I never heard an accordion played like this

[uwe]

And she's ugly enough to star in her own Halloween movie.  That face would make a good mask.

Give the old gal a break, she wasn't an oxygen-extinguishing beauty, but she was a type.



She went for that androgynous/donut bumper*** look to be taken serious as a philosopher/ideologist and perhaps because it fit in with her personal view that true strength is only derived from ignoring the esthetic standards of the majority of "second-handers".


***A term first introduced to a predecessor of this honorable forum by one Dave Westheimer, forever leaving a mark stain!!! 

[Dave W]

So since Ayn Rand was from St. Petersburg and Mr. Hrustevich is from the Ukraine, this turned into a discussion of Ayn Rand? Have I got that right?   Uwe's edit: You know how my mind works - if at all - in mysterious ways!

The whole fallout between Rand and Nathaniel Branden was enough to turn a lot of people against her. After that, she became a cult leader in the classic sense of the phrase. You don't ever want to get into an argument with one of her True Believers, they just parrot her pronouncements and condemnations as if they were under a spell. She also blamed America's industrialists for not embracing what she suggested in Atlas Shrugged. She died an angry, bitter woman.

[uwe]

An angry, bitter woman with, uhum, Medicare support and social security benefits. Tsk, tsk, tsk ... how un-collectivist is that?   Alas!, it's one thing to gratify your higher self by chain-smoking two packs a day - it's your life and your body after all and why impede the tobacco industrialists who create? - and quite another having your lung cancer treatment then paid by the derided collective.

Almost as bad (in her mindset) as the fact that her extensive university education in the Soviet Union was paid by that faceless mass of mediocrity - the, gasp!, proletariate ...

But we can't all be immaculate, can we? Actually, the glaring fissures in her own life as compared to her idolized philosophy endear her somewhat to me (but she wouldn't have wanted that, feeling sorry for someone was extremely despicable and degrading in her world of unadulterated single-mindedness and EGO-worship, sympathy only being bestowed by weaklings upon weaklings).

Reminds me of the NME's comment on a Rush concert (who were then blowing Ayn's Objectivist trumpet via their 2112 masterpiece) around 1976: "If you went to see them (Rush), you better didn't go with your dole money, because that would not fit in with their philosophy at all!"  


PS: "She also blamed America's industrialists for not embracing what she suggested in Atlas Shrugged." Oh, you mean that Apple and Microsoft have not ceased operations and service to an undeserving public long ago and withdrawn to the inside of a mountain to provide their gifts only to the worthy while the meek deservedly go to hell?  Well, I think the recent government shut-downs would have offered her some belated consolation!   

[westen44]

The primary reasoning behind it being blocked is the "but you'll want to replace those you've already got...!" and my reply is "... only with a select few: Blade Runner, Matrix, 2001, Avatar, Star Wars, Alien, Prometheus, LOTR ... "

Give me a few hours and I'll update the list properly...

Seriously though Uwe, certain movies will "cheapen", certain sounds are "poor" - anyone here buy LZ-IV when it first came out on CD - utterly awful transfer... certain modern films are designed for the modern technology and will view accordingly... DVD audio is almost flawless... but virtually unavailable...
I am certain on this though - 3d screens and players are an utter con-job: they could manage it on a standard HD screen: it is just an image and the market is dying in front of them because of greed...
... and this... the curved screen is just a product looking for a market and a fool to buy into it... and the manufacturers know it...

Now if LG (etc) bought into the idea of their super-slim screens as "wallpaper" ...

Michael... this Dell laptop has a DVD player that is not region-set and will allow me to set any region and changed a further 4 times - the Toshiba 32 we have has a VGA in and can support standard DVD's - my daughter's HP is WIN 8 and has a HDMI output as standard - you probably already have a R2 player and you are looking right at it now...

My sister or somebody was telling me something similar to what you're saying.  I'm looking into it.  If I can do it, it will be quite a joy to see some of the region 2 DVDs I have that I've never seen. 

[westen44]

Edit:

I was trying to post a quote here, but now see it has already been posted by someone in another thread. 

[Psycho Bass Guy]

I think the whole Blu-Ray thing is a hype. Over a high quality state-of-the-art TV with top notch resolution and a good 5.1 sound system I can neither see, much less hear a relevant difference between DVD and Blu-Ray when I feed our double-compatible Blu-Ray player with either one. (To be fair: The salesman guy said as much to us when we got the TV and the Blu-Ray player. He even said that for obsessive audio buffs DVD is the better choice, most Blu-Ray players not being geared to audiophiles, but videophiles.)

Blu-ray IS HD. If you're watching a DVD in hi-def, it's being upconverted. Some players do it very well, but your salesman is full of shit. The amount of video information in a blu-ray is six TIMES that of a DVD's. blu-rays also generally have uncompressed PCM audio, the same as a CD but sampled at 48 kHz instead of a CD's 44.1kHz. Unless you are talking about DVD Audio discs, which are pure audio with no video at all, EVERY DVD has mp3 audio. Most just call it Dolby Digital, but that's what it is: a lossy audio compression format with spacial assignment cues for multichannel speakers. Videophile blu-ray players often use audio as their major selling point since they can play all the weird high resolution audio formats, too.

When my mid-level Samsung player quit working for blu-rays the DAY its warranty expired and I replaced it with a nice Oppo a few years back, the FIRST thing I noticed was how much better the audio sounded on the better player, which was only 70% higher in price than the one it replaced and came with a ten year warranty. In "ophile" circles, that's chump change. CD's sound way better with it too. I have multiple disc players connected to the TV/receiver and before the Oppo, I could tell the difference in audio between them, but just barely. The video differences were more pronounced. My wife's DVR/DVD Recorder with analog inputs (try finding one of THOSE now) gives everything a light blue sheen and has slightly distorted audio, but when I switch between players now, all through the same Pioneer receiver I got on clearance at Best Buy a decade ago, the Oppo is like hearing a studio playback verses hearing something on a car stereo for the others. The dynamics are more distinct, the noise floor is lower, and the stereo image is far more pronounced.

There is even a model of Oppo blu-ray players that has XLR balanced stereo outputs for high resolution audio format playback. JUST for that feature, the price triples because they know audiophiles will pay it. In Oppo's defense, the upgraded version uses a completely different set of audio convertors and is of course connected to a discrete, class A output section to boost the level up to +4dBu, but to triple the price and offer that as a major alternative? There HAS to be a market to support something like that, and it does.

All I  notice is - and it drives me nuts - that ever since we have this high resolution TV every goddam interior scene even in the most expensive movies looks disturbingly like a studio-filmed scene in your cheapest daily soap. Of course, it might have all been studio scenes before, but I never noticed! Too much detail can take away the illusion.

That's probably your TV. Where most new HD TV's have the ability to resolve a picture at faster than video frame rate (around 30fps, 30Hz, depending on where you are, it varies a bit) their onboard computer interpolates the image and actually creates the "in between" video that is being generated BY the TV itself in between the frames of video being fed to it. that's why you see all these TV's with low midrange frequencies being advertised as features (engineer joke); if you'll notice, they're ALL some multiple of 30 Hz. It's similar to oversampling in older CD players, but it works differently. There are generally a set of adjustments for this in the TV's settings menu and when the "smooth motion" feature (or some variation of that term) is turned too high, it makes everything look like a soap opera. Just go into your TV's menu and turn it down and it will fix the problem.

BTW, if you want to know just how hardcore I am with video, I have a LASERDISC player connected too. It also plays DVD's and CD's. What was the attraction of a laserdisc player in the days of DVD you ask? Laserdiscs have the same video resolution as DVD's but don't use the .mpeg compression for either video OR audio, and their audio is sampled at 44  or 40kHz (depends on the who made it); all players support both. The Laserdisc was the original blu-ray.

[Pilgrim]

An angry, bitter woman with, uhum, Medicare support and social security benefits. Tsk, tsk, tsk ... how un-collectivist is that?   Alas!, it's one thing to gratify your higher self by chain-smoking two packs a day - it's your life and your body after all and why impede the tobacco industrialists who create? - and quite another having your lung cancer treatment then paid by the derided collective.

I love this.  Its like the cartoon I saw the other day showing an old guy waving a flag and yelling something like: "I want the government out of my life!  Just leave me alone with my medicare and veterans coverage, and go away!"

[Pilgrim]

[...el snippo magnifico...]

That's probably your TV. Where most new HD TV's have the ability to resolve a picture at faster than video frame rate (around 30fps, 30Hz, depending on where you are, it varies a bit) their onboard computer interpolates the image and actually creates the "in between" video that is being generated BY the TV itself in between the frames of video being fed to it. that's why you see all these TV's with low midrange frequencies being advertised as features (engineer joke); if you'll notice, they're ALL some multiple of 30 Hz. It's similar to oversampling in older CD players, but it works differently. There are generally a set of adjustments for this in the TV's settings menu and when the "smooth motion" feature (or some variation of that term) is turned too high, it makes everything look like a soap opera. Just go into your TV's menu and turn it down and it will fix the problem.

BTW, if you want to know just how hardcore I am with video, I have a LASERDISC player connected too. It also plays DVD's and CD's. What was the attraction of a laserdisc player in the days of DVD you ask? Laserdiscs have the same video resolution as DVD's but don't use the .mpeg compression for either video OR audio, and their audio is sampled at 44  or 40kHz (depends on the who made it); all players support both. The Laserdisc was the original blu-ray.

There's always trying the cinema mode or related display modes on your TV - sometimes that restores the slightly less agonizingly less detailed look.  (Which of course is what you're paying for with hi-res equipment.)

Until we get to 4K monitors, which are even higher res and just starting to hit the market at much higher prices.  From the LG website:

"To understand 4K, consider first current HDTV, which offers 1,920-twenty pixels—the tiny dots that make up the picture—across the width of the screen. The more pixels, the sharper the image. Now, imagine a TV that doubles the number of pixels across, to 3,840, which is approximately four thousand, or "4K." Vertical scanning lines are double as well, from 1080p to 2160p."

And I'm pleased to have a Pioneer laserdisc player that plays both sides of the disc without having to flip it over.  Unfortunately its best video output is S-Video, but I can live with that.  Audio is digital optical output.

[uwe]

Quote

All I  notice is - and it drives me nuts - that ever since we have this high resolution TV every goddam interior scene even in the most expensive movies looks disturbingly like a studio-filmed scene in your cheapest daily soap. Of course, it might have all been studio scenes before, but I never noticed! Too much detail can take away the illusion.

"That's probably your TV. Where most new HD TV's have the ability to resolve a picture at faster than video frame rate (around 30fps, 30Hz, depending on where you are, it varies a bit) their onboard computer interpolates the image and actually creates the "in between" video that is being generated BY the TV itself in between the frames of video being fed to it. that's why you see all these TV's with low midrange frequencies being advertised as features (engineer joke); if you'll notice, they're ALL some multiple of 30 Hz. It's similar to oversampling in older CD players, but it works differently. There are generally a set of adjustments for this in the TV's settings menu and when the "smooth motion" feature (or some variation of that term) is turned too high, it makes everything look like a soap opera. Just go into your TV's menu and turn it down and it will fix the problem.

BTW, if you want to know just how hardcore I am with video, I have a LASERDISC player connected too. It also plays DVD's and CD's. What was the attraction of a laserdisc player in the days of DVD you ask? Laserdiscs have the same video resolution as DVD's but don't use the .mpeg compression for either video OR audio, and their audio is sampled at 44  or 40kHz (depends on the who made it); all players support both. The Laserdisc was the original blu-ray."

Extremely helpful, danke, what you are talking about is DMM or Filmglättung on my Loewe Xelos 46 and I will try to adjust it.

[Highlander]

Nice and concise, Mr C...

[OldManC]

First off, that kid smokes on accordion. VERY impressed. Especially with it being that kind of accordion which seems even more difficult to my uninitiated brain. As for the rest...

An angry, bitter woman with, uhum, Medicare support and social security benefits. Tsk, tsk, tsk ... how un-collectivist is that?   Alas!, it's one thing to gratify your higher self by chain-smoking two packs a day - it's your life and your body after all and why impede the tobacco industrialists who create? - and quite another having your lung cancer treatment then paid by the derided collective.

Almost as bad (in her mindset) as the fact that her extensive university education in the Soviet Union was paid by that faceless mass of mediocrity - the, gasp!, proletariate ...

Ayn Rand doesn't need my defense and I'm not such a fan that I could be called a culty, but to assert that is really a stretch when you're referring to systems she, like everyone else, was forced into by the government. I don't know very much about early Communist workings in Soviet Russia but I'd imagine the only way she could get an education at the time was to attend University by the rules already in place before she got there. In any case, to blame the 17 year old Alisa Rosenbaum for not living up to the rhetoric of the 50 year old Ayn Rand is a little unfair, don't you think?

As for Medicare and SS, they're not benefits when you spend your entire working life paying for them. Both were both forced on the public by the US government. She, like everyone else, paid into them for years. To insinuate that she was taking advantage of charity by using either one is disingenuous. As for the smoking bit, until the 60s a lot of people (including doctors) were still claiming smoking was good for you. The idea that she should have been blamed or denied treatment for her cancer because she knew the dangers of smoking all those years is silly on its face. The only people I know who get as worked up about Ayn Rand as her fanbois are her detractors. That pretty much proves her cult status but it doesn't do much else to prove or disprove any validity in her philosophic pursuits.

[uwe]

Ah, George, I knew you'd come up in her defense! What kept you so long? I don't blame her for smoking nor for Medicare and social security, but the latter two would have had no place in her shiny new world of braves. You don't get paid out what you paid in, but rather you pay for those before you in the hope that those after you will pay for you. In her ideology, she wanted to pay for no one and wanted no one to pay for her. She wanted a state to provide three things: military (to protect against outside attackers), police (to protect those who have from getting robbed by those who don't) and laws (to protect individual rights). You show me in her works where she favored welfare, social security, pension schemes or health insurance.

And no one forced her to go to university in Stalinist Russia. She could have gone to the assembly line of a factory, you know. She took what was given and never analyzed that part of her life. Didn't fit in her black and white scheme of things that she was a little grey too.

[OldManC]

You don't get paid out what you paid in, but rather you pay for those before you in the hope that those after you will pay for you. In her ideology, she wanted to pay for no one and wanted no one to pay for her. She wanted a state to provide three things: military (to protect against outside attackers), police (to protect those who have from getting robbed by those who don't) and laws (to protect individual rights). You show me in her works where she favored welfare, social security, pension schemes or health insurance.

I never said she favored welfare or SS/Medicare. I said she shouldn't be faulted for using the latter when she had paid into it. Even Ayn Rand knew the difference between her ideal world and the far less perfect one in which she (and everyone else) has to live.

And I'd recommend We the Living to see that she was capable of looking at her early years as well. It was her first published work and hints at thoughts that were already forming what would later become her philosophy.

Of course nothing you've said and nothing I've said about this topic is new. Lefties in America (and elsewhere maybe?) have squealed in delight at what they thought was a great poke at Rand's philosophy versus her real life, but she addressed that very topic long before they ever brought it up:

Except, there's one problem: Rand herself addressed the issue of individuals taking benefits from government programs they were forced to pay into in a 1966 article for The Objectivist newsletter:

    It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the "right" to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.

In other words, programs like Social Security and Medicare aren't optional. We are forced to pay into them or we go to jail for tax evasion. Given that reality, there's really nothing hypocritical at all for a proponent of limited government – and an opponent to social programs like Social Security and Medicare – to try and get back from these programs what we are forced to put in.

http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/liberals-call-ayn-rand-a-hypocrite-for-collecting-social-security-and-medicare-benefits/


You're right that Medicare and Social Security are not accounts where ledgers are kept and people get what they put in. In fact, actuaries will tell you black men in America have been paying for white men's (and women's) retirements for decades due to their shorter life expectancy. The ugly truth is that the U.S. government has funded itself, more than anyone else, for decades with all that excess Social Security money that is now coming due for all those baby boomers. Jokes about the Social Security "lockbox" were old a decade ago because there was never any such thing.

As for Rand's three duties of government, that was hardly her creation. Those ideas came from many (admittedly not all) of the American Founding Fathers. Our government's choosing to do more has been a thorn in the side of many Americans for over 200 years.

Please note: While it's obvious that I may favor some (not all) of Rand's views, I am not advocating them here; nor do I think they should be outlined or argued here. All I'm doing is stating that beating people up for their views is a waste of energy if you can only do so by misstating the views in question.

[Dave W]

I have to correct you about one thing, George. No one seriously thought smoking was good for you as late as the 60s. That first surgeon general's report was just confirming what almost everyone new. Cigarettes were called coffin nails at least as early as the 30s. True, some brands advertised themselves as healthier than other brands (e.g. Old Gold's "not a cough in a carload"), but that was practically an admission that they weren't healthy.

Also, being a fan of Rand's books is one thing, the Rand cultists are something else entirely. "Fanbois" isn't a term that comes anywhere near describing them. But I won't get into that here.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

Until we get to 4K monitors, which are even higher res and just starting to hit the market at much higher prices.  From the LG website:

"To understand 4K, consider first current HDTV, which offers 1,920-twenty pixels—the tiny dots that make up the picture—across the width of the screen. The more pixels, the sharper the image. Now, imagine a TV that doubles the number of pixels across, to 3,840, which is approximately four thousand, or "4K." Vertical scanning lines are double as well, from 1080p to 2160p."

Yep, and there's Red Camera which is ANOTHER order of magnitude higher in resolution than 4K, but you're not going to see either anytime soon. Broadcasters just got all of the stuff converted to HD, and the cost of doing so was exorbitant. Even with the new digital infrastructure they had to create for HD video broadcast, upgrading resolution would take a minimum of five years.

Americans are stupid about Hi Def anyway. Even with a 1920 by 1080 progressive scanned image, when you get up to the huge 70" and larger sets that are becoming more common, processing artifacts become much more visible, no matter where they occur in the production chain. Here's a dirty little secret most cable companies don't want you do know: their signal isn't true HD, but a recompressed format similar to H.264, Apple's ITunes HD video compression. Unless it's a high quality mastered blu-ray or a directly produced broadcast source, all those fancy and increasing inexpensive TV's are doing is showing just how BAD the signal chain feeding them actually is. I've read about new movies being shot in the higher res formats, but for a long time, they're just novelties, and rightfully so. Film was the ORIGINAL digital media: the individual pigment molecules correspond to a pixel count that puts even Red Camera to shame.

And I'm pleased to have a Pioneer laserdisc player that plays both sides of the disc without having to flip it over.  Unfortunately its best video output is S-Video, but I can live with that.  Audio is digital optical output.

Same here, except I use the composite analog outputs: DVL-909, which by all accounts is the same guts as the more expensive DVL-919 and Pioneer Elite DVL models. I love it. BTW, laserdiscs may be digitally encoded, but are actually an analog medium, and for many years, the ONLY acceptable source for film school viewing outside of a 35mm print was a CAV laserdisc.