I am such an audiophile, but I have to agree that somehow I like this plan. I'll drop a couple bucks on the download (because I think they're worth it) and if it's really great, I'll drop $80 on the full deal. I believe Nigel Godrich is back to producing them, and consequently suspect they know full well what they're doing when it comes to encoding the MP3s in the mastering process. This band knows about sound.
I remember when U2 released "...Atomic Bomb" The CD and radio mixes were dreadful. Then someone I know had a theory, so we ripped the disc to MP3 at various compressions. Sure enough, as soon as we got down to 128kbps, we both nodded to each other and said, "that sounds pretty good." Pop in earbuds, and wham. There was the dynamic range and balance we were missing from the CD. I'm not saying that technically it was there, but I suspect they created those mixes with MP3s in mind.
I for one welcome our cannibalistic walking teddy bear masters...
I wouldn't rule out Chinese just based on their characters. Pinyin seems to solve most of that problem. That and the grammar is mercifully simple for English speakers, even if the tonal system takes a little more work. I think more Anglophones will start picking up Mandarin in the next 10 years as a second language.
They only need to shut down Internet to stop your message getting out.
They need to shoot you and that means catch you first to shut down your ham operations. A people under duress may be willing to take that chance if it affords them a way to get their message out. If they find your equipment and destroy it, you can build or salvage equipment. Not so easy to do with internet access.
Which raises the question, "Who watches the watchmen?"
Suddenly the distribution of information moves from a democratic system to a system of intellectual elite who are, after all, still human. I'd like to see the results of some of the Wiki type pages that are attempting to implement such a system and see how successful they've been, but at the moment I see little that will knock Wikipedia off it's spot as the most widely viewed (and edited) online "Encyclopedia."
How is this any different from having to check the sources of a magazine or newspaper article that may have inaccurate reporting in it, but is taken as fact? Or any different from books that have a slant, agenda, or simply poor research on the part of the author (1421: The Year China Discovered America)? Or what of Encyclopedia's of yesterday, which I recall discovering various biases and inaccuracies in well after writing a paper (that often were not caught by my Elementary and High School teachers, mind you); Funk and Wagnalls, Britannica, and Encarta?
That basically leaves scientific papers, which naturally never let the agenda or the bias of the researcher show through. I suspect most researchers try to be accurate and correct about their data and conclusions; but even they would not argue having someone check their facts and sources, repeat experiments, and verify results.
Wikipedia is an acknowledgement that a) information is not static and b) it is not the province of the intellectually elite. So long as the social contract as a whole values truth over ideology, Wikipedia will tend to develop towards the accurate, simply because it won't be useful to it's users if it doesn't. There is a kind of currency traded there in the manner of "I'll fix what I have facts about if the rest of you fix what you have facts about."
It's funny. I am constantly reading about how Wikipedia is not, and never will be "ready for prime time" as it were. Yet, because I bother to check the sources, I find it's useful and accurate more often than not. I am assuming other people are checking the sources when they find Wikipedia to be inaccurate, because if they have direct knowledge to the contrary (or perhaps access to accurate sources not mentioned in the article) then shouldn't they spend a couple minutes correcting the article rather than naysaying the platform on an unrelated forum? After all, I thought that was why Wikipedia basically works.
As for other naysayers who don't have direct knowledge, don't check sources or don't have access to contradictory sources themselves, how do you know it's inaccurate or untrustworthy?
I have to agree with the above poster. From this perspective it certainly is an interesting experiment and look into human nature.
But the fact that it's not really taught in schools explains Jefferson's suggestion that the country should periodically undergo revolution; to reconstruct and remind people of why they have what they have and to change things as they become obselete.
Unfortunately, periodic revolutions are not conducive to maintaining expansionist global powers (which the United States certainly was through most of the 19th century) and as such I think that idea fell by the wayside.
I haven't been blown up by a terrorist ("yet", the current administration attempts to remind me.)
40,000 Auto related fatalities a year
40,000 Gun related accidents a year
That's just in the U.S.
Average total casualties of terrorism (currently) worldwide is roughly 10,000(and was significantly less prior to 2004, in spite of the attack on the World Trade Center.)
I seem to recall M$ doing most of the foot dragging. And wasn't there something about M$ not sharing much information about it's new OS with anti-virus companies? Could there have been any similar problems with those who write drivers? More importantly, with Vista being altered right up until the last minute, might that have had something to do with the slow pace of driver support?
Though I agree that Vista's Media Center does look good (and for the most part behaves well other than the rare freeze up), I do think Vista is a processing hog and slows systems down. My friend, with minimal GUI on Vista and a marginally better machine than I can both play Civ IV, but I can have more civilizations, larger maps and smoother animation than he does. It's not the be all of all tests, but it is an example of average use of an OS.)
Have you ever played baseball? There is a set of rules which both teams know and abode by. There are also umpires who enforce those rules (as best they can) evenly. Would you play if an umpire could arbitrarily give the other team 6 outs per inning? Or if you were only allowed 8 players on the field?
That's why capitalism needs property rights and an equally enforced rule of law to work correctly.
Wait a minute. If I'm following this analogy correctly, wouldn't it be more like the rules should be there to prevent one team from playing against itself, claiming victory and taking all the ticket sales? Maybe I lost the thread on this one...
Exactly! Better to go bankrupt by having no revenue source for this expensive acquisition than to run off a few of your users who expect some kind of free lunch!
Right. It's better to throw more people at the problem. That's what an uneducated country needs. More people. Doesn't do any good to educate those that are here, so for them let's have soylent green and ship them off to Manhattan Island (maximum security prison).
Seriously. I'm all for bringing good immigrants into the U.S. It was founded by immigrants and is strengthened by immigrants. There comes a time, however, when a country matures to a point where it better figure out how to attend to those that are already there before it accepts another deluge of immigrants. Doesn't necessarily mean handouts. Just means making a *real* effort at solving American problems instead of sending them to the tempest of rhetoric and media frenzy only to die and be reborn come next election.
Greatest country on earth? Maybe. Doesn't mean we should stop trying to make it better.
"The main advantage of the PCM audio is excellent quality. With PCM you can preserve all audio frequencies (even outside the range of human hearing)."
I'm not arguing codecs here per se, but don't suggest that a lossy format is going to stand up to a lossless one. I can tell the difference in blind tests, as can many other people, just by using our ears. Naturally it becomes more difficult to notice a difference in higher bitrate lossless schemes, but that's because there is less audio material missing.
As for DVDs, I agree that the industry chose to compress the audio for a good logical reason. Perhaps we can have full quality audio if they ever sort out the BD/HD war. Sure would make my concert discs even more fun.
It is unfortunate that most people view science as voodoo. I'm not sure I understand where education of the how we apply scientific method and why we apply it has failed.
If more people understood what scientific method is, perhaps there would be less ignorance among the general populace when a power figure throws out accusations of the scientists being biased, wrong, or of science being another religion.
Please notify me if you are scientist, and if so please tell me if you follow the fads, group think and politics, and if so please tell me WHY?
I've known a few scientists, and when it comes to doing hard research they are interested in finding the truth, whatever it may be. If you are not one of these, I would love to know why you got into science to begin with.
Why is Consensus Science politics? If the facts add up to a certain result, then would it not be politics to not have a consensus regarding the data? I agree that the Global Warming debate is about politics, but not Scientific Consensus.
Besides which, good science is not about democracy. Democracy is not the magic pill for every ill! As a matter of policy and governance, it's a good solid system, but if science were about democracy, we wouldn't have to do any research. We'd just vote on it. And boy wouldn't the Creationists like that.
Much as I enjoy and appreciate the work of Philip K. Dick, this sounds very much like the kind of paranoia he would have written about if he were alive today. There are far more insidious efforts today in the realm of intellectual property than anything Apple's currently undertaking, and I'm no apologist or fanboy for apple.
In fact, much like Google, I just see Apple trying to do the right thing, while balancing the interests of their consumers and the producers. E for effort to Apple.
On the contrary. As experiments go, this one is highly successful, unless you had anticipated very specific results. It shows a few things, positive and negative.
Positive: We can be a passionate and determined people, we love a good story, we value our "freedom" enough to exercise it on something even it is spending money and throwing our voices at a television show, we're creative, a cultural force and there are a few things we actually give a damn about.
Negative: We're self-centered, driven by entertainment, worn-out, have short attention spans, often feel helpless, are overburdened by information (and uncertain how to organize it), have short attention spans, are undereducated regarding our systems of government, speech and business, and have exceedingly short spans of attention.
Ambiguous: We're the kind of people who will debate the relevance of the issue on Slashdot. Are we going to make any more of a difference talking about it here? Is it worth expending that energy on a forum such as this (where we've well established the general result.) Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Great call on the Network quote, though...as I think the context in which it appears in the movie is quite apt for your general point.
Slashdot Mirror
I am such an audiophile, but I have to agree that somehow I like this plan. I'll drop a couple bucks on the download (because I think they're worth it) and if it's really great, I'll drop $80 on the full deal. I believe Nigel Godrich is back to producing them, and consequently suspect they know full well what they're doing when it comes to encoding the MP3s in the mastering process. This band knows about sound.
I remember when U2 released "...Atomic Bomb" The CD and radio mixes were dreadful. Then someone I know had a theory, so we ripped the disc to MP3 at various compressions. Sure enough, as soon as we got down to 128kbps, we both nodded to each other and said, "that sounds pretty good." Pop in earbuds, and wham. There was the dynamic range and balance we were missing from the CD. I'm not saying that technically it was there, but I suspect they created those mixes with MP3s in mind.
I for one welcome our cannibalistic walking teddy bear masters...
Much as there are people who enjoy Object Oriented Programming.
SNAP!
Awaiting my -1(dumb)
I wouldn't rule out Chinese just based on their characters. Pinyin seems to solve most of that problem. That and the grammar is mercifully simple for English speakers, even if the tonal system takes a little more work. I think more Anglophones will start picking up Mandarin in the next 10 years as a second language.
They only need to shut down Internet to stop your message getting out.
They need to shoot you and that means catch you first to shut down your ham operations. A people under duress may be willing to take that chance if it affords them a way to get their message out. If they find your equipment and destroy it, you can build or salvage equipment. Not so easy to do with internet access.
Which raises the question, "Who watches the watchmen?"
Suddenly the distribution of information moves from a democratic system to a system of intellectual elite who are, after all, still human. I'd like to see the results of some of the Wiki type pages that are attempting to implement such a system and see how successful they've been, but at the moment I see little that will knock Wikipedia off it's spot as the most widely viewed (and edited) online "Encyclopedia."
How is this any different from having to check the sources of a magazine or newspaper article that may have inaccurate reporting in it, but is taken as fact? Or any different from books that have a slant, agenda, or simply poor research on the part of the author (1421: The Year China Discovered America)? Or what of Encyclopedia's of yesterday, which I recall discovering various biases and inaccuracies in well after writing a paper (that often were not caught by my Elementary and High School teachers, mind you); Funk and Wagnalls, Britannica, and Encarta?
That basically leaves scientific papers, which naturally never let the agenda or the bias of the researcher show through. I suspect most researchers try to be accurate and correct about their data and conclusions; but even they would not argue having someone check their facts and sources, repeat experiments, and verify results.
+1 Mod Up
Wikipedia is an acknowledgement that a) information is not static and b) it is not the province of the intellectually elite. So long as the social contract as a whole values truth over ideology, Wikipedia will tend to develop towards the accurate, simply because it won't be useful to it's users if it doesn't. There is a kind of currency traded there in the manner of "I'll fix what I have facts about if the rest of you fix what you have facts about."
It's funny. I am constantly reading about how Wikipedia is not, and never will be "ready for prime time" as it were. Yet, because I bother to check the sources, I find it's useful and accurate more often than not. I am assuming other people are checking the sources when they find Wikipedia to be inaccurate, because if they have direct knowledge to the contrary (or perhaps access to accurate sources not mentioned in the article) then shouldn't they spend a couple minutes correcting the article rather than naysaying the platform on an unrelated forum? After all, I thought that was why Wikipedia basically works.
As for other naysayers who don't have direct knowledge, don't check sources or don't have access to contradictory sources themselves, how do you know it's inaccurate or untrustworthy?
I have to agree with the above poster. From this perspective it certainly is an interesting experiment and look into human nature.
But the fact that it's not really taught in schools explains Jefferson's suggestion that the country should periodically undergo revolution; to reconstruct and remind people of why they have what they have and to change things as they become obselete.
Unfortunately, periodic revolutions are not conducive to maintaining expansionist global powers (which the United States certainly was through most of the 19th century) and as such I think that idea fell by the wayside.
Or maybe I've been playing too much Civ...
+1 Exactly.
I haven't been blown up by a terrorist ("yet", the current administration attempts to remind me.)
40,000 Auto related fatalities a year
40,000 Gun related accidents a year
That's just in the U.S.
Average total casualties of terrorism (currently) worldwide is roughly 10,000(and was significantly less prior to 2004, in spite of the attack on the World Trade Center.)
Terrorism Statistics: GTD
Terrorists want people to live in fear that today could be their last. Now who is for letting the terrorists win?
I for one welcome our MIT overlords.
My Kingdom for a mod point!
+1 more...Insightful.
I seem to recall M$ doing most of the foot dragging. And wasn't there something about M$ not sharing much information about it's new OS with anti-virus companies? Could there have been any similar problems with those who write drivers? More importantly, with Vista being altered right up until the last minute, might that have had something to do with the slow pace of driver support?
Though I agree that Vista's Media Center does look good (and for the most part behaves well other than the rare freeze up), I do think Vista is a processing hog and slows systems down. My friend, with minimal GUI on Vista and a marginally better machine than I can both play Civ IV, but I can have more civilizations, larger maps and smoother animation than he does. It's not the be all of all tests, but it is an example of average use of an OS.)
Obligatory "you must be new here."
That's why capitalism needs property rights and an equally enforced rule of law to work correctly.
Wait a minute. If I'm following this analogy correctly, wouldn't it be more like the rules should be there to prevent one team from playing against itself, claiming victory and taking all the ticket sales? Maybe I lost the thread on this one...
Exactly! Better to go bankrupt by having no revenue source for this expensive acquisition than to run off a few of your users who expect some kind of free lunch!
Welcome to the real universe.
Right. It's better to throw more people at the problem. That's what an uneducated country needs. More people. Doesn't do any good to educate those that are here, so for them let's have soylent green and ship them off to Manhattan Island (maximum security prison). Seriously. I'm all for bringing good immigrants into the U.S. It was founded by immigrants and is strengthened by immigrants. There comes a time, however, when a country matures to a point where it better figure out how to attend to those that are already there before it accepts another deluge of immigrants. Doesn't necessarily mean handouts. Just means making a *real* effort at solving American problems instead of sending them to the tempest of rhetoric and media frenzy only to die and be reborn come next election. Greatest country on earth? Maybe. Doesn't mean we should stop trying to make it better.
Wrong. Your own reference says otherwise.
"The main advantage of the PCM audio is excellent quality. With PCM you can preserve all audio frequencies (even outside the range of human hearing)."
I'm not arguing codecs here per se, but don't suggest that a lossy format is going to stand up to a lossless one. I can tell the difference in blind tests, as can many other people, just by using our ears. Naturally it becomes more difficult to notice a difference in higher bitrate lossless schemes, but that's because there is less audio material missing.
As for DVDs, I agree that the industry chose to compress the audio for a good logical reason. Perhaps we can have full quality audio if they ever sort out the BD/HD war. Sure would make my concert discs even more fun.
It is unfortunate that most people view science as voodoo. I'm not sure I understand where education of the how we apply scientific method and why we apply it has failed.
If more people understood what scientific method is, perhaps there would be less ignorance among the general populace when a power figure throws out accusations of the scientists being biased, wrong, or of science being another religion.
+1
+1, if I had the mod points
Please notify me if you are scientist, and if so please tell me if you follow the fads, group think and politics, and if so please tell me WHY?
I've known a few scientists, and when it comes to doing hard research they are interested in finding the truth, whatever it may be. If you are not one of these, I would love to know why you got into science to begin with.
Why is Consensus Science politics? If the facts add up to a certain result, then would it not be politics to not have a consensus regarding the data? I agree that the Global Warming debate is about politics, but not Scientific Consensus.
Besides which, good science is not about democracy. Democracy is not the magic pill for every ill! As a matter of policy and governance, it's a good solid system, but if science were about democracy, we wouldn't have to do any research. We'd just vote on it. And boy wouldn't the Creationists like that.
Well, if they won't classify porn as an addiction, I don't see how they could classify video games as such.
Agreed and +1.
Much as I enjoy and appreciate the work of Philip K. Dick, this sounds very much like the kind of paranoia he would have written about if he were alive today. There are far more insidious efforts today in the realm of intellectual property than anything Apple's currently undertaking, and I'm no apologist or fanboy for apple.
In fact, much like Google, I just see Apple trying to do the right thing, while balancing the interests of their consumers and the producers. E for effort to Apple.
On the contrary. As experiments go, this one is highly successful, unless you had anticipated very specific results. It shows a few things, positive and negative.
Positive: We can be a passionate and determined people, we love a good story, we value our "freedom" enough to exercise it on something even it is spending money and throwing our voices at a television show, we're creative, a cultural force and there are a few things we actually give a damn about.
Negative: We're self-centered, driven by entertainment, worn-out, have short attention spans, often feel helpless, are overburdened by information (and uncertain how to organize it), have short attention spans, are undereducated regarding our systems of government, speech and business, and have exceedingly short spans of attention.
Ambiguous: We're the kind of people who will debate the relevance of the issue on Slashdot. Are we going to make any more of a difference talking about it here? Is it worth expending that energy on a forum such as this (where we've well established the general result.) Maybe yes. Maybe no.
Great call on the Network quote, though...as I think the context in which it appears in the movie is quite apt for your general point.