James H. Schmitz was a Sci-Fi writer published from the 40s to the 70s. He mostly wrote short stories (most in a common setting, often with one of two specific lead characters), though he wrote a few (short) novels.

He was an early feminist author; most of the his lead characters are strong females (Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee are the leads in many of his short stories, and the main lead in the novel The Demon Breed is a woman). His most famous work, the novel The Witches of Karres, is a picaresque, wildly imaginitive space-romp (although rather overtly expanded from a novelette).

In one (or more?) stories, he imagines an Internet-like source of information, and (IIRC) even calls it a "web".

In the 2000s, most of his works were republished by Baen Books, with sometimes significant interference^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H editing by Eric Flint.

This law has over 60% support in AZ. That doesn't happen without the support of a *LOT* of hispanics.

AZ is 30% hispanic, so it's 70% non-hispanic. So, a lot of support from hispanics? Citation needed.

Every time you see a terrible Slashdot article or headline, check which editor posted it.

If you're like me you'll learn to just say "fucking timothy" when it happens.

tl;dr: RTFA, not just the pictures.

Full version:

Unfortunately, you misread the site. The site doesn't report the popularity of chords by name at all. If you'd read the lead-in to the chord chart, you'd see the explanation. Or if you'd thought about the most popular chords being "G F C Am Dm Em", the main traids in the key of C, you might be suspicious. Or if you had read the following analysis on the site which explains his theories for their popularity, you'd have seen your misinterpretation.

The site reports the popularity of key signatures by name.

It reports the popularity of chords by pseudo-name: relative to the key signature by transposing all the songs into the key of C. Yes, that's a dumb thing for him to do, but that's what he did, and it's identical to what you propose he should do. (The per-song analyses do actually use roman-numeral notation.)

Your explanation is therefore bogus; the A chord is not necessarily particularly rare as far as we can tell. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Probably it is, actually, which leads me to my second argument: your reason for why it's rare is wrong.

It is absolutely true that the popularity of many chords in guitar music is due to what's convenient on the guitar. But I'm doubtful that A chords are very rare in guitar music. More likely, the pop music analyzed here is not very guitar-centric.

Let's look at an actual guitar band. The easiest to use is the Beatles, since they're well studied. They got less guitar-y in their later albums, though. Here's a source.. Note that relative minors have already been adapted in the same way.

Top six keys in order on the site in the slashdot article:
C G Eb F D A

All beatles: G A E D C ...
First two albums: E D A G ...
Next three albums: A G D E ...
Abbey Road: A C E D F

So, in this actual guitar band, before they started writing on piano, retuning songs by changing the tape speed, etc., the keys of E, D, and A were incredibly popular, so I bet the A chord was probably popular as well. (but I have no stats).

And since guitarists don't actually avoid these keys, unsurprisingly, your explanation for why guitarists would avoid these keys are wrong. (1) The B chord is uncomfortable for a beginning guitarist, but the B7 chord is easily learned, so B doesn't present a problem for the key of E. (And the reality is that the difficulty of the chord isn't a big deal for serious musicians. They favor open chords not because they're easy, but because they sound better.) (2) The key of D doesn't present much problem, as not having the chord root not at the top just means you play inversions a lot, or use sparser chords. The fact it's not low is irrelevant when you have a bassist; and look at something like Nashville tuning. Indeed, the convenience of a flexible A7 for use as V, and the ease of Dsus2 and Dsus4, makes D a quite popular key signature on the guitar. (3) I don't know why your A theory is wrong, but since your E and D theories were wrong, and since the Beatles (with three different male singers) loved the key of A, I can't imagine it's correct.

So, the actual explanation for why A is at 2% is that it's the "relative A" chord that is the major VI chord, or i.e. the V-of-ii chord. That makes it popular enough to be at 2% -- V-of-ii isn't unheard of, but not a particularly common chord in the key of C, the way the non-diminished triads from the key signature are.

They accept user-contributed analyses and etc. Check.

They have no visible license (that I can find) under which user contributions are made. Check.

They do not provide any way (that I can find) to download the database. Check.

Made of fail.

I posted about this on twitter a month ago.

The frequency chosen had to be a multiple of 900 and had to be somewhere in a limited range of frequencies (above 40Khz, below some number I forget). The 900 comes from a factor of 300 (to guarantee it was divisible by 50 and 60 for PAL/NTSC), and a factor of 3 (the preferred number of samples per scanline; 2 was too few, 4 would have been wasteful).

There is no evidence that the specific multiple of 900 from the required range (40Khz to 47Khz) was chosen because of what the factors of the multiplier would be, but rather because the frequency wanted to be as high as possible (giving a wider region between limits of human hearing and the nyquist freq, thus making filtering it cheaper), but higher frequencies would have required encoding samples in the vertical blank part of the signal.

Certainly the fact that 900 itself is already the product of the squares of the three smallest primes is coincidence, since the factors of 300 and 3 were essentially independently motivated--the 3 wasn't chosen because it "completed the set" with the 300. Likewise, I don't believe the additional factor of 49 was chosen because of that factor. (Having more divisibility is useful in some circumstances, but 7 is such an uncommon divisor; 900*48 would be far more useful on the general divisibility front, introducing more factors of 2 and 3. But, in fact, nobody NEEDS this number to be more divisible, as it's not needed to be divisible beyond the factor of 900 that was required.)

There's a wikipedia page about it (do an "I feel lucky" search on google for "44.1").

(The linked article, by Jacobson and a collaborator, cites two sources: one is Jacobson's original article, and the other is by Jacobson and the same collaborator.)

I'm not saying he's wrong; I'm saying this isn't very scientific.

http://marksxp.mvps.org/WindowsXP/dvd/playback/dvdplayback.php

If the test requires 20 steps that build on each other, and you screw up one step because of an arithmetic error (forgetting to divide by 2), and do every other step perfectly (but building on that incorrect step), you shouldn't get a D on the test. A grade of D does not reflect the knowledge or competence you exhibited on the test.

Worse yet, Opera and Mozilla and Apple aren't saying, "Goddamn this stuff is just already too complicated. Let's just freeze what we've got and really consider it a standard, so we can just fix all the damn bugs and work on interactivity." Instead, it seems they've bought whole hog into W3C's "what's good for the web is constant generation of new standards", and they're happily generating more and more! Yay!

(That it WORKS, not that people try it.)

If you want to offer a contradictory viewpoint from a less-biased observer, that's fine. But if you go straight to the maximally biased source, it's suggestive that there isn't an unbiased source with that perspective in the first place. Maybe there is, but if so, use them. If not, don't bother with "balance".

Why would I want my code to be "free and open"? I want my code to contribute as much to society as possible.

In my evaluation, for the free libraries I write, I find this is best achieved by giving it away without restriction, allowing proprietary companies to incorporate it into their codebases without being obligated to give anything back. There are some companies whose companies won't let them touch GPL code. They can use my code and not give anything back (some give back anyway, even though there is no legal obligation). I think this is a net improvement for overal benefit measured over the entire world than if they couldn't.

I go further than most people at that point; I don't use MIT or BSD or any such licenses, most of which just require keeping authorship information in the code, or in the code and docs. There are some companies whose companies won't let them touch any open source code, and those companies (that I've talked to so far) are ok with public domain code (although I've heard some lawyers are scared of it, given the legal ambiguity in the US). The main practical difference between the non-viral open-source licenses and public domain is the former have legal obligation for attribution, and I just don't see the point in bringing the legal system into play just so some source code locked away in a company's safe somewhere still has my name on it.

So, personally, I believe public domain is a reasonable choice for people to make if they're trying to optimize for "maximum utility" of their code. I believe non-viral open-source licenses are reasonable if you want as much utility as you can get while still guaranteeing you receive "credit" (of some minimal kind) for your work. I believe GPL is the most reasonable choice for people who want to try to change the world to make sure that any printer they buy has drivers they can recompile (which is a rather programmer-centric view of the world, although after 30 years we've only seen mixed results).

(I don't mean "viral" in a negative way, I just like to have a simple word to distinguish that class of license.)