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User: TsuruchiBrian

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  1. Re:Seems reasonable. on Harvard Pulls Student Offers Over Online Comments (go.com) · · Score: 1

    It depends on the situation. If I am deciding whether or not to date someone, then I get to decide.

    If a private institution is deciding whether ot not to do business with a client (e.g. a food vendor, a student/customer, etc), then they get to decide

    Every person or private institution gets to have their own personal definition for what an asshole is.

    The government and public institutions get to have an objective standard for what is legal.

  2. Re:Seems reasonable. on Harvard Pulls Student Offers Over Online Comments (go.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Getting fired for telling your boss to go fuck himself/herself also probably has a chilling effect. Anyone in the office who thought maybe they could get away with doing the same thing without getting fired will have a serious disincentive to express their 1st amendment free speech rights in this way.

    I'm a libertarian, and this is the sort of chilling effects that I am comfortable with.

    The private school maintains it's freedom to accept and reject whomever it wants, and the students are free to apply to any other schools they wish and those other schools are free to accept or reject them.

    Your actions have consequences. The constitution promises that your speech will not have legal consequences in most circumstances (except special cases like perjury, etc). It is not limitless. These kids are either adults or soon to be adults. This is an important lesson to learn. Another important lesson is that one setback (e.g. not getting into a particular school) is not the end of the world, and it is an experience you can learn from and improve yourself. A third very important lesson, is to assume that everything on the internet is forever. Everyone says embarrassing stuff on the internet and in real life. Embarrassing things are easily forgiven if not forgotten. Try not to say to many things that you would be actually ashamed (not just embarrassed) of if made public.

  3. My hypothesis on Can Older IT Workers 'Navigate' Ageism? (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    1. Some percentage of people are reluctant to learn new ways of doing things.
    2. For younger people this means learning old ways of doing things and for old people this means new ways of doing things.
    3. If a company discriminates against people for only being willing to do things the old way, they will also be indirectly be discriminating against older people.
    I suspect that if a young person demanded a much higher salary, and refused to learn new things, they would also be discriminated against. I have met some young people like this, but not many.

  4. Re: The vast majority of NY and CA for clinton on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't see how it would.

  5. Re:It's all in a slogan on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    California is a solid blue state. 32% of Californian voters voter for Donald Trump. I guarantee those people are not happy with Dianne Feinstein Barabara Boxer, and Kamala Harris.

  6. Re:It's all in a slogan on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    There is not one single thing that lost her the race. When a race is close, lots of things can affect the outcome. That dumb pokemon joke she told could have cost her the election too.

  7. Re:It's all in a slogan on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes that is correct. I guess a clearer way to say it is that the election method outlined in the constitution allows states to award their electors undemocratically, in a way that a national popular vote would not. There is however a strong incentive not to award electors proprotionally (which is no doubt why so few states do it). If you are the majority party in a state (and therefore the party in the best position to change how your state awards electors), doing anything but winner take all would harm your party.

  8. I can imagine a scenario on Movie Studios Are Blaming Rotten Tomatoes For Killing Movies No One Wants To See (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    I can imagine a scenario where Hollywood starts making lots of really good quality films, and half the reviews on rotten tomatoes are still bad because of higher expectations caused by all the great new films and relative grading (i.e. on a curve).

    I can also imagine in this situation that people will be willing to go see more movies, because they find that they thoroughly enjoy even the movies that got mediocre scores on rotten tomatoes.

    How about that Hollywood? Make better movies. I get that the public doesn't seem to like the actual good movies you produce, but they apparently don't like the bad ones either anymore. At least good movies no one watches have the implicit virtue of being good, there is no more excuse for making bad movies if people don't like them anymore.

    It's a good thing for everyone if people don't like bad movies any more. Hollywood doesn't have to make them and we don't have to watch them.

  9. Re:It's all in a slogan on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 1

    The electoral college is a horrible design. I fail to see how the electoral college prevents CA and NY from deciding the election. It actually causes 100% of their votes to go to a single candidate. A popular vote would reduce the effect that California has on the election. It would give a voice to the republicans living in new york and california, just as it would give a voice to democrats living in texas.

    In 2024 when Texas flips to being a blue state, we will see CA, NY and TX deciding every election for the democrats, by ensuring that every republican in those states is disenfranchised. I'm not a dermocrat, so I don't see this as a good thing, other than it's potential to convince people of the weakness in this election system.

  10. Re:The vast majority of NY and CA for clinton on Hillary Clinton Rips 'Bankrupt' DNC Data Operation (axios.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Lot's of people in California and New York voted for Donald Trump. 32% and 37% respectively. The reason that Hillary running up her totals in california and new york don't help her, is because she is already winning 100% of the electoral vote despite there being many republicans who did not for her.

    Texas is projected to flip to being a blue state in 2024. I expect many electoral college proponents will changing their tune at that point.

    The electoral college has 2 separate effects. It gives slightly more voting power to smaller states, but it also just makes the results very erratic (severely diverging from the popular vote). This latter effect has a far more profound effect on the outcome of elections.

    It is largely incidental that the electoral college has been helping republicans in recent history. When the circumstances change and see the effect start to disproportionately help democrats, we'll see democrats clamoring to keep it and republicans clamoring to get rid of it.

    It's not a good voting system, regardless of what your desired outcome is.

  11. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    The meta data formatting is an artifact of the container format, which is technically separate from the data encoding, although many format specifications cause these to be coupled (e.g. .mp3, .flac, etc).

    If you really want all your meta data to be the same, you can choose a flexible open container format (e.g. ogg for audio, .mkv for video, etc), and the audio data can be whatever format you like (e.g. flac (lossless), mp3 (lossy)).

  12. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    However, the quality never got worse than the original lossy recording despite the format shifts.

    It can't be worse. It can't be better. It's lossless. It was probably larger though.

    Given player history, I prefer all my files in the same format for simplicity.

    How is that simpler in a way that's important? It's simpler if your metric for simplicity is variation in file formats. It's less simple if your metric is having every file be in it's most original form (e.g. least number of unnecessary conversions).

    One could ask the question like this: What is simpler? Using a player that can play multiple formats? Or converting your whole library to a single format? Supporting only one format may be simpler for the developer of the software, but I think most users would view this as more complicated.

  13. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    Yes you can probably intentionally build a player that is capable of playing an uncompressed wave file but not an mp3. You could probably easily do this by making certain math functions very inefficient (e.g. requiring multiple instructions). But you shouldn't build this player just as much as you shouldn't convert lossy audio to lossless.

  14. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    A. encoding to another lossy format will by deinfition will result in some loss of quality (perceptible or not).

    B. You will likely lose a lot of the benefit of some superior compression format in using lossy mp3 as the source material rather than the original.

    I can certainly understand the desire for an even smaller file if the loss in quality is not significant, but the only scenario I could see this being a good idea is if you have super high quality mp3's (e.g. 320kbps cbr) and want to compress them to like half the size. Given that you still have access to the uncompressed source material, it might be worth it in terms of reasonable quality loss and low effort, and space savings.

  15. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    You can DRM to just about any format, including mp3.

  16. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 2

    Did you forget to make sure those devices were turing-complete before buying them?

  17. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    bash? gross.

  18. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 2

    You're just using it wrong. Flac is not just for just sounding better than a 320Kpbs mp3 file to a casual listener. Flac is useful as an archival format that you can *also* efficiently stream. It's meant to be a better alternative to zipping uncompressed wave files.

    You don't need to encode the latest beyonce album as flac. You might want to encode the recording of your wedding or the time you bootlegged your favorite artist at a dive bar as flac.

    You might want to use flac if you are doing video editing, and you don't want to lose (a little) quality every time you re-encode the audio.

  19. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Converting a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding doesn't make it lossless. It just makes it appear lossless.

    The only reason to convert a lossy encoding to a lossless encoding is if someone pointing a gun to your head asks you to, and maybe not even then.

  20. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 2

    Flac is an open format. DRM maybe a reason to use mp3 over formats, but not flac.

  21. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 4, Informative

    Please don't ever convert your entire mp3 collection to flac. The point of flac is that it is lossless compression. If your collection is already mp3, converting to flac will make your files slightly larger and provide the false impression that the data is a lossless encoding from an uncompressed source (e.g. audio CD), with no benefit whatsoever.

    There are batch converters that will convert anything (including mp3) to flac. Maybe some of the more caring converters will warn you about not converting mp3 to flac.

  22. Re:I have thousands of songs on MP3 Is Not Dead, It's Finally Free (marco.org) · · Score: 1

    Mp3 players will always be for sale. They will just not be considered mp3 players anymore because they will do much more. My currently mp3 player is also a smartphone.

    I do in fact encode very important audio recordings in flac (e.g. the ones where I have the only copies, and will use as source material for editing projects). But I and most people on earth can not discern any difference between high quality mp3 encodings and flac, and mp3 is a fraction of the size/bandwidth of flac.

    I will use flac for everyday music listening, when smartphones have 16 TB of flash space and/or streaming music 24/7 does not put a dent in my cell data cap (i.e. even unlimited plans currently throttle your data after usage exceeds certain limits).

  23. Re:Highly unsual on Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    Well it seems as though even Donald Trump couldn't keep this lie going, even after he presumably had many of his staff try to do it.

  24. Re:Highly unsual on Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm not saying that would not be a good reason for firing Comey (back when it actually happened). It would be a very plausible reason for a hypothetical president Hillary Clinton to fire Comey on January 20th. I'm skeptical that this was Trump's reason for firing Comey.

  25. Re:Highly unsual on Trump Fires FBI Director James Comey (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    The reason is ostensibly Comey's mishandling of the Clinton email investigation. Is that explanation convincing to anyone?