The U2 single by Negativland! I am burdened by its lack of availability!
Har! Well, the single itself may be out of print, but it's downloadable, and all the tracks on it and many variations thereof are on the brilliant compilation, These Guys are from England and Who Gives a Shit?:
I just hope they can maintain a strong cohesion with disparate authors.
Good point. Seems that some of the 'purer' subjects wouldn't suffer so much from this effect - and I noted that they've started with math, which seems appropriate.
Suppose they move on to physics, mechanics, earth science, biology, physiology, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, etc., - will every successively more 'debatable' subject be more fractious and harder to edit?
My other big question, that ties into this somewhat, is, "So they've got a textbook. Who's gonna use it?" (*feverishly clicks and R's a bit of TFA, fails to see any mention of the aims of the project*)
If it's really a "textbook," I'd presume a goal would be to have schools adopt it. My reflexive response to this is, GOOD - this process has gotta produce a better textbook than many of the hobbled, dumbed-down, error-ridden, poorly-written, BORING, watered-down-to-not-offend-any-political-stance excuses for instruction I was subjected to in grade- and high-school.
Which brings me back to the first thoughts, on the subjects that might be covered. It seems that those subjects most, uh, subject to wildly varying, uh, subjective viewpoints/beliefs would be MOST instructive if actual proponents of each (or a representative sample) viewpoint were to do their best at writing their own material, and then an honest, objective group of editors take the results and hone them into something actually INFORMATIVE about each viewpoint, weeding out the hidden agendas and subtle biases along the way.
DirecTV also agreed to change its pre-lawsuit demand letters to explain in detail how innocent recipients can get DirecTV to drop their cases. The company also promised that it will investigate every substantive claim of innocence it receives. If purchasers provide sufficient evidence demonstrating that they did not use their devices for signal theft, DirecTV will dismiss their cases.
Does evidence that you do use your smart card programming interface/hardware for legitimate purposes count towards the not-well-defined "sufficient" amount of evidence "demonstrating that [you] did not use [your] devices for signal theft"? It's the same old logical fallacy of trying to prove a negative - what evidence do they expect supports the assertion that you did not try to program cards for part of a signal-theft scheme?
They're not very clear on this - though I (generously) presume there's some more practical definition somewhere in the process, . . . but I still think the burden of proof to even start this kind of proceeding should be on the accuser - show some evidence that each potential defendant did commit the crime. It seems that this still leaves plenty of room for harrassing innocent geeks who happen to work for companies who, for example, program industrial security systems, which could have included me a few years ago.
If it is played 40 times a week people are going to hear it and *believe* that it is popular. When it gets artificially vaulted to the top of the charts more people are going to *believe* that it is popular.
Here's a point I was babbling about in another thread: I sense that more and more people are coming around to the idea that they don't give a sh1t what's "popular" anymore. When that stance sinks in (and when the "listening audience" becomes collectivelly sophisti-muh-cated enough to know how to find stuff they DO like), this kind of 'advertising' mechanism will become unsustainable, unprofitable, and help take down the RIAA-pwn3d part of the industry, hallelujah and amen.
And, a big thumbs-up to your links to Furthurnet and SharingtheGroove - and might I throw in a BitTorrent here and a thankewe to artists everywhere who allow taping and trading?
If these paid "advertisements" are able to affect the album's position on the charts, then I feel that they should not be permitted, however if they have no adverse effect on anything else (album rankings, etc) then the major objection I have to this is removed.
Depending on what charts we're talking about here, one response could be, "So if the advertising works, then you think it shouldn't be allowed. Sounds perverse to me." But I guess that depends on charts being based on sales, and some are based on airplay or a combination of both.
But since the purpose of advertising AND airplay is to generate sales, I don't know how much that distinction is worth.
If I really gave a sideways sh1t what the charts said, I might get as worked up about this as I would've 20 years ago. But,... warning, semi-unrelated, unhinged rant ahead:
But, since what's on the charts should matter so incredibly, immeasurably, microscopically, infinitesimally little to anyone whose primary concern is the quality of music they listen to and who knows how to find what they like, I'm quickly arriving at the position that it doesn't matter a bit how much of a cluster-fsck the RIAA-umbrella'd portion of the industry becomes: It just doesn't affect what I listen to, the artists I follow (since, even in an ideal non-corrupt world, they're too "weird" to ever gain mainstream success - e.g., www.sleepytimegorillamuseum.com ), the methods by which I seek out new music, the importance of the music I DO like relative to popularity (since there IS no relationship there), and - here's the optimist in me peeking out - it seems that more people are getting around to this same realization or stance.
(Whew - sorry for the grammatically distended construction, there...
Meaning, the mainstream industry will go down, it's just a question of exactly when, and it's this kind of mechanism that will eventually become non-self-sustainable (what happens if you pay for 50 grillion airplays, and it has no effect on the sales charts at all, 'cos the song is such a turd?), and contribute to the downfall. I await gleefully with a bag of popcorn in hand.
This is interesting, and I suspect that there are more reasons than have been mentioned yet that the effort may prove fruitless.
Remember the Stanford prison experiment?
http://www.prisonexp.org/
Students, placed in a position of authority over others, quickly lost all sense of proportion and equanimity in carrying out their arbitrarily assigned actions.
Who's to say that the people monitoring these video feeds will keep their heads about them any better? Will they be sharp and perceptive enough to actually see anything worthwhile? Or will paranoia take over and just produce loads of bad data?
Am I paranoid for seeing parallels between this and the perverse belief that you get any good, valid information out of someone through torture?
I'm not obsessing about the Orwellian aspects of this latest scheme, nor the potential legalities or backlash thereto - just the thought that, "is it reallly going to get us much useful information?"
OK - those quotations settle it for me: I'm buying the DVD sets. I hadn't decided before, but I'd forgotten how many sweet geek-jokes were buried in there,...
Or people could do what my dad already does with our cars: he hooks his laptop up to the computer interface plug, and uses a software program to diagnose and discover the problem. If it reads out any special codes, he can just search on Google to find out what they mean (his laptop has a wireless card that works when he's in the garage).
Sweet. What program is this? Where can I get a copy? What kind of hardware connection is required? (Gotta see if my car has this feature first, I guess.)
Is this just going to be another "corrupt strategic sectors of the CD" strategy?
And if it is, you can always make an identically-"flawed" copy using, say, BlindRead/BlindWrite:
www.blindread.com
...which ignores error-correction interpretation and just grabs raw data. There's already plenty of software out there that will, in combination with appropriate hardware (Lite-On - the karaoke-pirate's friend), circumvent all existing DRM schemes (as if anyone doesn't know this), and there's nothing in the article that gives any solid evidence that they've thought up anything difrerent with this new "idea."
There's no need to even compress to FLAC (or SHN, similarly) - that's just an extra step past extracting to a raw.wav file (as with Exact Audio Copy or any number of other DAE apps). If you can extract to a.wav file stored on your hard drive, you can make as many copies as you want.
But with the codes out in the open she could be charged by Joe Bob down at the corner 120$ to be told that the gas cap is loose rather then payign 120$ to the Kia repair place to be told the same thing!
More likely, she'd be able to get the same service at a non-dealer shop for a lot less than $120. I had to have the diagnostic code checked in my 2000 Subaru Forester, and the privately owned shop charged me $60 (turned out to be the same thing - an "oxygen sensor" was what tripped the light, and what tripped the oxygen sensor was the leaky gas-cap).
In general, open up the playing field to more competition, and the price will go down. That $60 STILL seems ridiculous, considering the minuscule amount of work actually performed, but you're paying for the knowledge.
The manufacturers have been keeping that knowledge secret from everyone who hasn't passed all the initiation rites and paid all the associated fees to become a "dealer" - anybody going to draw the obvious parallel to Scientology?:-)
Not specifically a reply to your post, . . . but I haven't yet seen anyone point out that, well, aren't the numbers on which the RIAA are basing their sales-loss claims merely (some convoluted form of) sales of albums released by RIAA labels only? This is most certainly not the sum-total of all albums released in this country.
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/membership
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/fair-music/
...and plenty of other sites (just Google for "non-RIAA record labels") not only provide lists of labels that aren't part of the RIAA mob, but exhort boycotting the ones that are.
Back to my point - isn't it more likely all the time that, yes, the RIAA's sales may be down, but it may be at least in part because the popularity of non-RIAA music has grown, taking their sales down the good old-fashioned, legal capitalistic way?
Hell's bells, even Newsweek is at least partly hip to this - there's an article in this week's issue ( http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933394/ ) about how much more popular indie bands (more commonly non-RIAA, needless to say) are becoming. Yeah, so some of the bands they mention - Flaming Lips, etc., - are major-label, but the trend they're pointing out is that online sharing has enabled these indies to get the word out and generate sales without going through a major label and its marketing machine, and also that the deluge of information available has made the indie musos more hip to the scumbaggery of the major labels in the first place, and so less likely to cave in and sign a contract with one.
Users who are members of my site for weeks, months or years and have greate feedback records... then suddenly rip a bunch of people off all at once. Or people who choose to follow through on some transactions and flake off with other people. Of course, this
This is the classic pattern shown when an established seller's account has been hijacked. What fraction of "flake-outs" like this come from hijacks vs. actual good sellers suddenly going bad is anybody's guess, but consider that someone who has taken the time and been a reliable seller and built up a ton of good feedback - what straits would they have to come to to decide that ripping people off would serve them better long-term as a business model?
The shame is, from the outside - as a buyer - you just can't tell.
I've bought hundreds of things on eBay - mostly books and CDs - and there have been exactly three transactions - totalling under $40 - where I got screwed. Not a bad run, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm seeing the value in a very-very-quiet-if-not-silent computer more all the time. I spend a lot of time doing production on live recordings, and just lately, the noise has been getting to me more than usual, making it hard to determine what's background noise on the recording, and what's fan noise from the (ill-placed) CPU reflecting back at me from the corner behind the desk. I could definitely improved things by shuffling the setup around, but it wouldn't really be workable to put the CPU under the table with all the wire-swapping and disc-exchanging I do (not to mention the local cat population milling around amongst the wires).
All of which is to say, 'depends on your application.'
The compression you're talking about is caused by the analog compression used to squash (level) the dynamic range of material -- not digital compression which is part of the analog-to-digital encoding process. It's why FM radio stations sound so loud compared to, say AM
But part of the algorithm that results in MP3s and other lossy formats, mimics that very same dynamic-range compression scheme - reduce the bit-depth of each sample (thereby reducing the dynamic range) and voila - save that much data-space immediately. The first thing to listen for if you compare an MP3 to its full-quality source (and there's not an A/D step in this process - it's already digital, in that you're converting an un(data)compressed.wav or.aiff file to MP3, totally in the digital realm) is how much louder the MP3 sounds on average - 'cos you've squished it's dynamic range. This is misleading to a lot of people, who reflexively equate "louder" with "better" and conclude that MP3s don't suffer quality loss, when the "loss" they're quantifying isn't simply a "difference between source and MP3."
In a lot of cases, a little compression IS a good thing (I've tweaked hundreds of hours of live recordings, and sure enough, I usually do a little dynamic compression just to get the quiet bits up to an audible level - the rule of thumb is to compress only as much as absolutely needed and no more), but the downside to the dynamic compression that creeps into an MP3 is that you don't have independent control over it vs. other data-compression artifacts, like crappy-swishy sounding cymbals and weirded-out vocals.
BTW, taking the feed from the board is a bad idea. Because a number of instruments use backline amplification, the result is a poor balance. One really should run a separate recording mix.
Tru' dat. I was wondering (don't think TFA mentioned it) whether they might be running a sbd/aud matrix, rather than a straight soundboard feed. To my ear, this is the optimum live recording - all the clarity of a soundboard mix, plus the ambience and balance of a well-placed mic or mics in the audience, and thus a controllable amount of crowd noise. If there's a single clueful individual at the venue, they'll be doing it this way.
Who the hell drinks coke at a rock concert? Oh right.. This is/.
Har! My question (for some people, not necessarily you;-)) is, "do you freakin' always have to drink (to the point of stupefaction) at every concert you go to?" What's the point of paying for a concert, if you're going to get so shit-faced that you don't remember any of it anyway?
And, could ya cut it out with the incessant yapping while the band is playing? Yer making it hard for other folks to enjoy what they paid for.
And could ya SIT THE F&^% DOWN FOR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES AT A TIME and not keep crawling over me to go get another damn beer/take a piss/go get another damn beer/take a piss/go get another damn beer?
And how freakin' sardine-can crowded does it have to be up near the stage before you'll just decide that, nah, it's not worth pushing and shoving through the throng to get a better view?
Some PDA's work halfway decently for recording audio, are those banned from concerts now?
Dig around a www.coresound.com (I think) or Google for "PDAudio" - these would be "teh sh1t" if you didn't end up having to string together so many separate devices (mics -> mic-pre-amp -> A/D converter -> PDAudio attachment into PDA equipped with extra disk space) - by the time a stealth taper such as myself (darn brain - did I type that or just think it?) gets all wired up, he can barely move around without the fear of pulling something apart.
It's not such a big deal if open taping is allowed, and that's really pretty common at smaller venues and for non-major-label artists. Google for "Bands that allow taping" - there's a semi-maintained list of hundreds, if not a thousand or more, bands, and info on whether they allow/disallow/don't have a policy on taping.
It runs the gamut - from King Crimson (Robert Fripp is the most famously anti-taper musician alive) to many bands who actively encourage taping (Cowboy Junkies offer a couple pair of free tickets to each show to applicants who will tape and provide them with a copy; Mike Keneally [ www.keneally.com ] authorizes a tape-trading website run by fans [ www.mktrading.org ], some jam-bands (Steve Kimock and related projects) go so far as to allow tapers to put their mics ON-STAGE to capture the drums direct and the rest from the monitor speakers (or whatever you prefer, given that proximity)).
I've been avidly following the news on these new institutionalized live-recording distribution schemes. I'm still very suspicious of Clear Channel's earlier CD-R-based setup, just 'cos, you know, it's Clear Channel and they're evil - but I seriously prefer to avoid lossily-compressed storage formats, to the point that I'll still gladly stealth a show to get a full-quality audie-DAT recording instead of, or even in addition to, getting an MP3'd soundboard or soundboard/audie matrix recording.
I am very clearly arguing that a significant event took place outside the realm of science (created by intelligent design, an open system)
Then why bother with the principles of thermodynamics in the first place? By definition, you're only going to misuse the terms and confuse the argument if you start out basing your line of reasoning on terms from that discipline (with its basis in empirical observation, relying on mathematics, predictability, and some form of assent that the principles illuminated by the equations are based on underlying physical laws that will not change over time), and then, voila! you whip away the pretense and reveal that you're not constraining yourself to any such assumptions, that the reality you're basing your arguments on (one that includes "intelligent design") allows for things clearly outside empirical observation.
To restate part of that grammatical mess, a 'system' in thermodynamics pretty much has to be a physically isolatable area in three dimensional space; if you're calling ID a "system" - it's clearly a different meaning of the term, and it's nonsensical to call a theoretical construct like ID an 'open system' and expect that it bears any comparison to, or fits in the same place in an argument as, a thermodynamic 'open system'.
You try to call the Earth the system, however, I am not limiting evolution to earth(or the sun). I want the whole universe in my system.
If we're talking about evolution, what evidence do we collectively have of evolution anywhere besides the earth?
The theory that evelotution brought about the universe by no other cause than its own self
Well, here's the problem. "Evolution" as far as I know, is not what's posited to have brought about the universe. Evolution only brings about changes in existing species of life-forms over time, directed by natural selection acting upon variations produced by genetic mutation. If you're really conflating evolution with other, cosmological processes that may or may not have brought about the existence of the universe, then you're not "very clearly" arguing anything at all.
How come creationist "science" almost always seems to be supported by people who have clear religious connections? Even IF one can prove the existence of a "creator", who is to say that this creator's name is not Allah?
Right on. Allah, or Zoroaster, or any of the creators in between.
False dichotomies are everywhere. Either science or (this one particular) religion.
Who was it who said (paraphrased), 'For you to understand why I don't believe in your god, you need only understand why you don't believe in all those other gods.'?
Every system, left to its own devices, always tends to move from order to disorder, its energy tending to be transformed into lower levels of availability (for work), ultimately becoming totally random and unavailable for work....or...
The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease.
Your last sentence contains the correction of the error in your first, and the key to clearing up your fundamental misunderstanding of the principle at hand.
The first should begin Every closed system, left to its own devices...
Do you even understand the difference between an open and a closed system? A closed system is one that doesn't interact with things outside the system. You can illustrate this by drawing a boundary around the system and asking, 'what things cross this boundary?' For thermodynamic purposes, a 'thing' can be any form of energy.
The 'system,' in the context of evolution, is the earth's biosphere. This is emphatically not a closed system, because it receives energy from the sun.
Wanna redefine the 'system' in question to include the sun, and then claim that the whole is a closed system and thereby shows that evolution didn't happen? Taken as a whole, the sun is generating a hell of a lot more entropy (loosely stated) in every year, than the entirety of evolution has countered during the earth's existence. The overall entropy in the redefined system is clearly increasing, yet locally (here on earth) has decreased. Perfectly permissible within the principles of thermodynamics, and any sophomore engineering student could show you equations that describe these cases.
That this whole grasping-at-straws argument is based on such a simple misunderstanding of such a basic principle drives home the observation that the anti-evolutionists who spout that argument have made precious little attempt to earnestly understand that which they criticize.
Slashdot Mirror
Har! Well, the single itself may be out of print, but it's downloadable, and all the tracks on it and many variations thereof are on the brilliant compilation, These Guys are from England and Who Gives a Shit?:
http://www.negativland.com/nmol/cds.html
http://www.negativland.com/nmol/info/info_tgafea wgas.html
Good point. Seems that some of the 'purer' subjects wouldn't suffer so much from this effect - and I noted that they've started with math, which seems appropriate.
Suppose they move on to physics, mechanics, earth science, biology, physiology, psychology, philosophy, comparative religion, etc., - will every successively more 'debatable' subject be more fractious and harder to edit?
My other big question, that ties into this somewhat, is, "So they've got a textbook. Who's gonna use it?" (*feverishly clicks and R's a bit of TFA, fails to see any mention of the aims of the project*)
If it's really a "textbook," I'd presume a goal would be to have schools adopt it. My reflexive response to this is, GOOD - this process has gotta produce a better textbook than many of the hobbled, dumbed-down, error-ridden, poorly-written, BORING, watered-down-to-not-offend-any-political-stance excuses for instruction I was subjected to in grade- and high-school.
Which brings me back to the first thoughts, on the subjects that might be covered. It seems that those subjects most, uh, subject to wildly varying, uh, subjective viewpoints/beliefs would be MOST instructive if actual proponents of each (or a representative sample) viewpoint were to do their best at writing their own material, and then an honest, objective group of editors take the results and hone them into something actually INFORMATIVE about each viewpoint, weeding out the hidden agendas and subtle biases along the way.
DirecTV also agreed to change its pre-lawsuit demand letters to explain in detail how innocent recipients can get DirecTV to drop their cases. The company also promised that it will investigate every substantive claim of innocence it receives. If purchasers provide sufficient evidence demonstrating that they did not use their devices for signal theft, DirecTV will dismiss their cases.
Does evidence that you do use your smart card programming interface/hardware for legitimate purposes count towards the not-well-defined "sufficient" amount of evidence "demonstrating that [you] did not use [your] devices for signal theft"? It's the same old logical fallacy of trying to prove a negative - what evidence do they expect supports the assertion that you did not try to program cards for part of a signal-theft scheme?
They're not very clear on this - though I (generously) presume there's some more practical definition somewhere in the process, . . . but I still think the burden of proof to even start this kind of proceeding should be on the accuser - show some evidence that each potential defendant did commit the crime. It seems that this still leaves plenty of room for harrassing innocent geeks who happen to work for companies who, for example, program industrial security systems, which could have included me a few years ago.
Here's a point I was babbling about in another thread: I sense that more and more people are coming around to the idea that they don't give a sh1t what's "popular" anymore. When that stance sinks in (and when the "listening audience" becomes collectivelly sophisti-muh-cated enough to know how to find stuff they DO like), this kind of 'advertising' mechanism will become unsustainable, unprofitable, and help take down the RIAA-pwn3d part of the industry, hallelujah and amen.
And, a big thumbs-up to your links to Furthurnet and SharingtheGroove - and might I throw in a BitTorrent here and a thankewe to artists everywhere who allow taping and trading?
Depending on what charts we're talking about here, one response could be, "So if the advertising works, then you think it shouldn't be allowed. Sounds perverse to me." But I guess that depends on charts being based on sales, and some are based on airplay or a combination of both.
But since the purpose of advertising AND airplay is to generate sales, I don't know how much that distinction is worth.
If I really gave a sideways sh1t what the charts said, I might get as worked up about this as I would've 20 years ago. But,... warning, semi-unrelated, unhinged rant ahead:
But, since what's on the charts should matter so incredibly, immeasurably, microscopically, infinitesimally little to anyone whose primary concern is the quality of music they listen to and who knows how to find what they like, I'm quickly arriving at the position that it doesn't matter a bit how much of a cluster-fsck the RIAA-umbrella'd portion of the industry becomes: It just doesn't affect what I listen to, the artists I follow (since, even in an ideal non-corrupt world, they're too "weird" to ever gain mainstream success - e.g., www.sleepytimegorillamuseum.com ), the methods by which I seek out new music, the importance of the music I DO like relative to popularity (since there IS no relationship there), and - here's the optimist in me peeking out - it seems that more people are getting around to this same realization or stance.
(Whew - sorry for the grammatically distended construction, there...
Meaning, the mainstream industry will go down, it's just a question of exactly when, and it's this kind of mechanism that will eventually become non-self-sustainable (what happens if you pay for 50 grillion airplays, and it has no effect on the sales charts at all, 'cos the song is such a turd?), and contribute to the downfall. I await gleefully with a bag of popcorn in hand.
Remember the Stanford prison experiment?
http://www.prisonexp.org/
Students, placed in a position of authority over others, quickly lost all sense of proportion and equanimity in carrying out their arbitrarily assigned actions.
Who's to say that the people monitoring these video feeds will keep their heads about them any better? Will they be sharp and perceptive enough to actually see anything worthwhile? Or will paranoia take over and just produce loads of bad data?
Am I paranoid for seeing parallels between this and the perverse belief that you get any good, valid information out of someone through torture?
I'm not obsessing about the Orwellian aspects of this latest scheme, nor the potential legalities or backlash thereto - just the thought that, "is it reallly going to get us much useful information?"
*shrug* I dunno.
OK - those quotations settle it for me: I'm buying the DVD sets. I hadn't decided before, but I'd forgotten how many sweet geek-jokes were buried in there,...
Sweet. What program is this? Where can I get a copy? What kind of hardware connection is required? (Gotta see if my car has this feature first, I guess.)
Mod parent up.
And if it is, you can always make an identically-"flawed" copy using, say, BlindRead/BlindWrite:
www.blindread.com
There's no need to even compress to FLAC (or SHN, similarly) - that's just an extra step past extracting to a raw .wav file (as with Exact Audio Copy or any number of other DAE apps). If you can extract to a .wav file stored on your hard drive, you can make as many copies as you want.
More likely, she'd be able to get the same service at a non-dealer shop for a lot less than $120. I had to have the diagnostic code checked in my 2000 Subaru Forester, and the privately owned shop charged me $60 (turned out to be the same thing - an "oxygen sensor" was what tripped the light, and what tripped the oxygen sensor was the leaky gas-cap).
In general, open up the playing field to more competition, and the price will go down. That $60 STILL seems ridiculous, considering the minuscule amount of work actually performed, but you're paying for the knowledge.
The manufacturers have been keeping that knowledge secret from everyone who hasn't passed all the initiation rites and paid all the associated fees to become a "dealer" - anybody going to draw the obvious parallel to Scientology? :-)
NO KILL I
http://www.magnetbox.com/riaa/
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/membership
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/fair-music/
Back to my point - isn't it more likely all the time that, yes, the RIAA's sales may be down, but it may be at least in part because the popularity of non-RIAA music has grown, taking their sales down the good old-fashioned, legal capitalistic way?
Hell's bells, even Newsweek is at least partly hip to this - there's an article in this week's issue ( http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933394/ ) about how much more popular indie bands (more commonly non-RIAA, needless to say) are becoming. Yeah, so some of the bands they mention - Flaming Lips, etc., - are major-label, but the trend they're pointing out is that online sharing has enabled these indies to get the word out and generate sales without going through a major label and its marketing machine, and also that the deluge of information available has made the indie musos more hip to the scumbaggery of the major labels in the first place, and so less likely to cave in and sign a contract with one.
This is the classic pattern shown when an established seller's account has been hijacked. What fraction of "flake-outs" like this come from hijacks vs. actual good sellers suddenly going bad is anybody's guess, but consider that someone who has taken the time and been a reliable seller and built up a ton of good feedback - what straits would they have to come to to decide that ripping people off would serve them better long-term as a business model?
The shame is, from the outside - as a buyer - you just can't tell.
I've bought hundreds of things on eBay - mostly books and CDs - and there have been exactly three transactions - totalling under $40 - where I got screwed. Not a bad run, in the grand scheme of things.
I'm seeing the value in a very-very-quiet-if-not-silent computer more all the time. I spend a lot of time doing production on live recordings, and just lately, the noise has been getting to me more than usual, making it hard to determine what's background noise on the recording, and what's fan noise from the (ill-placed) CPU reflecting back at me from the corner behind the desk. I could definitely improved things by shuffling the setup around, but it wouldn't really be workable to put the CPU under the table with all the wire-swapping and disc-exchanging I do (not to mention the local cat population milling around amongst the wires).
All of which is to say, 'depends on your application.'
But part of the algorithm that results in MP3s and other lossy formats, mimics that very same dynamic-range compression scheme - reduce the bit-depth of each sample (thereby reducing the dynamic range) and voila - save that much data-space immediately. The first thing to listen for if you compare an MP3 to its full-quality source (and there's not an A/D step in this process - it's already digital, in that you're converting an un(data)compressed .wav or .aiff file to MP3, totally in the digital realm) is how much louder the MP3 sounds on average - 'cos you've squished it's dynamic range. This is misleading to a lot of people, who reflexively equate "louder" with "better" and conclude that MP3s don't suffer quality loss, when the "loss" they're quantifying isn't simply a "difference between source and MP3."
In a lot of cases, a little compression IS a good thing (I've tweaked hundreds of hours of live recordings, and sure enough, I usually do a little dynamic compression just to get the quiet bits up to an audible level - the rule of thumb is to compress only as much as absolutely needed and no more), but the downside to the dynamic compression that creeps into an MP3 is that you don't have independent control over it vs. other data-compression artifacts, like crappy-swishy sounding cymbals and weirded-out vocals.
Tru' dat. I was wondering (don't think TFA mentioned it) whether they might be running a sbd/aud matrix, rather than a straight soundboard feed. To my ear, this is the optimum live recording - all the clarity of a soundboard mix, plus the ambience and balance of a well-placed mic or mics in the audience, and thus a controllable amount of crowd noise. If there's a single clueful individual at the venue, they'll be doing it this way.
Har! My question (for some people, not necessarily you ;-)) is, "do you freakin' always have to drink (to the point of stupefaction) at every concert you go to?" What's the point of paying for a concert, if you're going to get so shit-faced that you don't remember any of it anyway?
And, could ya cut it out with the incessant yapping while the band is playing? Yer making it hard for other folks to enjoy what they paid for.
And could ya SIT THE F&^% DOWN FOR MORE THAN TEN MINUTES AT A TIME and not keep crawling over me to go get another damn beer/take a piss/go get another damn beer/take a piss/go get another damn beer?
And how freakin' sardine-can crowded does it have to be up near the stage before you'll just decide that, nah, it's not worth pushing and shoving through the throng to get a better view?
Sorry for the rant. Had that pent up for a while.
Dig around a www.coresound.com (I think) or Google for "PDAudio" - these would be "teh sh1t" if you didn't end up having to string together so many separate devices (mics -> mic-pre-amp -> A/D converter -> PDAudio attachment into PDA equipped with extra disk space) - by the time a stealth taper such as myself (darn brain - did I type that or just think it?) gets all wired up, he can barely move around without the fear of pulling something apart.
It's not such a big deal if open taping is allowed, and that's really pretty common at smaller venues and for non-major-label artists. Google for "Bands that allow taping" - there's a semi-maintained list of hundreds, if not a thousand or more, bands, and info on whether they allow/disallow/don't have a policy on taping.
It runs the gamut - from King Crimson (Robert Fripp is the most famously anti-taper musician alive) to many bands who actively encourage taping (Cowboy Junkies offer a couple pair of free tickets to each show to applicants who will tape and provide them with a copy; Mike Keneally [ www.keneally.com ] authorizes a tape-trading website run by fans [ www.mktrading.org ], some jam-bands (Steve Kimock and related projects) go so far as to allow tapers to put their mics ON-STAGE to capture the drums direct and the rest from the monitor speakers (or whatever you prefer, given that proximity)).
I've been avidly following the news on these new institutionalized live-recording distribution schemes. I'm still very suspicious of Clear Channel's earlier CD-R-based setup, just 'cos, you know, it's Clear Channel and they're evil - but I seriously prefer to avoid lossily-compressed storage formats, to the point that I'll still gladly stealth a show to get a full-quality audie-DAT recording instead of, or even in addition to, getting an MP3'd soundboard or soundboard/audie matrix recording.
Then why bother with the principles of thermodynamics in the first place? By definition, you're only going to misuse the terms and confuse the argument if you start out basing your line of reasoning on terms from that discipline (with its basis in empirical observation, relying on mathematics, predictability, and some form of assent that the principles illuminated by the equations are based on underlying physical laws that will not change over time), and then, voila! you whip away the pretense and reveal that you're not constraining yourself to any such assumptions, that the reality you're basing your arguments on (one that includes "intelligent design") allows for things clearly outside empirical observation.
To restate part of that grammatical mess, a 'system' in thermodynamics pretty much has to be a physically isolatable area in three dimensional space; if you're calling ID a "system" - it's clearly a different meaning of the term, and it's nonsensical to call a theoretical construct like ID an 'open system' and expect that it bears any comparison to, or fits in the same place in an argument as, a thermodynamic 'open system'.
You try to call the Earth the system, however, I am not limiting evolution to earth(or the sun). I want the whole universe in my system.
If we're talking about evolution, what evidence do we collectively have of evolution anywhere besides the earth?
The theory that evelotution brought about the universe by no other cause than its own self
Well, here's the problem. "Evolution" as far as I know, is not what's posited to have brought about the universe. Evolution only brings about changes in existing species of life-forms over time, directed by natural selection acting upon variations produced by genetic mutation. If you're really conflating evolution with other, cosmological processes that may or may not have brought about the existence of the universe, then you're not "very clearly" arguing anything at all.
You've been reading too much (i.e., any) Velikovsky, haven't you?
Right on. Allah, or Zoroaster, or any of the creators in between.
False dichotomies are everywhere. Either science or (this one particular) religion.
Who was it who said (paraphrased), 'For you to understand why I don't believe in your god, you need only understand why you don't believe in all those other gods.'?
Your last sentence contains the correction of the error in your first, and the key to clearing up your fundamental misunderstanding of the principle at hand.
The first should begin Every closed system, left to its own devices...
Do you even understand the difference between an open and a closed system? A closed system is one that doesn't interact with things outside the system. You can illustrate this by drawing a boundary around the system and asking, 'what things cross this boundary?' For thermodynamic purposes, a 'thing' can be any form of energy.
The 'system,' in the context of evolution, is the earth's biosphere. This is emphatically not a closed system, because it receives energy from the sun.
Wanna redefine the 'system' in question to include the sun, and then claim that the whole is a closed system and thereby shows that evolution didn't happen? Taken as a whole, the sun is generating a hell of a lot more entropy (loosely stated) in every year, than the entirety of evolution has countered during the earth's existence. The overall entropy in the redefined system is clearly increasing, yet locally (here on earth) has decreased. Perfectly permissible within the principles of thermodynamics, and any sophomore engineering student could show you equations that describe these cases.
That this whole grasping-at-straws argument is based on such a simple misunderstanding of such a basic principle drives home the observation that the anti-evolutionists who spout that argument have made precious little attempt to earnestly understand that which they criticize.