This is an arena where a few motivated civilians can play, too.

At the moment, I'll put Anonymous or a group of Eastern European boys I met a few years ago against the best that a political party's "opposition team" can put together.

Playing War in a distributed worldwide network is not the same as throwing a bunch of hardware onto a battlefield.

So far, the best armies on the Internet are not the ones affiliated with a government or establishment political party. Hell, despite the Octopus doing its best, Pirate Bay and wikileaks are still up and running. If they go down, I'll be more worried.

Now we wait

We wait mainly for the Basque government to change, now that their opposition is going to be so well-financed. I'm guessing there will also be a rash of media stories saying the Basque government is "anti-jobs" or "ineffective" or "anti-business".

The story is the same all over the world: You don't go against the Family (the "Family" being powerful corporations).

These bills are part of the public domain.

But strangely, as many of us know, the regulations are not part of the public domain.

In fact, a very large portion of U.S. law is proprietary, and if you were to publish or display it in any way you would get sued.

That is the downside of having corporations write those laws.

This is reasonable per Pelosi.

Except, the Republicans run the House of Representatives now, and they run the Appropriations Committee who actually made this pronouncement, so wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that it is "reasonable per Boehner"? Or maybe, "reasonable per Koch" since that's who runs the Republican Party?

I mean, if you wanted to be accurate...

Feeding solar in like that just causes inefficiency, you still need the same level of power generation from other (coal/gas etc) sources on the grid to cope with nights and cloudy days.

Yessirree. Plus, when you use solar energy, it makes baby Jesus cry. We're supposed to get our energy from fossil fuels and fossil fuels alone. That's in the Bible.

And everyone knows we've reached the limits of technological advance. We'll never be able to get any power from the Sun.

If you want an example of how superior a great, muscular fossil fuel burning country is to a weeny little sun using country, just look at how much better the US economy is doing compared to Germany. At least we were doing better until that Marxist bastard Obama gave us socialized medicine. Now we're going to have an inferior health care system like Germany does.

And don't tell me about the Germans. They're only able to make use of solar power because of godless government subsidies, (and government subsidies really make Baby Jesus cry), and anyway Germans don't really use energy the way Americans do. They've got fruity little solar panels and fruity little cars and nothing like the mighty industrial economy of the U.S. of A. which runs on the juice we squeeze from the ground like the great manly Colossus that we are.

ProTools is so unbelievably lock-in, expensive, and closed, that I can't believe any open source proponent of anything would even touch it.

Can it load a DXi plugin?

About once a year, I make another run at an all open source music project. I try to support Ardour and many other open source DAW and audio-related projects. They're getting closer, but it just isn't quite polished enough yet to be able to establish a nice workflow and produce a really refined end result. I hope it will get there, though.

Now, there's a good chance that a lot of my inability to use Ardour and a fully-OSS music workstation is because I'm just not that good with Linux. I get flummoxed trying to get my audio interfaces and MIDI controllers working properly, I get hung up on little things that I don't have to think about on Windows or OSX.

I absolutely want at least one Linux machine in my setup though. Using Rea-Mote to off-load effects processing and rendering and other processor-intensive tasks is something I can't work without. I no longer have to fret about having half a dozen convolution reverbs and 20 instances of Waves limiters and compressors popping in and out any more. Because of my Linux box(es) I don't even think about limitations any more. So, there's a place for Linux in my studio, but not as my main production workstation yet.

ProTools is so unbelievably lock-in, expensive, and closed, that I can't believe any open source proponent of anything would even touch it.

There is no DAW software as good as Cockos Reaper. It is priced so anyone can afford to use it, any VST or DX effect or instrument works in it without a hitch, and it can offload effects processing, rendering, sample streaming etc to a remote Linux box. And when I say "any" VST or DX plugin works great in Reaper, I do mean ANY. VSTi's that are fussy in ProTools or Sonar or Live or Cubase will be smooth as silk in Reaper.

There is no other DAW that comes close. I started with ProTools years ago when there really was nothing else, worked extensively with Logic, and have completed high-level projects in Sonar, Cubase, Ableton Live and others. Nothing compares to Reaper. The community that supports it is more helpful han professional support from any of the other companies.

Also, Reaper will run on practically anything with a processor. 32 bit, 64 bit, Linux, OSX, whatever. I teach some DAW production, and I tell all my students to get Reaper, so any project will work on any platform.

If you have any interest in making music with a digital audio workstation, you can get a fully functioning, non-time limited demo of Reaper for free. I'll bet you end up buying a license ust because it's so good and so worth it.

Now, regarding the MuseScore project with the Bach performances, this is really great news. MuseScore is terrific and mXML is terrific and I'm looking forward to all the future projects that will use these open source recordings as source material.

The fully OSS community hasn't yet put out a really great DAW, but boy, have they ever made an important contribution to the world of making music.

I would love to see projects like the Bach project with other composers. I'd love to see more enlightened contemporary composers embrace this open source approach.

That may be handy for a block of 25 year old Parmigiano-Reggiano.

I'll take the Offtopic hit, but damn that reminds me: Did you hear about this recent Parmigiano Apocalypse in Italy? An earthquake destroyed a large portion of the world's supply of Italian Parmigiano. Prices are already skyrocketing here in Chicago and this just happened a few days ago.

Apparently, they're giving away the stuff in Italy because it's all broken up or something, but they can't store it or ship it. There were reports on the radio a few days ago.

I don't think I'm prepared to start eating a domestic Parmigiano. I've got maybe a few pounds of the Reggiano in the fridge in the basement that's only good for storing cheese because Parmigiano makes everything else smell like old gym socks, but that's going to run out eventually and then what'll I do?

However the last two corporations I worked for had this asinine attempt to force coworkers into social contact with each other.

That's funny in a sad way, considering how badly corporations have broken THE social contract.

I would agree with this, except I would put classical music [classicalforums.com] and/or binaural music [blogspot.com] above silence, as both have been shown to improve concentration and reduce learning and recall times.

I'm not sure the binaural thing has been conclusively shown to have a benefit, but I have found that listening to music with binaural beats does make me feel like my mind is clearer and more capable of extended periods of concentration.

Silence would be best, I think, but the problem with the average office is that it is anything but silent, even when it's quiet. There are keyboards clacking, machines humming, cpu fans whirring and air conditioners blowing.

The main thing I'd like to say about this article is that I'm more concerned about what is making workers happy than what makes them a few percentage points more productive.

Everybody is already plenty productive. Too productive, maybe. Our lives are out of balance when it comes to productivity/happiness. Almost everyone I know could stand to be a little less productive and a little more content.