And we are supposed to get a hard-on here ? C'mon. This is disgusting.

...what is going to imagine: some insurance company is the first to come up with cheaper insurance for self-driving cars. The others follow. Murderous competition follows, until prices settle at a new, much lower level. Plus: we lose a couple of insurance companies as road-kill. Minus: the survivors may form a cartel.

Interesting. That had to happen, somehow. Good for the few Americans who dare to make the jump, good for the various European countries hosting them.

that is what we do. Works fine, here in Europe.

We may be talking about different things. You seem to exclusively mention concerts of amplified music, where indeed most of what you say applies. With non-amplified ( "acoustic" ) music, it is quite radically different.

I am trying to say that recorded music is not equivalent to live music. It is music minus something. Just as a talk with your eyes closed is a still a talk, but a talk minus something. Sheet music is music, too - it is music minus any performance. Only music performed live is music to the full extent.

Yes, please - if it can be done without insults, trolling and ad hominem attacks. It is then called "a discussion", and not only are - AFAIK - discussions the very purposing of Slashdot comments, discussions can be fruitful and interesting.

Disagree, strongly so. Let me illustrate this with an example. Could you pretend you had a talk with another person, whenever all you'd had was a telephone conversation with that person ? No, you couldn't. Having an actual talk implies the visibility of hand gestures, facial expressions and body language, as well as the two of you being in the same acoustical environment, something even a very good video & audio recording can not provide. Hence, having an actual talk requires physical presence. I am saying that hearing actual music requires hearing that music live. See the informal Celibidache quote in one of my comments further up.

It is certainly a consequence of technology providing us with the possibility to have cheap copies of recordings of sound and images that uncounted millions of people equal, in their mind, "a recording of music" with actual "music". It is not because of uncounted millions of people doing so that making that equalization is also valid, or a mere tautology. So, I am just doing the best I can in trying to get things right. Even if that involves saying an inconvenient truth.

Ha ! I do have a cite now, a tremendously authoritative one: the OED, or Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989:

I scanned the entire article "music" in the OED. It does not even contain the word "record" or "recording". The youngest quote in the article being from 1975, when the possibility to record sound/music had already been extant for many decades, this clearly indicates the OED makes a sharp distinction between music and records thereof. QED.

I do not have a direct cite, although I rely heavily upon what my beloved conductor Sergiu Celibidache thought about recordings:

"the acoustic space in which one hears a concert directly affects the likelihood of the emergence of his sought-after transcendent experience. The acoustic space within which one hears a recording of one of his performances, on the other hand, has no impact on the performance, as it is impossible for the acoustic features of that space to stimulate musicians to play slower or faster."

The above text is from the english-language wikipedia article on Sergiu Celibidache, as it formulates the idea better than I could have.

People talk about recordings, whether digital or on vinyl or tapes, as of "music". They are dead wrong. Music is, per definitionem, live music. A recording is just what it says, and nothing more. It can not capture quite a lot of things inherent to live music.

In many African countries, a cellphone network connection comes without internet access.

This near-automatic re-posting of Ethan's blog postings is becoming annoying. For sure, it popularizes science and may hence be argued to be stuff that matters. It can, however, certainly be proved to not be news for nerds.

...after thousands of years of getting out of the trees, getting away from the savanna, getting out of the caves, civlization, tool-making, science and culture ? Disappointing, to say the least.

One of both in each room. Without them, it's not a home.

... if you raise the operating temperature a couple of hundred Kelvin, then quantum docoherence and environmental scattering are going to play a role, meaning that information held in any one of the cells may simply vanish by "leaking" into a coupled environment. A little bit of thermal background radiation is enough to set such processes into motion.