AAC is not proprietary in the sense you're using it; certainly, it is no more or less proprietary than MP3.
And you are no more and no less 'locked-in' with iTMS than you are with any of the DRMed online stores - you can only (legally) transfer those songs to a device supported by the DRM software.
Practically, you are even less limited by iTMS, since tools aren't hard to find for removing that protection and transferring it to any device that will understand the AAC format.
(For the record, I have never spent a dime on iTMS - I prefer to actually buy something physical, which is why its nearly time for a new shelf to hold the latest batch of book, CD, vinyl, and DVD purchases.)
24 bit is about right; you preserve enough noise to gain dithering benefits from it, without going to ridiculous depths. IIRC, the thermal noise floor at room temperature is the 21st bit; this means that usable information is present through the first 21-22 bits, and further with oversampling some additional usable amplitude resolution information can be extracted at the cost of time resolution. Since halving your time resolution gains you one bit in amplitude, if we assume 21 usable raw bits, 8x oversampling gives us a usable 24 bit signal.
It's an artifact of the Klipsch 'sound'; their speakers, from their pro stuff to their high end consumer to their computer systems all have a very particular character. Some people find it excessively brassy; this is mainly an artifact of using compression drivers and horns as opposed to the more typical dome tweeter setup. I'm personally not a huge fan of it, but some people really do like that sound.
As computer speakers go, Klipsch's are decent, if you like the character of their sound. I'd still recommend a good external amp and decent set of bookshelf speakers (M&K make some nice, not completely outrageously priced ones, or at a cheaper level I've done alright with a pair of JBL bookshelfs, or at a more expensive level I really do like JBL's LSR studio monitors).
Or, what the insane people have been doing: SPDIF to a digital mixer (Yamaha 01V in my case) running to JBL reference monitors. Yeah, it cost me a bit of cash, but I can (and do!) do studio-quality production work on it.
Plus, there's nothing like using MIDI to make the faders on your mixer dance...
Cheap MIDI like a USB MidiSport 2x2 (can find em for under 70 bucks) and a Oxygen8 (around 90, IIRC)? Radium would give you a full keyboard for more like 150, or you could buy a used MIDI-capable synth on Ebay for the 150-200 price range (I personally like the action on Korg's DW-8000, and it sounds OK, but tastes will vary) and use it as the MIDI controller.
MIDI devices aren't rare at all; there are a ton of different MIDI slider/knob boards out there, combo keyboard/slider/knob units, etc, etc. Neither are they particularly expensive - for the price of one decent piece of sound software, you can pick up all the hardware you need.
Yes, it really is that much of a stretch. Many people routinely turn off the "Hide hidden folders" option in Windows - I do immediately on installing it, so it took me a while to even remember that the ipod_control folder is hidden. There's a minimum standard of care for what can be considered to be an actual effort at copyright control; a hidden folder, *especially* when Apple uses much stronger (cryptographic) measures to protect some music (i.e. FairPlay), cannot be considered to be a real effort at copyright control.
No, a smoker should not always ask. When I say bar, I should clarify - venue that serves drinks and has live bands. In such venues, smoking is (unless posted by the owners of the bar) assumed to be okay, and a smoker should NOT have to ask each and every person standing there watching the band play whether they mind a cigarette being lit.
And a non-smoker should not always say yes. There are many situations where a smoker shouldn't smoke, even if they ask. For example, in a restaurant at or next to a table with people who are still eating.
Polite is not being a pushover, which is what your definition seems to be. Polite is having a sense of manners, of what is appropriate and what is not, and acting in that fashion.
But how do I know which ones to copy? What if I only want to copy that one Stooges song, and not the entirety of my 3500 song garage rock collection? How do you find the correct track without something that reads the ID3s and matches them to the filenames?
Downside to your method is that, at least on my iPod, the filenames are not usable. Thus, while your method is fine for just retrieving *all* of the music, if you want specific songs a GUI that reads the ID3 data is nice.
How is it a DMCA crime to move a file from a 'hidden' folder on the iPod to my hard drive? There's no encryption, there's no method of copyright control. What the FUCK are you smoking?
Then you and I got no beef, minus the (as pointed out) issue of smoking directly in doorways where airflow tends to concentrate, and where non-smokers will be forced to put up with it.
For the record, when the village I used to live in voted on whether or not to ban smoking in all buildings open to the public, I voted no.
My advice? Walk 20 feet further away from the damn entrance. While not all places of business provide them, my company was smart enough to provide a (heat-lamped, even) smoker's shelter out front. In exchange for which, they have to stand about 50 feet away from the entrance in order to smoke.
The effort it'll take your wheezing ass to move 20 more feet is not comparable to the amount of distress you can cause the allergic/susceptible, so perhaps you should volunteer to not be a jackass?
I'll still tell them that "Yes, I do in fact mind" when its appropriate (restaurants, certain public places where its inappropriate, my home, my car). On the other hand, I don't expect to be asked, nor would I object, to someone smoking in a bar. Nor in their home. Nor in their car.
Polite != "letting the smoker smoke whenever they want to". Polite == "having a sense of where smoking is appropriate - and where it isn't."
(And hint - when other people are eating, it is NOT appropriate.)
It's dodging the question because the government has a HUGE existing body of law regarding rights awarded to the legally married couple. He can say "I don't think government should be involved", but that doesn't change the fact that they are, and probably will be, because there are aspects of a union of two people that are affected by the law. My problem is that while he does a good job of explaining his view on the sacred meaning of marriage, he does an awful job of explaining his view on the civil meaning of it. Does he support equivalent unions in the civil sense for gay couples? Who the hell knows, from that answer he gave? He's not any worse than Kerry or Bush, who also do a pretty good job of dodging the question, but he's still dodging.
What the hell do endorsements by newspapers have to do with people being satisfied by the Big Two? And the "paper has a role to inform the public"? I thought you were a Libertarian! How dare you impose rules on someone else's business! Obviously, the paper's role is to make money for the business owner, and if their method of making money isn't to the people's liking, they'll use their free market choice to go elsewhere!
Now, in a less Libertarian manner - the paper's role is to inform the public. My local paper did, in fact, include Badnarik in their issue guide. What more do you want them to do? Until he generates sufficient interest, they're not going to spend money to cover his campaign. I don't expect Rolling Stone to write articles on my (made-up) indie rock band until people start listening to it, I don't expect the New Yorker to write articles on my new (made-up) masterpiece of literary fiction, why should Badnarik expect things to be any different? Media's role is to give people news about things they're interested in, and no one has shown that third parties are particularly interesting this cycle - when they have been (i.e. Nader 4 years ago, Perot) they've gotten large amounts of coverage, but when people lost interest (Nader this year) they lost coverage.
Badnarik hasn't been covered because it isn't in the paper's best interests to cover him. If they were a public utility, where their role is to serve the public and not necessarily to make money, I'd agree - they should be covering all recognized candidates. But they aren't. They're a private company, and as such, their role is to maximize the interests the private owner holds, which are likely to be making money. And covering minor candidates doesn't make them money.
For the record, I don't find out about the triple homicide last night almost ever, because we have plenty of violence where I live so everyone is used to it and it doesn't sell papers. The papers tend to cover what their readers, or some large portion thereof, find interesting. Badnarik isn't.
I'm not going to bother defending their existence, because there is a fundamental disconnect between Libertarians and those who believe that certain social services should be provided by the government. Like you said, we aren't going to be able to reason with each other on the issues, so let's not try, okay?
I can in fact fault him on guns, but then I'm in the minority that believes the second amendment should be removed. I don't think its good for our mindset to equate gun ownership to such fundamental rights as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. I have mixed feelings on gun control, but I don't feel that all gun control is bad.
As to his gay marriage answer - his answer takes no stand at all on whether the *legal* definition of marriage, and rights attendent upon it, should be extended to gay couples. His answer is fine in the "Well, marriage is a sacred thing, and people should be allowed to decide for themselves what that should mean, and the feds shouldn't have any say in acknowledging it" sense. But it lacks any actual ANSWER as to whether a federal government run by him would attempt to recognize same-sex unions. He's dodging the important question, which is why it a dishonest answer.
I have nothing against Libertarians. I've voted for a few, when they were the best candidate (mainly in local offices where many of the Dems I might vote for are machine hacks). I'm not implying they aren't sensible, simply that they are not The Answer, nor necessarily are third parties. To expand:
My point is that someone who says "Vote third party! Vote third party!" ignores the people who are quite well served by the main parties; I know, in the "iconoclastic" culture of "non-conformists" we have here on Slashdot its hard to imagine they exist, but many people are in fact reasonably satisfied with the Big Two - or at least, more satisfied with the Big Two than with any visible third party.
What if I think Badnarik's ideas, of eliminating federally funded programs for the most part, of immediate Iraq withdrawal, his opposition to gun control, are awful ideas that will harm my country? What if I think his website's answer on gay marriage is totally dishonest (which, if you read it, it is). While some of his views are very, very appealing to me, some of them strike me as more harmful than simply hoping for major party gridlock to maintain a status quo.
Freedom is good, but the libertarian view of freedom isn't necessarily the only one. Please don't grind your political axe on my political views.
For the moment the Russians have a far more capable space program than we do
Insert a 'manned' in between capable and space, and you are correct. Its only our manned program that's FUBAR. Our unmanned space program is arguably superior and certainly not massively inferior to the current Russian space program.
I didn't say the tumbling sheet didn't generate lift; however, the gross mechanisms of twirling flight (helicopters, sycamore seeds) and tumbling flight (flat sheets) are not at all the same, beyond both require generation of lift.
The new thing the Cornell paper explains is how the boundary effects change the flight dynamics. These boundary effects are different/ignored in rotating-wing flight, but are important in tumbling flight.
Not quite... sycamore seeds fall with a twirling motion, much like a helicopter rotor. But autorotation (the proper name for that maneuver) doesn't rely on the physics they're talking about at all - heli blades are shaped such that the movement of air around the blades forces them to rotate, and the rotation generates lift. Not enough to keep the copter flying unpowered, but enough to prevent it from falling straight to the ground. The motion in the article is definitely not related to rigid airfoils with a fixed axis of rotation - the motion described in this article is that of a thin unconstrained flexible flat sheet.
Some people have made comments about using tumbling motion to build better parachutes - it probably wouldn't work for a parachute because a parachute requires some attachment of the load to the sheet, and that attachment will prevent the tumbling motion from happening, both by preventing the tumbling and also by loading specific points on the sheet instead of having the load effectively equally distributed.
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AAC is not proprietary in the sense you're using it; certainly, it is no more or less proprietary than MP3.
And you are no more and no less 'locked-in' with iTMS than you are with any of the DRMed online stores - you can only (legally) transfer those songs to a device supported by the DRM software.
Practically, you are even less limited by iTMS, since tools aren't hard to find for removing that protection and transferring it to any device that will understand the AAC format.
(For the record, I have never spent a dime on iTMS - I prefer to actually buy something physical, which is why its nearly time for a new shelf to hold the latest batch of book, CD, vinyl, and DVD purchases.)
That's why you couple a transducer to the wall and excite that wall directly. Everyone likes to share, after all!
And later on, after you turn the music off, turn it around and see what kinda kinky monkey love your neighbors are getting up to. Go contact mic go!
24 bit is about right; you preserve enough noise to gain dithering benefits from it, without going to ridiculous depths. IIRC, the thermal noise floor at room temperature is the 21st bit; this means that usable information is present through the first 21-22 bits, and further with oversampling some additional usable amplitude resolution information can be extracted at the cost of time resolution. Since halving your time resolution gains you one bit in amplitude, if we assume 21 usable raw bits, 8x oversampling gives us a usable 24 bit signal.
It's an artifact of the Klipsch 'sound'; their speakers, from their pro stuff to their high end consumer to their computer systems all have a very particular character. Some people find it excessively brassy; this is mainly an artifact of using compression drivers and horns as opposed to the more typical dome tweeter setup. I'm personally not a huge fan of it, but some people really do like that sound.
As computer speakers go, Klipsch's are decent, if you like the character of their sound. I'd still recommend a good external amp and decent set of bookshelf speakers (M&K make some nice, not completely outrageously priced ones, or at a cheaper level I've done alright with a pair of JBL bookshelfs, or at a more expensive level I really do like JBL's LSR studio monitors).
Or, what the insane people have been doing: SPDIF to a digital mixer (Yamaha 01V in my case) running to JBL reference monitors. Yeah, it cost me a bit of cash, but I can (and do!) do studio-quality production work on it.
Plus, there's nothing like using MIDI to make the faders on your mixer dance...
Cheap MIDI like a USB MidiSport 2x2 (can find em for under 70 bucks) and a Oxygen8 (around 90, IIRC)? Radium would give you a full keyboard for more like 150, or you could buy a used MIDI-capable synth on Ebay for the 150-200 price range (I personally like the action on Korg's DW-8000, and it sounds OK, but tastes will vary) and use it as the MIDI controller.
MIDI devices aren't rare at all; there are a ton of different MIDI slider/knob boards out there, combo keyboard/slider/knob units, etc, etc. Neither are they particularly expensive - for the price of one decent piece of sound software, you can pick up all the hardware you need.
Motorola Razr V3 is roughly credit card sized, though obviously not in thickness (9.8cm by 5.3cm, compared to a standard card at 8.6 x 5.4 cm).
Good, because crack will really fuck you up.
Yes, it really is that much of a stretch. Many people routinely turn off the "Hide hidden folders" option in Windows - I do immediately on installing it, so it took me a while to even remember that the ipod_control folder is hidden. There's a minimum standard of care for what can be considered to be an actual effort at copyright control; a hidden folder, *especially* when Apple uses much stronger (cryptographic) measures to protect some music (i.e. FairPlay), cannot be considered to be a real effort at copyright control.
No, a smoker should not always ask. When I say bar, I should clarify - venue that serves drinks and has live bands. In such venues, smoking is (unless posted by the owners of the bar) assumed to be okay, and a smoker should NOT have to ask each and every person standing there watching the band play whether they mind a cigarette being lit.
And a non-smoker should not always say yes. There are many situations where a smoker shouldn't smoke, even if they ask. For example, in a restaurant at or next to a table with people who are still eating.
Polite is not being a pushover, which is what your definition seems to be. Polite is having a sense of manners, of what is appropriate and what is not, and acting in that fashion.
Yeah, ID3 is preserved, and that's swell.
But how do I know which ones to copy? What if I only want to copy that one Stooges song, and not the entirety of my 3500 song garage rock collection? How do you find the correct track without something that reads the ID3s and matches them to the filenames?
Downside to your method is that, at least on my iPod, the filenames are not usable. Thus, while your method is fine for just retrieving *all* of the music, if you want specific songs a GUI that reads the ID3 data is nice.
Do they state they can go forwards anywhere?
How is it a DMCA crime to move a file from a 'hidden' folder on the iPod to my hard drive? There's no encryption, there's no method of copyright control. What the FUCK are you smoking?
Maybe you should do a little research.
Then you and I got no beef, minus the (as pointed out) issue of smoking directly in doorways where airflow tends to concentrate, and where non-smokers will be forced to put up with it.
For the record, when the village I used to live in voted on whether or not to ban smoking in all buildings open to the public, I voted no.
My advice? Walk 20 feet further away from the damn entrance. While not all places of business provide them, my company was smart enough to provide a (heat-lamped, even) smoker's shelter out front. In exchange for which, they have to stand about 50 feet away from the entrance in order to smoke.
The effort it'll take your wheezing ass to move 20 more feet is not comparable to the amount of distress you can cause the allergic/susceptible, so perhaps you should volunteer to not be a jackass?
I am a polite non-smoker.
I'll still tell them that "Yes, I do in fact mind" when its appropriate (restaurants, certain public places where its inappropriate, my home, my car). On the other hand, I don't expect to be asked, nor would I object, to someone smoking in a bar. Nor in their home. Nor in their car.
Polite != "letting the smoker smoke whenever they want to". Polite == "having a sense of where smoking is appropriate - and where it isn't."
(And hint - when other people are eating, it is NOT appropriate.)
Most people in America don't like Hormel SPAM either.
It's dodging the question because the government has a HUGE existing body of law regarding rights awarded to the legally married couple. He can say "I don't think government should be involved", but that doesn't change the fact that they are, and probably will be, because there are aspects of a union of two people that are affected by the law. My problem is that while he does a good job of explaining his view on the sacred meaning of marriage, he does an awful job of explaining his view on the civil meaning of it. Does he support equivalent unions in the civil sense for gay couples? Who the hell knows, from that answer he gave? He's not any worse than Kerry or Bush, who also do a pretty good job of dodging the question, but he's still dodging.
What the hell do endorsements by newspapers have to do with people being satisfied by the Big Two? And the "paper has a role to inform the public"? I thought you were a Libertarian! How dare you impose rules on someone else's business! Obviously, the paper's role is to make money for the business owner, and if their method of making money isn't to the people's liking, they'll use their free market choice to go elsewhere!
Now, in a less Libertarian manner - the paper's role is to inform the public. My local paper did, in fact, include Badnarik in their issue guide. What more do you want them to do? Until he generates sufficient interest, they're not going to spend money to cover his campaign. I don't expect Rolling Stone to write articles on my (made-up) indie rock band until people start listening to it, I don't expect the New Yorker to write articles on my new (made-up) masterpiece of literary fiction, why should Badnarik expect things to be any different? Media's role is to give people news about things they're interested in, and no one has shown that third parties are particularly interesting this cycle - when they have been (i.e. Nader 4 years ago, Perot) they've gotten large amounts of coverage, but when people lost interest (Nader this year) they lost coverage.
Badnarik hasn't been covered because it isn't in the paper's best interests to cover him. If they were a public utility, where their role is to serve the public and not necessarily to make money, I'd agree - they should be covering all recognized candidates. But they aren't. They're a private company, and as such, their role is to maximize the interests the private owner holds, which are likely to be making money. And covering minor candidates doesn't make them money.
For the record, I don't find out about the triple homicide last night almost ever, because we have plenty of violence where I live so everyone is used to it and it doesn't sell papers. The papers tend to cover what their readers, or some large portion thereof, find interesting. Badnarik isn't.
I'm not going to bother defending their existence, because there is a fundamental disconnect between Libertarians and those who believe that certain social services should be provided by the government. Like you said, we aren't going to be able to reason with each other on the issues, so let's not try, okay?
I can in fact fault him on guns, but then I'm in the minority that believes the second amendment should be removed. I don't think its good for our mindset to equate gun ownership to such fundamental rights as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. I have mixed feelings on gun control, but I don't feel that all gun control is bad.
As to his gay marriage answer - his answer takes no stand at all on whether the *legal* definition of marriage, and rights attendent upon it, should be extended to gay couples. His answer is fine in the "Well, marriage is a sacred thing, and people should be allowed to decide for themselves what that should mean, and the feds shouldn't have any say in acknowledging it" sense. But it lacks any actual ANSWER as to whether a federal government run by him would attempt to recognize same-sex unions. He's dodging the important question, which is why it a dishonest answer.
I have nothing against Libertarians. I've voted for a few, when they were the best candidate (mainly in local offices where many of the Dems I might vote for are machine hacks). I'm not implying they aren't sensible, simply that they are not The Answer, nor necessarily are third parties. To expand:
My point is that someone who says "Vote third party! Vote third party!" ignores the people who are quite well served by the main parties; I know, in the "iconoclastic" culture of "non-conformists" we have here on Slashdot its hard to imagine they exist, but many people are in fact reasonably satisfied with the Big Two - or at least, more satisfied with the Big Two than with any visible third party.
What if I think Badnarik's ideas, of eliminating federally funded programs for the most part, of immediate Iraq withdrawal, his opposition to gun control, are awful ideas that will harm my country? What if I think his website's answer on gay marriage is totally dishonest (which, if you read it, it is). While some of his views are very, very appealing to me, some of them strike me as more harmful than simply hoping for major party gridlock to maintain a status quo.
Freedom is good, but the libertarian view of freedom isn't necessarily the only one. Please don't grind your political axe on my political views.
What if the major parties more accurately reflect my political and social viewpoints than any of the third parties?
For the moment the Russians have a far more capable space program than we do
Insert a 'manned' in between capable and space, and you are correct. Its only our manned program that's FUBAR. Our unmanned space program is arguably superior and certainly not massively inferior to the current Russian space program.
I didn't say the tumbling sheet didn't generate lift; however, the gross mechanisms of twirling flight (helicopters, sycamore seeds) and tumbling flight (flat sheets) are not at all the same, beyond both require generation of lift.
The new thing the Cornell paper explains is how the boundary effects change the flight dynamics. These boundary effects are different/ignored in rotating-wing flight, but are important in tumbling flight.
Not quite... sycamore seeds fall with a twirling motion, much like a helicopter rotor. But autorotation (the proper name for that maneuver) doesn't rely on the physics they're talking about at all - heli blades are shaped such that the movement of air around the blades forces them to rotate, and the rotation generates lift. Not enough to keep the copter flying unpowered, but enough to prevent it from falling straight to the ground. The motion in the article is definitely not related to rigid airfoils with a fixed axis of rotation - the motion described in this article is that of a thin unconstrained flexible flat sheet.
Some people have made comments about using tumbling motion to build better parachutes - it probably wouldn't work for a parachute because a parachute requires some attachment of the load to the sheet, and that attachment will prevent the tumbling motion from happening, both by preventing the tumbling and also by loading specific points on the sheet instead of having the load effectively equally distributed.