Reading the article, it sounded more like sports commentary. He's looking at the evidence available to him and attempting to give his thoughts on what he thinks happened. It's not that he thinks he's smarter than the engineers, it's that he's interested in this incident, and he's using available public knowledge and his engineering interest to explain what he thinks about the event. Sorta like Bill Nye? It seems pretty obvious to me, given the way that he defines basic terms, that he's trying take a technical issue and explain it to a nontechnical audience.

I've got no basis for knowing if he's right or wrong, but if you think you know better, why not send him your ideas? He does seem to be reading mail.

I once filed a bug report to a developer with instructions on how to reproduce it.

He responded with a fix that involved no changes to the source code.

He said, "don't do that."

So I assume you have a solution to this problem that is more sophisticated than abolishing ITAR and any foreign national to work on anything?

Are you saying ITAR serves no useful purpose? I'm guessing not. But are you at least saying that ITAR does more harm than good? Because if so, I'd love to hear your reasoning on that.

Seems to me that you're proposing something that provides short term gains (more labor) for long term losses (loss in strategic technological advantage).

Brief and witty is good. Brief and ambiguous is bad. Should probably have just used more words, rather than try to be witty. You can't just ask someone to explain all their premises. State the premise you have a problem with, and then *maybe* you can use "citation needed."

I personally don't even know what he wants clarification on. Does he want someone to explain...

- what good deeds will will come of this (after all, how do we know that mining these minerals does not cause more environmental harm)?

- how specific government activities increase these 'beneficial' activities?

- how inflating the price of component is supposed to increase the availability of 'green' technology?

I dunno. Which one is it? Who knows.

That's true, but not very relevant. Whether a statement needs a citation does not depend on whether or not it is doubtable (or doubted), per se. Rather, it depends on whether the *factual accuracy* of the statement is doubtable. What I took from AC's post is that a statement judged on factual merit requires a citation if the veracity is doubtable, but a statement of opinion does not.

The factual premises on which the opinion is founded may need citations, but not the original statement of opinion.

It's an optimization tradeoff. If you want to optimize for disk space, you can do it the way I suggested. If disk space isn't an issue, then having two files isn't a problem.

For audio encoding, the overhead of transcoding a high quality file to a high-compression file might be relatively insignificant, but the usefulness is sort of similar to Scalable Video Coding.

Having both streams allows an itunes-like program that transfers audio files from your computer to your more limited mp3 player to very easily generate a high-compression file from a high quality one. The process is nearly free. You don't have to fully re-encode the audio, just strip out the lossless part.

Another use case is having a streaming media server that streams both high quality and low quality versions. The server only needs to store one audio file, but can serve multiple quality levels with minimal effort.