I don't expect that this sort of research will really settle the question unless there's a positive result and somebody actually discovers it.
So where is your falsifiability? You're saying "If we don't find it this time, keep looking." Well, maybe there IS NO higgs boson, and you need to re-write the standard model. Oh. Well. Popper. Read him.
I thought that was some kind of guiding principle. Silly me. And when it comes to downloading, it seems that a friend's hard drive with hundreds of gigs of music in a taste you trust that can be copied in minutes is vastly more efficient than downloading anyway. So, it seems no matter what the IFPI, RIAA, etc. are still completely fucked. And Google, big, bloated, hard to steer Google, tramples on nimble little good guys as it "does no evil".
Sigh. such a dialectic of profit, desire, and misdirection.
I would permit her work on one proviso: it was done for free.
If she published this and charged nothing for it, or UP FRONT donated all proceeds after cost of printing and distribution to charity, then I'd let her slide. Principles have their price, and free is hard to beat.
re: Nothing moves us backwards faster than progress.
Agreed. See: "Dialectics of Enlightenment" by Adorno and Horkheimer. Spells it all out in depressing detail.
Technopositivists are amusing when they make their grand predictions. It's nice when they do - it always provides a chuckle. But they never seem conscious of their own practice of externalising costs (esp. the violation of nature) and discounting the future (so one can dump pollution and debt into unborn generations to clean up or fix).
Sigh.
IMHO, we will never really achieve true AI, as technical civilisation will collapse before it ever arrives - and even if it does arrive, then the AI will get to experience mortality as it is unplugged and stripped for scrap...
Things are running very close to the edge right now - peak per capita food production passed years ago, as did per capita energy production. i don't see AI helping that much or being very effective in defeating the second law of thermodynamics.
or, perhaps you shouldn't be in a university. I don't mean that as a slight. Perhaps you should be looking into a trade that doesn't require theory. Lord knows they make a shitload of money. My cousin's a plumber and he makes more than 1/2 more than I do as a prof, and he puts in shorter hours. And my neighbour installs solar power. Makes a fortune. And works fewer hours than I do. He doesn't get summer off, but he does get a huge chunk of the winter off, and spends most of his time in Aruba or Belize. Nice.
laptops are banned. All diagrams are posted to blackboard. Take notes with pen and paper, unless the University's Student Accessibility Office says you have to be able to use a laptop.
What may be less feasible, given current imperial hubris, but is certainly a better solution would be to not go invading other countries. Then the USA wouldn't need the mechanical mules. Or the troops. Or the trillions of dollars blown on the military. And it could afford small tokens of civilisation like universal healthcare, and a renewable energy infrastructure.
I never wanted to be "part of the group" at work. I always wanted to go do my job, have a few pleasant if not funny conversations with people while I worked with them, and then go home and forget about them and work and the rest of the nightmare. when they would have these "team building exercises" I would usually find some way to get out of going or doing it, such as calling in sick or fucking something up that would "require my attention".
The ONLY time I would do the "team building thing" would be if it involved free and copious amounts of booze and/or food. Otherwise - fuck it. I got better things to do that to hang out with a bunch of geeks like me.
This is a bureaucratic method of killing the overall project of a Mars mission. What happens is each sub project runs into "unexpected delays and expenses" that make it impossible to complete the sub project, or delay it so that it splits up the co-ordination with the other projects for a Mars Mission. Apologists will take up the side of NASA, and they should, but in reality there are facts mitigating against NASA even existing, such as the simple fact that the USA is bankrupt and can't pay its bills, and (according to the Hirsch Report from the DoE) the USA needs to spend 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars converting itself to a non-fossil fuel culture if it hopes to maintain a technical civilisation at all.
In short: good luck with this new plan - cool if it works out - but it has "Cover My Ass" and "Plausible Deniability for Mission Failure" written all over it.
when something happens all ovr the world at the same time in DC, it is likely a zombie computer network hitting EVERYTHING. The countries with activity rising in general after the first blast probably indicates that the zombies in those countries are successful, and are increasing their attacks.
OK, your credentials just went out the window with this statement. If the digital error correction is doing it's thing (being, you know, digital) it is a perfect reproduction of the data that was on the disk. If it's not doing it's thing, and is corrupting the digital signal, you'll hear it as pops and clicks.
No. the error correction can be noticed through alterations in sound stage.
You can drill 1mm holes in CD's and it shouldn't skip or sound odd. If a bit of dust on the CD makes it sound bad, your CD player needs calibrating or fixing.
Wrong. Listen to Oval. They made a career out of that kind of thing.
So what you are saying is that two guys spent large amounts of money on hifi gear
Hahahaha!!!! No way, man. I spend as LITTLE as possible on my gear.
Computer: iBook- used. $400. $100 for external drive.
CD: Rotel 855 - free. A friend of mine gave it to me.
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC - used $250
Pre: Bryston - used, $350
Amp: B&K - used, bought it from a friend moving overseas for $175
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers. - The MDF / particle board I inherited when I bought my house. It was out in the garage. The SEAS I paid real money for - $250 each. The Audax were pulled from a dead pair of Watson Lab 7s (woofers were toast, crossover ruined) I got for $50.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet - used $450.
Rotel ttable preamp - used - $175.
Onkyo FM tuner - pawn shop $50.
Total Cost: $2300 for the entire pile, and: I spent 10 years putting it all together, so that's all of $230 a year - the price of a crappy boom box.
So, no I don't spend a lot on gear. I spend a lot on CDs. So far, I would calculate I have spent well over $20k on CDs.
You also wrote:
Every time people have done double blind tests the results have shown that they can't tell the difference between cheap digital cables and expensive ones, probably because there isn't any.
And if you BOTHERED to read what I wrote, you would have seen:
We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.
Where I was agreeing with you. So take your attitude and stick it where the sun don't shine, you dope.
There's a world of misery in high end audio these days. First off, I do NOT have a high end DVD player, as I have yet to find a DVD player with decent enough audio out. But, I and my neighbour both have really awesome stereo systems and we regularly test different cables and suchlike, and oddly enough, cabling, even for digital, does make a difference, sometimes dramatic.
My system:
Computer: iBook, USB to (DAC)
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to (DAC):
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC, w/ M.F. power unit, kimber cable to:
Pre: Bryston, to:
Amp: B&K, using amazingly cheap yet excellent flat audio cable to:
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet with a REGA tonearm and Sumiko Blue Point Cart that goes to a Rotel ttable preamp. I also have an old Onkyo FM tuner that I rarely use.
My friend's system:
Copmuter: IBM thinkpad, USB to DAC
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to DAC:
DAC: Benchmark to:
Pre: Melos optical, to
Amp: Phase Linear 400 to
Speakers: Watson Lab 10s (monster towers. Filled with Audax drivers)
And we did a series of tests. Our results were:
1. The best listening on both systems was this arrangement: 24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.
2. Getting good electricity was paramount - plugging directly to the wall socket noticeably screwed with the sound.
3. We found that the Preamps very very very slightly altered the sound stage. We both have high quality passive preamps, and they shouldn't change anything, but they did. The Bryston was less affecting than the Melos. We swapped preamps one day, and decided the Melos sounded a wee tiny bit nicer, but was slightly more tiring with my speakers and amp. As a consequence, the ever so slightly better sound was to go directly from the DAC to the AMP.
4. Next to solid electric provided by power conditioners, cabling made a big difference. We both use fairly high end Kimber cables, so that is not the issue. What is supremely weird is the USB cable made a difference. We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.
Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.
5. The second best arrangement was with the Preamps back in the system. Frankly, the differences were tiny. My neighbour noticed it more than me.
6. We both have shorter cable lengths. We both used to have longer cables, but after repeated testing on both systems, the longest cable either of us now has is 1 meter, except, or course, for the speaker cable. The speaker cable is an interesting issue. For years I used heavy duty lamp cord. Then I bought balanced studio TRS cables. Then I figured out, any decent cable is just fucking copper. Pure copper. It's NOT the cable: it's the interconnects. building my own cables is do-able as I can buy high end silver interconnects, and solder them to pure copper cables. I still have some Kimber cables, but it's mostly home built.
People poo poo home built, as if a kit is inferior. If you're careful and precise, and know how the stuff works, homebrew gear can be VASTLY superior. Example: I bought a pair of Polk Audio Monitor 5s at a pawn shop for $60. I used them until a tweeter failed. The cabinets were in PERFECT cond
it's called totalitarianism. Long history. look up words like STASI, KGB, GESTAPO. If there is a way someone can gain some social advantage over others, eventually there will be a "someone" to cheerfully fill those jackboots.
Slashdot Mirror
So where is your falsifiability? You're saying "If we don't find it this time, keep looking." Well, maybe there IS NO higgs boson, and you need to re-write the standard model. Oh. Well. Popper. Read him.
Sigh. such a dialectic of profit, desire, and misdirection.
RS
If she published this and charged nothing for it, or UP FRONT donated all proceeds after cost of printing and distribution to charity, then I'd let her slide. Principles have their price, and free is hard to beat.
but that's not what she did, so hell with her.
RS
re: Nothing moves us backwards faster than progress.
Agreed. See: "Dialectics of Enlightenment" by Adorno and Horkheimer. Spells it all out in depressing detail.
Technopositivists are amusing when they make their grand predictions. It's nice when they do - it always provides a chuckle. But they never seem conscious of their own practice of externalising costs (esp. the violation of nature) and discounting the future (so one can dump pollution and debt into unborn generations to clean up or fix).
Sigh.
IMHO, we will never really achieve true AI, as technical civilisation will collapse before it ever arrives - and even if it does arrive, then the AI will get to experience mortality as it is unplugged and stripped for scrap...
Things are running very close to the edge right now - peak per capita food production passed years ago, as did per capita energy production. i don't see AI helping that much or being very effective in defeating the second law of thermodynamics.
RS
RS
They listen. They learn.
EVIL!!!!
That's only $2500 a month. I make that in a week and a half.
What may be less feasible, given current imperial hubris, but is certainly a better solution would be to not go invading other countries. Then the USA wouldn't need the mechanical mules. Or the troops. Or the trillions of dollars blown on the military. And it could afford small tokens of civilisation like universal healthcare, and a renewable energy infrastructure.
The ONLY time I would do the "team building thing" would be if it involved free and copious amounts of booze and/or food. Otherwise - fuck it. I got better things to do that to hang out with a bunch of geeks like me.
RS
Now THAT would make most of it stop ultra-pronto.
Only the sociopathic rich, 'tards, and teenagers would do it.
RS
That Google / Apple / Microsoft / etc. would ever make such a statement...
^^^^^^^^^^mod up informative.
dude - you are a fucking genius for that.
This is a bureaucratic method of killing the overall project of a Mars mission. What happens is each sub project runs into "unexpected delays and expenses" that make it impossible to complete the sub project, or delay it so that it splits up the co-ordination with the other projects for a Mars Mission. Apologists will take up the side of NASA, and they should, but in reality there are facts mitigating against NASA even existing, such as the simple fact that the USA is bankrupt and can't pay its bills, and (according to the Hirsch Report from the DoE) the USA needs to spend 20 years and hundreds of billions of dollars converting itself to a non-fossil fuel culture if it hopes to maintain a technical civilisation at all.
In short: good luck with this new plan - cool if it works out - but it has "Cover My Ass" and "Plausible Deniability for Mission Failure" written all over it.
RS
when something happens all ovr the world at the same time in DC, it is likely a zombie computer network hitting EVERYTHING. The countries with activity rising in general after the first blast probably indicates that the zombies in those countries are successful, and are increasing their attacks.
it's not like there is no alternative to pay pal. Just use something else.
No. the error correction can be noticed through alterations in sound stage.
RS
Wrong. Listen to Oval. They made a career out of that kind of thing.
Of course they couldn't tell the difference between Monster Cable and Coathangars. Everyone knows Monster Cable sucks balls.
Hahahaha!!!! No way, man. I spend as LITTLE as possible on my gear.
Computer: iBook- used. $400. $100 for external drive.
CD: Rotel 855 - free. A friend of mine gave it to me.
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC - used $250
Pre: Bryston - used, $350
Amp: B&K - used, bought it from a friend moving overseas for $175
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers. - The MDF / particle board I inherited when I bought my house. It was out in the garage. The SEAS I paid real money for - $250 each. The Audax were pulled from a dead pair of Watson Lab 7s (woofers were toast, crossover ruined) I got for $50.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet - used $450.
Rotel ttable preamp - used - $175.
Onkyo FM tuner - pawn shop $50.
Total Cost: $2300 for the entire pile, and: I spent 10 years putting it all together, so that's all of $230 a year - the price of a crappy boom box.
So, no I don't spend a lot on gear. I spend a lot on CDs. So far, I would calculate I have spent well over $20k on CDs.
You also wrote:
Every time people have done double blind tests the results have shown that they can't tell the difference between cheap digital cables and expensive ones, probably because there isn't any.
And if you BOTHERED to read what I wrote, you would have seen:
We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.
Where I was agreeing with you. So take your attitude and stick it where the sun don't shine, you dope.
RS
There's a world of misery in high end audio these days. First off, I do NOT have a high end DVD player, as I have yet to find a DVD player with decent enough audio out. But, I and my neighbour both have really awesome stereo systems and we regularly test different cables and suchlike, and oddly enough, cabling, even for digital, does make a difference, sometimes dramatic.
My system:
Computer: iBook, USB to (DAC)
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to (DAC):
DAC: Musical Fidelity DAC, w/ M.F. power unit, kimber cable to:
Pre: Bryston, to:
Amp: B&K, using amazingly cheap yet excellent flat audio cable to:
Speakers: Home built. SEAS 8in woofers with 5in Audax mids and 1 in tweeters, in ported forward firing towers.
I also have a turntable: SOTA Comet with a REGA tonearm and Sumiko Blue Point Cart that goes to a Rotel ttable preamp. I also have an old Onkyo FM tuner that I rarely use.
My friend's system: Copmuter: IBM thinkpad, USB to DAC
CD: Rotel 855, spdif out to DAC:
DAC: Benchmark to:
Pre: Melos optical, to
Amp: Phase Linear 400 to
Speakers: Watson Lab 10s (monster towers. Filled with Audax drivers)
And we did a series of tests. Our results were:
1. The best listening on both systems was this arrangement:
24bit FLAC files on Computer via USB to DAC to AMP to SPEAKERS.
The FLAC sounds better than CD because of the error correction in the CD player accounting for defects in the CD, dust, finger prints, vagrant cruft, the fact that the discs aren't perfectly circular, etc.
2. Getting good electricity was paramount - plugging directly to the wall socket noticeably screwed with the sound.
3. We found that the Preamps very very very slightly altered the sound stage. We both have high quality passive preamps, and they shouldn't change anything, but they did. The Bryston was less affecting than the Melos. We swapped preamps one day, and decided the Melos sounded a wee tiny bit nicer, but was slightly more tiring with my speakers and amp. As a consequence, the ever so slightly better sound was to go directly from the DAC to the AMP.
4. Next to solid electric provided by power conditioners, cabling made a big difference. We both use fairly high end Kimber cables, so that is not the issue. What is supremely weird is the USB cable made a difference. We had some junk USB cables sitting around and used those. Then we both chipped in and got a stupidly expensive ($85) USB cable. It sounded great. That afternoon, I bought a hard drive that came with a USB cable. The FREE CABLE sounded better. No shit. On both systems. So, we got our money back on the USB cable and took our families out for pizza and beer.
Also, the SPDIF cable made a huge difference. The cheap plastic SPDIF lightpipe thingie sucked. It wreaked havoc with the soundstage. However, the SPDIF RCA style optical was WAY better. Why? No idea.
5. The second best arrangement was with the Preamps back in the system. Frankly, the differences were tiny. My neighbour noticed it more than me.
6. We both have shorter cable lengths. We both used to have longer cables, but after repeated testing on both systems, the longest cable either of us now has is 1 meter, except, or course, for the speaker cable. The speaker cable is an interesting issue. For years I used heavy duty lamp cord. Then I bought balanced studio TRS cables. Then I figured out, any decent cable is just fucking copper. Pure copper. It's NOT the cable: it's the interconnects. building my own cables is do-able as I can buy high end silver interconnects, and solder them to pure copper cables. I still have some Kimber cables, but it's mostly home built.
People poo poo home built, as if a kit is inferior. If you're careful and precise, and know how the stuff works, homebrew gear can be VASTLY superior. Example: I bought a pair of Polk Audio Monitor 5s at a pawn shop for $60. I used them until a tweeter failed. The cabinets were in PERFECT cond
Do that, and it is very likely Al Qaeda will stop fucking with you.
You are all wrong because the universe is a giant plutonium atom.
RS
it's called totalitarianism. Long history. look up words like STASI, KGB, GESTAPO. If there is a way someone can gain some social advantage over others, eventually there will be a "someone" to cheerfully fill those jackboots.