But the question is, given that any musician's ultimate target is to eventually have an audience, shouldn't how an instrument sounds to them be the quintessential point of evaluating the quality of an instrument?

How the instrument sounds is only half of the equation. What the musician has to do to generate those sounds is the other half. The better instruments will allow you to produce the desired sounds more easily and consistently. When you play a good instrument, it feels like you just think it and the instrument responds in kind. You're not fighting the instrument to try to make it produce the sound you want, rather than the sound it wants to produce.

I've played on pianos where the middle three octaves were harsher than the rest (probably hadn't been serviced by a technician in decades, and those octaves had the most wear). It makes it difficult because you have to play those three octaves differently than you play the rest in order to produce the same sound across the entire range. You have to devote brainpower to remembering to adjust for that inconsistency, instead of being able to devote everything to what you're playing.

Your analogies are wrong. If you read TFA, this isn't a case of people being unable to distinguish between the instruments in a blind test. It's pretty clear the violinists playing the instruments (blindfolded) could tell the instruments apart. It's just that when they tallied up which violins they most preferred playing, a modern one got the most votes.

I'd say this is more a testament to how much modern violin building has improved. It's no longer a black art like it had been for centuries. With modern measuring instruments like accelerometers and oscilloscopes and computer analysis, it's become possible to deconstruct what made the violins crafted by the old masters so great. Then replicate many of those features into modern violins. This in no way diminishes the reputation that Stradivarius violins have built up with centuries of use. It just means modern building techniques have finally caught up to and surpassed what Antonio Stradivarius was able to do in his shop 3 centuries ago.

And I've played on many Steinway pianos. I probably cannot tell from the sound if the music is coming from a Steinway, but I sure as hell can tell if the piano I'm playing on is a Steinway. There are subtle nuances from the weighting of the keys, to the dynamic range between soft and loud, to the consistency of the weighting and tone of the notes as you play them in sequence which are characteristic of Steinway. As a friend of mine said, it's like playing on butter - so soft and responsive. (I'd add easy, except Steinway tends to weight their keys rather heavily, making them not so easy to play for younger/smaller people. The German Steinways are more guilty of this than the NY Steinways; some of the heavier ones will give your fingers quite a workout.) The cheapest piano I've played on where it was obvious the builder paid attention to little details like this was $22k, and that one still had flaws in its tone and feel. Most of the pianos I'd consider comparable to a good Steinway for playing on are in the $50k+ range - the same as a Steinway.

Exactly. And even more specifically, when it comes time to evict someone who refuses to leave, the city would enforce that as well via the sheriff's department.

At that point you may as well announce that the City of San Francisco is aggressively enforcing a ban on dogs in leased apartments, or smokers in leased apartments, or practicing your heavy metal set in leased apartments. Law enforcement will step in in any instance in which someone refuses to leave after a valid eviction.

The article says that there are currently 85 investigations -- in a city of one million people. The summary says that the eviction was filed by a private attorney, not a city attorney or employee. While it's incorrect to say that the city isn't doing "anything," GGGP's point was that the landlords are the ones aggressively enforcing the ban for fundamentally different reasons.

From the article:

"People who rent out space on Airbnb, VRBO and other markets for temporary housing are facing fines by the City Planning Department and eviction on the grounds of illegally operating hotels."

BTW: I realize that the GP said that the City of San Fancisco was not enforcing "anything" and that you're correctly rebutting that. However, the substance of GP's post concerned the evictions, not the fines.

The article reads as if landlords are jumping the city's process, particularly since there's no mention of actual fines. You should note that the code in my other response requires the city to provide an owner with a reasonable period of time to correct the violation before they becomes liable for a fine.

There's a difference between:

"People who rent out space on Airbnb, VRBO and other markets for temporary housing are facing fines by the City Planning Department and eviction on the grounds of illegally operating hotels."

and

"People who rent out space on Airbnb, VRBO and other markets for temporary housing are facing fines and eviction by the City Planning Department on the grounds of illegally operating hotels."

Can you spot it?

You should also read this article analyzing the issue from an owner's perspective. You'll note that it doesn't suggest that the San Francisco has the ability to evict the tenant... merely to fine the landlord.

Finally, the actual code (warning: very large text document) lists several penalties, none of which include eviction. You're looking for Section 41A.5, "Unlawful Conversion," page 3902.

Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.

This is something software engineers should have learned in school. Sometimes a software failure can kill. Did they make *you* study the Therac-25 incident? I bet they didn't, much less to do when confronted with a project which puts lives in danger.

It must have seemed like a no-brainer to go from making thermostats to fire alarms, but I would be very, very reluctant to work on such a project. There's something ethically questionable about replacing a simple, highly effective device that saves lives with a more complex replacement. Even -- or perhaps especially -- if the replacement offers conveniences that simple device doesn't.

How many species would we need? I don't think that question has an answer, because of the somewhat vague definition of what a species is. Culex pipiens, restuans, and quinquifasciatus are very similar mosquito species that readily hybridize to form completely viable offspring; would you need *all three of them*? You might; these are important disease vectors, both human (Saint Louis and Japanese Encephalitis) and animal (dog heartworm), and its quite possible that some genetic populations don't spread certain diseases nearly as well.

And why would you need that? It turns out that pathogens and disease vectors might play an important part in maintaining ecosystem diversity. Hantavirus is common in rodents for example. Differences in hantavirus strains might prevent one population of rodents from taking over the range of another. In effect by co-evolving with a pathogen, a population can use it as a natural defense. This diversity in turn contributes to the resilience of the overall population to environmental changes.

Suppose meadow vole populations A and B live next to each other, but invade the other's territory. There is an environmental change that wipes out one of them, say B. Then A is free to spread into B's territory, and overall the population of voles looks pretty much the same. But if B had previously overrun A's territory, then the voles would have been wiped out.

The operation of the biosphere is immensely complex. The more you know about it, the less plausible things like terraforming seem. I think it may be possible to create a self-sustaining generation ship, particularly if the enclosure is very large and energy is essentially limitless. But I think such an environment would be a dead end. I don't think it would be possible to bootstrap anything like the Earth's biosphere on another planet, at least not for millions of years.

Burning isn't always bad.

Burning carbon sources that are the accumulation of millions of years of photosynthesis is bad, because you are net-adding carbon to the atmosphere.

Efficiently burning renewable carbon sources (while controlling other embedded pollutants) is not so bad, because over a reasonable timeframe you are merely putting carbon into the atmosphere that your fuel sources took out several years before; rinse & repeat, with little effect on long-term atmospheric carbon pollution.

The sky on Mars is blue during the daytime. Why wouldn't it be? Same Sun, same Rayleigh scattering, so you get a similar sky during the day, albeit somewhat darker than Earth's because of a thinner, dryer atmosphere. Mid-day martian landscapes look remarkably like barren Earth deserts.

The soil on Mars is reddish, but it's not because the Sun is reddish; it's because of minerals in the soil. If you brought a bunch of paint sample cards from the hardware store to Mars, they'd look exactly the same. On top of that, the Mars day is only slightly longer than a terrestrial day (by 37 minutes). That's actually *good* because most people tend to have circadian rhythms slightly longer than 24 hours.

A similar question about color arose in my sci-fi writing group. What would a landscape on a red star's planet look like? The answer is "different, but not red." You'd still have a blue sky, and you'd still have the same range of colors, but with the color *balance* is shifted. It's like going from a cold white LED bulb to a warm white incandescent bulb. Blue things will still be blue and red things red, but the blue thing will look more muted under the "reddish" light (which will still appear white because it has a broad spectrum of colors in it).

Please do not conflate the qualities of the tangible and the intangible.

I'm sorry, we're not dicussing the properties of the tangible versus the intangible. We're discussing the vicissitudes of natural versus social law. The quote and comment also have nothing to do with simultaneity.

"Never mind that, look over here" is not a rebuttal. Thanks for playing.

What's with the obnoxious, non-mutable autoplay ad for this movie? Half the sites I visit are playing this, some times more than once on a page so it comes out garbled because the copies don't sync. This has to be one of the biggest Internet ad campaigns ever.

And since when does Slashdot carry ads that autoplay audio? That's low-rent stuff. The worst thing with this ad is that the player presents a mute button that doesn't mute, it starts the replay over again. The only thing you can do is mute your entire computer, or close the tab with the ad.

Well, I'm not muting my entire computer. I'm closing the tab. So see you later, Slashdot, until the stupid ad campaign is over. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

See you later, Slashdot; I'm out of here until the ad campaign is off. And I'm not going to see the stupid movie.

And as long as they're not directly being a dick to you, you're supposed to exhibit some degree of tolerance, especially in the workplace.

I would say that if you are Gay and would like to receive the government benefits associated with a marriage then giving $1,000 to stopping you would fall into the category of "Being a dick to you".

I've actually proposed a solution that addresses that. Overhaul the government laws so that all "marriage" benefits are now tied to civil unions, leaving the term "marriage" reserved for purely ceremonial (religious) use. This neatly eliminates the conflict between religious definitions of marriage and government benefits tied to marriage (or lack thereof for gay couples). The benefits would be tied to civil unions instead.

Every pro-gay marriage friend I suggested this to rejected it. The only acceptable solution to them was to strip the concept of marriage entirely from any religious influence, and hand complete control of it over it to those with modern secular viewpoints. I protested that this could create a conflict wherein a church could be sued for refusing to allow a gay couple to use the church for a wedding. They had no problem with this. i.e. Their stance is based on attributing no value to any religious viewpoint - they do not believe in freedom of religion.

Second, it's not like the man is a skin-head.

Skinheads think blacks are inferior and bad for society.
Homophobes think gays are inferior and bad for society.

So yes it is like he's a skin-head.

Conservatives think liberals are inferior and bad for society.
Liberals think conservatives are inferior and bad for society.
Religio-phobes think religious people are inferior and bad for society.
People like you think skin-heads are inferior and bad for society.

So by your reasoning, pretty much everyone is like a skin-head; including yourself.

Skin-heads aren't bad because they think Jews and blacks are inferior and bad for society. They're bad because they think this justifies eliminating Jews and blacks from society - removing their influence from the socio-political fabric which makes up our society. Kinda like how Eich was eliminated. The supporters of Prop 8 at least had the decency to push their viewpoint through legislative channels, giving the electorate a chance to vote on the issue, and allowing the courts to weigh in on the outcome (eventually overturning the vote). What happened to Eich was a lynch mob-like naming and shaming. The whole reason we came up with formal government systems was because at some point we decided gossip and hearsay were a poor means to run society. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of the Internet is that it gives more power to gossip and hearsay.

Tolerance doesn't mean tolerating only those who tolerate you. Tolerance means also tolerating those who don't tolerate you. If you live by the former, then you believe the Black Panthers were right, and Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. were wrong. The former leads to all-out war. The latter leads to coexistence. When Prop 8 passed, I didn't rub it in the faces of my gay friends. I encouraged them to not lose hope and to continue fighting for what they believed in, because that is the way our system is set up to work. Everyone gets their (thorough) say before society as a whole decides what to do, and the losers (usually the minority, though in Prop 8's case it was the majority) agree to live with the outcome without resorting to violence, while the winners do not resort to outbursts of Schadenfreude.