I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but sometimes he has some...interesting ideas.
(emphasis blow is mine)
We're living in the darkest age of musical sound. When they started capturing music on records a long time ago-on 78's--the sound was pretty shaky.Then it got a little better, and from that point on, right up to the beginning of digital recording,
everything that was done was better than the digital recordings that are being made today. Digital is completely wrong. It's a farce.
They've improved digital technology to the point where you can at least say,"Hey, that's music." But your brain and your heart are starved for a challenge, and there's no challenge, there are no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're hearing simulated music. Your brain is capable of taking in an incredible amount of information, and the beauty of music should be like water washing over you. But digitally recorded music is like ice cubes washing over you. It's not the same.
My album Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere is now available on CD, but it's not as good as the original, which came out in 1969. Listening to a CD islike looking through a screen window If you get right up next to a screen window, you can see all kinds of different colors through each hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be reduced to only one color per hole-that's what digital recording does to sound. All that gets recorded is what's dominant at each moment. I would like to hear guitars again, with the warmth, the highs, the lows, the air, the electricity, the vibrancy of something that's real, instead of just a duplication of the dominant factors. It's an insult to the brain and heart and feelings to have to listen to this and think it's music.
There's a certain emptiness in the air these days.Youthink that it might be today'smusic, because
it just isn't as heartfelt as yesterday's.
Everybody says, "Well, business came in and took over, and they ruined music," but that's just an excuse. The real reason istechnical. It's not that people don't have souls anymore. All these bands have got huge souls and can't wait to play; they just can't figure out why their albums don't sound as good as some of the things they used to hear.
I've been making records for twenty-six years, and I'm telling you: from the early 1980s up till now, and probably for another ten or fifteen years to come-this is the darkest time ever for recorded music. We'll come out the other end and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go, "Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what that music really sounded like. We got so carried away that we never even really recorded it. We just made digital records of it." That's what people will say-mark my words.
And then he started selling Ponos. I'm not a big enough of a Neil Young fan to buy one though.
Part of it is how much time you devote to the game, whatever your game of choice might be.
Any professional gamer is probably spending at least 5 times as much time playing games as you and that's if you spend a lot of time playing games. If you don't they'll easily spend 10 times as much time.
You'll just have to quit your job and spend 16 hours a day playing whatever it is you want to be good at.
Bitter loser. I am 52, still play video games and have the same super twitch reflexes I had as a kid gamer.
I've actually become better in some respects, but that's probably because I no longer have to scrape up quarters and ride my bike to the mall to play video games. I have my own Galaga machine now. What has suffered though is stamina. The aliens just keep attacking and after fending them off for about 15 minutes or so I want a break - just for a minute or two.
But they won't stop! And putting a pause button on an old arcade style quarter game would just be wrong. It's not how they were intended to be played.
And so it goes. For the first 75% of the game or so I'm playing almost perfectly and then I start to lose it. Oh well, it wouldn't be fun if it were easy.
Were we supposed to be talking about Fortnite? I refuse to play it - seems like a bigger waste of time than playing Galaga 38 years after it came out.
What it won't do is anything about the duopoly I have to choose from and since Comcast couldn't provide reliable service in my area I effectively have a choice of CLink or nothing (or satellite I guess - screw that; maybe Verizon? I've resorted to them before when my own ISP was down - it's not ideal).
There are very few scenarios where this would decrease my options. Is Century Link going to go out of business because of this? Will Comcast?
And I wish I paid $65 a month for 100 mbps. It's more like $85 for about 20 mbps...if it's a good day. Fortunately I don't need a whole lot of bandwidth, but I do expect it to work consistently which only one provider seems capable of doing where I live.
I've been putting off calling CenturyLink to renegotiate my monthly bill. It's an annual ritual with them. I have to call them up and spend an hour on the phone and threaten to go back to Comcast and eventually, they'll cut it in half - TEMPORARILY. Comcast plays the same games.
If there were real competition, I would find an ISP that was reliable and charged a reasonable sum for their services and they would make money and customers would be reasonably happy.
Well, I did anyway until a little over a year ago. I wasn't really paying attention to my bill closely and I was wondering what they would charge me for the disc I couldn't return because I couldn't find it. AFAIK, they didn't charge me for it when I cancelled, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention closely enough.
I hadn't mailed discs for quite a while before I cancelled. I can't keep up with the streaming stuff. Some of it's great, some mediocre. It's a lot of stuff though.
And some of it's mindless garbage. Of course they had to come up with a cartoon version of Trailer Park Boys. It makes the first season of the live show look sophisticated. I can't believe Julian has been milking the same rum and coke for nearly 20 years.
And how does Bubbles know the the difference between the smell of bear shit and the smell of samsquatch shit anyway?
There's a ton of stuff that seems like a good deal on Amazon until you notice that "+ $11.55 shipping"
You're not supposed to notice that. Dark patterns. Bad, bad, bad. The other thing that's bad - from my point of view as a consumer - is I've bought tons of garbage I wouldn't have otherwise bought if I had to make the effort to go to a brick and mortar store and think about it. It's just click, click, click.
The impulse purchases are really my problem though as is not noticing the excessive shipping prices on some items. While it's very easy to click, Amazon has never failed to tell me how much I would have to pay before I made that final click to actually purchase something.
Personally, I think Sony's problem is they blew their reputation as a maker of solid electronics. Maybe I was naive, but I used to think of quality when I thought of Sony - about 30 years ago. That faded away in the past 3 decades.
Maybe the UAE and Saudi Arabia are technically different countries, but lately I see them as big and little brother who march in lockstep.
Full disclosure: I watch Al Jazeera all the time. It's only because I'm lazy that my TV is on PBS right now. Al Jazeera is biased, especially when it comes to news about Qatar, but I'm not convinced they're worse than Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Is Bezos really richer than the Saudi royal family? Even if he is on paper, can he put his hands on more cash?
The US's arms exports are 58% higher than those of Russia, the world's second-largest exporter. And while US arms exports grew by 25% in 2013-17 compared with 2008-12, Russia's exports fell by 7.1% over the same period.
It is Middle East states that have been among the US's biggest customers - Saudi Arabia tops the list - with the region as a whole accounting for almost half of US arms exports during 2013-17.
Why exactly are we arming Saudi Arabia to fight a war in Yemen? Trump says the US cannot survive without arms sales to Saudi Arabia so we must accept all their violations of human rights and war crimes. And yet most Americans can't even find Yemen on a map. I fancy myself to be up on the news, but I can't imagine why the poorest Arab country is of any consequence to us. Is it because Abu Rasasa owns Trump?
And we wonder why we're constantly at war with the Middle East. Maybe it's because we keep selling them weapons! But wait. That's the intent. "War's good business" and "The business of America is business". Grace Slick said the former. Calvin Coolidge said the latter.
Steven won't give his arm To no gold star mother's farm; War's good business so give your son But I'd rather have my country die for me
Why not just stop contraband from getting into prisons in the first place? I realize it's not an easy problem, but getting rid of corrupt prison guards would be a good start.
Boofing never meant getting wasted or "farting" which is what Brett Kavanaugh claimed.
I'll just reference this Frank Zappa song:
Like my English teacher He's like (Valley girl) He's like Mr. Bu-Fu (Valley girl)
We're talking Lord God King Bu-Fu (Valley girl) I am so sure He's, like, so gross
Like, he sits there and Like, plays with all his rings And he, like Flirts with all the guys in the class
Yes,the lyrics suggest that the valley girl's English teacher is gay and probably engages in anal sex with other men and she's grossed out by that. I don't think FZ ever pretended to be politically correct.
I honestly don't know about "Devil's Triangle", but it's not a drinking game I ever heard of and it does sound more like a sexual position to me. Maybe BK could explain the rules to us if he wasn't too drunk to remember.
I can't say whether he ever committed sexual assault or attempted to, but we do know he liked alcohol a little too much and bragged about sexual conquests whether real or imagined and he did lie to Congress.
I think Andrew Wheeler's plan is to follow the example of Brazil and wait until there's a dam holding toxic waste that breaks thus providing lots of money and jobs to whoever cleans it up...
Evo Morales chuckles at the thought. It's not just the US that will suffer. Chile will pay a steep price too. Maybe Bolivia will finally get access to the sea if it rises enough.
That's why I'm about a mile high in Denver. That's an old Jimmy Buffett song before he realized he liked Margaritas better than Coors? LOL... Nobody drinks Coors here.
That's pretty much why I stopped going to concerts except for the pizza. That and having to choose between drinking or being able to drive myself home.
Somehow they still sell out.
But then a strange phenomenon happened. Everyone who goes to these concerts or games now whips out their cell phones so they an watch it on a small screen or play Candy Crush while they watch people play whatever it is they're playing.
Slashdot Mirror
You only get mod points when nobody has anything worth modding or they've already been modded appropriately or you want to join in on the discussion.
Or you take a few days off and they just expire.
That's not really true, but sometimes it feels like it.
THE CD AND THE DAMAGE DONE an editorial by Neil Young (c. 1992)
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but sometimes he has some ...interesting ideas.
(emphasis blow is mine)
We're living in the darkest age of musical
sound. When they started capturing music on
records a long time ago-on 78's--the sound was
pretty shaky.Then it got a little better, and from
that point on, right up to the beginning of digital recording,
everything that was done was better than the digital recordings
that are being made today. Digital is completely wrong. It's a farce.
They've improved digital technology to the
point where you can at least say,"Hey, that's music."
But your brain and your heart are starved for
a challenge, and there's no challenge, there are
no possibilities, there's no imagination. You're
hearing simulated music. Your brain is capable of
taking in an incredible amount of information,
and the beauty of music should be like water
washing over you. But digitally recorded music is
like ice cubes washing over you. It's not the same.
My album Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere is
now available on CD, but it's not as good as the
original, which came out in 1969. Listening to
a CD islike looking through a screen window If
you get right up next to a screen window, you can
see all kinds of different colors through each
hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be
reduced to only one color per hole-that's what
digital recording does to sound. All that gets
recorded is what's dominant at each moment. I
would like to hear guitars again, with the warmth,
the highs, the lows, the air, the electricity, the
vibrancy of something that's real, instead of just
a duplication of the dominant factors. It's an insult
to the brain and heart and feelings to have
to listen to this and think it's music.
There's a certain emptiness in the air these
days.Youthink that it might be today'smusic, because
it just isn't as heartfelt as yesterday's.
Everybody says, "Well, business came in and took
over, and they ruined music," but that's just an
excuse. The real reason istechnical. It's not that
people don't have souls anymore. All these bands
have got huge souls and can't wait to play; they
just can't figure out why their albums don't sound
as good as some of the things they used to hear.
I've been making records for twenty-six years,
and I'm telling you: from the early 1980s up till
now, and probably for another ten or fifteen
years to come-this is the darkest time ever for
recorded music. We'll come out the other end
and it'll be okay, but we'll look back and go,
"Wow, that was the digital age. I wonder what
that music really sounded like. We got so carried
away that we never even really recorded it. We
just made digital records of it." That's what people will say-mark my words.
And then he started selling Ponos. I'm not a big enough of a Neil Young fan to buy one though.
I would suggest they call it Deceptive Experience Reduction Plan or just DERP.
Part of it is how much time you devote to the game, whatever your game of choice might be.
Any professional gamer is probably spending at least 5 times as much time playing games as you and that's if you spend a lot of time playing games. If you don't they'll easily spend 10 times as much time.
You'll just have to quit your job and spend 16 hours a day playing whatever it is you want to be good at.
Bitter loser. I am 52, still play video games and have the same super twitch reflexes I had as a kid gamer.
I've actually become better in some respects, but that's probably because I no longer have to scrape up quarters and ride my bike to the mall to play video games. I have my own Galaga machine now. What has suffered though is stamina. The aliens just keep attacking and after fending them off for about 15 minutes or so I want a break - just for a minute or two.
But they won't stop! And putting a pause button on an old arcade style quarter game would just be wrong. It's not how they were intended to be played.
And so it goes. For the first 75% of the game or so I'm playing almost perfectly and then I start to lose it. Oh well, it wouldn't be fun if it were easy.
Were we supposed to be talking about Fortnite? I refuse to play it - seems like a bigger waste of time than playing Galaga 38 years after it came out.
What it won't do is anything about the duopoly I have to choose from and since Comcast couldn't provide reliable service in my area I effectively have a choice of CLink or nothing (or satellite I guess - screw that; maybe Verizon? I've resorted to them before when my own ISP was down - it's not ideal).
There are very few scenarios where this would decrease my options. Is Century Link going to go out of business because of this? Will Comcast?
And I wish I paid $65 a month for 100 mbps. It's more like $85 for about 20 mbps...if it's a good day. Fortunately I don't need a whole lot of bandwidth, but I do expect it to work consistently which only one provider seems capable of doing where I live.
I've been putting off calling CenturyLink to renegotiate my monthly bill. It's an annual ritual with them. I have to call them up and spend an hour on the phone and threaten to go back to Comcast and eventually, they'll cut it in half - TEMPORARILY. Comcast plays the same games.
If there were real competition, I would find an ISP that was reliable and charged a reasonable sum for their services and they would make money and customers would be reasonably happy.
Well, I did anyway until a little over a year ago. I wasn't really paying attention to my bill closely and I was wondering what they would charge me for the disc I couldn't return because I couldn't find it. AFAIK, they didn't charge me for it when I cancelled, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention closely enough.
I hadn't mailed discs for quite a while before I cancelled. I can't keep up with the streaming stuff. Some of it's great, some mediocre. It's a lot of stuff though.
And some of it's mindless garbage. Of course they had to come up with a cartoon version of Trailer Park Boys. It makes the first season of the live show look sophisticated. I can't believe Julian has been milking the same rum and coke for nearly 20 years.
And how does Bubbles know the the difference between the smell of bear shit and the smell of samsquatch shit anyway?
They've been lying for years.
Oh, that's Direct TV Now?
Oh, that's different. Never mind. This is Emily Litella.
/Actually, it's not different. It's business as usual.
Do corporate IT support and you will know exactly why we wine.
I usually just beer, but wine is good too.
There's a ton of stuff that seems like a good deal on Amazon until you notice that "+ $11.55 shipping"
You're not supposed to notice that. Dark patterns. Bad, bad, bad. The other thing that's bad - from my point of view as a consumer - is I've bought tons of garbage I wouldn't have otherwise bought if I had to make the effort to go to a brick and mortar store and think about it. It's just click, click, click.
The impulse purchases are really my problem though as is not noticing the excessive shipping prices on some items. While it's very easy to click, Amazon has never failed to tell me how much I would have to pay before I made that final click to actually purchase something.
Personally, I think Sony's problem is they blew their reputation as a maker of solid electronics. Maybe I was naive, but I used to think of quality when I thought of Sony - about 30 years ago. That faded away in the past 3 decades.
I should mod you informative and the AC as "ditto" because my first instinct was to say "Sony makes smartphones?"
I never heard of Xperia either. It sounds a bit too much like Experian for my tastes.
Maybe the UAE and Saudi Arabia are technically different countries, but lately I see them as big and little brother who march in lockstep.
Full disclosure: I watch Al Jazeera all the time. It's only because I'm lazy that my TV is on PBS right now. Al Jazeera is biased, especially when it comes to news about Qatar, but I'm not convinced they're worse than Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
Is Bezos really richer than the Saudi royal family? Even if he is on paper, can he put his hands on more cash?
We should start spelling Allah as "-ll-h". Except then nobody would know what the hell we were talking about.
I'm pretty sure we're the LARGEST arms dealer.
According to the BBC
The US's arms exports are 58% higher than those of Russia, the world's second-largest exporter. And while US arms exports grew by 25% in 2013-17 compared with 2008-12, Russia's exports fell by 7.1% over the same period.
It is Middle East states that have been among the US's biggest customers - Saudi Arabia tops the list - with the region as a whole accounting for almost half of US arms exports during 2013-17.
Why exactly are we arming Saudi Arabia to fight a war in Yemen? Trump says the US cannot survive without arms sales to Saudi Arabia so we must accept all their violations of human rights and war crimes. And yet most Americans can't even find Yemen on a map. I fancy myself to be up on the news, but I can't imagine why the poorest Arab country is of any consequence to us. Is it because Abu Rasasa owns Trump?
And we wonder why we're constantly at war with the Middle East. Maybe it's because we keep selling them weapons! But wait. That's the intent. "War's good business" and "The business of America is business". Grace Slick said the former. Calvin Coolidge said the latter.
Steven won't give his arm
To no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
But I'd rather have my country die for me
And they'll continue to be called out for it. It may be a weak response, but it's all we've got.
systemd did that for me already.
I still have no idea what "dubstep" actually is. I just tried listening to a Skrillex song and couldn't even make it through a full minute.
Why not just stop contraband from getting into prisons in the first place? I realize it's not an easy problem, but getting rid of corrupt prison guards would be a good start.
Boofing never meant getting wasted or "farting" which is what Brett Kavanaugh claimed.
I'll just reference this Frank Zappa song:
Like my English teacher
He's like
(Valley girl)
He's like Mr. Bu-Fu
(Valley girl)
We're talking Lord God King Bu-Fu
(Valley girl)
I am so sure
He's, like, so gross
Like, he sits there and
Like, plays with all his rings
And he, like
Flirts with all the guys in the class
Yes,the lyrics suggest that the valley girl's English teacher is gay and probably engages in anal sex with other men and she's grossed out by that. I don't think FZ ever pretended to be politically correct.
I honestly don't know about "Devil's Triangle", but it's not a drinking game I ever heard of and it does sound more like a sexual position to me. Maybe BK could explain the rules to us if he wasn't too drunk to remember.
I can't say whether he ever committed sexual assault or attempted to, but we do know he liked alcohol a little too much and bragged about sexual conquests whether real or imagined and he did lie to Congress.
IMO, he's not fit for the Supreme Court.
I think Andrew Wheeler's plan is to follow the example of Brazil and wait until there's a dam holding toxic waste that breaks thus providing lots of money and jobs to whoever cleans it up...
They will clean it up, right?
Every country with coasts will suffer.
Evo Morales chuckles at the thought. It's not just the US that will suffer. Chile will pay a steep price too. Maybe Bolivia will finally get access to the sea if it rises enough.
the entire US east coast is under huge threat.
That's why I'm about a mile high in Denver. That's an old Jimmy Buffett song before he realized he liked Margaritas better than Coors? LOL... Nobody drinks Coors here.
That's pretty much why I stopped going to concerts except for the pizza. That and having to choose between drinking or being able to drive myself home.
Somehow they still sell out.
But then a strange phenomenon happened. Everyone who goes to these concerts or games now whips out their cell phones so they an watch it on a small screen or play Candy Crush while they watch people play whatever it is they're playing.
If I had mod points I would be torn between +1 Insightful or +1 Obvious.