I just got my hands on a 6 string after too long without and was toying with 'ubuntu offerings this weekend.

You can use MuseScore to convert sheet music or midi files into guitar tab, if you're interested. You have to use plugins which are readily available from the MuseScore community.

MuseScore is one of the most important open source applications installed on my computer. I have nothing but respect for the people who've developed it. They were also the people behind the phenomenal Wikifonia website, which aggregated crowd-sourced musical scores, and single-handedly kept the Great American Songbook vital and allowed thousands of young jazz musicians to access online, transposable scores of hundreds of jazz standards until it was forced off the air by music publishers and Hal Leonard. Luckily, some kind soul in Belgium rar'd the entire archive of Wikifonia and smuggled it out to a guy I know via Mega and that great resource for musicians still exists (and can be found at the Wikifonia fan page at Facebook, but you'll have to dig a bit). Until Wikifonia, musicians had to tote around poorly-transcribed sheets or Real Books with ugly calligraphy.

I use MuseScore every single day and it's every bit the equal of any of the expensive music score programs like Sibelius or Finale. If you are a musician or composer or use musical manuscripts, I highly recommend MuseScore. There are plugins that will do everything from providing tools to people who score films like me or just someone who wants to covert sheet music into harmonica, guitar or uke tabs. Laying out everything from a simple lead sheet to an orchestral score is a pure joy using MuseScore, and if you know a little bit about how musical manuscripts work, the learning curve is not bad at all.

I don't know any of these people personally, but if any of the MuseScore team see this, I want to thank you for your work. I've contributed what money I can to the project, but I want you to know how much your work has enriched my life.

Not really. His point is that school systems are spending money badly already, so that giving them more money would necessarily amount to "throwing money at the problem" (his words). For my town's schools that point fails in that we don't spend money the way he claims all schools do; we aren't top-heavy with administrators. And we spend just a tad less than the national average per student.

I suppose what you're saying is that since we get better results than the national average for less-than-average outlay, we're doing just fine. That's true, if your standard for "good enough" is "beat the national average"; if you think schools in this country are by-in-large doing a good enough job.

for the cost of doing it right; and to whatever degree you backed off doing it right you'd end up missing the point.

The big win of text based matching is that nobody has to prepare to be indexed in a search engine, search engine optimization notwithstanding. The big loss is that you get false matches due to polysemy (words that have more than one meaning) and false misses due to synonymous words whose equivalence the search engine doesn't know about.

If you go to something like RDF in which concepts have unique identifiers (URIs), the marginal win is that you get precise and accurate matches where a concept used in two places. I can write an app which searches the Internet for articles on John Williams the classical guitarist and not accidentally lead him to articles on John Williams the movie composer. The big downside is that content providers have to think carefully about how to index your content.

So the problem with the semantic web is that what is realistically achievable with semantic technologies is only a marginal (though real) improvement over what we have now, but that improvement requires content providers to make some effort. I have no expectation that everybody will do this, so the semantic web isn't likely to revolutionize everyone's web experience anytime soon. But I think it can serve many useful niche purposes.

And I can't come up with a economically defensible reason to go back,

You understand that the only option in 1968 for finding out whether or not there is a good reason to explore the moon is actually going to the moon, right? And despite your objectivist baloney, human beings do things without a profit motive. Sometimes, great things. How much did Isaac Newton profit when he was working out optics? You think Galileo or Copernicus were doing their rather unpopular work for the sweet sweet coin?

What is money except a measure of economic value? What is capital except a measure of society's perceived value in making a task possible?

Late stage capital is a complete refutation of this purely materialistic vision.

If you have to force people to do something via the application of the government's power of life and death, it probably isn't worth doing.

Wait, you think the guys that went to the moon or the guys that built the Apollo rockets or the people who paid a minuscule share of their tax money to pay for the space program were only doing it because of the "government's power of life and death"?

Maybe you're too young to remember this: https://youtu.be/g25G1M4EXrQ

I was too young to remember it, though I was alive at the time. What I do remember is that the space program inspired generations and it cost less than Americans were spending on cigarettes and cigars every year. We're talking about a people that were only 16 years from having saved their bacon grease and string to be able to help the war effort. We're talking about a generation of people who had come out of a very dark chapter in human history, having sacrificed universally for something they believed in. They didn't scrimp for war bonds and enlist in the military because they thought, "what profit is there in this?" but because they were inspired to do so by larger events. And the larger events of the US space program similarly inspired generations of young people to set their sights beyond just going to work selling insurance or vacuum cleaners door-to-door. During the space program, interest in the sciences - all of the sciences - exploded, and set the route that led to almost all of the technological innovation that followed in the decades hence.

I'm not sure what happened to you. When did you lose your ability to be inspired by something besides selfish financial gain? Though you demonstrate the symptoms of someone who fell in love with the pseudo-intellectual pursuit known as "objectivism", most likely as an undergrad, clearly something else went wrong as well.

[in case anyone is interested, here is the entirety of the JFK speech excerpted above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Sure, it would have happened later, but at least we'd get some kind of direct benefit from it, instead of a bunch of museum pieces that no one remembers how to reconstruct, and Tang.

You think Tang was the only benefit of the US space program?

http://www.sac.edu/academicpro...

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/def...

If there hadn't been a space program, Richard Branson would still be selling vinyl records and Elon Musk would be a mediocre video game developer.

How stupid people are to think that business profits are the only way to measure benefit to society. How small-minded and provincial. And all because of reading Ayn Rand's poorly-written fantasy novels when they're freshmen.

Sage advice. What you need to hack is not your nutritional energy budget, but your automatic habitual behavior. If you can control that you can control your body's consumption and use of energy. If you can't hack your behavior you can't hack anything which depends on that behavior -- not for long anyway.

Possibly because Roddenberry was dead ?

> I was a Republican until the core Republican party went batsh*t crazy.

One down... only all the rest to go...

Which is about as logical as saying "fire can burn firemen too so we better ban firefighting".

You're right of course, but the jury is still out on warp drives. NASA has an entire team researching them now. Ever since Alcubierre showed it was theoretically possible (and later physicists significantly refined the theory) it moved from pure science fiction into bona-fide science. Whether or when it can move to ENGINEERING is uncertain -but clearly at least some good scientists and engineers are willing to bet quite a significant budget on sooner over later.

And there is no doubt it was Star Trek that inspired the actual science here. Alcubierre wrote William Shatner an e-mail to thank him for Star Trek and openly stated that he it was seeing the idea in Star Trek that inspired him to do the research and work out if it could be done for real.

Useful how? I find a hell of a lot of use for free for non commercial use. Heck it's even better than free for educational use which is not suitable for personal use.

Posting something on github is not the same as stepping into a TV broadcast. Now dancing into the frame on your own TV broadcast would be a good analogy, in which case if someone told me off I'd tell them things in very unprofessional ways.

Giving the government credit for creating the current internet is like giving Abner Doubleday credit for Henry Aaron's home runs.

Now I'm confused. If baseball hadn't been invented, how would Hank Aaron have hit home runs again?

Maybe we need to work on your similes.