This is getting to be less and less true, regardless of how "cheap" you are, and that's the point.

There was an article in Wired a while back that dealt with genetically engineered beef, going in depth into the whole process by which it's created, interviewing the farmers and other people along every step of the chain. The upshot was that it's basically impossible *not* to buy genetically engineered beef these days, because there are so many people out there who don't follow what few rules there are, there's so little enforcement and such big financial incentives for breaking the rules. (Nobody wants to buy cattle with stringy beef when it's next to a bunch of other cattle that are plumped up artificially.)

And the thing you have to remember is that once you've contaminated the chain, it's impossible to uncontaminate it. It's like trying to remove paint thinner from a pitcher full of drinking water. Once it's in there, it's almost impossible to separate it again. If you have one genetically modified bull producing offspring with non-modified cattle, all of those offspring will then be genetically modified, and nobody knows about it. They will then have their own offspring, and REALLY quickly you will have an entire system full of contaminated beef.

All anybody wants is the choice to eat this stuff or not. And that's being taken away with the lack of rules, the lack of oversight and the lack of labeling. Nobody is saying this stuff shouldn't even be on the market, we're just saying it needs to be labeled, and separated from the natural stuff.

I can confirm personally that the North American launch model is also affected by the YLOD issue, as I had my PS3 reflowed a month ago to cure its YLOD.

No, you can confirm that your own personal PS3 broke. That's it. You cannot confirm that there's some systemic problem with launch US PS3's.

I also have a launch PS3 and it's fine. Does that mean I can "confirm" that there's no YLOD problem with US PS3's?

Old Strats are popular for a reason, too.

Was gonna say the same thing.

I'm inclined to believe the "nobody has made a better violin in 300 years" argument because I know from my own personal experience that nobody has made a better electric guitar than those early Fenders in 50 years either.

Actually, strike that - I'm sure that both arguments are overly broad, and not really what any of these people actually mean... 1950's and 60's Fender guitars all have a particular tone to them that just can't be precisely duplicated anymore (be it a Strat, Jazzmaster, or whatever). That doesn't mean that the current ones suck, or that you can't get really, really close to that old tone if you try really hard, but if you do want *that* specific tone, then the easiest way to get it is to just buy an original Fender.

I would doubt very much that classical music aficionados really consider the Strad the only violin worth listening to, more that they associate it with a particular tone that they like and that's very hard to duplicate today. Ditto for electric guitars - there are some great-sounding modern guitars on the market today making some great music, they just don't sound like guitars of yesteryear and that happens to be the sound a lot of people want to duplicate because that's the sound most associated with the kind of music they want to play. Rock bands of the 1960's were using guitars made in the 1950's and 1960's. Classical musicians in the 1600's and 1700's were using violins made in the 1600's and 1700's. So I think a lot of it is just trying to duplicate what people consider an "authentic" sound for a particular type of music, it's not that one instrument or another is the "best" or that you aren't perfectly valid in preferring something else.

But different instruments are better or worse for different things, and just like trying to play the Beatles with a Schecter Hellraiser is not going to sound quite right, I would imagine the same is probably true for some people when talking modern violins and certain types of classical music.

However, the listeners were highly inconsistent in their ratings of the sounds of the various instruments. How good a given piece of music sounded was different for different listeners, and unrelated to the commercial "value" of the instruments. It was also not very well corellated with the player's opinion of the instrument's quality.

The main conclusion I drew from it is that the significant difference in an instrument's "quality" is how well it plays (and that could well be different for different musical styles). The quality of sound heard at a distance is primarily a function of the player, not the instrument.

As a guitarist, I disagree with this conclusion. The mistake I think you're making is in equating the fact that these people couldn't hear the difference with a conclusion that the difference therefore can't be heard. I don't think that follows, anymore than it follows to say that because somebody can't tell the difference between a Sizzler steak and a carefully prepared Wagyu steak at a fine restaurant means there is none.

I think a more reasonable conclusion is to say that a lot of people who consider themselves to have refined ears, don't. But that doesn't mean there aren't objectively measurable differences in sound quality, assuming you brought in equipment that was sensitive enough.

I say all this because as a guitar *player*, I, like the violin players in your example, can easily tell the difference between guitars of different makes just by listening to them, and I can do it with near-100% reliability, at least for the most popular makes and models. A Strat and a Les Paul don't even sound close to similar, for example, and an American Strat doesn't even sound like a Chinese Strat (though it sounds closer than a Les Paul). I guarantee that 99% of the rest of the world, though - even many rock music lovers - could not make these kinds of distinctions. There is a difference between knowing what a Fender Strat *is* and knowing how it *sounds* - the latter requires actually using one and then using other models and comparing it, or at the very least actively listening to others doing the same, repeatedly. (And by "actively" I mean really paying attention to this specific facet of the music, what guitar is being played when.)

So I would say that this has more to do with having a trained ear or not than with whether or not there are real differences in sound. If the players can so easily identify the differences, then there probably are differences, and not just in playability. They're the ones that hear these things the most, and also develop the "sense memory" to associate a particular tone with a particular instrument. That's a unique skill that most people never develop.

That's your blind test, right there.

Wasn't double-blind, though, which can make all the difference in a test of the tonality of a musical instrument. Much of an instrument's tone comes from the player, not the instrument. And a lot of what we perceive as "tone" isn't tone at all anyway - all a musician would need to do was play an instrument louder and a sizable number of people will think that makes it sound "better".

What's really needed is for a robot to play these instruments - that's the only way to ensure they'd all be played the exact same way every time.

And I'm sure that most people do. But what's really ridiculous is that at least some carriers charge separately for "text" and "data". You can get an unlimited data plan on AT&T - but it doesn't include text! wtf? That's like your ISP saying you have unlimited download bandwidth except for .txt files, which will cost you an extra $5 per month.

Anyway, a little while ago I would have thought 2,000 texts per month was ridiculous. But now that my wife has an iPhone and I have an HTC Fuze, I actually find myself struggling to keep under the 200 messages per month we're both allotted on our $5 per month plan. It's just much easier to text about stuff like whether or not we need milk or whether I'll be working late or something than it is to actually call each other about those things (and it's not like we don't get to talk in person enough). And we're just two people - if I was a teenager with a circle of 100 friends again, I can easily see myself sending 2,000 texts per month or more. And I never considered myself all that popular in school.

When I had a dumbphone with a standard keypad, pretty much the most I could stomach typing out was the train I was on on my way home... and that was just numbers. But it's like the world changes once you get a phone with a qwerty keyboard and a decent OS. I'm the kind of person that really doesn't like getting sucked in to lengthy conversations on the phone - and I *hate* having to sit next to other people that obviously don't share the same aversion - so I'm happy to be firing off emails and texts instead and then replying to the replies I get only when and if I want to. I don't even think it's got anything to do with a person's age, except maybe that younger people adopt new technology quicker. But I'm 37 and my wife is 38 and now that we've got smartphones, we use them the same ways any teenager would.

The DSLR camera I want to get, the Canon prosumer model EOS 5D Mark II has a 21.1 Megapixel sensor than can put out a 60MB raw file. Process it and edit in Photoshop and the file could be 500MB.

Not that I disagree with your overall point, but Photoshop's default format (.psd) is a compressed format. Unless you are making an advertisement out of it, with a lot of layers and effects, it will never be bigger on disk than the RAW file.

If you're talking about saving as a tiff or something, then yeah, those file sizes can blow up pretty big. But even most pros don't do that anymore because it's wildly inefficient - there are just better file formats to use except in certain specific types of situations.

So what? If you can't take people calling you on it, take it out of your sig. Freedom of speech is a two way street. If you're going to have it in there, people are going to call you out.

"Designed"? You've got delusions of grandeur. You put a dumb phrase in your sig designed to make some naive point that's been made a hundred thousand times already by lots of other faux-intellectuals. You didn't "design" anything.

If the south had won he'd likely be considered a war hero by a small subset of the more insane southerners. No one else. Northerners would still hate him, as would any southerners who value a) human life, and b) a sense of honor and fairness in war. And quite honestly, a lot of southerners do fit that description.

Do you seriously think the country as it stands now, with the north winners of the war, would be celebrating whoever had managed to assassinate Jefferson Davis as a war hero?

Honestly, are you really fucking serious? George Washington did not walk up behind King George and shoot him in the back of the head. For crying out loud.

You've apparently taken the "history is written by the winners" line and corrupted it so completely that even that naive idea has lost all coherence.

And it is a naive idea because winners win for many real reasons - it is not by chance. And one of those reasons is that walking up behind people and shooting them in the back of the head is pretty much universally seen as a cowardly, heinous act that virtually nobody of any sane mind would support. Whichever side in any conflict engages in that kind of behavior is going to lose the public's support virtually instantly. Did Booth's action re-galvanize the south? No, it in fact turned Lincoln into a sympathetic figure. He helped the south lose. Sure, they had lost militarily before that, but his action made it easier for the north to reintegrate the south into the union.

Here, be my guest and change this passage in Wikipedia if you so believe in what you're saying:

Even in the South, sorrow was expressed in some quarters. In Savannah, Georgia, where the mayor and city council addressed a vast throng at an outdoor gathering to express their indignation, many in the crowd wept. Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston called Booth's act "a disgrace to the age". Robert E. Lee also expressed regret at Lincoln's death by Booth's hand.

Your sig is moronic, so go ahead and leave it there if that's what you want people to think of you.

Yeah, they were pretty much revered as heroes in the late 1700's too.

Bone up on your history, son, and quit thinking that saying everything was the opposite of how it was makes you sound smart.

If you're trying to make a point that the only thing that separates murder from war is perspective, then a) your naivete is pretty astounding, and b) you're making a nonsensical argument anyway, because making that point necessitates looking at the situation from two different sides, not the same one.

Just wondering, is the NY MTA public or privatized?

Third time here I'm saying this, but since you actually asked, they're quasi-private. The authority situation in New York is murky, but the whole reason these things exist is so that they are not treated by law as government agencies. They are government-sanctioned and government-subsidized, but privately managed and run, with basically no accountability to any government agency or the public.

In an ideal world MTA would come up with a way to accommodate what is obviously a public demand for the information.

Try Google Maps.

Seriously, try it. It's pretty neat the way they've integrated MTA schedules, with the MTA's blessing.

(Works with Amtrak too, btw.)

This is where one could say, once again, that government-run activities suck.

The MTA is not a government-run agency. It's an authority, an independent organization that relies only partially on a government subsidy. Yes, it takes government money, but more in the way that Blackwater takes government money than the way the US Army takes government money.

Anyway, as these things go, the MTA is not nearly as badly managed as you might think. The NY transit system is massive, it's very old, and it was formed out of disparate lines that had nothing to do with each other whatsoever before the MTA took them over. Consider that the MTA not only runs what is by some measures the largest subway system in the world, but also one of the largest bus systems in the world and two of the largest commuter railroads in the world. And the LIRR by itself has more track miles than the Tokaido Shinkansen line in Japan, so the scale here is not something I think most people outside of New York ever imagine. All things considered, I think they've done a pretty good job getting people where they need to go over the years. Granted, I complain about them as much as anybody in my day to day life, mostly about the fare hikes, but most of that's bills coming due from the 1970's, when government slashed the subsidy and the agency was forced to defer billions in basic maintenance and upgrades. When people demanded better service (as in, for example, elevated stations that did not literally rain rusted steel down on pedestrians below), the government would only give them loans for capital improvements rather than increasing the subsidy.

Also, believe it or not but some New York authorities are actually profitable. The bridge and tunnel authority, which is actually now owned by the MTA, has always been profitable and in fact helps subsidize the rest of the MTA. Without it, the MTA probably could not survive, because the government subsidy it receives is a pittance in percentage terms compared to other transit systems around the country and the world.

Another reason these schedules are not copyrightable is because the MTA is owned by the NY government, and the NY government is owned/funded by the People, therefore the schedules belong to the citizens of New York State.

Authorities are not "owned" by the NY government. This is one of the big issues with authorities in New York - they were invented precisely because they are independent of state government (they're designed as a workaround for various inconvenient state laws). The state has no direct control over the MTA or any other authority, and the authority's finances are intentionally kept separate. For all intents and purposes, authorities are simply very large non-profit organizations that have been granted broad powers by the state to provide public services, and have governing boards comprised of state and local officials, among others.

Some authorities are actually completely financially independent; they're not subsidized at all. The MTA is not in that category, but it does make more of its own money than any other transit system in the world. Its subsidy is relatively small in percentage terms, and it is not direct government funding, like an agency. It's an agreement that needs to be negotiated and renewed every few years.

I'm not disagreeing that this stuff can't be copyrighted, I'm just saying it's not for the reason you provided. There's no direct link between any NY authority and the taxpayer. There are indirect links, but it's not an unbroken chain between authority and taxpayer.

You can probably figure this out based on sales of games released simultaneously on different platforms. It won't be 100% accurate for a variety of reasons, but given a sample of enough titles in different genres, it will probably be pretty close.

I haven't done this myself but it would be an interesting project. With this data, you could at least figure out an approximate relative number of systems in actual use.

For example, if Madden 10 sells 300,000 copies on the 360 in its first month, and 200,000 copies on the PS3, and if other games were selling at that same ratio, then you could reasonably conclude that there are 50% more Xbox 360's in use than PS3's (or at least that there's at least one 360 in 50% more households than PS3). You could then look at the hardware sales data and see if that matches the sales advantage the 360 has. If it does not, then you could pretty reasonably conclude that the additional 360's being sold are either replacements for broken systems, or second 360's being bought by someone who already owns one.

I remember I did do this just for kicks in the PS2 era, because at that time the tables were turned and it was de rigeur to claim that all of the PS2's sales (especially later in its lifespan) were people replacing broken systems. But the game sales didn't support this - sales of multiplatform games always showed almost the exact same sales ratio as you'd expect given the total installed base of all three systems on the market at the time.

If there was really a 54% failure rate of the Xbox 360 you would have heard about it from retailers long before this unscientific, selection-biased poll came out.

First of all, why? MS's instructions if your Xbox 360 fails is to send it back to them. The retailer has nothing to do with it.

Second, we did hear from MS themselves that the Xbox 360 suffered from a series of design flaws leading to various types of breakdowns. It was a big story for a while, if you don't remember. MS set aside more than $1 billion to deal with it. I and others figured out that that kind of money would cover the repairs on every single Xbox sold to that point, leading me (and others) to conclude that the expected failure rate must be close to 100%.

If MS had instead asked Gamestop to foot the $1 billion bill for defective Xbox 360's, you're damn right we would have heard about it from the retailers before now.