"What do you do when ALL your choices are like that?"
All two of them? Tell you what I do - curse deregulation as loudly, frequently and stridently as possible, since it's directly responsible for the ever-increasing pace of conglomeration and ever-decreasing scope of *real* capitalsm. I don't care about cheap stuff (ie $30 DVD players) when a) it all sucks and b) there's no alternative. I'd gladly pay an increased price for better service, and I'm sure there's literally millions of others that feel the same way.
Everybody knows that behavior designed to rip the customer off should be illegal. But not only are they raking it in by ripping us off, it's only getting worse. Firing your customers from your store for shopping during sales? Next they'll be claiming I broke into their house, held a gun to their heads, and *forced* them to have that sale, and *forced* them to take out TV commercials *advertising* the sale...
I'd like to see them make me leave the store. I'll call the cops, I haven't done anything wrong.
Seems to me this unhealthy fixation on "demon customers" might well wind up generating a backlash of "devil customers" - people who are so fed up with the whole damn thing that they start actively engaging in activity for the sole purpose of costing best buy money, by any means necessary. I'm afraid the next, and long overdue, wave of consumer advocacy might just ride in on a wave of widespread guerilla actions. Do we really have to cause damage to their business to make them realize that they need to show a modicum of respect for their customers? Shouldn't their profits be motive enough?
Apparently not. Apparently, according to this idiotic consultant, "there is no carrot". There is only the stick, to be applied to our hides with increasing force and frequency.
75 years ago, hell, even 30 years ago, this would never have been allowed to happen. Because back then, any merchant trying such an idiotic tactic would have customers running screaming to another store. But now there aren't any other stores, they've all been either bought or buried. The unrestrained hegemony enjoyed (and abused) by Wal-Mart is only the beginning. The first step to eliminating real capitalism is eliminating competition. "It's the only game in town..."
The next step? Conflate the inevitable guerilla consumer advocacy with terrorism and get the media to parrot it mindlessly. Coming soon to a formerly capitalistic former democracy near you...
"Yes, CD-audio is deemed "good enough" but I remember when the CD was first introduced there were scores of musicians gnashing their teeth over the sampling rates and how so much of the sound is lost in the process of sampling the master tapes to create the CD-audio. The loss in that encoding step is substantial and really shouldn't be ignored. Yes, the loss is accepted in today's music world but it hasn't gone away."
If, by "scores of musicians" you mean Steve Albini, this is true. A CD copy of a song isn't exactly the same as the master tape. But it is 99.9% accurate, something no lossy codec can claim. And, short of having a 1/2" reel-to-reel in your living room, you're not gonna get that quality from *anything*, not a CD, not an MP3, not a cassette, not an 8-track, and *definitely* not a record. The only medium I've found that can ever sound as *perceptually* good (due to things like even harmonic distortion) as 1/2" analog tape is 1/2" analog tape. That is, until you play it a few times, oxide starts rubbing off on the head and the capstan, your head azimuth gets one molecule out of alignment, and you start to notice that there's this annoying hiss behind everything... The only medium I've found that can sound as *mathematically* good, which is to say as *accurate*, as a real live performance being heard by human ears, both in music and in silence, is the Pulse Code Modulation codec. Granted, 44.1 kHz may seem a little low on the face of it, but when you think about it, if you had a CD that was recorded at 96 kHz, not only do you have twice as much data space being taken up by the same musical content, so you can only fit half as much music on the same size disc, but fully half of that data (the half over roughly 44kHz): a) cannot be reproduced by your CD player, which only outputs at 44.1 kHz (unless you've got a professional player); b) cannot be reproduced by your amplifier (whose frequency response tailors off sharply above 20kHz); c) cannot be heard by any human being over the age of 10.
"One thing is for sure - it's almost certainly better to have an AAC made on professional-level equipment with professional-level software from a studio master than it would be to have an MP3 ripped from a CD at home!"
With some caveats (like lack of DRM in said AAC), this is also true - all other things being equal. However... it would be even *better* to have a 16/44.1 PCM copy made on professional equipment.
My main point here is that lossy compression is the digital equivalent to analog tape recording (legalized by an act of Congress), and that the quality loss suffered when converting from PCM to MP3 (or any lossy codec of your choice) is roughly equivalent to the loss of quality suffered by dubbing vinyl or CD to cassette. And therefore trading MP3's shouldn't be any more illegal than trading cassettes is. (BTW, trading cassettes, in fact even recording them, was illegal until enough people complained to their Congressmen. They were illegal because of massive lobbying efforts by the RIAA, who were screaming like chicken little that cassettes would singlehandedly destroy the music industry. Sound familiar?)
"As for the alternative music players you can easily convert the iTunes AAC files to some other format by burning a music CD and re-ripping to the format you want or by using one of the open source converters that have popped up. It's fairly simple and then your music is in whatever format you need."
Oh my fucking God. Are you serious?!
You're seriously considering downloading a lossily compressed file, making a PCM 16/44.1 format copy of the lossily compressed file, then lossily encoding it AGAIN?!
Have you ever had a cassette deck and made a copy of a copy of a copy? How did that sound? Do you think that your computer is, like, magical or something, that the laws of mathematics don't apply?
Do you have any idea what kind of compression artifacts will result? Do you even have any idea what lossy compression *is*? Do you know how artifacts are generated? Do you know what "perceptual encoding" is? Do you know that once you've lossily compressed something, it can never be de-compressed back to the original? Have you ever heard the effect of multiple iterations of lossy compression, the best efforts of these kind folks notwithstanding?
Cuz it's damn ugly.
research before posting, especially if yer gonna throw around terms like "artifacts" like you have any clue what you're taking about.
"This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD."
That is compeletely irrelevant. The single overriding consideration in music, digital or analog, is not quality (which is subjective), but FIDELITY. Which is to say, an objective, scientific measurement of how close the copy is to the original. Fidelity is the only thing recording engineers are worried about, and we are worried about it at every stage of the game. When the singer gets recorded by a microphone onto tape, when the multitrack tape gets mixed to a 1/2" master, when the 1/2" master gets mastered and transferred to ADAT, and when the digital master gets duplicated at a factory, ALL we're worried about *fidelity*, not quality. We don't care if the singer is Johnny Rotten as long as the recording sounds exactly like the sound in the room when he was singing. And sure, AAC has more fidelity than MP3.
But *it's not lossless*. Is it? It's not the same thing as a CD, period. PERIOD. That's like saying FM is much higher quality than AM. True, but FM isn't true fidelity. Just like MP3, FM radio broadcasts are compressed - lossily.
"Sure it may sound a little different than the song found on a CD but that doesn't mean it lost quality."
Having a degree in audio engineering, I feel qualified to tell you that that's just *wrong*. Digital music is stored as bits. Each individual bit corresponds to fidelity in music. When those bits change, the music changes, period. The only way to preserve the quality of original digital music is to not change it. Encoding into a lossy codec changes it, resulting in a loss of data (and therefore a loss in fidelity)in order to fit down a 56K modem line. AAC may well be a superior codec to MP3 but *it's still lossy compression*. PERIOD.
"Both the CD-audio and the AAC-audio introduce some artifacts simply due to the nature of digital formats and encoding."
But the 44.1 kHz 16 bit PCM codec has been widely accepted as the consumer equivalent of lossless by the community. Sure, if you want to get absurdly technical, a CD isn't an *exact* replica of the master tape. But it's a hell of a lot closer than any MP3 or AAC ever will be, and it's good enough for the ears of 99.9% of all the people listening. Face it, lossy compression is the digital equivalent of cassette taping - which was legalized by an act of Congress.
"Heck, why not encrypt the cd, have it access a server on the net where you put in your geographical location, favorite color, age, job position, mothers maden name, and your address, and they send you a floppy disk that has a program that checks for the original cd, then sets an "ok" flag in some directory, that will allow you to access the second digital key (each time you want to play the cd) from the internet, makes you take two steps backwards, turn clockwise twice, then hold the left mouse button, the - on the keypad, F2 and F10 all at the same time in order to listen to it....."
Well, I doubt you're even reading this since you posted AC, but...
In the beginning, there was rap. It was spawned from the old-school legends like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and/or Mellie Mel and the Furious Five, and the Sugar Hill Gang. This evolved rapidly until what most people consider to be the seminal moment when rap entered the mainstream - Run DMC and Aerosmith's "walk this way".
Past this point is where you get the divergence between hip-hop and rap. The two sub-genres slowly separated themselves until the early 90's, when the schism was blatent.
While it is true that what hip-hop MC's do is rapping, that doesn't make it rap music any more than Linkin Park is. Rapping itself goes back to 1970's Jamaican toasting, and has been employed in musical genres from metal to industrial to the much-fabled "alternative".
Rap music includes, but is not limited to: Run DMC; NWA; Tupac Shakur; Ice Cube; Notorious BIG; Jay-Z.
Hip-hop music includes, but is not limited to: Black star and it's component parts, Mos Def and Talib Qweli; Jurassic 5; Atmosphere; Living legends crew (Grouch, Slug, Aesop Rock); Anyone from Native Tongues crew (Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul); Hieroglyphics / Del tha Funkee Homosapien.
Most of the aforementioned hip-hop acts' lyrics are intelligent, politically- and economically-aware, and non-misogynist.
"Did that already. / moved too far away for that."
Well obviously, Einstein, you can't live in the sticks and the city, unless you can afford two homes, which you obviously can't - or, more to the point, won't, because you're too busy bitching about how impossible your life is to actually solve any problems.
"go f- yourself."
Real intelligent, asshole. All I was trying to do was point out some possible solutions and offer advice, but shove it up your fucking ass - if you can fit it in there alongside the giant stick lodged up there. You obviously want to do one thing - bitch. So go ahead and complain and whine and moan about how hard life is on you cuz you have to live in the suburbs. And when people try and offer you helpful advice, you get even more belligerent and complain about *that*. Poor fucking baby, boo hoo. My heart fucking bleeds.
Understand one thing, dickmunch - there's people in America much less fortunate than you, people who have trouble feeding their kids, people who don't even have a job, who are not only solving their problems creatively, but living happy, productive, enjoyable lives. The minute you're ready to join us, just grab that stick lodged in your ass firmly with both hands and pull. It only hurts until it's all the way out, unless it leaves splinters.
So fuck YOU. With an attitude like yours, that's all life is gonna do anyway. And it will be because you deserve it. It will be because you have earned it with the sweat of your brow.
"Nobody was bitching... I am VERY happy in my situation"
On the other hand, you also say...
"We were not all born with silver spoons."
"My commute is long enough, thanks for the crappy advice."
"a single income was not possible. Wake the f up."
"what's wrong are the house prices. Sure, I could move to Northern Canada and be a moose farmer"
And, just for good measure, "AAMCO transmissions ripped me off."
Yeah, you're just thrilled. You're not complaining about anything. Certainly not bitching. And *definitely* not abusive. Look, if you can make enough to live in the suburbs but can't make ends meet, you deserve whatever you get - which I personally hope is pure shit, seeing as how that's what would make you the happiest, since it would give you the most to bitch about.
There's two kinds of people in the boat of life - bailers and leakers. If your life sucks that bad you have two options - change it (warning: requires creativity) or end it.
But there's a happy medium. Your commute might get a little longer if you moved farther out, but wouldn't paying thousands less in mortgage and property taxes be worth it? Alternatively, I have yet to see a city where there's not a nice neighborhood that's inner-city enough to be affordable. Most cities with public schools, fire departments, etc, have residency requirements for their teachers, firemen, etc. Find out where most public school teachers/firemen/policemen live in your city and my guess is you'll find an affordable yet urban neighborhood. Quit locking yourself into bad solutions and then bitching about them.
"The use of a rating system is basically a tool for parents to do their job."
I agree with this in theory, however I think it's truly remarkable how many parents still manage to put in zero time raising their kids even with the tools of not only record/CD ratings, but movie ratings, TV ratings, video game ratings, nutrition facts on food, warning labels on umpteen million products... they don't do any good when the parents still feed their kids McDonalds and let them watch R rated movies. The only cure for this problem is better parenting, period. As long as society accepts the excuse from bad parents that "we just didn't *know*! We don't have the *tools*!" then the bad parents will keep using that excuse. At some point we need to put our foot down and stop accepting this excuse.
don't forget the quakers. A little wierd but their hearts are firmly in the right place. Simplicity is a highly undervalued commodity, and one that I think there's a potentially huge market for. I mean, who do you know that *doesn't* think their life is too complicated?
Although I couldn't agree more about black racism, I feel compelled to point out that what you are talking about is rap music and rappers, quite different from hip-hop music and MC's. Rap is exactly what you described. Hip-hop is the flip side to that coin, the kind that values intelligence, self-respect, and morals. If you're ready for the rebuttal to everything you just described, check out Jurassic 5, Kool Keith, Dialated Peoples, Prince Paul or Black Star. There's a lot out there that you apparently haven't heard - if you liked Public Enemy, don't lose heart, progressive and intelligent hip-hop exists, it's just deep deep underground.
Funny thing about sex and violence, we keep buying it.
"Maybe both parents work to put food on the table and pay the mortgage? You ever think of that? We were not all born with silver spoons."
If both parents are working all the time just to put food on the table and pay the mortage, then something's seriously wrong. There are solutions other than the two extremes - absolute poverty vs. absolute comfort. There really is a happy medium.
"Unfortunately, frugality will land you in a neighborhood that will surround your children with all the wrong influences."
That's a faulty assumption. Frugality can certainly lead to you living in the core/hood/ghetto, but it can just as easily lead to your living way out in the country, where land is much cheaper. My parents live in the sticks and rent a house for three figures a month that would cost millions in the city. And it's waterfront property, too.
"Everyone is living life to their credit limit. If you don't you'll be surrounded by hoodlum neighbors and pisspoor schools."
That statement is a) an extremely poor justification of the continuing trend of most Americans living waaaaay beyong their means, oblivious to the obvious consequences (ain't nothin free); b) vastly overbroad - many public schools in the city are bad, but many are good too, they just don't get any press cuz nobody gets shot there (and just a reminder - Columbine wasn't in the hood); c) *incredibly* prejudiced. Some of the economically poorest neighboorhoods I've ever lived in have been some of the richest in terms of human spirit and community, and have had some of the most kind-hearted, generous, human people I've ever met. Yes there were plenty of bad people there too, just like there's good and bad people in every city, in every neighboorhood, rich or poor. Duh. In the second place, frugality does not automatically equate with living in a "bad" (read: "poor") neighborhood - my current frugality led me to take a job as an apartment building manager in a wealthy, brittle, racist suburban community (where I don't have to pay rent).
I think it's sad that you're so locked into such narrow perceptions. The world is a big place. You should try it sometime.
...for the umpteenth time, when are they going to realize that the music from a CD and the music from an MP3 are *not the same thing*? Why hasn't anybody made this argument in court? For that matter, why don't they just say they taped the songs off the radio (which is perfectly legal) and made MP3's of them? This whole thing is just ludicrous...
We sure will. Funny thing, though, he just keeps getting re-elected. Damn voters. Wish there was some way to get rid of them. We'll have to work on that...
That's funny, seeing as how he recently was asked on a television interview if he was a liberal, and he wouldn't touch that word with a ten foot pole, preferring the term "progressive". That's how successful the Republican smear machine has been at turning "liberal" into the L-word.
Not to mention he spent most of the past month or so trying to get a *Republican* to be his running mate.
I think it should be the other way around - *don't* vote, and find yourself dropped off in a country where you'll never have to worry about that pesky voting ever again. I think not voting should not only be a criminal offence, but it's only punishment should be deportation to the non-democracy of your choice.
I understand that many people feel that if they're disgusted with all the candidates that they can best express their opinion by not voting, but it's obvious to me that this only provides incentive for politicians to get more disgusting. The more disgusting they are, the less people vote. The less people vote, the less accountable the politicians are. The less accountable the politicians are, the more evil shit they try to get away with and the more digusting they are... Iterate...
The other thing I think we in America need to get over on a national level is this silly trepedation against telling people how you voted. Sharing our votes with others is the only way vote we could ever get any sense of when voter fraud was occuring. But as long as we're clamming up about our votes we'll never know.
Didn't that make it illegal to reverse-engineer almost anything? (I'm asking because I don't know and IANAL - damned if I can understand all that legal mumbo-jumbo)
How is "unlocking" the overclocking protection any different from "unlocking" copy protection on software, music or movies?
"I'm surprised we don't have kick start deisel laptops... Urrr- that's right - I forgot - that was the Soviet idea of powering a laptop... "
Aiken's too. We're so used to thinking of processor cycles as electronic operations we forget the fact that the Mark I's "cycles" were RPM's of a drive shaft. Powered by a gasoline burning internal combustion engine.
wow, you've obviously never lived anywhere close to a coal plant. *Nothing* is free, especially when you consider how electricity's very "freeness" has turned consumers into dope fiends, using more and more and more and hey, just a little more...
the cost of the crash, in dollars and lives, when the dead shit in the ground runs out, will be staggering, I'm afraid.
I'm remembering the Bloom County strip, circa mid-80's when gas got really cheap, of an old man pulling up to a filling station attendant (remember those?) and saying, "Hell, fill up the trunk! It's CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!"
Been to the pump lately?
No, nothing is free, and to think that that's even possible is very risky thinking to my mind. Call me crazy.
Nobody made smaller cars until people were made willing to buy them by the 70's energy crisis. Nobody will make low power laptops until there's a market that demands them, and nobody is. The only complaint that I've heard about overpowered laptops is sweaty theigh syndrome. Once you start hearing people complain about their electric bill because of their laptop, which *should* be when people start to alter their spending habits and start becoming interested in buying low-power laptops, then you'll see more low-power laptops making their way into the marketplace.
The supply will not be widespread until the demand is - and then five years later it will probably be ubiquitous... just my $.02
Ignorance nothin. This is redundant, by the way. Saying hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe is misleading. While technically true, the hyrdrogen we're probably most concerned with here on Earth is the hydrogen that's, well, here on Earth. Not a lot of it is just floating around in diatomic form due to it's reactivity (see also: Hindenburg). Most of that hydrogen exists in compounds with other elements. So how do you separate them? Frequently through combustion. Combustion requires combustible fuel. Or, as somebody smarter than myself once said, "For production in large scale commercial bulk hydrogen is usually manufactured by decomposing natural gas". The other way that's mentioned is putting acid on zinc. But that method isn't commercially viable, and if the acid in question has to be manufactured then you can bet electricity is probably involved in the process somewhere - electricity from where?
Repeat after me, y'all: energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The supply side of the equation ain't changin anytime soon. There's a finite supply of oil, gas, and other things left behind by things that died millions of years ago. Guess that leaves the demand side, but even smarter-than-the-average-bear slashdotters seem loathe to reduce our energy consumption. But the unpleasant fact is it's not a matter of if, only of when.
We are headed for a catastrophic energy withdrawal in this country that's gonna make crack look like cupcakes, and I'm not looking forward to it. Not one little bit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft COULD do that, but it'd be a blantant violation of their slap-on-the-wrist agreement with the DoJ."
And?...
"What do you do when ALL your choices are like that?"
All two of them? Tell you what I do - curse deregulation as loudly, frequently and stridently as possible, since it's directly responsible for the ever-increasing pace of conglomeration and ever-decreasing scope of *real* capitalsm. I don't care about cheap stuff (ie $30 DVD players) when a) it all sucks and b) there's no alternative. I'd gladly pay an increased price for better service, and I'm sure there's literally millions of others that feel the same way.
Everybody knows that behavior designed to rip the customer off should be illegal. But not only are they raking it in by ripping us off, it's only getting worse. Firing your customers from your store for shopping during sales? Next they'll be claiming I broke into their house, held a gun to their heads, and *forced* them to have that sale, and *forced* them to take out TV commercials *advertising* the sale...
I'd like to see them make me leave the store. I'll call the cops, I haven't done anything wrong.
Seems to me this unhealthy fixation on "demon customers" might well wind up generating a backlash of "devil customers" - people who are so fed up with the whole damn thing that they start actively engaging in activity for the sole purpose of costing best buy money, by any means necessary. I'm afraid the next, and long overdue, wave of consumer advocacy might just ride in on a wave of widespread guerilla actions. Do we really have to cause damage to their business to make them realize that they need to show a modicum of respect for their customers? Shouldn't their profits be motive enough?
Apparently not. Apparently, according to this idiotic consultant, "there is no carrot". There is only the stick, to be applied to our hides with increasing force and frequency.
75 years ago, hell, even 30 years ago, this would never have been allowed to happen. Because back then, any merchant trying such an idiotic tactic would have customers running screaming to another store. But now there aren't any other stores, they've all been either bought or buried. The unrestrained hegemony enjoyed (and abused) by Wal-Mart is only the beginning. The first step to eliminating real capitalism is eliminating competition. "It's the only game in town..."
The next step? Conflate the inevitable guerilla consumer advocacy with terrorism and get the media to parrot it mindlessly. Coming soon to a formerly capitalistic former democracy near you...
"Yes, CD-audio is deemed "good enough" but I remember when the CD was first introduced there were scores of musicians gnashing their teeth over the sampling rates and how so much of the sound is lost in the process of sampling the master tapes to create the CD-audio. The loss in that encoding step is substantial and really shouldn't be ignored. Yes, the loss is accepted in today's music world but it hasn't gone away."
If, by "scores of musicians" you mean Steve Albini, this is true. A CD copy of a song isn't exactly the same as the master tape. But it is 99.9% accurate, something no lossy codec can claim. And, short of having a 1/2" reel-to-reel in your living room, you're not gonna get that quality from *anything*, not a CD, not an MP3, not a cassette, not an 8-track, and *definitely* not a record. The only medium I've found that can ever sound as *perceptually* good (due to things like even harmonic distortion) as 1/2" analog tape is 1/2" analog tape. That is, until you play it a few times, oxide starts rubbing off on the head and the capstan, your head azimuth gets one molecule out of alignment, and you start to notice that there's this annoying hiss behind everything... The only medium I've found that can sound as *mathematically* good, which is to say as *accurate*, as a real live performance being heard by human ears, both in music and in silence, is the Pulse Code Modulation codec. Granted, 44.1 kHz may seem a little low on the face of it, but when you think about it, if you had a CD that was recorded at 96 kHz, not only do you have twice as much data space being taken up by the same musical content, so you can only fit half as much music on the same size disc, but fully half of that data (the half over roughly 44kHz): a) cannot be reproduced by your CD player, which only outputs at 44.1 kHz (unless you've got a professional player); b) cannot be reproduced by your amplifier (whose frequency response tailors off sharply above 20kHz); c) cannot be heard by any human being over the age of 10.
"One thing is for sure - it's almost certainly better to have an AAC made on professional-level equipment with professional-level software from a studio master than it would be to have an MP3 ripped from a CD at home!"
With some caveats (like lack of DRM in said AAC), this is also true - all other things being equal. However... it would be even *better* to have a 16/44.1 PCM copy made on professional equipment.
My main point here is that lossy compression is the digital equivalent to analog tape recording (legalized by an act of Congress), and that the quality loss suffered when converting from PCM to MP3 (or any lossy codec of your choice) is roughly equivalent to the loss of quality suffered by dubbing vinyl or CD to cassette. And therefore trading MP3's shouldn't be any more illegal than trading cassettes is. (BTW, trading cassettes, in fact even recording them, was illegal until enough people complained to their Congressmen. They were illegal because of massive lobbying efforts by the RIAA, who were screaming like chicken little that cassettes would singlehandedly destroy the music industry. Sound familiar?)
actually, I do... and I gave just as much tact as I got. Fair's fair.
"As for the alternative music players you can easily convert the iTunes AAC files to some other format by burning a music CD and re-ripping to the format you want or by using one of the open source converters that have popped up. It's fairly simple and then your music is in whatever format you need."
Oh my fucking God. Are you serious?!
You're seriously considering downloading a lossily compressed file, making a PCM 16/44.1 format copy of the lossily compressed file, then lossily encoding it AGAIN?!
Have you ever had a cassette deck and made a copy of a copy of a copy? How did that sound? Do you think that your computer is, like, magical or something, that the laws of mathematics don't apply?
Do you have any idea what kind of compression artifacts will result? Do you even have any idea what lossy compression *is*? Do you know how artifacts are generated? Do you know what "perceptual encoding" is? Do you know that once you've lossily compressed something, it can never be de-compressed back to the original? Have you ever heard the effect of multiple iterations of lossy compression, the best efforts of these kind folks notwithstanding?
Cuz it's damn ugly.
research before posting, especially if yer gonna throw around terms like "artifacts" like you have any clue what you're taking about.
"This fact, along with the AAC encoding, makes it so that a 128 kbit AAC encoded music file from iTMS is much higher quality than a 128 kbit MP3 file ripped from a CD."
That is compeletely irrelevant. The single overriding consideration in music, digital or analog, is not quality (which is subjective), but FIDELITY. Which is to say, an objective, scientific measurement of how close the copy is to the original. Fidelity is the only thing recording engineers are worried about, and we are worried about it at every stage of the game. When the singer gets recorded by a microphone onto tape, when the multitrack tape gets mixed to a 1/2" master, when the 1/2" master gets mastered and transferred to ADAT, and when the digital master gets duplicated at a factory, ALL we're worried about *fidelity*, not quality. We don't care if the singer is Johnny Rotten as long as the recording sounds exactly like the sound in the room when he was singing. And sure, AAC has more fidelity than MP3.
But *it's not lossless*. Is it? It's not the same thing as a CD, period. PERIOD. That's like saying FM is much higher quality than AM. True, but FM isn't true fidelity. Just like MP3, FM radio broadcasts are compressed - lossily.
"Sure it may sound a little different than the song found on a CD but that doesn't mean it lost quality."
Having a degree in audio engineering, I feel qualified to tell you that that's just *wrong*. Digital music is stored as bits. Each individual bit corresponds to fidelity in music. When those bits change, the music changes, period. The only way to preserve the quality of original digital music is to not change it. Encoding into a lossy codec changes it, resulting in a loss of data (and therefore a loss in fidelity)in order to fit down a 56K modem line. AAC may well be a superior codec to MP3 but *it's still lossy compression*. PERIOD.
"Both the CD-audio and the AAC-audio introduce some artifacts simply due to the nature of digital formats and encoding."
But the 44.1 kHz 16 bit PCM codec has been widely accepted as the consumer equivalent of lossless by the community. Sure, if you want to get absurdly technical, a CD isn't an *exact* replica of the master tape. But it's a hell of a lot closer than any MP3 or AAC ever will be, and it's good enough for the ears of 99.9% of all the people listening. Face it, lossy compression is the digital equivalent of cassette taping - which was legalized by an act of Congress.
"Heck, why not encrypt the cd, have it access a server on the net where you put in your geographical location, favorite color, age, job position, mothers maden name, and your address, and they send you a floppy disk that has a program that checks for the original cd, then sets an "ok" flag in some directory, that will allow you to access the second digital key (each time you want to play the cd) from the internet, makes you take two steps backwards, turn clockwise twice, then hold the left mouse button, the - on the keypad, F2 and F10 all at the same time in order to listen to it....."
damn, don't give 'em any ideas, man!
Well, I doubt you're even reading this since you posted AC, but ...
In the beginning, there was rap. It was spawned from the old-school legends like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and/or Mellie Mel and the Furious Five, and the Sugar Hill Gang. This evolved rapidly until what most people consider to be the seminal moment when rap entered the mainstream - Run DMC and Aerosmith's "walk this way".
Past this point is where you get the divergence between hip-hop and rap. The two sub-genres slowly separated themselves until the early 90's, when the schism was blatent.
While it is true that what hip-hop MC's do is rapping, that doesn't make it rap music any more than Linkin Park is. Rapping itself goes back to 1970's Jamaican toasting, and has been employed in musical genres from metal to industrial to the much-fabled "alternative".
Rap music includes, but is not limited to: Run DMC; NWA; Tupac Shakur; Ice Cube; Notorious BIG; Jay-Z.
Hip-hop music includes, but is not limited to: Black star and it's component parts, Mos Def and Talib Qweli; Jurassic 5; Atmosphere; Living legends crew (Grouch, Slug, Aesop Rock); Anyone from Native Tongues crew (Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul); Hieroglyphics / Del tha Funkee Homosapien.
Most of the aforementioned hip-hop acts' lyrics are intelligent, politically- and economically-aware, and non-misogynist.
Hope this helps.
"Did that already. / moved too far away for that."
Well obviously, Einstein, you can't live in the sticks and the city, unless you can afford two homes, which you obviously can't - or, more to the point, won't, because you're too busy bitching about how impossible your life is to actually solve any problems.
"go f- yourself."
Real intelligent, asshole. All I was trying to do was point out some possible solutions and offer advice, but shove it up your fucking ass - if you can fit it in there alongside the giant stick lodged up there. You obviously want to do one thing - bitch. So go ahead and complain and whine and moan about how hard life is on you cuz you have to live in the suburbs. And when people try and offer you helpful advice, you get even more belligerent and complain about *that*. Poor fucking baby, boo hoo. My heart fucking bleeds.
Understand one thing, dickmunch - there's people in America much less fortunate than you, people who have trouble feeding their kids, people who don't even have a job, who are not only solving their problems creatively, but living happy, productive, enjoyable lives. The minute you're ready to join us, just grab that stick lodged in your ass firmly with both hands and pull. It only hurts until it's all the way out, unless it leaves splinters.
So fuck YOU. With an attitude like yours, that's all life is gonna do anyway. And it will be because you deserve it. It will be because you have earned it with the sweat of your brow.
"Nobody was bitching... I am VERY happy in my situation"
On the other hand, you also say...
"We were not all born with silver spoons."
"My commute is long enough, thanks for the crappy advice."
"a single income was not possible. Wake the f up."
"what's wrong are the house prices. Sure, I could move to Northern Canada and be a moose farmer"
And, just for good measure, "AAMCO transmissions ripped me off."
Yeah, you're just thrilled. You're not complaining about anything. Certainly not bitching. And *definitely* not abusive. Look, if you can make enough to live in the suburbs but can't make ends meet, you deserve whatever you get - which I personally hope is pure shit, seeing as how that's what would make you the happiest, since it would give you the most to bitch about.
There's two kinds of people in the boat of life - bailers and leakers. If your life sucks that bad you have two options - change it (warning: requires creativity) or end it.
Loser.
But there's a happy medium. Your commute might get a little longer if you moved farther out, but wouldn't paying thousands less in mortgage and property taxes be worth it? Alternatively, I have yet to see a city where there's not a nice neighborhood that's inner-city enough to be affordable. Most cities with public schools, fire departments, etc, have residency requirements for their teachers, firemen, etc. Find out where most public school teachers/firemen/policemen live in your city and my guess is you'll find an affordable yet urban neighborhood. Quit locking yourself into bad solutions and then bitching about them.
"The use of a rating system is basically a tool for parents to do their job."
I agree with this in theory, however I think it's truly remarkable how many parents still manage to put in zero time raising their kids even with the tools of not only record/CD ratings, but movie ratings, TV ratings, video game ratings, nutrition facts on food, warning labels on umpteen million products... they don't do any good when the parents still feed their kids McDonalds and let them watch R rated movies. The only cure for this problem is better parenting, period. As long as society accepts the excuse from bad parents that "we just didn't *know*! We don't have the *tools*!" then the bad parents will keep using that excuse. At some point we need to put our foot down and stop accepting this excuse.
"the voluntary simplicity movement "
don't forget the quakers. A little wierd but their hearts are firmly in the right place. Simplicity is a highly undervalued commodity, and one that I think there's a potentially huge market for. I mean, who do you know that *doesn't* think their life is too complicated?
Although I couldn't agree more about black racism,
I feel compelled to point out that what you are talking about is rap music and rappers, quite different from hip-hop music and MC's. Rap is exactly what you described. Hip-hop is the flip side to that coin, the kind that values intelligence, self-respect, and morals. If you're ready for the rebuttal to everything you just described, check out Jurassic 5, Kool Keith, Dialated Peoples, Prince Paul or Black Star. There's a lot out there that you apparently haven't heard - if you liked Public Enemy, don't lose heart, progressive and intelligent hip-hop exists, it's just deep deep underground.
Funny thing about sex and violence, we keep buying it.
"Maybe both parents work to put food on the table and pay the mortgage? You ever think of that? We were not all born with silver spoons."
If both parents are working all the time just to put food on the table and pay the mortage, then something's seriously wrong. There are solutions other than the two extremes - absolute poverty vs. absolute comfort. There really is a happy medium.
"Unfortunately, frugality will land you in a neighborhood that will surround your children with all the wrong influences."
That's a faulty assumption. Frugality can certainly lead to you living in the core/hood/ghetto, but it can just as easily lead to your living way out in the country, where land is much cheaper. My parents live in the sticks and rent a house for three figures a month that would cost millions in the city. And it's waterfront property, too.
"Everyone is living life to their credit limit. If you don't you'll be surrounded by hoodlum neighbors and pisspoor schools."
That statement is a) an extremely poor justification of the continuing trend of most Americans living waaaaay beyong their means, oblivious to the obvious consequences (ain't nothin free); b) vastly overbroad - many public schools in the city are bad, but many are good too, they just don't get any press cuz nobody gets shot there (and just a reminder - Columbine wasn't in the hood); c) *incredibly* prejudiced. Some of the economically poorest neighboorhoods I've ever lived in have been some of the richest in terms of human spirit and community, and have had some of the most kind-hearted, generous, human people I've ever met. Yes there were plenty of bad people there too, just like there's good and bad people in every city, in every neighboorhood, rich or poor. Duh. In the second place, frugality does not automatically equate with living in a "bad" (read: "poor") neighborhood - my current frugality led me to take a job as an apartment building manager in a wealthy, brittle, racist suburban community (where I don't have to pay rent).
I think it's sad that you're so locked into such narrow perceptions. The world is a big place. You should try it sometime.
...for the umpteenth time, when are they going to realize that the music from a CD and the music from an MP3 are *not the same thing*? Why hasn't anybody made this argument in court? For that matter, why don't they just say they taped the songs off the radio (which is perfectly legal) and made MP3's of them? This whole thing is just ludicrous...
We sure will. Funny thing, though, he just keeps getting re-elected. Damn voters. Wish there was some way to get rid of them. We'll have to work on that...
"Kerry? He seems quite liberal to me..."
That's funny, seeing as how he recently was asked on a television interview if he was a liberal, and he wouldn't touch that word with a ten foot pole, preferring the term "progressive". That's how successful the Republican smear machine has been at turning "liberal" into the L-word.
Not to mention he spent most of the past month or so trying to get a *Republican* to be his running mate.
Turn. Off. The TV.
This is off-topic, but...
I think it should be the other way around - *don't* vote, and find yourself dropped off in a country where you'll never have to worry about that pesky voting ever again. I think not voting should not only be a criminal offence, but it's only punishment should be deportation to the non-democracy of your choice.
I understand that many people feel that if they're disgusted with all the candidates that they can best express their opinion by not voting, but it's obvious to me that this only provides incentive for politicians to get more disgusting. The more disgusting they are, the less people vote. The less people vote, the less accountable the politicians are. The less accountable the politicians are, the more evil shit they try to get away with and the more digusting they are... Iterate...
The other thing I think we in America need to get over on a national level is this silly trepedation against telling people how you voted. Sharing our votes with others is the only way vote we could ever get any sense of when voter fraud was occuring. But as long as we're clamming up about our votes we'll never know.
Hell, for my company's payroll testing we use *hyperterminal*, on a 28.8 modem... uploading via zmodem... fun
Didn't that make it illegal to reverse-engineer almost anything? (I'm asking because I don't know and IANAL - damned if I can understand all that legal mumbo-jumbo)
How is "unlocking" the overclocking protection any different from "unlocking" copy protection on software, music or movies?
Is there a lawyer in the house?
"I'm surprised we don't have kick start deisel laptops... Urrr- that's right - I forgot - that was the Soviet idea of powering a laptop... "
Aiken's too. We're so used to thinking of processor cycles as electronic operations we forget the fact that the Mark I's "cycles" were RPM's of a drive shaft. Powered by a gasoline burning internal combustion engine.
"Electricity is essentially free"
wow, you've obviously never lived anywhere close to a coal plant. *Nothing* is free, especially when you consider how electricity's very "freeness" has turned consumers into dope fiends, using more and more and more and hey, just a little more...
the cost of the crash, in dollars and lives, when the dead shit in the ground runs out, will be staggering, I'm afraid.
I'm remembering the Bloom County strip, circa mid-80's when gas got really cheap, of an old man pulling up to a filling station attendant (remember those?) and saying, "Hell, fill up the trunk! It's CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!"
Been to the pump lately?
No, nothing is free, and to think that that's even possible is very risky thinking to my mind. Call me crazy.
The usual business reason: There's no percentage.
Nobody made smaller cars until people were made willing to buy them by the 70's energy crisis. Nobody will make low power laptops until there's a market that demands them, and nobody is. The only complaint that I've heard about overpowered laptops is sweaty theigh syndrome. Once you start hearing people complain about their electric bill because of their laptop, which *should* be when people start to alter their spending habits and start becoming interested in buying low-power laptops, then you'll see more low-power laptops making their way into the marketplace.
The supply will not be widespread until the demand is - and then five years later it will probably be ubiquitous... just my $.02
Ignorance nothin. This is redundant, by the way. Saying hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the universe is misleading. While technically true, the hyrdrogen we're probably most concerned with here on Earth is the hydrogen that's, well, here on Earth. Not a lot of it is just floating around in diatomic form due to it's reactivity (see also: Hindenburg). Most of that hydrogen exists in compounds with other elements. So how do you separate them? Frequently through combustion. Combustion requires combustible fuel. Or, as somebody smarter than myself once said, "For production in large scale commercial bulk hydrogen is usually manufactured by decomposing natural gas". The other way that's mentioned is putting acid on zinc. But that method isn't commercially viable, and if the acid in question has to be manufactured then you can bet electricity is probably involved in the process somewhere - electricity from where?
Repeat after me, y'all: energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The supply side of the equation ain't changin anytime soon. There's a finite supply of oil, gas, and other things left behind by things that died millions of years ago. Guess that leaves the demand side, but even smarter-than-the-average-bear slashdotters seem loathe to reduce our energy consumption. But the unpleasant fact is it's not a matter of if, only of when.
We are headed for a catastrophic energy withdrawal in this country that's gonna make crack look like cupcakes, and I'm not looking forward to it. Not one little bit.