The joke is that Neo played the Fiddle (Which isn't true either, the Fiddle was invented 1500 years too late...)
For the programmers out there:
Fiddle != Violin
Well, the bit in the brackets is accurate at least. The site you cite doesn't back you up: --
differences between violin and fiddle music
Note: it's not talking about differences between "violin and fiddle", but differences between violin music and fiddle music. Just for interest, from the OED:
fiddle, n. 1. a. A stringed instrument of music; usually, the violin, but also (with defining word as in bass fiddle) applied to other instruments of the viol kind. Now only in familiar or contemptuous use.
So, just to clarify: Fiddle == Violin.
And Nero? You're right in the inconsequential sense that the instrument he was playing happens to have been a lyre, not a violin; but in every essential respect, historical fact matches the legend. (Except the bit about him starting the fire, which is almost certainly just wrong.)
That does make more sense, though I'm not sure why you call it "deevolution". Isn't it simply a shift from suffixes to prefixes (though modern English is also gradually acquiring a set of infixes as well)? I suppose there may be some finely-honed distinction between suffixes and case-endings, but I should imagine it's a bit of an arbitrary one. In any case, I find the extraordinarily strict word-order in some modern languages such as English and French is anything but ambiguous!
I don't know what you're talking about, actually, because it's not clear what you mean by "deevolution". If you mean "simplification", that would be wrong. Over centuries, the main morphological trend is generally not from "complex" to "simple", but from "strong" forms to "weak" forms. That is a never-ending cycle, because different forms become the new weak ones, so that weak forms eventually become strong. Repeat ad infinitum.
Example: in some Germanic languages, -en is the weak plural ending. In English, -en is used on only a handful of nouns (children, oxen, and some more archaic ones like brethren and eyen); -s is now the weak plural ending. Someday, no doubt, some new plural ending will come along which will become the new default, and -s will gradually become a strong form.
(I had a bunch of other examples to reel off, but listing them would be about as geeky as writing out my own "Hello world" script in Bronze Age Greek.)
This will make the market for pop music very similar to the one for classical. Classical music is quite different from the pop. While the all of the pop is priced at roughly the same level as a consumer good, classics prices are all over the place. A single CD with Beethoven sonatas can cost anything from 5£ to 60£. A collection of Beethoven symphonies can set you back by a 3 digit number.
I see no problem whatsoever with this. If the sellers are sensible, they will price the product at the price the market will bear: people will pay more for things they particularly want. Sure, a set of Beethoven's symphonies can go for USD$ 18.98 if they're performed by the Dresden Philharmonic, or for USD$ 67.98 if they're conducted by Georg Solti or John Eliot Gardiner. That's absolutely fine: if people are willing to pay more for Solti and JEG, all well and good; if they're not, there's the Dresden Philharmonic. Same with contemporary music. If people are willing to pay $60 for an album by Celine Dion, well, it sucks to be them. Or maybe not, from their point of view: if they're willing to pay the price, clearly it's worth it to them. Personally, I'll be the one browsing through the Naxos CDs, more often than not, but that's fine.
Variation in pricing is a good thing, if the variation reflects demand for the product. You wouldn't expect to have to pay the same for an ersatz coffee maker as for a Krups; so why would you expect to have to pay the same for the Bavarian Radio Orchestra as for Karajan?
True enough. USA pennies have used the phrase "ONE CENT" for more than one hundred years.
More than two hundred, actually, according to the OED. I posted this elsewhere on this page, but here's the relevant snippet:
There exists, however, an American copper token, commonly called the Washington cent, bearing on one side a head in a wreath with the legend 'Washington and Independence', and date '1783'; on the other the words, 'One Cent', and the exergue . But it is not certain that 1783 represents the date of issue; this token was probably struck as late as 1789, the date 1783 being merely that of the conclusion of the War of Independence.
No, they didn't, though the word does come from the Latin word for 'a hundred', centum (cognate with English hundred via Gothic hund, if anyone's interested).
The earliest uses of the word as a monetary unit are summed up by the OED as follows (interesting stuff, much more detail than they give for most words):
Apparently the first mention of cent occurs in the letter of Robert Morris to the U.S. Congress in 1782, suggesting that the American monetary unit should be the of a dollar, and that a coin equal to 100 of these or of a dollar (about 3d. Eng.) should be made, and called a cent. This proposal was not taken up; but it may have suggested the name 'cent' for the coin = of a dollar, ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786 (see quot.). There exists, however, an American copper token, commonly called the Washington cent, bearing on one side a head in a wreath with the legend 'Washington and Independence', and date '1783'; on the other the words, 'One Cent', and the exergue . But it is not certain that 1783 represents the date of issue; this token was probably struck as late as 1789, the date 1783 being merely that of the conclusion of the War of Independence. Previously to the coining of the cent, or of a dollar, and down to 1789, accounts were kept in dollars and ninetieths, a relic of the time when the Spanish piastre or piece of eight reals, called by the colonists 'dollar', was worth 7s. 6d. (90 pence) of the money of account of Maryland and Pennsylvania. (From notes communicated by the late Prof. J. W. Andrews of Marietta Coll., Ohio.)
According to Wikipedia it was the Vienna branch of Rockstar that developed it (or at least started the development). Not in the UK, but within the EU. I imagine Rockstar could get into all kinds of trouble for doing what you suggest. (Pity.)
Then why, when I play my hi-fi so loud my neighbour bangs on the wall, am I not guilty of copyright infringement by making my loud music available to be recorded by my neighbour?
The answer is simple. You are infringing copyright when you do that. Ever seen a label like this? --
WARNING - Copyright subsists in all recordings issued under this label. Any unauthorised broadcasting, public performance, copying, re-recording in any manner whatsoever will constitute infringement...
They really mean that. They just don't have the apparatus to catch you. They do routinely dog people who have the temerity to have a radio on in a restaurant; once they're allowed inside your home -- and you probably already own some hardware that does allow them in, just not your hi-fi -- they'll go after you too.
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How often do you post comments on Slashdot? I guess I mean: do you post under sockpuppet accounts?
I've never used Photoshop, so for what it's worth, this is the opinion of one unbiased user.
When I first went looking for image editing software, I tried the GIMP. Then I tried GIMPShop and found it a lot easier. Then I discovered Paint.net and heaved a huge sigh of relief. It's not just about familiarity. The GIMP isn't exactly painful to use, it's just opaque: the interface has a lot of randomness, no default settings are ever remembered for anything, the terminology is incomprehensible.
For what it's worth, I still keep GIMPShop installed for the few things I need to do that Paint.net can't. But that's not many: the library of plugins available for Paint.net is enough to keep most amateurs happy. (Of course there are a good few things that I'd like that the GIMP can't do either, such as arbitrary colour-depth.)
And the same reply that you got there deserves to be posted here: how is anyone going to tell that TrueCrypt is being used in the first place? That's why TrueCrypt advertises itself as having two levels of plausible deniability. Maybe you should learn how it works before spreading FUD.
For reference, Dan Castellaneta played Nordom -- it takes a fair while to encounter him. Still, among the most memorable characters. I used to have Nordom quotes for most of my system sounds. "Affirmatory." "My analysis is correct. Danger! Danger!" "Annah, Morte wishes to snuggle with your pillows." etc.
Not so fast. They've set the wiki up with a rather short-sighted password policy: any editor can set a password on any page that can protect that page from being edited or even being seen by anyone else. I'm having difficulty finding any pages that don't have passwords set...
I doubt they'll ever get around to normalising the pricing, actually. Amazon has never had reliable information about classical recordings -- sometimes their metadata lists title-plus-composer, sometimes title-plus-performer, sometimes just title, and to find out e.g. who the conductor is you have to look at the scanned images of the CD booklet (as with the Prokofiev symphonies, for example) -- but those don't always give full information either. Amazon's always had similar problems with translated books (they give details of the translator only erratically). I would venture a guess that these peculiarities are here to stay. Unless, say, Naxos pipes up and starts complaining about how suddenly their recordings are the most expensive on the market.
is amazing! Prokofiev symphony #2 revealed 156 hits! Now that is some obscure music (his least popular symphony), and the fact that they would have multiple recordings of it right there for 90c... wow.
Just for some balance,
only a few of those hits are actually for Prokofiev's 2nd symphony;
only three separate recordings are available;
with one of them (the Ukraine National Symphony Orchestra recording), you're going to be paying that 90c for each and every variation in the second movement, for a total of $7.20 for that one movement. With the other two recordings (LSO and Berliner Phil.), you have to buy all the symphonies just to get number two, as number two is marked as "album only".
I mean, it seems to me like they're on the right track, but someone hasn't put too much thought into the fact that classical music tends to have a lot of very short and very long tracks. Evidence of this -- compare the prices for the complete set of Prokofiev symphonies in those three recordings:
Naxos (Ukrainian/Polish orchestras) -- $65.02
LSO/Gergiev -- $36.12
Berliner Philharmoniker/Dzawa -- $21.67
Who's going to pay more than three times as much for a Naxos set as for the Berliner Philharmoniker???
Do you think it'll encourage more than 8% of journeys to be made by rail?
Just for some perspective, Germany's 7.77% (according to those figures) is not half bad, as train statistics go. Only Hungary, Switzerland, and Japan have significantly greater train use -- a whole bunch of OECD countries are bunched up with Germany. Plus I'm not sure I have much faith in those figures -- apparently in my country, no one ever travels at all:-)
Or is it just a way for politicians to make themselves look good while wasting vast quantities of money?
I don't know enough about Munich politics to comment. But the S-Bahn trip between the airport and the city could do with being a lot quicker (though it's still a lot better than many major cities, *cough*New York*cough*). I don't know if maglev is the best option though.
Please ignore circletimessquare. S/he would make a terrible teacher: sink-or-swim is the second-worst approach to communicating information that there is. -- the worst being not to try to communicate it at all.
There's also the fact that good communication requires occasional punctuation; so I would take the parent's remarks about high-quality communication with a grain of salt anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. Here are the bids at the moment --
-- why am I not surprised?
For the programmers out there:
Fiddle != Violin
Well, the bit in the brackets is accurate at least. The site you cite doesn't back you up: --
differences between violin and fiddle musicNote: it's not talking about differences between "violin and fiddle", but differences between violin music and fiddle music. Just for interest, from the OED:
fiddle, n. 1. a. A stringed instrument of music; usually, the violin, but also (with defining word as in bass fiddle) applied to other instruments of the viol kind. Now only in familiar or contemptuous use.So, just to clarify: Fiddle == Violin.
And Nero? You're right in the inconsequential sense that the instrument he was playing happens to have been a lyre, not a violin; but in every essential respect, historical fact matches the legend. (Except the bit about him starting the fire, which is almost certainly just wrong.)
That does make more sense, though I'm not sure why you call it "deevolution". Isn't it simply a shift from suffixes to prefixes (though modern English is also gradually acquiring a set of infixes as well)? I suppose there may be some finely-honed distinction between suffixes and case-endings, but I should imagine it's a bit of an arbitrary one. In any case, I find the extraordinarily strict word-order in some modern languages such as English and French is anything but ambiguous!
Well, fair enough. I got burnt one time, that's all :-) More an issue with the mastering than with the orchestra itself, it has to be said.
Have you ever met a pair of "newlyweddeds"?
I don't know what you're talking about, actually, because it's not clear what you mean by "deevolution". If you mean "simplification", that would be wrong. Over centuries, the main morphological trend is generally not from "complex" to "simple", but from "strong" forms to "weak" forms. That is a never-ending cycle, because different forms become the new weak ones, so that weak forms eventually become strong. Repeat ad infinitum.
Example: in some Germanic languages, -en is the weak plural ending. In English, -en is used on only a handful of nouns (children, oxen, and some more archaic ones like brethren and eyen); -s is now the weak plural ending. Someday, no doubt, some new plural ending will come along which will become the new default, and -s will gradually become a strong form.
(I had a bunch of other examples to reel off, but listing them would be about as geeky as writing out my own "Hello world" script in Bronze Age Greek.)
I see no problem whatsoever with this. If the sellers are sensible, they will price the product at the price the market will bear: people will pay more for things they particularly want. Sure, a set of Beethoven's symphonies can go for USD$ 18.98 if they're performed by the Dresden Philharmonic, or for USD$ 67.98 if they're conducted by Georg Solti or John Eliot Gardiner. That's absolutely fine: if people are willing to pay more for Solti and JEG, all well and good; if they're not, there's the Dresden Philharmonic. Same with contemporary music. If people are willing to pay $60 for an album by Celine Dion, well, it sucks to be them. Or maybe not, from their point of view: if they're willing to pay the price, clearly it's worth it to them. Personally, I'll be the one browsing through the Naxos CDs, more often than not, but that's fine.
Variation in pricing is a good thing, if the variation reflects demand for the product. You wouldn't expect to have to pay the same for an ersatz coffee maker as for a Krups; so why would you expect to have to pay the same for the Bavarian Radio Orchestra as for Karajan?
Speak for yourself! For my part, I am a customer. Potentially.
More than two hundred, actually, according to the OED. I posted this elsewhere on this page, but here's the relevant snippet:
There exists, however, an American copper token, commonly called the Washington cent, bearing on one side a head in a wreath with the legend 'Washington and Independence', and date '1783'; on the other the words, 'One Cent', and the exergue . But it is not certain that 1783 represents the date of issue; this token was probably struck as late as 1789, the date 1783 being merely that of the conclusion of the War of Independence.No, they didn't, though the word does come from the Latin word for 'a hundred', centum (cognate with English hundred via Gothic hund, if anyone's interested).
The earliest uses of the word as a monetary unit are summed up by the OED as follows (interesting stuff, much more detail than they give for most words):
Apparently the first mention of cent occurs in the letter of Robert Morris to the U.S. Congress in 1782, suggesting that the American monetary unit should be the of a dollar, and that a coin equal to 100 of these or of a dollar (about 3d. Eng.) should be made, and called a cent. This proposal was not taken up; but it may have suggested the name 'cent' for the coin = of a dollar, ordained by the Continental Congress on 8 August 1786 (see quot.). There exists, however, an American copper token, commonly called the Washington cent, bearing on one side a head in a wreath with the legend 'Washington and Independence', and date '1783'; on the other the words, 'One Cent', and the exergue . But it is not certain that 1783 represents the date of issue; this token was probably struck as late as 1789, the date 1783 being merely that of the conclusion of the War of Independence. Previously to the coining of the cent, or of a dollar, and down to 1789, accounts were kept in dollars and ninetieths, a relic of the time when the Spanish piastre or piece of eight reals, called by the colonists 'dollar', was worth 7s. 6d. (90 pence) of the money of account of Maryland and Pennsylvania. (From notes communicated by the late Prof. J. W. Andrews of Marietta Coll., Ohio.)According to Wikipedia it was the Vienna branch of Rockstar that developed it (or at least started the development). Not in the UK, but within the EU. I imagine Rockstar could get into all kinds of trouble for doing what you suggest. (Pity.)
The answer is simple. You are infringing copyright when you do that. Ever seen a label like this? --
WARNING - Copyright subsists in all recordings issued under this label. Any unauthorised broadcasting, public performance, copying, re-recording in any manner whatsoever will constitute infringementThey really mean that. They just don't have the apparatus to catch you. They do routinely dog people who have the temerity to have a radio on in a restaurant; once they're allowed inside your home -- and you probably already own some hardware that does allow them in, just not your hi-fi -- they'll go after you too.
How often do you post comments on Slashdot? I guess I mean: do you post under sockpuppet accounts?
I've never used Photoshop, so for what it's worth, this is the opinion of one unbiased user.
When I first went looking for image editing software, I tried the GIMP. Then I tried GIMPShop and found it a lot easier. Then I discovered Paint.net and heaved a huge sigh of relief. It's not just about familiarity. The GIMP isn't exactly painful to use, it's just opaque: the interface has a lot of randomness, no default settings are ever remembered for anything, the terminology is incomprehensible.
For what it's worth, I still keep GIMPShop installed for the few things I need to do that Paint.net can't. But that's not many: the library of plugins available for Paint.net is enough to keep most amateurs happy. (Of course there are a good few things that I'd like that the GIMP can't do either, such as arbitrary colour-depth.)
What does the meaning of "going forward" mean? Has this submitted story been submitted as a story by the Department of Redundancy Department?
... with the minor difference that the FSF isn't going to go selling your code under a proprietary licence later.
And the same reply that you got there deserves to be posted here: how is anyone going to tell that TrueCrypt is being used in the first place? That's why TrueCrypt advertises itself as having two levels of plausible deniability. Maybe you should learn how it works before spreading FUD.
For reference, Dan Castellaneta played Nordom -- it takes a fair while to encounter him. Still, among the most memorable characters. I used to have Nordom quotes for most of my system sounds. "Affirmatory." "My analysis is correct. Danger! Danger!" "Annah, Morte wishes to snuggle with your pillows." etc.
Not so fast. They've set the wiki up with a rather short-sighted password policy: any editor can set a password on any page that can protect that page from being edited or even being seen by anyone else. I'm having difficulty finding any pages that don't have passwords set ...
Hmm ... loathing of government for no stated reason ... high probability of right-wing lean ... posting as AC ... do I detect a denizen of nz.general?
OT. Can I just that yours is the first sig to make me laugh out loud in a long time?
I doubt they'll ever get around to normalising the pricing, actually. Amazon has never had reliable information about classical recordings -- sometimes their metadata lists title-plus-composer, sometimes title-plus-performer, sometimes just title, and to find out e.g. who the conductor is you have to look at the scanned images of the CD booklet (as with the Prokofiev symphonies, for example) -- but those don't always give full information either. Amazon's always had similar problems with translated books (they give details of the translator only erratically). I would venture a guess that these peculiarities are here to stay. Unless, say, Naxos pipes up and starts complaining about how suddenly their recordings are the most expensive on the market.
Just for some balance,
I mean, it seems to me like they're on the right track, but someone hasn't put too much thought into the fact that classical music tends to have a lot of very short and very long tracks. Evidence of this -- compare the prices for the complete set of Prokofiev symphonies in those three recordings:
Who's going to pay more than three times as much for a Naxos set as for the Berliner Philharmoniker???
Just for some perspective, Germany's 7.77% (according to those figures) is not half bad, as train statistics go. Only Hungary, Switzerland, and Japan have significantly greater train use -- a whole bunch of OECD countries are bunched up with Germany. Plus I'm not sure I have much faith in those figures -- apparently in my country, no one ever travels at all :-)
Or is it just a way for politicians to make themselves look good while wasting vast quantities of money?I don't know enough about Munich politics to comment. But the S-Bahn trip between the airport and the city could do with being a lot quicker (though it's still a lot better than many major cities, *cough*New York*cough*). I don't know if maglev is the best option though.
Dear OP,
Please ignore circletimessquare. S/he would make a terrible teacher: sink-or-swim is the second-worst approach to communicating information that there is. -- the worst being not to try to communicate it at all.
There's also the fact that good communication requires occasional punctuation; so I would take the parent's remarks about high-quality communication with a grain of salt anyway.