If you're trying to cancel a 90dB wave, you generate the same 90dB wave, inverted. This means that every particle that receives a sound vibration in one direction receives an equal sound vibration in the opposite direction, resulting in a net movement of zero.
No vibration of the air means no vibration of the eardrum, which means no sound doing its mechanical damage to the moving pieces in your ear, which means no signal doing its neural damage inside your cochlea. Notably, earplugs do exactly the same thing to a lesser degree: they reduce the total transmission of vibration (that's what reducing the amplitude is, after all) into your ear canal.
In both cases, you haven't changed the total amount of energy reaching your ear, it's just that some portion of the kinetic energy (sound) that can damage your ear is now thermal energy that won't.
(Of course, noise-cancelling headphones have widely varying effectiveness in various regions of the audible sound spectrum, and won't do anything to prevent transmission of vibration from other parts of your body into your inner ear - but then, neither will softies)
You must be some kind of weird antimatter slashdot troll from the negativerse where the sky is white and the stars burn with the blackness of a thousand really really black things.
1. It didn't work that way before. 2. We had no warning whatsoever about the change. 3. Even when choosing "Threaded" in my view settings it doesn't display as threaded at all. 4. Clicking on the post # to view it alone and *then* reply to that message is not intuitive and is more work for the user *and* the server compared to the old way.
Slashdot is broken.
No shit, Sherlock. If you were to read the front page - specifically this story - before bitching, you'd know that the admins are aware of the problem, they know what caused it, they know how to fix it, and they've announced when the fix will happen.
It's not like it's buried in some obscure bug report or something, and it's not like they went and deliberately changed something without warning you. It's on the FRONT PAGE.
Before yesterday, this would have surprised me more.
Why yesterday? Because yesterday, I picked up Gears Of War. When I got home and tore the shrinkwrap off to put it in my drive, as soon as it loaded I was disconnected from Live.
I was like, "WTF, mates?"*
Then I was politely informed that there was a software update for the title. This came as something of a surprise, seeing as how I got it barely 24 hours after it was released. I have no idea what the update did, of course.
Anyway, I was surprised at this yesterday. But I am now inured to this tactic, so I find this news completely boring. In fact, my first response is "figures."
See my comment on this elsewhere in this thread. The first story I can get to is from '97, the first story with comments is from '99.
Both were reached by starting from "older stuff," then twiddling the "start" parameter in the URL. Using a sort of ham-fisted binary search, I narrowed "start" parameters that/. thought were valid into the 70000+ range (I didn't write down exactly where I found the start). The first post that has comments discernibly attached lay somewhere between starts of 66829 and 66893 (once I was down to 32 numbers between test parameters, it was easier to hit "next 30" than to go back to the URL).
I'd really like to see it. I bet it goes something like, "what's this stupid web thingy anyway? I bet it'll never make it to version 2.0..."
Well, here's the oldest story I could find: posted 12/31/1997, ignoring all the stories listed as posted on 12/31/1969. But there are no comments attached, so that doesn't really help.
This is the oldest comment on the oldest story I could find that had comments, posted on 1/1/1999.
Unfortunately, it's not even close to comment #1...but it's the best I could arrange.;)
Get your mod points ready, this is off topic, but considering the current state of discussion anyway, I don't feel so bad about it.
Regardless, while writing this post regarding why the/. admins won't (and shouldn't) consider releasing a copy of the/. DB to the public, something occurred to me.
Comments on/. are owned by the poster, according to that one line that shows up on all the comment pages (specifically, "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.") At the same time, though,/. doesn't provide a method for having comments you've made removed from the DB.
If I own the copyright on the comments I've made, shouldn't I be able to rescind publication rights on them, and prevent/. from displaying them in future? Or is there some kind of implicit license in posting on/.? Did I clicksign an agreement covering this when I joined (this was getting on towards a decade ago, so I really don't remember the joining process at all)?
Or are publication rights, once granted, irrevocable?
Of course, I suppose asking questions when there's no way for people to hit reply is a specific form of vague insanity...still, I'm curious.
Any thoughts on making the DB publicly accessable other than through teh Dot? Not sure what I'd do with all that data, but I'm sure these's a grad student somewhere who'd love the opportunity...
Not just grad students; as a DBA by profession, I'd love a crack at the DB. If nothing else, it would give me a great place to play around with MySQL. Not to mention the ability to maybe extract some interesting user-level statistics.
Of course, the odds of this happening are pretty damn low - there'd have to be an awful lot of work and review done to scrub the DB of information that is entrusted to/. that people didn't plan on having released to the internet at large. Passwords, for example (even if they're stored only as hashes, getting the whole DB would make it feasible to crack them); real email addresses, real names...I assume that the subscription process doesn't involve actually storing credit card information in the DB (I don't know; I've only used PayPal), but that might be another concern.
Just the email addresses would be a huge deal - can you imagine the market value of such a targeted list of addresses?
In short, it would be fantastically cool for them to release the DB, but it would be a lot of work on their part for no particular return. Not to mention that if they released it once, they'd no doubt be pestered to keep releasing periodic updates...then there's the bandwidth issues...and, even, the potential copyright issues (/. doesn't own the copyright on posted comments, the poster does)...then the copyright issues for stuff they do own; releasing the DB would make it trivial for a bad actor to post a mirrored slash. A little bit of domain typosquatting and some ad deals, and you could be talking about real money.
If I were them, there's no way in hell I'd even think about doing it.
Ignoring the "answer" provided by the retard rodeo above, this is a good question.
Anyway
It's my understanding that DSLRs have an actual mechanical shutter that trips to expose the CCD - essentially, they function exactly like film SLRs, but with a CCD instead of film. The big advantage of this, as far as I'm concerned, is response time. Instead of turning the chip on and off for every shot, the chip stays on and you reduce the time from button press to image capture to that which is achieved by the mechanical shutter. Which is a technology that's very mature.
But this is just what I've sort of absorbed from reading various articles in various places; I'm still diddling around with film. B&W film, no less.
Or, instead of trying to peg the jackass meter, you could read the question asked, to wit:
Does it really have single-lens reflex action and, if so, why? Can someone tell me what I'm missing?
Which clearly indicates he knows perfectly well what SLR stands for, and wants to know why it matters when the LCD display shows you a realtime through-the-lens view.
The Federalist Papers are fantastic. I'd campaign for everyone reading those, too, but I generally figure the Constitution is a better place to start.;)
Not at all - I wasn't trying to make you look like a dumbass in the slightest. And I'm not trying to be an asshole now, either, when I honestly say you should consider reading the Constitution. This isn't mean as any kind of insult or criticism, it's meant simply as a recommendation.
It's a fascinating document, and it's easier to understand than many people think it will be. If you read it while keeping in mind that the fed.gov was intended only to be able to do the things the Constitution says, and that the Bill Of Rights wasn't considered necessary, but simply to re-emphasize certain things that many of the founders felt would be obvious given the text of the Constitution*, it gives you a whole new perspective on modern America.
(IIRC, it was Adams who was against including the BoR, since he believed that writing down those rights would diminish others by contrast. He felt that the BoR could later be taken to mean that rights not mentioned in it weren't protected, when in fact, anything not specifically forbidden the people in the Constitution is allowed, or at worst, up to the states)
Only if the population mean and median were in fact indistinguishable (say, whatever value was being measured was normally distributed)
For the sake of brevity (soul of wit, and all that), I did commit two errors:
1) I used the term "sample" instead of the correct term "population" to imply that my comment was statistical, rather than referring to the "population" and risking confusion between the statistical meaning of the word and the idiomatic "population of this country" meaning.
2) I was also making an unstated assumption that IQ is distributed normally across the population of the United States.
Fine. A plurality system will inevitably trend towards a two-party political landscape.
The simple mathematical fact of the matter is that plurality voting only yields results reasonably approximating the actual will of the people when there are only two candidates. This will be a forcing influence towards a two-party system, as candidates will be aware that their chances of election are improved by being a member of one of the two dominant parties.
It's the most important right you have in this political system, because every other right you have is safeguarded by that one right. It's the one you go to war over if it's taken away or subverted.
Actually, that argument is that it's the second most important right, because it's safeguarded by the willingness and ability of the population to go to war over it if it's taken away or subverted - thereby making the most important right the right to bear arms.
I find it an interesting dichotomy that many of the people who most stridently argue that the voting process has been subverted by the people in power are the same people who want to remove the only option for change if the voting process is, in fact, no longer a useful method to effect change.
You do not have a 'duty' to vote. It is a *right*. If you don't know who you want to vote for, you should stay home and let me run your government for you.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the dB cancellation on those? I've been using Hearos (33 dB attenuation), but if Ears brand is better, I'll gladly switch.
Uh...no.
If you're trying to cancel a 90dB wave, you generate the same 90dB wave, inverted. This means that every particle that receives a sound vibration in one direction receives an equal sound vibration in the opposite direction, resulting in a net movement of zero.
No vibration of the air means no vibration of the eardrum, which means no sound doing its mechanical damage to the moving pieces in your ear, which means no signal doing its neural damage inside your cochlea. Notably, earplugs do exactly the same thing to a lesser degree: they reduce the total transmission of vibration (that's what reducing the amplitude is, after all) into your ear canal.
In both cases, you haven't changed the total amount of energy reaching your ear, it's just that some portion of the kinetic energy (sound) that can damage your ear is now thermal energy that won't.
(Of course, noise-cancelling headphones have widely varying effectiveness in various regions of the audible sound spectrum, and won't do anything to prevent transmission of vibration from other parts of your body into your inner ear - but then, neither will softies)
I've never heard of "tinny" graphics before.
But...but...
Everyone knows Linux is invulnerable to attack!
You must be some kind of weird antimatter slashdot troll from the negativerse where the sky is white and the stars burn with the blackness of a thousand really really black things.
1. It didn't work that way before.
2. We had no warning whatsoever about the change.
3. Even when choosing "Threaded" in my view settings it doesn't display as threaded at all.
4. Clicking on the post # to view it alone and *then* reply to that message is not intuitive and is more work for the user *and* the server compared to the old way.
Slashdot is broken.
No shit, Sherlock. If you were to read the front page - specifically this story - before bitching, you'd know that the admins are aware of the problem, they know what caused it, they know how to fix it, and they've announced when the fix will happen.
It's not like it's buried in some obscure bug report or something, and it's not like they went and deliberately changed something without warning you. It's on the FRONT PAGE.
Parent
'We are very comfortable with the pricing we have announced and have gotten tremendous support from retailers for that price point,'
Well, it's certainly comforting to know that the stores like the price.
I wonder if the consumers will.
Before yesterday, this would have surprised me more.
Why yesterday? Because yesterday, I picked up Gears Of War. When I got home and tore the shrinkwrap off to put it in my drive, as soon as it loaded I was disconnected from Live.
I was like, "WTF, mates?"*
Then I was politely informed that there was a software update for the title. This came as something of a surprise, seeing as how I got it barely 24 hours after it was released. I have no idea what the update did, of course.
Anyway, I was surprised at this yesterday. But I am now inured to this tactic, so I find this news completely boring. In fact, my first response is "figures."
Does comment #1 exist? /. seems to have had a different URL pattern then..(Date/Time!!)0 [slashdot.org]
/. thought were valid into the 70000+ range (I didn't write down exactly where I found the start). The first post that has comments discernibly attached lay somewhere between starts of 66829 and 66893 (once I was down to 32 numbers between test parameters, it was easier to hit "next 30" than to go back to the URL).
The farthest I could get to was,
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/01/08/11330
See my comment on this elsewhere in this thread. The first story I can get to is from '97, the first story with comments is from '99.
Both were reached by starting from "older stuff," then twiddling the "start" parameter in the URL. Using a sort of ham-fisted binary search, I narrowed "start" parameters that
Parent
I'd really like to see it. I bet it goes something like, "what's this stupid web thingy anyway? I bet it'll never make it to version 2.0..."
;)
Well, here's the oldest story I could find: posted 12/31/1997, ignoring all the stories listed as posted on 12/31/1969. But there are no comments attached, so that doesn't really help.
This is the oldest comment on the oldest story I could find that had comments, posted on 1/1/1999.
Unfortunately, it's not even close to comment #1...but it's the best I could arrange.
Parent
Get your mod points ready, this is off topic, but considering the current state of discussion anyway, I don't feel so bad about it.
/. admins won't (and shouldn't) consider releasing a copy of the /. DB to the public, something occurred to me.
/. are owned by the poster, according to that one line that shows up on all the comment pages (specifically, "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.") At the same time, though, /. doesn't provide a method for having comments you've made removed from the DB.
/. from displaying them in future? Or is there some kind of implicit license in posting on /.? Did I clicksign an agreement covering this when I joined (this was getting on towards a decade ago, so I really don't remember the joining process at all)?
Regardless, while writing this post regarding why the
Comments on
If I own the copyright on the comments I've made, shouldn't I be able to rescind publication rights on them, and prevent
Or are publication rights, once granted, irrevocable?
Of course, I suppose asking questions when there's no way for people to hit reply is a specific form of vague insanity...still, I'm curious.
Any thoughts on making the DB publicly accessable other than through teh Dot? Not sure what I'd do with all that data, but I'm sure these's a grad student somewhere who'd love the opportunity...
/. that people didn't plan on having released to the internet at large. Passwords, for example (even if they're stored only as hashes, getting the whole DB would make it feasible to crack them); real email addresses, real names...I assume that the subscription process doesn't involve actually storing credit card information in the DB (I don't know; I've only used PayPal), but that might be another concern.
Not just grad students; as a DBA by profession, I'd love a crack at the DB. If nothing else, it would give me a great place to play around with MySQL. Not to mention the ability to maybe extract some interesting user-level statistics.
Of course, the odds of this happening are pretty damn low - there'd have to be an awful lot of work and review done to scrub the DB of information that is entrusted to
Just the email addresses would be a huge deal - can you imagine the market value of such a targeted list of addresses?
In short, it would be fantastically cool for them to release the DB, but it would be a lot of work on their part for no particular return. Not to mention that if they released it once, they'd no doubt be pestered to keep releasing periodic updates...then there's the bandwidth issues...and, even, the potential copyright issues (/. doesn't own the copyright on posted comments, the poster does)...then the copyright issues for stuff they do own; releasing the DB would make it trivial for a bad actor to post a mirrored slash. A little bit of domain typosquatting and some ad deals, and you could be talking about real money.
If I were them, there's no way in hell I'd even think about doing it.
But it would be cool.
Parent
So let me guess...the parent index has been lost forever?
Hopefully it just rolled over, and you can add 2^24 to every value to get the parent links back.
Though I somehow doubt that will work.
Or they could just use a DB backup. Does MySQL support point-in-time recovery?
Parent
So let me guess...the parent index has been lost forever?
Hopefully it just rolled over, and you can add 2^24 to every value to get the parent links back.
Though I somehow doubt that will work.
Or they could just use a DB backup. Does MySQL support point-in-time recovery?
Parent
"Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion" (translation for atheists: "The establish clause does not matter").
As opposed, of course, to your far superior belief that "the free exercise clause does not matter."
Ignoring the "answer" provided by the retard rodeo above, this is a good question.
Anyway
It's my understanding that DSLRs have an actual mechanical shutter that trips to expose the CCD - essentially, they function exactly like film SLRs, but with a CCD instead of film. The big advantage of this, as far as I'm concerned, is response time. Instead of turning the chip on and off for every shot, the chip stays on and you reduce the time from button press to image capture to that which is achieved by the mechanical shutter. Which is a technology that's very mature.
But this is just what I've sort of absorbed from reading various articles in various places; I'm still diddling around with film. B&W film, no less.
Or, instead of trying to peg the jackass meter, you could read the question asked, to wit:
Does it really have single-lens reflex action and, if so, why? Can someone tell me what I'm missing?
Which clearly indicates he knows perfectly well what SLR stands for, and wants to know why it matters when the LCD display shows you a realtime through-the-lens view.
The Federalist Papers are fantastic. I'd campaign for everyone reading those, too, but I generally figure the Constitution is a better place to start. ;)
Not at all - I wasn't trying to make you look like a dumbass in the slightest. And I'm not trying to be an asshole now, either, when I honestly say you should consider reading the Constitution. This isn't mean as any kind of insult or criticism, it's meant simply as a recommendation.
It's a fascinating document, and it's easier to understand than many people think it will be. If you read it while keeping in mind that the fed.gov was intended only to be able to do the things the Constitution says, and that the Bill Of Rights wasn't considered necessary, but simply to re-emphasize certain things that many of the founders felt would be obvious given the text of the Constitution*, it gives you a whole new perspective on modern America.
(IIRC, it was Adams who was against including the BoR, since he believed that writing down those rights would diminish others by contrast. He felt that the BoR could later be taken to mean that rights not mentioned in it weren't protected, when in fact, anything not specifically forbidden the people in the Constitution is allowed, or at worst, up to the states)
Only if the population mean and median were in fact indistinguishable (say, whatever value was being measured was normally distributed)
For the sake of brevity (soul of wit, and all that), I did commit two errors:
1) I used the term "sample" instead of the correct term "population" to imply that my comment was statistical, rather than referring to the "population" and risking confusion between the statistical meaning of the word and the idiomatic "population of this country" meaning.
2) I was also making an unstated assumption that IQ is distributed normally across the population of the United States.
You are, of course, correct in your statements.
Fine. A plurality system will inevitably trend towards a two-party political landscape.
The simple mathematical fact of the matter is that plurality voting only yields results reasonably approximating the actual will of the people when there are only two candidates. This will be a forcing influence towards a two-party system, as candidates will be aware that their chances of election are improved by being a member of one of the two dominant parties.
It's the most important right you have in this political system, because every other right you have is safeguarded by that one right. It's the one you go to war over if it's taken away or subverted.
Actually, that argument is that it's the second most important right, because it's safeguarded by the willingness and ability of the population to go to war over it if it's taken away or subverted - thereby making the most important right the right to bear arms.
I find it an interesting dichotomy that many of the people who most stridently argue that the voting process has been subverted by the people in power are the same people who want to remove the only option for change if the voting process is, in fact, no longer a useful method to effect change.
You do not have a 'duty' to vote. It is a *right*. If you don't know who you want to vote for, you should stay home and let me run your government for you.
There. Fixed that for you.
Yeah, I know the difference between mean and median. It's a joke, and doesn't go over well with half of America if you use median
Strictly speaking, for a sample size of three hundred million, one would expect the mean and the median to be essentially indistinguishable.
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
That is why our founding fathers set up our educational system.
??
What educational system does this statement refer to?