:-/

I had the opposite problem. In Germany and Austria, I'd try to speak German and as soon as they heard my American accent they would speak English back to me.

> If you take three electronically produced 15kHz tones, one a sine wave, one a sawtooth wave, and one a square wave, that teenager can tell the difference between them.

That statement doesn't fit into my understanding how sound works and how humans hear. I'd be very interested to see a double-blind test where this is demonstrated, and not due to an error in the sampling process.

The thing that makes a tone a sine, sawtooth, or square wave is the presence or absence of harmonics. The first harmonic above the fundamental on a 15kHz tone would be 30kHz - inaudible. All any human (even with hearing up to 25kHz) can hear with any of these three tones is the 15kHz fundamental: a sine wave.

The parts of the shape you lose by sampling at 44.1kHz are the parts that make up the harmonics: 30kHz, 45kHz, 60kHz, 75kHz, etc. Since no human will ever hear those frequencies, they are OK to discard in order to sample at 44.1kHz. There will be a difference to the wave shape, but it will be *completely* inaudible to any human being. (Bats would notice it, though.)

All any person would ever hear in any of those three waves is a 15kHz sine, so all you need to record in this case is that frequency (unless you're planning to slow down/pitch shift the recording by several octaves, or play it for bats, or something).

Showing up as a new feature in Minecraft in 3... 2... 1...

Good Lord. Are people still confusing these two things? Words can have different meanings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E5kCRsr4gQ

It's no less arbitrary that those of us who create content (and I'm one of them) claim it's somehow our right to profit from it.

Take a look at this blog post by Jonathan Coulton. I can't think of any way I could agree more:
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/

But the artists are making fractions of a percent on CD sales, and paying for their advances from that net payment... Many end up in debt, even after a fairly decent hit. And the engineers usually work for hire - they get paid once for the work and make no royalties for sales.

So the middlemen are screwing the artists (thousands, all but the top dozen or two per year, lose money) and grabbing all the cash from CD sales. Meanwhile, the engineers already made their livable but modest salary and get nothing (except possibly reputation) if a record goes multi-platinum.

These bastards are trying to save their own gravy train by claiming that the piracy is harming the artists. They are being disingenuous.

Piracy does sometimes harm artists, but it's not a black-and-white situation. Some piracy harms, but some piracy helps due to publicity. Personally, I'd rather become popular by giving good stuff away and letting people voluntarily pay for it - look at Jonathan Coulton's business model.