So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?
Not what parent said; if we don't burn a barrel of oil because we have Magic Fairy Dust (tm), that barrel will just get burned by someone else. At least for the foreseeable future.
And "global cap-and-trade"? Are you kidding? Good luck getting every nation in the world to agree to that system. Good luck getting just China to agree to that system. Good luck getting everyone bound by that system to stop bickering over what their caps should be. And good luck having such a system function as it's actually intended to.
Getting the entire world to agree on a complicated system simultaneously is not a good way to solve world problems. Even if that problem would actually be solved by them doing so. The US has made greater progress on its would-be Kyoto goals than any Kyoto nation - and we didn't even sign the thing.
Now, biofuel is great and whatnot - biofuel and politics have killed a large chunk of the world economy. We subsidize corn ethanol to make the corn belt farmers happy. In the meantime, we have a huge tariff on imported ethanol - we can't buy alternative fuels from Brazil, for example, but we can buy crude oil from the Middle East. The result is a lot of corn diverted for ethanol production.
All this legislated corn-ethanol nonsense raises the price of corn - that's a side effect of doubling demand for it overnight. So, of course, some food prices go up too, but that's just for starters. The prices of other grains rise as well - they're "substitute goods", things people will use instead of the now-prices corn if they can. With the costs of every grain rising, livestock feed becomes more expensive, meaning practically everything you buy in a grocery store is more expensive. Meats, soda (corn syrup, remember) - all of it rising in price.
But it doesn't stop at just food, either. Soap is made in part from waste fats from slaughtered animals. As it becomes more expensive to feed livestock, even something as simple as soap becomes more expensive. We in America can generally deal with the rising food costs, but our Big Ag special-interest political games in the name of the "environment" come at the expense of the rest of the world.
Biofuel is great... If it happens on its own, and not when huge tracts of our economy are forcibly shifted so politicians can win the farm vote.
I recall a similar study where they asked students across the 50 states to rate their "self-esteem" in regards to mathematics - how confident they were in handling numbers, and how good they thought they were.
Students' self-esteem correlates negatively with test scores. I guess humility is learned through... learning.
As I hinted at, the "ideal" party archetype incarnate does not exist.
But, somebody needs a hug! And a dictionary. Capitalizing "corporation" doesn't make it more evil.
Green party is about destruction of for-profit business in the name of the "environment" and "consumer safety." I guess they're our communists.
Libertarians are more reactionary than Republicans are; they are very strict constructionist and generally isolationist. There's not much difference between Libertarian and Republican, other than that Libertarians are what Republicans "should" be.
The parties here in America definitely don't have the same "communist to fascist" range, but there are differences. At least, in stated philosophy. (Watch for anyone who tells you "There are no differences..." and uses that as an excuse for why you should vote for their candidate.)
Republicans are now viewed as the "conservative" party, which here means individual property rights, states rights, small government, low taxes, necessary services, strong military. (Just listing a bunch of common themes here.)
Democrats are the "liberal" party, and their modern philosophy descends from the progressive movement earlier in the 20th century. They view government as a tool to fix societal problems.
Raising taxes to fund an anti-poverty program is a perfectly legitimate government function for the (nonexistent) "typical" Democrat. A Republican would disapprove of the idea of forcibly taking someone else's money to give it to yet another person for a program that may or may not work. (People think our "war on drugs" is bad, but the "war on poverty" has had more time and fewer successes.)
Government as a necessary evil versus a tool for curing any and all problem for anybody anywhere. That's a false dichotomy, of course, but a starting place for seeing party differences. (We arrested all of our fascists and communists in the 50s, remember ^.^)
Do the stupid realize that they're stupid? That is, are they self-aware of their condition of intellectual deficiency? I think that they are; if they did realize their cognitive faculties were lacking, they would do something to rectify such a sorry situation. Besides - being aware of your own stupidity is "wisdom" and not really stupidity, is it not?
So, if the stupid are not aware that they are stupid, they could even believe that they are smart. Intelligent, perhaps; the breed of faux understanding that breeds arrogance.
Perhaps some quantity of these individuals find their way onto Slashdot and run long-winded thought experiments with a tired vocabulary.
Or, perhaps, they lump every ire-inspiring, plutocratic "have" that ever existed throughout history into one group, and blame their fellow ignoramus for some perceived evil? By the way, if you are in a "profitless treadmill of the serf/employee rat race," put down the Communist Manifesto and find another job.
Well, everyone has "solutions." Marx's ideas were that everyone working for the "collective good" would be more efficient than everyone working simply out of greedy self-interest. He developed the system from the assumption that competition creates inefficiency that cooperation could remove.
Remember that other names for economic "cooperation" are oligopoly and monopoly - competition tends to help efficiency.
But, your question (paraphrasing) "If everyone is equal, why pursue an education to become a neurosurgeon instead of a street sweeper?" The problem is, it's not your choice. If society needs a neurosurgeon, you will become one for the collective good. Implementation issues are usually resolved with an authoritarian government (Soviet Union) until such a day that everyone is so enlightened as to become a neurosurgeon on their own, out of humanitarian compassion.
"Now you see the violence inherent in the system...?" Wrong meme?
It's been a long time since I've read the communist manifesto, and I'm not reading that piece of garbage again. So this entire post is prefixed with an "IIRC."
Karl Marx saw an authoritarian government and forced redistribution of property as only one stage on the way towards communism. What Russia had, what China has... Not communism, but a step on the way to communism. After all the "property" was redistributed and all was right and equal (not nutrisweet) with the world, the government would "dissolve" as it was no longer necessary.
Sadly or no, no country has achieved "communism" as Marx saw it. They all got hung up on the authoritarian dictatorship phase. Please leave out any comments about "zomg communism can still work!" - those aren't helpful unless you have an idea to skip that lethal transitional step.
Dual discs... so that's what those are. I wouldn't expect most programs to recgonize the DVD half of it, but downloading VLC and clicking file->wizard should take you through most of the steps of ripping the audio out of the DVD part of it.
Is is (or should be) legal to download something you already own in some form, neglecting the fact that you generally have to share/upload/seed to others who probably don't own it. It's just unfathomable to me that anyone would try to download something when they have the disc right there... ^.^ I would rather spend the $150 for a drive and eSATA enclosure and never worry about backups again than try to fight with torrents or rapidshare or, heaven forbid, kazaa or some other gnutella POS.
Personal preference, I guess. I have the disc, and the disk space, so I want my copy lossless. Let WMP re-encode it for me when I plug my MP3 player in. But, I can see where others would prefer to get online copies - just be careful with the torrents, especially at college. Mine will potentially kick you out for torrenting music (it's in the honor code, but it's mostly a bandwidth problem) and the RIAA seem to be focusing on campuses. A judge probably would, but they won't buy the "fair use" bit if you're using a protocol that can upload to other clients.
I totally agree with you on #1. Of course, they'll want you to buy The Beatles Remastered Special Dolby 5.1 Edition Deluxe ZOMGPONIES! for the thousandth time, and they could probably get away with sueing you for torrenting the tracks that originally came on on the vinyl you own. But, it is my humble belief that torrenting a digital copy (if you own the record) should be fair use.
Ditto for tapes, but for a disc I would just eat the cost and buy another one. (Generally I rip to my hard drive and lose the disc in some pile anyways; the original might as well have been lost.)
I'm confused on number three. (Posting with numbered "bullet points" makes nit-picking sooo much easier ^.^) Let's take Windows Media Player - arguably the worst media player ever created. Even with this atrocious program, you can rip to completely unencumbered MP3s (128, 192, 256, or 320Kbps), lossless WAV (also unencumbered), or Windows Media Lossless (much smaller, also unencumbered unless you check "copy protect my music.")
Number four is another odd case, but you really should have ripped a copy (see #3) before you left the disc somewhere inconvenient. Remember that with torrents or most any other peer to peer application, every "fair use" bit that you download is offset by some fraction that you upload to those "not-so-fair-use" individuals. With bittorrent you can just refuse to seed, but short of special kludges (NinjaTorrent or whatever), you'll be punished with dial-up speeds for not seeding.
Ripping a CD to MP3 on my machine is finished before the first track is done playing. I only have 3Mbit DSL (which behaves like a 2Mbit line); finding the songs and downloading them is probably going to take from 15-30 minutes. More if I want lossless copies - those are both impossible to find and take a long time to download.
Take the worst case scenario: A six-year-old XP machine. Click start -> run -> wmplayer. Click on the "rip" button. Put your disc in. Wait five minutes, and watch as it properly tags all of your tracks, gets you the album cover, and puts it in its proper place in the rip folder. Easier than having to normalize somebody else's tags, or worse, do all the digging myself.
Is <rant/> valid HTML? I think I need to properly close mine >.>
For all the stretches of fair use I see here, downloading "03_Beyonce_Alubmtitle_Songtitle.mp3" to see if it's Beyonce's Songtitle from Albumtitle is probably the more reasonable.
I'm guessing that the RIAA doesn't even keep the stuff that they do own - that's a lot of space, when file sizes and hashes are only a few bytes.
Article has nothing to do about free tools letting the proletariat stage their own worker's rebellion against that bourgeois "wage-slave" line. Nor does it have anything to do about the "teach a man to fish" proverb.
The article assumes that some commercial tools are better than free ones. But people tend to pick the free, not-as-polished ones over the expensive, whiz-bang ones out of preference and comfort. Even if the expensive whiz-bang ones could save you weeks of work in the long run or thousands of man-hours of development time.
"Fictional scarcity" is a product of politics. I don't know what flawed definition of "capitalism" you adhere to, but even classical Adam Smith invisible-hand-esque economics handle the lack of scarcity perfectly well - infinite supply, zero cost. But, pre-digital times, this wasn't an interesting case to economists - everything was scarce.
1) They concentrate on college and university networks here in America, and your IP address generally betrays (at least) your nationality. Yes, they are aware.
2) Sources? You may very well be right, but the article says they download the file themselves and run it through a "fingerprinting" software to see if it matches a song they hold a copyright to. (You know, one of those nifty programs that'll tell you what's playing on the radio.) If it's an infringing file, they record its size and hash and look for matches.
3) They're probably not aware of your CD collection. But, what in Xenu's name are you doing torrenting an album you already own, when just putting the disc in the freaking drive gets you whatever quality (even Windows Media Player lets you do lossless!) correct tags, album art, and is done in a few minutes? In what case is finding a torrent faster than ripping the actual disc? Do you have a T3 line connected to a Windows 98 box with a dual-speed CD-ROM drive? And has anyone actually been sued for downloading their own CD collection?
4) Again, why are you downloading songs you already have? And again, has anyone actually been sued for this?
5) It's called "settling out of court." Our courts prefer it, actually. Now, the RIAA has done a lot of stupid, reprehensible things - but if I just finished pirating a record label, I'd rather spend a few hundred bucks to settle out of court than actually go to court for something I know I did illegally/unlawfully/contrasanguinous kittenous.
Now, the prices for a new album are pretty rediculous, especially if you only want one song on the disc. $.99 doesn't cut it, either, if the track's DRM'd. I was burned by the closing of the "URGE" music store, and I had to burn/rip my (rather small) music collection onto disc and off again to play my tracks after they shut down.
I also am a huge fan of Japanese music - but a lot of that's hard to get a hold of without spending $bucks at an importer. (Amazon.com has a surprising selection, though.) It's not like they'll let you into the Japanese iTunes store without a Japanese mailing address and credit card, either - although you can get around that by having someone send you (or e-mail you a scan of) a Japanese iTunes gift card. (Here's the one advantage of our entertainment industry being one evil **AA tradegroup - it's easier to license music. From what little I've heard, their entertainment industry is somewhat more fragmented, which makes it harder for people to license music.)
What a rant! But two points I want to make - it's still illegal/unlawful/contrasanguinous kittenous to "pirate" music, and it's just stupid if you own the disc. If you don't like it enough to pay $.99, then it probably wasn't worth downloading anyway, was it?
In seriousness, congratulations on managing something most of us can't even contemplate, let alone understand. I can't imagine dealing with the same thing - if my mind went, I'm not exactly getting through life on "good looks and charm." ^.^ (Depending on who you ask, I'm not getting by on just my "mind" either, but it's worth a shot!)
In jest... Slashdot is a good place to discuss this. There are a lot of mentally ill people here who could benefit from your experiences.
But in seriousness again, congratulations on holding down a job and finding fulfillment through something that would normally be debilitating. I'm glad "blogging" or online publishing or whatever buzzword describes your experiences in helping yourself and others has helped you conquer your illness.
Just because some of our 535 crazies committed to Congress this session want to shut it down, doesn't mean it'll happen.
A bill was introduced in 1955 to ban Rock and Roll music, for the same "protect the children" reasons used as excuses to ban anything. Of course, that didn't happen - what would've happened to "Guitar Hero?"
Congress wants to look like it's doing something - actually doing it is hard. Watch them ban Wikileaks, make a press release, and then do nothing within their (limited) power to actually shut the site down. They get their press time, everyone's happy.
But, in some ways, that's a good thing. An ineffectual government is better than one with "quaint" notions of law and justice.
Nah, just that most of my posts are knee-jerk rants. But, it's nice for my posts to be confused with something worth reading every once in a while. ^.^
But, there's no labels on the y-axis. Google seems to have made the trends information purposefully difficult to use. I suppose you could make relative comparisons, but then only if everything you wanted to compare was on the same graph - otherwise, the y-axis might be different.
Don't get me wrong - I think this is a really cool project. I never thought about using Google trends for something like this before, and it sounds like this kind of accuracy beats some exit polls. I'm just really disappointed that Google crippled their trends service, when something this neat could be using it.
What's voter mobilization as for as "poor people" and "Amish" are concerned? Since anecdote == data, my grandparents get some of their news on the internet, and I would suspect that some old farts might influence/be influenced by those un-old-farts doing the searching.
It's not a proper random sample, and it suffers from response bias. But with a near 90% success rate, I wonder how it compares to exit polls and the like.
Also, the elderly are more likely to vote, but census data since they're outnumbered 2-1 by younger folks (depending on where you cut off "older" and "younger" in the results table.) I'm guessing that even though a higher percentage of old farts turn out to vote, there is a larger quantity of young people. Underrepresenting an important group, sure, but a minority one.
You're setting the bar pretty low for "reasoned and mature." But, as some people don't seem to realize, controlling for confounding variables makes statistical work more accurate, not less.
But, that things seem to track more or less is pretty nifty. The next step would be to actually automate the predictions, and with curiousity piqued, I Googled (naturally) for a Google Trends API. They've been promising one since 2007, but evidently it hasn't shown up yet or was cancelled, which is disappointing.
It would be really neat to use an API to feed the data into SPSS; you could do nifty things like have it compute how significant some difference in search volume really is, which could improve the (already high) accuracy of the model. Or perhaps have it compute if first, last, or full names correlate with each other.
But, they don't even give you numbers on the Y axis, let alone a programmable API! SPSS is like XML; using it more makes anything better. And while I'm rambling, I'd be kinda bothered by comments about it being "very nice for a simple high school project." Obviously, it would be even more intriguing were you a mature college freshman like myself ^.^
DM is an acronym for, "Downstairs, Mom!" in reference to one's basement dwelling.
GM is obviously a clerical error, as the "G" is only two spaces over from the "D" on a QWERTY keyboard. It would also be a different dialect.
I kid, I kid. But I don't like the 4th edition rules. They simplify things that are handled transparently by a good DM anyway, and it seems to remove a lot of depth.
Never mind - as I read the rest of the FA, they are trying to predict elections.
^.^
But still, my point stands - they point out that this isn't useful for Ron Paul, because interest in Ron Paul on the internet has little to do with his actual campaign. But, nobody as the same Chuck Norris-like admiration of Hillary, so her results are related to campaigns.
There are such things as statistical outliers and externalities.
They're not talking about "zomg google popularity means they'll win!" They're saying, "Watch for your search graphs to spike after a speech to see if it was effective."
Contrived example: Barack Obama makes a big speech about social security. If, suddenly, the number of searches for "Barack Obama Social Security" spikes, you could conclude that maybe you reached some people, generated some interest.
Now, boys and girls, this is where we stop and think. This would work for Barack Obama because those searches track well with the speech he made. It would not work for Ron Paul given his status as an internet meme. The correlation between Ron Paul searches and events in his campaign is going to be just as weak as correlations between Chuck Norris and (actual) events in his life, or between lolcats and pet food product safety.
I don't know how to make it any clearer. There is no "hypothesis." They have not framed this a statistical H0: Google doesn't control the elections and calculated a p-value. They haven't ignored data that would disprove some part of string theory. They're just saying this:
Tracking search trends can be interesting for candidates. Less so for Ron Paul.
They're using a candidate's popularity in Google Trends as a measurement of the success of their campaign.
For Ron Paul, his popularity on the internet has nothing to do with his real-life political success - as grandparent poster said, he's an internet meme. You think there's any correlation between "Ron Paul" jokes on forums and genuine interest in his campaign?
Their "hypothesis" for the other candidates Google trends measures the success of their campaign. With Ron Paul, it's measuring something else entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?
Not what parent said; if we don't burn a barrel of oil because we have Magic Fairy Dust (tm), that barrel will just get burned by someone else. At least for the foreseeable future.
And "global cap-and-trade"? Are you kidding? Good luck getting every nation in the world to agree to that system. Good luck getting just China to agree to that system. Good luck getting everyone bound by that system to stop bickering over what their caps should be. And good luck having such a system function as it's actually intended to.
Getting the entire world to agree on a complicated system simultaneously is not a good way to solve world problems. Even if that problem would actually be solved by them doing so. The US has made greater progress on its would-be Kyoto goals than any Kyoto nation - and we didn't even sign the thing.
Now, biofuel is great and whatnot - biofuel and politics have killed a large chunk of the world economy. We subsidize corn ethanol to make the corn belt farmers happy. In the meantime, we have a huge tariff on imported ethanol - we can't buy alternative fuels from Brazil, for example, but we can buy crude oil from the Middle East. The result is a lot of corn diverted for ethanol production.
All this legislated corn-ethanol nonsense raises the price of corn - that's a side effect of doubling demand for it overnight. So, of course, some food prices go up too, but that's just for starters. The prices of other grains rise as well - they're "substitute goods", things people will use instead of the now-prices corn if they can. With the costs of every grain rising, livestock feed becomes more expensive, meaning practically everything you buy in a grocery store is more expensive. Meats, soda (corn syrup, remember) - all of it rising in price.
But it doesn't stop at just food, either. Soap is made in part from waste fats from slaughtered animals. As it becomes more expensive to feed livestock, even something as simple as soap becomes more expensive. We in America can generally deal with the rising food costs, but our Big Ag special-interest political games in the name of the "environment" come at the expense of the rest of the world.
Biofuel is great... If it happens on its own, and not when huge tracts of our economy are forcibly shifted so politicians can win the farm vote.
I recall a similar study where they asked students across the 50 states to rate their "self-esteem" in regards to mathematics - how confident they were in handling numbers, and how good they thought they were.
Students' self-esteem correlates negatively with test scores. I guess humility is learned through... learning.
As I hinted at, the "ideal" party archetype incarnate does not exist.
But, somebody needs a hug! And a dictionary. Capitalizing "corporation" doesn't make it more evil.
Green party is about destruction of for-profit business in the name of the "environment" and "consumer safety." I guess they're our communists.
Libertarians are more reactionary than Republicans are; they are very strict constructionist and generally isolationist. There's not much difference between Libertarian and Republican, other than that Libertarians are what Republicans "should" be.
The parties here in America definitely don't have the same "communist to fascist" range, but there are differences. At least, in stated philosophy. (Watch for anyone who tells you "There are no differences..." and uses that as an excuse for why you should vote for their candidate.)
Republicans are now viewed as the "conservative" party, which here means individual property rights, states rights, small government, low taxes, necessary services, strong military. (Just listing a bunch of common themes here.)
Democrats are the "liberal" party, and their modern philosophy descends from the progressive movement earlier in the 20th century. They view government as a tool to fix societal problems.
Raising taxes to fund an anti-poverty program is a perfectly legitimate government function for the (nonexistent) "typical" Democrat. A Republican would disapprove of the idea of forcibly taking someone else's money to give it to yet another person for a program that may or may not work. (People think our "war on drugs" is bad, but the "war on poverty" has had more time and fewer successes.)
Government as a necessary evil versus a tool for curing any and all problem for anybody anywhere. That's a false dichotomy, of course, but a starting place for seeing party differences. (We arrested all of our fascists and communists in the 50s, remember ^.^)
A rhetorical question for you.
Do the stupid realize that they're stupid? That is, are they self-aware of their condition of intellectual deficiency? I think that they are; if they did realize their cognitive faculties were lacking, they would do something to rectify such a sorry situation. Besides - being aware of your own stupidity is "wisdom" and not really stupidity, is it not?
So, if the stupid are not aware that they are stupid, they could even believe that they are smart. Intelligent, perhaps; the breed of faux understanding that breeds arrogance.
Perhaps some quantity of these individuals find their way onto Slashdot and run long-winded thought experiments with a tired vocabulary.
Or, perhaps, they lump every ire-inspiring, plutocratic "have" that ever existed throughout history into one group, and blame their fellow ignoramus for some perceived evil? By the way, if you are in a "profitless treadmill of the serf/employee rat race," put down the Communist Manifesto and find another job.
Well, everyone has "solutions." Marx's ideas were that everyone working for the "collective good" would be more efficient than everyone working simply out of greedy self-interest. He developed the system from the assumption that competition creates inefficiency that cooperation could remove.
Remember that other names for economic "cooperation" are oligopoly and monopoly - competition tends to help efficiency.
But, your question (paraphrasing) "If everyone is equal, why pursue an education to become a neurosurgeon instead of a street sweeper?" The problem is, it's not your choice. If society needs a neurosurgeon, you will become one for the collective good. Implementation issues are usually resolved with an authoritarian government (Soviet Union) until such a day that everyone is so enlightened as to become a neurosurgeon on their own, out of humanitarian compassion.
"Now you see the violence inherent in the system...?" Wrong meme?
Heeey.... you're right! Forgot about that; you don't exactly see your sig when you're posting.
These two posts are sure to be modded off-topic, but thanks for pointing that out to me. Now I can laugh, too. ^.^
It's been a long time since I've read the communist manifesto, and I'm not reading that piece of garbage again. So this entire post is prefixed with an "IIRC."
Karl Marx saw an authoritarian government and forced redistribution of property as only one stage on the way towards communism. What Russia had, what China has... Not communism, but a step on the way to communism. After all the "property" was redistributed and all was right and equal (not nutrisweet) with the world, the government would "dissolve" as it was no longer necessary.
Sadly or no, no country has achieved "communism" as Marx saw it. They all got hung up on the authoritarian dictatorship phase. Please leave out any comments about "zomg communism can still work!" - those aren't helpful unless you have an idea to skip that lethal transitional step.
Dual discs... so that's what those are. I wouldn't expect most programs to recgonize the DVD half of it, but downloading VLC and clicking file->wizard should take you through most of the steps of ripping the audio out of the DVD part of it.
Is is (or should be) legal to download something you already own in some form, neglecting the fact that you generally have to share/upload/seed to others who probably don't own it. It's just unfathomable to me that anyone would try to download something when they have the disc right there... ^.^ I would rather spend the $150 for a drive and eSATA enclosure and never worry about backups again than try to fight with torrents or rapidshare or, heaven forbid, kazaa or some other gnutella POS.
Personal preference, I guess. I have the disc, and the disk space, so I want my copy lossless. Let WMP re-encode it for me when I plug my MP3 player in. But, I can see where others would prefer to get online copies - just be careful with the torrents, especially at college. Mine will potentially kick you out for torrenting music (it's in the honor code, but it's mostly a bandwidth problem) and the RIAA seem to be focusing on campuses. A judge probably would, but they won't buy the "fair use" bit if you're using a protocol that can upload to other clients.
I totally agree with you on #1. Of course, they'll want you to buy The Beatles Remastered Special Dolby 5.1 Edition Deluxe ZOMGPONIES! for the thousandth time, and they could probably get away with sueing you for torrenting the tracks that originally came on on the vinyl you own. But, it is my humble belief that torrenting a digital copy (if you own the record) should be fair use.
Ditto for tapes, but for a disc I would just eat the cost and buy another one. (Generally I rip to my hard drive and lose the disc in some pile anyways; the original might as well have been lost.)
I'm confused on number three. (Posting with numbered "bullet points" makes nit-picking sooo much easier ^.^) Let's take Windows Media Player - arguably the worst media player ever created. Even with this atrocious program, you can rip to completely unencumbered MP3s (128, 192, 256, or 320Kbps), lossless WAV (also unencumbered), or Windows Media Lossless (much smaller, also unencumbered unless you check "copy protect my music.")
Number four is another odd case, but you really should have ripped a copy (see #3) before you left the disc somewhere inconvenient. Remember that with torrents or most any other peer to peer application, every "fair use" bit that you download is offset by some fraction that you upload to those "not-so-fair-use" individuals. With bittorrent you can just refuse to seed, but short of special kludges (NinjaTorrent or whatever), you'll be punished with dial-up speeds for not seeding.
Ripping a CD to MP3 on my machine is finished before the first track is done playing. I only have 3Mbit DSL (which behaves like a 2Mbit line); finding the songs and downloading them is probably going to take from 15-30 minutes. More if I want lossless copies - those are both impossible to find and take a long time to download.
Take the worst case scenario: A six-year-old XP machine. Click start -> run -> wmplayer. Click on the "rip" button. Put your disc in. Wait five minutes, and watch as it properly tags all of your tracks, gets you the album cover, and puts it in its proper place in the rip folder. Easier than having to normalize somebody else's tags, or worse, do all the digging myself.
Is <rant/> valid HTML? I think I need to properly close mine >.>
For all the stretches of fair use I see here, downloading "03_Beyonce_Alubmtitle_Songtitle.mp3" to see if it's Beyonce's Songtitle from Albumtitle is probably the more reasonable.
I'm guessing that the RIAA doesn't even keep the stuff that they do own - that's a lot of space, when file sizes and hashes are only a few bytes.
More Marxist stuff.
Article has nothing to do about free tools letting the proletariat stage their own worker's rebellion against that bourgeois "wage-slave" line. Nor does it have anything to do about the "teach a man to fish" proverb.
The article assumes that some commercial tools are better than free ones. But people tend to pick the free, not-as-polished ones over the expensive, whiz-bang ones out of preference and comfort. Even if the expensive whiz-bang ones could save you weeks of work in the long run or thousands of man-hours of development time.
"Fictional scarcity" is a product of politics. I don't know what flawed definition of "capitalism" you adhere to, but even classical Adam Smith invisible-hand-esque economics handle the lack of scarcity perfectly well - infinite supply, zero cost. But, pre-digital times, this wasn't an interesting case to economists - everything was scarce.
After reading the article:
1) They concentrate on college and university networks here in America, and your IP address generally betrays (at least) your nationality. Yes, they are aware.
2) Sources? You may very well be right, but the article says they download the file themselves and run it through a "fingerprinting" software to see if it matches a song they hold a copyright to. (You know, one of those nifty programs that'll tell you what's playing on the radio.) If it's an infringing file, they record its size and hash and look for matches.
3) They're probably not aware of your CD collection. But, what in Xenu's name are you doing torrenting an album you already own, when just putting the disc in the freaking drive gets you whatever quality (even Windows Media Player lets you do lossless!) correct tags, album art, and is done in a few minutes? In what case is finding a torrent faster than ripping the actual disc? Do you have a T3 line connected to a Windows 98 box with a dual-speed CD-ROM drive? And has anyone actually been sued for downloading their own CD collection?
4) Again, why are you downloading songs you already have? And again, has anyone actually been sued for this?
5) It's called "settling out of court." Our courts prefer it, actually. Now, the RIAA has done a lot of stupid, reprehensible things - but if I just finished pirating a record label, I'd rather spend a few hundred bucks to settle out of court than actually go to court for something I know I did illegally/unlawfully/contrasanguinous kittenous.
Now, the prices for a new album are pretty rediculous, especially if you only want one song on the disc. $.99 doesn't cut it, either, if the track's DRM'd. I was burned by the closing of the "URGE" music store, and I had to burn/rip my (rather small) music collection onto disc and off again to play my tracks after they shut down.
I also am a huge fan of Japanese music - but a lot of that's hard to get a hold of without spending $bucks at an importer. (Amazon.com has a surprising selection, though.) It's not like they'll let you into the Japanese iTunes store without a Japanese mailing address and credit card, either - although you can get around that by having someone send you (or e-mail you a scan of) a Japanese iTunes gift card. (Here's the one advantage of our entertainment industry being one evil **AA tradegroup - it's easier to license music. From what little I've heard, their entertainment industry is somewhat more fragmented, which makes it harder for people to license music.)
What a rant! But two points I want to make - it's still illegal/unlawful/contrasanguinous kittenous to "pirate" music, and it's just stupid if you own the disc. If you don't like it enough to pay $.99, then it probably wasn't worth downloading anyway, was it?
Nah; I lack a redundant "X" chromosome. Besides, it is demonstrably proven that there are no girlz on t3h intarwebs ^.^
I concur. He led an entire nation astray.
Except that now, our women do it. Improvement??! Stay tuned...
In seriousness, congratulations on managing something most of us can't even contemplate, let alone understand. I can't imagine dealing with the same thing - if my mind went, I'm not exactly getting through life on "good looks and charm." ^.^ (Depending on who you ask, I'm not getting by on just my "mind" either, but it's worth a shot!)
In jest... Slashdot is a good place to discuss this. There are a lot of mentally ill people here who could benefit from your experiences.
But in seriousness again, congratulations on holding down a job and finding fulfillment through something that would normally be debilitating. I'm glad "blogging" or online publishing or whatever buzzword describes your experiences in helping yourself and others has helped you conquer your illness.
Just because some of our 535 crazies committed to Congress this session want to shut it down, doesn't mean it'll happen.
A bill was introduced in 1955 to ban Rock and Roll music, for the same "protect the children" reasons used as excuses to ban anything. Of course, that didn't happen - what would've happened to "Guitar Hero?"
Congress wants to look like it's doing something - actually doing it is hard. Watch them ban Wikileaks, make a press release, and then do nothing within their (limited) power to actually shut the site down. They get their press time, everyone's happy.
But, in some ways, that's a good thing. An ineffectual government is better than one with "quaint" notions of law and justice.
I always thought the whole "Freedom Fries"... err, your "terrestrial fries", thing was hilarious.
The delectable dietary staple has nothing to do with the French, and very little to do with "freedom." In fact, they come from Belgian.
So, I call them "Belgium-fried potatoes." Or, "botatoes" for short.
Now, how inept are the French? Can't even hijack potato recipes properly, let alone solar systems. Yeesh.
Nah, just that most of my posts are knee-jerk rants. But, it's nice for my posts to be confused with something worth reading every once in a while. ^.^
But, there's no labels on the y-axis. Google seems to have made the trends information purposefully difficult to use. I suppose you could make relative comparisons, but then only if everything you wanted to compare was on the same graph - otherwise, the y-axis might be different.
Don't get me wrong - I think this is a really cool project. I never thought about using Google trends for something like this before, and it sounds like this kind of accuracy beats some exit polls. I'm just really disappointed that Google crippled their trends service, when something this neat could be using it.
What's voter mobilization as for as "poor people" and "Amish" are concerned? Since anecdote == data, my grandparents get some of their news on the internet, and I would suspect that some old farts might influence/be influenced by those un-old-farts doing the searching.
It's not a proper random sample, and it suffers from response bias. But with a near 90% success rate, I wonder how it compares to exit polls and the like.
Also, the elderly are more likely to vote, but census data since they're outnumbered 2-1 by younger folks (depending on where you cut off "older" and "younger" in the results table.) I'm guessing that even though a higher percentage of old farts turn out to vote, there is a larger quantity of young people. Underrepresenting an important group, sure, but a minority one.
You're setting the bar pretty low for "reasoned and mature." But, as some people don't seem to realize, controlling for confounding variables makes statistical work more accurate, not less.
But, that things seem to track more or less is pretty nifty. The next step would be to actually automate the predictions, and with curiousity piqued, I Googled (naturally) for a Google Trends API. They've been promising one since 2007, but evidently it hasn't shown up yet or was cancelled, which is disappointing.
It would be really neat to use an API to feed the data into SPSS; you could do nifty things like have it compute how significant some difference in search volume really is, which could improve the (already high) accuracy of the model. Or perhaps have it compute if first, last, or full names correlate with each other.
But, they don't even give you numbers on the Y axis, let alone a programmable API! SPSS is like XML; using it more makes anything better. And while I'm rambling, I'd be kinda bothered by comments about it being "very nice for a simple high school project." Obviously, it would be even more intriguing were you a mature college freshman like myself ^.^
DM is an acronym for, "Downstairs, Mom!" in reference to one's basement dwelling.
GM is obviously a clerical error, as the "G" is only two spaces over from the "D" on a QWERTY keyboard. It would also be a different dialect.
I kid, I kid. But I don't like the 4th edition rules. They simplify things that are handled transparently by a good DM anyway, and it seems to remove a lot of depth.
Never mind - as I read the rest of the FA, they are trying to predict elections.
^.^
But still, my point stands - they point out that this isn't useful for Ron Paul, because interest in Ron Paul on the internet has little to do with his actual campaign. But, nobody as the same Chuck Norris-like admiration of Hillary, so her results are related to campaigns.
There are such things as statistical outliers and externalities.
They're not talking about "zomg google popularity means they'll win!" They're saying, "Watch for your search graphs to spike after a speech to see if it was effective."
Contrived example: Barack Obama makes a big speech about social security. If, suddenly, the number of searches for "Barack Obama Social Security" spikes, you could conclude that maybe you reached some people, generated some interest.
Now, boys and girls, this is where we stop and think. This would work for Barack Obama because those searches track well with the speech he made. It would not work for Ron Paul given his status as an internet meme. The correlation between Ron Paul searches and events in his campaign is going to be just as weak as correlations between Chuck Norris and (actual) events in his life, or between lolcats and pet food product safety.
I don't know how to make it any clearer. There is no "hypothesis." They have not framed this a statistical H0: Google doesn't control the elections and calculated a p-value. They haven't ignored data that would disprove some part of string theory. They're just saying this:
Tracking search trends can be interesting for candidates. Less so for Ron Paul.
They're using a candidate's popularity in Google Trends as a measurement of the success of their campaign.
For Ron Paul, his popularity on the internet has nothing to do with his real-life political success - as grandparent poster said, he's an internet meme. You think there's any correlation between "Ron Paul" jokes on forums and genuine interest in his campaign?
Their "hypothesis" for the other candidates Google trends measures the success of their campaign. With Ron Paul, it's measuring something else entirely.