Typo: No one is sledging the comments were not submitted falsely - each comment represents a valid comment. Should have been: No one is aledging the

Is that like alleging?

much more worse

Like... worser?

Uh, China.

(d)uh.... /sarcasm

the scientist came away convinced that the Soviet Union was hopelessly behind. It had nothing to do with the rockets though. Instead, he noted that when they ate lunch at the cafeteria, the cafeteria workers had to total up their lunches using an abacus. Big propaganda show-pieces are impressive, but it's the little things that show you what's really going on.

That's interesting. I vaguely recall Krushchev being despondent about the Soviet Union's chances at matching/overtaking the US, after a visit to southern California. At one point he had asked if they were flying over the "ruling class" homes now, and when told, No, that's the mostly middle-class San Fernando Valley, the sight of so many swimming pools was like the writing on the wall for him.

But I agree, there really, really should be a toggle somewhere to show hidden files. It shouldn't be all or nothing. When I need to see hidden files, I need to see them, but having my home folder filled with... $ ls -d1 ~/.* | wc -l 38

I'm curious about something. If you have one or two files, or directories that you access often, but don't want the clutter of all the hidden files, all the time, can't you just use the terminal for:

sudo chflags nohidden path/to/file

or does that no longer work in OSX? Pretty sure it works fine, and if you were accessing private, or a sub-directory of /private, well, you wouldn't even have to see it in Home ("~/") in the Finder, anyway, since it's "up" a couple levels, right? neat & clean (oh, and simple)

The "hidden setting" method involves completely restarting Finder.

Want to relaunch Finder in about 1 second? From within Finder, anywhere: Cmd-Opt-Esc, click "relaunch" done. Same key combo will call up the Force Quit from within any app

Like any UNIX, you can abort/relaunch any app, process, sub-system, reasonably fast. Or, without shells, courtesy of the Apple GUI. The longer method (with deeper "reach") is Activity Monitor.app in Applications>Utilities

You're welcome

My hearing problem is that I can't hear voices well. Audio tests put me as exceptional hearing. Much better hearing than most. But put me in a situation with minor background noise, like an airplane, and I can't understand voices.

I'm not a doctor; just so we're clear. But, you might have more of a "notching-type" hearing loss.

Some people can "hear" the sounds of speech, easily. And only increasing volume might, or might not help, always. The thing with speech is that a consonant, or even the very first part of the sounds of syllables is actually very brief, compared to the "body" of a sound. It's about the "attack" "body" and "decay" of tones.

Believe it or not, if the initial attack, which is in the high end range of the spectrum, is muffled, briefly, then words like bay, day, may, nay, pay... etc, will be indistinguishable. We'd hear the "ay" but not the most important part of the word. Some people say, speak louder. That works, sometimes, depending on distance from the ear, background noise, etc. Some people will turn their head slightly, or even cup their hand behind their ear, and that might work far better than "simpler louder."

It's that narrow-band loss of frequency, in the high end, that explain all those partial "remedies." High freqs are narrow waves, and they bounce off (are reflected by) nearly everything. Low freqs are very wide waves that follow walls, floors, ceilings, etc. Even a guy with a very low voice (baritone or lower) has much higher freqs that are the initial part of syllables... so, we might hear 99% of what he says, but find it nearly unintelligible.

Cupping hands behind an earlobe gives the higher freqs that many more times to "bounce" and be heard, far more clearly. The reinforced sibilant makes identification of the "note" easier, even, technically, slightly "after the fact."

These things are tricky to diagnose correctly, for the simple reason that most hearing tests are done with headphones, so the sibilants and partials have direct access to the natural reverb chamber that the inside of the ear lobe provides. A good hearing specialist will be able to administer a variety of tests, including one that aims to reveal exactly this sort of loss. I'd get it checked out. Oh wait, I DID get it checked out. Was very helpful for me.

P.S. Not sure "notching" is a proper term, certainly not all pro hearing specialists would use it, as far as I know. But, think of a parametric equalizer. if a common parametric EQ divides total range of frequencies that humans hear into, say, ten "bands," then it's safe to assume each "band" includes quite a number of adjacent freqs, right? So, what the parametric part does is it allows us to narrow the range of freqs, within any of those arbitrary bands, so that only a few, or if needed, a lot, of them are affected by a 'boost" or "cut." It's a bit more "surgical" in that regard. Going the other way, dividing all the freqs into 2 parts (treble, and bass) is barbaric in comparison. And using volume, instead of EQ, just makes the same "problem" louder. HTH

A small amount of directionality is all you are missing out on.

A small amount? Are you kidding? Imagine, if you will, that your eyes are closed... Now.... Even missing part of the higher frequency range on one side, only, means you lose any precision, whatsoever, about a lot of things, including where a sound emanates from, the size of the place you're in, how close walls might be (which echoes of your footsteps, or speech, would otherwise tell you), and (given moderate environmental/background noise) conversation directed at you from your "disabled" side... etc.

And total hearing loss on one side, only, makes all those impacts far more devastating to what your hearing is basically trying to do, for you, all the time, whether you're conscious of it, or not.

I was doing recording/mixing with some "traditionalist" white-boy Blues musicians, years ago. And the spokesman for the band said, "No, we want to keep this "real" not like "studio" music... so, no reverb or echo or any "tricky" stuff."

I tried explaining the difference between "dumb" microphones and tape, and the simplest human hearing that we all have, and how reverb's basic usage was to put the "Real World" sound back into the analog recording... and how it, and echo were, on a basic level, trying to replicate the same effect that having real world sounds not only in both ears, but "bouncing" around inside the seemigly odd architecture of your ear lobes, was also about being able to pick out sibilants in speech, and the difference between oboes and french horns... and forget it! They weren't budging.

So, they ended up with a nice, "clean" recording all right. And it sounded nothing like their music (which was top-notch, by the way) did in real life, which was supposedly what they "thought" they were after. In other words it had about as much to do with "reality" as your "missing a little directionality" only hints at. Not much, in other words.

On the other hand, those Bose speakers could suffer from comb filtering effects, lumpy frequency response, phase shifting effects, and limited frequency extension at both high and low frequencies.

Ah yes, the old motto: "No highs, no lows... it must be Bose!"

"They pay the homeowners for the use of the poles that are in back gardens, do they? I think not." Then you are engaged in thinking without access to fact. My girlfriend is the General Counsel for an association of Cable/Telecoms, and "pole fees" are one of the many areas where all providers are engaged in contract law, disputes, and rulings. You need to do some minimal homework, pal.

I had the same issues, logged-in from the SF Bay Area, but after 15 minutes of crazy, I VPN'd to Brazil, and guess what? Fifteen minutes went by before there was a trace of a problem with the stream.

So, I disconnected, and reconnected to Switzerland and all was well until 15 seconds after the first shot of the Apple Watch.Then it got bumpy for a minute, so I reconnected to Mexico, and blazango! No more issues.

A good chunk of the problem was in the fall-back thing; as the servers crashed under load the "color bar" (for want of a better label) popped up. As for the Chinese overdub, well, that wasn't on the streams from the distributed servers around Switzerland, Mexico and Brazil.

So, who knows? My VPN is encrypted, both the content, and the tunnel. No throttling anywhere, because it can't be ID'd as a VPN tunnel. Nice. (and, of course, IP readers don't see any proxy, either... extra nice).

That being said, there were some issues, on Apple's end, no doubt, but crappy traffic management in the US was a huge part of the annoyance.

...causing arteries to start losing their ability to control the rate of blood flow.

I know this a bit off-topic, and for that, I apologize, profusely. Nevertheless, when I first glanced at the paragraph from which the above quote is taken, my first thought was,

"Isn't that supposed to be "loosing?"

I now know, beyond doubt, that I've spent too much time online. Thank you, and good night.

I'll buy one the day after The Leafs win the Cup.

Thank you!

Are the files removable from the Apple app to VLC app?

Yes, they are. Select any file of the type you want to change. Hit Command-I, or Get Info from the file menu. You see a thing that shows the default app handler for the file in the Info window. The current handler is the text of a typical dropdown that allows you to change the handler to a different app.

You can also make the change of handler universal (for all files of that type, in other words). I did just that with mp3s. When I have loops or small mp3 files I just want to open them in QuickTime, rather than have iTunes launching. So I changed the handler to QT. Easy.

When I am in the iTunes environment, itself, the mp3s in iTunes open and play in iTunes, But if I want to go into my directories or Desktop (whatever) and listen to one thing (even a track that also would appear in the iTunes library) it'll open with QT. Fast, simple, etc.