I find that the mix and mastering quality depends on the artist and the producer more than the medium. Bands that exercise a lot of creative control tend to put out a better final product. This can apply to all sorts of music.
For example, Tool, whatever you may think of their style of music, applies a wide range of sound levels. I was most impressed by this when I saw them live for one particular reason: the guys on the sound board did not try to blow everyone out of the venue. The soft portions were still very soft. The loud stuff was strong, yet you could still hear the nuances. Much of the same applies on their albums.
Another good example: take a Tool song like Sober that got a lot of radio play. Compare the radio-play version to the album. You'll note the version the stations play elevates the volume on the softest portion of the song. It's much like what you were talking about -- trying to "optimize" music for a certain target audience.
The point, though, is that many groups actively try to avoid doing this to the albums they sell, vinyl or not. I do find that more established groups tend to preserve the original form of their work, whereas younger groups are often more influenced by their labels. It's easy to notice who does this when you attend live shows.
However if they are using illegal business tactics to ensure it doesn't become a 3-way race, then that has to stop.
I would be more suspicious of them using illegal business tactics to inflate prices, rather than to obstruct a 3rd party. Have you checked prices on high end 3D cards lately? Plus, there are no viable competitors in the consumer 3D arena right now, at least not from a performance standpoint.
I live in WA state which is in large part powered by hydroelectric sources, and formerly nuclear fission. I'll take the hydro power any day, despite the drawbacks. They are far less severe than the environmental problems associated with Hanford. Not to mention, hydroelectric power isn't a security problem whereas fission reactors produce materials of interest to terrorists either via theft/espionage, or by directly attacking the site.
I agree that we have alternatives available. But I don't think you comprehend the sheer amount of oil the U.S. consumes on a daily basis. In order to replace it, we need to leverage ALL of our alternative energy sources. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear fission, ethanol / biodiesel, etc, as well as improve on the conservation side. Maybe when fusion becomes viable, it can alleviate the need for some of these alternatives.
Look on the bright side. Maybe not in my lifetime, but relatively soon, you're going to see it happen. Not because mankind is altruistic, but because most of the proven reserves of oil will be used up and the cost of drilling the remainder will be prohibitive.
While your points are on-target, it is easy to forget how much the U.S. government locked down encryption prior to Phil's efforts. We take for granted being able to make purchases over a 128-bit encrypted connection with SSL-enabled webbrowsers. Secure global e-commerce is a direct result of political change brought around by Phil Zimmerman.
So even though use of PGP / GPG have not penetrated the mainstream, there were other beneficial aspects of its existence.
"[a]n operating system would not produce a false positive[...]."
As a former game programmer, I can tell you that one of the first things to look for, if you want to catch cheaters, is suspicious system clock / timer activity.
Let's say Cedega had a bug that for some reason caused a Windows API to return improper values for the vanilla system timer, or the high performance timers. It is very possible that Warden would then detect a speed-hack attempt and flag the user.
I don't know if this was the case or not, but it is ridiculous to claim that the OS cannot produce a false positive.
First let me say I sympathize with you and hope you can find some alternative methods to improve your situation.
I have been lucky enough in my life to avoid any permanent chronic pain. But I've dealt with longer-term acute cases for various reasons over the years.
My problem is that I don't react well to opiates. a) They make me ill, at least at the dosage required for me to notice a lessening of pain, and b) I have a fairly high pain tolerance to begin with.
I recall after a knee surgery - ACL reconstruction amongst other damage - waking up and the doctors wanted to give me painkillers. This was back when they used patella tendon grafts. They saw a vertical strip from the middle of your patella tendon, including chunks of bone from your tibia and kneecap, and use that to replace the ACL. So my knee, and kneecap were sliced up pretty good. After I woke up from anesthesia, I said I was fine (it hurt a LOT, but I could put it out of my mind). They just looked at me as if I were an alien. I refused painkillers several more times before they relented. The pain continued for weeks but I took no opiates.
Years down the road, with another knee problem, they offered me a nerve block on my leg. This lasts about 24 hours I guess, but I really didn't want to lose feeling in my leg and trip over something and hurt it. But my point is that they can do very targeted pain management these days as opposed to systemic. So you may look into that as a possible option.
I've been blessed and trained to be able to put a lot of pain out of my mind. It's still there, it still hurts, but I can just go do other things. In some cases I've even aggravated injuries because I continued doing something when I should have stopped. But for chronic pain, I think as others have suggested, you could be trained by a psych professional, or possibly even hypnotized, to allow you better natural pain management.
I DO understand how you get to feeling like you just want to give up. How you would give anything for a 5 minute reprieve.
Natural methods / training will never be the same as living pain-free, but they can improve quality of life in a way that meds cannot.
I think Grand is an example of a very poor court decision.
Don't get me wrong -- I definitely agree. However, even though it was in a NY district court, it had a chilling effect on the music industry as a whole. I haven't looked into details of their producers but the Beastie Boys themselves are from New York so that case may have hit them more directly than other bands.
Specifically, Grand seemed to ignore whether the use was transformative. I'd wager that someone is unlikely to purchase a rap track to substitute for... well... anything else other than something else in a similar genre.
I don't dispute that either. One thing though, is that albums such as Paul's Boutique didn't really receive recognition until years later, AFTER sampling had been gutted. Then people began to see that it was more than the sum of its parts... more than a mishmash of random samples. The creative work was in the arrangement, styling, and combination of those samples.
The originality/creativitiy of the new work---is it a mere compilation or is it a new creative art form?
In other words, it CAME TO BE perceived as a new creative art form but only after the music landscape had been altered by the law, or fear of the law. After a couple years, the music changed. Then people went back and listened to older albums and realized what had been lost.
That is something that needs consideration, even if you aren't a particular fan of that style of music.
Unfortunately the legal community, and the big labels / copyright holders only claim to want interesting new artists with creativity. Or maybe they do to a degree. But they are far more interested in squeezing every last penny out of existing works.
And with that, I'll end my nice little music tangent now:)
The length of samples, and sheer volume of sampled tracks in Paul's Boutique would be nearly impossible nowadays, due to that case. But don't let it sidetrack you from the fact that this case was about copyright, not just music. Note that the sample in question in this case was most certainly less than the 8-10 seconds mentioned up above. The length of a sample is not a qualifier for fair use.
I'm not a lawyer either but I can tell you that he's still likely to run into trouble. See: Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique and the comments on how sampling has been heavily restricted in the music industry.
Osama or one of his successors is going to say the U.S. has no nerve whether we remove our troops today or 20 years from now. How long would you have us stay? Indefinitely?
As for your comment about Vietnam, how would you have resolved the deadlock? You blame the cost in lives on the withdrawal. I blame that cost on the mistake of our involvement in the first place, just like the current Iraq war.
This is the nature of guerilla warfare. The "resistance" fighters are like a mosquito that keeps stinging you over and over again. You swat it and another one shows up. Eventually you leave the area. Like I said in my first post: the U.S. military cannot hope to DEPLOY somewhere and achieve victory over guerilla fighters who LIVE in that location. You can achieve specific goals (say: Desert Storm's goal of driving Iraq from Kuwait territory).
Well, we achieved our defined goal for this Iraq war: seek & destroy WMDs. While that was accomplished, it wasn't the result Bush and Rumsfield wanted. So they decided to change to arbitrary goals as they moved forward. This is a recipe for a quagmire.
In contrast, there are cases like Israel, which fights against a resistance that is trying to push them out of their own home (or at least what Israelis consider their own home). They will never give up that fight. EVEN THEN it drags on, year after year. They have no option to leave their conflict, but we do.
Pulling our troops from Iraq WILL happen. Anti-U.S. elements will launch a full scale PR campaign when it happens. This is unavoidable. Being stubborn and leaving the troops in an unwinnable situation does not change the end result.
- I'm not a registered Democrat, but rather I vote for the people I best identify with. Right now, the Republican party has strayed pretty far from my own views.
- I served in the U.S. military and I have nothing against the troops, or the proper use of them as needed for the defense and security of this nation.
Now, on to your points:
The only definite thing I am hearing from their camp is the desire to repeal the tax breaks, but it was those tax breaks that got the economy back on its feet.
Please cite your sources.
Republicans love to tout this methodology but the simple fact is that uncontrolled deficit spending is BAD for the economy except in the very short term. I don't have a problem with tax cuts IF Congress matches those tax cuts with spending cuts. Neither major party does that, however. They fear losing votes when they have to make a cut in someone's pet project or program for their state.
Yes the Clinton administration had faults but it proved you can maintain a strong economy while avoiding a deficit. Granted, part of this was due to availability of the line-item veto, but the administration was fiscally responsible.
I don't really care if the Democrats want to repeal tax breaks or if they actually man up and cut spending. Either way, balancing the budget is better than continuing to live in fantasy-land.
When it comes to the war, they say to pull out the troops, but I have not really heard a coherent plan for how to achieve a solid ending for the war in Iraq.
The Iraq War Part 2 is a war we shouldn't have been involved with in the first place. I don't see the need for a "coherent plan". There is no solid ending. We've seen it before in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union saw it in Afghanistan. You can't impose your will on religious zealots in a land where they live there and you have no desire to. Get the troops home and let Iraqis sort out how they want to run their country. It's what they want. It's what most of the world wants. And it's what oh... 60+ percent of the U.S. citizens want. Not to mention, getting out of Iraq would save around 170 million dollars a day, keeping that economy on its feet like you mentioned.
What is their plan for dealing with terrorism going forward? What is their plan for solving the border problems with Mexico?
Post 9/11 resources should have been and should still be spent going after the source(s) of the attack, which were not Iraqi. Not to mention, U.S. troops being committed in Iraq has emboldened Iran and North Korea, and generally weakened U.S. leverage in matters of foreign policy. I would like to see enhanced focus on Afghanistan and homeland security, rather than Iraq.
I'm not a Democratic candidate, but it's really not difficult to offer alternatives to the rhetoric the Republicans are feeding this nation right now.
Americans feel the overwhelming urge to tell others how they ought to live and behave.
Or maybe that's just our government you are referring to. The average American doesn't really care what's happening outside our borders, except when it's his kid getting killed in some conflict that we shouldn't be involved with in the first place. But we only get to vote every so often for the lesser of two evils, while the special interests and corporations get to vote with their dollars every day.
Mine was of a much more temporary nature but still frightening.
I had been playing basketball at the gym one evening and took a good elbow to the head down in the post that put me on the floor. Hurt, but didn't knock me out or anything. I got up and continued playing the rest of the game. I didn't think much of it at the time. I went home, grabbed a shower and headed for bed. I was single at the time so I didn't chat with anyone at home.
The next day I got up, felt fine, went to work. Someone came over to ask me a question and as I responded, the words were just a jumble. I couldn't pronounce anything. Sounded like I was just mumbling some unintelligible garbage.
My vocal cords were fine. I could make sounds. I could understand people. I could write responses on paper. I just couldn't form words. I headed to the ER.
Anyhow there was nothing they could do for me. The scans showed no dangerous swelling that needed immediate attention, but obviously something had been short circuited in my speech center. I took me a good month+ to get back to where I could speak more or less fluidly again.
For me, it wasn't a "one day I could talk again" sort of thing. I had to work at it every day. I'd practice speaking in the mirror. I could speak very very slowly if I concentrated on each sound I wanted to make.
Anyhow I just wanted to convey some sympathy towards Scott Adams' situation.
That may be true (got a link?) but something else must've changed, economically, more recently. I know as a kid in the 70s, we had Coca-Cola with Sugar listed as the first ingredient. Then when I was in middle school, we went through the whole New Coke phase, and now we have "Classic Coke" which is supposed to be the old formula.
Except it's not. Coca-Cola Classic has High Fructose Corn Syrup instead of Sugar. This didn't happen 100 years ago though; the change happened in the 80s. Search that above link for "Reversal" and "Conspiracy Theories".
I've seen a marked decrease in the effectiveness of grey-listing lately
Agreed. My ISP *finally* added greylisting this year. This is the account I use on my domain registrations, so the email address shows up in whois. It therefore gets an insane amount of spam. After testing out the greylisting for a couple of weeks, I saw no perceptible difference in the amount of spam I was receiving.
When you greylist, you're basically using SMTP rules to tell the sender "try again later". As this became more common, spammers simply started handling it with a proper response.
So the idea in this article - slowing down their connection to a trickle - is actually easier for them to handle because they don't need to implement a full MTA. The only advantage to this solution is if enough people were throttling connections, a spammer's bots might very well crash under the load of their own outgoing connection attempts.
*Where* you live is a huge factor as well. If you live in Minnesota in the winter, or the opposite -- say, Arizona in the summer, your heating or AC bill will be very high. In thoses cases, small changes like fluorescent bulbs are not going to affect the bulk of your energy usage. The best thing those people can do is invest in proper home insulation. In the case of hot locations, solar panels are a good option because you can often sell power back to the grid if you are generating a surplus.
I hope you don't believe that the only purpose of college lectures is to prepare students to take exams.
I don't, but the fact is that success on those exams allows you to continue in your field. If you perform poorly, then many doors are closed to you later on.
After putting myself on the government's Do Not Call list, the only non-personal calls I've received in any quantity are from "charitable organizations". That'd be the local firefighters, stuff like that. They are irritating and pushy but not as bad as the for-profits that used to call.
I don't think I've received any calls of a political nature. My guess is that most campaigns realize that cold-calling people will generally a) not get them to vote for you anyhow, if they don't support your party, and b) possibly piss off people who DO support your party already.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad he's asking these questions, but I wish he'd be less sensationalistic and tinfoil-hat about it
I wish he'd shut down his open SMTP relay but it's still a free country, so far.
I find that the mix and mastering quality depends on the artist and the producer more than the medium. Bands that exercise a lot of creative control tend to put out a better final product. This can apply to all sorts of music.
For example, Tool, whatever you may think of their style of music, applies a wide range of sound levels. I was most impressed by this when I saw them live for one particular reason: the guys on the sound board did not try to blow everyone out of the venue. The soft portions were still very soft. The loud stuff was strong, yet you could still hear the nuances. Much of the same applies on their albums.
Another good example: take a Tool song like Sober that got a lot of radio play. Compare the radio-play version to the album. You'll note the version the stations play elevates the volume on the softest portion of the song. It's much like what you were talking about -- trying to "optimize" music for a certain target audience.
The point, though, is that many groups actively try to avoid doing this to the albums they sell, vinyl or not. I do find that more established groups tend to preserve the original form of their work, whereas younger groups are often more influenced by their labels. It's easy to notice who does this when you attend live shows.
- SEAL
However if they are using illegal business tactics to ensure it doesn't become a 3-way race, then that has to stop.
I would be more suspicious of them using illegal business tactics to inflate prices, rather than to obstruct a 3rd party. Have you checked prices on high end 3D cards lately? Plus, there are no viable competitors in the consumer 3D arena right now, at least not from a performance standpoint.
I live in WA state which is in large part powered by hydroelectric sources, and formerly nuclear fission. I'll take the hydro power any day, despite the drawbacks. They are far less severe than the environmental problems associated with Hanford. Not to mention, hydroelectric power isn't a security problem whereas fission reactors produce materials of interest to terrorists either via theft/espionage, or by directly attacking the site.
I agree that we have alternatives available. But I don't think you comprehend the sheer amount of oil the U.S. consumes on a daily basis. In order to replace it, we need to leverage ALL of our alternative energy sources. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear fission, ethanol / biodiesel, etc, as well as improve on the conservation side. Maybe when fusion becomes viable, it can alleviate the need for some of these alternatives.
Look on the bright side. Maybe not in my lifetime, but relatively soon, you're going to see it happen. Not because mankind is altruistic, but because most of the proven reserves of oil will be used up and the cost of drilling the remainder will be prohibitive.
While your points are on-target, it is easy to forget how much the U.S. government locked down encryption prior to Phil's efforts. We take for granted being able to make purchases over a 128-bit encrypted connection with SSL-enabled webbrowsers. Secure global e-commerce is a direct result of political change brought around by Phil Zimmerman.
So even though use of PGP / GPG have not penetrated the mainstream, there were other beneficial aspects of its existence.
"[a]n operating system would not produce a false positive[...]."
As a former game programmer, I can tell you that one of the first things to look for, if you want to catch cheaters, is suspicious system clock / timer activity.
Let's say Cedega had a bug that for some reason caused a Windows API to return improper values for the vanilla system timer, or the high performance timers. It is very possible that Warden would then detect a speed-hack attempt and flag the user.
I don't know if this was the case or not, but it is ridiculous to claim that the OS cannot produce a false positive.
First let me say I sympathize with you and hope you can find some alternative methods to improve your situation.
I have been lucky enough in my life to avoid any permanent chronic pain. But I've dealt with longer-term acute cases for various reasons over the years.
My problem is that I don't react well to opiates. a) They make me ill, at least at the dosage required for me to notice a lessening of pain, and b) I have a fairly high pain tolerance to begin with.
I recall after a knee surgery - ACL reconstruction amongst other damage - waking up and the doctors wanted to give me painkillers. This was back when they used patella tendon grafts. They saw a vertical strip from the middle of your patella tendon, including chunks of bone from your tibia and kneecap, and use that to replace the ACL. So my knee, and kneecap were sliced up pretty good. After I woke up from anesthesia, I said I was fine (it hurt a LOT, but I could put it out of my mind). They just looked at me as if I were an alien. I refused painkillers several more times before they relented. The pain continued for weeks but I took no opiates.
Years down the road, with another knee problem, they offered me a nerve block on my leg. This lasts about 24 hours I guess, but I really didn't want to lose feeling in my leg and trip over something and hurt it. But my point is that they can do very targeted pain management these days as opposed to systemic. So you may look into that as a possible option.
I've been blessed and trained to be able to put a lot of pain out of my mind. It's still there, it still hurts, but I can just go do other things. In some cases I've even aggravated injuries because I continued doing something when I should have stopped. But for chronic pain, I think as others have suggested, you could be trained by a psych professional, or possibly even hypnotized, to allow you better natural pain management.
I DO understand how you get to feeling like you just want to give up. How you would give anything for a 5 minute reprieve.
Natural methods / training will never be the same as living pain-free, but they can improve quality of life in a way that meds cannot.
Best of luck
- SEAL
I think Grand is an example of a very poor court decision.
:)
Don't get me wrong -- I definitely agree. However, even though it was in a NY district court, it had a chilling effect on the music industry as a whole. I haven't looked into details of their producers but the Beastie Boys themselves are from New York so that case may have hit them more directly than other bands.
Specifically, Grand seemed to ignore whether the use was transformative. I'd wager that someone is unlikely to purchase a rap track to substitute for... well... anything else other than something else in a similar genre.
I don't dispute that either. One thing though, is that albums such as Paul's Boutique didn't really receive recognition until years later, AFTER sampling had been gutted. Then people began to see that it was more than the sum of its parts... more than a mishmash of random samples. The creative work was in the arrangement, styling, and combination of those samples.
The originality/creativitiy of the new work---is it a mere compilation or is it a new creative art form?
In other words, it CAME TO BE perceived as a new creative art form but only after the music landscape had been altered by the law, or fear of the law. After a couple years, the music changed. Then people went back and listened to older albums and realized what had been lost.
That is something that needs consideration, even if you aren't a particular fan of that style of music.
Unfortunately the legal community, and the big labels / copyright holders only claim to want interesting new artists with creativity. Or maybe they do to a degree. But they are far more interested in squeezing every last penny out of existing works.
And with that, I'll end my nice little music tangent now
- SEAL
I'm specifically talking about case law that changed the legal landscape (at least insofar as music sampling goes). The case in question was Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records, Inc..
The length of samples, and sheer volume of sampled tracks in Paul's Boutique would be nearly impossible nowadays, due to that case. But don't let it sidetrack you from the fact that this case was about copyright, not just music. Note that the sample in question in this case was most certainly less than the 8-10 seconds mentioned up above. The length of a sample is not a qualifier for fair use.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/09/mehlman.ste ppingdown/index.html
I'm not a lawyer either but I can tell you that he's still likely to run into trouble. See: Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique and the comments on how sampling has been heavily restricted in the music industry.
Osama or one of his successors is going to say the U.S. has no nerve whether we remove our troops today or 20 years from now. How long would you have us stay? Indefinitely?
As for your comment about Vietnam, how would you have resolved the deadlock? You blame the cost in lives on the withdrawal. I blame that cost on the mistake of our involvement in the first place, just like the current Iraq war.
This is the nature of guerilla warfare. The "resistance" fighters are like a mosquito that keeps stinging you over and over again. You swat it and another one shows up. Eventually you leave the area. Like I said in my first post: the U.S. military cannot hope to DEPLOY somewhere and achieve victory over guerilla fighters who LIVE in that location. You can achieve specific goals (say: Desert Storm's goal of driving Iraq from Kuwait territory).
Well, we achieved our defined goal for this Iraq war: seek & destroy WMDs. While that was accomplished, it wasn't the result Bush and Rumsfield wanted. So they decided to change to arbitrary goals as they moved forward. This is a recipe for a quagmire.
In contrast, there are cases like Israel, which fights against a resistance that is trying to push them out of their own home (or at least what Israelis consider their own home). They will never give up that fight. EVEN THEN it drags on, year after year. They have no option to leave their conflict, but we do.
Pulling our troops from Iraq WILL happen. Anti-U.S. elements will launch a full scale PR campaign when it happens. This is unavoidable. Being stubborn and leaving the troops in an unwinnable situation does not change the end result.
1) Don't confuse Deficit with Debt.
2) Take a look at Debt held by the Public, not including Intragovernmental Holdings.
For the lazy (from your very own site):
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt.htm
scroll down to the bottom. Notice a trend during the Clinton years?
Here's another one for you:
http://www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.pdf
People like you are the reason this country treats money like a dot-com most of the time.
The pubs right now are too evil to allow to stay in power, I really can't think of any other word that adequately describes Bush's term in office.
Fascist.
Before I start, let me just say:
- I'm not a registered Democrat, but rather I vote for the people I best identify with. Right now, the Republican party has strayed pretty far from my own views.
- I served in the U.S. military and I have nothing against the troops, or the proper use of them as needed for the defense and security of this nation.
Now, on to your points:
The only definite thing I am hearing from their camp is the desire to repeal the tax breaks, but it was those tax breaks that got the economy back on its feet.
Please cite your sources.
Republicans love to tout this methodology but the simple fact is that uncontrolled deficit spending is BAD for the economy except in the very short term. I don't have a problem with tax cuts IF Congress matches those tax cuts with spending cuts. Neither major party does that, however. They fear losing votes when they have to make a cut in someone's pet project or program for their state.
Yes the Clinton administration had faults but it proved you can maintain a strong economy while avoiding a deficit. Granted, part of this was due to availability of the line-item veto, but the administration was fiscally responsible.
I don't really care if the Democrats want to repeal tax breaks or if they actually man up and cut spending. Either way, balancing the budget is better than continuing to live in fantasy-land.
When it comes to the war, they say to pull out the troops, but I have not really heard a coherent plan for how to achieve a solid ending for the war in Iraq.
The Iraq War Part 2 is a war we shouldn't have been involved with in the first place. I don't see the need for a "coherent plan". There is no solid ending. We've seen it before in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union saw it in Afghanistan. You can't impose your will on religious zealots in a land where they live there and you have no desire to. Get the troops home and let Iraqis sort out how they want to run their country. It's what they want. It's what most of the world wants. And it's what oh... 60+ percent of the U.S. citizens want. Not to mention, getting out of Iraq would save around 170 million dollars a day, keeping that economy on its feet like you mentioned.
What is their plan for dealing with terrorism going forward? What is their plan for solving the border problems with Mexico?
Post 9/11 resources should have been and should still be spent going after the source(s) of the attack, which were not Iraqi. Not to mention, U.S. troops being committed in Iraq has emboldened Iran and North Korea, and generally weakened U.S. leverage in matters of foreign policy. I would like to see enhanced focus on Afghanistan and homeland security, rather than Iraq.
I'm not a Democratic candidate, but it's really not difficult to offer alternatives to the rhetoric the Republicans are feeding this nation right now.
Americans feel the overwhelming urge to tell others how they ought to live and behave.
Or maybe that's just our government you are referring to. The average American doesn't really care what's happening outside our borders, except when it's his kid getting killed in some conflict that we shouldn't be involved with in the first place. But we only get to vote every so often for the lesser of two evils, while the special interests and corporations get to vote with their dollars every day.
shave cream sucks.. unless you use a straight razor.. and well i only know one person that still does that
:)
I used to... for my head
Just as a follow-on, for those curious:
My condition was not spasmodic dysphonia. It was classified as injury-induced dysarthria.
Mine was of a much more temporary nature but still frightening.
I had been playing basketball at the gym one evening and took a good elbow to the head down in the post that put me on the floor. Hurt, but didn't knock me out or anything. I got up and continued playing the rest of the game. I didn't think much of it at the time. I went home, grabbed a shower and headed for bed. I was single at the time so I didn't chat with anyone at home.
The next day I got up, felt fine, went to work. Someone came over to ask me a question and as I responded, the words were just a jumble. I couldn't pronounce anything. Sounded like I was just mumbling some unintelligible garbage.
My vocal cords were fine. I could make sounds. I could understand people. I could write responses on paper. I just couldn't form words. I headed to the ER.
Anyhow there was nothing they could do for me. The scans showed no dangerous swelling that needed immediate attention, but obviously something had been short circuited in my speech center. I took me a good month+ to get back to where I could speak more or less fluidly again.
For me, it wasn't a "one day I could talk again" sort of thing. I had to work at it every day. I'd practice speaking in the mirror. I could speak very very slowly if I concentrated on each sound I wanted to make.
Anyhow I just wanted to convey some sympathy towards Scott Adams' situation.
That may be true (got a link?) but something else must've changed, economically, more recently. I know as a kid in the 70s, we had Coca-Cola with Sugar listed as the first ingredient. Then when I was in middle school, we went through the whole New Coke phase, and now we have "Classic Coke" which is supposed to be the old formula.
Except it's not. Coca-Cola Classic has High Fructose Corn Syrup instead of Sugar. This didn't happen 100 years ago though; the change happened in the 80s. Search that above link for "Reversal" and "Conspiracy Theories".
- SEAL
I've seen a marked decrease in the effectiveness of grey-listing lately
Agreed. My ISP *finally* added greylisting this year. This is the account I use on my domain registrations, so the email address shows up in whois. It therefore gets an insane amount of spam. After testing out the greylisting for a couple of weeks, I saw no perceptible difference in the amount of spam I was receiving.
When you greylist, you're basically using SMTP rules to tell the sender "try again later". As this became more common, spammers simply started handling it with a proper response.
So the idea in this article - slowing down their connection to a trickle - is actually easier for them to handle because they don't need to implement a full MTA. The only advantage to this solution is if enough people were throttling connections, a spammer's bots might very well crash under the load of their own outgoing connection attempts.
The technology industry is perhaps the most guilty of all industries when it comes to love of acronyms
:)
I'd give that distinction to the government and/or military
*Where* you live is a huge factor as well. If you live in Minnesota in the winter, or the opposite -- say, Arizona in the summer, your heating or AC bill will be very high. In thoses cases, small changes like fluorescent bulbs are not going to affect the bulk of your energy usage. The best thing those people can do is invest in proper home insulation. In the case of hot locations, solar panels are a good option because you can often sell power back to the grid if you are generating a surplus.
I hope you don't believe that the only purpose of college lectures is to prepare students to take exams.
I don't, but the fact is that success on those exams allows you to continue in your field. If you perform poorly, then many doors are closed to you later on.
After putting myself on the government's Do Not Call list, the only non-personal calls I've received in any quantity are from "charitable organizations". That'd be the local firefighters, stuff like that. They are irritating and pushy but not as bad as the for-profits that used to call.
I don't think I've received any calls of a political nature. My guess is that most campaigns realize that cold-calling people will generally a) not get them to vote for you anyhow, if they don't support your party, and b) possibly piss off people who DO support your party already.