"If I have a CD full of 0's it should be played as silence. If I have a CD full of maximum amplitude sound it should be played at the maximum amplitude the system is capable of, given the current volume setting."
If the system was implemented as you seem to think it is, then there would be noticeable quantisation effects -- piano notes for example would initially decay smoothly until a certain volume level was reached, after which there would be perceptible steps. The reason for this is that our perception of volume is logarithmic, so we are capable of distinguishing minute differences in sound pressure level at the low-volume end of the scale, but require progressively larger differences as the pressure level rises, and it is the quiet end of the scale that would suffer if one attempted to represent ranges larger than 96 db with 16 bits. Note that quantisation effects would be quite noticeable even with pop and rock music, because they still contain instruments (e.g. drums) with envelopes that are susceptible to "steppiness".
"Your ears (and eyes) have a tremendous dynamic range, but they can't distinguish that finely between individual levels within that range."
Ears and eyes are completely different organs that are processed by separate areas of the brain. You cannot therefore make assumptions about one based on the other, any more than you can make assumptions about touch based on what you know about the sense of smell.
"We can hear a whisper and a jet plane taking off, but we can't distinguish between the loudness of jet plane A and jet plane B because the difference is too small."
Ears are logarithmic: we can distinguish between the relative volumes of two quiet sounds with great precision, but require progressively larger volume differences as the overall sound pressure rises.
"The original point was that I think the music industry hit the ceiling when they issued CDs. Almost everybody realized that there was little point in paying to go higher than that."
What you said was as follows:
"44 KHz (22 KHz Nyquist frequency) gives a decent safety margin. 16-bits is quite a bit finer than people's senses can reasonably register as far as intensity goes, certainly for light and I suspect for sound as well, particularly in an environment with noise (and every environment has some noise)."
Neither of those points was correct. Our ears are perfectly capable of handling a lot more than 90db of dynamic range, and sounds well above 22KHz can interact in ways that result in waveforms at audible frequencies.
As to whether it is worth paying for something better than CDs, that depends on many factors: what sort of music one listens to; how good one's audio system is; how well one's brain has been trained to listen instead of just hear; etc., etc. In my case for example, CDs are perfectly adequate, because my musical tastes are mostly based around recordings that were made on equipment which was in most respects inferior to them, while the vast majority of others are limited by the quality of the equipment used to play CDs, not the CDs themselves. It is in essence much like the HD TV debate: there's no point paying for a high-definition playback system and the media for it if you are going to view them on a TV set which is only capable of standard definition, or has a screen that is small enough to make the differences largely imperceptible.
I could earn a fortune as a patent examiner, then. For each twenty applications, alternately take the top or bottom one from the pile, reject it, and rubber stamp all the rest. I'm willing to bet that the number of frivolous patents that got admitted by such a process would be no higher than those who are spending 14 hours on each of them, so my system would get the same overall result, but only requires a minute or so per application. OK, so some perpetual motion machines or time cubes end up being patented, but the amount of total crap that they already allow makes contravening a few basic laws of physics look like a fairly minor technical point which, like all such technical points, can be satisfactorily resolved by lawyers, judges, and the ultimate experts, a jury.
Or for those really special occasions, a super-size MacBollinger in one of those plastic cups that looks like a little champagne bucket complete with a gold-coloured straw.
Especially when the solution is simply not to bother with such topics, just as one would with any other that covers something which is of no interest or relevance to the reader
"Human hearing typically extends up to 18 - 20 KHz for young people, less the older you get. So 44 KHz (22 KHz Nyquist frequency) gives a decent safety margin."
Many acoustic musical instruments do however produce harmonics well above the 22KHz threshold, and these in their turn generate audible beat frequencies when interacting with other instruments. This is the reason why tweeters for high-end audio systems are capable of reproducing frequencies well above the top threshold of human hearing (40KHz is not uncommon where price is no object), as do some studio microphones. Recording these beat frequencies themselves is _not_ the same as generating them from harmonic information contained in a recording. One reason for many audiophiles claiming that vinyl recordings sound better than CDs despite a much lower signal / noise ratio is because the best ones contain frequencies up to 50KHz, so they supply a far more realistic audio environment than a system that is limited to 22KHz. Some studio engineers refer to this as "voodoo", because recordings with an ultrasonic component shouldn't sound better on paper, but a number of blind tests have shown that in the real world, they do.
"16-bits is quite a bit finer than people's senses can reasonably register as far as intensity goes, certainly for light and I suspect for sound as well, particularly in an environment with noise (and every environment has some noise)."
16 bits has a maximum dynamic range of 96 db, but even the best CDs and players actually produce about 90 db. The human ear's dynamic range is around 130 db (quietist sound to threshold of pain), so our ears have more about 10,000 times as much dynamic range as CDs. 24 bit sound has an _effective_ (rather than theoretical) dynamic range of between 109 db and 120 db, depending on the quality of the converters being used; with good converters, we are thus within a factor of ten of the ear's own limits. 24 bits will therefore sound better given a system of sufficient quality (and of course a listener who doesn't think that low-quality car stereos running at 25% distortion sound great).
"For listening purposes, the music companies giving us 44 KHz 16-bit music is all you'll ever need, although they'd desperately like us to think that even higher quality is worth (re)buying."
It is adequate for most of the systems that will be used to play it, and indeed most listeners. There is however an audible difference between a 96KHz 24 bit master and its destination 44KHz 16 bit destination when both are heard on good equipment that is particular evident with certain types of music.
It's an old analogy, coined when men were men, cats were cats, and bags were bags. In those days, a man would stuff fifty or even a hundred cats into bags before breakfast without even breaking a sweat, go and do a full day's hard manual work, and then stuff another load of cats into bags before supper.
To be fair, there are also plenty of Slashdot stories about the UK, Aus, NZ, China, and lots of other countries when something happens in one of them that geeks find interesting.
"I, for one, sing: Praise spam, from whom all blessings flow, Praise it all admins here below, Praise it above ye SMTP host, Praise Viagra, Teenage Nigerian Nymphomaniacs, and Bill the most. Ahhh-hem"
I agree. Before spam, I lived the miserable life of one who is forced to bear the twin crosses of low libido and a tiny penis. Now, I am the proud bearer of a weapon the size of an 18 wheeler that hot babes I met via yes, SPAM, are queuing to mount, and I can satisfy them 24 hours a day (timed on my new Rolex diamond and 24 karat gold chronograph that they were GIVING WAY for $29.99) thanks to a cupboard filled with viagra plus many other useful prescription meds.
And that's not all! I have an excellent mortgage at really low!!! rates, together with a portfolio of shares in companies that are guaranteed money earners, and am in the process of negotiating a deal with a fellow who has hundreds of millions just beyond his reach, and just needs someone with an account outside his country to funnel it into.
Imagine how stupid I'd feel now if I'd blocked all the messages that ended up changing my life. And they could change your life too, so remember:
SPAM: don't block it, click it!
The Unsolicited Email Marketing Board cannot guarantee that the messages you receive will contain offers like the ones described above, and is not in any way responsible for the contents of solicited Email.
"Microsoft is using Bayesian filtering which way predates Bill's promise."
How can you say such a thing? It is a well known fact that Thomas Bayes plagiarised a paper published in September of 1744 by Microsoft employees working on a new spam filtering system for Outlook. The fact that overran estimated release dates by more than 260 years was solely due to the sort of delays that can and do affect many software development projects.
"What I don't get is how Congress justifies retroactive extension of copyright."
Gifts and money have usually supplied ample justification for all manner of interesting political activities. After all, voters are something you only have to worry about every few years, but a big bank balance and five-star hotel rooms with wall-to-wall hookers are things that benefit you every day.
Don't worry, it will be fixed whenever a major corporation's valuable copyrights are nearing their expiry date, by the simple expedient of shifting the binary representation of the current value one digit to the left.
"It's about controlling access and it always has been."
It is actually (as some have already said) about maximising profit. Controlling access is merely a means to that end, and they are trying to do it because it has been a successful strategy in the past. Note though that they've happily settled for other systems such as levies on blank media in situations where access control was not feasible, so I'm pretty sure they'd be amenable to letting people copy as much as they wanted to in exchange for (for example) 10% of the monthly fee US and European customers pay their ISVs for Internet connections. In fact, there's an excellent chance that they'd jump at such an opportunity, because it would be a guaranteed source of income without the expense and other headaches of DRM schemes (which always end up being cracked anyway) or the negative publicity of court cases.
NB: I am not defending the **AAs of this world, or claiming that levying a tax on Internet users to support them is desirable.
Anyone who actually applies a modicum of intelligence to that article (something which is a required skill with anything from The Register, whose articles should never be taken at face value) will know that what actually says is as follows:
The global recording and film industry has decided that they could earn a lot more money in Europe if certain annoying impediments to bigger profits are removed:
1. Those annoying national royalty collection agencies who stubbornly insist on funnelling large portions of what they collect to pesky, money-grubbing artists.
2. National distribution companies who expect to earn a percentage from each sale for the trivial task of ensuring that national copyright laws are complied with, promotions and the like are in the correct language and in line with national sensibilities, proven and profitable national retail chains are taken advantage of, etc.
3. Dominant DRM schemes that are owned by greedy Microsoft, who actually expect to be _paid by the global media industry_ (shock, horror!) for use of their system, and stubborn Apple, who insist on keeping total control of theirs.
Oh woe is the poor media industry, beset by all these adversities. But wait! There is hope in the form of the European Commission, an organisation more corrupt than the sum of the governments of ten banana republics. Only they can be bribed^H^H^H^H^H^H shown that the current situation of many small different organisations is evil, and must be replaced by one where all licensing, distribution, and DRM technology is owned and administered by a single benevolent media industry monopoly. And we shall tell the world of this via The Register, an organ famed for publishing uncritical paraphrased press releases as articles that even those who claim to be geeks believe.
"George W. Bush said the terrorists are attacking us because they are jealous of our freedoms. Well, I guess this means that if we lose our freedom, the terrorists have won."
You're not being a good patriot. We will have won, because the terrorists will have stopped attacking us. The fact that this is really because the part of the world that lives in Middle-East spanning Sharia-governed Caliphate of Ladenistan is now both freer and richer than us is irrelevant: the they are no longer attacking, and that proves we have won!
To paraphrase a Blairite election slogan: "Tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism".
44KHz is the sampling rate, not the frequency response -- you need at least two samples per audio cycle to prevent aliasing, but more is always better when digitising analogue wave-forms. Note also that 16 bits is the minimum required for acceptable audio rather than the ideal resolution for excellent fidelity, hence the fact that most studio recording equipment uses at least 24 bits with a sampling frequency of 96 KHz per channel.
"Frankly I don't give a shit if your codec cuts off frequencies above 17500 Hz because at age 25, I am incapable of hearing them."
But you are capable of hearing beat frequencies caused by supersonic waves interacting with each-other. Such things can be especially noticeable with acoustic instruments that produce broad bands of non-integral harmonics such as cymbals, and is the reason that most people can tell the difference between real ones and a recording of them.
NB: sub-sonics can also be noticeable, despite the fact that nobody's ears can use anything much below 20hz (unlike high-frequency response, which varies considerable between individuals, the low frequency threshold is fairly constant). However, one can detect such frequencies by body resonance, so it can have an effect on experiencing certain instruments (cathedral organs for example sometimes have pipes whose fundamental is 8hz). Note though that few people listen to recorded music in environments that are large enough for sound waves at that frequency, so even the best commercial loudspeakers rarely bother trying to cope with anything below 20hz (going below 60hz is probably a waste of both effort and space in most domestic settings).
"My point about pricing was not whether or not the market would support it. My point was, just becuase someone charges a lot for something you like doesn't make it alright to break the law"
If enough of a population which is subject to a law believes that said law is unjust, then breaking it in large numbers is a historically valid way of getting it changed. Many people (myself included, and I have been both a professional musician and professional software developer) believe that copyright laws have been progressively manipulated over the years until consumer rights have become virtually non-existent. Whenever some big corporation's property is at the point of passing into the public domain, they pay political shills to increase the copyright period, until we have reached a point where the original 20 years has been extended until nothing that is released today is likely to enter the public domain in either the life time of anybody old enough to read this, or the life time of any children they may have. The music industry complained about home taping until they got levies placed on blank tapes, yet they still maintain the right to prosecute people who use those tapes to distribute the copyrighted materials that they already paid to do with the levy; ditto for blank CDs; they complained about home copying via the Internet until what was a civil offence became a criminal one, thereby getting tax payers (i.e. everyone) to bear the cost of protecting their materials. And this isn't anything like an exhaustive list of the media industry's abuses of consumers (DMCA!).
Something needs to be done to bring things back into balance, and if breaking the current laws in numbers sufficient to make enforcing them both impractical and massively unpopular is the only way to do this, then so be it.
"I still feel my sotware analogy is viable."
I don't. I will list three ways that software differs from music / movies / whatever; there are many others, but space precludes an exhaustive list:
1. Computer software _requires_ a computer to run, whereas music or movies _can_ be played on a computer. 2. Software governs the way a computer behaves, and this behaviour can obviously include a variety of protection measures and incentives which help to ensure that people pay the vendor. Software vendors therefore take advantage of copyright laws because they are there, but they do not require them to protect their income. 3. The analogue output from music or movies _is_ the product, because its intended target is the senses of a human being, and those senses are analogue. Computer software on the other hand _may_ have some sort of human-percievable analogue output, but it is by no means a requirement: OS kernels, network and storage drivers, and the collection of programs that operate most of the Internet are all examples of software that most computer users don't even know is there because their I/O is not intended for human senses. Music and movies will thus remain copyable irrespective of any technological measures that are applied to the source signal by the simple expedient of recording the final output that is intended for our ears and eyes.
"if we got rid of charging for software"
As I said in one of my earlier posts, the original poster was advocating and end to _legal_ restrictions on _non-commercial copying_. This is _not_ the same as getting rid of charging for software or anything else.
"IF you don't like the law, work to change it."
History contains many examples where mass breaking of unpopular laws and the consequent jury nullification that resulted from it led to those laws being repealed or modified in ways that the populace was willing to accept. This tends to happen when it is the only form of effective protest that people have, which I would argue is the case with this situation, as sending letters or standing around waving placards will not have anything like as big an effect on politicians as fat bribe from a media industry "lobby group", with the promise of
And if Jill is a fat lump who weighs more than Jack, then Jack should get all the cake because Jill shouldn't be eating cakes at all.
NB: I am a fat lump (or in these politically correct times, a "circumferentially challenged person"), so I cannot by definition be accused of being a weightist.
Slashdot Mirror
"If I have a CD full of 0's it should be played as silence. If I have a CD full of maximum amplitude sound it should be played at the maximum amplitude the system is capable of, given the current volume setting."
If the system was implemented as you seem to think it is, then there would be noticeable quantisation effects -- piano notes for example would initially decay smoothly until a certain volume level was reached, after which there would be perceptible steps. The reason for this is that our perception of volume is logarithmic, so we are capable of distinguishing minute differences in sound pressure level at the low-volume end of the scale, but require progressively larger differences as the pressure level rises, and it is the quiet end of the scale that would suffer if one attempted to represent ranges larger than 96 db with 16 bits. Note that quantisation effects would be quite noticeable even with pop and rock music, because they still contain instruments (e.g. drums) with envelopes that are susceptible to "steppiness".
"Your ears (and eyes) have a tremendous dynamic range, but they can't distinguish that finely between individual levels within that range."
Ears and eyes are completely different organs that are processed by separate areas of the brain. You cannot therefore make assumptions about one based on the other, any more than you can make assumptions about touch based on what you know about the sense of smell.
"We can hear a whisper and a jet plane taking off, but we can't distinguish between the loudness of jet plane A and jet plane B because the difference is too small."
Ears are logarithmic: we can distinguish between the relative volumes of two quiet sounds with great precision, but require progressively larger volume differences as the overall sound pressure rises.
"The original point was that I think the music industry hit the ceiling when they issued CDs. Almost everybody realized that there was little point in paying to go higher than that."
What you said was as follows:
"44 KHz (22 KHz Nyquist frequency) gives a decent safety margin. 16-bits is quite a bit finer than people's senses can reasonably register as far as intensity goes, certainly for light and I suspect for sound as well, particularly in an environment with noise (and every environment has some noise)."
Neither of those points was correct. Our ears are perfectly capable of handling a lot more than 90db of dynamic range, and sounds well above 22KHz can interact in ways that result in waveforms at audible frequencies.
As to whether it is worth paying for something better than CDs, that depends on many factors: what sort of music one listens to; how good one's audio system is; how well one's brain has been trained to listen instead of just hear; etc., etc. In my case for example, CDs are perfectly adequate, because my musical tastes are mostly based around recordings that were made on equipment which was in most respects inferior to them, while the vast majority of others are limited by the quality of the equipment used to play CDs, not the CDs themselves. It is in essence much like the HD TV debate: there's no point paying for a high-definition playback system and the media for it if you are going to view them on a TV set which is only capable of standard definition, or has a screen that is small enough to make the differences largely imperceptible.
I could earn a fortune as a patent examiner, then. For each twenty applications, alternately take the top or bottom one from the pile, reject it, and rubber stamp all the rest. I'm willing to bet that the number of frivolous patents that got admitted by such a process would be no higher than those who are spending 14 hours on each of them, so my system would get the same overall result, but only requires a minute or so per application. OK, so some perpetual motion machines or time cubes end up being patented, but the amount of total crap that they already allow makes contravening a few basic laws of physics look like a fairly minor technical point which, like all such technical points, can be satisfactorily resolved by lawyers, judges, and the ultimate experts, a jury.
Be fair. Those who live in India, or recently emigrated from India could well find that Indian
support is very good indeed.
Maybe it's just me, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the mistake was a deliberate one.
Or for those really special occasions, a super-size MacBollinger in one of those plastic cups that looks like a little champagne bucket complete with a gold-coloured straw.
Especially when the solution is simply not to bother with such topics, just as one would with
any other that covers something which is of no interest or relevance to the reader
"Human hearing typically extends up to 18 - 20 KHz for young people, less the older you get. So 44 KHz (22 KHz Nyquist frequency) gives a decent safety margin."
Many acoustic musical instruments do however produce harmonics well above the 22KHz threshold, and these in their turn generate audible beat frequencies when interacting with other instruments. This is the reason why tweeters for high-end audio systems are capable of reproducing frequencies well above the top threshold of human hearing (40KHz is not uncommon where price is no object), as do some studio microphones. Recording these beat frequencies themselves is _not_ the same as generating them from harmonic information contained in a recording. One reason for many audiophiles claiming that vinyl recordings sound better than CDs despite a much lower signal / noise ratio is because the best ones contain frequencies up to 50KHz, so they supply a far more realistic audio environment than a system that is limited to 22KHz. Some studio engineers refer to this as "voodoo", because recordings with an ultrasonic component shouldn't sound better on paper, but a number of blind tests have shown that in the real world, they do.
"16-bits is quite a bit finer than people's senses can reasonably register as far as intensity goes, certainly for light and I suspect for sound as well, particularly in an environment with noise (and every environment has some noise)."
16 bits has a maximum dynamic range of 96 db, but even the best CDs and players actually produce about 90 db. The human ear's dynamic range is around 130 db (quietist sound to threshold of pain), so our ears have more about 10,000 times as much dynamic range as CDs. 24 bit sound has an _effective_ (rather than theoretical) dynamic range of between 109 db and 120 db, depending on the quality of the converters being used; with good converters, we are thus within a factor of ten of the ear's own limits. 24 bits will therefore sound better given a system of sufficient quality (and of course a listener who doesn't think that low-quality car stereos running at 25% distortion sound great).
"For listening purposes, the music companies giving us 44 KHz 16-bit music is all you'll ever need, although they'd desperately like us to think that even higher quality is worth (re)buying."
It is adequate for most of the systems that will be used to play it, and indeed most listeners. There is however an audible difference between a 96KHz 24 bit master and its destination 44KHz 16 bit destination when both are heard on good equipment that is particular evident with certain types of music.
It's an old analogy, coined when men were men, cats were cats, and bags were bags. In those days, a man would stuff fifty or even a hundred cats into bags before breakfast without even breaking a sweat, go and do a full day's hard manual work, and then stuff another load of cats into bags before supper.
Long, long ago, when the web was young, and "corporate shill" was a word that
people only used to describe politicians.
To be fair, there are also plenty of Slashdot stories about the UK, Aus, NZ, China, and lots of other countries when something happens in one of them that geeks find interesting.
"I, for one, sing:
Praise spam, from whom all blessings flow,
Praise it all admins here below,
Praise it above ye SMTP host,
Praise Viagra, Teenage Nigerian Nymphomaniacs, and Bill the most.
Ahhh-hem"
I agree. Before spam, I lived the miserable life of one who is forced to bear the twin
crosses of low libido and a tiny penis. Now, I am the proud bearer of a weapon the
size of an 18 wheeler that hot babes I met via yes, SPAM, are queuing to mount, and
I can satisfy them 24 hours a day (timed on my new Rolex diamond and 24 karat
gold chronograph that they were GIVING WAY for $29.99) thanks to a cupboard filled
with viagra plus many other useful prescription meds.
And that's not all! I have an excellent mortgage at really low!!! rates, together with a
portfolio of shares in companies that are guaranteed money earners, and am in the
process of negotiating a deal with a fellow who has hundreds of millions just beyond
his reach, and just needs someone with an account outside his country to funnel it into.
Imagine how stupid I'd feel now if I'd blocked all the messages that ended up
changing my life. And they could change your life too, so remember:
SPAM: don't block it, click it!
The Unsolicited Email Marketing Board cannot guarantee that the messages you receive will contain offers like the ones described above, and is not in any way responsible for the contents of solicited Email.
"Microsoft is using Bayesian filtering which way predates Bill's promise."
How can you say such a thing? It is a well known fact that Thomas Bayes plagiarised a
paper published in September of 1744 by Microsoft employees working on a new spam
filtering system for Outlook. The fact that overran estimated release dates by more than
260 years was solely due to the sort of delays that can and do affect many software
development projects.
"If that's what Gates had intended when he made the promise, he was promising something that already existed."
Isn't that what MS always do?
In tests, the new MacBook lasts 4x to 6x longer than the PowerBook on batteries*
*tests compared MacBooks in sleep mode and PowerBooks compressing multiple 10TB video streams with all power-saving features disabled.
"And let's not forget that Disney had the opportunity to do LOTR, but passed on it..."
Thankfully!
"What I don't get is how Congress justifies retroactive extension of copyright."
Gifts and money have usually supplied ample justification for all manner of interesting political activities. After all, voters are something you only have to worry about every few years, but a big bank balance and five-star hotel rooms with wall-to-wall hookers are things that benefit you every day.
Don't worry, it will be fixed whenever a major corporation's valuable copyrights are nearing their expiry date, by the simple expedient of shifting the binary representation of the current value one digit to the left.
"It's about controlling access and it always has been."
It is actually (as some have already said) about maximising profit. Controlling access is merely a means to that end, and they are trying to do it because it has been a successful strategy in the past. Note though that they've happily settled for other systems such as levies on blank media in situations where access control was not feasible, so I'm pretty sure they'd be amenable to letting people copy as much as they wanted to in exchange for (for example) 10% of the monthly fee US and European customers pay their ISVs for Internet connections. In fact, there's an excellent chance that they'd jump at such an opportunity, because it would be a guaranteed source of income without the expense and other headaches of DRM schemes (which always end up being cracked anyway) or the negative publicity of court cases.
NB: I am not defending the **AAs of this world, or claiming that levying a tax on Internet users to support them is desirable.
Anyone who actually applies a modicum of intelligence to that article (something which is a required skill with anything from The Register, whose articles should never be taken at face value) will know that what actually says is as follows:
The global recording and film industry has decided that they could earn a lot more money in Europe if certain annoying impediments to bigger profits are removed:
1. Those annoying national royalty collection agencies who stubbornly insist on funnelling large portions of what they collect to pesky, money-grubbing artists.
2. National distribution companies who expect to earn a percentage from each sale for the trivial task of ensuring that national copyright laws are complied with, promotions and the like are in the correct language and in line with national sensibilities, proven and profitable national retail chains are taken advantage of, etc.
3. Dominant DRM schemes that are owned by greedy Microsoft, who actually expect to be _paid by the global media industry_ (shock, horror!) for use of their system, and stubborn Apple, who insist on keeping total control of theirs.
Oh woe is the poor media industry, beset by all these adversities. But wait! There is hope in the form of the European Commission, an organisation more corrupt than the sum of the governments of ten banana republics. Only they can be bribed^H^H^H^H^H^H shown that the current situation of many small different organisations is evil, and must be replaced by one where all licensing, distribution, and DRM technology is owned and administered by a single benevolent media industry monopoly. And we shall tell the world of this via The Register, an organ famed for publishing uncritical paraphrased press releases as articles that even those who claim to be geeks believe.
"George W. Bush said the terrorists are attacking us because they are jealous of our freedoms. Well, I guess this means that if we lose our freedom, the terrorists have won."
You're not being a good patriot. We will have won, because the terrorists will have stopped attacking us. The fact that this is really because the part of the world that lives in Middle-East spanning Sharia-governed Caliphate of Ladenistan is now both freer and richer than us is irrelevant: the they are no longer attacking, and that proves we have won!
To paraphrase a Blairite election slogan: "Tough on terrorism, tough on the causes of terrorism".
44KHz is the sampling rate, not the frequency response -- you need at least two samples per audio cycle to prevent aliasing, but more is always better when digitising analogue wave-forms. Note also that 16 bits is the minimum required for acceptable audio rather than the ideal resolution for excellent fidelity, hence the fact that most studio recording equipment uses at least 24 bits with a sampling frequency of 96 KHz per channel.
"Frankly I don't give a shit if your codec cuts off frequencies above 17500 Hz because at age 25, I am incapable of hearing them."
But you are capable of hearing beat frequencies caused by supersonic waves interacting with each-other. Such things can be especially noticeable with acoustic instruments that produce broad bands of non-integral harmonics such as cymbals, and is the reason that most people can tell the difference between real ones and a recording of them.
NB: sub-sonics can also be noticeable, despite the fact that nobody's ears can use anything much below 20hz (unlike high-frequency response, which varies considerable between individuals, the low frequency threshold is fairly constant). However, one can detect such frequencies by body resonance, so it can have an effect on experiencing certain instruments (cathedral organs for example sometimes have pipes whose fundamental is 8hz). Note though that few people listen to recorded music in environments that are large enough for sound waves at that frequency, so even the best commercial loudspeakers rarely bother trying to cope with anything below 20hz (going below 60hz is probably a waste of both effort and space in most domestic settings).
Pink noise is bassier. Combine that with a variable-speed square wave generator modulating amplitude, and you'd probably have a recipe for success.
"My point about pricing was not whether or not the market would support it. My point was, just becuase someone charges a lot for something you like doesn't make it alright to break the law"
If enough of a population which is subject to a law believes that said law is unjust, then breaking it in large numbers is a historically valid way of getting it changed. Many people (myself included, and I have been both a professional musician and professional software developer) believe that copyright laws have been progressively manipulated over the years until consumer rights have become virtually non-existent. Whenever some big corporation's property is at the point of passing into the public domain, they pay political shills to increase the copyright period, until we have reached a point where the original 20 years has been extended until nothing that is released today is likely to enter the public domain in either the life time of anybody old enough to read this, or the life time of any children they may have. The music industry complained about home taping until they got levies placed on blank tapes, yet they still maintain the right to prosecute people who use those tapes to distribute the copyrighted materials that they already paid to do with the levy; ditto for blank CDs; they complained about home copying via the Internet until what was a civil offence became a criminal one, thereby getting tax payers (i.e. everyone) to bear the cost of protecting their materials. And this isn't anything like an exhaustive list of the media industry's abuses of consumers (DMCA!).
Something needs to be done to bring things back into balance, and if breaking the current laws in numbers sufficient to make enforcing them both impractical and massively unpopular is the only way to do this, then so be it.
"I still feel my sotware analogy is viable."
I don't. I will list three ways that software differs from music / movies / whatever; there are many others, but space precludes an exhaustive list:
1. Computer software _requires_ a computer to run, whereas music or movies _can_ be played on a computer.
2. Software governs the way a computer behaves, and this behaviour can obviously include a variety of protection measures and incentives which help to ensure that people pay the vendor. Software vendors therefore take advantage of copyright laws because they are there, but they do not require them to protect their income.
3. The analogue output from music or movies _is_ the product, because its intended target is the senses of a human being, and those senses are analogue. Computer software on the other hand _may_ have some sort of human-percievable analogue output, but it is by no means a requirement: OS kernels, network and storage drivers, and the collection of programs that operate most of the Internet are all examples of software that most computer users don't even know is there because their I/O is not intended for human senses. Music and movies will thus remain copyable irrespective of any technological measures that are applied to the source signal by the simple expedient of recording the final output that is intended for our ears and eyes.
"if we got rid of charging for software"
As I said in one of my earlier posts, the original poster was advocating and end to _legal_ restrictions on _non-commercial copying_. This is _not_ the same as getting rid of charging for software or anything else.
"IF you don't like the law, work to change it."
History contains many examples where mass breaking of unpopular laws and the consequent jury nullification that resulted from it led to those laws being repealed or modified in ways that the populace was willing to accept. This tends to happen when it is the only form of effective protest that people have, which I would argue is the case with this situation, as sending letters or standing around waving placards will not have anything like as big an effect on politicians as fat bribe from a media industry "lobby group", with the promise of
And if Jill is a fat lump who weighs more than Jack, then Jack should get all the cake because Jill shouldn't be eating cakes at all.
NB: I am a fat lump (or in these politically correct times, a "circumferentially challenged person"), so I cannot by definition be accused of being a weightist.