The HOA in my neighborhood hasn't socialized shit. They haven't even built the park that was supposed to be built 10 years ago. The closest thing we have to a park is the drainage ditch behind the neighborhood, which if you bicycle down, you can access both the garbage dump and a state prison. They definitely made sure to clear out all of the trees from the supposed park site to build more houses on, though.
The country has become a mockery of a lot of things, but as for invading NK - were there any incentive to do so - there are at least two countries off the top of my head who would also be sending soldiers: South Korea and Japan. Now if some unforeseen event happens so that attacking NK would be warranted, you could probably add a couple more Asian countries to the list, plus Australia and the majority of the EU, to the coalition. Hmm, where have I heard that phrase before, "coalition forces"...
Often times, HOA rules will change through committees or votes held at meetings, etc. I imagine there is a clause in most HOA agreements that rules can change through a specific process that you sign off on in the paperwork.
Now, in my experience they also don't notify you of pending changes, so it's still pretty shady. Once while I was biking through my neighborhood on a route I don't usually take, I happened to go by the elementary school. There was a small sign next to the driveway where people drop off their kids about a HOA meeting coming up. I've been in this neighborhood 10 years and that's the only time I've seen such a sign. Maybe they only want people with a child aged 5 - 10 to know about the meetings? (Seems plausible, actually.)
Because they use it as a tool to give an air of scientific legitimacy to otherwise shaky accusations. The truth often isn't their first priority, to say the least.
What was that Shakespeare quote, "A piece of crap by any other name..."? I don't need my media player installing auto-starting services that run with elevated privileges. That's a page right out of MS' "run everything as admin" book from 10 years ago. Even if there is a feature that does need admin privileges (haven't heard one yet), those things need to be done as plugins/components that can be disabled so the 80% of users that don't need it don't have to run it. Even just as a music player, iTunes is way behind on feature parity with foobar2000.
I know both 62-year-old grandmothers and 10-year-olds who use Skype regularly (and not just that one pair). Not frequently, but regularly. Hardly ubergeeks, these people can't download pictures from a digital camera. Skype is also making inroads with people who call internationally. They start using Skype for voice because it's cheaper than an international calling plan plus fees, then they end up trying out the video feature since it's right there.
MS has been up and down. Windows from inception through Vista was pretty bad, but 7 isn't bad at all. 8 has that terrible UI, but that can be replaced with less effort than changing window managers in Linux. Hopefully it's something MS will abandon completely as the negative publicity continues.
You're conflating a lot of different people into "we", nobody who understands how Bitcoin works (and certainly not the dude who created it) claimed it was private or untraceable. There are shady people who did try to use that as a selling point, but there's just as many shady people working with dollars or euros.
As for people "losing their shirts", it's clear by this time that BitCoin is too volatile to invest in or even hold on to for more than a few days. It's used as an intermediate currency. A guy in the US buys some BTC with dollars, then makes a transaction in BTC with a Russian. The Russian exchanges BTC to rubles on his end. Or maybe he uses the BTC to buy a Tesla or a computer from Dell or certain other items that are payable in BTC. Either way, the Bitcoins are "cashed out" at some point, and the smart people do it sooner rather than later. I see the lack of legitimate "cash out" options as being one way Bitcoin might die, but that will be a slow process as the cash-out options are distributed among many different nations, exchanges, and companies.
I wouldn't call it "biting the dust" yet. If the summary is correct, one wallet used as an intermediate to their offline storage was compromised, and Bitstamp has enough assets to replace the missing coins and continue operating. It's like Wal-Mart having one of their cash registers robbed.
Granted that's a pretty big "if", but it's the way they SHOULD be operating, especially after MtGox. If the site is still down a week or two later with nothing but empty platitudes from the operators, then you can call it as a MtGox.
Google changed their search quite a few years ago (2010? earlier?) to take boolean operators as more of a suggestion. You can still use them, and they still change the search results, but it would not literally exclude every page with the word "ferguson".
It might just be that the ratio of crap to cream on the internet is worse. In 1998, generally you didn't have a web site without something important to say. Or, if it was a personal web site on GeoCities or Angelfire, the nature of the site would be obvious from the URL, not to mention the content and layout. Computing power has been improving, but that doesn't mean search results improve. That requires a better search algorithm which is a different thing entirely.
For my two cents, I haven't noticed any reduction in search result quality during that time.
What's wrong with both? I stream music at work when I just need background noise and don't particularly care what songs get played. I buy or torrent music for home when I know an album is good and want to keep it in perpetuity without it being subject to the whims of corporate licensing. I guess if you're the kind of person who only ever listened to the radio, streaming services would substitute perfectly for that (though still at cost). It doesn't replace a music archive in your actual ownership.
Going to garage sales and secondhand shops for vinyl is a crapshoot. Whenever I do that, I never expect to come out with a listenable record anymore, I'm basically shopping for cover art. Even a record that looks shiny and clean can be worn to hell from being played a lot (or a little, with a damaged stylus). Not to mention the vast majority of records are crap, any good ones get snatched up very quickly. Places that are more selective about which records they put on sale have the price go up accordingly. This includes online places like eBay and GEMM where you do the selecting. New records might be anywhere from $10-40, depending on if it's a 7", 2xLP, or 3xLP (which are more common now that people are stuffing CD-length releases onto wax).
Well, they have to find some way to keep people at work 8-9 hours a day in the age of robotics. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any more indentured servants!
Hipsters are buying cassettes. Vinyl is too mainstream for them now. I know of several bands who have put out cassette releases in the past 5 years, usually they are limited-run, or only sold at shows, to maximize the hip factor. Vinyl at least gives you much better cover art and looks good on a wall - a cassette lets you... play it in your '95 Ford Windstar?
That sounds like really terrible trip planning for both your time and expenses. I plan out my route on Google Maps, manually adjusting as necessary (thankfully not much of that is needed anymore). I have the maps and the directions printed out. And I have a GPS. You shouldn't be GPS alone anyway, it can be unreliable in terms of route planning. GPS + Maps (Google or physical) are the way to go.
There was a story here on Slashdot a few months back about iOS fraud-ware in the Apple store. It was several apps. The example I remember had taken the name of a defunct office software suite, and the app itself did nothing but close immediately or show a grey screen. It would be interesting to know if the people who bought these apps were refunded by Apple, but that's a bit beside the point. It demonstrates that the iOS app store isn't as vetted or secure as Apple wants you to think. These programs apparently had no review - it'd be interesting to see what kind of rational Apple's constructed since then for the failures. I don't see any possibilities other than the apps were not reviewed, or there was some payola going on to bypass the review process.
The fuel economy might be comparable, but we are talking about emissions, not fuel economy. Cars have catalytic converters that scrub all kinds of nasty stuff, stuff worse than CO2, from the emissions. Jets have no such thing, the fuel is combusted in open air, and all the emissions are propelled out of the back, no filtration.
Additionally, as mentioned in these Slashdot comments, the pollutants are more damaging when released at 35,000 feet than at ground level.
I don't like to repost, but I read a bit further down that Kanye thread, and by reply #4 there is already someone confusing dynamic range compression and audio data compression (like MP3). It's clear these people have no idea of what they're talking about. The subject of audio in particular seems to draw lots of people who speak from their anus with an air of authority. Internet sites regarding audio are more likely to be BS than accurate information - Hydrogenaudio being a notable exception.
Myself, I have studied signal theory and a bit about DSPs in addition to researching modern recording/mastering processes that get used in the industry. Not to mention doing a bit of production work myself. Vinyl rips, cassette rips, open reel tape rips, original recordings...
You might be able to find a couple examples to the contrary, out of the ocean of badly-produced releases, but the images posted to that message board are proof of nothing. It takes a track containing 2.6 million individual samples, and squeezes it into a graph that's only 500px wide. The appearance of higher peaks in the vinyl rip is an artifact of that rip going from digital (studio) to analog (vinyl) then back to digital (ripped to computer). Not an indication of actual dynamic range increase.
I assure you, if you were presented with a proper comparison of zoomed-in waveform of a very dynamic sound, say a bass drum hit, it would look like this: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VD9d...
(Not the best example, but I'm short on time and can't dig through my own rips.) The top waveform is the CD and the bottom is the vinyl. You can see it's compressed and clipped just as badly as the CD - indeed they just fed the CD audio into the vinyl cutting machine. The physical limitations of the vinyl format (needle needs to adhere to the groove wall, etc) have just caused it to become a bit distorted. You can get the same effect by applying a bandpass filter to the CD version, that will also give you varied peaks without any actual dynamic range increase.
Besides, if someone was going to take the time to create a separate dynamic mix of their album... it definitely wouldn't be Kanye West.
It's very common these days for 1-CD albums to be issued as double LPs, I've even seen 1 CD spread out onto 3 LPs. Some are still issued on 1 LP of course, but they tend to be the shorter ones (under 45 minutes).
Analog recordings have never been better than digital recordings at CD-spec or higher. So, it doesn't matter if the source material for vinyl is an analog tape or a digital recording. In fact, the cutting lathes used to etch the grooves into the vinyl pressing plate have had an internal digital stage since the late 1970s. So even most of those old records have gone through a digital stage.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea it's like a smoothing filter - you will typically get less high-frequency response on vinyl vs. uncompressed digital, which is also a side-effect of smoothing filters, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.
Slashdot Mirror
The HOA in my neighborhood hasn't socialized shit. They haven't even built the park that was supposed to be built 10 years ago. The closest thing we have to a park is the drainage ditch behind the neighborhood, which if you bicycle down, you can access both the garbage dump and a state prison. They definitely made sure to clear out all of the trees from the supposed park site to build more houses on, though.
I'm willing to bet an ugly Nativity scene with plywood cut-outs would be there 365 days a year without a peep.
The country has become a mockery of a lot of things, but as for invading NK - were there any incentive to do so - there are at least two countries off the top of my head who would also be sending soldiers: South Korea and Japan.
Now if some unforeseen event happens so that attacking NK would be warranted, you could probably add a couple more Asian countries to the list, plus Australia and the majority of the EU, to the coalition. Hmm, where have I heard that phrase before, "coalition forces"...
Often times, HOA rules will change through committees or votes held at meetings, etc. I imagine there is a clause in most HOA agreements that rules can change through a specific process that you sign off on in the paperwork.
Now, in my experience they also don't notify you of pending changes, so it's still pretty shady. Once while I was biking through my neighborhood on a route I don't usually take, I happened to go by the elementary school. There was a small sign next to the driveway where people drop off their kids about a HOA meeting coming up. I've been in this neighborhood 10 years and that's the only time I've seen such a sign. Maybe they only want people with a child aged 5 - 10 to know about the meetings? (Seems plausible, actually.)
Why do polygraph advocates lie so much?
Because they use it as a tool to give an air of scientific legitimacy to otherwise shaky accusations. The truth often isn't their first priority, to say the least.
When were Apple machines serviceable? I bought one in 98 or 99, the only "service" you could do on it was to add in a stick of RAM.
What was that Shakespeare quote, "A piece of crap by any other name..."? I don't need my media player installing auto-starting services that run with elevated privileges. That's a page right out of MS' "run everything as admin" book from 10 years ago. Even if there is a feature that does need admin privileges (haven't heard one yet), those things need to be done as plugins/components that can be disabled so the 80% of users that don't need it don't have to run it. Even just as a music player, iTunes is way behind on feature parity with foobar2000.
I know both 62-year-old grandmothers and 10-year-olds who use Skype regularly (and not just that one pair). Not frequently, but regularly. Hardly ubergeeks, these people can't download pictures from a digital camera. Skype is also making inroads with people who call internationally. They start using Skype for voice because it's cheaper than an international calling plan plus fees, then they end up trying out the video feature since it's right there.
MS has been up and down. Windows from inception through Vista was pretty bad, but 7 isn't bad at all. 8 has that terrible UI, but that can be replaced with less effort than changing window managers in Linux. Hopefully it's something MS will abandon completely as the negative publicity continues.
You're conflating a lot of different people into "we", nobody who understands how Bitcoin works (and certainly not the dude who created it) claimed it was private or untraceable. There are shady people who did try to use that as a selling point, but there's just as many shady people working with dollars or euros.
As for people "losing their shirts", it's clear by this time that BitCoin is too volatile to invest in or even hold on to for more than a few days. It's used as an intermediate currency. A guy in the US buys some BTC with dollars, then makes a transaction in BTC with a Russian. The Russian exchanges BTC to rubles on his end. Or maybe he uses the BTC to buy a Tesla or a computer from Dell or certain other items that are payable in BTC. Either way, the Bitcoins are "cashed out" at some point, and the smart people do it sooner rather than later. I see the lack of legitimate "cash out" options as being one way Bitcoin might die, but that will be a slow process as the cash-out options are distributed among many different nations, exchanges, and companies.
Then where are the chicks?
I wouldn't call it "biting the dust" yet. If the summary is correct, one wallet used as an intermediate to their offline storage was compromised, and Bitstamp has enough assets to replace the missing coins and continue operating. It's like Wal-Mart having one of their cash registers robbed.
Granted that's a pretty big "if", but it's the way they SHOULD be operating, especially after MtGox. If the site is still down a week or two later with nothing but empty platitudes from the operators, then you can call it as a MtGox.
Google changed their search quite a few years ago (2010? earlier?) to take boolean operators as more of a suggestion. You can still use them, and they still change the search results, but it would not literally exclude every page with the word "ferguson".
It might just be that the ratio of crap to cream on the internet is worse. In 1998, generally you didn't have a web site without something important to say. Or, if it was a personal web site on GeoCities or Angelfire, the nature of the site would be obvious from the URL, not to mention the content and layout. Computing power has been improving, but that doesn't mean search results improve. That requires a better search algorithm which is a different thing entirely.
For my two cents, I haven't noticed any reduction in search result quality during that time.
What's wrong with both? I stream music at work when I just need background noise and don't particularly care what songs get played. I buy or torrent music for home when I know an album is good and want to keep it in perpetuity without it being subject to the whims of corporate licensing.
I guess if you're the kind of person who only ever listened to the radio, streaming services would substitute perfectly for that (though still at cost). It doesn't replace a music archive in your actual ownership.
Going to garage sales and secondhand shops for vinyl is a crapshoot. Whenever I do that, I never expect to come out with a listenable record anymore, I'm basically shopping for cover art. Even a record that looks shiny and clean can be worn to hell from being played a lot (or a little, with a damaged stylus). Not to mention the vast majority of records are crap, any good ones get snatched up very quickly. Places that are more selective about which records they put on sale have the price go up accordingly. This includes online places like eBay and GEMM where you do the selecting. New records might be anywhere from $10-40, depending on if it's a 7", 2xLP, or 3xLP (which are more common now that people are stuffing CD-length releases onto wax).
Well, they have to find some way to keep people at work 8-9 hours a day in the age of robotics. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any more indentured servants!
Hipsters are buying cassettes. Vinyl is too mainstream for them now. I know of several bands who have put out cassette releases in the past 5 years, usually they are limited-run, or only sold at shows, to maximize the hip factor. Vinyl at least gives you much better cover art and looks good on a wall - a cassette lets you... play it in your '95 Ford Windstar?
That sounds like really terrible trip planning for both your time and expenses. I plan out my route on Google Maps, manually adjusting as necessary (thankfully not much of that is needed anymore). I have the maps and the directions printed out. And I have a GPS. You shouldn't be GPS alone anyway, it can be unreliable in terms of route planning. GPS + Maps (Google or physical) are the way to go.
There was a story here on Slashdot a few months back about iOS fraud-ware in the Apple store. It was several apps. The example I remember had taken the name of a defunct office software suite, and the app itself did nothing but close immediately or show a grey screen.
It would be interesting to know if the people who bought these apps were refunded by Apple, but that's a bit beside the point. It demonstrates that the iOS app store isn't as vetted or secure as Apple wants you to think. These programs apparently had no review - it'd be interesting to see what kind of rational Apple's constructed since then for the failures. I don't see any possibilities other than the apps were not reviewed, or there was some payola going on to bypass the review process.
The fuel economy might be comparable, but we are talking about emissions, not fuel economy. Cars have catalytic converters that scrub all kinds of nasty stuff, stuff worse than CO2, from the emissions. Jets have no such thing, the fuel is combusted in open air, and all the emissions are propelled out of the back, no filtration.
Additionally, as mentioned in these Slashdot comments, the pollutants are more damaging when released at 35,000 feet than at ground level.
I don't like to repost, but I read a bit further down that Kanye thread, and by reply #4 there is already someone confusing dynamic range compression and audio data compression (like MP3). It's clear these people have no idea of what they're talking about. The subject of audio in particular seems to draw lots of people who speak from their anus with an air of authority. Internet sites regarding audio are more likely to be BS than accurate information - Hydrogenaudio being a notable exception.
Myself, I have studied signal theory and a bit about DSPs in addition to researching modern recording/mastering processes that get used in the industry. Not to mention doing a bit of production work myself. Vinyl rips, cassette rips, open reel tape rips, original recordings...
You might be able to find a couple examples to the contrary, out of the ocean of badly-produced releases, but the images posted to that message board are proof of nothing. It takes a track containing 2.6 million individual samples, and squeezes it into a graph that's only 500px wide. The appearance of higher peaks in the vinyl rip is an artifact of that rip going from digital (studio) to analog (vinyl) then back to digital (ripped to computer). Not an indication of actual dynamic range increase.
I assure you, if you were presented with a proper comparison of zoomed-in waveform of a very dynamic sound, say a bass drum hit, it would look like this:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_VD9d...
(Not the best example, but I'm short on time and can't dig through my own rips.)
The top waveform is the CD and the bottom is the vinyl. You can see it's compressed and clipped just as badly as the CD - indeed they just fed the CD audio into the vinyl cutting machine. The physical limitations of the vinyl format (needle needs to adhere to the groove wall, etc) have just caused it to become a bit distorted. You can get the same effect by applying a bandpass filter to the CD version, that will also give you varied peaks without any actual dynamic range increase.
Besides, if someone was going to take the time to create a separate dynamic mix of their album... it definitely wouldn't be Kanye West.
It's very common these days for 1-CD albums to be issued as double LPs, I've even seen 1 CD spread out onto 3 LPs. Some are still issued on 1 LP of course, but they tend to be the shorter ones (under 45 minutes).
Analog recordings have never been better than digital recordings at CD-spec or higher. So, it doesn't matter if the source material for vinyl is an analog tape or a digital recording. In fact, the cutting lathes used to etch the grooves into the vinyl pressing plate have had an internal digital stage since the late 1970s. So even most of those old records have gone through a digital stage.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea it's like a smoothing filter - you will typically get less high-frequency response on vinyl vs. uncompressed digital, which is also a side-effect of smoothing filters, but somehow I don't think that's what you meant.