I would prefer pitch correction done on the fly over some asshat lip-syncing to a recording any day.
Regardless, the entertainment value of seeing a "singer" squirm when their technology breaks mid-song might be worth it. I hope they design these gizmos with five-nines reliability.
If you need distortion and effects to make your music good, it means you aren't a good enough musician yet.
It's interesting how the flexibility of an electronic instrument is often confused for talent (hey that guy sounds different...he's good). One thing I've noticed, however, is that great electronic guitar players use that flexibility to change the instrument and, then, procede to challenge "classical" virtuosos with their mastery of their new invention. I'm not a heavy consumer of electronic guitar solos, but the few I've heard left me impressed. While a guitar might not have the heart-wrenching power of a violin, it's still pretty formidable.
Perhaps the bad reputation electronic music gets has a lot to do with its accessibility. A few hundred dollars for a decent used computer and MIDI keyboard can make any sap into a boy-band wannabe, whereas just getting a first good melody off a violin will leave many novices frustrated.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. -- Thomas Jefferson
Very good point. However, it would be very easy for the government to label rebels "terrorists" and crush them, arrest them, and lock them away isolated from the civilian court system. Also, the general US population is so complacent with cozy ideas of nationalized health care, social security, rent subsidies, digital cable, and used luxury cars that they would probably accept anything that lets them maintain their dime-a-dozen Matrix-tube fantasy.
circling a thousand tanks around congress, it would make a point.
Would the National Guard allow the tanks to even cross the Potomac? Would the Dept. of Homeland Security allow civilian 120mm cannons within 15 miles of any government facility? The best course of action would be to vote out the current adminsitration in 2004--unfortuately, that means a Democrat might win (sigh). Perhaps over the next ten or so elections, a third party might become prominent enough to unseat the current Republican/Democrat hegemony.
Come on, why else do we hand out condoms to high school kids?
To keep them from getting pregnant and diseased. Humans go into heat long before society will allow them to have children. Leaving them ignorant of birth control would simply be irresponsible.
we'd really prefer that our significant others don't betray us and steal everything we have
True, but the fact that this fear is so common is an indication of how weak people have become. Real life divorce rates should be 1% rather than 50%. A 50% divorce rates shows to me that people simply don't care about their children, if they have any, and shows that they are very selfish. Divorces due to other matters, such as mental illness, etc. are certainly more understandable, but they should be very very rare (genuine mental illness is much more rare than the number of Prozac prescriptions would lead us to believe).
if you have any doubt that your software project may run into terminal trouble, you should drop the project.
Software projects are run by morons and have a 90% failure rate over three years. A marriage is a small project between two people over a lifetime. If two people can't figure out a problem given those circumstances--even if they are both retarded--then someone needs to teach them a bit about making small sacrifices for potentially much greater gain. Marriage isn't necessarily for everyone, but learning that fact should not require a "trial run" that ends in divorce and messed-up kids. It is better to not get married nor have kids than make children legal objects in a pre-nuptual agreement. I consider having children a one-way street with a very early point of no return, and victimizing them over personal interests borders on criminal. If a marriage fails before kids are in the picture, then that's certainly more forgivable, but it still doesn't explain why the couple got married in the first place.
Really? It's not like he's shouting through a loud-speaker right into your ear, now, is it? ESR can say whatever he wants in any manner that suits him, as long as I still have a choice whether to pay him any attention.
...he needs to think about the results of what he says before he says it.
My bet is that he either has throught it through (he isn't a dum-dum) or decided that it doesn't matter.
As a Libertarian and Open Source moderate, he probably considers all U.S. citizens to be "his people." With regard to "serving," it is likely that he feels "his people" are best served by free market economics and a throttling of frivilous lawsuits and legal games like what SCO is pulling.
For the record, I believe the second amendment gives us the right to own any weapon up to and including nuclear warheads, but I do not personally possess any unless perhaps you count the knives in my kitchen.
I whole-heartedly agree...except with the nuclear warhead bit. Nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately. That simple goes counter to the notion of personal defense. National defense is one thing...personal defense just doesn't require a kiloton of TNT! What would a person blow up with it?!?
Agreed. What is even more saddening is the fact that the U.S. Bill of Rights is only a couple pages long. It would take only a week in a high school civics class to cover the whole thing in detail.
...they put many safeguards into the USA constitution to keep the state and church seperate.
They didn't stop the election of a right-wing fundamentalist to lead our nation, did they? When a canidate can visit a place like Bob Jones University and look perfectly at home...that's a warning sign if I ever saw one.
When did America become this country of limp wristed wussies...
Probably when people developed an idea that the federal government along with the ultra-wealthy Democratic and Republican parties is much too large an entity to understand. The average American is hardly informed enough to mount a debate over most issues currently under consideration by Congress and the 2004 Presidential Canidates, for example. When only 0.001% of people can properly form an opinion about an issue, then why is it considered of national importance in the first place? The fact that personal health care, for example, is even a Presidential-race issue should concern us. I'd rather they talk more about defense, immigration, and trade. But I guess the gimmie-gimmie public would find that boring. Oh well.
Re:The names may change, but
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There's always this thin line of trust/mistrust between a guy and a girl.
If there's a trust boundary in a relationship, I'd consider that a warning sign. I know people who seriously say things like "never get married without a pre-nup", but I never quite understood this. Getting joint accounts and dual-name titles on property is just a no-brainer for me (it makes a will much easier...it also helps keep nursing homes from robbing me blind if I ever end up in one). If a marriage with a pre-nuptual agreement starts out with some expectation for failure and divorce, doesn't that seem to be a prediction rather than a contingency?
Re:The names may change, but
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Uh. HOWTO would be appreciated.
We knew eachother for years before we got married. We are best friends, and jewelry is hardly high on our list of priorities. We'd rather spend the money on a dishwasher or furniture, anyway.
How is that so hard? Romantic idealism is overrated, IMO. I think long-term happiness is more easily obtained by fiscal responsibility, for example, than credit-supported fantasy. Perhaps I sound like an old fart, but that's just how I am.
Re:The names may change, but
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Try telling the girlfriend or the wife that though.
I told my wife exactly that. Good thing she isn't like most women: superficial and good for sex and not much else. Women who cry over a diamond are losers, period.
so I don't have to feel dirty about using thier products.
I despise Microsoft, for example, and use only Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux at home nearly 100% of the time, but I still cannot avoid owning Microsoft stock via my 401K mutual funds (retirement takes priority, here). Corporate ownership via stock is more an affirmation than anything else. Qt is really a damn good product, and investors show that by buying stock (affirmation of good product). Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply the richest most powerful software company on the planet, and I'm powerless to tell the S&P 500 managers that they should take my ethical considerations to heart (affirmation of being more powerful than the President).
Let us also not forget that the goal of these projects was to go out and do. They had budgets, and constraints of technology. But folks were willing to spend money.
I just remembered another engineering feat, where during World War II, companies would design and prototype an entire fighter aircraft in months. Months! Try getting modern engineers to pull that off. They'll be debugging the software controls for two years.
They are attempting to shift a lot of the day to day operations over to contractors and alleviate the need for in-house staff to handle the load.
And contractors don't care whether their projects succeed or fail as long as they can successfully manhandle the system to get paid over and over. Seeing contracting first-hand has taught me that some things just need to be done in-house.
If they would have simply checked the landing gear on takeoff, they would have been just fine. Again, we have people blaming all their problems on privatization and deregulation, when the fundamental problem lies elsewhere. Sheesh.
One interesting side-effect of the "good old days" of the cold war is that NASA fed tremendous amounts of "space tech" into regular earthly endeavors. Now, the world is much less directed and much more scatterbrained, so the effeciency of an agency like NASA to do targeted R&D cannot be good. In the 1960's they just build a big damn rocket and put three men on it--very direct and practical. Now, no one can decide between single-stage to orbit, space airplanes, nanotube columns, rail guns, traditional ballisic rockets--just watching the Discovery Channel about these things leave one confused and wanting their security blanket.
(Americans think that 15% of the budget goes to foriegn aid, and it should be around 5%, wheras in reality its more like.4%)
I thought the "Defense" pie slice covered the foreign aid part...
But what do we tell all the congressmen who need to fill their wheel barrow with pork lest they get kicked out of town? I think lots of contractors have grown used to doing meaningless work, because the constant flow of money is too addictive.
In the 60's, the mandate was to spend what was necessary to build the best solution that could be conceived...
And the 60's was also the era of the moon missions, the SR-71 Blackbird, and lots of other projects that modern engineers look back on with total amazement. Remember that 3GHz 32-bit CPUs hadn't even been dreampt of, yet--these engineers did things in their minds and with slide rules (yes, boys and girls, that is possible without Matlab and Pro/ENGINEER!).
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I would prefer pitch correction done on the fly over some asshat lip-syncing to a recording any day.
Regardless, the entertainment value of seeing a "singer" squirm when their technology breaks mid-song might be worth it. I hope they design these gizmos with five-nines reliability.
I say almost all the modern musicians are promoted based on how they look.
Do you mean the promotion of my lunch out of my body after looking at them?
If you need distortion and effects to make your music good, it means you aren't a good enough musician yet.
It's interesting how the flexibility of an electronic instrument is often confused for talent (hey that guy sounds different...he's good). One thing I've noticed, however, is that great electronic guitar players use that flexibility to change the instrument and, then, procede to challenge "classical" virtuosos with their mastery of their new invention. I'm not a heavy consumer of electronic guitar solos, but the few I've heard left me impressed. While a guitar might not have the heart-wrenching power of a violin, it's still pretty formidable.
Perhaps the bad reputation electronic music gets has a lot to do with its accessibility. A few hundred dollars for a decent used computer and MIDI keyboard can make any sap into a boy-band wannabe, whereas just getting a first good melody off a violin will leave many novices frustrated.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government. -- Thomas Jefferson
Very good point. However, it would be very easy for the government to label rebels "terrorists" and crush them, arrest them, and lock them away isolated from the civilian court system. Also, the general US population is so complacent with cozy ideas of nationalized health care, social security, rent subsidies, digital cable, and used luxury cars that they would probably accept anything that lets them maintain their dime-a-dozen Matrix-tube fantasy.
circling a thousand tanks around congress, it would make a point.
Would the National Guard allow the tanks to even cross the Potomac? Would the Dept. of Homeland Security allow civilian 120mm cannons within 15 miles of any government facility? The best course of action would be to vote out the current adminsitration in 2004--unfortuately, that means a Democrat might win (sigh). Perhaps over the next ten or so elections, a third party might become prominent enough to unseat the current Republican/Democrat hegemony.
Come on, why else do we hand out condoms to high school kids?
To keep them from getting pregnant and diseased. Humans go into heat long before society will allow them to have children. Leaving them ignorant of birth control would simply be irresponsible.
we'd really prefer that our significant others don't betray us and steal everything we have
True, but the fact that this fear is so common is an indication of how weak people have become. Real life divorce rates should be 1% rather than 50%. A 50% divorce rates shows to me that people simply don't care about their children, if they have any, and shows that they are very selfish. Divorces due to other matters, such as mental illness, etc. are certainly more understandable, but they should be very very rare (genuine mental illness is much more rare than the number of Prozac prescriptions would lead us to believe).
if you have any doubt that your software project may run into terminal trouble, you should drop the project.
Software projects are run by morons and have a 90% failure rate over three years. A marriage is a small project between two people over a lifetime. If two people can't figure out a problem given those circumstances--even if they are both retarded--then someone needs to teach them a bit about making small sacrifices for potentially much greater gain. Marriage isn't necessarily for everyone, but learning that fact should not require a "trial run" that ends in divorce and messed-up kids. It is better to not get married nor have kids than make children legal objects in a pre-nuptual agreement. I consider having children a one-way street with a very early point of no return, and victimizing them over personal interests borders on criminal. If a marriage fails before kids are in the picture, then that's certainly more forgivable, but it still doesn't explain why the couple got married in the first place.
I think someone should shut him up...
...he needs to think about the results of what he says before he says it.
Really? It's not like he's shouting through a loud-speaker right into your ear, now, is it? ESR can say whatever he wants in any manner that suits him, as long as I still have a choice whether to pay him any attention.
My bet is that he either has throught it through (he isn't a dum-dum) or decided that it doesn't matter.
Does it?
As a Libertarian and Open Source moderate, he probably considers all U.S. citizens to be "his people." With regard to "serving," it is likely that he feels "his people" are best served by free market economics and a throttling of frivilous lawsuits and legal games like what SCO is pulling.
That's my opinion, however.
For the record, I believe the second amendment gives us the right to own any weapon up to and including nuclear warheads, but I do not personally possess any unless perhaps you count the knives in my kitchen.
I whole-heartedly agree...except with the nuclear warhead bit. Nuclear weapons kill indiscriminately. That simple goes counter to the notion of personal defense. National defense is one thing...personal defense just doesn't require a kiloton of TNT! What would a person blow up with it?!?
This truely saddens me.
Agreed. What is even more saddening is the fact that the U.S. Bill of Rights is only a couple pages long. It would take only a week in a high school civics class to cover the whole thing in detail.
...they put many safeguards into the USA constitution to keep the state and church seperate.
They didn't stop the election of a right-wing fundamentalist to lead our nation, did they? When a canidate can visit a place like Bob Jones University and look perfectly at home...that's a warning sign if I ever saw one.
When did America become this country of limp wristed wussies...
Probably when people developed an idea that the federal government along with the ultra-wealthy Democratic and Republican parties is much too large an entity to understand. The average American is hardly informed enough to mount a debate over most issues currently under consideration by Congress and the 2004 Presidential Canidates, for example. When only 0.001% of people can properly form an opinion about an issue, then why is it considered of national importance in the first place? The fact that personal health care, for example, is even a Presidential-race issue should concern us. I'd rather they talk more about defense, immigration, and trade. But I guess the gimmie-gimmie public would find that boring. Oh well.
There's always this thin line of trust/mistrust between a guy and a girl.
If there's a trust boundary in a relationship, I'd consider that a warning sign. I know people who seriously say things like "never get married without a pre-nup", but I never quite understood this. Getting joint accounts and dual-name titles on property is just a no-brainer for me (it makes a will much easier...it also helps keep nursing homes from robbing me blind if I ever end up in one). If a marriage with a pre-nuptual agreement starts out with some expectation for failure and divorce, doesn't that seem to be a prediction rather than a contingency?
Uh. HOWTO would be appreciated.
We knew eachother for years before we got married. We are best friends, and jewelry is hardly high on our list of priorities. We'd rather spend the money on a dishwasher or furniture, anyway.
How is that so hard? Romantic idealism is overrated, IMO. I think long-term happiness is more easily obtained by fiscal responsibility, for example, than credit-supported fantasy. Perhaps I sound like an old fart, but that's just how I am.
Try telling the girlfriend or the wife that though.
I told my wife exactly that. Good thing she isn't like most women: superficial and good for sex and not much else. Women who cry over a diamond are losers, period.
so I don't have to feel dirty about using thier products.
I despise Microsoft, for example, and use only Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux at home nearly 100% of the time, but I still cannot avoid owning Microsoft stock via my 401K mutual funds (retirement takes priority, here). Corporate ownership via stock is more an affirmation than anything else. Qt is really a damn good product, and investors show that by buying stock (affirmation of good product). Microsoft, on the other hand, is simply the richest most powerful software company on the planet, and I'm powerless to tell the S&P 500 managers that they should take my ethical considerations to heart (affirmation of being more powerful than the President).
Let us also not forget that the goal of these projects was to go out and do. They had budgets, and constraints of technology. But folks were willing to spend money.
I just remembered another engineering feat, where during World War II, companies would design and prototype an entire fighter aircraft in months. Months! Try getting modern engineers to pull that off. They'll be debugging the software controls for two years.
2 weeks to go across the UK?
Well, if you stop at all the attractions, visit some family, make it leisurely, etc. Why not two weeks? Sounds like a good vacation to me.
They are attempting to shift a lot of the day to day operations over to contractors and alleviate the need for in-house staff to handle the load.
And contractors don't care whether their projects succeed or fail as long as they can successfully manhandle the system to get paid over and over. Seeing contracting first-hand has taught me that some things just need to be done in-house.
you people HAVE seen the Aliens films, right?
If they would have simply checked the landing gear on takeoff, they would have been just fine. Again, we have people blaming all their problems on privatization and deregulation, when the fundamental problem lies elsewhere. Sheesh.
Private industry can not take up the flag for space exploration until a cheaper way is found to get there.
Then explain how Burt Rutan appears to have created a very elegant X Prize plane within the means of his relatively small company.
Things here on earth tend to take precedence.
.4%)
One interesting side-effect of the "good old days" of the cold war is that NASA fed tremendous amounts of "space tech" into regular earthly endeavors. Now, the world is much less directed and much more scatterbrained, so the effeciency of an agency like NASA to do targeted R&D cannot be good. In the 1960's they just build a big damn rocket and put three men on it--very direct and practical. Now, no one can decide between single-stage to orbit, space airplanes, nanotube columns, rail guns, traditional ballisic rockets--just watching the Discovery Channel about these things leave one confused and wanting their security blanket.
(Americans think that 15% of the budget goes to foriegn aid, and it should be around 5%, wheras in reality its more like
I thought the "Defense" pie slice covered the foreign aid part...
Lets all send Darl to Mars, and put him in charge of the intellectual property there.
I believe Robert Heinlein already addressed this topic.
...you get what you pay for.
But what do we tell all the congressmen who need to fill their wheel barrow with pork lest they get kicked out of town? I think lots of contractors have grown used to doing meaningless work, because the constant flow of money is too addictive.
In the 60's, the mandate was to spend what was necessary to build the best solution that could be conceived...
And the 60's was also the era of the moon missions, the SR-71 Blackbird, and lots of other projects that modern engineers look back on with total amazement. Remember that 3GHz 32-bit CPUs hadn't even been dreampt of, yet--these engineers did things in their minds and with slide rules (yes, boys and girls, that is possible without Matlab and Pro/ENGINEER!).