yoga students? Also, a certain subset of that 75% will be absolutely correct in saying that they are better than the average student-- so how can you tell which ones are assessing themselves incorrectly? Maybe the number of incorrect-positive assessments is constant between the two groups, and the only effect of meditation was to reduce the number of incorrect-negative assessments).
Anyway, my point was that the summary talks about measures of narcissism ("I will be remembered for the great deeds I will do") and measures of healthy self-esteem (e.g. "My self-esteem is high right now") as if they were interchangeable.
That's not even getting into the potential issues with the construct validity of the different assessment tools. (To take a silly edge-case example: if one of your students happens to have won a Nobel Prize, or saved a child from drowning, the statement "I will be remembered for my great deeds" is not a valid measurement of whether he is a narcissist).
Did they make *any* attempt to distinguish between the two? If not, it's a worthless study.
Healthy self-esteem is based on a realistic and measured appreciation of your own good qualities ("I'm a good ukulele player"). Inflated self-esteem is, well, inflated ("I'm the greatest fucking ukulele player on earth"). Malignant narcissism, as seen for example in narcissistic personality disorder, also tends to include a competitive need to denigrate the positive qualities of others ("All other ukulele players are shit"), and tends to include the belief that you deserve special treatment because of your extraordinary qualities ("I should get my ukuleles sent to me for free, and I don't need to be nice to people because I'm such a genius at the ukulele").
Yeah, "last 10-15 years" puts it well after my time. I actually went to University of Chicago in the late 80s and I can remember meeting exactly *one* freshman who came from the Chicago Public School system. He was valedictorian of his class and a very bright guy all around, and he still thought he'd beaten long odds by getting into U of C after graduating from CPS.
Maybe. I guess nobody ever told me there was a "shitty-school bonus point" system. I figured it worked the opposite way-- if you had a B average from a highly competitive prep school, it would count for more than a B average from a public school, since they would know that the academic standards were higher.
Of course there are also bonus points for being poor/disadvantaged, so going to a public school might help you in that regard. I still think that if you transfer after your junior year, people will just assume that you got kicked out or something.
Thatâ(TM)s an odd strategy, since college applications take place midway through senior year. Half the grades from senior year wonâ(TM)t even be seen by the application committee (thatâ(TM)s why you see the âoesenior slumpâ in GPA once the applications are in). Also, committees are going to wonder why you transferred from an exclusive prep school into a public school.
Facebook, Google et al. should say: "This is the product we make. Our product is designed to have certain privacy safeguards in place, and we won't abide by your laws because it violates our company policy.* If this means our product is illegal to use in your country, then we're sorry, I guess people won't be using it in your country."
The downside: they don't do business in Vietnam. How big a fucking deal is that? For companies of this size, not a very big deal, I'm guessing.
The upside: They look like the good guys, and they get a huge amount of good publicity, for once.
The other upside: Vietnam's government has just forbidden the entire population of Vietnam from using Google and Facebook-- popular products that they want to use, and that almost everyone else in the world gets to use. They're going to be pissed off. Royally. Maybe it becomes a lot harder for you to hold onto your political power.
(*) Yes, yes, I know. Facebook and Google are both shitty companies that violate their own privacy policy all the time, both in ways that we know about and in ways that we don't. I have no illusions about that. Nonetheless, the blatant authoritarianism represented by this Vietnamese law is *even worse* than what we have to deal with in the US (IMO), and these companies can take a meaningful stand against it if they choose to do so.
Are any known examples of creatures who *can* count, but who *don't* understand zero? In other words, creatures who can be trained to pick the image with the smaller number of elements, but who fail to recognize that an empty image contains fewer elements than an image that is not empty?
That would actually be a more interesting result (I guess). I'm having a hard time getting my ahead around why this is an important question. I know that *written* systems for counting did not always use a symbol for zero (perhaps because with a sufficiently-primitive written system there is no real use for a zero symbol), but the concept that "none is less than one" seems inherent to the idea of counting. In fact, it's hard to imagine a creature that understands counting but does not understand that none is less than one.
So according to this study from 2013, we are putting about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
Even with this new downwardly-revised estimate, the cost of taking it out again comes to somewhere between 3.7 trillion dollars and 9.2 trillion dollars. Per year. Every year.
It's an interesting piece of research, but don't start celebrating in the streets just yet.
As far as I can tell from a quick web search, there are *no* Apple Stores located in Russia, never have been. I don't know if Apple has any employees in Russia at all. Iphones are available, but they're sold through local retail outlets.
If Apple has any guts they will say: look, this is the product we made, it is designed to run apps like Telegram-- if you don't like our product, you can just make it illegal to sell them in your country. The result would be this: a billion or two in lost sales (if that), and one of the greatest public-relations triumphs in the history of public relations. If they do it with any panache, they could easily make the front page of the New York Times with this story.
As far as I know, someEU countries don't even publish defendants' names in trials in order to protect them since they're presumed innocent. Not to mention that convictions for more minor crimes typically drop off a person's record after 5-10 years. They're actually concerned about rehabilitation, not pure vengeance.
I work in one of the wealthy suburbs in the North Shore of Chicago, and once in a while I leaf through one of the incredibly boring suburban newspapers from places like Northbrook or Glencoe. There is *always* a "police blotter" type column, where they seem to report every last arrest that took place in their suburb, and they make a point of identifying the arrestee as specifically as possible ("Robert Eric Smith, aged 37, of Waukegan, IL"). None of the arrests are remotely newsworthy-- they are mostly someone who was caught shoplifting, or caught with a joint, or caught driving with a suspended license, or something similar. (I also have noticed that the ones who were driving were invariably pulled over for something very minor or nebulous, like "improper lane usage"-- probably they were pulled over for driving a beater car in a town full of one-percenters). Of course, these papers absolutely never publish a followup story to tell us whether the person was convicted or not.
In other words, I agree with the policy of these EU countries, and indeed this is the standard I was taught to follow when I took journalism classes in high school. It's just unfortunate that so many newspapers follow the exact opposite of this policy.
Get a life... a sense of humour... and a username...
Look, I agree with you that the AC's response was humorless and gratuitously unpleasant, but... I have to admit I rolled my eyes a little bit at the (inevitable) 2010 reference. If I wanted to hear from commenters whose response to every conceivable news item is a movie reference, I'd start reading io9 again.
Well, sure I can do that, and personally this issue doesn't affect me a whole lot anyway, because when I go to see music it's usually at a club rather than a big theater or stadium. But I think it's outrageous that I don't even have the *option*. For example: I would have liked to see Leonard Cohen's final tour, and that would have almost certainly required dealing with Ticketmaster. They're a horrible company that I don't want to give any money to, and that was true even before they began asking me to hand over facial recognition data.
The problem is that Ticketmaster has what amounts to a monopoly on many of the larger venues in the US. Back in 1994 Pearl Jam, which at the time was one of the biggest bands in the world, tried to book a tour without using Ticketmaster and they found that they simply couldn't do it. And as the linked article indicates, Ticketmaster has only gotten bigger and more powerful since then.
I don't think we've made anything that would be considered "undecomposable" after millions of years. Moreover, even if we could, wouldn't they be buried after millions of years instead of sitting on the surface?
We've made cut gemstones. I'm guessing most of these would not decompose even after two million years. (I don't know if or how you could distinguish a diamond that was cut a million years ago from one that was cut a hundred years ago, but still).
And according to this chart, (https://www.des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/trash/documents/marine_debris.pdf) glass bottles take a million years to decompose.
Also, I don't know if decomposed plastic fully decomposes, even in geologic time. (No, really-- I don't know. Maybe a chemist can weigh in on the subject). Let's assume they don't: that means that a million years from now, there will be a distinct strata of the Earth's crust which is enriched with plastic sediment or microspheres. Geologists, if there are any around, would be able to deduce that our civilization existed from that alone.
I know this story is about the UK, but clearly the US telecoms are moving to VOIP as well, and I wonder about the legal implications. If phone service is now considered an "online service", does the FOSTA/SESTA legislation apply to it? Will telecoms be required to monitor the content of phone calls in order to make sure that no one is committing a crime? How will this affect the ease with which LEOs can monitor or record your phone calls?
Iâ(TM)ve worked with one dork who wrote a paper a month because it was a 2k bonus and after working with him briefly i found out he was basically was a historian. He just used other papers as a reference and did no actual study or research.
Yes, this kind of paper is called a "review article". What's your point?
People take jobs, signing non-compete clauses, knowing these are unenforceable.
Are you quite sure that non-compete clauses are unenforceable?
I can tell you how it is in healthcare: non-compete clauses are fairly common, and people tend to take them quite seriously. I did read about a case where a non-compete clause was defeated in court (the doctor argued, successfully, that it harmed the public interest by depriving patients of their choice of physician), but it took a significant amount of time and money. That court decision took place in a different state than the one I live in and the precedent would be of limited value to me, if I ever ended up in court.
I also know that lawyers in the US universally refuse to sign non-compete clauses for their own services (it's a bar association rule, or something), again making the argument that it is unfair to the clients. They're obviously not comfortable with the idea that "I'll just sign this, but it doesn't matter because it's unenforceable".
You are aware that 50% of the population have an IQ of 100 or less?
That's how it works.
That was my first thought as well-- of course, IQ scores are normed and his statement is incorrect. But in fairness to the OP, I *think* what he was trying to say is this: If you measure people's IQ using the norms derived from developed countries, then significantly more than half of the world's population will fall below 100. (I have no idea whether the 60% figure is accurate).
We know that if you look at IQs by country there are very significant differences. Frankly, it's interesting to look at these differences. (Did you know that the USA is tied for ninth place? Did you know that the average IQ in China is 105? I didn't.) The one fairly consistent pattern is that wealthier countries, and countries with a good medical system, get much higher scores. (That being said, there are some remarkable outliers, the biggest one being China-- they're ranked only #105 in per capita income, but tied for #3 in IQ!)
I don't think there is any need to invoke racial/genetic factors to explain these differences in IQ, since there are so many good explanations we can come up which involve nurture rather than nature. We know that IQ is strongly affected by prenatal care, by childhood disease, by malnutrition, by factors such as endemic parasite infections, and by access to early education. Do a literature search on Pubmed and you'll find a ton of painstakingly-done research which backs me up. The fact is that our brains are fragile, and it doesn't take much to stunt their growth.
Sorry for the double post-- I hit "submit" too early. I did in fact google this shit, about three years ago when Apple was still making iPods and I wanted to buy one for my daughter. Yes, there were some folks on the forums who preferred to use outboard DACs and the like-- but there were a lot more who were simply interested in getting the best product for off-the-shelf use. That's how I ended up buying a slightly used 5th gen iPod, instead of the then-current 6th gen. It was widely believed that the 5th gen sounded better.
You may want to google that shit. There seems to be a lot of hardware mods and use of external DACS. They see the capacity as convenience, not quality.
Well, sure, I could carry around an external DAC to use with my phone (actually I already own one-- the Apogee ONE-- which I use with my Mac for music recording/playback, and which can be connected to my iPhone if I want to do that). Or I could void my warranty by implementing some kind of DIY hardware mod. The point is, I don't want to do either! I have enough trouble not losing my phone as it is, I don't want to carry around a bunch of extra stuff!
Slashdot Mirror
Or, you know, just make it possible for people to participate in a self-sufficient agrarian economy outside of the mainstream "get a job with the man" one. Only problem with that is that people would have to be responsible for their own welfare, and that doesn't fit with your (american) liberal ideas.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't know if it's a workable idea.
What happens when someone in your self-sufficient agrarian society gets sick/injured and needs medical care? How much arable land will you require per person? Who pays the property taxes on the land?
I can think of other objections (e.g. farming equipment is not cheap), but many of the other objections are at least theoretically solvable with enough of a DIY ethic. The objections listed above... I don't see how you can DIY your way out of those.
I'm not an acoustical engineer, but I seriously wonder whether you can "compensate for room geometry" in any meaningful sense just by adding a bit of digital processing. You can notch the EQ to compensate for the resonant frequencies of the room itself, any competent sound guy can do that, but I'm not sure what else you can do. There's a reason that studio owners spend thousands, or sometimes tens of thousands, on room treatments.
"It's so advanced... you don't even need it." -Stephen Wright
It's a good point, that a "comparison to the average" test can tell us something about inflated self-regard, although even that is fraught with multiple problems. (Let's say 75% of the meditation group assess themselves as being better at yoga than the average student in their class. Are they comparing themselves to the entire class, or just to the subset that did meditation? Was the meditation subgroup randomly selected, and did they ensure that the average skill level of the meditation subgroup was similar to that of the other yoga students? Also, a certain subset of that 75% will be absolutely correct in saying that they are better than the average student-- so how can you tell which ones are assessing themselves incorrectly? Maybe the number of incorrect-positive assessments is constant between the two groups, and the only effect of meditation was to reduce the number of incorrect-negative assessments).
Anyway, my point was that the summary talks about measures of narcissism ("I will be remembered for the great deeds I will do") and measures of healthy self-esteem (e.g. "My self-esteem is high right now") as if they were interchangeable.
That's not even getting into the potential issues with the construct validity of the different assessment tools. (To take a silly edge-case example: if one of your students happens to have won a Nobel Prize, or saved a child from drowning, the statement "I will be remembered for my great deeds" is not a valid measurement of whether he is a narcissist).
Did they make *any* attempt to distinguish between the two? If not, it's a worthless study.
Healthy self-esteem is based on a realistic and measured appreciation of your own good qualities ("I'm a good ukulele player"). Inflated self-esteem is, well, inflated ("I'm the greatest fucking ukulele player on earth"). Malignant narcissism, as seen for example in narcissistic personality disorder, also tends to include a competitive need to denigrate the positive qualities of others ("All other ukulele players are shit"), and tends to include the belief that you deserve special treatment because of your extraordinary qualities ("I should get my ukuleles sent to me for free, and I don't need to be nice to people because I'm such a genius at the ukulele").
Yeah, "last 10-15 years" puts it well after my time. I actually went to University of Chicago in the late 80s and I can remember meeting exactly *one* freshman who came from the Chicago Public School system. He was valedictorian of his class and a very bright guy all around, and he still thought he'd beaten long odds by getting into U of C after graduating from CPS.
Maybe. I guess nobody ever told me there was a "shitty-school bonus point" system. I figured it worked the opposite way-- if you had a B average from a highly competitive prep school, it would count for more than a B average from a public school, since they would know that the academic standards were higher.
Of course there are also bonus points for being poor/disadvantaged, so going to a public school might help you in that regard. I still think that if you transfer after your junior year, people will just assume that you got kicked out or something.
Thatâ(TM)s an odd strategy, since college applications take place midway through senior year. Half the grades from senior year wonâ(TM)t even be seen by the application committee (thatâ(TM)s why you see the âoesenior slumpâ in GPA once the applications are in). Also, committees are going to wonder why you transferred from an exclusive prep school into a public school.
Facebook, Google et al. should say: "This is the product we make. Our product is designed to have certain privacy safeguards in place, and we won't abide by your laws because it violates our company policy.* If this means our product is illegal to use in your country, then we're sorry, I guess people won't be using it in your country."
The downside: they don't do business in Vietnam. How big a fucking deal is that? For companies of this size, not a very big deal, I'm guessing.
The upside: They look like the good guys, and they get a huge amount of good publicity, for once.
The other upside: Vietnam's government has just forbidden the entire population of Vietnam from using Google and Facebook-- popular products that they want to use, and that almost everyone else in the world gets to use. They're going to be pissed off. Royally. Maybe it becomes a lot harder for you to hold onto your political power.
(*) Yes, yes, I know. Facebook and Google are both shitty companies that violate their own privacy policy all the time, both in ways that we know about and in ways that we don't. I have no illusions about that. Nonetheless, the blatant authoritarianism represented by this Vietnamese law is *even worse* than what we have to deal with in the US (IMO), and these companies can take a meaningful stand against it if they choose to do so.
Are any known examples of creatures who *can* count, but who *don't* understand zero? In other words, creatures who can be trained to pick the image with the smaller number of elements, but who fail to recognize that an empty image contains fewer elements than an image that is not empty?
That would actually be a more interesting result (I guess). I'm having a hard time getting my ahead around why this is an important question. I know that *written* systems for counting did not always use a symbol for zero (perhaps because with a sufficiently-primitive written system there is no real use for a zero symbol), but the concept that "none is less than one" seems inherent to the idea of counting. In fact, it's hard to imagine a creature that understands counting but does not understand that none is less than one.
So according to this study from 2013, we are putting about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
Even with this new downwardly-revised estimate, the cost of taking it out again comes to somewhere between 3.7 trillion dollars and 9.2 trillion dollars. Per year. Every year.
It's an interesting piece of research, but don't start celebrating in the streets just yet.
As far as I can tell from a quick web search, there are *no* Apple Stores located in Russia, never have been. I don't know if Apple has any employees in Russia at all. Iphones are available, but they're sold through local retail outlets.
If Apple has any guts they will say: look, this is the product we made, it is designed to run apps like Telegram-- if you don't like our product, you can just make it illegal to sell them in your country. The result would be this: a billion or two in lost sales (if that), and one of the greatest public-relations triumphs in the history of public relations. If they do it with any panache, they could easily make the front page of the New York Times with this story.
It's a trick to get it posted all over the place, and since I'd never heard of it before Slashdot posted this story, mission accomplished.
Posting to reverse an accidental mod (I was trying to mod the parent as "Insightful" and accidentally hit "flamebait")
With the rapid advancements in AI, it doesn't seem that this problem should be too hard to resolve.
Wasn't that the plot of Terminator 3?
As far as I know, someEU countries don't even publish defendants' names in trials in order to protect them since they're presumed innocent. Not to mention that convictions for more minor crimes typically drop off a person's record after 5-10 years. They're actually concerned about rehabilitation, not pure vengeance.
I work in one of the wealthy suburbs in the North Shore of Chicago, and once in a while I leaf through one of the incredibly boring suburban newspapers from places like Northbrook or Glencoe. There is *always* a "police blotter" type column, where they seem to report every last arrest that took place in their suburb, and they make a point of identifying the arrestee as specifically as possible ("Robert Eric Smith, aged 37, of Waukegan, IL"). None of the arrests are remotely newsworthy-- they are mostly someone who was caught shoplifting, or caught with a joint, or caught driving with a suspended license, or something similar. (I also have noticed that the ones who were driving were invariably pulled over for something very minor or nebulous, like "improper lane usage"-- probably they were pulled over for driving a beater car in a town full of one-percenters). Of course, these papers absolutely never publish a followup story to tell us whether the person was convicted or not.
In other words, I agree with the policy of these EU countries, and indeed this is the standard I was taught to follow when I took journalism classes in high school. It's just unfortunate that so many newspapers follow the exact opposite of this policy.
Get a life... a sense of humour... and a username...
Look, I agree with you that the AC's response was humorless and gratuitously unpleasant, but... I have to admit I rolled my eyes a little bit at the (inevitable) 2010 reference. If I wanted to hear from commenters whose response to every conceivable news item is a movie reference, I'd start reading io9 again.
Well, sure I can do that, and personally this issue doesn't affect me a whole lot anyway, because when I go to see music it's usually at a club rather than a big theater or stadium. But I think it's outrageous that I don't even have the *option*. For example: I would have liked to see Leonard Cohen's final tour, and that would have almost certainly required dealing with Ticketmaster. They're a horrible company that I don't want to give any money to, and that was true even before they began asking me to hand over facial recognition data.
The problem is that Ticketmaster has what amounts to a monopoly on many of the larger venues in the US. Back in 1994 Pearl Jam, which at the time was one of the biggest bands in the world, tried to book a tour without using Ticketmaster and they found that they simply couldn't do it. And as the linked article indicates, Ticketmaster has only gotten bigger and more powerful since then.
I don't think we've made anything that would be considered "undecomposable" after millions of years. Moreover, even if we could, wouldn't they be buried after millions of years instead of sitting on the surface?
We've made cut gemstones. I'm guessing most of these would not decompose even after two million years. (I don't know if or how you could distinguish a diamond that was cut a million years ago from one that was cut a hundred years ago, but still).
And according to this chart, (https://www.des.nh.gov/organization/divisions/water/wmb/coastal/trash/documents/marine_debris.pdf) glass bottles take a million years to decompose.
Also, I don't know if decomposed plastic fully decomposes, even in geologic time. (No, really-- I don't know. Maybe a chemist can weigh in on the subject). Let's assume they don't: that means that a million years from now, there will be a distinct strata of the Earth's crust which is enriched with plastic sediment or microspheres. Geologists, if there are any around, would be able to deduce that our civilization existed from that alone.
I know this story is about the UK, but clearly the US telecoms are moving to VOIP as well, and I wonder about the legal implications. If phone service is now considered an "online service", does the FOSTA/SESTA legislation apply to it? Will telecoms be required to monitor the content of phone calls in order to make sure that no one is committing a crime? How will this affect the ease with which LEOs can monitor or record your phone calls?
Iâ(TM)ve worked with one dork who wrote a paper a month because it was a 2k bonus and after working with him briefly i found out he was basically was a historian. He just used other papers as a reference and did no actual study or research.
Yes, this kind of paper is called a "review article". What's your point?
People take jobs, signing non-compete clauses, knowing these are unenforceable.
Are you quite sure that non-compete clauses are unenforceable?
I can tell you how it is in healthcare: non-compete clauses are fairly common, and people tend to take them quite seriously. I did read about a case where a non-compete clause was defeated in court (the doctor argued, successfully, that it harmed the public interest by depriving patients of their choice of physician), but it took a significant amount of time and money. That court decision took place in a different state than the one I live in and the precedent would be of limited value to me, if I ever ended up in court.
I also know that lawyers in the US universally refuse to sign non-compete clauses for their own services (it's a bar association rule, or something), again making the argument that it is unfair to the clients. They're obviously not comfortable with the idea that "I'll just sign this, but it doesn't matter because it's unenforceable".
No idea how it works in other fields...
You are aware that 50% of the population have an IQ of 100 or less?
That's how it works.
That was my first thought as well-- of course, IQ scores are normed and his statement is incorrect. But in fairness to the OP, I *think* what he was trying to say is this: If you measure people's IQ using the norms derived from developed countries, then significantly more than half of the world's population will fall below 100. (I have no idea whether the 60% figure is accurate).
We know that if you look at IQs by country there are very significant differences. Frankly, it's interesting to look at these differences. (Did you know that the USA is tied for ninth place? Did you know that the average IQ in China is 105? I didn't.) The one fairly consistent pattern is that wealthier countries, and countries with a good medical system, get much higher scores. (That being said, there are some remarkable outliers, the biggest one being China-- they're ranked only #105 in per capita income, but tied for #3 in IQ!)
I don't think there is any need to invoke racial/genetic factors to explain these differences in IQ, since there are so many good explanations we can come up which involve nurture rather than nature. We know that IQ is strongly affected by prenatal care, by childhood disease, by malnutrition, by factors such as endemic parasite infections, and by access to early education. Do a literature search on Pubmed and you'll find a ton of painstakingly-done research which backs me up. The fact is that our brains are fragile, and it doesn't take much to stunt their growth.
Sorry for the double post-- I hit "submit" too early. I did in fact google this shit, about three years ago when Apple was still making iPods and I wanted to buy one for my daughter. Yes, there were some folks on the forums who preferred to use outboard DACs and the like-- but there were a lot more who were simply interested in getting the best product for off-the-shelf use. That's how I ended up buying a slightly used 5th gen iPod, instead of the then-current 6th gen. It was widely believed that the 5th gen sounded better.
You may want to google that shit. There seems to be a lot of hardware mods and use of external DACS. They see the capacity as convenience, not quality.
Well, sure, I could carry around an external DAC to use with my phone (actually I already own one-- the Apogee ONE-- which I use with my Mac for music recording/playback, and which can be connected to my iPhone if I want to do that). Or I could void my warranty by implementing some kind of DIY hardware mod. The point is, I don't want to do either! I have enough trouble not losing my phone as it is, I don't want to carry around a bunch of extra stuff!