One problem is that it's not possible to validate your climate modeling. Planetary terraforming is writing and implementing Alpha code in a Production System with no backout plan.

Pretty scary when it's the Fate of All Mankind in your hands.

On the other hand, things are VERY bleak if something isn't done. History is very clear about how we will respond to this threat. Humans are very selfish as individuals and will not act collectively for the good of the whole. It's never happened and is not likely to any time soon.

The only real answer will be to both continue with current efforts to develop new sources of energy, new energy storage systems, new ways of acquiring safe water cheaply as well as looking for ways to gently manage the planetary climate. There really is no other choice.

If you're considering putting a whole office of newbies on Linux, then all they need is a web browser and simple word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail and printing. Sounds to me like something that could be accommodated by a Chromebox or Chromebook. They're CHEAP too! Zero maintenance.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...

The tech jobs have come to SF big time. Where have you been? South of Market is full of techies. I live in the East Bay and work at 3rd/Brannan. The whole area is tech companies. Rackspace, Zynga, Adobe, Facebook, Twitter, Macys.com and Ubisoft are just a few of the companies in the area. A ton of little startups like the one I'm with are there as well.

But yes, SF has a large number of people who work in Mountain View and Cupertino as well. Google, Apple and some of the other big companies provide buses for their people who work in SF. There are so many techies in SF that rents have gone waaaaay up and the working class folks are pissed because of it.

Actually San Francisco is gaining a lot of people with money. Rents are beyond belief. This is the city where $4000 gets you a 1 bedroom apartment within walking distance of your tech job. Your basic $1 million home is 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, with a patch of cement in front some here call a lawn.

Certainly there is a sizeable left leaning population, but they are hardly unemployed sitting around demanding handouts. The politically active leftists are just as self-sufficient and delusional as the politically active right wingnuts. We do have both here in the San Francisco area.

In this I agree. Frankly this is the appealing quality of digital technology. Unfortunately we don't listen in the digital domain and there are a number of links in the chain that happen by the time you actually hear something and they're all analog.

As far as vinyl vs. CD, I never said one was superior to the other. I just said they were different and attempted to qualify what that difference was. I do know that vinyl (or digital for that matter) on my home system will be vastly more pleasurable than a digital recording on any set of head phones, computer attached speakers, commercial home theatre system, or whatever it is most of y'all listen to. Ultimately it's all about the pleasure of listening to music.

"Better" is something subjective. It really comes to what you prefer. As for "accuracy", there is so much that affects audio reproduction that the simple notion of "accuracy" is almost nonsense.

I find so many audiophiles who worry about the smallest details of reproduction, spending enormous sums on a variety of audio tweaks, completely ignoring how the recording was originally engineered and produced. There is enormous difference in the signal produced by different microphones. Miking technique makes a tremendous difference in a recordings timbre and imaging. When you put separate mikes on each player in isolation, the resulting recording never sounds like the band was actually sitting in front of you. It's a totally different experience.

There are a variety of recording techniques that are used for a reason. Many find that the 3 channel recordings the Mercury label did back in the 1950s to be some of the best sound ever done. Are you familiar with the differences between M-S, Blumlein and ORTF recording techniques? Do you know which microphones are best with each and why?

And then there's how you use the playback equipment you have. What is the shape of your listening room? What effect do you believe it is that your room has on the result? Did you ever consider that your room might be affecting your sound? Have you ever experimented with speaker placement?

The whole notion of "accuracy" is almost irrelevant in the face of so many other variables.

I love digital because bits is bits and get copied with perfect accuracy, but we don't listen to digital. We listen to analog and every file of digital information has to be translated to an analog wave form, and that translation has a great deal of variation in it. That's why there are so many different DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) devices sold. And you don't have to spend megabucks to hear this. Take a Behringer USB audio interface and compare it to any of the $400 to $600 DAC devices on the market. You'll hear a very real difference, and one that I submit would be surprising. Compare the Behringer to the output of a typical pro-grade Tascam CD player (you do this by feeding the Behringer a digital signal direct from the CD player) and you'll find that they're indistinguishable. So your typical CD player is actually inferior to most of the $500 range DAC devices you'll find.

We listen to analog and there is a great deal of analog happening long after you leave the digital domain. Anyone who says that digital is perfection clearly hasn't seriously examined the world of analog reproduction, which is so much more than vinyl vs. CD.

if you truly believe that 44.1khz/16 bit digital reproduction is perfection, then there is no further discussion possible with you.

The thing I object to in some of the earlier comments is the suggestion that the difference in sound quality is due to equalization. That the difference in sound quality of vinyl vs. digital is that it's just a low-pass filter. I think there are many other reasons for audible differences, such as the distortion characteristics you suggest. I also like tube amps but currently only run solid state. If my Bryston preamp ever dies (and I probably will before it does), I may go to a tube preamp then. My Linkwitz Orions are multi-amped and call for 8 channels at 60wpc, which would be far too expensive to run with tubes, let alone how much they'd heat the house. I find that mosfet amps have a pleasing distortion quality similar to that of tubes, so I'm happy with that.

Please note that I've never said here that either format was better than the other. All I've said is that I hear differences and that it's not simply a matter of equalization. In a world where most experience music through ear buds connected to their smart phones or iPods, what we audiophiles think really is of little consequence.

It's also been my experience that CD releases are typically re-mastered from the original studio recordings, so much of the difference between vinyl and CD releases has to do with the mastering engineers and the decisions they made.

As for my own preference, I don't have one. I enjoy both formats and am more interested in listening to good players than I am in worrying about the relative merits of vinyl/CD/hi-res recordings. I've got some 10" LPs from the late 1940s which really swing. To me, that's what's important.

I'm both a performing musician and an engineer. I've had a strong interest in audio since I built my first Heathkit tuner in 1971. During my college days, I built solid state Dynaco units, and later spent a number of years designing and building loudspeakers. My first loudspeaker was from a design in the August 1976 issue of Audio Magazine for a Theil aligned enclosure of 20 cubic feet. It was the size of a refrigerator. Was 3 db down at 20 hz. Loads of fun.

The definition of a "true audiophile" is as varied as their are human beings to interpret the phrase. I see the term "audiophile" as being anyone who loves listening to music and wants to reproduce it faithfully at home. Most are constrained by limitations of budget, physical listening space and situation, and having to accommodate the living situation requirements of others they live with. Many audiophiles are familiar with the acronym "WAF" (Wife Acceptance Factor) as it seems to be fact that those who consider themselves to be audiophiles, under whatever definition you care to use, are 99% male.

I like to think that audiophiles are people who care to engineer the sound reproduction systems in their homes. What takes it another great leap forward is when you begin to build your own gear - amplifiers, speakers, etc. Another path is to do your own location recordings. As my wife is a professional violinist, I get to record some very good concerts from time to time. You can check out some of them at the website for the Temescal String Quartet. In particular the recordings of the 1st movement of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet and the whole of the Ravel String Quartet are performances I very much enjoy.

So if you want to meet *MY* definition of a "true audiophile", you'll build some of your own gear and will get out and record stuff live and bring it back home. If it sounds in your living room like it did live, then you've accomplished something. And yes. You can get it all done with very inexpensive gear. My recordings were done with Behringer C2 mikes, cheap cables, an M-Audio USB audio interface feeding into a 7 year old Win XP laptop running Audacity. Take a listen at:

http://www.temescalquartet.com...

Since you know so much about live music, what instrument do you play? Is it an acoustic instrument? Do you play without amplification and thus have experience balancing your sound level with the other players in the ensemble? Or is that too Old School for you?

And while we're at it, what gear do you listen on which so accurately informs you that digital is so much better.

To my ear, (and that's MY ear), the things I listen for in an audio system are tonal balance and imaging. For me it's all about voices. There are some local jazz singers I know well and have heard live a number of times. One woman used to sing with my big band back in the 90s. I can take those tracks and have a pretty good idea of how accurate a system sounds.

A truly good system will have a real 3D quality to the imaging as well. It's not only left-right, but also front-back that you can hear on a good system. Sadly few people ever get to hear that sort of thing outside of a hi-end showroom, and most of those systems cost an insane amount of loot.

That's why I'm so big on the Linkwith Orion stuff. Siegfried Linkwitz will sell you just the plans and you can build everything from scratch, or you can buy everything already built and get the same results as hi-end systems costing 10 times as much. But you don't get it for the price of a Cambridge Audio system.

Headphones can sound quite good, but they can never give you the same kind of experience.

If you're going to be that serious about it, then you're going to need a system that reproduces accurately. I'll betcha it ain't better than mine.

The problem with digital is that you won't find my Bill Hardman or Frank Rosolino recordings in that medium. It doesn't matter how much "better" it sounds to you if you can't listen to it at all.

I like digital because it's so much easier to work with than analog. I like analog because of the library I have on it you'll never hear anywhere else. What you like is what you like and that's totally cool with me.

I've got about a dozen recordings on both CD and vinyl. My own experience is that vinyl has different timbre, which many describe as "warmer" than the CDs I have. It certainly feels more... I dunno what words best describe it... "organic" maybe? It's definitely different. But is it better? That's up to you.

CDs have no background or media noise the way that vinyl does and vinyl is typically compressed a bit. It just doesn't have the signal to noise ratio that digital does.

I record the concerts my wife's string quartet does at 96 khz/24 bit, and when I down sample to 44.1 khz/16 bit to made a CD, it seems to me that I can hear differences there as well.

Personally I buy recordings to listen to the music. I like to listen on better gear just like everyone else does, but the hi-end can get waaaaay too anal retentive for me. I keep my vinyl because there's so much of it that will never make it to CD. I've got some jazz recordings you'll never see on CD.

And if you ever think you want to get into some real hi-end sound without spending an insane amount, check out

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/

And what kind of equipment do you listen on that gives you this opinion? I'll grant you that there's a whole lotta snake oil in hi-end audio, but were you to listen on my system (Linn LP-12 turntable, Bryston preamp, Linkwitz Orion loudspeakers), you'd hear real differences in vinyl vs. CD. Is one better than the other? Not really if your goal is simply to listen to good music. But the differences are certainly there.