I haven't posted here in years, partly because I've been too focused on my music career.

First off (-topic), fuck Cubase, Ableton is waaaay better and just as easily pirated. And while on the subject of piracy, musicians spend more money on music (shows, instruments, hardware, etc) than anyone else, all while actively giving back to the music community by producing art; if they pirate music software, I say good as long as they can't afford it, because it at least allows them to create their art, which is good for everybody. I haven't paid for my copy of Ableton yet, but I definitely plan on it once I can.

Now regarding primary points of the article. Say what you want, but making beautiful expressive music is extremely difficult in a digital environment. Sure you can correct your mistakes, layer a dozen parts by yourself, and accomplish musical feats with the press of a button that, e.g., concert pianists might spend their whole life practicing to achieve, but none of that has to do with the artistic side of music. What the author really means is that humans no longer have to spend years practicing fine muscle coordination to be able to create complex music, but that doesn't free the musician of the burden of turning sound into art with real expression behind it.

This is why a lot of electronic music sounds stale and repetitive. If you don't know, there exist "construction kits" which allow me to create, e.g., an above average trap song in about an hour (including mastering). A lot of people do this, but a lot fewer go--or even know to go---to the trouble of creating real expressive content so that the music is not only aurally pleasing and cerebrally interesting, but also emotionally evocative. Evocativeness used to be a given in music, but these days it has to be sought out. That said, all the best producers reliably achieve it, even in the digital space, which can add challenges since expression is fundamentally an analog creature.

What's true is there's a lot more noise around the signal. This can make it a lot harder for good musicians to succeed, but most of the doom-and-gloom perspective comes from the masses of shitty musicians who've entered the market now that the barriers to entry are lowered: Talent still rises to the top, but all these n00bs who create digitally perfect tracks that sound like music are whining en mass that no one listens to their songs and that it must the system's fault because their tracks sound good. People don't listen to music because it "sounds good", they listen to it because it's art, i.e. it has content and is moving. Everything else is just icing on the cake, but who wants to eat just icing all the time.

I don't need to be a rock star to be a satisfied musician. That said, if you don't believe there exist rock stars and legends these days, clearly you've never been to a Bassnectar concert or are otherwise not paying attention.

In case you're interested:

https://soundcloud.com/mdmtmusic

https://soundcloud.com/mdmt-development

https://www.facebook.com/MDMTmusic

And if you're in the Denver area, we're playing at Cervantes on Sept 29th.

Primer... glwt :-)

If you're in front of her, use your left hand and pinch your thumb and first two fingers fingers together on either side of the clasp. If you're behind her, use your right hand.

That's why I'm excited for the (potentially) upcoming Halo movie. They've have a whole universe to work with, the franchise's underlying concept is relatively accessible for a sci-fi movie, and the nature of the conflict offers a lot of opportunity for good action, breathtaking scenery and visuals, and interesting scenes. Other perks: good sized projected budget, potential Peter Jackson direction, huge fan base, and I saw blood in the brief live-action clip that was produced, so maybe it won't get mangled trying to make it "family friendly". But who knows, they might throw in some absurd romantic subplot between Master Chief and some trollop played by Megan Fox that never culminates in seeing her naked.

There are little box-shaped things you can get that act as a key dispenser or sorts. It's a key-length tall, a key-width deep, and wide enough to fit ~5-6 keys side by side the thin way. Each key fits into a slot at the top so that all keys are in the box, and each slot has a slider on the side of the box that pushes the respective key out far enough to expose the teeth, but still in the box and able to be retracted after use. It's sort of like those big pens that can write in a bunch of different colors, except they're your keys. It fits on a keychain, oversize keys won't fit, but it's a good start. Googled quickly, found this, but there are cheapo versions around as well.

This assumes he can sell it for that much right away. If he holds the property until it goes back up to $2000, then profits is a misleading metric. IRR would be better, but that decreases as the length of the investment increases, like if he needs to wait to sell the place, so things don't look as good as you might think.

Of course while he's waiting he gets to collect rent, so that will help a bit. But he also has to pay to maintain the building, pay interest on the loan (which will carry a high rate because banks aren't giving loans easily right now, especially with only 10% down). Don't forget insurance. And, of course, if any of your tenants can't pay rent, or they move, then you'll lose at least 1 month rent from them and have to go through the process of getting a new tenant, which may prove difficult if you want to get as much as the last person paid, a monthly rate that was set pre-recession. Oh, and don't forget taxes, and not just the taxes on your rental income, but also property taxes which are based on property value and may have an assessed value a great deal higher than you purchased the property for. Point: there's a reason these buildings are so cheap.

Blows my mind when they say things like that, it contains implicit assumptions about what "the industry" is. E.g., many indie labels are gaining significantly more exposure as a result of sites like last.fm. I'll agree that it's not net positive for Warner.

But this is a Good thing. Sure, producer surplus (profit) for the most major players has decrease somewhat, but consumer surplus (total benefit minus cost) has increased tremendously as we can now get tons of music for very cheap. But this is what happens when monopolies fall, they have to drop prices in order to compete and we are the beneficiaries. Who cares about Warner, people will always be making music, probably more now than ever since we're able to be exposed to so much more and culture begets culture. And now we have the tools to distribute that music without the big media companies.

Maybe. The interesting thing is that the exploit is both the attack also what is needed to fix it. There's a credible threat that others may use the same exploit, not just the one who found it. A company who did this openly, whose founding documents declare they only sell software vulnerability information with the software's creator, whose NDAs included clauses that they will never share this information with others in to perpetuity regardless of the potential client's decision on whether to buy the information... I think they could develop a defensible case and eventually a trusted brand image. Just because a company sells fire insurance doesn't mean they're really threatening to commit arson.

Another problem with the strategy is that more drugs will be produces. If you buy up all the drugs at high prices, you'll have artificially injected a huge amount of demand into the market, as well as effectively condoned drug production. The existing producers will produce much more, since they can move it, and other's will flock to the drug trade, knowing that the U.S. government will buy it. If we don't, they'll just sell it to the Taliban again and, since we never put it on the streets, they'll still receive good prices and have no problems moving it. Always remember to apply the game theoretical implications of any can of economic policy (which I've found very few in Congress do.

Wow, I know /.ers rarely read TFA, but did you even read the summary? They explicitly mention "white markets" where companies can do just that. If the white markets are well known about, learning of an exploit is often likely to be more valuable to the company than a hacker. A company can suffer liability for damages, lose clients, suffer hits to their company's good will, and, depending on the nature of the software and what it's used for, and the exploit and how it works, any number of other things. Those buying the exploits can't know how long it will be effective, or how profitable it will be. My guess is, the more profitable it could be, the quicker it will get fixed, so how much can the black market pay? Besides companies potentially paying better, there's the added bonus of not having to do something illegal, harmful and immoral, though I know that doesn't matter to some. And there might be the appeal of being on the side of preventing malicious attacks. Think about it, all the CS nerds will be able to effectively become digital Jack Bauers, and that's bound to get chicks.

Credentials: math major at Johns Hopkins.

There's a logical error in your first step. When doing algebra, one doesn't "move" the 0 from the left side by the right side, they multiply both sides by 0. The usual next step is to cancel out the left side and proceed, which you implicitly did but didn't explicitly show the step. However, when you multiply by 0, you have:

0/0 = 0*inf.

You CANNOT assume 0/0 = 1 and cancel it out because it's not uniquely defined; 0/0 = x for every x in the real numbers, imaginary (complex) numbers, and every other field.

To see if 0/0 = 0*inf holds, we need to know whether 0*inf exists in a field, but 0*inf = 0, we know this because part of what defines fields is how limits work with inf:

lim_x->inf x = inf

It's axiomatic. So when we apply this to 0*inf, we get lim_x->inf 0*x = 0. This gives us 0/0 = 0, which IS true.

Here's the catch: 0/0 does not equal 0 uniquely. The logic is such that if EVERY number can equal 0/0, then NO number in any field can define 1/0. Zero attacks every number but itself with decidedly beyond infinite feebleness.

Clearly "positions" means investment positions, so it's probably something like:

"Golly mister! You've been standing like that for hours! What gives?"

"Well son, my investment manager told me it would pay to hold my position!"

Hilarious! Nothing funnier than investment managers, they prove prostitutes aren't the only ones who use different positions to fuck people out of their money.

At the time I used straight LaTeX, but I made it work. The trick was to get a good editor and set up keyboard shortcuts for common things to blaze through the process quicker. Add on top of that a bunch of renaming functions in the preamble to save keystrokes for other common actions and keeping up isn't much of a problem.

That being said, I'm going to cast my vote for Lyx because you can still do all I suggested above, but it greatly aids in building tables, matrices, and other things that'll slow you down a bit. And don't be afraid to use shorthand that won't format properly when necessary, as long as you know what it says you can always fix it after class or during a lull in the lecture; I find this typically takes less than 5 min. And use lots of white space. And reconsider what the best way to keep notes is; when you have a medium with the flexibility of files, folders, etc, I find it's usually better to take notes by topic instead of chronology of when it is said.

Funny story, took notes all semester for my stat class that way and we got to use 1 page of notes for the final. About 20-30 minutes of copy/paste-ing gave me every equation we used, qualitative descriptions of what they do and when to use them, and a whole host of other useful stuff. Never studied beyond doing my homework (which I only did most of the time) but I got a 297 out of 300, highest grade in a class of ~150 and about half a standard deviation above the next highest score...

Or most of them, anyhow. Wow, that's clever though. We've been trying to decide the outcome of wars around the world pretty regularly since WWII, this just provides a very efficient means of doing so. It also gives a big disincentive for people buying US weapons on the black market (well, the really bad ones).

Of course there's always the fear of hackers figuring out a way to kill the kill switch, but at least it's one more obstacle. It'd probably be a good idea to ensure none of our craft, etc, have these kill switches though, just the ones we sell. I'm sure we try very very hard to protect the switches, but security systems of all kinds get broken, it's easier to find exploits than it is to create a system that has none whatsoever. If lives (potentially thousands or more) depend on it, why take the chance?

There's a subtlety I think I didn't make clear. The importance is in the disposition, not the action. You can always refuse service; a person should not get mad at another because they won't do them a favor (remember that next time someone won't do you a favor, btw). But if you help, don't treat the person like they're an ass for "making" you do it. A favor should show loyalty, not exasperation. Either say no, charge for the help, or make it an actual favor. Acting in a manner that inspires guilt for "making" you help them is just as immoral as actions designed to make you feel guilty for not helping. But seriously, pro tip, learn to take joy in helping others, that way when you do help you'll actually enjoy doing it. The beneficiary of your services will pick up on that and respond positively.

A noteable exception to this rule, btw, is when applied to a girl you're even slightly interested in; the right move is to, while channeling the complete confidence of Kirk, refuse to help her and, with a smile on your face, poke fun at her computer skills. If done right, she'll panic at the failure of her sexual prowess and will proceed to plead for your assistance to prove she still has control. She does not, you do. Refuse again, she'll persist, so explain, still while smiling and channeling Kirk, that you know girls love to get guys to do stuff for them for free and that you're not so easily controlled. She'll probably act offended or more desperate for help; either way ignore her emotions then offer her a compromise: if she cooks you dinner, you'll fix her computer while she's cooking. Bring a semi-inexpensive bottle of wine, then without asking pour her a glass to drink while she cooks. Fix her computer, come back and sit to her right (or left, not across), eat dinner while teasing her that her porn browsing adiction will only lead to more problems. If this doesn't sound right to you, consider the following: you have shown yourself to be ultra alpha-male, you have put yourself in a position of control, you have a date with a girl you're interested in where she is submissively making you free dinner, you kept her busy so she didn't see how nerdy you look when you hack, and you've left her feeling grateful for it all.