Well, I suppose it depends how you define "functioning demoacracy", and given your sloppy argumentation thus far, I imagine you define it to best suit your arguments. But in any case, there are Malaysia and Morocco (both constitutional monarchies), Egypt, Azerbajin, Mali, Mauritania, to name a few. Indonesia is improving after its bout with Suharto (another U.S. backed dictator, oh the irony). If you want to talk Human Rights conditions then that's great, since this is something that needs to be addressed in most states around the world, but "dictatorships" they certainly aren't.
Iran was a functioning parliamentary democracy before the the U.S. and Britain overthrew its democratically elected government and re-installed the Shah in 1953. But you're probably right, it's Islam that's the problem.
Can you not see the ridiculous irony in your post? You've taken a specific incident involving a deeply repressive autocratic regime (financially and politically backed by the U.S., which only increases the irony) and generalized it to represent an religion of nearly 2 billion people spanning numerous continents and governmental systems. Congratulations, that is the exact definition of painting an entire religion with a broad brush.
I'm willing to acknowledge that if you compare the average Western democracy with the average majority-muslim state, you'll find that religious extremists have far too much power there. But what does this have to do with qualities inherent to Islam? Besides the fact that there are more factions and varieties of Islam than you can shake a stick at, as with any religion, you're ignoring the real source of the problem, which is autocracy, theocracy and repression. Most of these regimes haven't been given a legitimate popular mandate, and those that have (Hamas comes to mind) need to be understood in light of the dire circumstances in their respective territories. No reasonable person will vote an extremist into power unless conditions are themselves already extreme, which will predictably turn even the most reasonable citizen into a raving lunatic if things get bad enough. Just look at how many Americans complacently abandoned their civil liberties after 9/11, which was a pretty minor disaster compared to the kind of horror that prefigured the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the contemporary Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Persistent support for those repressive regimes that happen give back rubs to Western geopolitical and corporate interests isn't helping either.
I suppose that CBS doesn't make as much money reporting on Turkish women who aren't harassed into wearing Burqas. But don't let that fool you into thinking that the handful of news headlines you read every day are a comprehensive summary of the state of the world. There is more of a narrative in the selection process than you appear to realize.
Given their track record, and given who they work for, why on earth should any American in their right mind believe anything the CIA has to say? If this threat were real, they'd just keep it - and the methods used to combat it - a secret for as long as possible, which is what they usually do. What possible reason would they have to reveal it to the press unless the primary objective is propaganda?
Because it's not the corn farmers doing the lobbying, it's the industrial food corporations. Corn subsidies remove the price floor for corn, so that overfarming drives prices down below the cost of production without causing the market to implode. Conagra, Cargill and Tyson buy up the cheap corn and use it to manufacture the ubiquitous processed foods we find in the supermarket, and feed it to cows and chickens (who are not evolutionarily adapted to it) in concentrated feedlots so that we can have the hyper-abundance of diseased meat we've grown accustomed to.
You know, it's really depressing how these forums can expose just how nonchalant most guys still are about sexism. And no, I'm not a woman, or a "bra burning fem-nazi". For the sake of brevity (and because there's no arguing with outright bigotry) I'm going to ignore all the infantile sexist jokes that inevitably come up when a story like this gets posted. But for those of you who mean well but assume that being a woman in our society is all cake and soap operas, I sincerely hope you end up taking some kind of Womens' Studies course sometime so that hopefully you end up getting a badly-needed dose of context.
If you're a man consuming images in our culture, it's incredibly easy not to notice all the little (and not so little) ways that women are denigrated, from the classic "school crossing" icon of a dude firmly holding the arm of a younger girl, to female roles in Hollywood movies that serve little purpose other than to gratify both the male lead and the male audience member. This is because when the images in question are directed toward you, as they typically are, you will tend to accept images of women represented for male consumption because you haven't been given an alternative context, and more to the point, it gets you off. Nobody is asking you to feel ashamed for going to the movies (or at least I'm not) but it never hurts to be more aware of the ways this kind of stuff gets encoded in the media we encounter. Nor is it a bad idea to try to put yourself in a woman's shoes and try to imagine how irritating it can get when you're surrounded by images of women in the classic Western stereotype: irrational, passive, scheming, slutty or virtuous (or frigid) with no room in between, frivolous, etc.
Claiming that some women in real life live up to their media representations is a cop out. That is, unless you are foolish enough to believe that your own identity is something whole and untainted by contemporary mythology, as though your mannerisms and fashion choices and social tendencies are obvious universalities of masculinity and not deeply performative amalgams of everything you have ever seen "normal" men do. Take the blinders off, people. We're all products of our culture. If this woman wants to tell the story of Wonder Woman from a female perspective, something that frankly should have already happened by now, great. You don't have to buy it. But don't doubt that there are nerdy comic-loving girls out there who would love to see a classic super hero shown from a perspective they can more readily relate to.
You don't have to be a super-aggro-bitch (or a woman) to be a feminist.
Speaking as someone who is most likely out of the loop in academia, you appear to be mischaracterizing contemporary theories of gender. There is a popular meme that conflates equality with identity, which is blatantly false. What gender theorists and "college professors" have been saying for a long time now is that sex (male and female) is not the same as gender (man and woman), and that gender traits in our culture are often socially constructed. I agree that men are often portrayed as imbiciles in recent media, but it's nothing compared to the way women have been treated on film and on television, and there is no feminist conspiracy to undermine the viability of "male" parenting. The reason why women dominate elementary school education is because primary teaching is a historically denigrated position that was seen as "feminine", and therefore left to women. If you want a man to take a stronger role in parenting, teach him to embrace nurture along with assertiveness, instead of perpetuating the cultural myth of manliness and then having him wonder why his behavior is deemed unacceptable in a society where women have equal rights. Mothers have always been "overbearing". This story has everything to do with flaws in our legal system and bureaucratic shortcuts to conscientious supervision in our sorry excuse for an education institution, nothing to do with the suppression of masculine values.
The fact that the names were part of an ongoing investigation is utterly meaningless because the FBI will not tell us who they were investigating or what they were being investigated for. What you are saying, ultimately, is that you trust the FBI to do what is right regardless of your ability to discern what they are actually doing. The lack of transparency in these kind of programs is what is truly alarming, not the fact that they exist at all. Granting legitimacy to a formerly secret data sharing program effectively grants legitimacy to any program like it. And since the burden of discretion is left up to a narrow channel of the federal government without any public, judicial, or legislative oversight, you will not have an opportunity to complain about it when a related (and likely escalated) program goes into effect, because you will never hear about it unless a ballsy investigative journalist picks up on clues, harasses the government for details, or gets a call from an inside whistleblower. Furthermore, it would be naiive to assume the FBI were only interested in investigating terror suspects -- the federal government has a rich history of infiltrating and conducting surveilance on student dissidents and campus organization. Just last year the Pentagon put the UCSC activist group "Students Against War" on a Credible Threat list...for protesting military recruiters at a campus job fair.
I've been reading through the references you've given (including the rationale for the Hutter Prize) and I'm still a little fuzzy on the purpose of this competition. Granted, my training is in Theoretical Linguistics and not Math, so I may be misunderstanding some key points. If you have a maximally compressed corpus of linguistic data, it makes sense that this would effectively act as an extremely condensed version the "rules" that govern the patterns in that data. Not all compression operates on the same kinds of patterns though, and in order to achieve maximum compression you would need to incorporate a highly sophisticated set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic models into your algorithm, which is an insanely difficult task (the current state of the art in linguistic modeling is still pretty crude). Is the point of this research that better compression will itself lead to stronger models (which I'm having a hard time believing), or that depth of compression is a hard metric for the viability of a model? In the latter case, it seems like what you'd really be researching is the linguistic model used, not the compression algorithm per se.
There is not a answer to your question that is as simple as the question itself, but for the record, the ISPs were prohibited from doing this by law up until a few years ago, because digital communications was presumed to have Common Carrier status, as granted to telephony in the Communications Act of 1934. However in 2002, the new media-deregulatory FCC ruled that Cable ISPs were "information services" and not telecommunications as such, absolving them of Common Carrier obligations to allow open access to their networks. This was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where last June they ruled six to three in the FCC's favor, indicating that a similar judgment would be appropriate for telco ISPs as well. Then in August, the FCC (surprise) issued a statement classifying DSL as an information service as well, effectively paving the way for a tiered Internet. The only reason nothing's come of it yet (at least in the US) is that the August, 2005 ruling came with a one year transition period attatched to it, which we are still in. This is why the issue is coming to a head right now.
At a recent Digital Arts/New Media symposium, Nigel Helyer suggested that the danger in talking on a cellphone while driving has to do with the psychology of Place. The gist of it is that when we speak with another individual occupying a different space, we tend to imagine their location and transport ourselves there psychologically, probably as a means of rationalizing the conversation. Given this conjecture, it would stand to reason that a conversation with an internal passenger would not have the same effect on a driver's attentiveness to his surroundings. Things get even more complicated when both participants in the conversation are on cellphones, because their locations are not presuppositionally static, as they are calling a land line. Hence one of the first questions that often comes up in a cellphone conversation is not "How are you", but "Where are you".
Nobody is saying that adults can't ever reach fluency. The claim is that as you get older your ability to learn languages decreases rapidly. If both you and a five year old are immersed in a foreign language environment, she will (barring a huge exception) inevitably end up speaking the language better than you. You need to distinguish between fluency and *native* fluency. Adults who are able to achieve fluency that is comparable to that of a native speaker are very rare, and while the limits vary from person to person there will almost always be a wall past which one cannot progress.
For example, children start having trouble being able to hear the difference between sounds that are non-constrastive in their native languages as early as 18 months. If you poke around in the literature on developmental psychology, you'll probably come across stories about "Jeanie", a strange case of a child who was basically locked in a dark room for her entire childhood. Despite sincere attempts, there was no success in teaching her anything that resembled a human language.
There was also a recent study done on Nicaraguan Sign Language(a form of sign language that's being invented as we speak by deaf children who had no previous access to sign language). It's an interesting case, because the language originates from a school in Managua so every year a fresh group of first year kids are newly exposed to it by their older peers. Over the years NSL has evolved substantially from a more iconic gesture-like system to one that is begining to demonstrate hallmarks of universal linguistic properties, such as the building of hierarchical phrase structures and the serialization of complex ideas into separate words. This has happened rapidly, so the younger kids sign quite differently than the older ones. The older kids, and especially the young adults who were among the first NSL speaking classes, have retained the more primitive gestural components of the language and are basically stuck in that pattern, more or less unable to augment their signing skills with the newer features. The conclusion reached by the study is that not only do young children have a better time learning language, but they also seem to have a brain that's specially adapted to the creation of language from scratch, an adaptation which does not appear to be similarly shared in mature adults. Cool stuff.
I mean, I'm guessing that, for example, getting two voices per staff would be easier in a GUI system than having to manage the text input
It looks pretty easy acutally. Check here. Basically, you just enter each voice as a separate sequence, and then combine them by enclosing the whole thing in double angled brackets. Pretty easy on the eyes all in all.
At least not in my opinion. The syntax is very simple, and while there is a learning curve in getting started, once you know the basics it's a breeze. Music notation is a relatively sparse system, with a small number of things to worry about. You've got clefs, staves, notes, rests, signatures, accents, performance diacritics, ornamets, and various methods of specifying length and grouping.
I think the people who will most benefit from a tool like this are performers and composers in the academic vein. Someone who's studied theory much isn't going to look at.ly source and freak -- they've already spent years learning how to describe music in an abstract form. After doing Figured bass analysis on chord progressions and learning how to cut up a piece into it's atomic parts, something like this will probably make more sense than any other solution out there.
On the other hand, if someone is just looking for a program that they can play music into from a keyboard, or punch a few notes into without having to know much about how notation is structured, then of course Lilypond isn't the program for them.
Maybe some of you are getting 'ease' confused with 'instant gratification'. The only easy thing about Finale in my mind is that you can start the new score wizard set to 'Piano' and enter in notes within seconds. I won't deny this is an attractive feature. Any point past that though, and you have to learn the program and all it's quirks(and believe me if you're uninitiated, there are a few billion of them). Once you go beyond the first steps, the balance shifts considerably. Where Finale fails is in the ease of getting right all the minor details of a complex score, wheras Lilypond is remarkably consistent and structured.
And since the input language to Lily is open, non proprietary plain Ascii, I imagine usable graphical frontends will become available for those who are vehemently opposed to having to write out scores in a description language. Much like there are tools like Dreamweaver for HTML. But I think if I showed Lily in it's raw form to my old Theory and Orchestration teacher from my undergrad years, he'd fall right in love.
Attempted murder would be a pretty inappropriate charge too, but that would never fly, since it's obvious he wasn't messing with 911 in order to cost lives. But in 'merica, the government has done such a good job freaking out its citizens that the very mention of terrorism will cause most people to sit down, shut up, and agree. This may be the cynic in me talking, but I would expect more of this stuff in the future. It'll end up being the US flavour of "subversion" if we let it.
Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Amnesty would have no luck attacking the government, because as we can now see, the government isn't at fault! The only party left that could have perpetrated this oppression is Microsoft, and therefore Amnesty is obligated to go after them singularly. Duh!
It's not technically latex, AFAIAA. It uses Tex for output, but the syntax of the lilypond markup language is different.
That said, yes, the output is simply gorgeous. This example was the clincher. It's so jaw droppingly better looking than Finale, I don't even want to try to joke about it.
Of course, I always felt like the key benefit of lilypond was not paying $600 for a license.
Actually, speaking as someone with Tourette's Syndrome, that's a misconception. As it happens, TS and ADD have a high rate of comorbidity. As far as I am aware this is due to the genetic factors that contribute to them. Many people have noticed TS symptoms in kids given Ritalin, and concluded that this means Ritalin causes those symptoms.
Definitely. And furthermore, most of the comments here ignore the possiblity that he might just avoid digital cameras altogether for aesthetic reasons. In Photography, resolution is a very small part of the equation. Film simply reacts to light differently. I don't know the numbers, but I've heard some startling figures about the narrowness of modern CCD technology's response to light. Plus there's the noise issue, which may or may not be so much of a problem with the more expensive digital SLRs...anyone with experience care to comment?
Personally, I like the way film grain looks, and would choose a grainy picture on film to a pixelated digicam shot any day of the week. The aesthetic quality of your resulting image also has a lot to do with the type or brand of film you use too. And Black and White film does something simply amazing to light and contrast that is just stunning -- I've never seen anything coming from CCDs that can touch that. The day I see a fully digital print that can achieve the gorgeous silverly tones and analog texture of a traditional print will be a triumph.
Now Photoshop on the other hand, would be Adams' dream come true. Nobody said you have to use a digital camera for that, though.
That's the most lucid analysis of the Spam situation I've heard yet. Well done.
We artists have nothing to worry about yet.
on
Synthesized Singers
·
· Score: 1
Speaking as a musician, I've fretted many a time over whether my skills will one day be co-opted by synths and automata. I stopped worrying about it when I got into Electronic Music techniques, probably about 7 years ago.
The reason why synths have not replaced instrumentalists, and why I don't think it will ever happen, is that the majority of people out there using synthetic approximations of acoustic instruments do so out of laziness. Every jackass with a sampler conjours up this warm and toasty image of a 'symphony in my keyboard'. It's supposed to make everything easy. You'll never get a realistic(and more properly, dynamic facsimile of an acoustic instrument in reducing it to a simple method of performance.
I don't doubt that we're steadily approaching a time where one can fully model the human voice and all it's eccentricities, or the tuba, violin or piano for that matter. Physical Modeling synthesis is an exciting frontier right now. But once we get there, it's going to take someone of an exceptional(read virtuoso) skill to make it sound like a virtuoso. Why? Partly what makes the sound of these instruments so compelling and dynamic is that there are so many variables being controlled. In playing the violin you have bow pressure, speed, bowing technique, finger vibrato(which has IMO never been adequately reproduced by algorithm), and host of other things going on. To reduce all this to a single keypress on a keyboard, which is one of the least expressive controllers out there, leaves you with a dramatic loss of information.
A good friend of mind said it best, when I expressed my misgivings in taking an AI in music class. The task of effectively tackling the problem of making a computer autmoatically do all the work of a human musician is so daunting, and would involve so much finesse, that the very act of accomplishing it would itself be art of the highest form. If things like this replace real singers, you'd better believe that their operators are going to have to be just as artistically and technically skilled as those they're replacing. It's sort of a beautiful circle when you think about it.
Maybe so, but I can't help but think that it would end up being expensive to the artists regardless. It might be cheap to produce, and there might even come to be personal 'burners' and such, but mass production will still be firmly in the hands of the same companies that charge high rates to press CDs. There's always hope I guess.
Sorry, didn't mean to get huffy there. It freaks me out when I'm sure I remember reading something somewhere and I could be mistaken. It's happened many times before.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I suppose it depends how you define "functioning demoacracy", and given your sloppy argumentation thus far, I imagine you define it to best suit your arguments. But in any case, there are Malaysia and Morocco (both constitutional monarchies), Egypt, Azerbajin, Mali, Mauritania, to name a few. Indonesia is improving after its bout with Suharto (another U.S. backed dictator, oh the irony). If you want to talk Human Rights conditions then that's great, since this is something that needs to be addressed in most states around the world, but "dictatorships" they certainly aren't.
Iran was a functioning parliamentary democracy before the the U.S. and Britain overthrew its democratically elected government and re-installed the Shah in 1953. But you're probably right, it's Islam that's the problem.
Can you not see the ridiculous irony in your post? You've taken a specific incident involving a deeply repressive autocratic regime (financially and politically backed by the U.S., which only increases the irony) and generalized it to represent an religion of nearly 2 billion people spanning numerous continents and governmental systems. Congratulations, that is the exact definition of painting an entire religion with a broad brush.
I'm willing to acknowledge that if you compare the average Western democracy with the average majority-muslim state, you'll find that religious extremists have far too much power there. But what does this have to do with qualities inherent to Islam? Besides the fact that there are more factions and varieties of Islam than you can shake a stick at, as with any religion, you're ignoring the real source of the problem, which is autocracy, theocracy and repression. Most of these regimes haven't been given a legitimate popular mandate, and those that have (Hamas comes to mind) need to be understood in light of the dire circumstances in their respective territories. No reasonable person will vote an extremist into power unless conditions are themselves already extreme, which will predictably turn even the most reasonable citizen into a raving lunatic if things get bad enough. Just look at how many Americans complacently abandoned their civil liberties after 9/11, which was a pretty minor disaster compared to the kind of horror that prefigured the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the contemporary Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Persistent support for those repressive regimes that happen give back rubs to Western geopolitical and corporate interests isn't helping either.
I suppose that CBS doesn't make as much money reporting on Turkish women who aren't harassed into wearing Burqas. But don't let that fool you into thinking that the handful of news headlines you read every day are a comprehensive summary of the state of the world. There is more of a narrative in the selection process than you appear to realize.
Given their track record, and given who they work for, why on earth should any American in their right mind believe anything the CIA has to say? If this threat were real, they'd just keep it - and the methods used to combat it - a secret for as long as possible, which is what they usually do. What possible reason would they have to reveal it to the press unless the primary objective is propaganda?
Because it's not the corn farmers doing the lobbying, it's the industrial food corporations. Corn subsidies remove the price floor for corn, so that overfarming drives prices down below the cost of production without causing the market to implode. Conagra, Cargill and Tyson buy up the cheap corn and use it to manufacture the ubiquitous processed foods we find in the supermarket, and feed it to cows and chickens (who are not evolutionarily adapted to it) in concentrated feedlots so that we can have the hyper-abundance of diseased meat we've grown accustomed to.
You know, it's really depressing how these forums can expose just how nonchalant most guys still are about sexism. And no, I'm not a woman, or a "bra burning fem-nazi". For the sake of brevity (and because there's no arguing with outright bigotry) I'm going to ignore all the infantile sexist jokes that inevitably come up when a story like this gets posted. But for those of you who mean well but assume that being a woman in our society is all cake and soap operas, I sincerely hope you end up taking some kind of Womens' Studies course sometime so that hopefully you end up getting a badly-needed dose of context.
If you're a man consuming images in our culture, it's incredibly easy not to notice all the little (and not so little) ways that women are denigrated, from the classic "school crossing" icon of a dude firmly holding the arm of a younger girl, to female roles in Hollywood movies that serve little purpose other than to gratify both the male lead and the male audience member. This is because when the images in question are directed toward you, as they typically are, you will tend to accept images of women represented for male consumption because you haven't been given an alternative context, and more to the point, it gets you off. Nobody is asking you to feel ashamed for going to the movies (or at least I'm not) but it never hurts to be more aware of the ways this kind of stuff gets encoded in the media we encounter. Nor is it a bad idea to try to put yourself in a woman's shoes and try to imagine how irritating it can get when you're surrounded by images of women in the classic Western stereotype: irrational, passive, scheming, slutty or virtuous (or frigid) with no room in between, frivolous, etc. Claiming that some women in real life live up to their media representations is a cop out. That is, unless you are foolish enough to believe that your own identity is something whole and untainted by contemporary mythology, as though your mannerisms and fashion choices and social tendencies are obvious universalities of masculinity and not deeply performative amalgams of everything you have ever seen "normal" men do. Take the blinders off, people. We're all products of our culture. If this woman wants to tell the story of Wonder Woman from a female perspective, something that frankly should have already happened by now, great. You don't have to buy it. But don't doubt that there are nerdy comic-loving girls out there who would love to see a classic super hero shown from a perspective they can more readily relate to. You don't have to be a super-aggro-bitch (or a woman) to be a feminist.
Speaking as someone who is most likely out of the loop in academia, you appear to be mischaracterizing contemporary theories of gender. There is a popular meme that conflates equality with identity, which is blatantly false. What gender theorists and "college professors" have been saying for a long time now is that sex (male and female) is not the same as gender (man and woman), and that gender traits in our culture are often socially constructed. I agree that men are often portrayed as imbiciles in recent media, but it's nothing compared to the way women have been treated on film and on television, and there is no feminist conspiracy to undermine the viability of "male" parenting. The reason why women dominate elementary school education is because primary teaching is a historically denigrated position that was seen as "feminine", and therefore left to women. If you want a man to take a stronger role in parenting, teach him to embrace nurture along with assertiveness, instead of perpetuating the cultural myth of manliness and then having him wonder why his behavior is deemed unacceptable in a society where women have equal rights. Mothers have always been "overbearing". This story has everything to do with flaws in our legal system and bureaucratic shortcuts to conscientious supervision in our sorry excuse for an education institution, nothing to do with the suppression of masculine values.
The fact that the names were part of an ongoing investigation is utterly meaningless because the FBI will not tell us who they were investigating or what they were being investigated for. What you are saying, ultimately, is that you trust the FBI to do what is right regardless of your ability to discern what they are actually doing. The lack of transparency in these kind of programs is what is truly alarming, not the fact that they exist at all. Granting legitimacy to a formerly secret data sharing program effectively grants legitimacy to any program like it. And since the burden of discretion is left up to a narrow channel of the federal government without any public, judicial, or legislative oversight, you will not have an opportunity to complain about it when a related (and likely escalated) program goes into effect, because you will never hear about it unless a ballsy investigative journalist picks up on clues, harasses the government for details, or gets a call from an inside whistleblower. Furthermore, it would be naiive to assume the FBI were only interested in investigating terror suspects -- the federal government has a rich history of infiltrating and conducting surveilance on student dissidents and campus organization. Just last year the Pentagon put the UCSC activist group "Students Against War" on a Credible Threat list...for protesting military recruiters at a campus job fair.
I've been reading through the references you've given (including the rationale for the Hutter Prize) and I'm still a little fuzzy on the purpose of this competition. Granted, my training is in Theoretical Linguistics and not Math, so I may be misunderstanding some key points. If you have a maximally compressed corpus of linguistic data, it makes sense that this would effectively act as an extremely condensed version the "rules" that govern the patterns in that data. Not all compression operates on the same kinds of patterns though, and in order to achieve maximum compression you would need to incorporate a highly sophisticated set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic models into your algorithm, which is an insanely difficult task (the current state of the art in linguistic modeling is still pretty crude). Is the point of this research that better compression will itself lead to stronger models (which I'm having a hard time believing), or that depth of compression is a hard metric for the viability of a model? In the latter case, it seems like what you'd really be researching is the linguistic model used, not the compression algorithm per se.
There is not a answer to your question that is as simple as the question itself, but for the record, the ISPs were prohibited from doing this by law up until a few years ago, because digital communications was presumed to have Common Carrier status, as granted to telephony in the Communications Act of 1934. However in 2002, the new media-deregulatory FCC ruled that Cable ISPs were "information services" and not telecommunications as such, absolving them of Common Carrier obligations to allow open access to their networks. This was taken all the way to the Supreme Court, where last June they ruled six to three in the FCC's favor, indicating that a similar judgment would be appropriate for telco ISPs as well. Then in August, the FCC (surprise) issued a statement classifying DSL as an information service as well, effectively paving the way for a tiered Internet. The only reason nothing's come of it yet (at least in the US) is that the August, 2005 ruling came with a one year transition period attatched to it, which we are still in. This is why the issue is coming to a head right now.
At a recent Digital Arts/New Media symposium, Nigel Helyer suggested that the danger in talking on a cellphone while driving has to do with the psychology of Place. The gist of it is that when we speak with another individual occupying a different space, we tend to imagine their location and transport ourselves there psychologically, probably as a means of rationalizing the conversation. Given this conjecture, it would stand to reason that a conversation with an internal passenger would not have the same effect on a driver's attentiveness to his surroundings. Things get even more complicated when both participants in the conversation are on cellphones, because their locations are not presuppositionally static, as they are calling a land line. Hence one of the first questions that often comes up in a cellphone conversation is not "How are you", but "Where are you".
This is going to be a boon for tech-savvy thugs. Now you don't even have to lead a guy to his ATM at gunpoint anymore.
Fuck Them.
Nobody is saying that adults can't ever reach fluency. The claim is that as you get older your ability to learn languages decreases rapidly. If both you and a five year old are immersed in a foreign language environment, she will (barring a huge exception) inevitably end up speaking the language better than you. You need to distinguish between fluency and *native* fluency. Adults who are able to achieve fluency that is comparable to that of a native speaker are very rare, and while the limits vary from person to person there will almost always be a wall past which one cannot progress.
For example, children start having trouble being able to hear the difference between sounds that are non-constrastive in their native languages as early as 18 months. If you poke around in the literature on developmental psychology, you'll probably come across stories about "Jeanie", a strange case of a child who was basically locked in a dark room for her entire childhood. Despite sincere attempts, there was no success in teaching her anything that resembled a human language.
There was also a recent study done on Nicaraguan Sign Language(a form of sign language that's being invented as we speak by deaf children who had no previous access to sign language). It's an interesting case, because the language originates from a school in Managua so every year a fresh group of first year kids are newly exposed to it by their older peers. Over the years NSL has evolved substantially from a more iconic gesture-like system to one that is begining to demonstrate hallmarks of universal linguistic properties, such as the building of hierarchical phrase structures and the serialization of complex ideas into separate words. This has happened rapidly, so the younger kids sign quite differently than the older ones. The older kids, and especially the young adults who were among the first NSL speaking classes, have retained the more primitive gestural components of the language and are basically stuck in that pattern, more or less unable to augment their signing skills with the newer features. The conclusion reached by the study is that not only do young children have a better time learning language, but they also seem to have a brain that's specially adapted to the creation of language from scratch, an adaptation which does not appear to be similarly shared in mature adults. Cool stuff.
It looks pretty easy acutally. Check here. Basically, you just enter each voice as a separate sequence, and then combine them by enclosing the whole thing in double angled brackets. Pretty easy on the eyes all in all.
I think the people who will most benefit from a tool like this are performers and composers in the academic vein. Someone who's studied theory much isn't going to look at .ly source and freak -- they've already spent years learning how to describe music in an abstract form. After doing Figured bass analysis on chord progressions and learning how to cut up a piece into it's atomic parts, something like this will probably make more sense than any other solution out there.
On the other hand, if someone is just looking for a program that they can play music into from a keyboard, or punch a few notes into without having to know much about how notation is structured, then of course Lilypond isn't the program for them.
Maybe some of you are getting 'ease' confused with 'instant gratification'. The only easy thing about Finale in my mind is that you can start the new score wizard set to 'Piano' and enter in notes within seconds. I won't deny this is an attractive feature. Any point past that though, and you have to learn the program and all it's quirks(and believe me if you're uninitiated, there are a few billion of them). Once you go beyond the first steps, the balance shifts considerably. Where Finale fails is in the ease of getting right all the minor details of a complex score, wheras Lilypond is remarkably consistent and structured.
And since the input language to Lily is open, non proprietary plain Ascii, I imagine usable graphical frontends will become available for those who are vehemently opposed to having to write out scores in a description language. Much like there are tools like Dreamweaver for HTML. But I think if I showed Lily in it's raw form to my old Theory and Orchestration teacher from my undergrad years, he'd fall right in love.
Attempted murder would be a pretty inappropriate charge too, but that would never fly, since it's obvious he wasn't messing with 911 in order to cost lives. But in 'merica, the government has done such a good job freaking out its citizens that the very mention of terrorism will cause most people to sit down, shut up, and agree. This may be the cynic in me talking, but I would expect more of this stuff in the future. It'll end up being the US flavour of "subversion" if we let it.
Bzzzt, wrong! From the Chinese Constitution:
Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Amnesty would have no luck attacking the government, because as we can now see, the government isn't at fault! The only party left that could have perpetrated this oppression is Microsoft, and therefore Amnesty is obligated to go after them singularly. Duh!
It's not technically latex, AFAIAA. It uses Tex for output, but the syntax of the lilypond markup language is different. That said, yes, the output is simply gorgeous. This example was the clincher. It's so jaw droppingly better looking than Finale, I don't even want to try to joke about it. Of course, I always felt like the key benefit of lilypond was not paying $600 for a license.
Actually, speaking as someone with Tourette's Syndrome, that's a misconception. As it happens, TS and ADD have a high rate of comorbidity. As far as I am aware this is due to the genetic factors that contribute to them. Many people have noticed TS symptoms in kids given Ritalin, and concluded that this means Ritalin causes those symptoms.
See here.
Are you a former UCSC student?
Definitely. And furthermore, most of the comments here ignore the possiblity that he might just avoid digital cameras altogether for aesthetic reasons. In Photography, resolution is a very small part of the equation. Film simply reacts to light differently. I don't know the numbers, but I've heard some startling figures about the narrowness of modern CCD technology's response to light. Plus there's the noise issue, which may or may not be so much of a problem with the more expensive digital SLRs...anyone with experience care to comment?
Personally, I like the way film grain looks, and would choose a grainy picture on film to a pixelated digicam shot any day of the week. The aesthetic quality of your resulting image also has a lot to do with the type or brand of film you use too. And Black and White film does something simply amazing to light and contrast that is just stunning -- I've never seen anything coming from CCDs that can touch that. The day I see a fully digital print that can achieve the gorgeous silverly tones and analog texture of a traditional print will be a triumph.
Now Photoshop on the other hand, would be Adams' dream come true. Nobody said you have to use a digital camera for that, though.
Wow.
That's the most lucid analysis of the Spam situation I've heard yet. Well done.
Speaking as a musician, I've fretted many a time over whether my skills will one day be co-opted by synths and automata. I stopped worrying about it when I got into Electronic Music techniques, probably about 7 years ago.
The reason why synths have not replaced instrumentalists, and why I don't think it will ever happen, is that the majority of people out there using synthetic approximations of acoustic instruments do so out of laziness. Every jackass with a sampler conjours up this warm and toasty image of a 'symphony in my keyboard'. It's supposed to make everything easy. You'll never get a realistic(and more properly, dynamic facsimile of an acoustic instrument in reducing it to a simple method of performance.
I don't doubt that we're steadily approaching a time where one can fully model the human voice and all it's eccentricities, or the tuba, violin or piano for that matter. Physical Modeling synthesis is an exciting frontier right now. But once we get there, it's going to take someone of an exceptional(read virtuoso) skill to make it sound like a virtuoso. Why? Partly what makes the sound of these instruments so compelling and dynamic is that there are so many variables being controlled. In playing the violin you have bow pressure, speed, bowing technique, finger vibrato(which has IMO never been adequately reproduced by algorithm), and host of other things going on. To reduce all this to a single keypress on a keyboard, which is one of the least expressive controllers out there, leaves you with a dramatic loss of information.A good friend of mind said it best, when I expressed my misgivings in taking an AI in music class. The task of effectively tackling the problem of making a computer autmoatically do all the work of a human musician is so daunting, and would involve so much finesse, that the very act of accomplishing it would itself be art of the highest form. If things like this replace real singers, you'd better believe that their operators are going to have to be just as artistically and technically skilled as those they're replacing. It's sort of a beautiful circle when you think about it.
Maybe so, but I can't help but think that it would end up being expensive to the artists regardless. It might be cheap to produce, and there might even come to be personal 'burners' and such, but mass production will still be firmly in the hands of the same companies that charge high rates to press CDs. There's always hope I guess.
Sorry, didn't mean to get huffy there. It freaks me out when I'm sure I remember reading something somewhere and I could be mistaken. It's happened many times before.