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Comment Re:Because death threats are illegal and a felony (Score 1) 806

My school has multiple entrances, but one main one that's open at all times. However, the other 20 or so entrances are locked off to the outside, but open from the inside. I'm positive many other schools are engineered like that, because in the event of a fire or other emergency, there's no way a school can disperse their population out quickly enough without multiple entrances.

Comment Re:275,000 years? Wow. (Score 2, Interesting) 125

http://www.last.fm/charts

They have detailed week-by-week charts going back to 2005. Lady Gaga is in fifth place this week is at 1,923,168 plays by 92,208 listeners.

Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, and Coldplay precede her, but that's likely due to the fact that Last.fm is based in the UK and the majority of their users from the UK* and that those bands are much much better :) What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.

Comment Re:ABX Just Destroyed My Ego (Score 1) 849

This ABX test interested me so I decided to take a quick test. It's not scientific by any means but I downloaded an ABX program from a site Hydrogen Audio suggested (http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/winabx/) in order to see if I could tell the difference. I used a secure lossless rip of Queens of the Stone Age's "3's & 7's", a somewhat complex song with varying frequencies and converted the FLAC to a lossless wave, and a MP3 V0 version (highest quality MP3 variable bit rate, same as 320 CBR), and converted that to wave. With one quick run through of the song, I took four ABX tests, I got 4/4 tests right with a 6.2% probability of getting them all right if I was purely guessing. There was an extremely subtle difference between the V0 and FLAC, but it's possible to hear. The highs were easy to distinguish as the MP3 codec cuts off at that range which was the biggest clue in differentiating the formats. Factors to account for: Now I'm 17 so my hearing's still intact. I'm pretty sure age would degrade your auditory senses over time, especially with high frequencies. My equipment is actually plain. I'm using Vmoda Vibes, a pair of $60 mid-end earbuds, and I'm using my laptop's onboard audio, so equipment isn't that much of an obstacle to be able to tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio. My two cents: It is possible to tell the difference, but unless doing side-by-side comparisons and listening for differences, it's nearly impossible to tell if an audio is lossless or lossy alone.

Comment Re:Physics Simulators (Score 2, Informative) 145

There's this game called Crayon Physics where you draw objects in order to get a ball to the end point. It sounds simple but it challenges you to overcome various physical obstacles like getting your ball uphill, or to get your ball into a little catapult, and creating a counterweight to launch it to the end point. Neat game, check it out. http://www.crayonphysics.com/

Comment Re:RTFA - misleading summary (Score 2, Interesting) 628

How do you explain the whole "police had full-on camouflage trousers on and body-armour" deal then? BBC (YOUR newspaper) said four cruisers, and a RIOT van arrived after the police helicopter watched fifteen people grilling and eating. This was in a private field and nothing illegal was happening. Instead, they took drastic measures by controlling people to stop a "potential" crime from happening. Kinda like in that one book by Orwell.

Comment Capitalism in disguise? (Score 1) 1

When there's a ton of supply (or unlimited in digital's case) of course the cost to consumers is free to cheap. I suspect once we get to the bottom, it'll stay there because people will expect free. Maybe some fluctuations when new, innovative features come out, but it'll eventually be free again.
Music

Submission + - Artists Attack RIAA after Thomas-Rasset Verdict (rollingstone.com)

gzipped_tar writes: Last week a judge ruled that Jammie Thomas-Rasset owes the RIAA a $1.92 million fine for illegally downloading 24 songs. Richard Marx — one of the artists whose music Thomas-Rasset downloaded via P2P network Kazaa — spoke out against the court's verdict, saying he's "ashamed" to be associated with the massive fine.

"As a long-time professional songwriter, I have always objected to the practice of illegal downloading of music. I have also always, however, been sympathetic to the average music fan, who has been consistently financially abused by the greedy actions of major labels," Marx said in a statement. "These labels, until recently, were responsible for the distribution of the majority of recorded music, and instead of nurturing the industry and doing their best to provide the highest quality of music to the fans, they predominantly chose to ream the consumer and fill their pockets."

He continued, "So now we have a 'judgement' in a case of illegal downloading, and it seems to me, especially in these extremely volatile economic times, that holding Ms. Thomas-Rasset accountable for the continuing daily actions of hundreds of thousands of people is, at best, misguided and at worst, farcical. Her accountability itself is not in question, but this show of force posing as judicial come-uppance is clearly abusive. Ms. Thomas Rasset, I think you got a raw deal, and I'm ashamed to have my name associated with this issue."

Marx isn't the only artist to take umbrage with the ruling against Thomas-Rasset. Writing on his official Website, Moby said, "What utter nonsense. This is how the record companies want to protect themselves? Suing suburban moms for listening to music? Charging $80,000 per song? Punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business."

In related news, Nate Anderson on ArsTechnica noted that "In the wake of the RIAA win, the organization's legendarily poor public image somehow got even worse". He quoted the words from a music critic Jim DeRogatis: "[the Thomas-Rasset ruling is] infamous as one of the most wrong-headed in the history of the American judicial system--not to mention that it will forever stand as the best evidence of the contempt of the old-school music industry toward the music lovers who once were its customers."

On the other side of the story, an RIAA spokesperson recently commented about their victory: "This group of 12 Minnesotans showed us that, despite the protestations of some pundits who suggest that the digital world should resemble some kind of new wild west, the majority understands and believes that the same laws and rules we follow every day apply online. Not just in theory, but in practice. Another group of 12 people presented with similar questions said the same thing two years ago. That makes a sample size of only 24, but it's certainly enough to learn from."

Democrats

US House Democrats Unveil a Health Care Plan 925

gollum123 sends in this piece from a political blog in the NY Times. Here is the text of the bill in question (PDF). "House Democrats on Friday answered President Obama's call for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system by putting forward [an] 852-page draft bill that would require all Americans to obtain health insurance, force employers to provide benefits or help pay for them, and create a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers — a move that Republicans will bitterly oppose. ... But the chairmen said they still did not know how much the plan would cost, even as they pledged to pay for it by cutting Medicare spending and imposing new, unspecified taxes. The three chairmen described their bill as a starting point in a weeks-long legislative endeavor that they said would dominate Congress for the summer and ultimately involve the full panorama of stakeholders in the health care industry, which accounts for about one-sixth of the nation's economy. ... House Republicans, who have had no involvement in the development of the health legislation so far, quickly denounced the Democrats' proposal as a thinly disguised plan for an eventual government takeover of the health care system. ... The House Democrats' plan is one of three distinct efforts underway on Capitol Hill to draft the health overhaul legislation. In the Senate, both the Finance Committee and the health committee have separate bills in the works, and in recent days those efforts seem to have stumbled."
Mozilla

Submission + - Chrome and Firefox 3.5 Memory Usage (dotnetperls.com) 2

An anonymous reader writes: This experiment graphs the memory usage of Chrome and Firefox 3.5 over a series of 150 web page loads using an automated script. Firefox 3.5 shows the lowest memory usage in all categories, including average memory usage, maximum memory usage, and final memory usage. Chrome shows over 1 GB of memory due to its process architecture. Safari 4 and Opera show memory usage degradation over time while Chrome and Firefox 3.5 are more reliable in freeing memory to the OS. http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory

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