Frequency of each name? Frequency of characters in names? Bayesian probability of one character following another in names? Number of names of a particular length?

Each worker would compute the stats for their chunk of work (the "Map" part of MapReduce), and then send the results back to the server to be aggregated (the "Reduce" part of MapReduce).

Some of these may seem interesting, but then again, what interesting data can you derive at all from a list of names, even if you had the whole list?

I don't see why web clients being transient is a problem. The whole point of the MapReduce algorithm is that each worker (the web clients in this case) don't need to know anything about what the other worker is doing, what the system as a whole is doing, nor what it had done with any past job.

In a way, what you call "the rhythm track" is essentially what this "click track" concept refers to. In some (many?) cases, the track is just two different percussive sounds played at regular intervals (essentially mimicking a metronome). In other cases, it might be a synth or MIDI rendering of the song. In yet others, it might be a "single-track" version of the song, and the musicians are replaying along with it just for the purpose of having a multitrack recording."

I'm referring to the scenario of you telling someone to play at "120bpm", without providing them with any tempo-aid at all. One band member might end up playing at 119bpm instead, and another at 121bpm, and thus they won't be synchronized.

As a drummer, the presence or absence of a click track doesn't really affect the "fun". If the song has a repetitive drum pattern played over and over throughout, the song is not fun to play; and this is true regardless of whether I have to get the timing perfectly right with a click track, or if I just play the same old pattern loosely. What makes a song fun (for me) is having lots of interesting variations throughout the song.

Actually one of the more fun things for me to do as a drummer is to use a click track for some odd time signature I haven't really practiced or internalized yet (say 11/8), and try to improvise over the click. The click itself (on most metronomes the "1" will sound different from all the other beats) help me know what the "feel" of the time signature is supposed to be, and my challenge is to see how quickly I can adapt and play around with that feel.

One of my most uncomfortable drumming moments was during a live show where I was using a click track which was just a tad too quiet. Everything was going perfectly fine until I hit a mini-drum-solo/fill a bit too quickly, and when I came out of it, I so I was off the rest of the song. I had to really focus to play everything with a 3/16th delay after when I actually heard the click in my headphones.

If the metronome is "click", the snare is "tack", and the two simultaneous is "clack", then the song, in my mind, went from "clack, clack, clack, clack" to "cltack, cltack, cltack, cltack". Kind of gave it a nice jazz-swing feel, but I wouldn't want to go through that again.

Not only that, but I bet 95% of the artists never made it to the top 5%.

I guess it depends on whether you care more about the music or the musician. If all you care about is "good music", then who cares whether it was even a human who played the music, or if it was all computer generated with synthesizers?

Maybe there's an artist who can't play any instrument at all, but is a great composer, and so all his songs are "played" by software. No human has ever played the song, but the music sounds great.

Maybe there's a mathematician who can't play instruments and can't compose, but figured out an algorithm which generates beautiful melodies. No human has ever composed the song or played the song, but the music songs great.

Maybe there's a programmer who can't play instruments, can't compose, and can't figure out complex equations, but wrote a genetic algorithm that figured out the equations to compose the songs. No human ever conceived of the math, composed the song, or played the song, but the music sounds great.

etc.

It has more to do with multitrack recording than digital recording. When you do a multitrack recording, each track is recorded individually. Usually this means that each band member will be recorded in isolation, and it's very rare for every band member to have such a developped internal metronome such that you can just tell them "play at 120 beats per minute", and when you combine all the tracks, they'll all be synced up.

Instead, what is done is that you set a metronome to play at 120bpm, and each bandmember will play along to the metronome.

Uh... why do you feel you need to defend your purchase of the PS3? I'm pretty confident nobody on the Internet really cares what you, personally, have bought and why.

If you're happy with your PS3, that's great. But any anguish from "having to defend" is just coming from within yourself. There will always be flame wars around consoles on the Internet. Learn to just relax and enjoy the consoles you own. Who cares what other people on the Internet think is the better console? If you're happy with your console, that's all that matters, right?

A lot of people have no idea how computers work and are not interested in learning. Router may prevent external computers from exploiting open ports or whatever, but nothing's going to stop the user who downloads and runs an ".exe" because the website claimed it was a "required plugin" for viewing the secret porn content. Even if the antivirus pops up a warning, the user is just as likely to disable it, or add this .exe as an "exception", to be able to get at the porn.

Preserving culture and heritage is fine. Forcing people who have no interest in your culture and heritage to learn your language is not fine.

There are at least 85 languages which are extinct in North America alone (citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_languages_of_North_America). If someone wants to preserve the culture by learning one or more of those languages, that's perfectly fine by me. What's completely ridiculous is forbidding people to send their children to English schools (because English is not a dying language), and forcing them to attend a Molalan school instead, all in the name of preserving culture. What's completely ridiculous is making it illegal to post any commercial signs in English, and instead saying all commercial signs be written in Coquille. "Sorry, you can't name your cafe 'Starbucks Coffee'. You'll have to translate the name to whatever the Coquille equivalent is." What's completely ridiculous is forbidding the sales of videogames unless they've been translated to Piro.

Montreal (a city in Quebec, for those less geographically inclined) has a beautiful section of the city called "Chinatown", and no sane person would argue that Chinatown is not part of the unique culture and heritage of Montreal (and thus of Quebec). So why do the Quebec language police go to Chinatown and tell the restaurant owners there that they can't have their signs in Chinese, instead these signs must be written in French?

If it were up to me, people should be allowed to learn whatever languages they want, and post commercial signs in whatever languages they want, and provide service in whatever languages they want. You want to open up a restaurant where all the staff only speak Yaquinan? Perfectly fine with me. Maybe it'll turn out to be a bad idea because none of your potential customers speak Yaquinan, and thus your business will suffer. Or maybe it'll turn out great, and you'll revive the Yaquinan language. You're an adult, and thus allowed to make these decisions yourself and live responsibly with the consequences.

The only exception to this rule is any government provided service should speak, at a minimum, all the official languages of the region. So for example, since the official languages of Canada are French and English, then post offices employees, public transport employees, police officers, firefighters, public school teachers, free clinic doctors, etc. would all be required by law to speak both French and English, and have signs in at least these two languages. They are free to speak more languages, and have signs translated into more languages if they like. Private businesses (like restaurants, stores, etc.) have no minimum requirements on language at all. The capitalistic free-market is enough of a pressure to push them towards supporting whatever languages are spoken in their region.

The lack of showering and laundering is a facet of that "personality issue". If you're the type of person who would rather spend an extra 15 minutes learning Haskell than shower, then you're a "true geek". If you value "smelling good", "having clean clothes", etc. more than "having 15 more minutes to tinker with your computer", then you're not a "true geek".

You probably don't mention that you're straight in your profile because most people are straight. Usually you don't bother listing data which applies to the majority of people. For example, I bother listing that I'm a "drummer" on my profile, because most people aren't. I don't do it because I have an agenda I'm pushing whereby I feel like drummers are being persecuted and I want to push this fact into everyone's face or anything like that. I don't bother mentioning that "I am not blind nor deaf" because most people are not blind nor deaf.

Perhaps the woman in the article was pretty average in most respects (does okay in school, doesn't really like school, but doesn't hate it either. Likes music. Likes mass media like movies, TV, etc. Not blind. Not deaf. Not in a wheelchair. Right handed. Enjoys junk food sometimes. Not a vegetarian. Etc.), and being a lesbian happened to be the most "unusual" thing about her that she was willing to admit to the world.

So when faced with the task of writing her own profile, she tried to think about what information was most striking about her, and she figured that was it.