Exactly. This is one theory why, in addition to camouflage, polar bears are white. In the arctic daylight is extremely sparse in the winter, so it is better to optimize for reducing thermal emission than for capturing radiation. Similarly, many nomadic desert tribes traditionally wear black. This increases thermal emission, and you simply stay out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day. Most travel would be done at dawn or dusk, or even at night.
Okay. A woman's ex husband is putting signs on her Camry advertising that she is looking for random sex with strangers. These signs include her work phone number and email address, which is causing her a lot of grief as people keep calling her looking for random sex. The author of the article is wondering why Toyota isn't doing anything about her ex putting these inflammatory signs on her car.
That is one element involved... note how (at least in the 20th century) almost all musical innovations come from people in oppression or at least a lower economic class. Blues, Jazz, Country, Soul, Rock N Roll, R&B, Techno, and Hip Hop came from poor people. Reggae, Dub and Dancehall from Jamaica where people live in shacks around the razor wire and broken bottle topped walls of manor houses. The whole Latin Music movement started primarily in Cuba, with everything that goes along with living on a dictator run island nation under a trade embargo with the largest economic superpower which lays less than 100 miles from your shores. Rai from the Maghreb (Northern Africa) where simply practicing their own culture could get people jailed or worse by the controlling Islamic population.
That being said, there are many other elements allow bands to only get a few good albums out:
The so called "Genius Curve" in which people in any creative discipline (Including theoretical scientists) as a rule produce their most influential work in their late mid to late twenties.
A limit of good ideas. The environment a person surrounds themselves with may limit themselves to one or a few good, creative ideas. Bands like the Beatles (whether or not you like them, they did put out a large number of albums which were liked by a large number of people) strove to immerse themselves in other cultures and ways of thought, which could expand the number of ideas to combine allowing for a new idea to emerge.
Getting stale or selling out. If you keep doing the same thing musically, it gets old. It gets old both for you and for the audience. If you try something new, your old fans accuse you of selling out and there are lots of people who may have liked your new stuff, but their image of what you are doing is tainted by their perceptions of your older works. This may sound cynical, but in fact musicians write music to be listened to by other people... it is a performance art. If writing music was done purely for the love of the process of making something new, that could be done in your basement without the hassle of getting it recorded and pressed. A good set of headphones for the musician sounds much better for the money and is a lot easier to manage than the amplifiers and PA systems needed to perform modern instruments for the public, but headphones isn't what musicians spend their money on.
Other responsibilities. When musicians dedicated to becoming great start out, The Music is their primary responsibility. Everything else is just a vehicle to allowing the music to happen. They get jobs to pay for instruments and other band equipment. They choose where to live based on the ability to practice their without the neighbors complaining, as well as the proximity to other musicians and artists who would serve to enhance creative discussion. They socialize based on people's ideas. Eventually the business end of being a musician starts to creep up in importance simply to maintain the band's status, so time spent with lawyers, PR folks, managers, accountants, touring, making videos etc starts to eat away at practice and writing time. Musicians who tend to keep making innovative music often have to get away from the world to keep doing so. The Band would spend months and years on a plot of land with a studio built in an old farmhouse doing nothing but music. Rivers Cuomo reportedly has a cabin he retreats to and writes music for long stretches of time. And once a musician has a family, that almost universally becomes the focus of their life. Once this happens, it is almost only family tragedy that can bring out a new, powerful, successful song which can spark a renewed passion in music, such as Eric Clapton writing Tears in Heaven after his son's tragic death.
Getting older demographically: younger people (teens and twenties) tend to be far more interested in music than older people. So the conversations of the people around you tend to start drifting away from music and on to ot
Here in the United States, the opposite generally happens. If one of the two parties feels they are in danger of losing votes to a third party, they take on more elements of the other major party to sway votes from the fence sitters between them, and with good reason: there are currently many more voters to sway from the other second party than from the third parties, and third party voters are probable less likely to be swayed than those on the fence between Democrat and Republican. This aligning of ideals then goes one step worse: it allows the two major parties to paint third parties as kooks, weirdos and outsiders when a campaign platform significantly differs with a shared ideal of the two majors. See the political response to Socialism in the United States as an example.
Notice even the term "third party." That means any party which is not Republican or Democrat gets lumped together as one, even though there are many parties. Those supporting the ideology of supporting a party other than the major two are split between many different actual parties. Greens compete with Libertarians and the Constitution party more than with Republicans or Democrats, and so on. We've got a long way to go before the bicameral system is actually broken apart for more than a token run at a couple of local seats. Even if a third party did manage to gain enough strength for consistent wins, I fear that they would be more likely to end up supplanting one of the other two parties than actually serving to increase political diversity, due to the very same reasons I stated why significant third party turnout serves to tighten the platforms between the two major parties. Once a third party becomes an incumbent they have to start playing by the rules of the big dogs to stay in power as the grass roots charm is lost.
Not to mention, if the Mega-Corp likes the idea, they'll find a way to implement it whether or not you are helping them. You may be in the right, but if they want they can get the product cranked out faster and with more developed distribution channels and contacts. More importantly, they can throw more and better experienced lawyers at defending themselves than you can throw at them.
If it suddenly become legal, what made them think that they can profit from it?
They think they can profit because they have (or at least intend to have) an exclusive contract with the game company to do the legal transactions.
Players would have an incentive to purchase from an official third party rather than a black market source as the likelihood of all sorts of different fraudulent activities would be reduced. What assurance are you given that you will receive the item advertised, or any item at all? Do you think the back alley item salesman would think twice about selling your contact information to spammers? How convinced are you that your financial information will be handled in a secure manner, if not outright sold on the black market?
The big question might be why the game publishers don't get into the action themselves rather than having a third party perform the transaction. There are foreseeable problems with the developer running an in game real money trading economy, primarily in customer perception. Redirecting the ire of irate "purist" gamers to a third party is a win for the developer. Additionally, specialization and economies of scale could possible make combating fraud more reasonable. Same for handling a sale between people who use different currencies. Developing both the game world and the transaction system could be tricky tax-wise and could even present expensive edge cases of legal liability.
In the end, some developers will decide to use a third party to handle player/player transactions. Some game companies will decide that handling financial transactions internally is worthwhile... likely those under the umbrella of a larger publisher that can devote the developer expertise to creating a fairly robust market system (parts of which can the be reused in other games) as well as the legal muscle to not get in too much trouble with it. Other in-game economies will still prohibit all real money sales... and those games will always have a prominent, annoying black market element. The developers can do their best to stamp out the gold-farmers, but any time there is a profit motive roaches will come out of the woodwork to try to get a quick meal. And once they are there, they reproduce quicker than you can stamp them out.
Meh... only bad form on bulletin boards which have an "edit post" feature. Slashdot decided not to allow editing of posts (most likely because it would be too powerful of a tool for trolls) so it's all good here.
The rationale behind using the MSRP of the whole album does indeed make sense: copyright infringement is on a "per work" basis not on a "per snippet" basis. I assume the "work" here is being defined as the entire album. If you were illegally distributing a single chapter of a book, the value used would likely be for the entire book. An album is traditionally the basic unit of sale, and therefore is reasonable to use the album's MSRP as the base value. The album as base unit of sale is indeed changing with online sales of single songs, but the copyright holder would be the one to define what constitutes a work, and it would take a fair bit of legal savvy to prove otherwise.
Note that I am not arguing that 116 times retail value is reasonable, and I am far from convinced that it is indeed reasonable. My current suspicion is that pushing for such large damages will actually hurt the record companies in the long run, but the settlement value of $4000 (according to this post) offered does seem justifiable to me (I'm not claiming it is RIGHT, simply justifiable.) However, it would require a very strong argument to convince me that using the album retail price as the base rate is unreasonable.
All this aside, I do feel that if the RIAA is claiming damage values based on the entire album, then sharing multiple songs from the same album should indeed be counted as one infringement. Not that I have any reason to suspect that the RIAA is attempting to seek damages based on the full album price for multiple infringements off the same album, just speaking my mind. And I also feel that copyright terms are currently indefensibly long in duration, but that is a whole different topic and I am probably just preaching to the choir with that thought.
To further this, I don't even think the person who receives the software under a temporary license will be directly doing the reciprocation... supply and demand of labor will do the job for you. If there is an excess of potentially employable people who are familiar with your software, companies will not have to pay as high wages for new hires. Therefore purchasing your software will yield companies a net gain. So they buy your software rather than a competitor's, even if the feature set is comparable.
It may seem like taking the free license will be hurting you more than helping, as your wages go down because of the process. However, not taking the free license results in you not being employable at all... enough people would think a job with less money is better than no job with no money.
This does, of course, assume that the two pieces of software are different enough that learning one will not make you significantly better at the other. This assumption is realistically not very strong in practice, but the image of the assumption's strength could very well be enough to convince HR to put "3 years of experience with Autocad" rather than "3 years of experience with CAD software."
Yes, there will be some errors. And those exist now... just last night I was talking to someone who went to get a birth control shot, and she got suspect when they tried to administer it in a different arm than normal (the charts list preference of arm.) It turns out they had the chart of someone with the same name (first, middle initial, and last) and birthdate (but born two years later) who was also scheduled to come in that day for an insulin injection for diabetes. If the other patient had also been right handed, a dangerous situation would have been caused for both patients.
Having the blood sugar level information automatically read by instruments already in the body would have sent an immediate warning to not administer insulin...
And having as little of a medical history as most doctors currently do makes diagnosis resemble a snipe hunt compared to the wild goose chase that errors in the history would cause. I assume determining if anomalous readings are due to actual fluctuation or equipment error would be a standard part of diagnosis.
I suspect that this has far more to do with PAX bringing in 50k+ visitors than it does with anything else
To be fair, the file name of the PDF representing the Senate bill is called "Honoring Child's Play" and the PDF representing the House bill is called "Child's Play." At the very least the legislature is trying to make it LOOK like they are honoring the charitable aspects
The shuttle was manufactured by private companies... Wikipedia lists United Space ALliance, Thiokol, Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Boeing for various parts. NASA, like the rest of the U.S. government, bids out a large portion of their work. Just like the Air Force doesn't actually build their own planes.
On another note, I can't get out of my head that this sounds mankind actualizing Gaia Theory. I'm not saying this in a teleological fashion, as in "the purpose of mankind is to produce the sensory systems of Gaia" but that, combined with the vast networked computing system we have created (which on some accounts is on the same level of complexity as a human brain) we could indeed be engineering a global consciousness.
As for refresh rate, I'll take that one... it was just a "possibly." I do believe that we'd have to learn a lot more about how the optic system as a whole works to be able to make anything work with this without a major upgrade to the neural pathways.
As far as color sensitivity, I wasn't referring to adding more colors, but shifting the points where our color sensitivity lies. For instance moving the sensitivity of "red" cones to a longer wavelength would allow the viewer to see infrared. It is even conceivable that we would be able to switch which frequencies trigger the given neurons, allowing us to scan across the IR spectrum (within the capabilities of the detector) or have normal human vision. Whether a person would want to do this or society would be willing to find the resources to actually make these is a different question completely...
FWIW, resolution is not the only thing that you can improve in an eye to improve on it. Just off the top of my head there is: focusing ability, range of light intensity, spread of IR spectrum and possibly refresh rate that could be improved on without increasing the resolution.
That's not 64,000 man hours. That's 64,000 man YEARS. About half a billion man hours. And that's not even including campaign mode, custom maps, waiting around in the lobby, reading FAQs and hint guides, making and watching machinimas on Youtube, and even more..
When I was in the studio we had the whole band play while the drummer laid down the drum track. Then me (the bassist) and the guitarist recorded our parts to the drum track. You get a tiny bit of bleed through in the tracks, but aggressive EQ shaping can cut that down, and in theory the same bled through sounds will be pulled into the final mix so it isn't much of an issue. We even got bleed through of some really unintended sounds (voices, feedback) that just went really well so we decided to augment them in the mix rather than diminish them. Then again, the engineer is a drummer at heart and started back in the days of tape and razor blades, so it would make sense that he would try to allow the drummer to provide the pulse of a song rather than a click track.
And that's not even including one of the biggest advantages of doing a forklift upgrade... putting the old computer on a shelf for some time as a backup. Great for things like "What were the settings we ended up using to get the software to work in condition X? The intern who whipped up a fix didn't leave documentation..." For my personal computing use, I will at the very least buy a new hard drive when running a major OS upgrade, or when troubleshooting my family's computer problems and determine that a fresh install is the path of least resistance...
It is very comforting knowing that if all else fails you can at least get back to the way things were before you started fixing things.
Another point pushing for English to be a dominant world language is the Internet... it was first developed in English speaking countries, and I would hazard a guess that most computer software is written using English. Written in English both as in the most common programming languages use English commands, and the code, comments and documentation are written in English. Being the "native" language of computing could do almost for pushing English as a dominant world language as simply having a large speaking base.
I personally think it would be more likely for a patois of Chinese (mostly Mandarin,) English and other languages to develop than for Mandarin to take over as the sole language of trade and international relations.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. This is one theory why, in addition to camouflage, polar bears are white. In the arctic daylight is extremely sparse in the winter, so it is better to optimize for reducing thermal emission than for capturing radiation. Similarly, many nomadic desert tribes traditionally wear black. This increases thermal emission, and you simply stay out of the sun during the hottest parts of the day. Most travel would be done at dawn or dusk, or even at night.
Okay. A woman's ex husband is putting signs on her Camry advertising that she is looking for random sex with strangers. These signs include her work phone number and email address, which is causing her a lot of grief as people keep calling her looking for random sex. The author of the article is wondering why Toyota isn't doing anything about her ex putting these inflammatory signs on her car.
I imagine this would fall under Libel.
That is one element involved... note how (at least in the 20th century) almost all musical innovations come from people in oppression or at least a lower economic class. Blues, Jazz, Country, Soul, Rock N Roll, R&B, Techno, and Hip Hop came from poor people. Reggae, Dub and Dancehall from Jamaica where people live in shacks around the razor wire and broken bottle topped walls of manor houses. The whole Latin Music movement started primarily in Cuba, with everything that goes along with living on a dictator run island nation under a trade embargo with the largest economic superpower which lays less than 100 miles from your shores. Rai from the Maghreb (Northern Africa) where simply practicing their own culture could get people jailed or worse by the controlling Islamic population.
That being said, there are many other elements allow bands to only get a few good albums out:
The so called "Genius Curve" in which people in any creative discipline (Including theoretical scientists) as a rule produce their most influential work in their late mid to late twenties.
A limit of good ideas. The environment a person surrounds themselves with may limit themselves to one or a few good, creative ideas. Bands like the Beatles (whether or not you like them, they did put out a large number of albums which were liked by a large number of people) strove to immerse themselves in other cultures and ways of thought, which could expand the number of ideas to combine allowing for a new idea to emerge.
Getting stale or selling out. If you keep doing the same thing musically, it gets old. It gets old both for you and for the audience. If you try something new, your old fans accuse you of selling out and there are lots of people who may have liked your new stuff, but their image of what you are doing is tainted by their perceptions of your older works. This may sound cynical, but in fact musicians write music to be listened to by other people... it is a performance art. If writing music was done purely for the love of the process of making something new, that could be done in your basement without the hassle of getting it recorded and pressed. A good set of headphones for the musician sounds much better for the money and is a lot easier to manage than the amplifiers and PA systems needed to perform modern instruments for the public, but headphones isn't what musicians spend their money on. Other responsibilities. When musicians dedicated to becoming great start out, The Music is their primary responsibility. Everything else is just a vehicle to allowing the music to happen. They get jobs to pay for instruments and other band equipment. They choose where to live based on the ability to practice their without the neighbors complaining, as well as the proximity to other musicians and artists who would serve to enhance creative discussion. They socialize based on people's ideas. Eventually the business end of being a musician starts to creep up in importance simply to maintain the band's status, so time spent with lawyers, PR folks, managers, accountants, touring, making videos etc starts to eat away at practice and writing time. Musicians who tend to keep making innovative music often have to get away from the world to keep doing so. The Band would spend months and years on a plot of land with a studio built in an old farmhouse doing nothing but music. Rivers Cuomo reportedly has a cabin he retreats to and writes music for long stretches of time. And once a musician has a family, that almost universally becomes the focus of their life. Once this happens, it is almost only family tragedy that can bring out a new, powerful, successful song which can spark a renewed passion in music, such as Eric Clapton writing Tears in Heaven after his son's tragic death.
Getting older demographically: younger people (teens and twenties) tend to be far more interested in music than older people. So the conversations of the people around you tend to start drifting away from music and on to ot
Here in the United States, the opposite generally happens. If one of the two parties feels they are in danger of losing votes to a third party, they take on more elements of the other major party to sway votes from the fence sitters between them, and with good reason: there are currently many more voters to sway from the other second party than from the third parties, and third party voters are probable less likely to be swayed than those on the fence between Democrat and Republican. This aligning of ideals then goes one step worse: it allows the two major parties to paint third parties as kooks, weirdos and outsiders when a campaign platform significantly differs with a shared ideal of the two majors. See the political response to Socialism in the United States as an example.
Notice even the term "third party." That means any party which is not Republican or Democrat gets lumped together as one, even though there are many parties. Those supporting the ideology of supporting a party other than the major two are split between many different actual parties. Greens compete with Libertarians and the Constitution party more than with Republicans or Democrats, and so on. We've got a long way to go before the bicameral system is actually broken apart for more than a token run at a couple of local seats. Even if a third party did manage to gain enough strength for consistent wins, I fear that they would be more likely to end up supplanting one of the other two parties than actually serving to increase political diversity, due to the very same reasons I stated why significant third party turnout serves to tighten the platforms between the two major parties. Once a third party becomes an incumbent they have to start playing by the rules of the big dogs to stay in power as the grass roots charm is lost.
Yet somehow I remain hopeful.
Not to mention, if the Mega-Corp likes the idea, they'll find a way to implement it whether or not you are helping them. You may be in the right, but if they want they can get the product cranked out faster and with more developed distribution channels and contacts. More importantly, they can throw more and better experienced lawyers at defending themselves than you can throw at them.
Your tin-foil hat has reported back to the Department of Thought as malfunctioning. Fear not, it will soon be returned in proper working order.
They think they can profit because they have (or at least intend to have) an exclusive contract with the game company to do the legal transactions.
Players would have an incentive to purchase from an official third party rather than a black market source as the likelihood of all sorts of different fraudulent activities would be reduced. What assurance are you given that you will receive the item advertised, or any item at all? Do you think the back alley item salesman would think twice about selling your contact information to spammers? How convinced are you that your financial information will be handled in a secure manner, if not outright sold on the black market?
The big question might be why the game publishers don't get into the action themselves rather than having a third party perform the transaction. There are foreseeable problems with the developer running an in game real money trading economy, primarily in customer perception. Redirecting the ire of irate "purist" gamers to a third party is a win for the developer. Additionally, specialization and economies of scale could possible make combating fraud more reasonable. Same for handling a sale between people who use different currencies. Developing both the game world and the transaction system could be tricky tax-wise and could even present expensive edge cases of legal liability.
In the end, some developers will decide to use a third party to handle player/player transactions. Some game companies will decide that handling financial transactions internally is worthwhile... likely those under the umbrella of a larger publisher that can devote the developer expertise to creating a fairly robust market system (parts of which can the be reused in other games) as well as the legal muscle to not get in too much trouble with it. Other in-game economies will still prohibit all real money sales... and those games will always have a prominent, annoying black market element. The developers can do their best to stamp out the gold-farmers, but any time there is a profit motive roaches will come out of the woodwork to try to get a quick meal. And once they are there, they reproduce quicker than you can stamp them out.
Meh... only bad form on bulletin boards which have an "edit post" feature. Slashdot decided not to allow editing of posts (most likely because it would be too powerful of a tool for trolls) so it's all good here.
I agree, cutting and pasting URLs is for suckers.
The rationale behind using the MSRP of the whole album does indeed make sense: copyright infringement is on a "per work" basis not on a "per snippet" basis. I assume the "work" here is being defined as the entire album. If you were illegally distributing a single chapter of a book, the value used would likely be for the entire book. An album is traditionally the basic unit of sale, and therefore is reasonable to use the album's MSRP as the base value. The album as base unit of sale is indeed changing with online sales of single songs, but the copyright holder would be the one to define what constitutes a work, and it would take a fair bit of legal savvy to prove otherwise.
Note that I am not arguing that 116 times retail value is reasonable, and I am far from convinced that it is indeed reasonable. My current suspicion is that pushing for such large damages will actually hurt the record companies in the long run, but the settlement value of $4000 (according to this post) offered does seem justifiable to me (I'm not claiming it is RIGHT, simply justifiable.) However, it would require a very strong argument to convince me that using the album retail price as the base rate is unreasonable.
All this aside, I do feel that if the RIAA is claiming damage values based on the entire album, then sharing multiple songs from the same album should indeed be counted as one infringement. Not that I have any reason to suspect that the RIAA is attempting to seek damages based on the full album price for multiple infringements off the same album, just speaking my mind. And I also feel that copyright terms are currently indefensibly long in duration, but that is a whole different topic and I am probably just preaching to the choir with that thought.
To further this, I don't even think the person who receives the software under a temporary license will be directly doing the reciprocation... supply and demand of labor will do the job for you. If there is an excess of potentially employable people who are familiar with your software, companies will not have to pay as high wages for new hires. Therefore purchasing your software will yield companies a net gain. So they buy your software rather than a competitor's, even if the feature set is comparable.
It may seem like taking the free license will be hurting you more than helping, as your wages go down because of the process. However, not taking the free license results in you not being employable at all... enough people would think a job with less money is better than no job with no money.
This does, of course, assume that the two pieces of software are different enough that learning one will not make you significantly better at the other. This assumption is realistically not very strong in practice, but the image of the assumption's strength could very well be enough to convince HR to put "3 years of experience with Autocad" rather than "3 years of experience with CAD software."
It's usually not the scientists labeling the effect as cold fusion, but the reporters.
Yes, there will be some errors. And those exist now... just last night I was talking to someone who went to get a birth control shot, and she got suspect when they tried to administer it in a different arm than normal (the charts list preference of arm.) It turns out they had the chart of someone with the same name (first, middle initial, and last) and birthdate (but born two years later) who was also scheduled to come in that day for an insulin injection for diabetes. If the other patient had also been right handed, a dangerous situation would have been caused for both patients.
Having the blood sugar level information automatically read by instruments already in the body would have sent an immediate warning to not administer insulin...
And having as little of a medical history as most doctors currently do makes diagnosis resemble a snipe hunt compared to the wild goose chase that errors in the history would cause. I assume determining if anomalous readings are due to actual fluctuation or equipment error would be a standard part of diagnosis.
I suspect that this has far more to do with PAX bringing in 50k+ visitors than it does with anything else
To be fair, the file name of the PDF representing the Senate bill is called "Honoring Child's Play" and the PDF representing the House bill is called "Child's Play." At the very least the legislature is trying to make it LOOK like they are honoring the charitable aspects
The shuttle was manufactured by private companies... Wikipedia lists United Space ALliance, Thiokol, Alliant Techsystems, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Boeing for various parts. NASA, like the rest of the U.S. government, bids out a large portion of their work. Just like the Air Force doesn't actually build their own planes.
On another note, I can't get out of my head that this sounds mankind actualizing Gaia Theory. I'm not saying this in a teleological fashion, as in "the purpose of mankind is to produce the sensory systems of Gaia" but that, combined with the vast networked computing system we have created (which on some accounts is on the same level of complexity as a human brain) we could indeed be engineering a global consciousness.
I hope they sit down with the Warner execs and say: Have a look at album sales after we release a track. If you want us to use your songs, pay up. If not, we can always go elsewhere.
As for refresh rate, I'll take that one... it was just a "possibly." I do believe that we'd have to learn a lot more about how the optic system as a whole works to be able to make anything work with this without a major upgrade to the neural pathways.
As far as color sensitivity, I wasn't referring to adding more colors, but shifting the points where our color sensitivity lies. For instance moving the sensitivity of "red" cones to a longer wavelength would allow the viewer to see infrared. It is even conceivable that we would be able to switch which frequencies trigger the given neurons, allowing us to scan across the IR spectrum (within the capabilities of the detector) or have normal human vision. Whether a person would want to do this or society would be willing to find the resources to actually make these is a different question completely...
FWIW, resolution is not the only thing that you can improve in an eye to improve on it. Just off the top of my head there is: focusing ability, range of light intensity, spread of IR spectrum and possibly refresh rate that could be improved on without increasing the resolution.
That's not 64,000 man hours. That's 64,000 man YEARS. About half a billion man hours. And that's not even including campaign mode, custom maps, waiting around in the lobby, reading FAQs and hint guides, making and watching machinimas on Youtube, and even more..
When I was in the studio we had the whole band play while the drummer laid down the drum track. Then me (the bassist) and the guitarist recorded our parts to the drum track. You get a tiny bit of bleed through in the tracks, but aggressive EQ shaping can cut that down, and in theory the same bled through sounds will be pulled into the final mix so it isn't much of an issue. We even got bleed through of some really unintended sounds (voices, feedback) that just went really well so we decided to augment them in the mix rather than diminish them. Then again, the engineer is a drummer at heart and started back in the days of tape and razor blades, so it would make sense that he would try to allow the drummer to provide the pulse of a song rather than a click track.
Problem solved.
And that's not even including one of the biggest advantages of doing a forklift upgrade... putting the old computer on a shelf for some time as a backup. Great for things like "What were the settings we ended up using to get the software to work in condition X? The intern who whipped up a fix didn't leave documentation..." For my personal computing use, I will at the very least buy a new hard drive when running a major OS upgrade, or when troubleshooting my family's computer problems and determine that a fresh install is the path of least resistance...
It is very comforting knowing that if all else fails you can at least get back to the way things were before you started fixing things.
To extend your argument, "Chinese" is not really a language. The people of China speak several different non-mutually intelligible variants. Linguistically these are more separate languages than dialects, although they are often lumped under "Chinese" for cultural and political reasons. For comparison, the linked article states that there are 836 Million speakers of Mandarin Chinese, the most common "dialect," while the number of English speakers is estimated between . To be fair, I do not know if the numbers for Mandarin only include native speakers or also includes those who speak Mandarin as an additional language.
Another point pushing for English to be a dominant world language is the Internet... it was first developed in English speaking countries, and I would hazard a guess that most computer software is written using English. Written in English both as in the most common programming languages use English commands, and the code, comments and documentation are written in English. Being the "native" language of computing could do almost for pushing English as a dominant world language as simply having a large speaking base.
I personally think it would be more likely for a patois of Chinese (mostly Mandarin,) English and other languages to develop than for Mandarin to take over as the sole language of trade and international relations.
If facial recognition is being offered as a replacement for passwords, then it is being sold as a replacement for security.