"Professional" music isn't actually superior these days in most cases: the record labels force the recording/mixing engineers to overly compress the mix, leading to a lot of distortion and a complete lack of dynamic range. Read up on the "loudness wars" for more info. CDs/MP3s these days sound much worse than ones made in the 80s.
I mean, they get points for admitting a blunder and backpedaling furiously, but the hubris of passing laws nobody in the legislature understands is mind-boggling. Just, wow.
To be fair, this seems to be the norm for almost all legislatures, at least here in America. Look at Congress and ObamaCare; no one even read the thing before passing it. Most laws are written by lobbyists these days, and given a rubber-stamp by legislators who are in the pay of those lobbyists.
Yes, but I have to say after reading the summary, I'm actually quite impressed that the Massachusetts politicians have reversed course on this idiotic tax so quickly. Usually, politicians do exactly like you say: refuse to change course after it's obvious they made a horrible mistake. Maybe I should look into moving to MA....
If you're talking about having the government own and maintain the last-mile connections (the way local governments today frequently own and maintain the water and sewer services), then yes, that could work. When I was saying "ISP", I guess I really meant the entire package of what you'd need, as a residential customer, to pay to get internet access. A dial-up ISP does not give you internet access unless you already have a landline, for instance, whereas if you subscribe to Comcast or Verizon's ISP service, that's all you need, you don't need to buy some other service from a different company to have working internet service.
Don't be stupid, there's been several movies showing terrorist attacks on stadiums; The Rock and The Dark Knight Rises off the top of my head. It doesn't take a genius to think of attacking a stadium: there's thousands of people clustered in one building with limited exits.
Another thing terrorists could do, which they haven't yet, is get assault rifles and shoot up people in malls or streets. It's been done before, in Mumbai, but it's never happened here.
The fact is, if terrorists wanted to create terror here, there's lots of ways to do it cheaply and easily, assuming they can find enough men willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (the Boston bombers were different, they just planted a bomb and tried to evade capture). That this hasn't happened shows that the "terrorist threat" is completely overblown, and simply being used as a reason to curtail our civil liberties.
This is stupid. You think people should be willing to give up their careers and livelihoods and become homeless so they don't have to use a company's services? Not having internet service leads directly to unemployment for many, many people (and probably most Slashdotters) these days.
Sure, there were hundreds of ISPs, but that's not real competition, because to use any of those ISPs, you were forced to purchase service from the local telco monopoly. That's not competition at all.
These days, because there's no real way for hundreds of ISPs to install physical infrastructure to your house/apt, and because dial-up speeds are impossible to use with modern internet applications, the telco and cable monopolies have become the ISPs as well.
The simple fact is that there's no way to have anything resembling a free market with ISPs, and there never has been. Last-mile connections are a huge capital expense. The only way to do it is to have a monopoly or duopoly, and have government regulation to keep these companies in line. Or have the government provide ISP service directly, as has been done in several small cities already.
That wouldn't be so bad if there actually were a datasheet, but instead everything's closed and proprietary, leading to pointlessly closed drivers as h4rr4r complained about.
Which is exactly why I said these things should be transferred over to better media ASAP. No, in 1990 there was nothing better. By 1999, there certainly was.
As for audio CDs, I have a bunch from 1990 and earlier, and they all play (and rip) just fine in modern DVD-ROM drives. The power of standardization...
No, he hasn't, he's shown you to be someone too dumb to read the article before commenting. He specifically said he didn't favor tapes because of sonic qualities, because he thinks digital recordings won't be readable in the future. This has been reiterated here in the comments over and over.
Again, they're proprietary. Nothing proprietary can ever be counted on for longevity, so if these recordings were so important, they should have been transferred onto different media as soon as feasible (which probably would have been in the late 1990s with the advent of inexpensive CD-ROM burners for PCs). Yes, back in 1990, you didn't have a lot of choices as digital audio was still confined to high-end professional equipment (except for consumer CD players, which could only play discs manufactured in expensive factories using glass masters), but you've had a LOT of time to rectify this situation now.
And if you kept around a bunch of recordings which require rare and proprietary equipment to read, but you didn't bother to actually keep around the rare and proprietary equipment needed to read them, that's incredibly stupid. Why bother hanging onto the recordings? You might as well throw them all away now since you were too dumb to keep the player. (I can't tell from your previous writings if you kept around a player or not, so if you did, this doesn't apply.) Even if the player stops working, older electronics can frequently be restored to working condition, usually by replacing capacitors.
Better than ZIP/gzip/bzip2/xz is FLAC, which is also very well documented and open-source, and thus future-proof, and better suited to audio than a general-purpose compression format.
But you're absolutely right, Albini has no idea what he's talking about.
Again, the AC is correct: you used some half-assed proprietary garbage and improper equipment. This is nothing like someone recording to a WAV or FLAC file and saving it to an archival-quality optical disc. How many of these weird Sony VHS players with integrated PCM decoders exist? Not many, I'm sure. How many CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives exist? Too many to count. That's not going to change much in the future, and it's pretty easy to pop a DVD-ROM into a DVD-ROM drive and copy the contents to a hard drive or some other format so you can have backups. (Plus, newer optical drives are always backwards-compatible with older formats, so DVD-ROM drives all read CD-ROMs, BD-ROM drives read CD- and DVD-ROMs, etc.)
Keeping all your important stuff on analog tape isn't much different: how many of these analop tape decks still survive? Or will be around in 25 or 50 years? With digital files, it's easy to make (perfect) copies of copies and keep things indefinitely. As long as you don't use some shitty proprietary undocumented file type, then you'll always be able to read it. WAV and FLAC will always be readable, WAV because it's just simple PCM any idiot can decode, and FLAC because the source code is open and easily available.
Anyone have any good recommendations for an ITX case? I'd love to switch to an ITX case for my next system, so I can have something much smaller than my current tower, but I just haven't seen anything I'm terribly wild about. I want something with room for 2 hard drives (for a RAID0 mirror), and 2 5.25" external bays (for an optical drive and a HD dock), and then I'd like the capability of driving dual monitors, preferably with video on the motherboard. Surely I'm not the only one who'd like something like this. All these tower cases are far too large, and are designed for the bad old days when everyone had multiple expansion cards in their PC. No one does that any more (except gamers, and even then they only ever have 1, maybe 2 video cards), so all these ATX cases are totally wrong for today's needs.
Spanish is a crappy language because it's far too wordy and inefficient. I takes 3 times as many syllables to express the same thought as in English.
The primary strength of English is its versatility and its adaptability. It has a far larger vocabulary than any other language, mainly because it so readily adopts new words from other languages.
English is also a fairly easy language for others to learn at a basic level; there's no idiotic sense of gender like most other Indo-European languages, all the basic words are short and simple. It is hard to learn English at a very advanced level, but if you just want to be conversational, and be able to read simple text, it's pretty easy. It's kinda like learning to play a guitar: any idiot can learn to play 4 chords and make decent-sounding songs from those 4 chords, but only really talented and/or dedicated people can play at the level of Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, and this is probably why the guitar is such an incredibly popular musical instrument these days.
Um, it's really pretty simple. English took over because of WWI and WWII: the French lost in WWII and were taken over by the Germans. The English took a beating too, but finally between the Americans and the Russians, Germany lost and America and Russia were the two big powers. America's language was English, so when they in concert with the British became the main powers for the western-aligned nations, English became the lingua de franca just like French was long before. Meanwhile, Russian became the main language in the eastern-bloc countries; however they did poorly economically, and eventually that system collapsed, and since then (~1990) English has been taking over as the lingua de franca there too, for any kind of international trade and communication (also thanks to the Internet, which was started mostly in America and also western Europe).
The rise of China and the decay of America could very well change this in the future however.
No, all students don't need to be educated. If we handled this the way countries like Germany did (or the US did in the old days), we'd have different schools for different kids, and the problem kids would go to the dumb-kid school, and be kept away from the rest of the kids. Just because there's a public mandate to have compulsory school for all children doesn't mean they all need to be mainstreamed in the same school and the same classes.
They can often believe you've taken a slip road (off ramp) when you haven't, and vice versa, before correcting. But to believe you're on a road you are simply passing over is a big fuck up.
This happens to me all the time with Google Maps on Android.
I don't think a massive shift toward socialism would help much actually. It's not just the parents' wealth (or lack thereof) that's the problem, it's their culture and attitude towards education. Poor people generally don't believe that much in it; my mother was always told by her family that education is a waste of time and that a woman needs to get married at 16 and start having babies. Forcibly redistributing wealth to people like that isn't going to change their attitudes towards education. These things can be changed through well-funded education systems that seek to overcome parents' bad attitudes, but it takes generations, and the US has been going backwards for a long time.
It's called self-segregation. If you lump everyone together, the good parents are basically going to be fighting against the bad parents and their bad kids, and the overall quality of education is going to be mediocre at best, and that's IF the good parents put in a Herculean effort to fix things. Even then, their power is very limited by the political school boards, and by state and federal laws and funding. There's only so much a bunch of concerned parents can do.
However, if they take their kids out of the school and put them into a private school, they have far more say. The private school isn't answerable to stupid government requirements like NCLB, and private schools compete with each other. If one school sucks, you can leave it and put your kids in a competing school that's better-run. And since private schools don't have to deal with bad parents and bad kids, they have a much easier time of providing a good education.
In some places it is great. In some places it is a horror show.
I went to both public and private school growing up and had a pretty good experience in both. That said, the schools I went to were top quality.
I've been to private (and Catholic) schools, and public schools in both good and bad areas. The public schools in good areas aren't too bad, though they aren't good at dealing with bullies as has been pointed out in the media many times since Columbine. The public schools in the bad areas are terrible, not so much because of the kids, but because of the terrible teachers. Good teachers don't want to teach at the schools in poor areas. And teachers' unions make it so they can't get rid of really bad ones. Private schools don't have most of these problems; problem children are expelled and bad teachers are generally not hired, and there's no unions.
Of course they don't want to be part of Cuba, but the other Southern states probably don't want them (since the whole south part of the state basically speaks Spanish), so they can't join the new country of "Dixie" (or whatever they end up calling it), so either they can be independent, or they can join Cuba. And if they're independent, they run the risk of being invaded by Cuba and being taken over, and I don't see their Dixie neighbors coming to their defense. And unlike all those rednecks in Dixie, the people aren't all armed to the teeth with rifles, so they won't be able to defend themselves against the invading Cuban forces.
Of course, after a few decades of rising sea levels, south Florida will be underwater anyway, so all those people will either have to try to sneak into Dixie, or go back to Cuba.
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"Professional" music isn't actually superior these days in most cases: the record labels force the recording/mixing engineers to overly compress the mix, leading to a lot of distortion and a complete lack of dynamic range. Read up on the "loudness wars" for more info. CDs/MP3s these days sound much worse than ones made in the 80s.
I mean, they get points for admitting a blunder and backpedaling furiously, but the hubris of passing laws nobody in the legislature understands is mind-boggling. Just, wow.
To be fair, this seems to be the norm for almost all legislatures, at least here in America. Look at Congress and ObamaCare; no one even read the thing before passing it. Most laws are written by lobbyists these days, and given a rubber-stamp by legislators who are in the pay of those lobbyists.
Yes, but I have to say after reading the summary, I'm actually quite impressed that the Massachusetts politicians have reversed course on this idiotic tax so quickly. Usually, politicians do exactly like you say: refuse to change course after it's obvious they made a horrible mistake. Maybe I should look into moving to MA....
If you're talking about having the government own and maintain the last-mile connections (the way local governments today frequently own and maintain the water and sewer services), then yes, that could work. When I was saying "ISP", I guess I really meant the entire package of what you'd need, as a residential customer, to pay to get internet access. A dial-up ISP does not give you internet access unless you already have a landline, for instance, whereas if you subscribe to Comcast or Verizon's ISP service, that's all you need, you don't need to buy some other service from a different company to have working internet service.
Dallas is a 9-hour drive from Monterrey, Mexico. You could fly from there.
Don't be stupid, there's been several movies showing terrorist attacks on stadiums; The Rock and The Dark Knight Rises off the top of my head. It doesn't take a genius to think of attacking a stadium: there's thousands of people clustered in one building with limited exits.
Another thing terrorists could do, which they haven't yet, is get assault rifles and shoot up people in malls or streets. It's been done before, in Mumbai, but it's never happened here.
The fact is, if terrorists wanted to create terror here, there's lots of ways to do it cheaply and easily, assuming they can find enough men willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (the Boston bombers were different, they just planted a bomb and tried to evade capture). That this hasn't happened shows that the "terrorist threat" is completely overblown, and simply being used as a reason to curtail our civil liberties.
This is stupid. You think people should be willing to give up their careers and livelihoods and become homeless so they don't have to use a company's services? Not having internet service leads directly to unemployment for many, many people (and probably most Slashdotters) these days.
Sure, there were hundreds of ISPs, but that's not real competition, because to use any of those ISPs, you were forced to purchase service from the local telco monopoly. That's not competition at all.
These days, because there's no real way for hundreds of ISPs to install physical infrastructure to your house/apt, and because dial-up speeds are impossible to use with modern internet applications, the telco and cable monopolies have become the ISPs as well.
The simple fact is that there's no way to have anything resembling a free market with ISPs, and there never has been. Last-mile connections are a huge capital expense. The only way to do it is to have a monopoly or duopoly, and have government regulation to keep these companies in line. Or have the government provide ISP service directly, as has been done in several small cities already.
That wouldn't be so bad if there actually were a datasheet, but instead everything's closed and proprietary, leading to pointlessly closed drivers as h4rr4r complained about.
Which is exactly why I said these things should be transferred over to better media ASAP. No, in 1990 there was nothing better. By 1999, there certainly was.
As for audio CDs, I have a bunch from 1990 and earlier, and they all play (and rip) just fine in modern DVD-ROM drives. The power of standardization...
>He's obviously done the math.
No, he hasn't, he's shown you to be someone too dumb to read the article before commenting. He specifically said he didn't favor tapes because of sonic qualities, because he thinks digital recordings won't be readable in the future. This has been reiterated here in the comments over and over.
Again, they're proprietary. Nothing proprietary can ever be counted on for longevity, so if these recordings were so important, they should have been transferred onto different media as soon as feasible (which probably would have been in the late 1990s with the advent of inexpensive CD-ROM burners for PCs). Yes, back in 1990, you didn't have a lot of choices as digital audio was still confined to high-end professional equipment (except for consumer CD players, which could only play discs manufactured in expensive factories using glass masters), but you've had a LOT of time to rectify this situation now.
And if you kept around a bunch of recordings which require rare and proprietary equipment to read, but you didn't bother to actually keep around the rare and proprietary equipment needed to read them, that's incredibly stupid. Why bother hanging onto the recordings? You might as well throw them all away now since you were too dumb to keep the player. (I can't tell from your previous writings if you kept around a player or not, so if you did, this doesn't apply.) Even if the player stops working, older electronics can frequently be restored to working condition, usually by replacing capacitors.
Better than ZIP/gzip/bzip2/xz is FLAC, which is also very well documented and open-source, and thus future-proof, and better suited to audio than a general-purpose compression format.
But you're absolutely right, Albini has no idea what he's talking about.
Again, the AC is correct: you used some half-assed proprietary garbage and improper equipment. This is nothing like someone recording to a WAV or FLAC file and saving it to an archival-quality optical disc. How many of these weird Sony VHS players with integrated PCM decoders exist? Not many, I'm sure. How many CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drives exist? Too many to count. That's not going to change much in the future, and it's pretty easy to pop a DVD-ROM into a DVD-ROM drive and copy the contents to a hard drive or some other format so you can have backups. (Plus, newer optical drives are always backwards-compatible with older formats, so DVD-ROM drives all read CD-ROMs, BD-ROM drives read CD- and DVD-ROMs, etc.)
Keeping all your important stuff on analog tape isn't much different: how many of these analop tape decks still survive? Or will be around in 25 or 50 years? With digital files, it's easy to make (perfect) copies of copies and keep things indefinitely. As long as you don't use some shitty proprietary undocumented file type, then you'll always be able to read it. WAV and FLAC will always be readable, WAV because it's just simple PCM any idiot can decode, and FLAC because the source code is open and easily available.
That's Japan. You think American banks give a shit about improving customers' experiences? I think not.
Anyone have any good recommendations for an ITX case? I'd love to switch to an ITX case for my next system, so I can have something much smaller than my current tower, but I just haven't seen anything I'm terribly wild about. I want something with room for 2 hard drives (for a RAID0 mirror), and 2 5.25" external bays (for an optical drive and a HD dock), and then I'd like the capability of driving dual monitors, preferably with video on the motherboard. Surely I'm not the only one who'd like something like this. All these tower cases are far too large, and are designed for the bad old days when everyone had multiple expansion cards in their PC. No one does that any more (except gamers, and even then they only ever have 1, maybe 2 video cards), so all these ATX cases are totally wrong for today's needs.
Spanish is a crappy language because it's far too wordy and inefficient. I takes 3 times as many syllables to express the same thought as in English.
The primary strength of English is its versatility and its adaptability. It has a far larger vocabulary than any other language, mainly because it so readily adopts new words from other languages.
English is also a fairly easy language for others to learn at a basic level; there's no idiotic sense of gender like most other Indo-European languages, all the basic words are short and simple. It is hard to learn English at a very advanced level, but if you just want to be conversational, and be able to read simple text, it's pretty easy. It's kinda like learning to play a guitar: any idiot can learn to play 4 chords and make decent-sounding songs from those 4 chords, but only really talented and/or dedicated people can play at the level of Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, and this is probably why the guitar is such an incredibly popular musical instrument these days.
Um, it's really pretty simple. English took over because of WWI and WWII: the French lost in WWII and were taken over by the Germans. The English took a beating too, but finally between the Americans and the Russians, Germany lost and America and Russia were the two big powers. America's language was English, so when they in concert with the British became the main powers for the western-aligned nations, English became the lingua de franca just like French was long before. Meanwhile, Russian became the main language in the eastern-bloc countries; however they did poorly economically, and eventually that system collapsed, and since then (~1990) English has been taking over as the lingua de franca there too, for any kind of international trade and communication (also thanks to the Internet, which was started mostly in America and also western Europe).
The rise of China and the decay of America could very well change this in the future however.
Um, I thought they had decided there really was a "mitochondrial Eve".
No, all students don't need to be educated. If we handled this the way countries like Germany did (or the US did in the old days), we'd have different schools for different kids, and the problem kids would go to the dumb-kid school, and be kept away from the rest of the kids. Just because there's a public mandate to have compulsory school for all children doesn't mean they all need to be mainstreamed in the same school and the same classes.
They can often believe you've taken a slip road (off ramp) when you haven't, and vice versa, before correcting. But to believe you're on a road you are simply passing over is a big fuck up.
This happens to me all the time with Google Maps on Android.
I don't think a massive shift toward socialism would help much actually. It's not just the parents' wealth (or lack thereof) that's the problem, it's their culture and attitude towards education. Poor people generally don't believe that much in it; my mother was always told by her family that education is a waste of time and that a woman needs to get married at 16 and start having babies. Forcibly redistributing wealth to people like that isn't going to change their attitudes towards education. These things can be changed through well-funded education systems that seek to overcome parents' bad attitudes, but it takes generations, and the US has been going backwards for a long time.
It's called self-segregation. If you lump everyone together, the good parents are basically going to be fighting against the bad parents and their bad kids, and the overall quality of education is going to be mediocre at best, and that's IF the good parents put in a Herculean effort to fix things. Even then, their power is very limited by the political school boards, and by state and federal laws and funding. There's only so much a bunch of concerned parents can do.
However, if they take their kids out of the school and put them into a private school, they have far more say. The private school isn't answerable to stupid government requirements like NCLB, and private schools compete with each other. If one school sucks, you can leave it and put your kids in a competing school that's better-run. And since private schools don't have to deal with bad parents and bad kids, they have a much easier time of providing a good education.
In some places it is great. In some places it is a horror show.
I went to both public and private school growing up and had a pretty good experience in both. That said, the schools I went to were top quality.
I've been to private (and Catholic) schools, and public schools in both good and bad areas. The public schools in good areas aren't too bad, though they aren't good at dealing with bullies as has been pointed out in the media many times since Columbine. The public schools in the bad areas are terrible, not so much because of the kids, but because of the terrible teachers. Good teachers don't want to teach at the schools in poor areas. And teachers' unions make it so they can't get rid of really bad ones. Private schools don't have most of these problems; problem children are expelled and bad teachers are generally not hired, and there's no unions.
Of course they don't want to be part of Cuba, but the other Southern states probably don't want them (since the whole south part of the state basically speaks Spanish), so they can't join the new country of "Dixie" (or whatever they end up calling it), so either they can be independent, or they can join Cuba. And if they're independent, they run the risk of being invaded by Cuba and being taken over, and I don't see their Dixie neighbors coming to their defense. And unlike all those rednecks in Dixie, the people aren't all armed to the teeth with rifles, so they won't be able to defend themselves against the invading Cuban forces.
Of course, after a few decades of rising sea levels, south Florida will be underwater anyway, so all those people will either have to try to sneak into Dixie, or go back to Cuba.