>Note that quad never did catch on. In part, because it couldn't be done for next to no cost.

The problem with quad/surround is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You can't mic a scene in a movie for surround because the mics would be behind the camera. Same for a concert. Your surround channels would be crowd cheering. Might be nice, but it's a niche at best.

Stereo gave us a soundstage, and surround is incompatible with that. To mic a band properly for surround, either the singer would be behind you, or if you invert it, the drums would be. I think it would be a nice experiment to try, giving each bandmember his own speaker. But it would also be nice if I could just buy two more speakers and a CD and try it, instead of getting a bunch of microphones and renting a band.

>Go look up some of the double blind taste test studies done. People aren't nearly as good at telling wines apart when they don't know before hand. Wine snobs (and wine vinters even more especially) like to claim some extremely subtle differences base on the smallest thing, but the scientific evidence isn't there to support it.

Actually, what makes the wine industry fun is that some people have good taste and others don't. The salesmen in particular have good taste and they make a game of passing around crap and seeing who buys it. How do you think the prices are set, if there isn't some broader agreement about the quality involved?

Here's a better experiment: Compare a $10 wine to a $30 one straight out of the bottle. Chances are, the $10 will be quite approachable, and the $30 one will be harsh. Now put the corks in, wait 3 days. Wait a week. Hell, wait 2 weeks.

Now compare again. Chances are, the $10 will be dirty and rotten while the $30 will be peaking. Now here's the kicker - a wine expert can taste the $30 straight out of the bottle, harsh, and know from experience, "Tomorrow this will be a great wine."

That MIT experiment from last year really poisoned the well. Most expensive wines taste like crap out of the bottle, and comparing them to cheap ones in the first hour, you would EXPECT the cheap wine to win a taste test. Everybody in the wine industry knows this. MIT undergrads? God, they screwed up again.

While not lexically precise, I believe he was referring to the high degree of blending, as well as the fact that Champagne supposedly doesn't taste good until it's finished. In other words, if Champagne was made from good wine, they would just sell that, and skip the nonsense.

Nice sentiment, but you wouldn't want to drink wine produced by any traditional technology. Foot stamping? It tastes like feet. Terroir? The filthy smell of an unshowered Frenchman. White wine? Can't be done without refrigeration, steel casks, AND proper alloys.

Go back in time and throw around the phrase "partial malolactic." Winemaking has finally gotten high-tech, and the biggest difference in taste is how clean it is.

It's Chilean!

>why the heck is this story even on Slashdot, which is primarily a technology news site?

Because they decided to post something interesting.

They also have "Google Wave To Live On As 'Wave In a Box'", which has 54 comments, and "Spammers Attack Apple's Ping Social Network", which has 74 comments.

Also 3 articles about P2P and four more articles about on-line services. Because, you know, when I get on the web, what I really want to read about is the web.

>Also, Burgundy can be made from other grapes than just Pinot Noir

Nope. They don't plant anything else.

I looked at the Wiki article you cited. It lists 4 other grapes in Burgundy. 3 of them are white, and the fourth is Beaujolais.

I will say that New World pinot noirs are made much differently than Burgundies. Oregon pinots tend to be "the less color the better" (and yet still have flavor).

I don't have a real problem with tightening the rules, but I'm curious what they will call Port now. Italy has a problem that some of its best wines aren't DOCG, because they're cabs. So you end up with $200 table wines. This happened in the 70's, and people have gotten used to it, but they still haven't changed the rules.

Some of the New World names are not obvious. Australia's version of Cotes-du-Rhone is called GSM. Most customers have to have their hands held when they learn that Meritage=Bordeaux. I suppose Port will be Fortified Wine, Sherry will be Solera style (Rum has this too), and Marsala will be Cooked Wine (as if Marsala didn't already have an image problem).

But how to differentiate between Fino and Amontillado? With/Without Flor? Some Flor? It will be funny to watch.

There is no Quantum Theory of Gravity. This is like saying we should be looking for a Pebble Theory of Gas Mileage. You are talking about things that are so far flung in size, they effectively do not influence each other.

The standard model is the way to go for now.

There's no evidence of singularities, you fell right into the trap again. Black hole if you will. Which do, remarkably, exist.

>Does that make more sense?

It makes sense that you believe in singularities as a concrete, physical object, rather than as an abstract inflection point that produces other, more realistic objects.

>you end up with an object that seems to be smaller than the smallest subatomic particles

I think the important word here is "seems". Black holes were discovered when Schwarzchild found a way to get 1/0 in Einstein's field equations.

From then, it's been 95 years of madness perpetuated by people who have never seen a "limit" drawn on a graph.

Wow I hope this is a troll for your own sanity. Use ctrl+F on "truth" and see your epic fail.

>Unless you're suggesting that it isn't possible, but that's really just another theory that you're going to have to justify in the same way.

That's quite easy. Black holes are formed when gravity overwhelms all other forces, which I take to mean nuclear strong/weak forces. (If you look at a neutron star, it's density is the same as a nuclear density.)

In everyday life, it takes about 7000 cubic kilometers of volume before you have enough space to pack in enough mass to do this (calculated from a 12km schwarzchild radius typical of a neutron star).

And you want to do that on a smaller scale? Where oh where will you get the gravity?

Actually, check Wikipedia, it says 10^500. Wikipedia can be wrong, or imprecise, but they're not known for sarcasm.

It's under "Superstring Theory" below the yellow table.