Bingo.

I learned touch-typing on QWERTY in high-school in the '60's: the theory was that all college-bound students needed to type. At the time, I was disgusted, but put up with the course.

Fast forward forty years. Math, science, everything be damned: learning to touch type was the best course I ever had in preparation for a 35-year career in coding. Dvorak yadda yadda yadda: great, but none of my clients had Dvorak keyboards, so that would have been pointless. Is QWERTY the greatest ever? Perhaps not, but it works (particularly on modern, non-jamming machines) and it's what works in the normal workplace.

So: thank you QWERTY, and thank you, touch typing. I have a nice retirement today, thanks to my success in normal IT.

I've worked with NIST, and largely sorta respect 'em: yeah, they're bureaucrats and, yeah, they share some characteristics with the rest of the dumbocracy. On the other hand, they _do_ try, and I my impression has been, after working with other fed agencies, that they're better than most. But not perfect, and probably not as 'alert' (i.e. as guarded with development funds) as private corporations would be.

And, yeah: let's see the details on the fast ones. If they can be disproved, so much the better, but if good, they're math triumphs.

It's a nice -- but musically off the tracks -- idea. The problem is that music, and this is especially true of classical music where a single work can be recorded by scores of artists, is not just a matter of mechanically reproducing sound from notation; it's a matter of interpretation.

If this project succeeds in hiring excellent musicians, and if the resulting recordings bring rave reviews, that means that _one_ recording of, say, Beethoven's Ninth is open sourced, but it has no effect on the legitimate desire for other alternate performances. Yes, it does make one recording available to those who don't want to pay, though it does little to free the intellectual content of the work itself, because that intellectual content is derived from the original composer _and_ each interpreter.

Worse, if they produce something that is artistically uninteresting, even while a 'faithful' representation of the score, they've accomplished little.

Poutine is not abuse; it is apotheosis.

And Alfred Ely Beach built his own in 1870 Manhattan:

http://hoeffmeir.org/Richard_LeBlanc/Alfred_Beach.htm

Mind you, it was a one-block demo, rather than a working system, but you have to tip your hat to someone who built something like this in secret in such a high-density environment.