I totally agree. Consider, this guy, who won a MacArthur "Genius" grant, is the undisputed leading modern scholar and performer of ragtime music, and yet still cannot afford his own grand piano.

Success was never really about talent, was it?

I am personal friends with a few musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They are not wealthy, but doing fine...enough for a modest townhouse, a car, and some neat bicycles. Of course, getting any full-time job playing for an orchestra is pretty top-of-the-heap considering how many classical musicians graduate each year from even just the top 3 programs (Eastman, Oberlin, Julliard).

More commonly, one finds classical musicians who are part-time with an orchestra, and have other jobs. I think that's true of several of the musicians in the Chicago Philharmonic for example.

In classical music, more than pop, performance is where the money is. If your orchestra records Beethoven's 9th, you're competing with hundreds of previous recordings, some of them amazing, while splitting the proceeds among a hundred people.

Ironically, classical music may be leading pop in this sense.

I think Lowery's response would be that in such a case, one would mostly find the extra revenue going to what he terms the First Leg of the "new boss" (File sharing/Cyber Lockers).

Lowery's analysis seems cogent to me, and I am pessimistic about the world of digital distribution to match previous decades' spikes in artist revenue. I agree instead with the numerous posters above, who argue that the future profitability for musicians will be determined by having fewer musicians and more live revenue.

A very important point!

The way I see it, the technical difficulties -- both manifest and potential -- of protecting users from each other on the same OSX system made FileVault 1 untenable. Every app (written by Apple or not) that put data into unprotected memory, swap, or disk was in principle leaking confidential information from the vault. You may have felt like your files were safe, and if you never turned on remote login or allowed fast user switching you were probably right, but the general multiuser case is full of attack vectors.

So while in principle the per-user protection was nice, in practice it inevitably full of holes. Rather than provide the illusion of inter-user security, Apple switched to full disk encryption in FileVault 2 -- something closer to what most of its users really needed anyway.

To expand somewhat on your point:

The entire framework works extremely well (with certain modifications such as using volatility surfaces) for highly liquid markets with clear contracts and negligible jump risk, such as index futures and options. That success led to other markets "stretching" the model and its conceptual brethren to contracts where it worked successively worse, culminating perhaps in the silliness of options on tranche protection in CDO^2.

I would also like to distinguish between risk models, which were always supposed to use real-world probability measures, and pricing models using risk-neutral measure. The mathematics explicitly distinguishes them, while the practice (as you note) often did not. But even when real-world probabilities were used, things went wrong when the parameters were fitted to historical experience. The prime example most telling example of that was risk models for packaged mortgages, calibrated to a historical period in which real estate prices had never declined.

Ah, yes. That would be the same Warren Buffet who traded over $37 billion of those very same derivatives (p.19) just prior to the 2008 crisis, in addition to selling even more esoteric tax-free bond insurance contracts.

I agree with you that the formula is not to blame. I don't think one should (implicitly or explicitly) assume there was much in the way of fraud -- that way lies conspiracy kookiness. Derivatives simply helped exacerbate a real estate bubble. Do you recall the endless conversations with all sort of ordinary people about the brilliance of their real estate investments? I sure do.

Good explanation. To amplify this point with respect to Julia, if the Julia developers really intend it to be merely a matrix computation platform then they chose the right syntax.

Based on the linked materials, though, it seems they are really aiming for the general numerical computing crowd. If so, their choice of syntax is a grave mistake. Matlab may be stuck with it for historical reasons, but I have no desire to go back to finding bugs whose presence is inferred by noticing a single pixel on my monitor or, worse, the lack of it.

This may seem petty, but one of the biggest sources of relief to me in changing from Matlab to R and Numpy was finally leaving behind that damned operator syntax where element-wise operations need to have an extra dot prepended. That is to say, if I have an array t of times and an array x of distances, I want to be able to get the corresponding array of speeds using x / t. In Matlab and Julia I must instead use x ./ t.

It seems like no big deal, but it is unbelievable how many Matlab bugs I wrote due to that little difference. True linear algebraic operations are so rare, at least to me, that I am far happier giving them the special operators and reserving the usual operators to work element-wise.

I also must have named arguments and default values. It's a pity, because otherwise it looks to have decent syntax, good speed and nice parallelization. For now, I'm sticking with R, numpy and C.

When we built out our rec room two years ago, I paid to have the electricians fit it out with "dimmable" LED lighting. Overall, I am happy with the light temperature and eventual cost savings (the incremental cost was many hundreds of dollars for about 10 fixtures).

I am not impressed at all with the level of dimmability these lights can achieve. Their perceived light output can be cut by half, or maybe 2/3. That's probably about a factor of 10 or so in terms of light energy output, but it's nowhere near what I am looking for when I want to soften the room's appearance.

We're getting some ceiling lights put in a couple other rooms tomorrow, so on Monday I asked the electrician ( *very* competent guy) to show me the latest and greatest in dimmable LEDs. There's been essentially no improvement; they are still only nominally dimmable. So I asked him to install incandescents.