The people who knowingly decided to live below sea level bear no responsibility?
Seriously; this look to government to protect one's self has gone too far.
Political and economic conservatives like to state the importance of 3 main things: Property rights, Personal responsibility, and Sanctity of contract. For instance, a consumer buys a product with terms of use. If he fails to uphold the terms of use, he's failing his responsibility to uphold a contract, thus depriving the seller of revenue (the seller's property). Now these things all seem to make sense. It would be hard to have a market economy without them.
But an interesting thing happens when the wronged party is the consumer, the citizen, the "little guy". Suddenly, we hear a lot more caveat emptor, "you should have known better. You should have done your due diligence before buying that or making a deal with a party you should have known not to trust." You start to get the idea that "personal responsibility" is meant much more literally than first thought -- it's always the person's responsibility.
So here we've got the Katrina case. Thousands of individuals rent, build and buy homes in parts of New Orleans the that Corps of Engineers has reclaimed from persistent flooding. The Corps has taken the responsibility to maintain this level of protection. They are contracted to maintain the dams and levees to preserve and protect the property in the reclaimed areas. When they fail to do this -- and court finds that they have failed to uphold their obligation -- the same conservatives who are so staunchly in favor of enforcing contracts, protecting property and ensuring people meet their responsibilities now change their minds. "These people should have known better. Why were they looking to the government ( The CoE) to protect them?"
I fault the conservative mindset more for failing to consistently apply their beliefs than for their beliefs themselves. This lack of compassion when the aggrieved is a person or persons vs. the attitude when it's a business or other large entity makes for hypocrisy and empty words.
Can't afford to move indeed.
Even Bag Ladies move.
If you decided to stay in squalor after being born there. You pretty much decided to be poor. You decided not to be educated. You decided not to try to better yourself. All this because you gave up because you were born poor.Poor you, sit on a government pity pot.
Silly ass.
You are being sarcastic, right?
Cause if you're serious, I'll assume you delivered yourself by C-Section. After carefully choosing appropriate parents, of course.
In other words, having been shown to be wrong, now you're moving the goalposts and still trying to find ways to blame the victim.
Not only am I "moving the goalposts," you'll find, "at the end of the day," that I've "compared apples and oranges," "stepped up" and "taken this to another level."
And let me throw in a relevant cliche, too: You're way overplaying the "victim" card on the part of the newspaper in question. There is no "victimization" here. Put up an open forum and insightful and stupid and crazy people alike will post in it. It's not "forum rape". Your rape analogy would be extreme to the point of being ridiculous except that it insults actual victims of actual rape.
As above, now having been shown to be wrong, you're moving the goalposts. Threads are in no way needed for a functional discussion, many forums if many types across the internet do just fine without them. (Not to mention that threads are just one of several modes of displaying the conversation on Slashdot.)
C'mon, you're using the same saw twice in one post. Show me a little respect and use a new one.
I'll maintain (or move the goalposts as you prefer) that a linear "discussion" is not. It's just a bunch of people yelling "@". You can "take that to the bank".
That's kind of like saying a rape victim was begging for it because she wore tight jeans. It's bullshit.
This excessively hyperbolic comparison makes Joseph Goebbels seem like a slight exaggerator.
Seriously, though. Didja have to pull out that old chestnut? When you've got a "feedback forum" you are literally "asking for it". If you fail to police it properly -- that is, to the standards of your organization -- then you're making the extremely naive assumption that everyone who comments has something descent and even valuable to add. If you want it to be valuable to your readers, you need to edit the posts in some way. Otherwise the only readers will be those looking for laughs. For crying out loud, the reporters get edited and they write for a living!
Also, when you say that these forums (fora?) are "[a] place for people to discuss the story - the same as Slashdot", that's not really true. They are almost always setup as un-threaded lists of comments on the main story. Attempts to "discuss" with other commenters requires the lame "@MonkeyShines" kind of silliness that I get irritated trying to follow. This is a discussion we're having, I can tell you're responding to my comment and vice-versa. It's intentionally organized that way, in contrast to the majority of feedback forums out there.
Sounds sensible to me. I'd imagine the vast majority of Ubuntu users are unlikely to use the gimp.
And any user that wants Gimp will know to install it. It was a rather specialized package to install on every desktop distro. We don't put geda or rosegarden or Scilab on every desktop. If I'm setting up a machine for web browsing, games, light office tasks, etc., Gimp just wastes space and install time.
Anonymous trolling is "an asshole and idiotic thing to do". Embarrasing someone for trolling might be as well, but at that point it's just eye-for-an-eye.
The difference is that Kurt Greenbaum was paid for doing it. He is a professional asshole.
Kurt Greenbaum is scum, and I will do my best to avoid their website in the future.
You could pretty much guarantee success in that mission by redirecting requests to their domain (stltoday.com) to 127.0.0.1 -- or your own choice -- on every machine you use.
he did delete the comment and the guy from the school kept posting the same thing multiple times
So what? How hard is it to delete it multiple times. That guy could be replaced by a shell script. And anyway, these reader feedback forums on newspapers' websites (and elsewhere) are just an open invitation for every crank, crackpot and wacko in town (and the whole internet) to post whatever vile, stupid, racist, crazy, nonsensical comment they can come up with.
First, we had letters to the editor. You had to take pen or keyboard in hand, crank out a physical copy, mail it in and even then the editors only posted a sampling of the feedback on any given subject. Usually, the editors even tried to get a balanced discussion on controversial topics -- at least in terms of number of letters.
Then we get the phone-in comment line. Any loser with a phone and time to burn could rant to his hearts content. The messages were kept short by the recording time limit, so the paper could print a bunch on the comment page. Uninformed illiterates could finally voice their ill-considered, illogical opinions in a public forum. But at least the finite amount of space on the page and the fact the editors had to choose which ones to print kept things to a dull but stupid roar.
Fast forward to on-line comments. Space is practically unlimited, so the editors no longer even bother to review comments prior to posting. Anything and everything gets put up for all to see until someone comes around to delete the really bad stuff (racism, threats, pointless profanity, rabid non-sequiturs, etc.)
Again, I say, if you create such a forum, you are begging for this kind of thing. Hunting down one guy for double-posting a profanity (and a slightly funny -- but cliched -- on-topic one at that) is really overkill, when there's plenty of really bad stuff to be dealt with. "Pussyman" was clearly singled out for personal reasons on the part of the newspaper employee for special treatment. Poster was a little stupid and childish, but the editor was mean and spiteful.
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
Sure, but which would you rather work with?
I see your point -- if you're the slob -- or rather just the "sloppier/less snobby" of the two of you. Having a real slob would take some of the heat off you when it came to code review time.
Bullshit. Software development isn't just about "coding". It's about producing software that's functional and maintainable. "Hacking it until it works" is completely antithetical to those goals.
When coders are hired as temps or on project-duration contracts, their motivations may not necessarily align with the "professionals" who'll have to maintain the crap. And if you know that you'll be out of there once it ships (or your time is up), you'd have to have a mighty strong ethical commitment to quality to do much better than "hack it till it works". It's not ideal, but individuals are gonna primarily look out for themselves (and for good reason). You'd think this would give such an individual or a firm a bad reputation, but that would depend on management listening carefully to the concerns of the maintenance coders.
...back in my university days, we used to scoff at the morons in the labs who would, quite literally, randomly hack their projects until they worked.
Apparently there *is* a dark side to a high-quality unit test suite... it gives idiots a false sense of security and justifies their idiotic development practices.
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
An explanation may be long if it is explaining something complex that the code is doing. A long-winded comment may also be a precise one, rather than a general one: rather than an excuse, this may be an explanation.
This is a frequent rationale for tediously long comments: that the code commented is really complicated and "you are not expected to understand". In reality, such problems are rarely as atomic and complicated as commenters/coders would have you believe. More frequently, it's a sign that the coder simply didn't have the time or interest in breaking up the problem into easier to understand (and easier to maintain) chunks. Truly obtuse and opaque problems do exist, but not nearly to the same extent as long-winded comments.
I once coded a function that varied depending on what quadrant (+x,+y; -x, +y; -x,-y; +x,-y) it was in. I couldn't get it to work right in the second quadrant, but finally got it working by chance and said so in my comments. The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding? It worked!
Bad code, good comment, I'd say. That way at least Monday man doesn't come in and re-use your code thinking you had some particular insight that he oughta copy! Cause Monday man could be you.
it sounds like you... care about any copyright protection they have
Do you see what selective quoting is capable of? Kind of like how you removed the section about him being happy to pay directly for their copyrighted works....
THere's a huge gap between saying "I will pay for this music if I like who is selling it, otherwise I shall take it." and saying "I do not like who is selling this music, therefore I shall do without."
Whether or not he is happy to pay directly is completely irrelevant. If he truly respected the copyright he claimed to be in favor of, he would not be "pirating" at all -- it's not a conditional kind of thing.
As long as it's OK to put words in others mouth through selective quotation and specious interpretation, then I'd say you favor a "copyright tax" on all consumers, based on income and in addition to prices paid for physical and downloaded recordings to make up for "piracy losses". I'm also pretty sure you did not chop up and eat a baby in 1999, despite what others may say.
Musicians work for the people??? What, are they civil servants now?
Yes, I know what you meant, but isn't everyone who gets paid ultimately working for the people, at least in the most liberal interpretation of that phrase? Even that motivational speaker who reminds me of Larry the Cable Guy encourages entrepreneurs and business people to have the mindset of "serving others"? And he's pretty conservative, just like Jesus told us to be.
(p.s. Thanks google: Larry Winget. Quote:
"Money is the result of serving people well. Serving people is an honorable thing. Money is the result of hard work. Hard work is honorable. Having money is a wonderful thing in your life. It pays for college for your kids. It pays for healthcare when you and the people you love get sick. It takes care of your mom and dad when they get old and need help. It feeds the homeless and helps those who are less fortunate. It pays your taxes to build roads and provide fire and police protection. It is to be appreciated, saved, invested, and ENJOYED. ")
It's a shame that so many people in the US think that "free speech" means "I can say anything I want".
I'd like to add another restriction on free speech while we're at it: Saying "It's a shame," like you just did in that poor, pitiful Jessica Fletcher head-shake kind of way we use to describe and condescend to those who aren't as informed.
Smart does not equal an ability to explain. But given that I've lectured on digital signal processing at the post-graduate level, I'm not without some qualification in the area.
Apparently, in your case, it equals an ability to bluster your way into a lecture hall. Oh, I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings? You speak of engineers as "others" ('Engineers have poorly chosen the word aliasing'). You are amazed that CDs sound OK. You literally hear the results of the engineering, and still say it doesn't work. And your only argument is to call opposing theories "laughable".
Something tells me, if I built a fire, you'd tell me it shouldn't produce heat.
Any digital sampling of even a simple sine wave - absolutely regardless of sampling rate - is going to present to the electronics as nothing less than a series of impulses. Regardless of the optical illusion that the sampled points look like the sine wave sampled (dots on an x-y graph) - that's not how it's going to work out.
Well, that is or is not true based on the behavior of the D to A converter you use. No, actually, this is never true. You can't produce a perfect "impulse" -- since it has 0 time duration -- with any actual hardware. Because it would have, as you suggested, infinitely wide frequency response: DC to Daylight, as they say. More likely, your D to A will sample and hold, or do some form of interpolation. It's the reconstruction filter's job to turn this back into the original sampled signal. You can make the analog filter's job easier (and your job as a filter designer easier) by doing some DSP interpolation. So let's not pretend that D to A converters output impulses to the reconstruction filters, OK? It would imply that the designers went out of their way to obtain the unobtainable to do something stupid.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength. Chances of getting reduced sampling error - to even hit the peaks and zero crossings in time of that frequency or higher is absolutely laughable. That's 8 points at 5 to 6 kHz, and 16 sampled data points in the critical voice range.
11 kHz fundamental is what, A9? I'm just pulling that out of my ass, but violins? Harpsichords? Really? You really think so, eh? How many keys does your harpsichord have?
I can reconstruct your sine wave with 4 points per cycle. Why can't you? And Nyquist does better than me, but I'm conservative with respect to signal processing. Do you know who I'm writing about? Are you aware of the Nyquist sampling theorem? Yes, yes, I know we can only approach the theoretical, thanks. I'm aware of your "approach" argument. But we can and do approach it, and we work very hard at it. Maybe not as hard as the marketeers who write press releases for audiophile magazines, though.
Do you have any actual experience or education in DSP?
I'm completely comfortable admitting that CDs may not be the ultimate in audio fidelity, but your arguments are without basis in math, physics or fact.
Heh. I've got a short run of CAT5 going from phone box outside to a rafter in my attic, each wire spread out, stripped, and wrapped around a nail. Then CAT3 from the nails to the phone jacks in the few rooms that have a landline phone. Voice quality is no issue.
My DSL on the other hand is CAT5 from the phone box outside up into the attic down thru a wall to a wall plate. And I get constant disconnects due to "timeout waiting for PADO" which apparently is due to too much noise on the line.
Sounds pretty sophisticated to me. Nails! In my day we had to make our own. But seriously folks, the "quad" of which I wrote is untwisted wire in a jacket, arranged in a diamond pattern when looking at a cut end, hence the name "quad". Provides no noise immunity at all, and coupled with the ground loops induced by multiple signal paths, you could barely hear a thing. I agree: baseband analog voice is pretty resilient, but my old wiring was suitable for nothing more demanding than a doorbell. Maybe a thermostat if you really pushed your luck.
I really think the landline is slowly going the way of the dodo as far as home users are concerned.
And yes I've been without power to my house for days on end (ice storms in the Northeast). Light's didn't work but my home phone worked fine.
My phone lines would always get pulled down by the same tree branch that killed my power, you insensitive clod! But other that that, POTS is still very reliable. However, since I don't have POTS anymore, I guess that extra reliability wasn't that valuable to me, at least compared to the cost of a cell plus a landline.
Good old fashioned POTS stuff has its advantages(phones, even wireless ones, are incredibly cheap, you can carry the signal over cable of virtually arbitrary crappiness)..
If you define "carry the signal . .." to mean sound quality gets worse and worse the crappier the cable gets. There's some pretty craptacular wiring out there. I have had to pull out all the POTS wiring in a house ("quad" cable spliced with anything convenient: scotch tape, bandage tape, nothing . . . all hooked together in a bizarre ring/star/daisy chain hybrid group loop disaster ) because I couldn't understand anybody and vice-versa..
1) Buy a SIP to POTS adapter
2) Install asterisk on your Linux server (You do have a Linux server right?)
3) Create a web app, preferably Ruby on Rails, that connects to Asterisk over the management port and dials a phone number and rings it back to your home phone line
4) Profit until the system breaks and the wife wrings your neck because she can't call to make her beauty salon appointment!
Enjoy!
If you don't want to kill it that much, you could switch to a VOIP service for your home number. But your solution does have that cool Dr. Seuss/Rube Goldberg vibe, so don't let me discourage you.
Asterisk would definitely do it. You can get SIP instruments for under $100 each. Power over Ethernet switch with 8 powered ports isn't too expensive and eliminates the need for wall warts at all your extensions (Assuming you get PoE capable phones). Migrate or replace your home phone number with a VOIP service, they're not that expensive, might even come with an incoming fax line.
P.S. Grandstream phones relatively are cheap. You can get executivey, businessy, or homey type models. They can import your XML phonebook from your server, you can remotely manage the extensions with a web interface. What's not to love, except for the not-wireless part? Probably wifi SIP phones too, but I've never checked.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who knowingly decided to live below sea level bear no responsibility?
Seriously; this look to government to protect one's self has gone too far.
Political and economic conservatives like to state the importance of 3 main things: Property rights, Personal responsibility, and Sanctity of contract. For instance, a consumer buys a product with terms of use. If he fails to uphold the terms of use, he's failing his responsibility to uphold a contract, thus depriving the seller of revenue (the seller's property). Now these things all seem to make sense. It would be hard to have a market economy without them.
But an interesting thing happens when the wronged party is the consumer, the citizen, the "little guy". Suddenly, we hear a lot more caveat emptor, "you should have known better. You should have done your due diligence before buying that or making a deal with a party you should have known not to trust." You start to get the idea that "personal responsibility" is meant much more literally than first thought -- it's always the person's responsibility.
So here we've got the Katrina case. Thousands of individuals rent, build and buy homes in parts of New Orleans the that Corps of Engineers has reclaimed from persistent flooding. The Corps has taken the responsibility to maintain this level of protection. They are contracted to maintain the dams and levees to preserve and protect the property in the reclaimed areas. When they fail to do this -- and court finds that they have failed to uphold their obligation -- the same conservatives who are so staunchly in favor of enforcing contracts, protecting property and ensuring people meet their responsibilities now change their minds. "These people should have known better. Why were they looking to the government ( The CoE) to protect them?"
I fault the conservative mindset more for failing to consistently apply their beliefs than for their beliefs themselves. This lack of compassion when the aggrieved is a person or persons vs. the attitude when it's a business or other large entity makes for hypocrisy and empty words.
In my opinion, it wasn't just myopia and shortsightedness, but nearsightedness as well!
You're neglecting the "insouciance".
Can't afford to move indeed. Even Bag Ladies move. If you decided to stay in squalor after being born there. You pretty much decided to be poor. You decided not to be educated. You decided not to try to better yourself. All this because you gave up because you were born poor.Poor you, sit on a government pity pot.
Silly ass.
You are being sarcastic, right?
Cause if you're serious, I'll assume you delivered yourself by C-Section. After carefully choosing appropriate parents, of course.
no but they at least know how to build levee's and dam's
I dunno, build levee's and dam's what?
In other words, having been shown to be wrong, now you're moving the goalposts and still trying to find ways to blame the victim.
Not only am I "moving the goalposts," you'll find, "at the end of the day," that I've "compared apples and oranges," "stepped up" and "taken this to another level."
And let me throw in a relevant cliche, too: You're way overplaying the "victim" card on the part of the newspaper in question. There is no "victimization" here. Put up an open forum and insightful and stupid and crazy people alike will post in it. It's not "forum rape". Your rape analogy would be extreme to the point of being ridiculous except that it insults actual victims of actual rape.
As above, now having been shown to be wrong, you're moving the goalposts. Threads are in no way needed for a functional discussion, many forums if many types across the internet do just fine without them. (Not to mention that threads are just one of several modes of displaying the conversation on Slashdot.)
C'mon, you're using the same saw twice in one post. Show me a little respect and use a new one.
I'll maintain (or move the goalposts as you prefer) that a linear "discussion" is not. It's just a bunch of people yelling "@". You can "take that to the bank".
That's kind of like saying a rape victim was begging for it because she wore tight jeans. It's bullshit.
This excessively hyperbolic comparison makes Joseph Goebbels seem like a slight exaggerator.
Seriously, though. Didja have to pull out that old chestnut? When you've got a "feedback forum" you are literally "asking for it". If you fail to police it properly -- that is, to the standards of your organization -- then you're making the extremely naive assumption that everyone who comments has something descent and even valuable to add. If you want it to be valuable to your readers, you need to edit the posts in some way. Otherwise the only readers will be those looking for laughs. For crying out loud, the reporters get edited and they write for a living!
Also, when you say that these forums (fora?) are "[a] place for people to discuss the story - the same as Slashdot", that's not really true. They are almost always setup as un-threaded lists of comments on the main story. Attempts to "discuss" with other commenters requires the lame "@MonkeyShines" kind of silliness that I get irritated trying to follow. This is a discussion we're having, I can tell you're responding to my comment and vice-versa. It's intentionally organized that way, in contrast to the majority of feedback forums out there.
Sounds sensible to me. I'd imagine the vast majority of Ubuntu users are unlikely to use the gimp.
And any user that wants Gimp will know to install it. It was a rather specialized package to install on every desktop distro. We don't put geda or rosegarden or Scilab on every desktop. If I'm setting up a machine for web browsing, games, light office tasks, etc., Gimp just wastes space and install time.
Anonymous trolling is "an asshole and idiotic thing to do". Embarrasing someone for trolling might be as well, but at that point it's just eye-for-an-eye.
The difference is that Kurt Greenbaum was paid for doing it. He is a professional asshole.
Kurt Greenbaum is scum, and I will do my best to avoid their website in the future.
You could pretty much guarantee success in that mission by redirecting requests to their domain (stltoday.com) to 127.0.0.1 -- or your own choice -- on every machine you use.
RTFA
he did delete the comment and the guy from the school kept posting the same thing multiple times
So what? How hard is it to delete it multiple times. That guy could be replaced by a shell script. And anyway, these reader feedback forums on newspapers' websites (and elsewhere) are just an open invitation for every crank, crackpot and wacko in town (and the whole internet) to post whatever vile, stupid, racist, crazy, nonsensical comment they can come up with.
First, we had letters to the editor. You had to take pen or keyboard in hand, crank out a physical copy, mail it in and even then the editors only posted a sampling of the feedback on any given subject. Usually, the editors even tried to get a balanced discussion on controversial topics -- at least in terms of number of letters.
Then we get the phone-in comment line. Any loser with a phone and time to burn could rant to his hearts content. The messages were kept short by the recording time limit, so the paper could print a bunch on the comment page. Uninformed illiterates could finally voice their ill-considered, illogical opinions in a public forum. But at least the finite amount of space on the page and the fact the editors had to choose which ones to print kept things to a dull but stupid roar.
Fast forward to on-line comments. Space is practically unlimited, so the editors no longer even bother to review comments prior to posting. Anything and everything gets put up for all to see until someone comes around to delete the really bad stuff (racism, threats, pointless profanity, rabid non-sequiturs, etc.)
Again, I say, if you create such a forum, you are begging for this kind of thing. Hunting down one guy for double-posting a profanity (and a slightly funny -- but cliched -- on-topic one at that) is really overkill, when there's plenty of really bad stuff to be dealt with. "Pussyman" was clearly singled out for personal reasons on the part of the newspaper employee for special treatment. Poster was a little stupid and childish, but the editor was mean and spiteful.
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
Sure, but which would you rather work with?
I see your point -- if you're the slob -- or rather just the "sloppier/less snobby" of the two of you. Having a real slob would take some of the heat off you when it came to code review time.
That, and he's probably good at mixing drinks.
Bullshit. Software development isn't just about "coding". It's about producing software that's functional and maintainable. "Hacking it until it works" is completely antithetical to those goals.
When coders are hired as temps or on project-duration contracts, their motivations may not necessarily align with the "professionals" who'll have to maintain the crap. And if you know that you'll be out of there once it ships (or your time is up), you'd have to have a mighty strong ethical commitment to quality to do much better than "hack it till it works". It's not ideal, but individuals are gonna primarily look out for themselves (and for good reason). You'd think this would give such an individual or a firm a bad reputation, but that would depend on management listening carefully to the concerns of the maintenance coders.
...back in my university days, we used to scoff at the morons in the labs who would, quite literally, randomly hack their projects until they worked.
Apparently there *is* a dark side to a high-quality unit test suite... it gives idiots a false sense of security and justifies their idiotic development practices.
You sir, are a snob. A programming snob at that, congrats.
I'd rather follow up on the work of a programming snob than a programming slob.
An explanation may be long if it is explaining something complex that the code is doing. A long-winded comment may also be a precise one, rather than a general one: rather than an excuse, this may be an explanation.
This is a frequent rationale for tediously long comments: that the code commented is really complicated and "you are not expected to understand". In reality, such problems are rarely as atomic and complicated as commenters/coders would have you believe. More frequently, it's a sign that the coder simply didn't have the time or interest in breaking up the problem into easier to understand (and easier to maintain) chunks. Truly obtuse and opaque problems do exist, but not nearly to the same extent as long-winded comments.
I once coded a function that varied depending on what quadrant (+x,+y; -x, +y; -x,-y; +x,-y) it was in. I couldn't get it to work right in the second quadrant, but finally got it working by chance and said so in my comments. The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding? It worked!
Bad code, good comment, I'd say. That way at least Monday man doesn't come in and re-use your code thinking you had some particular insight that he oughta copy! Cause Monday man could be you.
Do you see what selective quoting is capable of? Kind of like how you removed the section about him being happy to pay directly for their copyrighted works....
THere's a huge gap between saying "I will pay for this music if I like who is selling it, otherwise I shall take it." and saying "I do not like who is selling this music, therefore I shall do without."
Whether or not he is happy to pay directly is completely irrelevant. If he truly respected the copyright he claimed to be in favor of, he would not be "pirating" at all -- it's not a conditional kind of thing.
As long as it's OK to put words in others mouth through selective quotation and specious interpretation, then I'd say you favor a "copyright tax" on all consumers, based on income and in addition to prices paid for physical and downloaded recordings to make up for "piracy losses". I'm also pretty sure you did not chop up and eat a baby in 1999, despite what others may say.
Musicians work for the people??? What, are they civil servants now?
Yes, I know what you meant, but isn't everyone who gets paid ultimately working for the people, at least in the most liberal interpretation of that phrase? Even that motivational speaker who reminds me of Larry the Cable Guy encourages entrepreneurs and business people to have the mindset of "serving others"? And he's pretty conservative, just like Jesus told us to be.
(p.s. Thanks google: Larry Winget. Quote:
"Money is the result of serving people well. Serving people is an honorable thing. Money is the result of hard work. Hard work is honorable. Having money is a wonderful thing in your life. It pays for college for your kids. It pays for healthcare when you and the people you love get sick. It takes care of your mom and dad when they get old and need help. It feeds the homeless and helps those who are less fortunate. It pays your taxes to build roads and provide fire and police protection. It is to be appreciated, saved, invested, and ENJOYED. ")
It's a shame that so many people in the US think that "free speech" means "I can say anything I want".
I'd like to add another restriction on free speech while we're at it: Saying "It's a shame," like you just did in that poor, pitiful Jessica Fletcher head-shake kind of way we use to describe and condescend to those who aren't as informed.
Smart does not equal an ability to explain. But given that I've lectured on digital signal processing at the post-graduate level, I'm not without some qualification in the area.
Apparently, in your case, it equals an ability to bluster your way into a lecture hall. Oh, I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings? You speak of engineers as "others" ('Engineers have poorly chosen the word aliasing'). You are amazed that CDs sound OK. You literally hear the results of the engineering, and still say it doesn't work. And your only argument is to call opposing theories "laughable".
Something tells me, if I built a fire, you'd tell me it shouldn't produce heat.
Any digital sampling of even a simple sine wave - absolutely regardless of sampling rate - is going to present to the electronics as nothing less than a series of impulses. Regardless of the optical illusion that the sampled points look like the sine wave sampled (dots on an x-y graph) - that's not how it's going to work out.
Well, that is or is not true based on the behavior of the D to A converter you use. No, actually, this is never true. You can't produce a perfect "impulse" -- since it has 0 time duration -- with any actual hardware. Because it would have, as you suggested, infinitely wide frequency response: DC to Daylight, as they say. More likely, your D to A will sample and hold, or do some form of interpolation. It's the reconstruction filter's job to turn this back into the original sampled signal. You can make the analog filter's job easier (and your job as a filter designer easier) by doing some DSP interpolation. So let's not pretend that D to A converters output impulses to the reconstruction filters, OK? It would imply that the designers went out of their way to obtain the unobtainable to do something stupid.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength. Chances of getting reduced sampling error - to even hit the peaks and zero crossings in time of that frequency or higher is absolutely laughable. That's 8 points at 5 to 6 kHz, and 16 sampled data points in the critical voice range.
11 kHz fundamental is what, A9? I'm just pulling that out of my ass, but violins? Harpsichords? Really? You really think so, eh? How many keys does your harpsichord have?
I can reconstruct your sine wave with 4 points per cycle. Why can't you? And Nyquist does better than me, but I'm conservative with respect to signal processing. Do you know who I'm writing about? Are you aware of the Nyquist sampling theorem? Yes, yes, I know we can only approach the theoretical, thanks. I'm aware of your "approach" argument. But we can and do approach it, and we work very hard at it. Maybe not as hard as the marketeers who write press releases for audiophile magazines, though.
Do you have any actual experience or education in DSP?
I'm completely comfortable admitting that CDs may not be the ultimate in audio fidelity, but your arguments are without basis in math, physics or fact.
Heh. I've got a short run of CAT5 going from phone box outside to a rafter in my attic, each wire spread out, stripped, and wrapped around a nail. Then CAT3 from the nails to the phone jacks in the few rooms that have a landline phone. Voice quality is no issue.
My DSL on the other hand is CAT5 from the phone box outside up into the attic down thru a wall to a wall plate. And I get constant disconnects due to "timeout waiting for PADO" which apparently is due to too much noise on the line.
Sounds pretty sophisticated to me. Nails! In my day we had to make our own. But seriously folks, the "quad" of which I wrote is untwisted wire in a jacket, arranged in a diamond pattern when looking at a cut end, hence the name "quad". Provides no noise immunity at all, and coupled with the ground loops induced by multiple signal paths, you could barely hear a thing. I agree: baseband analog voice is pretty resilient, but my old wiring was suitable for nothing more demanding than a doorbell. Maybe a thermostat if you really pushed your luck.
I really think the landline is slowly going the way of the dodo as far as home users are concerned.
And yes I've been without power to my house for days on end (ice storms in the Northeast). Light's didn't work but my home phone worked fine.
My phone lines would always get pulled down by the same tree branch that killed my power, you insensitive clod! But other that that, POTS is still very reliable. However, since I don't have POTS anymore, I guess that extra reliability wasn't that valuable to me, at least compared to the cost of a cell plus a landline.
Good old fashioned POTS stuff has its advantages(phones, even wireless ones, are incredibly cheap, you can carry the signal over cable of virtually arbitrary crappiness)..
If you define "carry the signal . . ." to mean sound quality gets worse and worse the crappier the cable gets. There's some pretty craptacular wiring out there. I have had to pull out all the POTS wiring in a house ("quad" cable spliced with anything convenient: scotch tape, bandage tape, nothing . . . all hooked together in a bizarre ring/star/daisy chain hybrid group loop disaster ) because I couldn't understand anybody and vice-versa..
Time for overkill solution number 1:
1) Buy a SIP to POTS adapter 2) Install asterisk on your Linux server (You do have a Linux server right?) 3) Create a web app, preferably Ruby on Rails, that connects to Asterisk over the management port and dials a phone number and rings it back to your home phone line 4) Profit until the system breaks and the wife wrings your neck because she can't call to make her beauty salon appointment!
Enjoy!
If you don't want to kill it that much, you could switch to a VOIP service for your home number. But your solution does have that cool Dr. Seuss/Rube Goldberg vibe, so don't let me discourage you.
Asterisk would definitely do it. You can get SIP instruments for under $100 each. Power over Ethernet switch with 8 powered ports isn't too expensive and eliminates the need for wall warts at all your extensions (Assuming you get PoE capable phones). Migrate or replace your home phone number with a VOIP service, they're not that expensive, might even come with an incoming fax line.
P.S. Grandstream phones relatively are cheap. You can get executivey, businessy, or homey type models. They can import your XML phonebook from your server, you can remotely manage the extensions with a web interface. What's not to love, except for the not-wireless part? Probably wifi SIP phones too, but I've never checked.