Ten Failed Tech Trends for 2005: "High Fidelity Digital Audio
Most digital audio on portable players is highly compressed. For the majority of pop and rock music, that's not a big deal. Recordings are often 'too hot' even for CDs, and compressing already distorted audio doesn't have much audible impact. But compressed MP3, WMA, and AAC files often will throw away too much.
This isn't exactly a new argument. The iPod and its camp followers in the digital audio player business seem to be the modern incarnation of the 1960s transistor radio. Way back then, audiophiles complained vociferously about how the transistor radio was creating a generation of consumers who couldn't appreciate quality audio. That lament is echoed by industry pundits (me included) who yearn for even higher-fidelity sound than current CD technology can deliver.
While a scant few players do support lossless compression formats (mostly FLAC), lossless formats are generally unavailable for portable players. As the storage capacity of these players increases, the designers seem to think you want to watch tiny video, rather than listen to clean, pristine, losslessly compressed music. So we get ten gazillion songs in 128KB format, rather than a few hundred encoded with lossless compression."
Ten Failed Tech Trends for 2005
Shut Him Up, Shut Him up!
MichaelMoore.com! : Latest News: "THE bound and bullet-riddled body of an Iraqi student leader has been found, a few days after he led a campus march alleging fraud in last week's election, a students' group said.
The body of Qusay Salahaddin was found close to a hospital in the northern city of Mosul with his hands bound behind his back and marks of strangling on it, a hospital source said.
Gunmen took Mr Salahaddin, president of Mosul University's students' union, from his house last week and bundled him into the trunk of a car before driving off, said Mohammed Jassim, a friend of the victim. He said Mr Salahaddin used his mobile phone to make last-ditch pleas for help.
'Save me, the Peshmerga have kidnapped me,' Mr Jassim quoted Mr Salahaddin, a Sunni Arab, as saying before the line went dead, apparently referring to Kurdish militia groups operating in northern Iraq.
Residents of ethnically mixed Mosul frequently blame rival Arab and Kurdish groups for the city's daily staple of murders, assassinations and kidnappings.
No group has claimed responsibility for the killing."
Top News Article | Reuters.com
Top News Article | Reuters.com: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Get ready for a minute with 61 seconds. Scientists are delaying the start of 2006 by the first 'leap second' in seven years, a timing tweak meant to make up for changes in the Earth's rotation.
The adjustment will be carried out by sticking an extra second into atomic clocks worldwide at the stroke of midnight Coordinated Universal Time, the widely adopted international standard, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said this week.
'Enjoy New Year's Eve a second longer,' the institute said in an explanatory notice. 'You can toot your horn an extra second this year.'
Coordinated Universal Time coincides with winter time in London. On the U.S. East Coast, the extra second occurs just before 7 p.m. on New Year's Eve. Atomic clocks at that moment will read 23:59:60 before rolling over to all zeros.
A leap second is added to keep uniform timekeeping within 0.9 second of the Earth's rotational time, which can speed up or slow down because of many factors, including ocean tides. The first leap second was added on June 30, 1972, according to NIST, an arm of the U.S. Commerce Department.
Since 1999 until recently, the two time standards have been in close enough synch to escape any need to add a leap second, NIST said.
Although it is possible to have a negative leap second -- that is, a second deducted from Coordinated Universal Time -- so far all have been add-ons, reflecting the Earth's general slowing trend due to tidal breaking.
Deciding when to introduce a leap second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, a standards-setting body. Under an international pact, the preference for leap seconds is December 31 or June 30.
Precise time measurements are needed for high-speed communications systems among other modern technologies. "
Mentally Unstable Man Killed on Airplane
Mentally unstable man shot dead by US Feb Air marshalls. The flight was coming from Columbia and landed in Miami. It's understandable that these federal agents are there to protect people from "Terrorists" post 9/11. But did they act too fast? The time line on the events leading up to the shooting will probably be different on every outlet of news today. But ultimately-was this use of force necessary?
Anarchism
Anarchism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Thomas Jefferson said the native American Indians 'never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government. Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling in every man, makes a part of his nature...' and 'I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government, enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments' (Notes on Virginia and Letter to Colonel Carrington)."
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