The issue with the cd format is not that it's digital, it's that it's 16bit/44k digital. This is not even close to the full analog sound as produced in nature. This number was chosen because it was all the data they could cram through the DAC's built in the late 1970's. The "CD format" as you know it is the best digital audio format that computers (actually IC's) could handle 32 years ago. Anything else a 32 year old computer is "good enough" for these days?

So why do most people think CD is actually the top standard, and that mp3 is "good enough"? Brilliant engineering, understanding commerce, and counting on people's horrible (and often damaged) ears. Let me explain:

-- It was brilliant engineering that built the first A to D and D to A converters. The idea that you could encode audio digitally with a laser and millions of holes in a small piece of tin foil was ambitious. The CD was a breakthrough in data storage. Being able to print a music format with no inherent noise floor was exciting new stuff. Most production music and sound effects dropped vinyl ASAP since fighting the noise and dust was their biggest production issue, and the cost of vinyl creation and storage size were issues too. So lots of smart people worked on the CD format, and it overall surpasses vinyl in all kinds of categories. But not on a very important one -- dynamic range.

-- This leads to understanding commerce. Most music or audio programming is not consumed by golden eared listeners fully concentrating on every nuance in the playback of their favorite music artist. They don't have expensive playback systems tuned to their rooms complete with subwoofers, crossovers, bass traps, etc. Alot of content isn't even "music", it's news, talk, commercials, sports, religion, ambient sound, scientific sounds, etc.. These utilitarian uses of audio, combined with the great masses of 'convenience first, quality second' people that want their favorite songs, show CD to be an excellent business format for 20+ years. Look at the markups on those discs! A plastic cd complete with extensive liner notes and case costs less than $0.20 to produce per unit, and goes down to $0.05 or less with quantity. But they sold regularly for $10-25. So for commerce, CD is king. Vinyl is large, expensive to print, requires better care, and is not as portable as CD.

-- But again - record store day is about music. If you love music you probably understand sound quality. Even if you are into raw punk bands, you want to hear a raw mix that appeals to your senses. We can all point to a favorite band of ours that has a horrible sounding bootleg (or 20) out there. It matters. No one wants a blurry painting or a chemically decomposing sculpture. But that's just it. If it's been sold to you that you are seeing the entire picture, you aren't going to pull off the frame and search for more of the image. But if you were to buy a painting and the artist told you that the frame is much too small and you are actually only seeing about 60% of the painting, you'd feel gipped. Confused. And then you might remove the frame to see the whole picture.

-- OK, I'll pull this out of the audio world and give you a metaphor in the visual sense. The CD format is equivalent to a picture taken by a low-megabit camera that is then radically cropped. The sensor can only process so much at a time (16 bit audio) and the end image has to have a small enough memory footprint to work with so the edges are thrown away (44k hz). Finally, if you make an mp3 of that image, your are doing radical jpg compression to it.

-- So do this experiment if you are still skeptical: take a picture of your backyard with a 2MB camera. Crop out a couple of inches on each side (leaving about 50% of the image). Now compare that image with what your eyes see. That's is roughly the difference between vinyl and cd in a visual sense. Now apply about an 80% jpg compression to that image. That's the mp3. Compare that to what your eyes see from the very same thing. Now your grainy, cropped, compressed image might look cool. It might be exactly what you want. But it's not "the same thing" as what your eyes see by any stretch of the imagination.

-- Back to some quick science, then I'll wrap this up . The real key is transients and sub frequencies. These are the 'edges' of the picture that they were forced to crop out. CD's don't have the highs or the lows of vinyl (even though you probably think they do because of brilliant engineering). But it's false. A trick. Hearing the whole range provides context, feel, emotional complexity, and a sense of space. CD's remove all of this. This 44k number was picked because it was as fast as the computers could handle in 1979. It was justified because hearing tests of isolated tones show most humans can't hear below or above a certain range. The 44k number covered 'most' of what people heard, so it was decided upon. I don't think they thought 33 years later people would still be defending it. Isolated tones are something no human ever listens to, so that theory was flawed.

-- Solution? CD's should have moved to a 24bit/48k or 24bit/96k standard in the 90's but they didn't. This comes close to representing what our ears can actually hear and feel and the chips were fast enough by then. You should only listen to MP3's when mobile, and then 192k compression is the absolute minimum before you are so 'blurry' why bother?

-- Listen to a great record, preferably one you are familiar with on MP3 or CD, on a decent record player through a decent system. It does not need to be high-end, it should just not be drugstore plastic crap. Proper vinyl playback requires a precision object, not a plastic box with some IC's and motherboard. You *should* hear a difference, but it might take you a bit to figure it out. It's like getting your glasses prescription fixed. It's like looking outside the viewfinder at the scene and seeing the whole scene.

WOW I got this far and didn't answer your original question. NO - buying vinyl that was recorded digitally is not useless, because it's all about the delivery mechanism and how accurate it delivers to you the artist's original intention. All CD's have to ship at 16/44, but almost no artists record at that rate. Even home studios these days use higher specs than that. So the final step in the process is the 'master' it to the media you are shipping. Mastering to CD requires downsampling to 16/44 no matter what, in effect throwing out all the other information recorded. Mastering to vinyl does no such thing - whatever signal is fed to the lathe prints on the master disc and is copied to vinyl records. So even if the band used Pro-Tools and digital everything in the studio, they did it at a format wider and deeper than 16/44. A vinyl record would still deliver to you a more complete audio picture of their sound in the studio than a 16/44 CD.

The whole system. I had a 1200 baud modem to access the FreeNet, the BBS's, and the Gopher servers. Hook into any TV set and phone line and off you go!

So what could this thing do? It had a nice soundchip for the time and could get pretty funky midi going (for 1985). If I had my studio then I would have been producing music on this thing, for sure, but I was just a snot nosed 12 year old.

Granted these things are not 'sand sized' yet, with some serious miniaturization still needing to take place, but the fun work of the low-level system logic and control design is underway.

The idea is much like a replicator on Star Trek, in that you could provide this system with a 3D item to scan, or a wireframe image of one, and it would send the design to the sandbots. The software in the sandbots would work to position and lock themselves into place, ultimately creating a reasonable facsimile of the object's shape.

Not only can your private information get stolen by unknown 3rd party 'advertising' companies (something you probably don't care about if you are using Facebook in the first place), but from my perspective, it's much bigger than that. The issue is not about your indivdual Facebook security, it's about Facebook's attempt to become the defacto 'internet ID' that we all need to use the world's information networks.

Some of you might be fine using one profile tied directly to your legal name, your family, your job, and your life as you surf around the world wide web, but this is not how the system was designed and not how it grew to such prominence. Anonymity, or at least misdirection, is an important part of information sharing on the internet.

The only way to stop a bandwagon is to jump off it. It might still crash and burn down the road with some riders, but you'll be safe and sound with just small scratches.

So don't use your Facebook login to interact with other sites. Doing so will ultimately kill the original purpose of the internet and turn the whole thing into a big, even less secure, Facebook. Not to mention all of your posts, likes, and views during all of your browsing exploits -- even that one night where you drank that whole bottle! -- will be available for future employers to review. Think about it.

A single internet ID, controlled by anyone (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.)  will kill the internet. Do not kill the internet.

My First glance: IBM = titans, Microsoft = nerds, Apple = hippies, Atari = artists

My High school: IBM = clumsy old titans, Microsoft = business nerds, Apple = misguided hippies & artists, Atari = dead

My College: IBM = business nerds, Microsoft = titans, Apple = hippies on life support, NeXT = futurists

My 20's: IBM = researchers, Microsoft = clumsy old titans, Apple = colored plastic iMachines hiding futurist code, NeXT = artists, Be = futurists

My 30's: IBM = futurists, Microsoft = business school, Apple = titans & artists, NeXT & Be = long gone

My point? I've seen most of these companies grow, shrink, dominate, follow, and some even disappear. It's been a wild ride watching it, and as Apple sits seemingly at the top of the mountain again (arguably the first time since 1978) I felt the need to show this cyclic nature. You younger geeks out there can get a little context.

Complete digital masturbation circle jerks, coming soon, exploding all over your facebook, suckers!

Seems to me that anything that gets us using energy gathered from the sun, the wind, or the water in a more affordable way is good, and I'm glad progress is being made here.

The Squishy Robot has no skeleton and can crawl (shimmy?) underneath small spaces.

Then there's this scary monster that can solve Rubik's Cube in 5 seconds, using a smart phone as it's processor and a bunch of specialized arms.

Perhaps we get these two together for a robot night out and make a baby bot that would crawl under the bed and solve the puzzles it finds?

What's amazing to me is how 20 years on most of this demo holds up. There are things the NextStep OS was doing then that Windows and Linux still don't do today. Of course MacOSX inherited most of those features when it grew out of NextStep in the late 90's.

The graphics power, the inter-app services, the rich-media, the text handling, the networking concepts - history has justified Steve and the NeXT team. He saw in the 80's that higher-powered chips would allow workstation-like tasks and multimedia on every personal computer, and set about building the system to take UNIX power to the people.

It's not in this video, but there's cool video online with Steve circa 1999 talking about how using his Next box, he put his home directory 'in the cloud' in the early 90's. He explains how every machine he uses has access to his networked home directory, and because of this setup, he has not done a single backup nor lost a single bit of personal data in over 10 years.