stolio

To be clear, I'm not agreeing with you and it's bizarre that you think I am. The term DAW is just fine, it's not overloaded and I found grandparent comment's usage of it to be perfectly clear.

Rereading your post I see you did put Radium under your 'modern tracker' category, I think I was so appalled at how you described the other products that I didn't pay attention to where you put it because at that point you had already demonstrated the depth of your knowledge.

No, the point doesn't hold up. That's like saying 'workbench' or 'car' is too general to mean anything. It's a general category and you put adjectives in front of it as needed.

And if you're going to eschew the term and use descriptions instead, then it's important to get the descriptions right and not arrange them just so your favorites are up top next to ProTools even though they don't belong there.

Better categories: Professional DAWs - these do everything well: ProTools, Logic, (maybe) Cubase. Consumer DAWs - these aim to do most things well: Reaper, Ardour, GarageBand. Sequencers - geared for hip-hop and electronic music: Ableton Live (yes, it's awesome and will probably become full-featured), Fruity Loops. Trackers....

My point is being fussy about the term DAW derailed GP's question, when they asked if it's a DAW they're asking if it's a general purpose or specialty platform which is frankly a good question.

It's strange to have Ardour and Reaper up there with ProTools and Logic described as a MIDI sequencer. That's how it started but at some point it crossed over into a full-featured professional DAW and I'm not sure even Reaper has caught up to its live instrument mixing and editing capabilities.

Ableton is literally a sequencer (and much more) and probably belongs in your MIDI sequencer category.

We did read the same article, but I don't think it was very consistent throughout. Their opening statement is this:

> EFF is fighting for vehicle owners’ rights to inspect the code that runs their vehicles and to repair and modify their vehicles, or have a mechanic of their choice do the work.

So I see "inspect" as read access, "repair and modify" as write access and I think what would we do if we had read-write access to our cars? Relly think about that one for a second.

I disagree with the "regulation will be enough" idea in the same way I understand the law regulates people from entering my house but I still lock my door.

Later in the article they go into why the DMCA is the wrong tool for the job and they're probably right, this shouldn't be done in the name of ending music piracy.

Falling barriers. Like you say, tuning is currently very expensive. The financial and technical costs act as an idiot filter (forgive my negativity.) Those barriers are falling so we're left with artificial costs i.e. legal penalties and intentional code obfuscation.

You haven't heard of it because it's too stupid and dangerous to allow to happen. But it's a natural consequence of car ownership including read-write access to its computers.

Can we just be honest about this? The EFF hates the DMCA and I think it's clouding their judgement. They need to separate their very good fight against the abuses of copyright law from this ridiculous fight to let people do stupid and dangerous things to their cars.

If they have a better tool than the DMCA to keep the average person from defeating safety features built in to their car, they should say it. But any system strong enough to ensure there's no dangerous code running in any cars on the road will be opposed by the EFF because it would be a whole new level of surveillance.

The new artificial boundaries are only recreating the natural boundaries from before. If you wanted to boost your fuel/air ratio in 1965 you had to open your hood and take apart your carburetor, that keeps most people out of it.

Now we're talking about downloading iPhone apps that promise 10% more speed and the only technical challenge is aligning your car's USB plug with your phone. And then hitting the big green button labeled "GO FASTER!"

What I object to is this statement:

> And you don't have to leave your frame of reference to see a difference between acceleration and gravity, they are distinguishable in any frame of reference.

You're clearly presenting an idealized situation, which is fine. You've chosen a non-idealized (or less idealized) gravitational field, which is also fine. But the convention when talking about this particular subject is to also idealize gravity and take it as being the same everywhere. If somebody reads this statement with the usual definition of gravity, they might get the wrong idea.

All it needs is some signal that the gravity you're using is different (less symmetric) than usual. It is an interesting idea, I'm just saying maybe present it a little differently so people like me don't get confused.

I generally agree with the EFF, I'd even say I'm a fan, but I disagree on this one.

TL;DR == "tough"

Regulations can be bad, they can stifle innovation, enforce inequality, maintain awful power structures, etc. But, they can also save lives. In America there are a million things you can't do because they infringe on the safety of others.

At an abstract level, an automobile is 3,000 lbs. of metal holding 10 gallons of gasoline that carries human beings through public spaces at up to ~70mph. It travels through neighborhoods where children live and play at up to 25mph. It's a mixture of chemical, mechanical, computing and electrical systems that an engineer needs about 10 years of study to be able to handle after they get to engineering school. Even then they'll specialize.

Car enthusiasts simply don't have the skills to merit carte blanche access to mess around with cars that drive on public roads. In general, they probably don't even have the skills necessary to evaluate their skills which is what makes this so dangerous.

Tinkering with a mechanical system like your brakes is very different from tinkering with a computing system that through an electrical system is controlling the mechanical system that is your brakes. That's orders of magnitude of new complexity. Do you really think the average car-guy will understand the bugfix, written in optimized C or assembly, that accounts for how a certain transistor behaves above 200 degrees Fahrenheit?

To be clear, these laws aren't to protect anybody from their own stupidity, they protect the rest of us. If you do have the skills to tinker at this level then you're free to use them in race cars that aren't street-legal.

The comment you jumped in to "correct" was based on the equivalence of inertial reference frames which you can take up with Newton, and the equivalence of force-accelerated and gravity-accelerated reference frames which you can take up with Einstein.

If you don't like the thought experiment commonly used to give people an intuition about the Equivalence Principle then come up with a better one. I don't think yours holds up either, I'm guessing that thanks to the Uncertainty Principle you'll also need infinities to generalize it.

Right. So sorry. "Constant" gravitational field. Happy?

But I agree, if you put the box within the event horizon of a black hole (aka near a point mass) the person inside the box might be able to tell, if they and the box were still intact. What I don't agree with is that splitting hairs on the divergence of the gravitational field is productive.