In one interesting book I've read that religions were started by visionaries. Visionaries would see something that they interpreted as god, and would feel compelled to do things that are too unusual, risky or so out of bounds that people would believe they are on to something otherworldly. However, what they have seen is something called the mold of man. It's more exact to say that they have seen only a glimpse of it.
If one looks at the mold of man briefly, he will be overcome with awe - because it is full of ethereal beauty that has nothing comparable in our experience. It combines all that is highest in our nature.
However magicians can look at the mold of man for hours at a time, and therefore they can see that it cannot do anything in the sense that people would expect god to do. Nor in any other sense.
Normal people have at least some vague recollection of it and therefore cannot be purely atheistic. Only magician can be purely atheistic if he looked at the mold of man for many hours. This echoes a comment of Dostoevsky who said that atheists at his time (1880s in russian empire), are more religious than normal faithful people.
Blair witch was one movie. Cheap video was part of the story. In vast majority of movies out there, sound IS only 1/10th as important as video.
Besides, what was good about BWP is not that sounds were well done or eerily, but that pacing and story were arranged in such a way as to create many empty spaces that you had to fill in with your imagination. Nothing's scarier than the unknown.
It's a fact of life that we're relying less and less on our hearing and sense of smell and respectively our communication channels switch to visual sense. A primordial hunter-gatherer would find our hearing pathetic. He'd find our sense of smell.. well, he wouldn't find THAT at all. You know why those smell-movies failed? For the same exact reason 1/10th of budget is routinely spent on sound - we're visual animals.
I don't have to like it - I think we're losing a lot, but that's teh way things are.
If you want to point out how current tendencies are unhealthy and wrong, you better not secure your argument with bogus evidence like BWP.
Sorry if I sound a tad harsh - I think you're passionate about your trade and that's great, you're just letting your passion get in the way of your reason.
There wasn't a single communist country on the face of the earth. None even *claimed* to have communism. Stalin said he was building communism, it was generally thought at the time that it'll be built in 1960-70; by the time it was 1960-70, it was generally thought it'll take 20 years more. There's a pattern here - leaders were saying "don't bug us - when our time here is over, it'll be here". As of now, communism remains an idealistic regime that was never tried in real life (except in small communes with mixed success, some of them still exist in US).
Actually, it was going at 18mph supposedly during that collision. (harbor speed). But that's a good point.. a ship/plane going at 500mph is not easily dodged.
I think it's the funniest show I ever saw, by far. Some episodes are sub-par, though, especially some of the old ones, where actors didn't hit the right wavelength yet. But i guess you have to take the good with the bad.
The best thing about Seinfeld is that there's 3 stellar actors.. well, okay, Kramer isn't stellar but he gets by on quirkiness. At any rate, I don't know any other sitcom that'd have even one actor as good as George or Elaine. They save the average material and make it great, and they make great material brilliant.
It ain't rocket sciense, eh? Well, it's funny that Americas never invented something as simple as a wheel and system of roads. We can't say which things are obvious and which aren't because we've been subjected to them while growing up. They're common knowledge. I think to hunterers-gatherers the obvious idea was that if they don't hunter-gather and instead play around with chunks of wood of round shape, they won't have enough food and die out. We've becomed accustomed to a leisurely attitude toward innovation but at the time if you didn't catch some animal, you didn't say "ah, hell, let's just order pizza or something?". And after a full day of running and hunting, you're too tired to do much inventin'.
Yeah, anything's possible. We don't have any proof that there was no galactic empire 50k years ago either. Sciense concerns itself with what proof we *do* have, the rest is SF.
It's really Korolev. The best way to approximate the sound with latin letters is "Korolyov", in russian that sound is designated with an 'e' with two dots above it. It's called a "short e", in literal translation.
Trailers are often much worse than movies; in fact they often contain scenes that were cut from the movie itself. "Something about mary" trailer was absolutely hideous, but the movie is #2 funniest movie ever on my list right after "The Big Lebowski".
I like 'em, they let me preview some movies on big screen. With action movies, seeing ads on TV is just not the same. OTOH I could see that if I were watching almost every movie that came out, I could find it vexing. I guess the system in place is tuned so that most people don't mind these ads. By the way, you could time how long they take and show up when they're over (if they take the same time every day).
Aw, face it, it was a piece of crap. Absolutely tasteless, and even the action was un-forceful - these beasts looked like holograms. When a troll attacks the company in LOTR, I can suspend disbelief to some extent and *feel* a mountain of muscles carrying a 2-ton hammer looming over me. FF was like watching somebody watching a laser show in WB theme park, or something. As for the ending, I wouldn't know, I couldn't stand it by the time it got to the middle and walked out on it. You have to understand, it's very embarrassing for me to say that it took me almost an hour to figure out this movie is worthless. I do solemnly hope nobody I know reads this.:/
Not that I do it myself, but if someone has a good ftp site and good capless cable or dsl, it'd take about 2-3 hours to get one movie. That's what MPAA is worried about.
Why exactly do you find it hard? Try different fonts and colors. Maybe the monitor flickers? Check the refresh rate. It may flicker so quickly that you don't notice it but it's still heavy on the eyes, refresh rate has to be at least 75. Higher rates may even be better, I personally read hundreds of books at refresh rate of 85 or so. It's as easy for me to read as a dead book tree. But russian sf sucks, alas. The only good authors are Ivan Efremov (real good, especially the andromeda galaxy one), and kir bulychev who is a very pleasant and amusing author working in harry potter-like style but with a scifi setting.
There's nothing amazing about skiing. I skied all the time when I was young (I lived kind of close to Siberia) and it's okay, kind of like riding a bike on Peabody enjoyment scale I just made up.
This don't run as root thing is *WAY* overestimated. I mean.. a newbie installs linux. He's got a bunch of cds sitting nearby, ready to reinstall it all in 30 minutes. In his home dir, he's got tons of his work, that could not possibly be replaced in any amount of time. (Well, okay, he's not that kind of newbie, he's spent enough time to fill ~ with valuable work). So, who gives a shit about rm -rf / when rm -rf ~ is just as bad and requires no root? I think the trouble is that this piece of wisdom trickled down to us from admins who deal with 10,000 user systems, where root *IS* far totally dangerous, but on a single user system it don't make much difference. In fact, I hope some distro will finally figure out that linux could be made much more desktop-friendlier if it was strickly single-user.
Denon and Bang&Olufsen aren't exactly audiophile, you know.. Denon is more like a department store brand, and B&O is a hockey glitz new age type brand..
How is sitting at the concert the best thing for audio quality? Distortion is proportional to the size of the hall, and sound still have to pass through electronics and amplifiers. Sure, they can spend more dough on equipment than a typical listener on his home system, but that's negated several times over by volume having to be much higher, hall being larger and besides in concerts nobody's trying for perfect sound, because they already know bands won't sing and play as precisely as in studio, there won't be multiple takes and so on.. so they focus on making performance as lively as possible.. So the best live bands like the who or joplin or good floyd live albums don't focus on precision of sound but on power and liveliness.
It depends much on the song. On some, 128 works fairly well, although you can still hear artifacts.. But the same song at 256 will sound perfect. Other songs, however, will sound hockey at 256. As for vinyls, the thing is, we don't know much about how brain's parsing of music & sound works exactly. So, you have cds that make more accurate sound, but it's distortions, even though smaller than vynils, are of a different sort, so it's not impossible that your mind may notice cd's distortion more keenly. Plenty of people say that vynils sound much warmer, and cds have a metallic cast on its sound (although it's not as bad with tube preamp, they say). At any rate, I feel I shouldn't pass judgement until I try good components that use vinyl and/or tube amps. I just dont' have the money to buy them now, so I figure when I do, I'll try them.. Can't hurt, eh?
Yes, but you said yourself it's a subjective matter, so your opinion that those are snake-oil type of things may simply be a result of your not wanting to spend that much money and sunsequently persuading yourself that it doesn't make objective difference.
Oh, and if you buy a $20k setup, I imagine you can go to the store and *try* it before buying, since you can do the same with even a $400 setup. In fact, many audiophile grade stores will let you borrow expensive products, the reason being that there's indeed few people willing to spend 20k or more on something they haven't made absolutely sure is worthwhile.
There's a slight difference between terrorism on one hand and porn, games, and bbc news on the other. In fact, they aren't much alike at all. Think about it.
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In one interesting book I've read that religions were started by visionaries. Visionaries would see something that they interpreted as god, and would feel compelled to do things that are too unusual, risky or so out of bounds that people would believe they are on to something otherworldly. However, what they have seen is something called the mold of man. It's more exact to say that they have seen only a glimpse of it.
If one looks at the mold of man briefly, he will be overcome with awe - because it is full of ethereal beauty that has nothing comparable in our experience. It combines all that is highest in our nature.
However magicians can look at the mold of man for hours at a time, and therefore they can see that it cannot do anything in the sense that people would expect god to do. Nor in any other sense.
Normal people have at least some vague recollection of it and therefore cannot be purely atheistic. Only magician can be purely atheistic if he looked at the mold of man for many hours. This echoes a comment of Dostoevsky who said that atheists at his time (1880s in russian empire), are more religious than normal faithful people.
Besides, what was good about BWP is not that sounds were well done or eerily, but that pacing and story were arranged in such a way as to create many empty spaces that you had to fill in with your imagination. Nothing's scarier than the unknown.
It's a fact of life that we're relying less and less on our hearing and sense of smell and respectively our communication channels switch to visual sense. A primordial hunter-gatherer would find our hearing pathetic. He'd find our sense of smell.. well, he wouldn't find THAT at all. You know why those smell-movies failed? For the same exact reason 1/10th of budget is routinely spent on sound - we're visual animals.
I don't have to like it - I think we're losing a lot, but that's teh way things are.
If you want to point out how current tendencies are unhealthy and wrong, you better not secure your argument with bogus evidence like BWP.
Sorry if I sound a tad harsh - I think you're passionate about your trade and that's great, you're just letting your passion get in the way of your reason.
There wasn't a single communist country on the face of the earth. None even *claimed* to have communism. Stalin said he was building communism, it was generally thought at the time that it'll be built in 1960-70; by the time it was 1960-70, it was generally thought it'll take 20 years more. There's a pattern here - leaders were saying "don't bug us - when our time here is over, it'll be here". As of now, communism remains an idealistic regime that was never tried in real life (except in small communes with mixed success, some of them still exist in US).
yeah, it's faster than hovercraft and burns less fuel than an airplane.
Actually, it was going at 18mph supposedly during that collision. (harbor speed). But that's a good point.. a ship/plane going at 500mph is not easily dodged.
The best thing about Seinfeld is that there's 3 stellar actors.. well, okay, Kramer isn't stellar but he gets by on quirkiness. At any rate, I don't know any other sitcom that'd have even one actor as good as George or Elaine. They save the average material and make it great, and they make great material brilliant.
It ain't rocket sciense, eh? Well, it's funny that Americas never invented something as simple as a wheel and system of roads. We can't say which things are obvious and which aren't because we've been subjected to them while growing up. They're common knowledge. I think to hunterers-gatherers the obvious idea was that if they don't hunter-gather and instead play around with chunks of wood of round shape, they won't have enough food and die out. We've becomed accustomed to a leisurely attitude toward innovation but at the time if you didn't catch some animal, you didn't say "ah, hell, let's just order pizza or something?". And after a full day of running and hunting, you're too tired to do much inventin'.
Yeah, anything's possible. We don't have any proof that there was no galactic empire 50k years ago either. Sciense concerns itself with what proof we *do* have, the rest is SF.
You're seinfeld impaired, arentcha?
No, the gallons in a pound one is funnier. It clearly scores 3F on my funny-o-meter while stupid hex joke is only 1A.
Yeah, stories that aren't true always show mentality. That's what they're made up for.
It's really Korolev. The best way to approximate the sound with latin letters is "Korolyov", in russian that sound is designated with an 'e' with two dots above it. It's called a "short e", in literal translation.
Trailers are often much worse than movies; in fact they often contain scenes that were cut from the movie itself. "Something about mary" trailer was absolutely hideous, but the movie is #2 funniest movie ever on my list right after "The Big Lebowski".
I like 'em, they let me preview some movies on big screen. With action movies, seeing ads on TV is just not the same. OTOH I could see that if I were watching almost every movie that came out, I could find it vexing. I guess the system in place is tuned so that most people don't mind these ads. By the way, you could time how long they take and show up when they're over (if they take the same time every day).
Aw, face it, it was a piece of crap. Absolutely tasteless, and even the action was un-forceful - these beasts looked like holograms. When a troll attacks the company in LOTR, I can suspend disbelief to some extent and *feel* a mountain of muscles carrying a 2-ton hammer looming over me. FF was like watching somebody watching a laser show in WB theme park, or something. As for the ending, I wouldn't know, I couldn't stand it by the time it got to the middle and walked out on it. You have to understand, it's very embarrassing for me to say that it took me almost an hour to figure out this movie is worthless. I do solemnly hope nobody I know reads this. :/
Not that I do it myself, but if someone has a good ftp site and good capless cable or dsl, it'd take about 2-3 hours to get one movie. That's what MPAA is worried about.
Why exactly do you find it hard? Try different fonts and colors. Maybe the monitor flickers? Check the refresh rate. It may flicker so quickly that you don't notice it but it's still heavy on the eyes, refresh rate has to be at least 75. Higher rates may even be better, I personally read hundreds of books at refresh rate of 85 or so. It's as easy for me to read as a dead book tree. But russian sf sucks, alas. The only good authors are Ivan Efremov (real good, especially the andromeda galaxy one), and kir bulychev who is a very pleasant and amusing author working in harry potter-like style but with a scifi setting.
There's nothing amazing about skiing. I skied all the time when I was young (I lived kind of close to Siberia) and it's okay, kind of like riding a bike on Peabody enjoyment scale I just made up.
This don't run as root thing is *WAY* overestimated. I mean.. a newbie installs linux. He's got a bunch of cds sitting nearby, ready to reinstall it all in 30 minutes. In his home dir, he's got tons of his work, that could not possibly be replaced in any amount of time. (Well, okay, he's not that kind of newbie, he's spent enough time to fill ~ with valuable work). So, who gives a shit about rm -rf / when rm -rf ~ is just as bad and requires no root? I think the trouble is that this piece of wisdom trickled down to us from admins who deal with 10,000 user systems, where root *IS* far totally dangerous, but on a single user system it don't make much difference. In fact, I hope some distro will finally figure out that linux could be made much more desktop-friendlier if it was strickly single-user.
Denon and Bang&Olufsen aren't exactly audiophile, you know.. Denon is more like a department store brand, and B&O is a hockey glitz new age type brand..
2.54*10^24?? Terabyte is 1k gigs, isn't it? So, they have 300 gigs, so this is a bit more than 3 times the storage.
How is sitting at the concert the best thing for audio quality? Distortion is proportional to the size of the hall, and sound still have to pass through electronics and amplifiers. Sure, they can spend more dough on equipment than a typical listener on his home system, but that's negated several times over by volume having to be much higher, hall being larger and besides in concerts nobody's trying for perfect sound, because they already know bands won't sing and play as precisely as in studio, there won't be multiple takes and so on.. so they focus on making performance as lively as possible.. So the best live bands like the who or joplin or good floyd live albums don't focus on precision of sound but on power and liveliness.
It depends much on the song. On some, 128 works fairly well, although you can still hear artifacts.. But the same song at 256 will sound perfect. Other songs, however, will sound hockey at 256. As for vinyls, the thing is, we don't know much about how brain's parsing of music & sound works exactly. So, you have cds that make more accurate sound, but it's distortions, even though smaller than vynils, are of a different sort, so it's not impossible that your mind may notice cd's distortion more keenly. Plenty of people say that vynils sound much warmer, and cds have a metallic cast on its sound (although it's not as bad with tube preamp, they say). At any rate, I feel I shouldn't pass judgement until I try good components that use vinyl and/or tube amps. I just dont' have the money to buy them now, so I figure when I do, I'll try them.. Can't hurt, eh?
Yes, but you said yourself it's a subjective matter, so your opinion that those are snake-oil type of things may simply be a result of your not wanting to spend that much money and sunsequently persuading yourself that it doesn't make objective difference. Oh, and if you buy a $20k setup, I imagine you can go to the store and *try* it before buying, since you can do the same with even a $400 setup. In fact, many audiophile grade stores will let you borrow expensive products, the reason being that there's indeed few people willing to spend 20k or more on something they haven't made absolutely sure is worthwhile.
There's a slight difference between terrorism on one hand and porn, games, and bbc news on the other. In fact, they aren't much alike at all. Think about it.