Somebody has to hold the line, where are new mid-level architects going to come from if they didn't start writing code from scratch? AI seems to be able to at first glance write code that seems plausible, but it never works "out of the box" it always needs tweaking and debugging because AI doesn't have an understanding of configuration, thus far anyway. At least what I've been able to get from it. To me it seems like a supercharged search engine, definitely an order of magnitude shift, but far from being able to replace humans. We should do everything we can to stay sharp though, we're on a trajectory course with something big and no one is really sure how it plays out. Until it can self replicate and fix itself we're fine. Entropy will still keep us in business. Flesh and blood is still gonna need to change out the hardware at least.

I've been using lilypond for years and find it actually very nice for quick and dirty ... once you figure it out and have set up an initial format for whatever you want. The learning curve is steep - it is essentially a scripting language for music, somehow related to LaTex. It took about 50 hours to do my first 3 lead sheets, now I can crank one out in about 15 minutes. Frescobaldi is a nice way of dealing with lilypond, it is sort of an IDE for lilypond with a panel for viewing your pdf while you work on the code. On the other hand, I just checked out musescore and I like being able to play the notes on a midi keyboard with one hand and adjusting note values with the left... it will export to lilypond format as well (but not back).

No freaking wonder, damn. What's wrong with perl and ttytter? And I thought Ubuntu had gotten bloated. No wonder they couldn't find { O | U } sama Bin Waldo.

There is a natural cohesion to it nonetheless which comes from the fact that they are always muliplying by a power of 3 to get to the next note, unless you jump off the end and start again so to speak. When you consider that there are 12 separate and distinct notes, interesting things happen in music when you divide the notes (chromatic scale to be specific) symmetrically and is a widely understood phenomenon, and gives rise to many of the patterns you hear in music. 3 into 12 is possibly the most versatile of them all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Slonimsky

There is definitely a harmonic pattern, and this music by no means is pattern free, just that they don't play the same note twice. Interesting but a false premise. If it were played with an even tempo the patterns would emerge even more. It could easily be made more ugly, try overlapping some of the notes in another sort of pattern for one, like running two different sequences at the same time, or even varying the durations then we'd see ugly, and that's just for starters. The ugliest piece of music, bah.

Wait a minute, banks LOSING money? Come on son, which financial institution are you working for? What desert island have you been living on for the past two months? That's like all the money you supposedly SAVE when you buy something from your local shyster used car salesman. That's the biggest pile of horse nitrogenous compounds I've ever heard. The banks did more to shoot themselves in the foot by lending bogus loans and bundling them and reselling them as financial instruments, laughing all the way to the ... errr wait. Seriously? We are talking about enough money lost to equal the whole economy for one year of the whole planet!! And then lobby to get the money from the US government. This has always pissed me off about banks, they hold on to 10% of your money make money hand over fist with YOUR money and charge YOU fees for their trouble. They should be paying you for the privilege of making money from your money. That's why the kids are Occupying Wall Street, that's why. To quote Matt Taibbi .... oh never mind. Go stroke your gold bullion or something. "My precious, my precious..."

But there could be: http://freenetworkfoundation.org/

IP based telephony could work here.

Worth a shot.

That's great and all, but when I go to my "local" electronics store in Marin county to buy piezo tweeters for my keyboard amplifier and they are damn near $30 and I can get the same ones online for a couple of bucks, well... and they blow after about a month. I know I need to update the electronics, will do it soon - but still. I know they have crazy overhead, but isn't that also a function of the cost of renting commercial space which goes back to the mortgage problem?

vi(m) is like a dog, emacs is a cat. vim will always be there for you, is uncomplicated and reliable. emacs is mysterious, sometimes there sometimes not, and takes more patience to own.

I'm a dog person.

So you form your opinion based on what you watch on TV? I know CNN is not Fox, but neither is Democracy now. I'd say on that spectrum, CNN is closer to Fox. One of the charges that the OWS people are saying is that the M$M is lying to us left and right, and if you choose to entertain that notion for even one second you must logically deduce that trying to understand the movement through the eyes of its enemies is indeed impossible to achieve.

Go to one, talk to people there. Yes you will find drum beating hippies, yes you will find incoherence, but what is not widely seen on TV is that you will also find incredibly articulate mostly (but not all) young people who are not apathetic and want to make some changes in the world to make it a better place, and are willing to get off the couch and do something about it. That should make you wonder about the common narrative of youth today. If you cannot do that for whatever reason (not local enough, home responsibilities whatever) You can actually see a lot of it live online through livestreaming. Youtube also has a lot of information. At least try to see the narrative through the eyes of the people who are making the statement and not the detractors before making your opinion.

Or you could vote, or you could contact your representative. I did it this week, I tried to fit my concerns into a 2000 *character* limit box on my state representative's website. Not big enough, so I called asking for an email address and was told, that (s)he was too busy for that. Huh? Upon further pressing I was told by the staffer that I could fax and he gave me a fax number. I'm guessing that's a dead letter office right there. Either that or they compile all the faxes into stacks and then process all the info that way (which a staffer from another office told me that's how they do it.) Faxes? Are you kidding me? So the state instead of using email and search capabilities etc. etc. (grep anyone?) instead chooses to use dead trees to compile reams of concerns? At the cost of the taxpayers. Again why should I be surprised, it's gubment after all - but why is that to be tolerated? That's the point here, so many things are broken and people have let it slide for far too long.

bridgekeeper: What is the velocity of a sparrow in flight?
Brian: African or American?
bridgekeeper: I dunno? Aaaaaaaaaah, (flies into the abyss....)


Isn't a billion a different amount (million is different I'm pretty sure) on the American side of the pond than on the European? 500,000,000 is a half billion in American terms.

It is exactly that plan, the plan is a long term war of attrition - if anyone in the West would have actually bothered to listen to what {O | U} sama Bean Laiden said was his plan, but then you'd actually have had to get out of your comfort zone and go to AlJazeera's translation for that. His plan was that for every "dollar" the terrorist spends the US (and the West) would spend one million. It is working, at this rate they will drain us before we drain them. I'm not a sympathizer, repeat I realize that he was an enemy, but that is the clear strategy and they even said so. In our zeal to demonize and depersonalize the enemy we lose the ability to *respect* the enemy which is a terrible mistake to make in war. Isn't that from some old book somewhere? Nah, who reads books anymore, it doesn't apply to the old USA we transcend all that and make our own rules. Pride before the fall.

Troubleshooting networks is not hard, it's the peopleshooting that presents the real problem.