Is it possible to determine whether a phone call is local or long distance by analyzing the audio?

Hardly. I have Google to find all my answers. What more could I want?

Easy. Music is my escape from reality. Without music, I would really be a classic curmudgeon.

Sorry. I missed the change in topic somewhere upstream.

Everyone lies, but that's ok because nobody listens.

Have you ever been quoted by the press? I have a few times. Every time, what is printed is a total distortion of what I said or what happened, usually to fit someones agenda. I suppose it might be possible to report the news accurately, but it would bore the audience, irritated the sponsors, and probably vilify the owners. What people want is entertainment from literally everything they read, watch, or do. If it's not fun, find something else. Much of entertainment is fantasy. The only question for the press is how much fantasy.

If you want examples, just watch any "action" movie and see how many gross violations of basic physics you can see. Long ago, I went to a movie theater only to find that it had been taken over the Naval Postgraduate Skool to watch the 1972 version of the Poseidon Adventure. The students were expected to catch and detail the numerous distortions of hydraulics, maritime technology, buoyancy, physics, etc. There were plenty. It might have been nice to correct all those mistakes, but then, the movie would be terminally boring. Todays news has more in common with movie style "creativity" than with reality.

I pay 1and1.com about $10/month for hosting my junk and some of my friends junk. I suspect you can afford that.

Yep. It's boring. Making electronics exciting is a major challenge for the future or we may not have any engineers.

Interesting stuff, but getting involved would burn too much time. Sorry.

Also, this is nothing new. There is specialized software for removing vocals from music to produce Karaoke CD's available. You can sorta do it with Audacity: With a stereo recording, I can also filter by differential audio delay to remove or enhance voices or instruments.

Can't completely agree with that after having a three head Technics with Do lby HX. You aso ight get a little flac(k) from Nakamichi engineers.

Eight tracks were double the speed but for some reason never seemed to hit double the quality. An analogy might be records. Technically a 45 is better than an LP. However the arm has ti be set right to track at those radii, r ather than optimized for a 12" disk. Also, the cartridge needs enough comli ance and response range to handle the higher groove modulation. Technically 78s should be the best of al, it's just that nobody developed the technolo gy.

I don't know about cassettes but I do know that the whole process of digita l compression sort of and choice off encoding and everything on CDs was cho sen to meet two goals - on was to be able to fit more than an hour os aaudi o so assuredly an LP would fit, and the disk size had to fit where a typica l car radio goes so player could be built in. Imagine if CDs were like rwic e the size. Not only would that ake car players alot less easy, alot pf peo ple would have stuck with cassettes, especially since that technology did g et advanced enough to get as good as FM at least.

Yes, newspapers and TV. *HAD* my 15 minutes of fame. That is the cool thing about being from a relatively small, underdeveloped country: It is a heck of a lot easier to reach some degree of recognition than in the US or any developed, larger country.

Would you prefer:

(a) Techie Stuff?

(b) Civil and Military Unrest, assassination threats?

I am cursed with being involved in both the technical infrastructure, founding newsgroups (not to mention the first Arab Spring, 20 years earlier) and with militant, activist content.

Let's start with (a).

My predecessor, head of the Venezuelan Internet was invited to meet with his peers: the head of every country's Internet, in sunny Hawaii, all expenses paid. Meanwhile, the country's Internet service was shut down (another first and last!) for lack of payment. The bean counters in the Caracas treasury had no idea for what the hell was that invoice. It spent one year in red tape (The John von Neumann ISP had given us some time for free, to wet the appetite, but the freebie had expired).

But it digress: When this suntanned guy arrived back in Caracas, after his share of pina coladas and Hawaiian shirts, he had already been fired.

Every university (the important ones) submitted a trio of candidates, for Luis' replacement. I was in Cambridge when I received a call from the Minister of Science and Technology:

"Ramon, in every single one of the university proposed candidates, yours name is the first one. There is unanimity. Congratulations. However, if you are not here in Caracas next week, I will appoint the second runner".

Meanwhile there were headlines in the national press:

"La red de las mil tormentas espera por Ramon Herrera" [It rhymes in Spanish]

"The network of the 1,000 storms awaits for Ramon Herrera".

As soon as I arrived was interviewed in a TV program. Hierarchy-wise, there was one officer between me and el Presidente.

For bloody stuff (b), see attachment.

In what year were you in the news? What was the context?

-Ramon

Can 1and1.com even approach Google's bandwidth?

I need lots of disk space (WAV files sampled at max rates) and bandwidth. Video, too. For example, I would like to have several revisions of the "Lancer" videoclip, with monotonically increasing quality.

Why that? Why not? (*) I consider it a cool example, that broaches my 2 passions. The contents is cool, for us JFK buffs, anyway. It is not too hard or too easy. With the current state of the art, it needs a lot of

Have I said that I am obsessed with quality? A perfectionist?

Can they host all this?

I just got started filling it up.

-RFH

(*) "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"

I don't know, don't have the numbers, don't know your requirements, and don't have the time to research or guess. 1and1 does unlimited bandwidth, same as some of the other providers. Google is probably cheaper. I vaguely recall my storage limit is 2 GBytes per account: I just checked my account and I'm half way there. Hmmm... looks like two downloads of my entire site by someone in Korea. This could be interesting.

What's that in Mega/Gigabytes?

A bigger trash can does not make a cleaner web site. Unfortunately, that applied to my disorganized sites.

I'm in the former category. I wonder why things are as screwed up as they seem. My background is in repair, service, redesign and damage control. Reverse engineering someone else's stupidity is all too common. Nobody will pay me to create the next big thing. Instead, I get to determine why things aren't working as someone had dreamt, and occasionally fix the problems. I do have some dreams of things to come, but they're not for public consumption.