The question has been asked innumerable times, "Why is there so much sex and violence on television?" I think the best answer to that question is that the medium of television is particularly suited to certain emotions. Violence, fear, hatred - these are emotions that come across very well on television. They're concrete - ambiguity on TV doesn't work. Same goes for sex - sex is concrete, but abstract feelings such as love, longing, wistfulness, resentment, etc. are much more difficult to adapt to the medium.
The argument has also been made that what is on TV is only "what the people want." I believe that is incorrect. Television is inherently boring; how long would someone watch static footage of something with no action or jump-cuts? What is on TV is there because the material it consists of fits into the narrow range of subject matter that TV is effective at conveying.
Does slashdot intend to run a story every time some social networking site puts the tabs on the left instead of the right or changes the user interface color. Are users still finding people to fuck? Yeah? Then everything is still working just fine so who fucking cares christ goddamn
Getting music equipment manufacturers to adopt standards has always been an exercise in cat-herding. My studio is quite modest, and almost every piece of gear has some interface unique to itself. The sampler has SCSI, the controller keyboard has USB, the audio interface has FireWire, the Roland module has the R-Bus connection that not even Roland uses anymore, there's a synth with a "to-host" serial port.
About the only standard that everyone can agree upon is MIDI (which was adopted jointly by the two heavy-hitter manufacturers back in the day) which is why everything still has a MIDI in and out 25 years later. There are some products that use Ethernet, for example the Muse Receptor, but I think the problem is that nobody wants to adopt a new standard until they're sure everyone else has adopted it, or else it's a wasted investment. I've believed for quite some time now that the major hardware manufacturers need to settle on some kind of MIDI-for-the-21st century specification, but perhaps it's a moot point now as people turn more towards software tools for audio synthesis and production.
I don't want to seem like an ass, but the fact that you are using M-Audio gear indicates to me that you're really not working "pro" audio interfaces (particularly on Mac, since the OS X support for M-Audio is awful).
What do you mean by "pro" audio? Sure, the high end studios may all be using Pro Tools|HD PCI interfaces or Icon consoles, but there are plenty of working musicians who earn a living using Firewire audio interfaces. Pro Tools second-tier audio interfaces, like the Digi 08, the Project 8 control surface/interface and Mbox all use Firewire. Same goes for many of RME's interfaces, Echo Audio's, PreSonus, etc.
The trend has been away from monolithic recording studios for years now. Home studios are becoming project studios, and project studios have sufficient capability to produce commercial albums. Apple may have been happy abandoning these customers - but I can only think it's out of ignorance.
But, as I said on Ars, that's fine. The audio folks will eventually just move to an alternate OS platform.
Small comfort to folks who have dropped $500 on Logic 8 and perhaps hundreds or thousands more on OS-X only plugins.
Have you read the personals lately? When it comes to what most women are looking for, "bald middle-aged guy" is not exactly at the top of the list.
But most women don't look for men in the personals. I've read some Internet personals, and it seems a great majority of the people (both men and women) slapping them down are, frankly, delusional. Many female personal ads appear to be simply laundry lists of requirements apparently in exchange for - a vagina? Often there's absolutely no indication of what SHE intends to bring to a relationship with her hypothetical interweb Brad Pitt except that. Recipie for failure, that is. Men take a different tack; since the odds of success are so low their personals and responses generally consist of "Hey baby, hit me back!" It's unlikely to work, but it saves time in an endeavor that's
unlikely to work anyhow.
At least that's how things seem to be on Craigslist. I can't say if it's different on sites like Match.com, eHarmony, etc (all internet dating sites I've looked at have a scammy feel) and I don't think I'd pay to find out.
I have thought over it many times and, regarding myself, I have concluded: I would prefer to live freely and unobserved and someday die in a terrorist attack, than live in a "security" hell for all my life with cameras and RFIDs up my ass.
It has never been about what you or I want - everyone intellectually knows that the amount of money being spent on surveillance to combat terrorism is orders of magnitude out of proportion to the real threat. Terrorism is the pretext, sure, but these surveillance systems have great value-added functions that finally outshine whatever their original purpose was "supposed" to be.
These people fucked up - by the tenets of capitalism, if they can't survive this on their own, LET THEM FAIL. Oh, boo hoo, a tough few years. Better than going even further into debt just to bail out a few rich pricks who made the mistake of doing things where the benefits were far outweighed by the costs and potential risks.
It's known as the US system of quasi-capitalomarxism called "Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor."
From a liability point of view, it's preferable for automobile manufacturers to have their vehicles only engage safety systems well after human reaction time has been taken out of the equation. If a car started implementing emergency braking, seat belt tightening, etc. while the vehicle still had positive human control one could both imagine and expect endless varieties of "the car made it happen" litigation that would have no target other than the manufacturer.
So long as you build the front and back walls of your house out of mirrors, everything should be OK. Not only will you be able to have the same infinite orthogonal clone army you had when you played with your granny's fold out vanity as a kid, if you cut a small hole in one wall and fire up the LEDs you'll be able to burn your neighbor's house down.
more importantly, free online repositories such as arXiv.org, MIT OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, E2, Project Gutenberg, and even file sharing, have removed traditional barriers to education & knowledge. because of this the internet has the potential to radically change the power dynamics of our society. and all this may be a potential catalyst for sweeping social changes within the next few decades--if we take advantage of this incredible technological boon to humanity.
Education and knowledge in a vacuum is useless, and if one wants to have any chance of applying their education and knowledge then "traditional barriers" are still as firmly in place as they ever were. One can spend all their spare time reading Wikipedia or taking free online courses about recombinant DNA or the Space Shuttle OMS or algorithm optimization, just as one could at a public library with other topics 50 or 100 years ago. However, if one lacks the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to obtain the resources of a college and university, and more importantly the degree that proves you have made your monetary contribution to that system, most of these avenues will be forever closed. The powers that be have a vested interest in making sure that is the case.
I think it's great that websites like Wikipedia and OpenCourseWare exist, don't get me wrong. However, I think wrapping them in some kind of utopian humanist "we are going to enlighten the world and raise up everyone who doesn't have our kind of opportunities" message is dishonest. I'm sure they know that while lack of access to information is a problem, it's neither the only nor even the largest one in terms of shifting the power dynamics of society. It's just the easiest to address. And frankly, why would Stanford, MIT, Wikipedia, E2, or any other organization particularly want a shift of the power dynamics of society?
I believe that some solutions have space being discrete at the Planck length, rather than continuous, and this discreteness also removes singluarities.
I spent $82,000 on tube amplifiers and vintage vinyl, and now you tell me God's system is digital? Auuuugghh...
Now, I'm not an anarchist. I think that we should band together and form governments to stop people from victimizing each other. But that's it. That's the good idea that has gone so horribly wrong all over the world.
-Peter
But for governments to effectively prevent citizens from victimizing each other, they must exercise control over people's companies, money, property, skills, labor, and bodies; which you previously declared as inviolable.
Several years ago I came down with a chronic illness after some kind of massive viral/bacterial infection. Having had quite a bit of experience over the past years with the medical profession, I believe the problem with your idea of an "Apollo program" for biological sciences is that the healthcare industry is already massively overburdened with the diseases we already know about.
When I first became ill, I was naive in thinking that since my illness did not fit into any standard patterns, physicians might be interested in my condition. What I found from the medical profession, however, generally ranged from indifference to outright hostility. Even one of the best neurologists at Mass General told me essentially "Your symptoms are impossible. Why are you malingering?" I actually received the most honest answer from a harried doctor at the local hospital after an excruciating flareup of pain landed me in the ER. "Honestly, we don't know what you have. I doubt anyone will be able to diagnose what you have, because no hospital has the time or the resources. However, since you weren't killed outright by whatever you got, you will probably recover one day." Not the most heartening speech to hear lying in a gurney, but I did appreciate his forthrightness.
It is not in the best interests of either governments, insurance companies, or the healthcare industry to go around turning over metaphorical rocks to find what horrible diseases may be lurking outside of our knowledge. There are already illnesses like Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. that are consistently downplayed as attempting to treat these conditions is a losing proposition for everyone except the patients. Fibromyalgia has finally gained some mainstream recognition, but I think this has to do with the fact that a pharmaceutical company was able to rehash an old medication under a new patent for the treatment of the condition. As far as others are concerned, if the existence and severity of the conditions is downplayed the healthcare industry doesn't have to deal with them, insurance companies do not have to pay for treatment, and governments don't have to fund research or deal with a concerned populace. It is economically and politically more prudent to be willfully ignorant about the threats that aren't known, shut up about the inconvenient ones that are, and let the casualties fall where they may.
Boston Suburbs, USA -
Earthlink DSL, $35 a month for 1.5 down, 768 up. The only other services available in my area are Verizon DSL which require you to sign up for phone service with them, and Comcast which is also a package deal. I desire neither, so my options are limited.
In my (very close) suburb of Boston 768k/128k DSL is $29 a month via Verizon. I have 1.5 mbps through Earthlink for $40 a month. 6mbps service is available through Comcast cable, but you have to subscribe to their digital cable and voice package for $100 a month. FiOS is not available because Verizon has demanded that for the fiber to be run FiOS must be the sole telco broadband provider available in town (I agree with the town, fuck them), so probably not likely soon.
That fucked up bitch never wrote a word that contained a "lesson" other than her pissed offness at the Bolsheviks and their abortion of a regime that looted her father's drugstore. Rand's slapdick followers like Alan Greenspan have been pulling her LF capitalism philosophy for decades now and have led us into the best financial crisis since the 1930s.
If you have small hands and are currently playing a Strat-style guitar, you might want to consider a a guitar with a shorter scale length, such as a Les Paul-style or a Fender Jag-Stang. It'll make fretting that F barre chord much easier.
Imagine you're in NYC before 9/11, and someone takes you to the WTC complex and says "Point out WTC 7." Unless you were intimately familiar with the complex, could you do it? Which building is WTC 3? WTC 5? Is the South Tower WTC 1, and the North WTC 2, or vice versa? Now imagine you're a reporter for the BBC who may have spent a total of a few weeks in the United States. WTC 3 was destroyed in the collapse of WTC 1 and 2, and WTC 5 suffered a partial collapse. Are you absolutely positive that in that position while reporting either the partial collapse of WTC 5 or the total collapse of WTC 3 you might not refer to one as WTC 7?
The Apollo program consisted of 17 manned missions on the Saturn V. Much of the success of the Apollo program can probably be attributed to dumb luck - the Saturn launch vehicle was by no means perfect and had many significant flaws including the well known pogo oscillations in multiple stages that might have cut Apollo 6 and Apollo 13 short before it had even left Earth orbit.
I have no idea why people call the Shuttle Transportation system a disaster - the Shuttle program has had 123 flights, two of which resulted in catastrophic failure. Catastrophic failures in any system almost never occur in isolation; specifically to the Shuttle they were indeed related to flaws in the vehicle design that might have been rectified had the management of NASA and their contractors not become sedentary. They also occurred because of poor judgment calls, unfortunate timing, and just bad luck. Had Challenger not experienced severe wind shear on ascent, the SRB O-rings might not have failed. Had the SRB O-ring blown out away from the external tank, rather than towards, the vehicle might have been able to survive to SRB burnout and perform an abort RTLS or abort transatlantic. This is conjecture of course - but had the Saturn V been used for 123 manned launches instead of 17, there would have been catastrophic vehicle failures.
The sine qua non of a permanent human presence in space is a single stage to orbit vehicle. Going back to Saturn V technology will get you to the moon again, sure, but aside from that it's nothing but a cold war dick-stretching contest. The Shuttle engineers should be commended for pushing the limits of the time, even though their reach exceeded their grasp.
Although 44,100 samples sounds pretty impressive, whatever is in between those samples is lost in the final recording and can make a noticeable difference to the human hear (especially in fast-paced music).
Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
An interesting detail is that Shannon's sampling theorem has a bit of fine print: that a signal sampled at twice its highest frequency is perfectly reconstructable provided that the bit depth is infinite. This makes intuitive sense; the minimum AC voltage level change that is detectable by an n bit ADC is V/2^(n-1), where V is the maximum RMS voltage swing. So for a 16 bit ADC with a 2 volt RMS input that's 60 microvolts. In an ideal ADC signal level changes that are less than 1/2 that amount are going to be quantized down, and vice versa for above. Since you can divide an analog signal into an infinite number of divisions it follows that you'd need measurements of infinite precision to capture the signal with "perfect" resolution.
Of course in practice even with a 16 bit converter those levels are probably well into the noise floor - but mathematically it truly is impossible to digitize a signal and then reproduce it perfectly.
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
In theory a 96khz sampling rate ADC should be superior to 44.1 because it allows the anti-aliasing filter rolloff to be shifted above the range of human hearing, creating a flatter passband. In practice all modern sigma-delta DACs use oversampling, 128x, 256x, whatever the case may be. Not only does this reduce the complexity of the input analog anti-aliasing filter, but it pretty much ensures that even at a 44.1khz sampling rate the passband is essentially flat out past 20khz.
I think the issue you have with "slow output" may have less to do with the sampling rate and more to do with the slew rate of the analog amplifiers and overall design of the DAC - on consumer equipment cost cutting measures have to be made somewhere, and the analog output circuitry is often where it happens. Op-amps with very fast slew rates and ultra-low noise, like the Burr Brown OPA series are far too expensive to use in consumer grade equipment.
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
What is "true to the original source"? If a difference can be heard at a 96khz sampling rate, then the recording has to be made on absolutely top quality recording equipment in a pristine acoustic environment. For recording jazz and classical this may make sense - but for most other genres including pop and rock the "original source" material (guitars, synths, drums etc.) have very little sonic information aside from noise above 12khz or so anyhow, and before being mastered at 96khz have probably been run through dozens or hundreds of bog-standard ICs in mixing consoles, dynamics processors, and effects. In that case it's hard to justify the sonic advantage of the last step in the chain being "true to the original source" when the sound of the original source has already been processed beyond recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
The question has been asked innumerable times, "Why is there so much sex and violence on television?" I think the best answer to that question is that the medium of television is particularly suited to certain emotions. Violence, fear, hatred - these are emotions that come across very well on television. They're concrete - ambiguity on TV doesn't work. Same goes for sex - sex is concrete, but abstract feelings such as love, longing, wistfulness, resentment, etc. are much more difficult to adapt to the medium.
The argument has also been made that what is on TV is only "what the people want." I believe that is incorrect. Television is inherently boring; how long would someone watch static footage of something with no action or jump-cuts? What is on TV is there because the material it consists of fits into the narrow range of subject matter that TV is effective at conveying.
Does slashdot intend to run a story every time some social networking site puts the tabs on the left instead of the right or changes the user interface color. Are users still finding people to fuck? Yeah? Then everything is still working just fine so who fucking cares christ goddamn
Getting music equipment manufacturers to adopt standards has always been an exercise in cat-herding. My studio is quite modest, and almost every piece of gear has some interface unique to itself. The sampler has SCSI, the controller keyboard has USB, the audio interface has FireWire, the Roland module has the R-Bus connection that not even Roland uses anymore, there's a synth with a "to-host" serial port.
About the only standard that everyone can agree upon is MIDI (which was adopted jointly by the two heavy-hitter manufacturers back in the day) which is why everything still has a MIDI in and out 25 years later. There are some products that use Ethernet, for example the Muse Receptor, but I think the problem is that nobody wants to adopt a new standard until they're sure everyone else has adopted it, or else it's a wasted investment. I've believed for quite some time now that the major hardware manufacturers need to settle on some kind of MIDI-for-the-21st century specification, but perhaps it's a moot point now as people turn more towards software tools for audio synthesis and production.
I don't want to seem like an ass, but the fact that you are using M-Audio gear indicates to me that you're really not working "pro" audio interfaces (particularly on Mac, since the OS X support for M-Audio is awful).
What do you mean by "pro" audio? Sure, the high end studios may all be using Pro Tools|HD PCI interfaces or Icon consoles, but there are plenty of working musicians who earn a living using Firewire audio interfaces. Pro Tools second-tier audio interfaces, like the Digi 08, the Project 8 control surface/interface and Mbox all use Firewire. Same goes for many of RME's interfaces, Echo Audio's, PreSonus, etc.
The trend has been away from monolithic recording studios for years now. Home studios are becoming project studios, and project studios have sufficient capability to produce commercial albums. Apple may have been happy abandoning these customers - but I can only think it's out of ignorance.
But, as I said on Ars, that's fine. The audio folks will eventually just move to an alternate OS platform.
Small comfort to folks who have dropped $500 on Logic 8 and perhaps hundreds or thousands more on OS-X only plugins.
Qantas never crashed. But you've got to go to Melbourne to get the plane that flies from Cincinnati to Los Angeles.
Have you read the personals lately? When it comes to what most women are looking for, "bald middle-aged guy" is not exactly at the top of the list.
But most women don't look for men in the personals. I've read some Internet personals, and it seems a great majority of the people (both men and women) slapping them down are, frankly, delusional. Many female personal ads appear to be simply laundry lists of requirements apparently in exchange for - a vagina? Often there's absolutely no indication of what SHE intends to bring to a relationship with her hypothetical interweb Brad Pitt except that. Recipie for failure, that is. Men take a different tack; since the odds of success are so low their personals and responses generally consist of "Hey baby, hit me back!" It's unlikely to work, but it saves time in an endeavor that's unlikely to work anyhow. At least that's how things seem to be on Craigslist. I can't say if it's different on sites like Match.com, eHarmony, etc (all internet dating sites I've looked at have a scammy feel) and I don't think I'd pay to find out.
I have thought over it many times and, regarding myself, I have concluded: I would prefer to live freely and unobserved and someday die in a terrorist attack, than live in a "security" hell for all my life with cameras and RFIDs up my ass.
It has never been about what you or I want - everyone intellectually knows that the amount of money being spent on surveillance to combat terrorism is orders of magnitude out of proportion to the real threat. Terrorism is the pretext, sure, but these surveillance systems have great value-added functions that finally outshine whatever their original purpose was "supposed" to be.
These people fucked up - by the tenets of capitalism, if they can't survive this on their own, LET THEM FAIL. Oh, boo hoo, a tough few years. Better than going even further into debt just to bail out a few rich pricks who made the mistake of doing things where the benefits were far outweighed by the costs and potential risks.
It's known as the US system of quasi-capitalomarxism called "Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor."
From a liability point of view, it's preferable for automobile manufacturers to have their vehicles only engage safety systems well after human reaction time has been taken out of the equation. If a car started implementing emergency braking, seat belt tightening, etc. while the vehicle still had positive human control one could both imagine and expect endless varieties of "the car made it happen" litigation that would have no target other than the manufacturer.
So long as you build the front and back walls of your house out of mirrors, everything should be OK. Not only will you be able to have the same infinite orthogonal clone army you had when you played with your granny's fold out vanity as a kid, if you cut a small hole in one wall and fire up the LEDs you'll be able to burn your neighbor's house down.
That's why all high-quality hotels have mirrored ceilings.
more importantly, free online repositories such as arXiv.org, MIT OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, E2, Project Gutenberg, and even file sharing, have removed traditional barriers to education & knowledge. because of this the internet has the potential to radically change the power dynamics of our society. and all this may be a potential catalyst for sweeping social changes within the next few decades--if we take advantage of this incredible technological boon to humanity.
Education and knowledge in a vacuum is useless, and if one wants to have any chance of applying their education and knowledge then "traditional barriers" are still as firmly in place as they ever were. One can spend all their spare time reading Wikipedia or taking free online courses about recombinant DNA or the Space Shuttle OMS or algorithm optimization, just as one could at a public library with other topics 50 or 100 years ago. However, if one lacks the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to obtain the resources of a college and university, and more importantly the degree that proves you have made your monetary contribution to that system, most of these avenues will be forever closed. The powers that be have a vested interest in making sure that is the case.
I think it's great that websites like Wikipedia and OpenCourseWare exist, don't get me wrong. However, I think wrapping them in some kind of utopian humanist "we are going to enlighten the world and raise up everyone who doesn't have our kind of opportunities" message is dishonest. I'm sure they know that while lack of access to information is a problem, it's neither the only nor even the largest one in terms of shifting the power dynamics of society. It's just the easiest to address. And frankly, why would Stanford, MIT, Wikipedia, E2, or any other organization particularly want a shift of the power dynamics of society?
I believe that some solutions have space being discrete at the Planck length, rather than continuous, and this discreteness also removes singluarities.
I spent $82,000 on tube amplifiers and vintage vinyl, and now you tell me God's system is digital? Auuuugghh...
Now, I'm not an anarchist. I think that we should band together and form governments to stop people from victimizing each other. But that's it. That's the good idea that has gone so horribly wrong all over the world.
-Peter
But for governments to effectively prevent citizens from victimizing each other, they must exercise control over people's companies, money, property, skills, labor, and bodies; which you previously declared as inviolable.
Several years ago I came down with a chronic illness after some kind of massive viral/bacterial infection. Having had quite a bit of experience over the past years with the medical profession, I believe the problem with your idea of an "Apollo program" for biological sciences is that the healthcare industry is already massively overburdened with the diseases we already know about.
When I first became ill, I was naive in thinking that since my illness did not fit into any standard patterns, physicians might be interested in my condition. What I found from the medical profession, however, generally ranged from indifference to outright hostility. Even one of the best neurologists at Mass General told me essentially "Your symptoms are impossible. Why are you malingering?" I actually received the most honest answer from a harried doctor at the local hospital after an excruciating flareup of pain landed me in the ER. "Honestly, we don't know what you have. I doubt anyone will be able to diagnose what you have, because no hospital has the time or the resources. However, since you weren't killed outright by whatever you got, you will probably recover one day." Not the most heartening speech to hear lying in a gurney, but I did appreciate his forthrightness.
It is not in the best interests of either governments, insurance companies, or the healthcare industry to go around turning over metaphorical rocks to find what horrible diseases may be lurking outside of our knowledge. There are already illnesses like Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. that are consistently downplayed as attempting to treat these conditions is a losing proposition for everyone except the patients. Fibromyalgia has finally gained some mainstream recognition, but I think this has to do with the fact that a pharmaceutical company was able to rehash an old medication under a new patent for the treatment of the condition. As far as others are concerned, if the existence and severity of the conditions is downplayed the healthcare industry doesn't have to deal with them, insurance companies do not have to pay for treatment, and governments don't have to fund research or deal with a concerned populace. It is economically and politically more prudent to be willfully ignorant about the threats that aren't known, shut up about the inconvenient ones that are, and let the casualties fall where they may.
Boston Suburbs, USA - Earthlink DSL, $35 a month for 1.5 down, 768 up. The only other services available in my area are Verizon DSL which require you to sign up for phone service with them, and Comcast which is also a package deal. I desire neither, so my options are limited.
An artist's conception of a dual shuttle rescue mission is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MPTbSJH0lE
In my (very close) suburb of Boston 768k/128k DSL is $29 a month via Verizon. I have 1.5 mbps through Earthlink for $40 a month. 6mbps service is available through Comcast cable, but you have to subscribe to their digital cable and voice package for $100 a month. FiOS is not available because Verizon has demanded that for the fiber to be run FiOS must be the sole telco broadband provider available in town (I agree with the town, fuck them), so probably not likely soon.
That fucked up bitch never wrote a word that contained a "lesson" other than her pissed offness at the Bolsheviks and their abortion of a regime that looted her father's drugstore. Rand's slapdick followers like Alan Greenspan have been pulling her LF capitalism philosophy for decades now and have led us into the best financial crisis since the 1930s.
If you have small hands and are currently playing a Strat-style guitar, you might want to consider a a guitar with a shorter scale length, such as a Les Paul-style or a Fender Jag-Stang. It'll make fretting that F barre chord much easier.
Imagine you're in NYC before 9/11, and someone takes you to the WTC complex and says "Point out WTC 7." Unless you were intimately familiar with the complex, could you do it? Which building is WTC 3? WTC 5? Is the South Tower WTC 1, and the North WTC 2, or vice versa? Now imagine you're a reporter for the BBC who may have spent a total of a few weeks in the United States. WTC 3 was destroyed in the collapse of WTC 1 and 2, and WTC 5 suffered a partial collapse. Are you absolutely positive that in that position while reporting either the partial collapse of WTC 5 or the total collapse of WTC 3 you might not refer to one as WTC 7?
The Apollo program consisted of 17 manned missions on the Saturn V. Much of the success of the Apollo program can probably be attributed to dumb luck - the Saturn launch vehicle was by no means perfect and had many significant flaws including the well known pogo oscillations in multiple stages that might have cut Apollo 6 and Apollo 13 short before it had even left Earth orbit.
I have no idea why people call the Shuttle Transportation system a disaster - the Shuttle program has had 123 flights, two of which resulted in catastrophic failure. Catastrophic failures in any system almost never occur in isolation; specifically to the Shuttle they were indeed related to flaws in the vehicle design that might have been rectified had the management of NASA and their contractors not become sedentary. They also occurred because of poor judgment calls, unfortunate timing, and just bad luck. Had Challenger not experienced severe wind shear on ascent, the SRB O-rings might not have failed. Had the SRB O-ring blown out away from the external tank, rather than towards, the vehicle might have been able to survive to SRB burnout and perform an abort RTLS or abort transatlantic. This is conjecture of course - but had the Saturn V been used for 123 manned launches instead of 17, there would have been catastrophic vehicle failures.
The sine qua non of a permanent human presence in space is a single stage to orbit vehicle. Going back to Saturn V technology will get you to the moon again, sure, but aside from that it's nothing but a cold war dick-stretching contest. The Shuttle engineers should be commended for pushing the limits of the time, even though their reach exceeded their grasp.
I didn't mean to post as an AC - I did not notice that I wasn't logged in.
Er, no. It's all about frequency content. Whether events in a musical piece occur at 10 Hz or 3 Hz, a sample rate in the multi-kilohertz range will have no problem picking them up. The signal in between the samples is perfectly reconstructable up to frequencies of half the sample rate.
An interesting detail is that Shannon's sampling theorem has a bit of fine print: that a signal sampled at twice its highest frequency is perfectly reconstructable provided that the bit depth is infinite. This makes intuitive sense; the minimum AC voltage level change that is detectable by an n bit ADC is V/2^(n-1), where V is the maximum RMS voltage swing. So for a 16 bit ADC with a 2 volt RMS input that's 60 microvolts. In an ideal ADC signal level changes that are less than 1/2 that amount are going to be quantized down, and vice versa for above. Since you can divide an analog signal into an infinite number of divisions it follows that you'd need measurements of infinite precision to capture the signal with "perfect" resolution. Of course in practice even with a 16 bit converter those levels are probably well into the noise floor - but mathematically it truly is impossible to digitize a signal and then reproduce it perfectly.
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
In theory a 96khz sampling rate ADC should be superior to 44.1 because it allows the anti-aliasing filter rolloff to be shifted above the range of human hearing, creating a flatter passband. In practice all modern sigma-delta DACs use oversampling, 128x, 256x, whatever the case may be. Not only does this reduce the complexity of the input analog anti-aliasing filter, but it pretty much ensures that even at a 44.1khz sampling rate the passband is essentially flat out past 20khz.
I think the issue you have with "slow output" may have less to do with the sampling rate and more to do with the slew rate of the analog amplifiers and overall design of the DAC - on consumer equipment cost cutting measures have to be made somewhere, and the analog output circuitry is often where it happens. Op-amps with very fast slew rates and ultra-low noise, like the Burr Brown OPA series are far too expensive to use in consumer grade equipment.
DVDs allow for a higher sampling rates, so less sound is lost. The sound, as a result, is more true to the original source. Currently, DVD movies use 96,000 samples per second or higher.
What is "true to the original source"? If a difference can be heard at a 96khz sampling rate, then the recording has to be made on absolutely top quality recording equipment in a pristine acoustic environment. For recording jazz and classical this may make sense - but for most other genres including pop and rock the "original source" material (guitars, synths, drums etc.) have very little sonic information aside from noise above 12khz or so anyhow, and before being mastered at 96khz have probably been run through dozens or hundreds of bog-standard ICs in mixing consoles, dynamics processors, and effects. In that case it's hard to justify the sonic advantage of the last step in the chain being "true to the original source" when the sound of the original source has already been processed beyond recognition.