The whole article seemed to culminate in the following information: some guy said if Macs were more popular they would have a worse record than "other operating systems." It seems to be comparing OS X to Linux, but it isn't entirely clear what the baseline is for their eval of Mac OS.X and it also doesn't clarify what exactly makes these OSs different. Also, the web site defacement isn't proof that the person with an unprivileged account acquired superuser privileges to do anything other than deface the web page. I don't doubt it could have happened, but maybe it did and maybe it didn't...
"The only thing which has kept Mac OS X relatively safe up until now is the fact that the market share is significantly lower than that of Microsoft Windows or the more common UNIX platforms.... If this situation was to change, in my opinion, things could be a lot worse on Mac OS X than they currently are on other operating systems," said Archibald at the time.
Also, giving people LDAP accounts on the machine is really cheating. Maybe some noobs get a boner when someone fuzzes the hell out of a box from a local account until they get some fuzz escalated **BORING**. If they really wanted to throw down the gauntlet, then we would see Mandatory Access Control implemented on OS X . The big difference is that the MAC policies would be enforceable at the Mach MK level (on Mach ports, tasks, processes...), and OS X would be the ONLY OS with a security policy interface that could come close to usable for average people.
How about this: imagine a company that makes its money by inserting a neural interface in free ranging tigers - the neural interface can be mapped to any person so you can briefly experience what it feels like to be a tiger - or another interface that allows you to control the tiger remotely, become the tiger.
Or better yet, why not use those brain-scan beams the NSA is using to detect terrorist intentions at the Superbowl? You could wire the signals right into another person's brain for interperetation. Later it could be commercialized and they could wire it into movie cameras. Instead of just watching John Malkovitch, you could try being John Malkovitch....
The main problem with Open Source (Free) software is that forking is easy, but merging is hard. It is not wrong for Google to fork Ubuntu. It is wrong to avoid the extra care of making sure the Ubuntu community can easily merge Google's work back into Ubuntu.
What Google *should* do is explicitly design the roadmap for Goobuntu as an iterative process of forking, releasing, merging back to Ubuntu (so that the community as a whole (not JUST Google) can support the persistent Google features, and then re-forking before Google starts work on another release.
I think this is a good model for cooperative free software collaboration with industry. Google would be accomplishing much more than just another great software implementation: they would be championing a framework that would result in many more free software accomplishments.
This idea of plugging a phone into a TV and somehow getting a computing experience out of it is a joke. The $100 computer from MIT is a TEXT based computing device, even if it is graphical. Nobody at Microsoft would be able to use the crap they are suggesting for anything productive, therefore it will never sell. They could only hope to unload boatloads of the shit on developing nations with the hopes of getting some kind of cut of the foreign aid budget: ie. the US gave "computers" to developing nations, but really they bought shiny plastic junk with TAX DOLLARS at inflated prices from Microsoft and dumped them on poor people.
Please don't forget that the Cato Institute is a bunch of self-aggrandizing nitwits who play "we're smarter than everyone else" waving their "invisible hands" to explain everything away.
Nobody really understands how the "Invisible Hand" works. It's friggin' magic! Adam Smith used it to obfuscate a bunch of obtuse macroeconomics in a way that made people feel like they understood what he was saying. The bottom line of Adam Smith's economics NEVER materializes because you can never account for all of the costs. It's a teleology, and there IS NO telos. Adam Smith has some ideas about how to shoot yourself in the foot trying to manipulate an economic system, but lassais faire is really just a cop-out.
On one side of this asshole, you can hear him say "open unix yuk" and the other side he whines about viruses and lack of automation. Somehow, in his world, "the poor" are getting so much better off, completely independant of the rich (who are getting even better off), that they don't bother to revolt. This guy's favorite newspaper is written on lint inside his navel. He also likes to pretend he isn't insular. He thinks it would be a good idea for (other) people to live in pods at WalMart.
He also thinks he invented "Virtual Reality" by coining the term. Never mind the GUI version of VR is an embarassing failure. The most successful VR systems are texty MUD systems or even more texty books, or even less interactive films, or video games (which only have a gloss of continuous movement). WTF do you think we should be doing?
It's easy to *seem* smart if one only raises questions and never ventures an idea that can be attributed critically to oneself. On the writing style: I have an obligatory Nietzsche quote. "The poet who is in love with the superlative wants more than he is capable of."
Some people like this though. If you decide that this guy is smarter than you, you might also decide to agree with him, and sneer together at the things and people he insults. Then you can be in the smart club of winners instead of the dumb club of losers. Here's another obligatory Nietzsche quote: "You seek followers? Seek zeroes!"
If you had good earbuds, and there wasn't anything to drown out, the music would sound better at lower volumes. The answer is to drown out the external noise with passive dampening.
Put shooters hearing protection on over your earbuds. All earmuff style headphones should be built with ~25dB+ sound dampening gel inserts. I always judge headphones by how quiet they are when unplugged compared to the ambient noise level of the room. The better the headphones, the more noise they tolerate at ZERO power. Then the sound quality from the drivers takes effect: but only as a secondary factor. If I only listened to headphones in a noise-controlled environment, then I could probably just use a real stereo.
From Crossbows to Cryptography and back to crossbows? What if the bad guys just use a nano-engineered armor piercing tip projectile? I'm sure a piece if armor made from this stuff will cost much more than 50-60 rounds of ammo made out of the same stuff. What if they made really tiny HEAT style rounds (squirting a jet of molten metal on impact)?
If you try to report on music sales in the same way that you report on, say: corn or wheat or even iPods, you are a friggin moron.
A) Music is not a material thing. I read posts in this discussion citing iTunes gift cards' sales going with iPods.
B) Music is not commodifiable. You can fart the melody to jingle-bells and put it on the iTMS, but that isn't going to make people want to shell out $10-15 for it. If everyone did it, sales would go way down.
You appear to want to draw a line in the sand, pitching some examples to suggest its proximity, but no matter how much you assert its existence, I don't see it. I hope I'm not standing on your invisible friend.
I'm trying to make a subtle point here. Think! I know this is Slashdot, but someone will get it.
It seems to me that we have two separate issues to deal with. One is the theoretical limits of epistemology that Wikipedians must cite when defending errors in the Wikipedia. The other is the difference between an honest mistake and deliberately misleading content. The Register, I think, is correct to say that the former is no excuse for the latter.
So the real problem is not that the Wikipedia cannot achieve a higher level of factual rectitude. The real problem is that the Wikipedia has no facility to help novices establish the authority of an article of the Wikipedia. The best science can offer us [laypeople] is a bunch of journals that practice a complicated protocol of anonymous referees from a select bunch of supposed "experts" in the journal's field. If you want to don the scientist hat, you can always try to replicate the results of someone's journal article. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but plenty of crap, for various reasons, has slipped through the journals' sacred peer reviews.
The real problem here is that the Wikipedia puports to be peer-reviewed, but each article has its subscribers, and it isn't clear whether an article has been tacitly approved by innumerable readers, or quietly corrupted out of salutary neglect. This ambiguity is the real failing of the Wikipedia, but it should be easily corrected by applying something similar to Slashdot Karma--just to show whether any editorial attention has affected any given article or not.
The real problem with the Register's scathing polemic is that it is just scathing polemic. The Wikipedia and the Register are apples and oranges. The authority of the Register's criticism cannot really be levelled with the Wikipedia, though its argument has a resounding us and them posture. It conveniently ignores the wealth of good content in math and science and that traditional encyclopedias get historical biography just as wrong (Christopher Columbus is a good candidate for this angle). So the punk teenager straw man at the conclusion of the Register article could just as well have been a fat, lazy armchair anthropologist to characterize the racist crap in the encyclopedias I grew up using.
In the end, I think the Wikipedians are right. "The price of liberty is vigilance." The Register is also right. This is one thing that will happen if we're asleep at the wheel. However fiery the iconoclasty makes you feel, do we throw the baby out with the bathwater? No. We take what we have and make it better.
If you follow the biography link http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/biography.aspx ?name=seigenthaler you will find that JS is a (historic) public figure. He is (or has been) a journalist and an activist involved with historical celebrities in public office. This IMHO makes him ineligible for libel protection as a public figure.
I agree that he should also understand as a journalist that what he really wants when he whines about the Wikipedia is editorial control, and he is too stoopud to really look for an opportunity to take care of his own problem. He could have editied the crap out himself if he didn't like it, and he could have appealed to the broader community of Wikipedians for help if he got into an edit war with vandals. What a crybaby!
In a sense, importance = expense. If something is important, one is willing to go to great expense for it. Hence expensive = important, and vice versa cheap = unimportant. Reasons can be made less important. Specifically, the justification for defending intellectual property (trade secrets).
If the foundation technology (chipsets, etc.) are so old and cheap to produce, then I would suspect the reasons for keeping it closed are also old and cheapened.
Please remember that this is the oldest and most stable global electronic democracy alive. The regional and national governments are jealous of the trust people place in the new world democracy, and they want to usurp from it.
What Lessig doesn't say and all of the rest of these ninnies don't seem to know is that the DNS is a 100% voluntary participation system. Alternative root DNS clusters HAVE been set up in the past. Most people just blindly take the DNS servers suggested by their ISPs, but the ISPs, and the corporate network admins could add a new set of root servers at any time.
The operators of the root DNS servers could opt to ignore ICANN and any other body, or they could do something in between and resolve the conflict in a creative way over which neither the ICANN nor the EU has any control. We all vote for the root-zone operators when we set up our resolvers to point to them, and we grant a proxy to our ISPs and companies when we let them do it for us.
For discussion: on what does this DNS democracy depend?
There are (for the purpose of this post) innumerable possible licenses out there. Only one of them will be called GPL3.0, but if you don't like the one arbitrarily named GPL3.0 you are perfectly free to use one of the others. Keep using GPL2.0, for instance. The democracy in the GPL3.0 is VOLUNTARY ADOPTION. This license will not be foisted on anyone.
The real problem is that lots of people may dislike GPL3.0, and they will likely go with plan B, which may not be the same license as everyone else. Then we will all have to read the fine print again. Of course, upon rejection of the GPL3.0 license, these same dissenters can (and probably will) wish they had an acceptible GPL, which provides the perfect motivation for a GPL3.1 fork. We all have to choose between the LGPL and the GPL as things stand, because there was a bifurcation in the types of GPL software, their users and their respective licensing needs. It isn't clear whether this situation is more or less dangerous than the debate that led to the LGPL. The implied message is clear: "GPL3.0 may not be any good."
The expression that GPL3.0 might be bad is meaningless because it doesn't exist yet. Communicating this to a mass audience is FUD. The purpose is to stir up demand for participation in the GPL3.0 drafting process, which will complicate it, and slow it down, and sacrifice the quality of the final product (even if only the timeliness). If there was real reason for concern, people would already be embroiled in an Internet wide debate on what needs to be fixed with the GPL. Maybe that is already happening, and it's just the people most qualified and or interested that are participating in the debate, at a quiet level compared to Slashdot controversy. If I wanted to derail those people, the best tool at my disposal is to try and discredit them and force them to spend their valuable time defending themselves and their work from angry mobs of mouth-breathers who refuse to Google the issue themselves.
Here's a hint: if you ever get a feeling of righteous indignation, you're playing the victim, and you're ignoring your real opportunity to do something positive.
Joe: What does Apple hold back from the iPod that the free software community can offer?
Bob: Record 48KHz 32bit floating point sampled stereo to that 20-60GB hard drive!
Joe: Why does that matter?
Bob: Because it cuts out the studio middleman! Does anyone remember the Grateful Dead tapes that were flying around? Well, going digital in a $200 device makes things a LOT cheaper. People used to lug around portable DAT decks that were 4-6 times the size of an iPod, and they could only record a couple of hours of music. Give it an interface to connect to a peer and copy music back and forth (sans computer). Apple would have to give up the ITMS and all of the content to make iPods do that.
There is a lot that can be done about ignorance. The opposite of ignorance is attentiveness: start by caring about the things that ignorance tries to cover up.
There are essential facts of life that no ignoramus can successfully ignore. For example: death--their own personal death. Even if they wave their hands and cite some dogma to cover up the issue, you will be able to see the reality of anxiety over death in their eyes.
Questions: ask questions of an ignoramus. Don't ask rehearsed questions, just genuine down-to-earth questions that point right at the heart of the issue whenever there is an immediate practical opportunity to do it.
Understand your interests and the interests of others (even the ignoramii). First, do no harm, but do what you know you have to. The reality of your situation might supercede any of the principles or dogmas that you may normally rely upon. Make authentic judgements in the present, and you will consistently find yourself in eminently superior position to people who program themselves with dogmas.
Of course, someone may have very varied taste in music - but their songs would still flow - to them - beacuse they probably like to have very different songs played while listening.
Buried in this claim is the implication that any song in a selective subset of songs collected by anyone has a uniform ability to flow into any other song in the subset. A random selection is as good as any statistically matched selection if and only if the preceding statement is true. I'm not claiming to have/know such a magic bullet, but you'll have a harder time supporting your assertion that it is not possible.
Actually, you're right but I somewhat barely do know what eigenvalues are. I saw Eigenradio (which uses eigenvalues for PCA, according to the diagram) a while ago, which is what got me thinking. What I thought was cool about eigenvalues is what you think sucks about them for this purpose. Also I think you're talking about computing eigenvalues on the song files' metadata. I mean computing eigenvalues and doing PCA on the raw audio data for the actual music contained in the files. The cool thing about this is that the covariance you get is freely independant of any arbitrary categorization in the files' artist or genre tags.
I thought about your suggestion about using FFTs too, but I came down to the suspicion that a lot of the heavy lifting is to support all of the assumptions about what makes a song flow well with another one: like frequency distribution or the other things you listed like variance of volume (which audio people call compression, and beats per minute. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to gather statistics on the whole song, whereas only the beginning and end are significant to a good segue. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to always compare against the complete set of statistical metadata for your songs when all you need is to take the favorite match from a limited set of randomly selected possible next tracks.
Of course, if I'm wrong about iTunes, but right about generating a better playlist through statistical matching, we may have totally blown the patent here:)
If anyone who can afford an iPod can afford to carry a digital recording studio in their pocket, then the barrier to record live music will be low enough for quality recordings of good live music to flood the market. A musician or band can then build up a following and promote themselves with cheap (free) downloads. By the time musicians need major distribution, they will not have to sign crappy boy-band contracts because the P&D will not be able to claim there is a risk that the band will bomb.
I read the MS paper on AutoDJ. It is crap. Here's how it works: editors magically decide some finite set of descriptive qualities and rate each of your songs on each of those qualities. If editors rate your least favorite song "highly snazzy" and your most favorite song also "highly snazzy", AutoDJ will guess that whenever you select three "highly snazzy" songs in a row to seed the playlist, your least favorite song will be a good match based on the "highly snazzy" factor. Maybe other songs fit better on other descriptors besides "snazzy", but those scores are no more reliable at predicting your impression than "snazzy."
Moreover, the underlying assumption is that when you select a few songs your selection represents a state which the playlist should make a best effort to approximate. Even if it worked ideally, the generated playlists would always represent a musical rut.
I have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together. THAT is smart. It sometimes gets into a rut, but that is because I need to round out my collection, and the rut is always more interesting than getting stuck in one mode. AutoDJ is half-baked.
One product of a massive income gap is that the winners, flush with cash, have less and less stuff to buy with their cash as investment assets become scarce. Everyone (in this market) has cash, but there are few easy ways to leverage it. As you move up the pricing tier, there are fewer and fewer buyers who can afford that investment, so market pressure seems to let up making investments seem more attractive. Diamonds from Tiffany's? Turning the table, the simpler explanation is that the more money a person has, the less each dollar means to them. The more cash you have, the less risk-averse you need to be.
Take into account that Google stock is kind-of like Google's currency: Googlebucks if you will and the Dollar is kind-of weak. This is like people saying that "we want to trade all of our US dollars for something backed by more than just US labor."
Slashdot Mirror
The whole article seemed to culminate in the following information: some guy said if Macs were more popular they would have a worse record than "other operating systems." It seems to be comparing OS X to Linux, but it isn't entirely clear what the baseline is for their eval of Mac OS.X and it also doesn't clarify what exactly makes these OSs different. Also, the web site defacement isn't proof that the person with an unprivileged account acquired superuser privileges to do anything other than deface the web page. I don't doubt it could have happened, but maybe it did and maybe it didn't...
Also, giving people LDAP accounts on the machine is really cheating. Maybe some noobs get a boner when someone fuzzes the hell out of a box from a local account until they get some fuzz escalated **BORING**. If they really wanted to throw down the gauntlet, then we would see Mandatory Access Control implemented on OS X . The big difference is that the MAC policies would be enforceable at the Mach MK level (on Mach ports, tasks, processes...), and OS X would be the ONLY OS with a security policy interface that could come close to usable for average people.
Or better yet, why not use those brain-scan beams the NSA is using to detect terrorist intentions at the Superbowl? You could wire the signals right into another person's brain for interperetation. Later it could be commercialized and they could wire it into movie cameras. Instead of just watching John Malkovitch, you could try being John Malkovitch....
Uh... never mind. That would suck.
Hmmm... Sucks... http://www.google.com/search?q=teledildonics
The main problem with Open Source (Free) software is that forking is easy, but merging is hard. It is not wrong for Google to fork Ubuntu. It is wrong to avoid the extra care of making sure the Ubuntu community can easily merge Google's work back into Ubuntu.
What Google *should* do is explicitly design the roadmap for Goobuntu as an iterative process of forking, releasing, merging back to Ubuntu (so that the community as a whole (not JUST Google) can support the persistent Google features, and then re-forking before Google starts work on another release.
I think this is a good model for cooperative free software collaboration with industry. Google would be accomplishing much more than just another great software implementation: they would be championing a framework that would result in many more free software accomplishments.
This idea of plugging a phone into a TV and somehow getting a computing experience out of it is a joke. The $100 computer from MIT is a TEXT based computing device, even if it is graphical. Nobody at Microsoft would be able to use the crap they are suggesting for anything productive, therefore it will never sell. They could only hope to unload boatloads of the shit on developing nations with the hopes of getting some kind of cut of the foreign aid budget: ie. the US gave "computers" to developing nations, but really they bought shiny plastic junk with TAX DOLLARS at inflated prices from Microsoft and dumped them on poor people.
Please don't forget that the Cato Institute is a bunch of self-aggrandizing nitwits who play "we're smarter than everyone else" waving their "invisible hands" to explain everything away. Nobody really understands how the "Invisible Hand" works. It's friggin' magic! Adam Smith used it to obfuscate a bunch of obtuse macroeconomics in a way that made people feel like they understood what he was saying. The bottom line of Adam Smith's economics NEVER materializes because you can never account for all of the costs. It's a teleology, and there IS NO telos. Adam Smith has some ideas about how to shoot yourself in the foot trying to manipulate an economic system, but lassais faire is really just a cop-out.
On one side of this asshole, you can hear him say "open unix yuk" and the other side he whines about viruses and lack of automation. Somehow, in his world, "the poor" are getting so much better off, completely independant of the rich (who are getting even better off), that they don't bother to revolt. This guy's favorite newspaper is written on lint inside his navel. He also likes to pretend he isn't insular. He thinks it would be a good idea for (other) people to live in pods at WalMart.
He also thinks he invented "Virtual Reality" by coining the term. Never mind the GUI version of VR is an embarassing failure. The most successful VR systems are texty MUD systems or even more texty books, or even less interactive films, or video games (which only have a gloss of continuous movement). WTF do you think we should be doing?
It's easy to *seem* smart if one only raises questions and never ventures an idea that can be attributed critically to oneself. On the writing style: I have an obligatory Nietzsche quote. "The poet who is in love with the superlative wants more than he is capable of."
Some people like this though. If you decide that this guy is smarter than you, you might also decide to agree with him, and sneer together at the things and people he insults. Then you can be in the smart club of winners instead of the dumb club of losers. Here's another obligatory Nietzsche quote: "You seek followers? Seek zeroes!"
If you had good earbuds, and there wasn't anything to drown out, the music would sound better at lower volumes. The answer is to drown out the external noise with passive dampening.
Put shooters hearing protection on over your earbuds. All earmuff style headphones should be built with ~25dB+ sound dampening gel inserts. I always judge headphones by how quiet they are when unplugged compared to the ambient noise level of the room. The better the headphones, the more noise they tolerate at ZERO power. Then the sound quality from the drivers takes effect: but only as a secondary factor. If I only listened to headphones in a noise-controlled environment, then I could probably just use a real stereo.
From Crossbows to Cryptography and back to crossbows? What if the bad guys just use a nano-engineered armor piercing tip projectile? I'm sure a piece if armor made from this stuff will cost much more than 50-60 rounds of ammo made out of the same stuff. What if they made really tiny HEAT style rounds (squirting a jet of molten metal on impact)?
FP?
The NYT hates Slashdot, so click the link, a few times, but gimme a good one with no stoopud signup teaser!
If you try to report on music sales in the same way that you report on, say: corn or wheat or even iPods, you are a friggin moron. A) Music is not a material thing. I read posts in this discussion citing iTunes gift cards' sales going with iPods. B) Music is not commodifiable. You can fart the melody to jingle-bells and put it on the iTMS, but that isn't going to make people want to shell out $10-15 for it. If everyone did it, sales would go way down.
You appear to want to draw a line in the sand, pitching some examples to suggest its proximity, but no matter how much you assert its existence, I don't see it. I hope I'm not standing on your invisible friend.
I'm trying to make a subtle point here. Think! I know this is Slashdot, but someone will get it.
It seems to me that we have two separate issues to deal with. One is the theoretical limits of epistemology that Wikipedians must cite when defending errors in the Wikipedia. The other is the difference between an honest mistake and deliberately misleading content. The Register, I think, is correct to say that the former is no excuse for the latter.
So the real problem is not that the Wikipedia cannot achieve a higher level of factual rectitude. The real problem is that the Wikipedia has no facility to help novices establish the authority of an article of the Wikipedia. The best science can offer us [laypeople] is a bunch of journals that practice a complicated protocol of anonymous referees from a select bunch of supposed "experts" in the journal's field. If you want to don the scientist hat, you can always try to replicate the results of someone's journal article. I leave it as an exercise for the reader, but plenty of crap, for various reasons, has slipped through the journals' sacred peer reviews.
The real problem here is that the Wikipedia puports to be peer-reviewed, but each article has its subscribers, and it isn't clear whether an article has been tacitly approved by innumerable readers, or quietly corrupted out of salutary neglect. This ambiguity is the real failing of the Wikipedia, but it should be easily corrected by applying something similar to Slashdot Karma--just to show whether any editorial attention has affected any given article or not.
The real problem with the Register's scathing polemic is that it is just scathing polemic. The Wikipedia and the Register are apples and oranges. The authority of the Register's criticism cannot really be levelled with the Wikipedia, though its argument has a resounding us and them posture. It conveniently ignores the wealth of good content in math and science and that traditional encyclopedias get historical biography just as wrong (Christopher Columbus is a good candidate for this angle). So the punk teenager straw man at the conclusion of the Register article could just as well have been a fat, lazy armchair anthropologist to characterize the racist crap in the encyclopedias I grew up using.
In the end, I think the Wikipedians are right. "The price of liberty is vigilance." The Register is also right. This is one thing that will happen if we're asleep at the wheel. However fiery the iconoclasty makes you feel, do we throw the baby out with the bathwater? No. We take what we have and make it better.
If you follow the biography link http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/biography.aspx ?name=seigenthaler you will find that JS is a (historic) public figure. He is (or has been) a journalist and an activist involved with historical celebrities in public office. This IMHO makes him ineligible for libel protection as a public figure.
I agree that he should also understand as a journalist that what he really wants when he whines about the Wikipedia is editorial control, and he is too stoopud to really look for an opportunity to take care of his own problem. He could have editied the crap out himself if he didn't like it, and he could have appealed to the broader community of Wikipedians for help if he got into an edit war with vandals. What a crybaby!
Well, if you really were a dedicated terrorist, then I suppose the Fearless Mice genetic therapy might work here too...
1 8/0644240
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/
In a sense, importance = expense. If something is important, one is willing to go to great expense for it. Hence expensive = important, and vice versa cheap = unimportant. Reasons can be made less important. Specifically, the justification for defending intellectual property (trade secrets).
If the foundation technology (chipsets, etc.) are so old and cheap to produce, then I would suspect the reasons for keeping it closed are also old and cheapened.
Please remember that this is the oldest and most stable global electronic democracy alive. The regional and national governments are jealous of the trust people place in the new world democracy, and they want to usurp from it.
What Lessig doesn't say and all of the rest of these ninnies don't seem to know is that the DNS is a 100% voluntary participation system. Alternative root DNS clusters HAVE been set up in the past. Most people just blindly take the DNS servers suggested by their ISPs, but the ISPs, and the corporate network admins could add a new set of root servers at any time.
The operators of the root DNS servers could opt to ignore ICANN and any other body, or they could do something in between and resolve the conflict in a creative way over which neither the ICANN nor the EU has any control. We all vote for the root-zone operators when we set up our resolvers to point to them, and we grant a proxy to our ISPs and companies when we let them do it for us.
For discussion: on what does this DNS democracy depend?
There are (for the purpose of this post) innumerable possible licenses out there. Only one of them will be called GPL3.0, but if you don't like the one arbitrarily named GPL3.0 you are perfectly free to use one of the others. Keep using GPL2.0, for instance. The democracy in the GPL3.0 is VOLUNTARY ADOPTION. This license will not be foisted on anyone.
The real problem is that lots of people may dislike GPL3.0, and they will likely go with plan B, which may not be the same license as everyone else. Then we will all have to read the fine print again. Of course, upon rejection of the GPL3.0 license, these same dissenters can (and probably will) wish they had an acceptible GPL, which provides the perfect motivation for a GPL3.1 fork. We all have to choose between the LGPL and the GPL as things stand, because there was a bifurcation in the types of GPL software, their users and their respective licensing needs. It isn't clear whether this situation is more or less dangerous than the debate that led to the LGPL. The implied message is clear: "GPL3.0 may not be any good."
The expression that GPL3.0 might be bad is meaningless because it doesn't exist yet. Communicating this to a mass audience is FUD. The purpose is to stir up demand for participation in the GPL3.0 drafting process, which will complicate it, and slow it down, and sacrifice the quality of the final product (even if only the timeliness). If there was real reason for concern, people would already be embroiled in an Internet wide debate on what needs to be fixed with the GPL. Maybe that is already happening, and it's just the people most qualified and or interested that are participating in the debate, at a quiet level compared to Slashdot controversy. If I wanted to derail those people, the best tool at my disposal is to try and discredit them and force them to spend their valuable time defending themselves and their work from angry mobs of mouth-breathers who refuse to Google the issue themselves.
Here's a hint: if you ever get a feeling of righteous indignation, you're playing the victim, and you're ignoring your real opportunity to do something positive.
Joe: What does Apple hold back from the iPod that the free software community can offer?
Bob: Record 48KHz 32bit floating point sampled stereo to that 20-60GB hard drive!
Joe: Why does that matter?
Bob: Because it cuts out the studio middleman! Does anyone remember the Grateful Dead tapes that were flying around? Well, going digital in a $200 device makes things a LOT cheaper. People used to lug around portable DAT decks that were 4-6 times the size of an iPod, and they could only record a couple of hours of music. Give it an interface to connect to a peer and copy music back and forth (sans computer). Apple would have to give up the ITMS and all of the content to make iPods do that.
There is a lot that can be done about ignorance. The opposite of ignorance is attentiveness: start by caring about the things that ignorance tries to cover up.
There are essential facts of life that no ignoramus can successfully ignore. For example: death--their own personal death. Even if they wave their hands and cite some dogma to cover up the issue, you will be able to see the reality of anxiety over death in their eyes.
Questions: ask questions of an ignoramus. Don't ask rehearsed questions, just genuine down-to-earth questions that point right at the heart of the issue whenever there is an immediate practical opportunity to do it.
Understand your interests and the interests of others (even the ignoramii). First, do no harm, but do what you know you have to. The reality of your situation might supercede any of the principles or dogmas that you may normally rely upon. Make authentic judgements in the present, and you will consistently find yourself in eminently superior position to people who program themselves with dogmas.
Google has a great strategy for bleeding out Microsoft.
Buried in this claim is the implication that any song in a selective subset of songs collected by anyone has a uniform ability to flow into any other song in the subset. A random selection is as good as any statistically matched selection if and only if the preceding statement is true. I'm not claiming to have/know such a magic bullet, but you'll have a harder time supporting your assertion that it is not possible.
Actually, you're right but I somewhat barely do know what eigenvalues are. I saw Eigenradio (which uses eigenvalues for PCA, according to the diagram) a while ago, which is what got me thinking. What I thought was cool about eigenvalues is what you think sucks about them for this purpose. Also I think you're talking about computing eigenvalues on the song files' metadata. I mean computing eigenvalues and doing PCA on the raw audio data for the actual music contained in the files. The cool thing about this is that the covariance you get is freely independant of any arbitrary categorization in the files' artist or genre tags.
I thought about your suggestion about using FFTs too, but I came down to the suspicion that a lot of the heavy lifting is to support all of the assumptions about what makes a song flow well with another one: like frequency distribution or the other things you listed like variance of volume (which audio people call compression, and beats per minute. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to gather statistics on the whole song, whereas only the beginning and end are significant to a good segue. Also you do a lot of heavy lifting to always compare against the complete set of statistical metadata for your songs when all you need is to take the favorite match from a limited set of randomly selected possible next tracks.
Of course, if I'm wrong about iTunes, but right about generating a better playlist through statistical matching, we may have totally blown the patent here :)
If anyone who can afford an iPod can afford to carry a digital recording studio in their pocket, then the barrier to record live music will be low enough for quality recordings of good live music to flood the market. A musician or band can then build up a following and promote themselves with cheap (free) downloads. By the time musicians need major distribution, they will not have to sign crappy boy-band contracts because the P&D will not be able to claim there is a risk that the band will bomb.
I read the MS paper on AutoDJ. It is crap. Here's how it works: editors magically decide some finite set of descriptive qualities and rate each of your songs on each of those qualities. If editors rate your least favorite song "highly snazzy" and your most favorite song also "highly snazzy", AutoDJ will guess that whenever you select three "highly snazzy" songs in a row to seed the playlist, your least favorite song will be a good match based on the "highly snazzy" factor. Maybe other songs fit better on other descriptors besides "snazzy", but those scores are no more reliable at predicting your impression than "snazzy."
Moreover, the underlying assumption is that when you select a few songs your selection represents a state which the playlist should make a best effort to approximate. Even if it worked ideally, the generated playlists would always represent a musical rut.
I have a theory that iTunes Party Shuffle uses computed Eigenvalues of your iTunes library to compare the end of one track to the beginnings of other tracks and find a good match so that songs flow together. THAT is smart. It sometimes gets into a rut, but that is because I need to round out my collection, and the rut is always more interesting than getting stuck in one mode. AutoDJ is half-baked.
One product of a massive income gap is that the winners, flush with cash, have less and less stuff to buy with their cash as investment assets become scarce. Everyone (in this market) has cash, but there are few easy ways to leverage it. As you move up the pricing tier, there are fewer and fewer buyers who can afford that investment, so market pressure seems to let up making investments seem more attractive. Diamonds from Tiffany's? Turning the table, the simpler explanation is that the more money a person has, the less each dollar means to them. The more cash you have, the less risk-averse you need to be.
Take into account that Google stock is kind-of like Google's currency: Googlebucks if you will and the Dollar is kind-of weak. This is like people saying that "we want to trade all of our US dollars for something backed by more than just US labor."