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Comment Gold has better weight/value ratio (Score 2, Informative) 138

Gold still has a much better weight/value ratio. One kilo of gold costs more than 25.000 euros, so it costs more than twice as much as the highest quality saffron in your example. Gold also has much less issues with quality (easier to certify/quantify the quality), and is much easier to sell quickly. Besides, a private individual (as in: not a professional saffron dealer) selling large amounts of saffron might attract a lot of attention...

Comment difference in file size between 320kbps and FLAC (Score 1) 849

At 320kbps you are pretty close to the size that FLAC compression would produce, so at that point you might as well go lossless even if you can't tell the difference (at least you could get back to wave files that way). Also you may not have "tin ears," because I've found it takes thousands of dollars of audio equipment to tell the difference at 192kbps. However, any true audio file will say do what you think sounds good (even if it happens to be the tape deck in your car), it is only the snobby ones who are douche bags.

FLAC often has a bitrate higher than 1000kbps, so there is a significant difference between the size of a 320 version and a FLAC version. So it takes about 200% more storage space, takes 3 times as long to copy, etc. That being said, if possible, I'd still go for FLAC, especially for important things (original work, a rip of a rare CD/LP, etc.). With FLAC, you can always make lossy derivative copies, but if you start at 320kpbs (let alone 192 or, god forbid, 128), you will never get better sound from that source, it will only get worse. So if it isor whatever, go for FLAC, other

Comment I'll tell you how. (Score 1) 174

Let's try an example. Kings of Leon is enjoying some pretty good success right now with songs from their most recent album reaching the top 5 of Billbaord, Hot 100, and other charts. But the band formed in 1999. For for the better part of a decade they were only "good" to a small number as you put it. But then how did they suddenly jump out of relative obscurity to the top of mainstream charts?

You seem to assume that Kings of Leon have produced music for 10 years of a constant quality. Perhaps their "Only By The Night" album (2008) and the associated singles just were so good that the quality of the music made that their popularity grew?

I am not saying that this true, but just because they make good music and are popular now does not necessarily mean that they "deserved" to be popular all along.

Comment Solution (Score 1) 218

What if they track both the pet and the owner, and then only register the pets location on the website (behind a password of course) when the pet and owner are more than n meters away from each other? The irony of this system is of course that in order to increase the privacy of the owner, he/she too needs to be tracked initially...

Comment Don't worry about the rock stars (Score 1) 294

Life + 70 means the creator's life + 70 years

So... to give our (great?) grand-children a free world, we should be killing off all the creators now right? :)

"Well you see son, there used to be this thing called a 'rock star', and they made music. But we had to kill them all to set the music free. It was the only way."

I don't think we should bother too much with the rock stars, they usually kill themselves quite quickly in one way or another. Let's focus our attention on the Backstreet Boys, Miley Cyrus, etc. Then again, we should ask ourselves; is this really the kind of music we want in de public domain?

Space

Submission + - Space vehicle unveiled at EAA (jsonline.com) 1

xanthos writes: "Sir Richard Branson was at the annual Experimental Aircraft Assoc Fly-in to show off EVE (previously known as White Knight Two), the launch vehicle for Virgin Galactic's commercial space operation. Test flights for SpaceShipTwo are slated for next year with the first paying passenger's going up in 2011.

What surprised me was the following from the article:

"So many people have signed up already, Whitehorn said, that the company has collected $40 million in deposits with orders to build five spaceships to meet the demand."

Will this mean that the $200k price tag may be dropping?"

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