I actually laughed out loud when the pundits started in on the "oh, we never thought terrorists would fly planes into buildings" on account of Clancy's work. Then, of course, it turns out that we knew good and damn well there were plans to fly planes into buildings; the government just decided to do nothing about it.
And now, thank God, they're taking this terrorist (living in my home state of Indiana -- who ever would've thought It Could Happen Here?!) to the woodshed for exposing the continued incompetence of the people who run this country (yes, that's bipartisan spite you're reading).
Admittedly, I've only done an upgrade on one machine, but from Dapper -> Edgy using the `update-manager -c -d' command, or whatever it was, everything went beautifully.
And I use Xubuntu, primarily, so I have to say, contra the claims of the main post, the Xubuntu upgrade went pretty well... This may or may not be related to the fact that I also keep the ubuntu-desktop metapackage installed, even though that leads to overkill in some areas:)
In many cases, they won't identify themselves as they bust down the door
I can't attest to how true this is, but I would point out there have been a couple major federal court cases in the last year which have weakened knock-and-announce precedents for police at a domicile.
How fucking magnanimous, since health care and cost of living have only gone up to cover most of that in his term.
The Bush plan is that the rich get richer, and the normal people learn to cope better with less purchasing power. It's the track we've been on since WWII, and we've sure done some incredible things. But at some point capitalism will have to answer for its propensity for screwing everyone-but-those-who-have-the-most as much as it possibly can.
given the fact that the GDP in places like Germany or France used to be similar to one in USA about 25 years ago - today it is only 70% of that in USA.
You ever looked at a map or population numebrs for Germany or France? If your numbers are accurate, there's no reason why the GDP of the 3rd most-populous country on earth shouldn't be well beyond small European nations. Even having a 10-to-7 lead on them isn't really a sparkling number.
Adium is built on libgaim, too, of all things. My hunch is that they use some OS-X-y thing to negotiate file transfer. I don't know the first thing about OS X specific development, but that would seem to me to be a reasonable explanation for why their stuff works and why GAIM is still freaky spotty.
Canada. Of course, that assumes Harper doesn't end up doing too much damage.
Why not move there? Immigration really looks difficult. I don't have any of the special skills where they just sort of shoo you in at the border. And nobody has offered to sponsor me. Feh. I'm moving far away in December, anyway.
Perhaps I should've been more clear. I was trying to get at the fact that it is in no way advantageous to RIAA to have P2P appear to be a useful mechanism in any way, even if they could show that one song is more popular on account of their P2P ads. That's what grandparent was trying to assert, but it is simply not in RIAA's interests to have P2P be seen as anything other than a hepatitis-C infested black market.
Whether or not it would be trivial for them to rig some fancy statistics is beyond the point -- why would they take the time and effort to do that? They're clearly not doing this to boost any song or artist's popularity; it is simply another tactic to get RIAA-controlled media onto P2P nets and people's hard drives.
but the RIAA is going to claim they buy more music because of the ads they're decoying out now.
Not that bullshit statistics have ever stopped a recording association of America, but they'd have to actually show that the increase in music purchases were driven by the decoy ads *and also* that those tunes / artists / albums / tours that didn't have decoy ads didn't benefit in the same way from the P2P network.
Really, they can only show the efficacy of these ads if there's only a specific, targeted sales uptick for those and those acts only. Otherwise, you're stuck speculating about the other ways in which P2P boosts increase in music, and that is the last thing RIAA wants to do.
Your implicit suggestion that I misrepresented the article is right-on. Mea culpa.
I don't know why, but I do actually have a strong psychological distinction between grafting in flora and cloning in fauna. Maybe it's the hundreds of years of history the former technique has behind it. So you may scoff at my distinction, and well, that's fine.:)
A lot of people tell me they can't hear the difference between 128kbps MP3s (I'm unsure of the details of the format, but even at 320kbps, isn't there a change in the waveform? That could techincally be detected too.) and the original CDs and that sort of thing, but for different people, they'll be able to discern different things.
If you're really interested, I have some spectrograms of what OGG and MP3 do to a waveform. The data rate is undoubtedly important, but you also have to take into consideration the sample rate (which controls how many samples per second the decoder has to interpolate a waveform and side effects thereof) and the number of quantization bits available, which controls the resolution of the individual samples. Plus, MP3 has a lowpass filter which is somewhere between 16kHz and 19kHz, which for certain musical passages is really noticeable, though not so much so for just voice.
AFAIK, MP3 is by nature always a lossy codec, with no option for lossless encoding. If that's true, no matter how much information you want to make available to the encoder, you'll never be able to match the original waveform.
Gmail is all smoke and mirrors with their storage space anyway. You don't really "have" that much space, nor do they actually have that much space to give you. It's a great marketing trick -- but ten-to-the-negative-who-knows-what percent of their users actually come anywhere close to that cap.
I think others are right on WRT the amount of realtime serving issues associated with the AJAX-driven interface for the office utilities. Storage is cheap; the bandwidth, memory, etc., for running live programs is much more expensive.
Fair point, but it's still the case that for most crimes in the US, you're innocent until proven guilty. Unless the "Presniz" decides you're a "tarist", then may God have mercy on your soul, because they'll torture you're sorry ass til you're proven innocent. Or longer.
I know there will be snarky +5 Funny comments underneath this (as well there should be), but this system to decrease the perceived randomness is actually really similar to the algorithm most radio stations use when programming their music.
There's a simple parameter that's set to control, to within one minute, the amount of temporal separation there must be between playing two songs from the same artist, or the same song twice. The radio algorithm is a little more complicated, since songs aren't in just one big batch like the iTunes library, but in different categories, based generally on the perceived desire of target listeners to hear a given new song, or like and identify with a given older song.
The system is built off the (once literal, now metaphorical) use of index cards: The format clocks say, e.g., at the top of the hour, play a P category song, followed by a B category song, then a G, then an A, etc. You'd have a set of rules, like "don't play the same artist within 45 minutes" or "don't play the same current song within 3 hours", and you'd take the first card in the category that fit all the rules, play it, and move the card to the back of the stack.
Basically, what Apple is doing with that slider is enabling artist separation control, which is completely one of the illusions radio stations (used to) use to convince you they had every song under the sun available to them.
On Lewis Black's Carnegie Hall album, he winds up on this very point. He absolutely wails on the policymakers in this debate, handing them their asses for pretending to know this about that and what's right and what's wrong, when the real problem is we don't even know what's dead and what's alive.
Something to the effect of how we need to just round up a bunch of people from all walks of life, lock them in a room, and have them figure out for us, so we can at least move forward from a set of uniform assumptions about what's dead and what's alive. And if they don't, we'll kill 'em.
Just a guess that you're Canadian from describing it as the Comedy channel which is Canadian vs. Comedy Central where it airs in the US. The news-trash broadcasts they're beating down in this study are nigh but a wimper compared to The National which is consistently the best damn news show around.
It's so good that even though I can't get it on TV anymore, I grab it online. The only thing it misses regularly is the minutiae of US government (it's CBC, right -- thoguh they do cover the bigger events), which is an easy enough gap to patch over as long as you don't expect the network news to cover it for you.
I'm no longer interested in playing MSFT's games. If I didn't have to have a Windows PC at home for my wife to do her job, I wouldn't be using Windows at all.
I *despise* Linux on the desktop but I'm not about to use a crack that could be open me to more attacks than using the vanilla MSFT OS, have to deal with MSFT, and pay the crazy price point that they want for Vista. Nevermind the fact that my current machines will probably run the OS like shit.
I'll suffer with OS X (which I also despise as a desktop OS), Linux, and my current interation of XP (heavily firewalled).
So what OS do you want to use for your desktop computer?? Amiga? Syllable? QNX?
I can understand finding flaws in an OS, and even considering some of them showstoppers, leading you to prefer one system over the next. But it must be agonizing to hate every single even semi-popular computing platform for the desktop.
I'm not being critical of your point, which is right-on (i.e., that people being willing to lose money is the key to being able to make money playing poker), but don't forget the house rake and "administration" fees and things like that, which are attached to both tournament entry fees and to individual pots. It's actually worse than a zero sum game for players, not that it matters, as you said, so long as people are willing to lose money:)
Or, you know, just count the votes citizens actually cast for the actual person they voted for. Rather than letting me cast my vote, and then having that amount to nothing because my state consistently goes for The Other Guy.
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I actually laughed out loud when the pundits started in on the "oh, we never thought terrorists would fly planes into buildings" on account of Clancy's work. Then, of course, it turns out that we knew good and damn well there were plans to fly planes into buildings; the government just decided to do nothing about it.
And now, thank God, they're taking this terrorist (living in my home state of Indiana -- who ever would've thought It Could Happen Here?!) to the woodshed for exposing the continued incompetence of the people who run this country (yes, that's bipartisan spite you're reading).
Admittedly, I've only done an upgrade on one machine, but from Dapper -> Edgy using the `update-manager -c -d' command, or whatever it was, everything went beautifully.
:)
And I use Xubuntu, primarily, so I have to say, contra the claims of the main post, the Xubuntu upgrade went pretty well... This may or may not be related to the fact that I also keep the ubuntu-desktop metapackage installed, even though that leads to overkill in some areas
I can't attest to how true this is, but I would point out there have been a couple major federal court cases in the last year which have weakened knock-and-announce precedents for police at a domicile.
How fucking magnanimous, since health care and cost of living have only gone up to cover most of that in his term.
The Bush plan is that the rich get richer, and the normal people learn to cope better with less purchasing power. It's the track we've been on since WWII, and we've sure done some incredible things. But at some point capitalism will have to answer for its propensity for screwing everyone-but-those-who-have-the-most as much as it possibly can.
You ever looked at a map or population numebrs for Germany or France? If your numbers are accurate, there's no reason why the GDP of the 3rd most-populous country on earth shouldn't be well beyond small European nations. Even having a 10-to-7 lead on them isn't really a sparkling number.
Adium is built on libgaim, too, of all things. My hunch is that they use some OS-X-y thing to negotiate file transfer. I don't know the first thing about OS X specific development, but that would seem to me to be a reasonable explanation for why their stuff works and why GAIM is still freaky spotty.
Canada. Of course, that assumes Harper doesn't end up doing too much damage.
Why not move there? Immigration really looks difficult. I don't have any of the special skills where they just sort of shoo you in at the border. And nobody has offered to sponsor me. Feh. I'm moving far away in December, anyway.
What about Photoshopped pictures of a Supreme Court justice in a bikini?
I had to give a presentation on my favorite SCOTUS justice, and, well, Ruth Bader Ginsburg wins. What can I say?
Perhaps I should've been more clear. I was trying to get at the fact that it is in no way advantageous to RIAA to have P2P appear to be a useful mechanism in any way, even if they could show that one song is more popular on account of their P2P ads. That's what grandparent was trying to assert, but it is simply not in RIAA's interests to have P2P be seen as anything other than a hepatitis-C infested black market.
Whether or not it would be trivial for them to rig some fancy statistics is beyond the point -- why would they take the time and effort to do that? They're clearly not doing this to boost any song or artist's popularity; it is simply another tactic to get RIAA-controlled media onto P2P nets and people's hard drives.
Not that bullshit statistics have ever stopped a recording association of America, but they'd have to actually show that the increase in music purchases were driven by the decoy ads *and also* that those tunes / artists / albums / tours that didn't have decoy ads didn't benefit in the same way from the P2P network.
Really, they can only show the efficacy of these ads if there's only a specific, targeted sales uptick for those and those acts only. Otherwise, you're stuck speculating about the other ways in which P2P boosts increase in music, and that is the last thing RIAA wants to do.
Your implicit suggestion that I misrepresented the article is right-on. Mea culpa.
:)
I don't know why, but I do actually have a strong psychological distinction between grafting in flora and cloning in fauna. Maybe it's the hundreds of years of history the former technique has behind it. So you may scoff at my distinction, and well, that's fine.
You also can't graft a cow into soil and make it grow. There's a difference between selective breeding and cellular-level manipulation of organisms.
If you're really interested, I have some spectrograms of what OGG and MP3 do to a waveform. The data rate is undoubtedly important, but you also have to take into consideration the sample rate (which controls how many samples per second the decoder has to interpolate a waveform and side effects thereof) and the number of quantization bits available, which controls the resolution of the individual samples. Plus, MP3 has a lowpass filter which is somewhere between 16kHz and 19kHz, which for certain musical passages is really noticeable, though not so much so for just voice.
AFAIK, MP3 is by nature always a lossy codec, with no option for lossless encoding. If that's true, no matter how much information you want to make available to the encoder, you'll never be able to match the original waveform.
Next time just thank me for bullshitting an answer for you :)
Gmail is all smoke and mirrors with their storage space anyway. You don't really "have" that much space, nor do they actually have that much space to give you. It's a great marketing trick -- but ten-to-the-negative-who-knows-what percent of their users actually come anywhere close to that cap.
I think others are right on WRT the amount of realtime serving issues associated with the AJAX-driven interface for the office utilities. Storage is cheap; the bandwidth, memory, etc., for running live programs is much more expensive.
Fair point, but it's still the case that for most crimes in the US, you're innocent until proven guilty. Unless the "Presniz" decides you're a "tarist", then may God have mercy on your soul, because they'll torture you're sorry ass til you're proven innocent. Or longer.
It's like podcasting on a massive wireless scale. Except you have almost no choice of content by comparison, and the radio hosts get paid even less.
I know there will be snarky +5 Funny comments underneath this (as well there should be), but this system to decrease the perceived randomness is actually really similar to the algorithm most radio stations use when programming their music.
There's a simple parameter that's set to control, to within one minute, the amount of temporal separation there must be between playing two songs from the same artist, or the same song twice. The radio algorithm is a little more complicated, since songs aren't in just one big batch like the iTunes library, but in different categories, based generally on the perceived desire of target listeners to hear a given new song, or like and identify with a given older song.
The system is built off the (once literal, now metaphorical) use of index cards: The format clocks say, e.g., at the top of the hour, play a P category song, followed by a B category song, then a G, then an A, etc. You'd have a set of rules, like "don't play the same artist within 45 minutes" or "don't play the same current song within 3 hours", and you'd take the first card in the category that fit all the rules, play it, and move the card to the back of the stack.
Basically, what Apple is doing with that slider is enabling artist separation control, which is completely one of the illusions radio stations (used to) use to convince you they had every song under the sun available to them.
On Lewis Black's Carnegie Hall album, he winds up on this very point. He absolutely wails on the policymakers in this debate, handing them their asses for pretending to know this about that and what's right and what's wrong, when the real problem is we don't even know what's dead and what's alive.
Something to the effect of how we need to just round up a bunch of people from all walks of life, lock them in a room, and have them figure out for us, so we can at least move forward from a set of uniform assumptions about what's dead and what's alive. And if they don't, we'll kill 'em.
Just a guess that you're Canadian from describing it as the Comedy channel which is Canadian vs. Comedy Central where it airs in the US. The news-trash broadcasts they're beating down in this study are nigh but a wimper compared to The National which is consistently the best damn news show around.
It's so good that even though I can't get it on TV anymore, I grab it online. The only thing it misses regularly is the minutiae of US government (it's CBC, right -- thoguh they do cover the bigger events), which is an easy enough gap to patch over as long as you don't expect the network news to cover it for you.
Fair enough :) You might want to check out Syllable, though, if you're truly in the mood for Something Completely Different(tm).
So what OS do you want to use for your desktop computer?? Amiga? Syllable? QNX?
I can understand finding flaws in an OS, and even considering some of them showstoppers, leading you to prefer one system over the next. But it must be agonizing to hate every single even semi-popular computing platform for the desktop.
I'm not being critical of your point, which is right-on (i.e., that people being willing to lose money is the key to being able to make money playing poker), but don't forget the house rake and "administration" fees and things like that, which are attached to both tournament entry fees and to individual pots. It's actually worse than a zero sum game for players, not that it matters, as you said, so long as people are willing to lose money :)
Thank you and props to moofie and portmaster (sister responses). I don't really have anything else to add.
Or, you know, just count the votes citizens actually cast for the actual person they voted for. Rather than letting me cast my vote, and then having that amount to nothing because my state consistently goes for The Other Guy.