Sydney Schanberg with the New York Observer gets it, and spells it out to anyone that doesn’t:
Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney’s man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record—testimony, exhibits, the lot—will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq—and other military excursions—for the purpose of expanding American dominion.
Just got a note that there is a shiny new dPulse sampler available from Xpressbeats.com featuring your intrepid crew… go check it out!
So, it looks like dPulse is about to take a collective trip (and yes, there is an irony here, one that is spelled M$) - still waiting on some of the details, but posting this little mix of dPulse-style techno to keep the podcast feeds abuzzing. Anyway, let me know if you’ll be in Miami around the middle of March! In the meantime, work progresses on the new single… What? Huh? Single? Oh, and then there’s that other big thing on the horizon…
Hook The Captain - Temple (Deep House Edit)
Maurice Syntax - It’s Always Too Nice, Isn’t It?
3kStatic - Art In Wartime
P.Hux vs Logickal - Showdown
3kStatic - The Kick Out (Censure Resolution Mix)
Hook The Captain - Something Wonderful
3kStatic - Circular Evidence
Maurice Syntax - Across The Room
Logickal - Old Thom
3kStatic - Berlin Calling
Hook The Captain - To Change The Way
Standard Podcast [35:52m]:
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Geez, almost forgot!
Happy Birthday cEvin Key!
Happy Birthday Peter Gabriel!
Homer Hickam writes an interesting and compassionate OpEd for the LA Times about Lisa Nowak, and has a novel approach on how to solve what he sees as the root of dysfunction within the Astronaut Office:
As a training manager, I was aware that many astronauts felt as if they were powerless, stressed-out peons within their own organization. I observed their daily competition with one another to get a seat into space. In many cases, this trial by fire changed enthusiastic young astronauts into bureaucratic combatants with warped personalities and shaken confidence.
For a long time, I also have been aware of the corrosive resentment many NASA engineers and scientists feel toward the astronauts. The astronauts have a sense of entitlement, and what they want, they get, or so it seems. For instance, I was in a meeting once in which an astronaut who only had a few years of NASA experience constantly interrupted and belittled a 20-year space engineering veteran. That’s the kind of thing that fuels discontent.
I’m sure that some of you have noticed that I have once again added advertising to the FlightDynamics sidebar. Some of it is advertising for my very own products, some is typical blogad noise that most people probably ignore anyway (oh, and a means to directly help me pay my monthly hosting bill).
Now, I’m not going to beat anyone over the head with appeals for los ducatos - but I’m also not in a position to be so alturistic that I don’t at least put the means out there to make a few dimes here and there. I know there are a few folks out there who have purchased Krushjob from one or another online source- to you, I extend a very deep, heartfelt thanks.
To the rest of you, I will take this opportunity to adopt my best Victorian Era Street Urchin guise.
“Alms for the poor, Guv’nor? Alms for the needy?”
Steve Jobs has some very interesting thoughts on the iPod, ITMS and DRM…
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
Martin over at Traumwind has an interesting post regarding some sound theories that deserve further exploration.
- there are three layers of sound/music. Let’s say we have A for atmospheres, H for habitats and S for species.
- make three distinct kinds of each of these layers to three fixed themes (r relaxed, a active, e energetic)
- that gives nine (9) seperate tracks: Ar, Hr, Sr, Aa, Ha, Se, Ae, He, Se
- now combine all tracks in all possible combinations so we always have AxHxSx
- we should get 27 possible combinations if my math is cottent (3*3*3)
This is based on a Guardian Unlimited article about ex-Cabaret Voltaire and Hafler Trio member Chris Watson and his field/location recordings for television. It’s a great background on Watson, and he also provides some of his conceptual ideas that will resonate very deeply with many of you who follow this blog and the music it pertains to.
The operative quote that led to Martin’s idea is based on what Watson teaches during his Wildeye sound recording seminar he gives in Norfolk (Oh, how I’d love to attend THAT!):
… he introduces the three layers of sound: atmospheres, habitats and species. They are natural terms, but could just as easily apply to recording, say, a railway goods yard. Atmosphere is the unobtrusive bed of sound - perhaps the gentle noise of distant traffic, the hum of air conditioning, wind in the trees. A habitat could be the general sound of that railway goods yard. The species is the specific animal (or train, or voice) you want to feature.
There is also a related post over at the Trond Lossius’ Lostblog where he comments on the “Auditive Horizon” - the point where sounds fade into the background noise of an environment, as opposed to the very real silence (0db) common on most digital recordings.
I’ll be revisiting this in the near future, I believe.
Dan Froomkin wrote this bit of commentary for the media, but these guidelines are worth reading and remembering by every citizen of any democracy:
You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority
- Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.
- Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.
- Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should be make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion — or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion — may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.
- Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.
Continue reading ‘You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority’
Spent yesterday lying feverish on the couch with some sort of bug not covered by my influenza vaccination. So, what do infirm Logickals do in these situations? Well, they start hacking away at Wordpress, that’s what. Two notable new little features - All pages will now give you a random Oblique Strategy from the V1 of those Worthwhile Dilemmas by Mssrs Eno and Schmidt. I hope that comes in handy for some of you that visit here.
Secondly, I finally added an mp3 player to the page, currently loaded with a few selections from Krushjob. I’m going to keep tinkering with that, as I’m not happy with the fact that it’s a bit of a chore to configure. If anyone has any Flash-based media players they are particularly fond of, let me know in the comments! Either way, expect more music to find its way into the player shortly!
