After reading your response I re-read your initial post, and I concede that I largely mis-read your point and tone. I would agree with you that using faith as an excuse to kill and torture people is despicable; however, I think that you and I would disagree in many other regards (including what conclusions we can draw from the examples of people and the literature you cited).
I never said, implied, or intimated that all people of faith were alike--you reached that conclusion either because of a persecution complex, or because pretending to do so suits your purpose.
I have neither a persecution complex, nor a purpose which I aim to suit. Please do not try to guess my motivation or intent.
You did indeed imply (perhaps unintentionally) that all people of a certain faith are alike, as seen in the example below:
We are being pwned by bible-thumping do-gooders who are not burdened by the humility and self-doubt that plague those of us who can't think of ourselves as instruments of divine providence.
I think it it is your reference to "Bible-thumping do-gooders." Use of an epithet is generally considered to indicate a prejudice, which does include the idea of lumping people together based on a perceived fault or deficiency, without regard to individual characteristics or circumstances.
If you choose to think that I'm offended by their faith in Christ, rather than by killing and torture, then you are more interested in defending the honor of religion than in maintaining a basic level of human decency.
I am not interested in defending any aspect of any religion; at the same time, I disagree with the basic assumption of "human decency" and have found it to be a myth like unicorns and leprechauns. What prompted my post is that you seemed offended by these people's combination of faith and arrogance. I will leave you with this question: are these compatible, or does one put the lie to the other?
Your well-spoken call for moderating the hyperbolic rhetoric is cancelled out by your anti-religious bigotry. You paint a shallow caricature of those with whom you disagree; a very childish and immature thing from an otherwise seemingly intelligent person.
Never mind that Diebold's project manager, Tom Feehan, told me it would take four hours to train a computer moron like me to run the voter sign-in machine.
This is probably the number-one reason why electronic voting machines aren't ready for the real world, probably never will be. People understand and can work with paper; no fancy training necessary.
What will happen if people who were trained can't make it on election day (sickness, car accident, etc.)?
I don't see how you can argue that it's about telcos vs. cable-cos because this whole discussion started when the FCC changed the classification of certain ways to connect to the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality). Under the current regulations, Internet traffic isn't subject to the same rules as either broadcast TV or POTS telephone networks. So nobody has to get persmission from local governments to roll out IP TV, or any other service over the Internet.
As for IP TV not being the same as Apple's "iTV", you're correct, but have entirely missed the point. Can you refer me to the most successful IP TV prodcut at the moment? How many subscribers does it have? If Apple can get 10% of the people who own an iPod to regularly download movies and TV shows, then they'll have a run-away hit compared to current IP TV offerings.
Which brings us back to the whole Net Neutrality issue. If Apple gets to make money off of delivering these downloads, then the telcos/cable-cos that deliver the bits want a piece of the pie. The only way they can do that is if Apple's bits cost more than e-mail bits or Slashdot bits. Once they're able to charge you more for certain bits, the song-and-dance will revert back to their tired old arguments about why they should continue to have government-sanctioned monopolies (cable companies aren't the only ones with those) - because that's how they'll keep their customers locked into the new pricing structure.
Basically what this all boils down to is that the phone/cable companies want to make more money for offering us "new" services (that are basically services that they offer now, but *over the Internet*). Of course, by extension, the equipment manufacturers will reap profits by selling everyone new hardware.
The whole tiered Internet thing is based on the fact that they want to differentiate these "new" services from what we think of as the Internet right now (e-mail, web pages, etc.). They want to break up the current pricing structures so that they can charge more for certain bits.
They last thing that telcos/cable-cos want is to become generic bit pipes. If moving bits around becomes just another commoditized service (like deregulated electric in some places), then they'll have to compete on price and customer service. Competing on price impacts profits, and competing on customer service...well, I've been a customer of GTE/Verizon, Southwestern Bell, and AT&T at different times and if I were them, I'd be scared of competing based on customer satisfaction.
I'll sum it up for you, though: basically, you can *perfectly* reproduce a waveform that was digitally sampled with a sampling frequency of at least twice the waveform's frequency, given that you eliminate the sounds above the "Nyquist frequency" (i.e., half of the sampling frequency). With CDs, that means that with sounds below 22KHz, no information is lost, and the waveform can be reproduced perfectly. I sincerely doubt that you can hear sounds much above 18KHz, and if you are over 30 I doubt you can hear sounds much above 15KHz.
As for your comment about "audiophile" differences being audible only on really expensive systems, there are two things wrong with this:
1. As I already stated, your average person will be able to immediately tell the differnce between vinyl and CD, even on a modestly priced system. This has nothing to do with the quality of the audio system and everything to do with the limitations of the recording media. Vinyl does not "perfectly" record the music; not by a long shot. CD is measurably much closer to the original. Just because you prefer the sound of vinyl does not mean that it is more accurate.
2. Above a certain price point, which is *well* below the $80,000 you cite, the ability of a system to more accurately reproduce the recorded signal is subject to a very steep "diminishing returns" curve. I defy you to find a credible scientific double-blind ABX listening test where a subject was able to tell the difference between a $500 CD player and a $5000 CD player. This is scientific, mind you, so the rest of the setup would have to be the same, everything carefully matched, tests administered in a controlled double-blind manner, etc.
The problem with most tests conducted is that there is more than one variable in play, or people aren't really testing what they think they're testing. People will perceive a difference (notice that I said "perceive" - this does not mean that there is an actual difference; the human mind is easy to deceive) based on many, many different factors. Just try eating something with a subtle flavor while smelling something like turpentine to see my point.
No, no, no, no, NO!
I keep hearing this same ill-informed claptrap from people. You are simply wrong about many things.
But here is a fact: A well mastered vinyl pressing will ALWAYS have MORE of the original audio signal than any CD will. A CD samples the original analog signal, where as a record will contain nearly all of it (actually more, with artifacts and what not, but I'd rather have more than less, even if they are "flaws".)
This "fact" is wrong. I refer you to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem to refute your assertion and perhaps educate you at the same time.
The problem with blind tests is that they are done with music people aren't familar with. Take a group of audiophiles and their favorite track and then perform the test, and they'll get it every time.
This also has been proven wrong (I'm sorry I can't link you to sources, you'd have to be a member of the AES). The reliability of auditory memory for the purposes of comparative listening tests is very short; a minute at the outside for even the most "trained" of audiophiles. Familiarity with the source material does not objectively affect a person's ability to differentiate* between sources. The "golden ear" is a myth.
* Notice I said "differentiate", not express a preference. All a good double-blind scientific test can do is tell whether a person can consistently tell the difference between two things (i.e., beyond the statistical probability that they are guessing). It does not try to determine which is "better".
When a track is mastered to a CD, it is sampled. This sampling process uses an algorithm to decide what frequencies are being played simotaenously and then decides which one the human ear has a harder time hearing. The frequency with the least chance of being heard (such as a high hat played over a strong bass line) will be squared out.
What you describe here in rather rough terms is the psycho-acoustic phenomenon called "frequency masking". This is but one of the tricks employed in lossy compression schemes like MP3 and Dolby AC3 encoding. This does not happen with the PCM encoding that is used for CDs.
And last, but certainly not least, you state:
Can everyone tell the difference? No.
I guarantee you that anyone can tell the difference between vinyl and CD. And in the majority of cases, they will prefer the CD recording.
If you prefer vinyl, then that is your perogative. Some people enjoy Limburger cheese too, but they don't try to deny that it stinks or trot out pseduo-science to try to persuade people that stinky cheese is inherently better than non-stinky cheese.
I know it may seem stupid, but the term "Net Neutrality" may be a stumbling block to the average American. When was the last time anyone but the Swiss got really worked up about neutrality?
Maybe we can call it "Not being sodomized by the bastards" or "Not paying extra for crap service" or "Leave my Skype alone!"
Something is "illegal" if there is a law against it, by definition. No law, no problem. Hence, I see it as an entirely practical way to tackle the issue.
I can guarantee you that the "choice" these service companies made was no choice at all. Microsoft is an abusively dominant player in the computer industry acting in collusion with other abusively dominant players in the music and movie industry. I was being ironic.
If you want to sell music or movies in digital format today, you must use the DRM approved by the music/movie studios. It is not surprising that they would choose Microsoft DRM (goes hand in hand with the built-in media players in the most dominant OS).
What is funny to *me* is that Microsoft would be willing to jeopardize their business of selling DRM to the music/movie industry. After all, that is who they've decided is their customer (it's obviously not the user).
Microsoft really does a remarkable job of shooting themselves in the foot, don't they? It's like a frickin' comedy of errors with Microsoft's attempts to enter into the media device market.
The worst part is that their formats (WMA/WMV) have become the formats of choice for a large number of devices and services. And now those services are feeling what it's like to be a Microsoft customer. Ouch. Sorry guys, we should've told you to lube up first.
1. Having your sensitive information recorded in any medium.
That's it.
Really, there's no such thing as perfect security. If you have any information that you want to keep secure and you tell it to even one other person, it will eventually be accessible to anyone who has enough interest in it.
Hell, if we don't rule out torture, you yourself aren't a reliable repository for your own sensitive information.
But you have to share certain information with others if you want to do business, don't you? Well, it seems to me that the only way to avoid all the mess and hassle is to either:
1. Develop a system of doing business where I don't have to be able to identify a person and keep track of that person and/or their assets (goodbye credit-based economy!)
OR
2. Make it so that even if the information used to idenitfy me is made public, it doesn't matter in the slightest.
The second choice means that the information a business uses to establish my identity has to be enough to authenticate me in some manner to that business, but is otherwise useless to identify my person (age, gender, race, etc.), my place of residence, my bank account, my credit rating, or anything else about me.
Hmm... I think it's possible, but not likely. The banks and corporations very much enjoy knowing all this about you, and it will be a mighty struggle indeed to wrest control of your "personal information" away from them.
The average user can't figure out how to organize their *own* desktop to accomodate their workflow better than "this pile of icons is for this, that pile of icons is for that", and these guys are going to come along and have the *computer* decide what's best?
Sheesh, have we learned nothing from Microsoft? Having the computer decide what things a user can interact with and how the user can interact with them based on a set of hidden, unchangeable rules is counter-productive at best; at times, it can be murderous-rage inducing.
How about we actually help people become better-organized by, oh, I don't know...teaching them some useful organizational skills?!
One definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior expecting a different outcome. It looks like advertising companies are functionally insane. Advertising on television is dead; people have moved on. (Hell, I don't even watch or pay for TV anymore).
Time to find a new way to get paid to annoy millions of people.
Isn't this a bad thing, not for Spamhaus, but for companies that do the same kind of thing and *are* in the US? WIth this case as precedent, can't the spammers now attack US-based anti-spam companies?
Well, at $14.99 the movies are too expensive. But the new set-top box is a promising step in the right direction. That plus a Mac Mini look like a nice, quiet, unobtrusive presence in the living room. Notice that the box has HDMI out - possible hi-def videos in the future?
This is exactly what happens when MBAs are allowed to run things. When will management learn that they are not there to tell people how to do things, they are there to serve the people who actually make/do the things that earn the corporation money.
Middle management in corporations concentrates on the process because they don't understand or know how to improve the people. They don't know how to tell a good engineer from a bad one. They certainly don't understand how to facilitate and develop the abilities of the engineers. They want the higher-ups to notice them, so they go about changing the only thing they can: the process.
And the CEOs don't want to recognize that it's the good people who make the company successful, because that would threaten both their sense of power/control and their ego. [sarcasm]Workers should realize that they are interchangeable parts, and that it's the all-mighty CEO and his super-duper management process that are responsible for the success of the company.[/sarcasm]
After all, how else are the CEOs going to land their next gig when things go tits-up?
(Isn't it always strange how, when things go well the CEO takes all the credit, but when things go wrong it has nothing to do with them?)
It must be early because I read that last sentence as "final stage of our drive to reach both core and nontraditional gamers with an inviting, inclusive and trademarkable gaming experience."
Richard Knob, John Thomas, and Wang Dong were all released from custody today after a mixup leading to their arrest. A police spokesperson was quoted as saying that it was "...a simple clerical error."
Slashdot Mirror
I have neither a persecution complex, nor a purpose which I aim to suit. Please do not try to guess my motivation or intent.
You did indeed imply (perhaps unintentionally) that all people of a certain faith are alike, as seen in the example below: I think it it is your reference to "Bible-thumping do-gooders." Use of an epithet is generally considered to indicate a prejudice, which does include the idea of lumping people together based on a perceived fault or deficiency, without regard to individual characteristics or circumstances.
I am not interested in defending any aspect of any religion; at the same time, I disagree with the basic assumption of "human decency" and have found it to be a myth like unicorns and leprechauns. What prompted my post is that you seemed offended by these people's combination of faith and arrogance. I will leave you with this question: are these compatible, or does one put the lie to the other?
Your well-spoken call for moderating the hyperbolic rhetoric is cancelled out by your anti-religious bigotry. You paint a shallow caricature of those with whom you disagree; a very childish and immature thing from an otherwise seemingly intelligent person.
This is probably the number-one reason why electronic voting machines aren't ready for the real world, probably never will be. People understand and can work with paper; no fancy training necessary.
What will happen if people who were trained can't make it on election day (sickness, car accident, etc.)?
It's too bad that I can't patent a political process by which ridiculous laws are passed by clueless people. I'd be the richest man in the universe.
I don't see how you can argue that it's about telcos vs. cable-cos because this whole discussion started when the FCC changed the classification of certain ways to connect to the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality). Under the current regulations, Internet traffic isn't subject to the same rules as either broadcast TV or POTS telephone networks. So nobody has to get persmission from local governments to roll out IP TV, or any other service over the Internet.
As for IP TV not being the same as Apple's "iTV", you're correct, but have entirely missed the point. Can you refer me to the most successful IP TV prodcut at the moment? How many subscribers does it have? If Apple can get 10% of the people who own an iPod to regularly download movies and TV shows, then they'll have a run-away hit compared to current IP TV offerings.
Which brings us back to the whole Net Neutrality issue. If Apple gets to make money off of delivering these downloads, then the telcos/cable-cos that deliver the bits want a piece of the pie. The only way they can do that is if Apple's bits cost more than e-mail bits or Slashdot bits. Once they're able to charge you more for certain bits, the song-and-dance will revert back to their tired old arguments about why they should continue to have government-sanctioned monopolies (cable companies aren't the only ones with those) - because that's how they'll keep their customers locked into the new pricing structure.
Basically what this all boils down to is that the phone/cable companies want to make more money for offering us "new" services (that are basically services that they offer now, but *over the Internet*). Of course, by extension, the equipment manufacturers will reap profits by selling everyone new hardware.
The whole tiered Internet thing is based on the fact that they want to differentiate these "new" services from what we think of as the Internet right now (e-mail, web pages, etc.). They want to break up the current pricing structures so that they can charge more for certain bits.
They last thing that telcos/cable-cos want is to become generic bit pipes. If moving bits around becomes just another commoditized service (like deregulated electric in some places), then they'll have to compete on price and customer service. Competing on price impacts profits, and competing on customer service...well, I've been a customer of GTE/Verizon, Southwestern Bell, and AT&T at different times and if I were them, I'd be scared of competing based on customer satisfaction.
The more you tighten your grip, the more music listeners will slip through your fingers.
Dude, where have you been? Most previous versions of Windows were "episodic computing".
Sorry for the bad link, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NyquistShannon_sampli ng_theorem.
I'll sum it up for you, though: basically, you can *perfectly* reproduce a waveform that was digitally sampled with a sampling frequency of at least twice the waveform's frequency, given that you eliminate the sounds above the "Nyquist frequency" (i.e., half of the sampling frequency). With CDs, that means that with sounds below 22KHz, no information is lost, and the waveform can be reproduced perfectly. I sincerely doubt that you can hear sounds much above 18KHz, and if you are over 30 I doubt you can hear sounds much above 15KHz.
As for your comment about "audiophile" differences being audible only on really expensive systems, there are two things wrong with this:
1. As I already stated, your average person will be able to immediately tell the differnce between vinyl and CD, even on a modestly priced system. This has nothing to do with the quality of the audio system and everything to do with the limitations of the recording media. Vinyl does not "perfectly" record the music; not by a long shot. CD is measurably much closer to the original. Just because you prefer the sound of vinyl does not mean that it is more accurate.
2. Above a certain price point, which is *well* below the $80,000 you cite, the ability of a system to more accurately reproduce the recorded signal is subject to a very steep "diminishing returns" curve. I defy you to find a credible scientific double-blind ABX listening test where a subject was able to tell the difference between a $500 CD player and a $5000 CD player. This is scientific, mind you, so the rest of the setup would have to be the same, everything carefully matched, tests administered in a controlled double-blind manner, etc.
The problem with most tests conducted is that there is more than one variable in play, or people aren't really testing what they think they're testing. People will perceive a difference (notice that I said "perceive" - this does not mean that there is an actual difference; the human mind is easy to deceive) based on many, many different factors. Just try eating something with a subtle flavor while smelling something like turpentine to see my point.
I keep hearing this same ill-informed claptrap from people. You are simply wrong about many things. This "fact" is wrong. I refer you to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem to refute your assertion and perhaps educate you at the same time. This also has been proven wrong (I'm sorry I can't link you to sources, you'd have to be a member of the AES). The reliability of auditory memory for the purposes of comparative listening tests is very short; a minute at the outside for even the most "trained" of audiophiles. Familiarity with the source material does not objectively affect a person's ability to differentiate* between sources. The "golden ear" is a myth.
* Notice I said "differentiate", not express a preference. All a good double-blind scientific test can do is tell whether a person can consistently tell the difference between two things (i.e., beyond the statistical probability that they are guessing). It does not try to determine which is "better". What you describe here in rather rough terms is the psycho-acoustic phenomenon called "frequency masking". This is but one of the tricks employed in lossy compression schemes like MP3 and Dolby AC3 encoding. This does not happen with the PCM encoding that is used for CDs.
And last, but certainly not least, you state:
I guarantee you that anyone can tell the difference between vinyl and CD. And in the majority of cases, they will prefer the CD recording.If you prefer vinyl, then that is your perogative. Some people enjoy Limburger cheese too, but they don't try to deny that it stinks or trot out pseduo-science to try to persuade people that stinky cheese is inherently better than non-stinky cheese.
Dr. Evil, is that you?
...then I can eat Mexican food for lunch and power my laptop for free!
I know it may seem stupid, but the term "Net Neutrality" may be a stumbling block to the average American. When was the last time anyone but the Swiss got really worked up about neutrality?
Maybe we can call it "Not being sodomized by the bastards" or "Not paying extra for crap service" or "Leave my Skype alone!"
Something is "illegal" if there is a law against it, by definition. No law, no problem. Hence, I see it as an entirely practical way to tackle the issue.
I can guarantee you that the "choice" these service companies made was no choice at all. Microsoft is an abusively dominant player in the computer industry acting in collusion with other abusively dominant players in the music and movie industry. I was being ironic.
If you want to sell music or movies in digital format today, you must use the DRM approved by the music/movie studios. It is not surprising that they would choose Microsoft DRM (goes hand in hand with the built-in media players in the most dominant OS).
What is funny to *me* is that Microsoft would be willing to jeopardize their business of selling DRM to the music/movie industry. After all, that is who they've decided is their customer (it's obviously not the user).
Microsoft really does a remarkable job of shooting themselves in the foot, don't they? It's like a frickin' comedy of errors with Microsoft's attempts to enter into the media device market.
The worst part is that their formats (WMA/WMV) have become the formats of choice for a large number of devices and services. And now those services are feeling what it's like to be a Microsoft customer. Ouch. Sorry guys, we should've told you to lube up first.
1. Having your sensitive information recorded in any medium.
That's it.
Really, there's no such thing as perfect security. If you have any information that you want to keep secure and you tell it to even one other person, it will eventually be accessible to anyone who has enough interest in it.
Hell, if we don't rule out torture, you yourself aren't a reliable repository for your own sensitive information.
But you have to share certain information with others if you want to do business, don't you? Well, it seems to me that the only way to avoid all the mess and hassle is to either:
1. Develop a system of doing business where I don't have to be able to identify a person and keep track of that person and/or their assets (goodbye credit-based economy!)
OR
2. Make it so that even if the information used to idenitfy me is made public, it doesn't matter in the slightest.
The second choice means that the information a business uses to establish my identity has to be enough to authenticate me in some manner to that business, but is otherwise useless to identify my person (age, gender, race, etc.), my place of residence, my bank account, my credit rating, or anything else about me.
Hmm... I think it's possible, but not likely. The banks and corporations very much enjoy knowing all this about you, and it will be a mighty struggle indeed to wrest control of your "personal information" away from them.
The average user can't figure out how to organize their *own* desktop to accomodate their workflow better than "this pile of icons is for this, that pile of icons is for that", and these guys are going to come along and have the *computer* decide what's best?
Sheesh, have we learned nothing from Microsoft? Having the computer decide what things a user can interact with and how the user can interact with them based on a set of hidden, unchangeable rules is counter-productive at best; at times, it can be murderous-rage inducing.
How about we actually help people become better-organized by, oh, I don't know...teaching them some useful organizational skills?!
One definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior expecting a different outcome. It looks like advertising companies are functionally insane. Advertising on television is dead; people have moved on. (Hell, I don't even watch or pay for TV anymore).
Time to find a new way to get paid to annoy millions of people.
...and teach him Perl
Isn't this a bad thing, not for Spamhaus, but for companies that do the same kind of thing and *are* in the US? WIth this case as precedent, can't the spammers now attack US-based anti-spam companies?
Well, at $14.99 the movies are too expensive. But the new set-top box is a promising step in the right direction. That plus a Mac Mini look like a nice, quiet, unobtrusive presence in the living room. Notice that the box has HDMI out - possible hi-def videos in the future?
Middle management in corporations concentrates on the process because they don't understand or know how to improve the people. They don't know how to tell a good engineer from a bad one. They certainly don't understand how to facilitate and develop the abilities of the engineers. They want the higher-ups to notice them, so they go about changing the only thing they can: the process.
And the CEOs don't want to recognize that it's the good people who make the company successful, because that would threaten both their sense of power/control and their ego. [sarcasm]Workers should realize that they are interchangeable parts, and that it's the all-mighty CEO and his super-duper management process that are responsible for the success of the company.[/sarcasm]
After all, how else are the CEOs going to land their next gig when things go tits-up?
(Isn't it always strange how, when things go well the CEO takes all the credit, but when things go wrong it has nothing to do with them?)
It must be early because I read that last sentence as "final stage of our drive to reach both core and nontraditional gamers with an inviting, inclusive and trademarkable gaming experience."
Richard Knob, John Thomas, and Wang Dong were all released from custody today after a mixup leading to their arrest. A police spokesperson was quoted as saying that it was "...a simple clerical error."