February 12th, 2010
I e-mailed the letter below to Stereophile magazine this afternoon. Normally, I do post audio and digital audio content to Computers. This thread has little to do with digital audio, and a lot to do with commentary and the rules of the road.
I would violate my own terms of service (TOS) if I posted this in Computers because it hijacks a thread that, by rights, should have been about digital audio. Also, my letter cites the same cuss word I’m writing Stereophile about (another TOS violation). So, the questionable word is expertly edited out so that you could hardly recognize it.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: journalism, Rhetoric
Posted in Observations | No Comments »
February 10th, 2010
This just popped up in BBC news. Here’s a country with a civil rights track record that’s worse than Singapore’s and actually has much in common with the Taliban. And to think Turkey seeks admittance into the EU …
Read the article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8509455.stm
Excerpt:
A Turkish court has sentenced the editor of a Kurdish newspaper to 21 years in prison for publishing material sympathetic to the outlawed PKK …
The paper had in fact simply described the jailed leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, as the “leader of the Kurdish people” – and it had failed to describe Turkish soldiers killed in battle as “martyrs”.
Tags: censorship, rights, totalitarianism, World
Posted in Civil Rights, World | No Comments »
November 18th, 2009
It’s all a matter of mining the shopping data. Amazon knows quite a bit more about me than I thought they did.
From the Wikipedia article on Heuristics:
Heuristic … (from the Greek … for “find” or “discover”) is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or ‘optimal solution’. Heuristics are “rules of thumb”, educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A Heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.
From an email today: Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on items you purchased or told us you own.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Business, consumer
Posted in Business | No Comments »
Amazon e-book Price Dispute
February 2nd, 2010The manufacturer’s cost of printing and reproducing an e-book, spread over several thousand downloads, is about zero. If e-books catch on, legacy book publishers would sell more titles and more books, but not at hardcover prices! This sounds like that old music industry deja vu, all over again. Shame on Macmillan.
Excerpt:
(Read the full article at MarketWatch)
Tags: Business, consumer, Publishing
Posted in Commentary | No Comments »