Should have clarified this in my OP, but we have outsourced IT for workstations, file&print, backup, etc, and we wouldn't survive without them.
The specialized and uncommon (acoustics is a niche market) engineering tools we use (some are off the shelf, others are internally developed) aren't in scope for them. Their business model is generally to provide support for IT systems that are common across their client base... systems that most offices have.
I'm not sure about 4k for home use, but I think it has applications in office environments.
The small company I work for (less than 50 ppl) just bought a 65" 4K TV for use in one of our meeting rooms for collaborative computer work. I tried outputting a desktop to a number of 1080p panels and the picture quality was quite shit (unless of course you stand far away to the point the panel seems too small and you can't read much).
I'm not sure why that is... 1080p computer monitors are fine, but for some reason it just doesn't translate to TVs.
At 4k, PC picture quality is acceptable - actually quite remarkable, and so we went this route. We just got the thing so time will tell how useful it is.
"eight fundamental emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, discuss, anger and anticipation"
Great. When my wife tells me I need to be more open about my feelings I just need to discuss the relative merits of procedural and nonprocedural programming languages
You can't have a democracy and a precedent for simply removing elected leaders when you are not satisfied with the outcome.
I agreed at first.
But in theory such a system might be an improved one - if we can elect people based on their platforms and then axe them when their platform proves to be nothing but lies and deceit, we might eventually end up with elected leaders that do as they claim they will.
The problem, obviously, is doing it peacefully. Maybe if the Egyptians get a few more rounds of practice at this they'll get it down to a fine art and invent* the next form of government.
There aren't many places on the net where you can go to discuss political topics rationally without emotional/inflammatory interference. You just don't get amuch of that on Slashdot, I presume due to the above average intelligence that most Slashdotters have in common (elitist as that sounds).
It's not part of the site's mission statement, agreed, but its uniqueness in this regard is what draws people to discuss out of scope topics. I don't think it's a bad thing.
Best course -- pray it turns out to have been a big gas leak.
It would be nice to return to the days of blissful ignorance when we believed we had no enemies or if the mounds of money and freedoms we give up for security would actually make us safe.
"Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Everywhere), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."
How and what, exactly, have you insulated, and where is your domicile in relation to the street?
Do you have sound dampening mats on the ceiling? If not, bear in mind that most houses and apartments are above street level, and most of the sound will be reflected off the ceiling. A layer of sound dampening material there should have the largest effect.
If you live low to the ground, sound insulating the walls that can see the street, rather than just outside walls would have a similar effect.
There are two components to the noise intrusion - the direct field and the reverberant field. Adding absorptive finishes to the room will help reduce the reverberant field, which in a best case scenario will buy you 3dB (i.e a barely noticeable improvement). Short improving the isolation (i.e windows and exterior partition construction) there isn't anything you can do about the direct field.
A few strategically placed plants or sound dividers - think cubicle walls but far less intrusive - can also help.
Massive barriers can help in outdoor noise propagation scenarios. In this type of situation, the outdoor noise is impacting the exterior facade, causing it to vibrate, and is re-radiating sound in the interior of the OP's space. This means that the source of sound is a large area, not a point source. The sound is effectively coming from "everywhere", and so you don't get the same kind of path length difference attenuation from barriers like you do when you have a point source that is far from the receiver. This is exascerbated by the fact that the intrusion is low frequency which diffracts around corners far more than higher frequency sound.
Plants are not massive enough to be of any significant help. To put things into perspective, a dense forest that's 100m in depth will only attenuate sound 2-3dB, and that's mostly a high frequency reduction.
If you must go with a noise generator (which I don't recommend), try pink noise instead of white. The sounds from the street you try to mask out are going to be mostly low frequency, and white noise will mainly add more sound energy in the higher end of the spectrum.
White noise will add equal sound energy across the spectrum. Pink noise will add more energy in the lower frequencies. We don't typically recommend noise masking for low frequency intrusions into offices and other facilities we consult on because the masking is generally perceived to be more annoying than the original problem. It's best used when there is a speech privacy problem in large open offices because there isn't ENOUGH background noise.
Upgrading your window would typically be recommended, but will only do a little for low frequency. Note that in glazed assemblies, the framing is the weak point. STC 35 is where most frames will top out (even though the glazing will advertise higher STCs into the 50s). If you want a really solid window construction you need an isolated frame assembly which is two frames in series that do not touch each other and which are isolated from the surrounding structure using 3mm thick neoprene gaskets. Each frame supports a separate pane of glass. The inside perimeter should be lined with glass-fibre to prevent standing waves in the cavity. Overall thickness of the glazing might be 2-3"
That's not the kind apology the PM was offering. It was more a "sorry about your luck" kind of apology, not the "this is broken and needs to be fixed" variety.
We need more of this. We need to know more about what businesses and governments do in secret to line their pockets by picking ours. The mainstream media can't quite be trusted to do so, I feel they're in the payroll of government and business -- so the last resort is.. this.
But, who vets this kind of leaks? Who can assure the reader that it isn't misinformation? Wow, paranoids are right, I think!
Still, there's a little place in my heart that tells me.. we really don't want to know. I think it could be that revolting, that repulsive.
Committing of atrocities by popular and powerful people has been a constant throughout human existence. It's safe to assume it continues today, to a degree as revolting as ever.
There's two types of people in this world: The blissfully ignorant, and those with futile optimism that awareness might breed change.
For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
How is that patentable? Not only is a obvious, it is already implemented by various android applications. Tasker probably being the most famous.
Can you now patent stuff people are already doing?
While I agree, I'm happy to let Apple have all the patents it wants regarding locking down devices. It provides all the more motivation for Android to be open and free.
In my country a-la-carte works like this: the price per channel scales depending on how many channels you buy, such that the total cost you pay is always at least equal to the cost of the traditional bundle packages. It's totally pointless. Also in my country, over the Internet broadcast licencing hasn't really been established (for the most part).
The result is that over the net tv is far cheaper, but in no way legal.
Agreed. My old Nokia may be "dumb" but it lasts the entire workweek (5 days...sometimes 6). Who want a phone that dies partway through the day? You would miss incoming calls.
Because technology evolves and eventually smartphones will last a whole week. When they reach that point, I'll know how to use them to their full extent. You however will be a while behind on that learning curve.
Also, for my lifestyle, battery life is of limited importance. I have inexpensive charging cradles at home, in my car, and at my office desk - and the routine to use these was not hard to develop.
What this amounts to is a way out for the government any time something embarrassing is leaked through the likes of Wikileaks (or similar). The government can simply announce that a piece of leaked information was part of their disinformation campaign... the population can rest safely knowing that the offending "leaker" is being brought to justice (i.e scape goat is sent off to Gitmo), and that the information leaked is not actually true.
This campaign isn't to give the government power against the untrustworthy, it's to give the untrustworthy government more power over you.
The problem isn't with predictable low-speed conditions, it's with drivers accustomed to cars which drive themselves under low-speed conditions who are suddenly thrown into an unpredictable situation.
There should (one day) be "Accountability-Cams" which are legally required to be operated by police anywhere they are performing protest-related-duties. The devices must be supported by a portable "pole" mount at a certain height, and consist of an array of HD video cameras which record a 360deg panoramic video. The video and realtime GPS coordinates of each device must be live-streamed to a publicly accessible server. There are requirements for how many of these must be present and how they are distributed, to ensure that all activities (from police and protesters alike) are recorded from multiple vantage points.
Slashdot Mirror
Should have clarified this in my OP, but we have outsourced IT for workstations, file&print, backup, etc, and we wouldn't survive without them.
The specialized and uncommon (acoustics is a niche market) engineering tools we use (some are off the shelf, others are internally developed) aren't in scope for them. Their business model is generally to provide support for IT systems that are common across their client base... systems that most offices have.
I remember getting laid by Violet, and contracting a bad case of VD. Being a young child at the time, this was a very educational game.
Mod parent Funny!
Agreed, except in the case of certain media industries which seem to command the government and police to carry out their orders.
I'm not sure about 4k for home use, but I think it has applications in office environments.
The small company I work for (less than 50 ppl) just bought a 65" 4K TV for use in one of our meeting rooms for collaborative computer work. I tried outputting a desktop to a number of 1080p panels and the picture quality was quite shit (unless of course you stand far away to the point the panel seems too small and you can't read much).
I'm not sure why that is... 1080p computer monitors are fine, but for some reason it just doesn't translate to TVs.
At 4k, PC picture quality is acceptable - actually quite remarkable, and so we went this route. We just got the thing so time will tell how useful it is.
"eight fundamental emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, discuss, anger and anticipation"
Great. When my wife tells me I need to be more open about my feelings I just need to discuss the relative merits of procedural and nonprocedural programming languages
You can't have a democracy and a precedent for simply removing elected leaders when you are not satisfied with the outcome.
I agreed at first.
But in theory such a system might be an improved one - if we can elect people based on their platforms and then axe them when their platform proves to be nothing but lies and deceit, we might eventually end up with elected leaders that do as they claim they will.
The problem, obviously, is doing it peacefully. Maybe if the Egyptians get a few more rounds of practice at this they'll get it down to a fine art and invent* the next form of government.
*this is how you know I'm a Civilization fan.
Mod parent up.
There aren't many places on the net where you can go to discuss political topics rationally without emotional/inflammatory interference. You just don't get amuch of that on Slashdot, I presume due to the above average intelligence that most Slashdotters have in common (elitist as that sounds).
It's not part of the site's mission statement, agreed, but its uniqueness in this regard is what draws people to discuss out of scope topics. I don't think it's a bad thing.
Best course -- pray it turns out to have been a big gas leak.
It would be nice to return to the days of blissful ignorance when we believed we had no enemies or if the mounds of money and freedoms we give up for security would actually make us safe.
Except that you can buy a house worth $400,000 using bitcoins.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2013/03/alberta-man-accepting-bitcoins-in-exchange-for-home.html?cmp=fbtl
"Here's the list of sites, including where they are hosted: Extratorrent (Ukraine), IsoHunt (Canada), Kickass Torrents (Canada), Rutracker (Russia), The Pirate Bay (Everywhere), Torrentz (Canada), and Kankan (China)."
Source:
http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-moves-to-the-cloud-becomes-raid-proof-121017/
How and what, exactly, have you insulated, and where is your domicile in relation to the street?
Do you have sound dampening mats on the ceiling? If not, bear in mind that most houses and apartments are above street level, and most of the sound will be reflected off the ceiling. A layer of sound dampening material there should have the largest effect.
If you live low to the ground, sound insulating the walls that can see the street, rather than just outside walls would have a similar effect.
There are two components to the noise intrusion - the direct field and the reverberant field. Adding absorptive finishes to the room will help reduce the reverberant field, which in a best case scenario will buy you 3dB (i.e a barely noticeable improvement). Short improving the isolation (i.e windows and exterior partition construction) there isn't anything you can do about the direct field.
A few strategically placed plants or sound dividers - think cubicle walls but far less intrusive - can also help.
Massive barriers can help in outdoor noise propagation scenarios. In this type of situation, the outdoor noise is impacting the exterior facade, causing it to vibrate, and is re-radiating sound in the interior of the OP's space. This means that the source of sound is a large area, not a point source. The sound is effectively coming from "everywhere", and so you don't get the same kind of path length difference attenuation from barriers like you do when you have a point source that is far from the receiver. This is exascerbated by the fact that the intrusion is low frequency which diffracts around corners far more than higher frequency sound.
Plants are not massive enough to be of any significant help. To put things into perspective, a dense forest that's 100m in depth will only attenuate sound 2-3dB, and that's mostly a high frequency reduction.
If you must go with a noise generator (which I don't recommend), try pink noise instead of white. The sounds from the street you try to mask out are going to be mostly low frequency, and white noise will mainly add more sound energy in the higher end of the spectrum.
White noise will add equal sound energy across the spectrum. Pink noise will add more energy in the lower frequencies. We don't typically recommend noise masking for low frequency intrusions into offices and other facilities we consult on because the masking is generally perceived to be more annoying than the original problem. It's best used when there is a speech privacy problem in large open offices because there isn't ENOUGH background noise.
Upgrading your window would typically be recommended, but will only do a little for low frequency. Note that in glazed assemblies, the framing is the weak point. STC 35 is where most frames will top out (even though the glazing will advertise higher STCs into the 50s). If you want a really solid window construction you need an isolated frame assembly which is two frames in series that do not touch each other and which are isolated from the surrounding structure using 3mm thick neoprene gaskets. Each frame supports a separate pane of glass. The inside perimeter should be lined with glass-fibre to prevent standing waves in the cavity.
Overall thickness of the glazing might be 2-3"
Whoa Whoa WHOA!
That's not the kind apology the PM was offering. It was more a "sorry about your luck" kind of apology, not the "this is broken and needs to be fixed" variety.
We need more of this. We need to know more about what businesses and governments do in secret to line their pockets by picking ours. The mainstream media can't quite be trusted to do so, I feel they're in the payroll of government and business -- so the last resort is.. this.
But, who vets this kind of leaks? Who can assure the reader that it isn't misinformation? Wow, paranoids are right, I think!
Still, there's a little place in my heart that tells me.. we really don't want to know. I think it could be that revolting, that repulsive.
Committing of atrocities by popular and powerful people has been a constant throughout human existence. It's safe to assume it continues today, to a degree as revolting as ever.
There's two types of people in this world: The blissfully ignorant, and those with futile optimism that awareness might breed change.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hF_RhD-xE
You may not be able to do this in 10 years...
Then I'd say you've got a touch of masochism in you :P
Point taken however.
For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
How is that patentable?
Not only is a obvious, it is already implemented by various android applications. Tasker probably being the most famous.
Can you now patent stuff people are already doing?
While I agree, I'm happy to let Apple have all the patents it wants regarding locking down devices. It provides all the more motivation for Android to be open and free.
That's like saying how bad a law is depends on how its used.
Laws which allow authorities unfettered rights to spy on citizens are good, provided the government doesn't use that power to persecute.
Wrong.
Laws which allow authorities unfettered rights to spy on citizens are bad BECAUSE they could be used by governments to persecute.
In my country a-la-carte works like this: the price per channel scales depending on how many channels you buy, such that the total cost you pay is always at least equal to the cost of the traditional bundle packages. It's totally pointless. Also in my country, over the Internet broadcast licencing hasn't really been established (for the most part).
The result is that over the net tv is far cheaper, but in no way legal.
Agreed. My old Nokia may be "dumb" but it lasts the entire workweek (5 days...sometimes 6). Who want a phone that dies partway through the day? You would miss incoming calls.
Because technology evolves and eventually smartphones will last a whole week. When they reach that point, I'll know how to use them to their full extent. You however will be a while behind on that learning curve.
Also, for my lifestyle, battery life is of limited importance. I have inexpensive charging cradles at home, in my car, and at my office desk - and the routine to use these was not hard to develop.
(That's magnet with an "e", as per the subject line) :D
Is it magnitism-day or something?
What this amounts to is a way out for the government any time something embarrassing is leaked through the likes of Wikileaks (or similar). The government can simply announce that a piece of leaked information was part of their disinformation campaign... the population can rest safely knowing that the offending "leaker" is being brought to justice (i.e scape goat is sent off to Gitmo), and that the information leaked is not actually true.
This campaign isn't to give the government power against the untrustworthy, it's to give the untrustworthy government more power over you.
The problem isn't with predictable low-speed conditions, it's with drivers accustomed to cars which drive themselves under low-speed conditions who are suddenly thrown into an unpredictable situation.
There should (one day) be "Accountability-Cams" which are legally required to be operated by police anywhere they are performing protest-related-duties. The devices must be supported by a portable "pole" mount at a certain height, and consist of an array of HD video cameras which record a 360deg panoramic video. The video and realtime GPS coordinates of each device must be live-streamed to a publicly accessible server. There are requirements for how many of these must be present and how they are distributed, to ensure that all activities (from police and protesters alike) are recorded from multiple vantage points.