Uh, really? Christians killed non-believers often enough that it became known as the "Crusades". In our modern era, you have state-enforced anti-homosexuality laws. Alan Turing was prosecuted under them, and Texas still has things like sodomy on their books as a crime. Gay marriage is illegal in most places. On and on...
Why should we respect any viewpoints based on superstition? They're not rational. Worse, they're often harmful.
Furthermore, we have thousands of years of evidence of religious people not respecting anyone else's views. Why am I obligated to make concessions to them? I'm not killing them because they believe in God (I do not), but in many places in the world, I would be. Can you imagine what would happen to a public leader in a Western country who refused to swear an oath on a Holy Book? People would run him/her out of town.
I believe that in a civil society, you are obligated to respect people (until they give you a reason not to), but you are under no obligation to respect people's views.
OTOH, we can finally get over this hangup about nudity being something naughty. We have Christianity to thank for making sins out of things as commonplace as nudity and sex.
I don't want my naked image to be seen by anyone
It's not like the stuff under your clothes is a mystery to anyone. Get over it. Do you also think it's indecent when a doctor asks to see your naked body?
My problem with body scans has nothing to do with nudity-- it's that we're being driven toward it by a knee-jerk reaction. Before we dive into body scanning everyone, we need to ask whether we are more likely to catch terrorists this way, and whether it is worth the cost.
Yes, another example is the Domino Sugar trademark infringement suit against Domino's Pizza. The court found in favor of Domino's Pizza (i.e., not infringing). And this was a case of two food products. The key test is whether the same name use is "likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive." If a court thinks there's little chance of confusing pizza and sugar, I think Google has a pretty good chance that someone won't confuse a fictional book character and a telephone.
Depending on how far you live from FL (<1000 miles), and how fuel-efficient your car is, you could drive there, with the intention of tent camping when you get there. There are lots of places to camp in FL. If the weather turns sour, sleep in your car. If it gets really bad, drive home (they won't be launching a shuttle in a hurricane anyway).
Most of the time, I try to do without my car, but this is one of those cases where using one is probably the most economical solution. As another poster mentioned, though-- expect it to be crowded.
When I first started in IT, building a server was an *ART*.
Today, IT needs to be much more closely integrated with the business.
I'd argue that there's still some excitement (and art) in the latter statement that you make, especially for businesses whose product is information. Where I work (publishing) we have a lot of very talented and creative people, but they don't know squat about using technology to better do their work. I can and do build tools for them to take the monotony out of their own jobs. This requires a lot of thinking, a lot of programming, and it generally makes my job a lot more enjoyable. Now that a lot of pre-packaged IT tools are better out of the box, I can spend less time dealing with the day-to-day chores of network maintenance, and more time on the fun stuff.
That YouTube video is unquestionably fake. The fart is the wrong color (Why would it be colder than the ambient air? It's coming out of a warm body). And I doubt that a fart disperses like that through a pair of pants, unless there's a hole.
Generally speaking, in the U.S., you can publish things that even the government wants to keep secret, so long as the government cannot meet some stringent exceptions to lawfully prevent you from speaking (this is called "prior restraint"). One of those exceptions is "national security", an argument which the U.S. Supreme Court did not buy into during the 1971 case on the Pentagon Papers. Of course, the concept of "national security" has shifted somewhat dramatically since 2001, so that exception may be a bit broader now.
The Menezes case is clearly a tragedy, as he was completely innocent, but Flavius? Come on. These people may not have been imminent bombers, but they were certainly in the process of doing so. I have sympathy for the Irish people as I do with many others under the often cruel British rule, but hey-- a military band ain't the same thing as a military target. You have to expect civilians to be standing around watching. By repeatedly killing innocent people, the IRA proved that they were nothing but a bunch of thugs.
Most things in life aren't black and white, but-- proving your point by killing innocent people? Unquestionably wrong.
Let's not forget that there are an estimated 11.5 million illegal aliens in the United States. Good luck deporting them all.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think people shouldn't be fired for making mistakes. After all, you want to learn from your mistakes. What you get with a policy of firing people who make an occasional blunder is a party-line culture. In intelligence, you definitely want free-thinkers. New ideas fail sometimes, but you need new ideas if you want to keep your edge. Instead, fire people who don't learn from their mistakes.
Not that I agree with the Slovakian police in this particular case, but what they did here was essentially a double-blind trial of the airport detection systems in the field-- which is an important hurdle they should be able to pass if they want to claim that they aren't just expensive junk. There was an article here on Slashdot not too long ago about how the U.S. military was bemoaning the fact that Iraqi security forces were using divining rods to detect hidden explosives. The Iraqis claim that they are effective, and in non-double-blind trials that may even be true. But not for the reason that the Iraqis think.
Making the trial double-blind controls for other variables, like the bomber being detected by security personnel because he's "twitchy". Someone who doesn't know he/she is carrying explosives won't act abnormally because they don't know they're going to bomb anything. If you're making bomb-detecting equipment, you may consider that an important scenario to be able to catch. The Slovakian approach is elegant, if somewhat immoral.
But the posted contract in question is not purported to be libelous-- Apex claims copyright infringement. This is a completely different matter, and an abuse of both contract and copyright law. If Apex is claiming copyright infringement, they are implicitly saying that the contract is real, and thus not libelous. After all, why would you claim copyright infringement on a lie? Doesn't make any sense.
I like to think of "greed" as "primarily self-motivated". If one can divorce oneself for a moment from the pejorative, historical usage of "greed", and think about it like this, then I think that certain economic policies make sense. In computer science (and indeed, economics), there are a class of problems that can be solved using what is called a greedy algorithm.
Essentially, it works like this: Decisions are made in accordance with being "locally optimal". In some cases, if the conditions of the problem are right, these locally optimal choices, in aggregate, form a 'globally optimal' solution. The key thing, though, for this to work, are that the conditions are just right. In computer science, greedy algorithms are often employed to find shortest paths (useful for routing datagrams as well as delivery trucks), and other kinds of global answers where the problem is composed of many small decisions.
Now, it turns out that there are some places where this is very useful when talking about economies, and this is where the "usefulness" of greed comes in. Actors who are "greedy", i.e., primarily self-motivated, tend to make locally-optimal solutions (of course, people are complex beings, and they don't always make the "best" decisions for themselves; this is an area of active research in economics). People who are in a position to influence the fates of economies (e.g., legislators), can use this behavior to encourage certain outcomes. E.g., the "Cap and Trade" carbon emissions model depends precisely on this strategy: allow companies to make the best decision for themselves, but "stack the deck", so to speak, so that the "best" decision leads to the globally optimal one, i.e., the emission of less greenhouse gases.
This is where capitalism tends to flourish as a strategy versus socialism. The problem with capitalism, of course, is that globally optimal solutions are not always possible in this very free environment: the ending of hunger, poverty, public health; the enforcement of laws; the maintenance of infrastructure, and so on. These problems persist and are sometimes worse with capitalist solutions. And so you end up seeing an admixture of socialist philosophy (welfare, public transportation, state-run or regulated water, sewer, electricity, and broadcast infrastructure), imperialist philosophy (standing army, police force), democratic philosophy (elected officials, no nobility, balance of power), and capitalist philosophy (largely-free market, liberalized and secular government to prevent interference in trade and prosperity). Yeah, it's ugly, but so far, it's the best thing we've figured out. So far, I have found no evidence that there are better systems, except maybe a benevolent dictator, and those tend to end badly (like Alexander II of Russia, because if there's one thing people hate, it's doing good things for no reason.
Ditto. We've been running OpenBSD in our server room for years, and we duly pay for it. We buy 1 copy of the newest release for every machine running OpenBSD, regardless of whether that machine gets an upgrade or not. The bean counters don't have a problem with it because we're paying less than other IT divisions in the company, but we're still shelling out about $5k a year to the project. If we could afford to pay more, we would, but we have other things that we have to pay for as well.
In short, the control NAT gives you is illusory and meaningless.
Then it is as illusory and meaningless as paging. After all, you can accomplish the same thing with segmented memory. But as time has shown, the properties inherent in paging make using a computer (for a programmer) much easier. You don't have to worry about bounds-checking; the bounds are built-in by virtue of addresses not being meaningful outside of a particular process, and your addressing model is simple.
NAT gives you the same thing: addresses that are non-routable outside of your network. Using it becomes simpler. You argue that this other fellow is not competent, but you yourself clearly do not understand the complexities of large private networks. E.g., where I work, we have a global private address space. Now, we're talking hundreds of IT people working in this domain, with probably a dozen or so engineers. When I expose one of my subnets to one of my colleague's over a point-to-point link, I don't need to worry if he's been careful to set up the correct IT policy on his edge devices, because my address space is NOT ROUTABLE on the Internet. Exposing it is possible of course, but now someone has to jump through some hoops to make it happen. Hopefully they get hit with the clue stick before they get that far.
Your anti-NAT argument is equivalent to the following: we don't need technology X because person Y should be better at his job. Yeah, sure, but X rules out an entire class of human error. We've heard the same thing over and over again about, e.g., garbage collection, object-orientation, strong typing, language-level support for parallelism, high-level programming, DHCP, network management software, W XOR X, automatic bounds checking, etc, etc, etc.
You're using NAT as a method of access control, which is not what it was designed for.
Sure, originally. But it turns out that it's useful for other things, too. E.g., RFC 2663, the updated NAT RFC, specifically talks about access control:
The need for IP Address translation arises when a network's internal IP addresses cannot be used outside the network either because they are invalid for use outside, or because the internal addressing must be kept private from the external network.
So while NAT may not have been designed to function as access control, it does. Dismissing it because it "wasn't designed" to work that way is like complaining that aspirin should only be used for headaches while ignoring that it might also prevent people from dying of heart attacks.
I think most people hate NAT because traversing it is annoying. Doing this is supposed to be annoying!
Seconded. Bought mine secondhand from a coworker for $50. I also run Ubuntu 9.10 (after attempting to run OpenBSD-- unfortunately, my EVDO modem just won't talk to the OS), and it's a real pleasure to use. My only gripe is that sometimes modal application dialogs are bigger than the screen, so I can't hit certain buttons. I would love to see something in this form factor that does the tablet/multitouch thing.
I was quite surprised to discover that I could plug this into my parents' HDTV and play movies. I didn't think the processor would be up to the task, but it turns out that it has no issues at all! So now when I visit, I load up a thumb drive with MP4s. This thing is also great for programming on public transportation-- doesn't get in anybody's way like the old Thinkpad (which is a "small" X41!) did. I'm not bothered by the keyboard, but that does drive certain people crazy. That's how I ended up getting one for $50.
My point is-- what is fair game in a stimulus bill? It seems to me that the point is to spend money, no? There's no other point. You're saying that giving money to NSF is OK as long as you don't specify a purpose? But if you say-- spend this on flu research, it is? I think these distinctions are useless hair-splitting. The point is to spend money, and the bill accomplishes that. The problem you seem to have with it is that there are strings attached to the money.
Now, if we're talking about a fund-the-war-bill, and the Census pops up in that, OK, that's wacky, and you could call it pork, because the aim of the bill is to fund a war. It must pass. But a stimulus bill has essentially limitless scope, no?
She was also woefully unqualified for the job, unlike McCain. It's hard-to-impossible to know what would have been had Palin not been chosen as a running mate, but I think that McCain would have beaten Obama had he chosen someone else. Palin energized the Republican base but turned away a lot of moderates. I wouldn't have voted for McCain, but I did feel that, until he chose Palin, he was the best choice from our selection of Republicans.
Maybe you can elaborate. Was this the bill in which Republicans called funding for the 2010 Census, airport security, public transportation and new fire stations "earmarks"? Sounds to me like exactly the kind of spending you want a stimulus bill to do. There were also $237 billion in tax cuts to individuals and $51 billion in tax cuts to companies, so I can't think of a legitimate reason why Republicans would be opposed to this, except that they're attempting to build party unity by being contrarian. Sadly, it works with people, but talk about sour grapes, man.
You're talking about hard-limiting, not normalization
Actually, no-- analog compression does both limiting and expanding, but it does not have to be "hard" (technically, it can never be, but it can be close; digital can provide a true hard limit). How "hard" or "soft" you want that compression to be is a function of "attack" (how fast compression kicks in) and "decay" (how fast compression stops being applied). A hard limiter is fast on the attack and fast on the decay. But it doesn't have to be.
Digital equipment can unquestionably do this better, at the expense of output delay. But for most applications, you have to do the analog stuff first anyway, because your digital circuitry has real upper and lower signal level threshholds that you must never exceed. As a result, digital normalization is usually what you do when you're DONE with the recording, to bring it to the maximum volume level that your digital reproduction equipment (e.g., CD player) can handle.
Nonsense. Analog normalization techniques have been around forever.
I worked in broadcasting in college. We had numerous stages of normalization, depending on the input. Right before the signal goes out to the antenna stage (this was a radio station), we had a hard limiter. Hard limiters are dead simple to use. Failure to use one results in distortion if you're using forgiving equipment, or clipping if you're not. You HAVE to use it.
The lack of dynamic compression is what makes band demo recordings sound terrible, and the skillfull application of it is what makes good recordings sound great. In our studio, mics typically needed both expanding and limiting. This allows untrained speakers to actually be heard on the radio.
If you're talking about real-time digital compression-- well, that's trickier. If your audience can tolerate some delay (fine for broadcast, not fine for live performance) you can get away with what we have now.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, really? Christians killed non-believers often enough that it became known as the "Crusades". In our modern era, you have state-enforced anti-homosexuality laws. Alan Turing was prosecuted under them, and Texas still has things like sodomy on their books as a crime. Gay marriage is illegal in most places. On and on...
How is that tolerance of other people's ideas?
It might just be an Anglo tradition. wiki.
Why should we respect any viewpoints based on superstition? They're not rational. Worse, they're often harmful.
Furthermore, we have thousands of years of evidence of religious people not respecting anyone else's views. Why am I obligated to make concessions to them? I'm not killing them because they believe in God (I do not), but in many places in the world, I would be. Can you imagine what would happen to a public leader in a Western country who refused to swear an oath on a Holy Book? People would run him/her out of town.
I believe that in a civil society, you are obligated to respect people (until they give you a reason not to), but you are under no obligation to respect people's views.
I don't want my naked image to be seen by anyone
It's not like the stuff under your clothes is a mystery to anyone. Get over it. Do you also think it's indecent when a doctor asks to see your naked body?
My problem with body scans has nothing to do with nudity-- it's that we're being driven toward it by a knee-jerk reaction. Before we dive into body scanning everyone, we need to ask whether we are more likely to catch terrorists this way, and whether it is worth the cost.
Yes, another example is the Domino Sugar trademark infringement suit against Domino's Pizza. The court found in favor of Domino's Pizza (i.e., not infringing). And this was a case of two food products. The key test is whether the same name use is "likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive." If a court thinks there's little chance of confusing pizza and sugar, I think Google has a pretty good chance that someone won't confuse a fictional book character and a telephone.
Depending on how far you live from FL (<1000 miles), and how fuel-efficient your car is, you could drive there, with the intention of tent camping when you get there. There are lots of places to camp in FL. If the weather turns sour, sleep in your car. If it gets really bad, drive home (they won't be launching a shuttle in a hurricane anyway).
Most of the time, I try to do without my car, but this is one of those cases where using one is probably the most economical solution. As another poster mentioned, though-- expect it to be crowded.
When I first started in IT, building a server was an *ART*.
Today, IT needs to be much more closely integrated with the business.
I'd argue that there's still some excitement (and art) in the latter statement that you make, especially for businesses whose product is information. Where I work (publishing) we have a lot of very talented and creative people, but they don't know squat about using technology to better do their work. I can and do build tools for them to take the monotony out of their own jobs. This requires a lot of thinking, a lot of programming, and it generally makes my job a lot more enjoyable. Now that a lot of pre-packaged IT tools are better out of the box, I can spend less time dealing with the day-to-day chores of network maintenance, and more time on the fun stuff.
That YouTube video is unquestionably fake. The fart is the wrong color (Why would it be colder than the ambient air? It's coming out of a warm body). And I doubt that a fart disperses like that through a pair of pants, unless there's a hole.
Generally speaking, in the U.S., you can publish things that even the government wants to keep secret, so long as the government cannot meet some stringent exceptions to lawfully prevent you from speaking (this is called "prior restraint"). One of those exceptions is "national security", an argument which the U.S. Supreme Court did not buy into during the 1971 case on the Pentagon Papers. Of course, the concept of "national security" has shifted somewhat dramatically since 2001, so that exception may be a bit broader now.
The Menezes case is clearly a tragedy, as he was completely innocent, but Flavius? Come on. These people may not have been imminent bombers, but they were certainly in the process of doing so. I have sympathy for the Irish people as I do with many others under the often cruel British rule, but hey-- a military band ain't the same thing as a military target. You have to expect civilians to be standing around watching. By repeatedly killing innocent people, the IRA proved that they were nothing but a bunch of thugs.
Most things in life aren't black and white, but-- proving your point by killing innocent people? Unquestionably wrong.
Let's not forget that there are an estimated 11.5 million illegal aliens in the United States. Good luck deporting them all.
Maybe I'm naive, but I think people shouldn't be fired for making mistakes. After all, you want to learn from your mistakes. What you get with a policy of firing people who make an occasional blunder is a party-line culture. In intelligence, you definitely want free-thinkers. New ideas fail sometimes, but you need new ideas if you want to keep your edge. Instead, fire people who don't learn from their mistakes.
Not that I agree with the Slovakian police in this particular case, but what they did here was essentially a double-blind trial of the airport detection systems in the field-- which is an important hurdle they should be able to pass if they want to claim that they aren't just expensive junk. There was an article here on Slashdot not too long ago about how the U.S. military was bemoaning the fact that Iraqi security forces were using divining rods to detect hidden explosives. The Iraqis claim that they are effective, and in non-double-blind trials that may even be true. But not for the reason that the Iraqis think.
Making the trial double-blind controls for other variables, like the bomber being detected by security personnel because he's "twitchy". Someone who doesn't know he/she is carrying explosives won't act abnormally because they don't know they're going to bomb anything. If you're making bomb-detecting equipment, you may consider that an important scenario to be able to catch. The Slovakian approach is elegant, if somewhat immoral.
Hey, you know, sometimes we learn things after we do them.
But the posted contract in question is not purported to be libelous-- Apex claims copyright infringement. This is a completely different matter, and an abuse of both contract and copyright law. If Apex is claiming copyright infringement, they are implicitly saying that the contract is real, and thus not libelous. After all, why would you claim copyright infringement on a lie? Doesn't make any sense.
I like to think of "greed" as "primarily self-motivated". If one can divorce oneself for a moment from the pejorative, historical usage of "greed", and think about it like this, then I think that certain economic policies make sense. In computer science (and indeed, economics), there are a class of problems that can be solved using what is called a greedy algorithm.
Essentially, it works like this: Decisions are made in accordance with being "locally optimal". In some cases, if the conditions of the problem are right, these locally optimal choices, in aggregate, form a 'globally optimal' solution. The key thing, though, for this to work, are that the conditions are just right. In computer science, greedy algorithms are often employed to find shortest paths (useful for routing datagrams as well as delivery trucks), and other kinds of global answers where the problem is composed of many small decisions.
Now, it turns out that there are some places where this is very useful when talking about economies, and this is where the "usefulness" of greed comes in. Actors who are "greedy", i.e., primarily self-motivated, tend to make locally-optimal solutions (of course, people are complex beings, and they don't always make the "best" decisions for themselves; this is an area of active research in economics). People who are in a position to influence the fates of economies (e.g., legislators), can use this behavior to encourage certain outcomes. E.g., the "Cap and Trade" carbon emissions model depends precisely on this strategy: allow companies to make the best decision for themselves, but "stack the deck", so to speak, so that the "best" decision leads to the globally optimal one, i.e., the emission of less greenhouse gases.
This is where capitalism tends to flourish as a strategy versus socialism. The problem with capitalism, of course, is that globally optimal solutions are not always possible in this very free environment: the ending of hunger, poverty, public health; the enforcement of laws; the maintenance of infrastructure, and so on. These problems persist and are sometimes worse with capitalist solutions. And so you end up seeing an admixture of socialist philosophy (welfare, public transportation, state-run or regulated water, sewer, electricity, and broadcast infrastructure), imperialist philosophy (standing army, police force), democratic philosophy (elected officials, no nobility, balance of power), and capitalist philosophy (largely-free market, liberalized and secular government to prevent interference in trade and prosperity). Yeah, it's ugly, but so far, it's the best thing we've figured out. So far, I have found no evidence that there are better systems, except maybe a benevolent dictator, and those tend to end badly (like Alexander II of Russia, because if there's one thing people hate, it's doing good things for no reason.
Ditto. We've been running OpenBSD in our server room for years, and we duly pay for it. We buy 1 copy of the newest release for every machine running OpenBSD, regardless of whether that machine gets an upgrade or not. The bean counters don't have a problem with it because we're paying less than other IT divisions in the company, but we're still shelling out about $5k a year to the project. If we could afford to pay more, we would, but we have other things that we have to pay for as well.
In short, the control NAT gives you is illusory and meaningless.
Then it is as illusory and meaningless as paging. After all, you can accomplish the same thing with segmented memory. But as time has shown, the properties inherent in paging make using a computer (for a programmer) much easier. You don't have to worry about bounds-checking; the bounds are built-in by virtue of addresses not being meaningful outside of a particular process, and your addressing model is simple.
NAT gives you the same thing: addresses that are non-routable outside of your network. Using it becomes simpler. You argue that this other fellow is not competent, but you yourself clearly do not understand the complexities of large private networks. E.g., where I work, we have a global private address space. Now, we're talking hundreds of IT people working in this domain, with probably a dozen or so engineers. When I expose one of my subnets to one of my colleague's over a point-to-point link, I don't need to worry if he's been careful to set up the correct IT policy on his edge devices, because my address space is NOT ROUTABLE on the Internet. Exposing it is possible of course, but now someone has to jump through some hoops to make it happen. Hopefully they get hit with the clue stick before they get that far.
Your anti-NAT argument is equivalent to the following: we don't need technology X because person Y should be better at his job. Yeah, sure, but X rules out an entire class of human error. We've heard the same thing over and over again about, e.g., garbage collection, object-orientation, strong typing, language-level support for parallelism, high-level programming, DHCP, network management software, W XOR X, automatic bounds checking, etc, etc, etc.
You're using NAT as a method of access control, which is not what it was designed for.
Sure, originally. But it turns out that it's useful for other things, too. E.g., RFC 2663, the updated NAT RFC, specifically talks about access control:
The need for IP Address translation arises when a network's internal IP addresses cannot be used outside the network either because they are invalid for use outside, or because the internal addressing must be kept private from the external network.
So while NAT may not have been designed to function as access control, it does. Dismissing it because it "wasn't designed" to work that way is like complaining that aspirin should only be used for headaches while ignoring that it might also prevent people from dying of heart attacks.
I think most people hate NAT because traversing it is annoying. Doing this is supposed to be annoying!
Seconded. Bought mine secondhand from a coworker for $50. I also run Ubuntu 9.10 (after attempting to run OpenBSD-- unfortunately, my EVDO modem just won't talk to the OS), and it's a real pleasure to use. My only gripe is that sometimes modal application dialogs are bigger than the screen, so I can't hit certain buttons. I would love to see something in this form factor that does the tablet/multitouch thing.
I was quite surprised to discover that I could plug this into my parents' HDTV and play movies. I didn't think the processor would be up to the task, but it turns out that it has no issues at all! So now when I visit, I load up a thumb drive with MP4s. This thing is also great for programming on public transportation-- doesn't get in anybody's way like the old Thinkpad (which is a "small" X41!) did. I'm not bothered by the keyboard, but that does drive certain people crazy. That's how I ended up getting one for $50.
My point is-- what is fair game in a stimulus bill? It seems to me that the point is to spend money, no? There's no other point. You're saying that giving money to NSF is OK as long as you don't specify a purpose? But if you say-- spend this on flu research, it is? I think these distinctions are useless hair-splitting. The point is to spend money, and the bill accomplishes that. The problem you seem to have with it is that there are strings attached to the money.
Now, if we're talking about a fund-the-war-bill, and the Census pops up in that, OK, that's wacky, and you could call it pork, because the aim of the bill is to fund a war. It must pass. But a stimulus bill has essentially limitless scope, no?
He might be Libertarian. Plenty of guns to go around there.
She was also woefully unqualified for the job, unlike McCain. It's hard-to-impossible to know what would have been had Palin not been chosen as a running mate, but I think that McCain would have beaten Obama had he chosen someone else. Palin energized the Republican base but turned away a lot of moderates. I wouldn't have voted for McCain, but I did feel that, until he chose Palin, he was the best choice from our selection of Republicans.
So what isn't an earmark, then?
Maybe you can elaborate. Was this the bill in which Republicans called funding for the 2010 Census, airport security, public transportation and new fire stations "earmarks"? Sounds to me like exactly the kind of spending you want a stimulus bill to do. There were also $237 billion in tax cuts to individuals and $51 billion in tax cuts to companies, so I can't think of a legitimate reason why Republicans would be opposed to this, except that they're attempting to build party unity by being contrarian. Sadly, it works with people, but talk about sour grapes, man.
You're talking about hard-limiting, not normalization
Actually, no-- analog compression does both limiting and expanding, but it does not have to be "hard" (technically, it can never be, but it can be close; digital can provide a true hard limit). How "hard" or "soft" you want that compression to be is a function of "attack" (how fast compression kicks in) and "decay" (how fast compression stops being applied). A hard limiter is fast on the attack and fast on the decay. But it doesn't have to be.
Digital equipment can unquestionably do this better, at the expense of output delay. But for most applications, you have to do the analog stuff first anyway, because your digital circuitry has real upper and lower signal level threshholds that you must never exceed. As a result, digital normalization is usually what you do when you're DONE with the recording, to bring it to the maximum volume level that your digital reproduction equipment (e.g., CD player) can handle.
Nonsense. Analog normalization techniques have been around forever.
I worked in broadcasting in college. We had numerous stages of normalization, depending on the input. Right before the signal goes out to the antenna stage (this was a radio station), we had a hard limiter. Hard limiters are dead simple to use. Failure to use one results in distortion if you're using forgiving equipment, or clipping if you're not. You HAVE to use it.
The lack of dynamic compression is what makes band demo recordings sound terrible, and the skillfull application of it is what makes good recordings sound great. In our studio, mics typically needed both expanding and limiting. This allows untrained speakers to actually be heard on the radio.
If you're talking about real-time digital compression-- well, that's trickier. If your audience can tolerate some delay (fine for broadcast, not fine for live performance) you can get away with what we have now.