Indeed, SpaceX has demonstrated that first, that they can achieve objectives in space, and second, that their tech has some fairly impressive fault-tolerance while still safely fulfilling its mission. There was both an incident of an aborted post-ignition event that didn't damage the vehicle, subsequently allowing technicians to inspect and restart the launch, and a failure with one of the clusters of rockets that was successfully worked-around mid-flight, shutting down the affected engine and boosting the performance on the remaining engines.
Also to the matter of who can rent, GP's argument that anyone should be able to rent it is stupid not only because Blue Origin isn't ready to launch yet, but that the argument could mean that anyone, including those that don't have interest in space launches, could rent it. Mind you, there's a risk that SpaceX could block once other competitors enter the market, but on the other hand, 39B has been reconfigured to be multirole already, and 39C was planned and could still be built, and if serious competitors can demonstrate an ability to launch, SpaceX might lose its exclusivity the next time the contract comes up.
SpaceX has gloriously managed to go where we've gone before. Using a half century old government facility!
SpaceX has also managed to gain exclusive rights to use the pad with the greatest history of manned spaceflight in the United States.
Yes, it's a dick-waving contest. But, given that the bulk of the history of human spaceflight has been a dick-waving contest, it's about as prestigious as they can get. It's also a sign of confidence in SpaceX, as they probably wouldn't give them sole rights to the pad if they didn't think they'd measure up.
It also makes one consider if they didn't feel confident about Bezos' endeavors, to lock his company out of use of that pad entirely.
It's definitely news for nerds though. Only someone truly nerdy enough would actually give a damn.
I stopped giving a damn and I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The few times I tried to add information, sources and all, my changes got reverted by some wikidiot that didn't like how I changed things.
They're complaining about not having money and begging for it with their own banner ads at the top; stop running the site like an unmoderated debating web forum and perhaps people will be more inclined to participate and to give money. That may mean having *gasp* an actual editorial staff, and cutting the wikidiots from edit privileges when they nitpick things that don't mean anything.
Hopefully, someone will now come along to yell at me for placing the final period in the above sentence outside the closing quote. Only way to save this thread I'm afraid.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current convention for the use of punctuation vis-à-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
...will again become the host that one is connecting to and that side of the network getting there, rather than one's last-mile issues.
As for FIOS, I can't deny that I worry, ever-so-slightly, about security. From what I understand, there's a single fiber pair that feeds numerous subscribers, and there's some kind of fan-out kit that sends the same signal from the service provider to all of the subscribers, and that phone company active equipment on each customer premises filters out all but the traffic intended for that subscriber. My concern is that if the phone company's gear gets hacked by either another subscriber in the segment then they'll be able to get at traffic that they shouldn't.
In that case the truck's engine is too big and you'd get better efficiency running the engine of a smaller car at a higher speed. Alas, VW 2.0L diesels don't have power take-offs, as far as I know.
True, but the truck approach has several advantages... Power will camping in places that a car can't as-easily reach, generally significantly greater fuel tank capacity and more space to add auxiliary fuel tanks, and with a full frame, it'd be easier to build a cradle to drive the truck over, jack it up, pull the wheels off, and lower it down on to, making the truck much harder to steal while it's working as a generator. It'd also be easier to beef up the cooling system on the truck, and since the one I have in mind for this has a stepside bed, I could route the exhaust up higher, making it vent away further away from the vehicle than the car would.
Plus I already have the truck and am already planning on doing the engine swap, so there's that...
It'd be better to replace the pulley on the crank rather than the pulley on the alternator, and given the need for the timing to stay right, it'd probably be even better to have a teethed-pulley made that bolts on in front of the accessories pulley, with a matching unit on the generator head.
It's not as simple as messing with the alternator, the cycles will be off. A properly-sized generator head is meant to run at a specific RPM in order to produce the proper cycling rate. A transformer won't fix that part. An inverter would, but that's another point of loss.
Just because Nissan only makes the Leaf as a 100% electric now, doesn't mean that they'll limit themselves to only the Leaf forever...
Nissan may well make an Infiniti-grade car in the future, which should be just fine as far as company cars go, and would be much easier to have serviced with the large Infiniti and Nissan dealer network than a Tesla would be.
I don't think it's intended for rank-and-file workers to supplement the company's electricity, it's probably more that higher-ranking employees with company cars would end up doing this.
If work gave me a car to use for several years, I don't think that the negligible electrical costs that I might incur at home would be enough to make me bat an eye at such an arrangement.
This is why I've considered putting a generator head on the PTO of a Dodge/Cummins truck. Damn near idling the truck would produce enough power to keep the whole house running during power outages.
I've also considered building a battery room if I ever put solar on the house. Even running HVAC equipment it's doable.
As for home delivery, it'll be sad to lose it but the alternative, the community mailbox a few doors down from most houses, will have one advantage: parcels will be loaded into it for you to pick up. Currently if you're not home you have to drive to the nearest sub-post office to get your parcels. This will be way more convenient.
I see a whole lot of mail returned to sender for being abandoned, or being discarded for being abandoned, in those communal mailboxes. I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.
What I don't get is why they just don't just raise the price of first-class mail. In the US, as a lower-volume mailer I'd be okay with spending a dollar to mail something, I end up mailing something about four times a year. It'd still be cheaper than using UPS or FedEx or the like...
I am personally acquainted with several MIT graduates that know how to operate heavy machinery, know how to go rock-crawling in old Jeeps, know how to quarter-mile drag-race in the eleven-second range, and my wife, also an MIT graduate, was a competitive ballroom dancer for a time.
I have five friends with PhDs, and all of them have had hands-on experience with equipment in getting their doctorates.
You're dreaming if you think that smart people are inept at interacting with the physical world in any way different than the regular population. If they were so terrible at it, their insurance rates would be higher than average, not lower than average.
Bear in mind, most of the people the world haven't structured their lives to understanding technology. They may like technology, they may be technology groupies, but they probably haven't really contemplated the ramifications of technology or how it can be used differently than their preconceived notions. They probably don't necessarily get that databases can be cross-referenced so easily or that unless they're willing to go through a specific amount of work each and every time they want to obfuscate their identities, it's likely that someone can figure out who they are.
Another thing to remember, it's never really been possible to be truly anonymous when saying something in text. In the days when the printing press was the preferred way, one still had to have trusted people to help print and distribute the words. In early electronic days when dialup was king, there were always phone records and one had to have accounts on bulletin boards, and systems like fidonet kept origination records. In the days of Usenet, messages could at least be tracked back to a newsserver of origin, and assuming that records were kept, the ISP information could be found and then the subscriber account could be identified.
Nowadays, unless the person wants to take the special laptop that's only used for this purpose, with a special add-on wifi adapter, go park next to a public wifi hotspot and use that public connection, being sure to store the equipment far enough away from themselves when not using it for plausible deniability, there's really isn't true anonymity.
If one wants to truly remain anonymous, one generally has to not say anything. That's the tradeoff, true anonymity comes at the price of nonparticipation.
This is just a symptom of college and university boards wanting to attract attention to their institutions, which pushes tenure-track professors and researchers into 'flashier' research to help their cause to get tenure, which then drives what gets submitted to journals.
Either make tenure easier to get so that professors are less likely to pursue fad or headline-grabbing science in order to achieve it, or encourage more grants to scientists that aren't affiliated with particular schools, so that they don't have to dance for their boards...
Unfortunately most major companies aren't conducting basic research like IBM, Xerox, Bell, and other big organizations did fifty+ years ago, so getting grants from big entities is harder than it once was.
It's even worse for those who are overweight than it is for drug addicts. Drug addicts aren't constantly being bombarded with happy, uplifting advertising claiming how good it is to use drugs. Once weaned from their drugs, drug addicts don't have to continue taking measured amounts of drugs simply to survive.
There are so many aspects to why we're overweight as a society that it's stupid to cite any one thing as why. Sure, we don't move around enough, either at work or for our leisure time. We're taught that active, physical jobs are low-brow, and that the definition of success is to have others do things for us. We watch TV and sit at the computer instead of taking care of our homes and playing sports and working on things. We eat more than we should calorically. The kinds of things that we eat are bad for us. There aren't many rules about what companies are allowed to prepackage for food for us, and when rules do get passed, the public get pissed off and tries to reverse them.
This, "I don't wanna!" neoteny that our culture has fallen into, regarding getting out, being active, actually doing things is going to be our undoing. I actually support the idea of using medication to stimulate metabolism, at least enough to help us overcome the hump of inactivity, maybe if our metabolic rates were raised for a time before we get active, it'll be easier to get active in the first place.
I'm stuck in the same trap that we're all stuck in, it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting on my ass on the couch on my laptop, not really interested in fixing the compressed air distribution system in my shop or in insulating around the whirlpool bathtub or in putting new hatches on some of the openings to mechanical spaces, I'm warm and comfortable in my laziness. Yes, give me medication that makes it harder for me to sit still, and maybe I'll get my ass up and go do something. At least I finally accepted a few years ago that 99% of what's on TV is crap, so I have one less thing holding me here.
Like a 76 Chrysler New Yorker with a 225 slant 6 cyl
A friend if mine had a Canadian-market '68 Dodge Polara fastback that had been imported to the United States. He bought for his first-time-driver son, it came factory-equipped with the RG 225ci slant six. He pulled the factory motor and dropped in a G 170ci slant six and put in shorter gears in the differential, he didn't want him going too fast. Car strained to reach 65mph on the freeway.
His son wasn't real happy with him for a long time over that...
GP and you really don't know anything about Wagner beyond what you've seen on TV documentaries about the Nazis, do you?
Wagner himself may have held some horrible views, but the work that he produced was not geared toward racism, classism, or religious bigotry. His fascination with Norse Mythology was not based on an attempt to tie it to Prussian and later German history, rather to turn an epic tale into an opera and into profit for himself.
It's not Wagner's fault that fifty years after his death, Germany reappropriated his music, attempting to tie Norse Mythology, their concept of what a perfect human was (in the form of Scandinavian coloring) and finding a fit with his personal views (which I've already acknowledged were horrible) to attempt to redefine the music. Wagner never explicitly defined Jewish characters as foils or villains; one can argue that Shakespeare, in his body of work, was worse to the Jews through his character Shylock the Moneylender as being out for literal flesh when his borrower defaults.
Do you advocate banning Shakespeare for the same reasoning?
I tend to think of Wagner and his attitudes and personal history in a similar context to Al Jolson. Jolson's biggest hit was Swanee, demonstrably highly racist in that it was not only in Blackface, but pined for a fictional, idealized South that was kind to slaves that never existed. As such, some of Jolson's body of work doesn't appeal to me, but I can acknowledge the man's faults, choose to avoid those works that I don't agree with, and can enjoy what I don't find unpalatable. I can even acknowledge that given the history and legacy of the Minstrel Show, it's not surprising that at the end of the Blackface era, there was still acceptance of the style and that its commercial viability basically ensured that it wasn't going to go away quickly, and that Jolson and many other performers employed it because they were brought up finding it acceptable. I don't find it acceptable, so I don't embrace those elements of the performers' bodies of work.
I used to feel that way, but Autotune and the excessive amount of post-production that one sees in most charting music changed my mind. It's one thing to multitrack-record to combine the best takes, it's entirely another to almost synthesize the voice yet still attribute the performance to a singer as opposed to a machine or a sound engineer.
Number of the Beast, Live After Death, and the Best of the Beast complication album.
I like hearing how a band sounds live in judging how good a band is. I've only seen a handful of live shows, been impressed with some, not so much with others, and sometimes live show albums aren't so good, like AC/DC's from 1992, where they couldn't even get the bell for Hell's Bells timed right. Maiden's was pretty good, Dickinson hit most of the notes that he hits in the studio cuts but it's imperfect enough that it's obvious he's not lip-synching.
Seriously... you need to turn off the TV, turn off the radio, and the Internet for awhile. Go camping or something, just get away from the self-force-feeding of so much negativity.
...who decides. We've all exhibited behavior at one time or another that could be interpreted as antisocial, and with our paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and less institutional family connections, it's very possible that someone involuntarily committed may find literally all of their worldly possessions gone when they come out. Such involuntary confinement could be used when someone in authority finds something otherwise noncriminal to be abhorrent. There are numerous examples of countercultures throughout our fairly recent history that were investigated by the authorities, and it was bad enough without those people having to particularly worry about involuntary confinement attributed to supposed mental illness.
Who decides, what they can compel, and how that person's life is managed while they're institutionalized are all very, very important factors in if it's even possible to use involuntary medical-based confinement or not.
And that doesn't even begin to address costs. While I don't care for it, it's possible for prisons to get some return on their costs by using prison labor to do things that don't really pay the prisoners but do pay the prison. If someone's committed for what's supposed to be a mental illness problem, it's doubtful that using that person for profit for the institution would really be possible.
I like Maiden over other heavy metal in large part because Bruce Dickinson's singing is superb and the band is technically excellent in their musicianship. I can understand everything he's saying, and when one strips away the album art, the public controversies, and any of the 'myth' surrounding the group, one still has excellent music.
It's not a bunch of growling into the mic with uncoordinated thrash and a drummer with a double-bass pedal pounding out sixteenth notes for no good reason.
I've purchased three of their older albums in the past couple of years because of the music. The albums could have fallen into the, "it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black," realm and their music still stands on its own.
As to the nature of fans, there are plenty of follower-types that end up in one scene or another and really are just along for the ride. It happens in scifi-fantasy fandom, in sports, in gaming, in automotive enthusiasm, in the coffee shop scene, in the dance scene, everywhere. In music, many bands or acts realized that their bread and butter was in making music that the parents of teenagers hated, so that the teenagers would reactionarily buy it to spite their parents. That doesn't doesn't actually hold any bearing on how good or bad the music is though.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, SpaceX has demonstrated that first, that they can achieve objectives in space, and second, that their tech has some fairly impressive fault-tolerance while still safely fulfilling its mission. There was both an incident of an aborted post-ignition event that didn't damage the vehicle, subsequently allowing technicians to inspect and restart the launch, and a failure with one of the clusters of rockets that was successfully worked-around mid-flight, shutting down the affected engine and boosting the performance on the remaining engines.
Also to the matter of who can rent, GP's argument that anyone should be able to rent it is stupid not only because Blue Origin isn't ready to launch yet, but that the argument could mean that anyone, including those that don't have interest in space launches, could rent it. Mind you, there's a risk that SpaceX could block once other competitors enter the market, but on the other hand, 39B has been reconfigured to be multirole already, and 39C was planned and could still be built, and if serious competitors can demonstrate an ability to launch, SpaceX might lose its exclusivity the next time the contract comes up.
SpaceX has also managed to gain exclusive rights to use the pad with the greatest history of manned spaceflight in the United States.
Yes, it's a dick-waving contest. But, given that the bulk of the history of human spaceflight has been a dick-waving contest, it's about as prestigious as they can get. It's also a sign of confidence in SpaceX, as they probably wouldn't give them sole rights to the pad if they didn't think they'd measure up.
It also makes one consider if they didn't feel confident about Bezos' endeavors, to lock his company out of use of that pad entirely.
The PTO is a function of the transmission. That's how tow trucks, dump-bed trucks, and other mechanical-powered trucks use their engines for tasks.
It's definitely news for nerds though. Only someone truly nerdy enough would actually give a damn.
I stopped giving a damn and I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The few times I tried to add information, sources and all, my changes got reverted by some wikidiot that didn't like how I changed things.
They're complaining about not having money and begging for it with their own banner ads at the top; stop running the site like an unmoderated debating web forum and perhaps people will be more inclined to participate and to give money. That may mean having *gasp* an actual editorial staff, and cutting the wikidiots from edit privileges when they nitpick things that don't mean anything.
My guess is that many Slashdotters, myself included, feel that the current convention for the use of punctuation vis-à-vis quotation isn't technically accurate enough anyway.
So, sorry that I couldn't save the thread.
...will again become the host that one is connecting to and that side of the network getting there, rather than one's last-mile issues.
As for FIOS, I can't deny that I worry, ever-so-slightly, about security. From what I understand, there's a single fiber pair that feeds numerous subscribers, and there's some kind of fan-out kit that sends the same signal from the service provider to all of the subscribers, and that phone company active equipment on each customer premises filters out all but the traffic intended for that subscriber. My concern is that if the phone company's gear gets hacked by either another subscriber in the segment then they'll be able to get at traffic that they shouldn't.
True, but the truck approach has several advantages... Power will camping in places that a car can't as-easily reach, generally significantly greater fuel tank capacity and more space to add auxiliary fuel tanks, and with a full frame, it'd be easier to build a cradle to drive the truck over, jack it up, pull the wheels off, and lower it down on to, making the truck much harder to steal while it's working as a generator. It'd also be easier to beef up the cooling system on the truck, and since the one I have in mind for this has a stepside bed, I could route the exhaust up higher, making it vent away further away from the vehicle than the car would.
Plus I already have the truck and am already planning on doing the engine swap, so there's that...
It'd be better to replace the pulley on the crank rather than the pulley on the alternator, and given the need for the timing to stay right, it'd probably be even better to have a teethed-pulley made that bolts on in front of the accessories pulley, with a matching unit on the generator head.
It's not as simple as messing with the alternator, the cycles will be off. A properly-sized generator head is meant to run at a specific RPM in order to produce the proper cycling rate. A transformer won't fix that part. An inverter would, but that's another point of loss.
Just because Nissan only makes the Leaf as a 100% electric now, doesn't mean that they'll limit themselves to only the Leaf forever...
Nissan may well make an Infiniti-grade car in the future, which should be just fine as far as company cars go, and would be much easier to have serviced with the large Infiniti and Nissan dealer network than a Tesla would be.
I don't think it's intended for rank-and-file workers to supplement the company's electricity, it's probably more that higher-ranking employees with company cars would end up doing this.
If work gave me a car to use for several years, I don't think that the negligible electrical costs that I might incur at home would be enough to make me bat an eye at such an arrangement.
This is why I've considered putting a generator head on the PTO of a Dodge/Cummins truck. Damn near idling the truck would produce enough power to keep the whole house running during power outages.
I've also considered building a battery room if I ever put solar on the house. Even running HVAC equipment it's doable.
Maybe they were in one of those depressed periods, where they decided to forego their alliances with the Anglophone world...
I see a whole lot of mail returned to sender for being abandoned, or being discarded for being abandoned, in those communal mailboxes. I also see a lot of people only visiting their mailboxes weekly, like how they take out their trash cans for the truck to pick up, so mailboxes will be even bigger targets for thieves as there'll be more payoff for the effort than before.
What I don't get is why they just don't just raise the price of first-class mail. In the US, as a lower-volume mailer I'd be okay with spending a dollar to mail something, I end up mailing something about four times a year. It'd still be cheaper than using UPS or FedEx or the like...
I am personally acquainted with several MIT graduates that know how to operate heavy machinery, know how to go rock-crawling in old Jeeps, know how to quarter-mile drag-race in the eleven-second range, and my wife, also an MIT graduate, was a competitive ballroom dancer for a time.
I have five friends with PhDs, and all of them have had hands-on experience with equipment in getting their doctorates.
You're dreaming if you think that smart people are inept at interacting with the physical world in any way different than the regular population. If they were so terrible at it, their insurance rates would be higher than average, not lower than average.
Bear in mind, most of the people the world haven't structured their lives to understanding technology. They may like technology, they may be technology groupies, but they probably haven't really contemplated the ramifications of technology or how it can be used differently than their preconceived notions. They probably don't necessarily get that databases can be cross-referenced so easily or that unless they're willing to go through a specific amount of work each and every time they want to obfuscate their identities, it's likely that someone can figure out who they are.
Another thing to remember, it's never really been possible to be truly anonymous when saying something in text. In the days when the printing press was the preferred way, one still had to have trusted people to help print and distribute the words. In early electronic days when dialup was king, there were always phone records and one had to have accounts on bulletin boards, and systems like fidonet kept origination records. In the days of Usenet, messages could at least be tracked back to a newsserver of origin, and assuming that records were kept, the ISP information could be found and then the subscriber account could be identified.
Nowadays, unless the person wants to take the special laptop that's only used for this purpose, with a special add-on wifi adapter, go park next to a public wifi hotspot and use that public connection, being sure to store the equipment far enough away from themselves when not using it for plausible deniability, there's really isn't true anonymity. If one wants to truly remain anonymous, one generally has to not say anything. That's the tradeoff, true anonymity comes at the price of nonparticipation.
This is just a symptom of college and university boards wanting to attract attention to their institutions, which pushes tenure-track professors and researchers into 'flashier' research to help their cause to get tenure, which then drives what gets submitted to journals.
Either make tenure easier to get so that professors are less likely to pursue fad or headline-grabbing science in order to achieve it, or encourage more grants to scientists that aren't affiliated with particular schools, so that they don't have to dance for their boards...
Unfortunately most major companies aren't conducting basic research like IBM, Xerox, Bell, and other big organizations did fifty+ years ago, so getting grants from big entities is harder than it once was.
It's even worse for those who are overweight than it is for drug addicts. Drug addicts aren't constantly being bombarded with happy, uplifting advertising claiming how good it is to use drugs. Once weaned from their drugs, drug addicts don't have to continue taking measured amounts of drugs simply to survive.
There are so many aspects to why we're overweight as a society that it's stupid to cite any one thing as why. Sure, we don't move around enough, either at work or for our leisure time. We're taught that active, physical jobs are low-brow, and that the definition of success is to have others do things for us. We watch TV and sit at the computer instead of taking care of our homes and playing sports and working on things. We eat more than we should calorically. The kinds of things that we eat are bad for us. There aren't many rules about what companies are allowed to prepackage for food for us, and when rules do get passed, the public get pissed off and tries to reverse them.
This, "I don't wanna!" neoteny that our culture has fallen into, regarding getting out, being active, actually doing things is going to be our undoing. I actually support the idea of using medication to stimulate metabolism, at least enough to help us overcome the hump of inactivity, maybe if our metabolic rates were raised for a time before we get active, it'll be easier to get active in the first place.
I'm stuck in the same trap that we're all stuck in, it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting on my ass on the couch on my laptop, not really interested in fixing the compressed air distribution system in my shop or in insulating around the whirlpool bathtub or in putting new hatches on some of the openings to mechanical spaces, I'm warm and comfortable in my laziness. Yes, give me medication that makes it harder for me to sit still, and maybe I'll get my ass up and go do something. At least I finally accepted a few years ago that 99% of what's on TV is crap, so I have one less thing holding me here.
A friend if mine had a Canadian-market '68 Dodge Polara fastback that had been imported to the United States. He bought for his first-time-driver son, it came factory-equipped with the RG 225ci slant six. He pulled the factory motor and dropped in a G 170ci slant six and put in shorter gears in the differential, he didn't want him going too fast. Car strained to reach 65mph on the freeway.
His son wasn't real happy with him for a long time over that...
GP and you really don't know anything about Wagner beyond what you've seen on TV documentaries about the Nazis, do you?
Wagner himself may have held some horrible views, but the work that he produced was not geared toward racism, classism, or religious bigotry. His fascination with Norse Mythology was not based on an attempt to tie it to Prussian and later German history, rather to turn an epic tale into an opera and into profit for himself.
It's not Wagner's fault that fifty years after his death, Germany reappropriated his music, attempting to tie Norse Mythology, their concept of what a perfect human was (in the form of Scandinavian coloring) and finding a fit with his personal views (which I've already acknowledged were horrible) to attempt to redefine the music. Wagner never explicitly defined Jewish characters as foils or villains; one can argue that Shakespeare, in his body of work, was worse to the Jews through his character Shylock the Moneylender as being out for literal flesh when his borrower defaults.
Do you advocate banning Shakespeare for the same reasoning?
I tend to think of Wagner and his attitudes and personal history in a similar context to Al Jolson. Jolson's biggest hit was Swanee, demonstrably highly racist in that it was not only in Blackface, but pined for a fictional, idealized South that was kind to slaves that never existed. As such, some of Jolson's body of work doesn't appeal to me, but I can acknowledge the man's faults, choose to avoid those works that I don't agree with, and can enjoy what I don't find unpalatable. I can even acknowledge that given the history and legacy of the Minstrel Show, it's not surprising that at the end of the Blackface era, there was still acceptance of the style and that its commercial viability basically ensured that it wasn't going to go away quickly, and that Jolson and many other performers employed it because they were brought up finding it acceptable. I don't find it acceptable, so I don't embrace those elements of the performers' bodies of work.
It's possible to separate the man from the work.
I used to feel that way, but Autotune and the excessive amount of post-production that one sees in most charting music changed my mind. It's one thing to multitrack-record to combine the best takes, it's entirely another to almost synthesize the voice yet still attribute the performance to a singer as opposed to a machine or a sound engineer.
Number of the Beast, Live After Death, and the Best of the Beast complication album.
I like hearing how a band sounds live in judging how good a band is. I've only seen a handful of live shows, been impressed with some, not so much with others, and sometimes live show albums aren't so good, like AC/DC's from 1992, where they couldn't even get the bell for Hell's Bells timed right. Maiden's was pretty good, Dickinson hit most of the notes that he hits in the studio cuts but it's imperfect enough that it's obvious he's not lip-synching.
I think that's enough Internet for today...
Seriously... you need to turn off the TV, turn off the radio, and the Internet for awhile. Go camping or something, just get away from the self-force-feeding of so much negativity.
...who decides. We've all exhibited behavior at one time or another that could be interpreted as antisocial, and with our paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle and less institutional family connections, it's very possible that someone involuntarily committed may find literally all of their worldly possessions gone when they come out. Such involuntary confinement could be used when someone in authority finds something otherwise noncriminal to be abhorrent. There are numerous examples of countercultures throughout our fairly recent history that were investigated by the authorities, and it was bad enough without those people having to particularly worry about involuntary confinement attributed to supposed mental illness.
Who decides, what they can compel, and how that person's life is managed while they're institutionalized are all very, very important factors in if it's even possible to use involuntary medical-based confinement or not.
And that doesn't even begin to address costs. While I don't care for it, it's possible for prisons to get some return on their costs by using prison labor to do things that don't really pay the prisoners but do pay the prison. If someone's committed for what's supposed to be a mental illness problem, it's doubtful that using that person for profit for the institution would really be possible.
I like Maiden over other heavy metal in large part because Bruce Dickinson's singing is superb and the band is technically excellent in their musicianship. I can understand everything he's saying, and when one strips away the album art, the public controversies, and any of the 'myth' surrounding the group, one still has excellent music.
It's not a bunch of growling into the mic with uncoordinated thrash and a drummer with a double-bass pedal pounding out sixteenth notes for no good reason.
I've purchased three of their older albums in the past couple of years because of the music. The albums could have fallen into the, "it's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black," realm and their music still stands on its own.
As to the nature of fans, there are plenty of follower-types that end up in one scene or another and really are just along for the ride. It happens in scifi-fantasy fandom, in sports, in gaming, in automotive enthusiasm, in the coffee shop scene, in the dance scene, everywhere. In music, many bands or acts realized that their bread and butter was in making music that the parents of teenagers hated , so that the teenagers would reactionarily buy it to spite their parents. That doesn't doesn't actually hold any bearing on how good or bad the music is though.