How much carbon is produced by the production of shampoos and their associated plastic bottles, by the manufacture of hairstyling equipment, the molding of combs, etc? Having more hair might make someone feel better about himself individually, but on a societal level that increased consumption has its toll on the environment.
But it also had the implication that the Redskin was powerful, skilled, supremely capable in his environment, and an opponent to be feared.
That "positive" view of the Native American is essentially Orientalism, and some Native American activists oppose romanticizing their people just as much as they oppose derogatory depictions of them.
Unless I am mistaken (and please point me to a reference if so, I can't find one), GNU/Linux can only run in a chroot environment on recent Google Nexus phones, on top of CyanogenMod. The N900 booted into the same desktop Linux environment one is used to from one's PC without almost no tweaking.
Furthermore, I assume that the Nexus talks to its cell modem through shared memory, whereas the Neo900 promised to separate the modem from the rest of the system for the sake of security.
I loved my Nokia N900 phone (sadly lost somewhere in the wilderness of Africa), and I was long looking forward to the Neo900 project that would give me a slightly upgraded device with the same hackability and (for privacy fanatics) cell modem walled off from device RAM. But every time I read a new phone announcement, like this Amazon one, my enthusiasm wanes. Even lower-end phones have increasingly fine resolution and RAM, while the Neo900 looks antiquated with its 3.5" TFT, 800x480 screen and paltry 1GB RAM. Mass production has been pushed back to Q4 2014, and will seem even more of a dinosaur once it's finally released.
It's sad that the only real chance for a nerd-friendly, hackable phone (Jolla is not open in some key respects) missed the boat.
Paranoid much? Outside of smartphones, digital cameras don't usually have GPS functionality: that is a feature one has to shop around for. And the JPG files produced by a camera, even one with a GPS feature, are not exactly obfuscated labyrinths of DRM: you can easily view and edit the EXIF and XMP metadata, and if you want to really be sure of what's in the file, the binary format is quite straightforward.
Nowadays, low-end Canon DSLRs are getting quite cheap, not that much more expensive than high-end point-and-shoot cameras. Right now the EOS Rebel T3i is going for $550 on Amazon, and I'm sure it could be found cheaper if one shops around. What really breaks the bank with owning an SLR are the lenses, but if one gets a digital SLR, would a further couple of lenses not quickly pay for themselves with the money saved on developing film?
My local bookstore has cut back heavily on its offering of books, since apparently it can't make much money off of them in a post-literary age when what books are read can be bought for cheaper online. To fill the void, it has expanded its choice of what I can only describe as hipster accoutrement, such as ECM on vinyl, Moleskine notebooks, and fancy tea sets.
But the most surprising item was Lomo cameras: these are selling like hotcakes, in spite of the fact that they use old-fashioned film. I would have imagined no one wanted to deal with the expense of giving film to a photo lab (I live in an Eastern European country where this costs serious money) or the hassle of developing it themselves, but when marketed as a trendy thing, some people are ready to turn back from digital.
I've seen Qoros cars (a Chinese brand) on the roads of Europe for over a year now, and I don't think there's been any real backlash against them. Their sedan has a high Euro NCAP safety rating. One might complain that exterior parts rust faster than a more expensive brand, but then again, one can make that same charge against locally-made low-end cars.
Unfortunately, if you only choose to pay attention only to the "Verified Purchase" tag, you'll miss out on a lot of good reviews. Plenty of entirely sincere and trustworthy reviewers do their shopping at other online shops where they managed to get a better deal, but they review at Amazon because they are used to its community features. There are more such reviews than the shills; in fact, the shills are so relatively few in number that it is easy to figure out who they are and just ignore their reviews in future.
Amazon can only show a message on reviews of products received for free through the Vine Voice program, where reviewers choose the product through Amazon's website. However, a lot of reviewers receive their free product directly from the manufacturer or publisher, and Amazon has no way of knowing. FTC rules require that a reviewer disclose that he is reviewing a free sample, but this law is often ignored.
Why do you figure? As a top-ranked Amazon reviewer familiar with the reviewer "community", a hell of a lot of reviewers will give only positive reviews because they are afraid that any negative comments will stop the flow of free electronics and media coming. A lot of reviewers make a decent living eBaying products that we are sent gratis with a request for a review.
Plus, when you are getting a steady flow of free stuff to review, you are busy enough with the latest arrivals that you don't want to spend time going back and reworking a review you've already written. That's already ancient history for some.
I imagine these same problems exists at many independent tech review sites too.
Sorry, but I really struggle with the idea that government should be in the business of funding culture.
Basically the entire West has stronger cultural subsidies than the United States. This is something utterly normal, and the fact that some Americans act like it is some kind of eregarious transgression is baffling. (Even our right-wing parties generally support funding the arts).
One can hope that the tide may someday turn in the US to greater subsidies in at least some areas. In fact, the US already funds culture to a considerable degree through the tax exempt status of non-profit organizations and the tax breaks or direct funding that some states provide -- lots of art films credit "The state of X" for allowing them to make the picture on a smaller budget.
And moreover, this is about introducing new productions, not slimming down old ones.
The funding climate being what it is, it is obvious that this will spread to established companies. After all, that has long since happened with musicals in the US: even in major metropolitan areas, not only on provincial tours, musicals have come to use digital backing instead of live musicians.
I must say, I really don't get what you mean by Finnish coffee being stronger. When I moved to Finland to study, after living for some time in espresso- and Turkish-coffee-dominated countries, I was surprised to see that Finns were using the same watery drip coffee process as Americans. The only really unusual thing about coffee here is that people drink rather more of it than elsewhere.
Even with multiple space elevators, you'll never be able to move more people off Earth than are being born on it at any given moment. The OP's right in that, while there is still work to be done in the sciences and moving mankind into space, it's unreasonable to expect the billions of uneducated and unpoverished peoples among us to all get a piece of that pie.
There are some academic composers out there who, while not writing specifically for an academic cognoscenti, tend to be known only among such peers. However, Xenakis and Glass are not such composers. Many thousands of people visited the installations that Xenakis set up and came away wowed. Even today, a Xenakis orchestral concert is likely to sell out, with only the great expense of additional rehearsals getting in the way. Most performances of the string quartets sell out too, and the Ardittis and the JACK Quartet have included them in their programmes in order to pull in fans of IDM and other experimental genres. Xenakis has great crossover appeal.
And Philip Glass "elitist insider music"?! The whole deal with the New York Downtown composer scene was that they were writing for a general audience and inviting amateur performers. Glass's operas inevitably sell out, and classical record labels have long used his music, which sells well, to subsidize other, less popular musicians. Maybe you just haven't heard much from Glass -- he's certainly less "out there" than John Zorn, who you say you like.
But many of the modern composers seemed to me have lost sight of what sounds good, preferring to take some kind of conceptual approach
It's worth keeping in mind that as late as 1990, and perhaps even still today, the vast majority of composers on earth were writing ordinary tonal music, such as neo-Romanticism. The avant-garde was always only a small slice of what was going on at the time. Naxos's American Classics series and Melodiya can acquaint you with a great many of these composers who didn't want to radically break with tradition.
This is not a case of dispensing with the musicians to make money, this is about staging opera in a time and place where there is no way you could afford to produce a full scale production.
And why can't you afford to produce a full-scale production? A lot of the push for replacing live musicians with the VSP is coming out of the United States, where there are insufficient cultural subsidies. This development will only make the problem worse, as now the state or private patrons are even more likely to deny funding based on the fact that machines could technically be used instead. You don't see something like this in Finland, where even the smaller provincial capitals manage to put on operas with a full human ensemble, thanks in large part to generous arts funding (an approach that has also ensure wider interest in opera among the population in than in the US).
You've just explained why the Vienna Symphonic Library will not be playing Ferneyhough or Saariaho anytime soon. However, the provincial opera performance in question is of Wagner, whose scores (like most from the early-mid Romantic era) do not call for extended techniques, and the VSL was designed to represent this era fairly well.
Don't blame the CD. Blame the soloist who refuses to be miked during the live gig.
Why do you think that the soloist has any say in this? It's generally the music director's call, and the idea of miking a soloist in traditional repertoire (as opposed to an IRCAM piece) would not appeal for at least two major reasons:
1) It increases the costs significantly, as you are paying not just an expensive soloist but also a union technician to set up the miking and speaker assembly -- that's why some ensembles do rather fewer works with live electronics than they'd like;
2) The subscriber audiences that orchestras depend on financially and for whom they programme this kind of traditional repertoire to keep them coming would express discontent with messing with the original scoring.
Why do you think people want something that sounds like "real life"? Human beings today are exposed to far more recorded music coming out of speakers than acoustic live performance, and their ears are attuned to the former.
Even in art music this is a noticeable trend. I'm active in classical music fora and filesharing circles, and I'm amazed at how many fans with many hundreds or thousands of CDs have no interest in going to the concert hall, because they are more comfortable in how classical music sounds off a CD or FLAC download (for example, a solo violin or cello in a concerto will likely be mixed louder on a disc than it sounds in live performance).
As the late composer Fausto Romitelli once said, "Ever since I was born, I have been immersed in digitalized images, symthetic sounds, artifacts. Artificial, distorted, filtered, this is the nature of man today."
Probably a good number of the engineers designing digital orchestra hardware and software might be keen on exploring new possibilities in music, but the suits who have chosen to use them to replace live musicians in musicals, and now this opera production, are thinking first and foremost about how much money they can save when they don't have to pay human beings any more. I have no particular opinion on the use of digital orchestras, but I wish their use were motivated by something deeper than filthy lucre.
You likely have some relationship to them, you've simply forgotten. One name that I often see on LinkedIn spam invitations puzzled me, but eventually I ascertained that years before, while travelling in another part of the world, I contacted his dentist office to inquire about prices. Never met him, never even had e-mail contact with him again, but my e-mail persisted on his end long enough to get vacuumed up by LinkedIn.
oh okay so i cant get a ride to the airport but how about the arbys down the street.
Many airports are designed so that the only access is via a road classed as motorway, i.e. off-limits to pedestrians. The only way in is via a car, bus or train.
Slashdot Mirror
How much carbon is produced by the production of shampoos and their associated plastic bottles, by the manufacture of hairstyling equipment, the molding of combs, etc? Having more hair might make someone feel better about himself individually, but on a societal level that increased consumption has its toll on the environment.
That "positive" view of the Native American is essentially Orientalism, and some Native American activists oppose romanticizing their people just as much as they oppose derogatory depictions of them.
Unless I am mistaken (and please point me to a reference if so, I can't find one), GNU/Linux can only run in a chroot environment on recent Google Nexus phones, on top of CyanogenMod. The N900 booted into the same desktop Linux environment one is used to from one's PC without almost no tweaking.
Furthermore, I assume that the Nexus talks to its cell modem through shared memory, whereas the Neo900 promised to separate the modem from the rest of the system for the sake of security.
It's sad that the only real chance for a nerd-friendly, hackable phone (Jolla is not open in some key respects) missed the boat.
FWIW, the Lomo(graphy) cameras to which I am referring are now entirely made in China.
No, I mean the legendary European jazz label ECM.
Paranoid much? Outside of smartphones, digital cameras don't usually have GPS functionality: that is a feature one has to shop around for. And the JPG files produced by a camera, even one with a GPS feature, are not exactly obfuscated labyrinths of DRM: you can easily view and edit the EXIF and XMP metadata, and if you want to really be sure of what's in the file, the binary format is quite straightforward.
Nowadays, low-end Canon DSLRs are getting quite cheap, not that much more expensive than high-end point-and-shoot cameras. Right now the EOS Rebel T3i is going for $550 on Amazon, and I'm sure it could be found cheaper if one shops around. What really breaks the bank with owning an SLR are the lenses, but if one gets a digital SLR, would a further couple of lenses not quickly pay for themselves with the money saved on developing film?
My local bookstore has cut back heavily on its offering of books, since apparently it can't make much money off of them in a post-literary age when what books are read can be bought for cheaper online. To fill the void, it has expanded its choice of what I can only describe as hipster accoutrement, such as ECM on vinyl, Moleskine notebooks, and fancy tea sets.
But the most surprising item was Lomo cameras: these are selling like hotcakes, in spite of the fact that they use old-fashioned film. I would have imagined no one wanted to deal with the expense of giving film to a photo lab (I live in an Eastern European country where this costs serious money) or the hassle of developing it themselves, but when marketed as a trendy thing, some people are ready to turn back from digital.
I've seen Qoros cars (a Chinese brand) on the roads of Europe for over a year now, and I don't think there's been any real backlash against them. Their sedan has a high Euro NCAP safety rating. One might complain that exterior parts rust faster than a more expensive brand, but then again, one can make that same charge against locally-made low-end cars.
Unfortunately, if you only choose to pay attention only to the "Verified Purchase" tag, you'll miss out on a lot of good reviews. Plenty of entirely sincere and trustworthy reviewers do their shopping at other online shops where they managed to get a better deal, but they review at Amazon because they are used to its community features. There are more such reviews than the shills; in fact, the shills are so relatively few in number that it is easy to figure out who they are and just ignore their reviews in future.
Amazon can only show a message on reviews of products received for free through the Vine Voice program, where reviewers choose the product through Amazon's website. However, a lot of reviewers receive their free product directly from the manufacturer or publisher, and Amazon has no way of knowing. FTC rules require that a reviewer disclose that he is reviewing a free sample, but this law is often ignored.
Why do you figure? As a top-ranked Amazon reviewer familiar with the reviewer "community", a hell of a lot of reviewers will give only positive reviews because they are afraid that any negative comments will stop the flow of free electronics and media coming. A lot of reviewers make a decent living eBaying products that we are sent gratis with a request for a review.
Plus, when you are getting a steady flow of free stuff to review, you are busy enough with the latest arrivals that you don't want to spend time going back and reworking a review you've already written. That's already ancient history for some.
I imagine these same problems exists at many independent tech review sites too.
Basically the entire West has stronger cultural subsidies than the United States. This is something utterly normal, and the fact that some Americans act like it is some kind of eregarious transgression is baffling. (Even our right-wing parties generally support funding the arts).
One can hope that the tide may someday turn in the US to greater subsidies in at least some areas. In fact, the US already funds culture to a considerable degree through the tax exempt status of non-profit organizations and the tax breaks or direct funding that some states provide -- lots of art films credit "The state of X" for allowing them to make the picture on a smaller budget.
The funding climate being what it is, it is obvious that this will spread to established companies. After all, that has long since happened with musicals in the US: even in major metropolitan areas, not only on provincial tours, musicals have come to use digital backing instead of live musicians.
I must say, I really don't get what you mean by Finnish coffee being stronger. When I moved to Finland to study, after living for some time in espresso- and Turkish-coffee-dominated countries, I was surprised to see that Finns were using the same watery drip coffee process as Americans. The only really unusual thing about coffee here is that people drink rather more of it than elsewhere.
Even with multiple space elevators, you'll never be able to move more people off Earth than are being born on it at any given moment. The OP's right in that, while there is still work to be done in the sciences and moving mankind into space, it's unreasonable to expect the billions of uneducated and unpoverished peoples among us to all get a piece of that pie.
There are some academic composers out there who, while not writing specifically for an academic cognoscenti, tend to be known only among such peers. However, Xenakis and Glass are not such composers. Many thousands of people visited the installations that Xenakis set up and came away wowed. Even today, a Xenakis orchestral concert is likely to sell out, with only the great expense of additional rehearsals getting in the way. Most performances of the string quartets sell out too, and the Ardittis and the JACK Quartet have included them in their programmes in order to pull in fans of IDM and other experimental genres. Xenakis has great crossover appeal.
And Philip Glass "elitist insider music"?! The whole deal with the New York Downtown composer scene was that they were writing for a general audience and inviting amateur performers. Glass's operas inevitably sell out, and classical record labels have long used his music, which sells well, to subsidize other, less popular musicians. Maybe you just haven't heard much from Glass -- he's certainly less "out there" than John Zorn, who you say you like.
It's worth keeping in mind that as late as 1990, and perhaps even still today, the vast majority of composers on earth were writing ordinary tonal music, such as neo-Romanticism. The avant-garde was always only a small slice of what was going on at the time. Naxos's American Classics series and Melodiya can acquaint you with a great many of these composers who didn't want to radically break with tradition.
And why can't you afford to produce a full-scale production? A lot of the push for replacing live musicians with the VSP is coming out of the United States, where there are insufficient cultural subsidies. This development will only make the problem worse, as now the state or private patrons are even more likely to deny funding based on the fact that machines could technically be used instead. You don't see something like this in Finland, where even the smaller provincial capitals manage to put on operas with a full human ensemble, thanks in large part to generous arts funding (an approach that has also ensure wider interest in opera among the population in than in the US).
You've just explained why the Vienna Symphonic Library will not be playing Ferneyhough or Saariaho anytime soon. However, the provincial opera performance in question is of Wagner, whose scores (like most from the early-mid Romantic era) do not call for extended techniques, and the VSL was designed to represent this era fairly well.
Why do you think that the soloist has any say in this? It's generally the music director's call, and the idea of miking a soloist in traditional repertoire (as opposed to an IRCAM piece) would not appeal for at least two major reasons:
Why do you think people want something that sounds like "real life"? Human beings today are exposed to far more recorded music coming out of speakers than acoustic live performance, and their ears are attuned to the former.
Even in art music this is a noticeable trend. I'm active in classical music fora and filesharing circles, and I'm amazed at how many fans with many hundreds or thousands of CDs have no interest in going to the concert hall, because they are more comfortable in how classical music sounds off a CD or FLAC download (for example, a solo violin or cello in a concerto will likely be mixed louder on a disc than it sounds in live performance).
As the late composer Fausto Romitelli once said, "Ever since I was born, I have been immersed in digitalized images, symthetic sounds, artifacts. Artificial, distorted, filtered, this is the nature of man today."
Probably a good number of the engineers designing digital orchestra hardware and software might be keen on exploring new possibilities in music, but the suits who have chosen to use them to replace live musicians in musicals, and now this opera production, are thinking first and foremost about how much money they can save when they don't have to pay human beings any more. I have no particular opinion on the use of digital orchestras, but I wish their use were motivated by something deeper than filthy lucre.
You likely have some relationship to them, you've simply forgotten. One name that I often see on LinkedIn spam invitations puzzled me, but eventually I ascertained that years before, while travelling in another part of the world, I contacted his dentist office to inquire about prices. Never met him, never even had e-mail contact with him again, but my e-mail persisted on his end long enough to get vacuumed up by LinkedIn.
They must have been, especially since the US had never ever seen any problems with corrupt local politicians before Obama became president!
Many airports are designed so that the only access is via a road classed as motorway, i.e. off-limits to pedestrians. The only way in is via a car, bus or train.