Technically, they are. Marketplace insurance is just a private plan with an extra layer of government collusion. Crony-capitalism at its finest.
true.
but the way insurance works, of course, the more people in your risk pool the better it performs, so in that way the increased enrollment is good for everybody. not to mention the people who now have coverage and previously didn't.
While I don't buy into the summary, I would caution against ever making an assumption that something isn't detectable due to its frequency.
There have been many MANY cases where inter-modulation of various signals magically puts things within the audible range. If there's a second clock source somewhere, or there's an external frequency near the fundamental then you most definitely can suddenly generate signals within the audible range.
You betcha. Any kind of nonlinearity, or a resonance that could get excited, ends up acting in the audible realm; that's why the > 22 khz spurious mage is actively filtered out of CD player outputs instead of just assuming that even if the equipment won't reproduce it, and even if it could you wouldn't hear it.
So yes, those elevators do solve an actual problem. They're not the best solution (hooks and/or screws are cheaper and at least as effective, probably more so, while taking up less floorspace), but they are a solution. For suckers.
But one of the reviews says: "The damn things do lower noise, increase dynamics, remove haze, and open up the top octaves. Once you listen to their effects, even a skeptic like me has to admit that it is hard to take them back out of the system. Music sounds more like music with the Cable Elevators in place. I recommend them strongly, especially given their price!".
How can you argue with that? LOL
Well, you are elevating them to a point of lower gravitational field (1/r^2 and all that) and of course, relativistically that means less time dilation, so of course it will be more accurate. Same as losing weight, your lowered mass in the listening room will diminish the gravitional field around the wiring and improve the sound.
So, let me get this straight. A "professional" pop artist today walks into a studio to drop a track, which is then Autotuned, excited, boosted, compressed, and otherwise destroyed by post-processing...
...and we're now worried about macro-levels of electrical noise coming from the memory card?
Perhaps we should worry more about what we define as an "artist" these days.
Exactly. I remember when CDs were the New Thing (Christ am I old) and people were enthusing about you could recognize them on the car stereo because they sounded so clear; and I was thinking if you can recognize them through the junk that makes up a commercial pop recording, played on a pop radio station through their equipment, through the average car stereo of that era...... then they must really be cranking out some very noticeable distortion.
From what I understand, we went through the exact same thing when solid state replaced tubes, "list to the crystal clarity" which turned to be high freq distortions, of course. Thank God I'm not That Old to remember it myself though.
of course, on a literal basis, if somebody pays $300 for a gold plated AC plug and thinks it makes it sound better, then if does sound better, to him. The rest of us are sadly unable to appreciate the improvement, because we are stuck on the material plane. we can't do objective analysis of his mental processes.
listening to music is all about emotions and other such intangibles; if you're sitting there doing fourier analysis of the waveforms from the speaker and judging how accurate they are, you're not really enjoying it.
or: ignorance is bliss. expensive, but bliss.
You see things sometimes in equipment that makes you go "?" For instance, decoupling capacitors for the power supply outputs, but instead of putting them on the actual boards, they put them all back on the power supply board so that the inductance of the wiring to the boards would fight them, ?
indeed; in what we use for atmosphere over here, phono connectors and the like become low grade semiconductors after a year. phono connectors are my candidate for the optimally worst connector, anyway. but the gold plating needs to be sufficiently thick as to make a difference other than visually.
heck, just solder the damn cables to the equipment, make more difference than any high performance connectors, and how often do you connect and disconnect them anyway?
digital stuff generates so much switching noise, that can get picked up on the analog side and have bad effects. A trick from the earliest days of hotrodding cd players was just to move the audio parts out from the whole digital end, with their own power supply.
Why do you think that "anyone out there that we encounter is very likely to be even more aggressive" than humans? D'you realize that a remarkable thing about people is not how aggressive people are, but rather how well people actually get along? Pretty much only colony insects are as capable of getting along as we are. It is not aggressiveness that makes humans globally dominant.
When technology has advanced to the point where an INDIVIDUAL has the power to bring down the entire planetary civilization (and I'd argue that we are at that point right now), low aggression seems like a rather key survival trait. I'd argue that a civilization that has survived longer than us is probably FAR less aggressive, FAR more willing to take the long view, and FAR more willing to work out cooperative everyone-wins solutions rather than indulging in exploitative zero-sum behavior.
--PM
Exactly. The average wild animal probably encounters more violence in a day than the average human does in a year.
Hawkings, one could argue is out of his league on many topics and/or issues he has opinions about. But seems to always get the media attention he doesn't deserve. There is no exception here. Move along.
We need the papers to report on what athletes and actors think.
800 volts on the plates of all those old heathkit transmitters using 6146 tubes. 3000 on most linear amps. ooh, and dig those metal-ceramic power tubes with beryllium oxide ceramics, or the insulator blocks for conducted cooling tubes being beryllium oxide.
or hunting. those.22 rifles can put an eye out!
scouting, perhaps? axes, knives, and pack saws, not to mention building fires.
I won't even start with farm kids, all those types of poo, power take-offs, barn roofs, tools, welders...
and this texting and Facebook thing, well, get somebody riled enough to punch you into Jello.
there is always a way for a kid to get into trouble. don't leave them to the TV, be around and guide them.
The great classic: the ubiquitous tube-type radio found in every kitchen, the "all-American five", which featured one lug of the unpolarized power plug directly connected to the metal chassis; normally situated where it was nice and handy to grab with one hand while turning the tap on and off with the other.
When it says "the most dangerous toy" I laughed thinking this product never disabled kids or sent them to the hospital like LAWN DARTS (Jarts) which was responsible for 1000's of injures and even disabilities... don't know if any one died but this toy was certainly much more dangerous that the kits described in the article.
Especially the scare-mongering over depleted uranium being somehow seen as more toxic than lead is entirely political theater ungrounded in any science.
Once again, slashcode blows goats. Instead of Beta, how about we get the ability to edit posts?
You don't have to go far - just take the americium for a smoke detector and you've got a radiation source.
The most stable isotope of americium (243) has a half-life of 7370 years, so barely radioactive (not sure what they use in smoke detectors, but even 242 has a half-life of 141 years and thus isn't exactly hot.
Uranium 238, which is the vast majority of natural uranium (and basically all of "depleted" uranium) has a half-life of 4.47 billion years. No one rational is afraid of it's radioactivity - it's entirely scare-mongering. This is why no one cares about the uranium in granite countertops. Especially the scare-mongering over depleted uranium being somehow seen as more toxic than lead is entirely political theater ungrounded in any science.
Depleted Uranium, mainly U238, is primarily a source of alpha particles, which are not very penetrating and even skin will keep you relatively safe. The subatomic version of somebody chucking bricks at you, as opposed to shooting you with bullets (beta particles) or lasers (gamma rays).
However, once internalized by the body, it can directly irradiate lung tissue or your digestive epithelium, both of which are highly susceptible to carcinogenesis. Thus the dangers of depleted uranium weapons are embedded fragments to some degree, but more importantly inhalation of uranium dust, and/or uranium oxide smoke. In that this hasn't been a serious public health concern for too long, we don't have a really large background of studies, and the epidemiological studies on humans have a hard time calibrating how much exposure the person may have had; nobody's measuring the uranium content of the smoke on the battlefield. At this point the data is largely exploratory. http://www.ehjournal.net/conte...
From wikipedia:
"The major natural source of radioactivity in plant tissue is potassium: 0.0117% of the naturally-occurring potassium is the unstable isotope potassium-40 (40K). This isotope decays with a half-life of about 1.25 billion years (4×1016 seconds), and therefore the radioactivity of natural potassium is about 31 Bq/g – meaning that, in one gram of the element, about 31 atoms will decay every second.[2][3] Plants naturally contain other radioactive isotopes, such as carbon-14 (14C), but their contribution to the total activity is much smaller.[citation needed] Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium,[4] it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.[5] Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports."
The potassium in our bodies represents ~ 5,000 Bq of K40.
You can get some for free if you want to take a trip. Right outside of Moab, UT is an old Uranium Mine. There's a tailings pile nearby and you can pick up a piece of it. It's mostly combined in other rocks and has very little radioactivity. It's not the refined, ultra-pure stuff, 5 minutes of exposure will kill you type; that's what they did with all the other stuff they didn't think was crap.
NOTE: While it's not VERY radioactive is still IS radioactive. Don't plan a long camping trip there, or decide carry a piece of it around in your pocket. Ummm... I guess unless you like having tumors.
You don't have to go far - just take the americium for a smoke detector and you've got a radiation source.
Or you can buy it from the US Atomic Energy Commission for $1500 per gram. Or you can order (really) small amounts online, exempt from USNRC and State licensing. They produce sufficient count-rate to check survey meters or conduct most nuclear science experiments in normal lab periods using standard Geiger Mueller counters or scintillation detectors, yet low enough so as not to present any radiation hazard.
Or you can order directly from the government. Now that I've done all those searches for "radioisotopes for sale" I'm probably on a few watch lists:-)
And of course the Gilbert chemistry sets with potassium cyanide. I remember when we were requested to bring it to the local fire department to dispose of. As an indication of how innocent I was then, I actually complied.
It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.
In case you missed the previous thousand posts, 1)there is more and more stuff around, cheaper and cheaper 2)at the same time as fewer and fewer people are working 3)also we have robots now whose productivity is pretty high and need very few humans involved
...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.
The poor are not the cause of the growing national debt. Endless wars, defense spending, and corporate welfare make up the lion's share of the national debt.
You mean that collecting money from Americans to give to Americans who spend it in America so that other Americans collect it does not make America less wealthy? You'll never get a rightwinger to agree with that.
For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.
Day labor construction, for example. A robot that could do framing for a house unsupervised would have to be extremely sophisticated and expensive; a human to do it can be extremely unsophisticated and inexpensive.
Of course, this represents the difference between the way we mass produce cars, and the way we mass produce houses. If a car was built by a truck dumping a bunch of sheet metal and other hardware in your driveway and then a crew swarmed over it for a month, cars would cost as much as a house and be as unreliable, but the business of automobile construction would still be the province of humans, not robots. On the other hand, if houses were all built as prefabs in factories and sent to be setup on site, they could be assembled by robots and would cost less than $100K (not including the real estate).
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, they are. Marketplace insurance is just a private plan with an extra layer of government collusion. Crony-capitalism at its finest.
true. but the way insurance works, of course, the more people in your risk pool the better it performs, so in that way the increased enrollment is good for everybody. not to mention the people who now have coverage and previously didn't.
While I don't buy into the summary, I would caution against ever making an assumption that something isn't detectable due to its frequency.
There have been many MANY cases where inter-modulation of various signals magically puts things within the audible range. If there's a second clock source somewhere, or there's an external frequency near the fundamental then you most definitely can suddenly generate signals within the audible range.
You betcha. Any kind of nonlinearity, or a resonance that could get excited, ends up acting in the audible realm; that's why the > 22 khz spurious mage is actively filtered out of CD player outputs instead of just assuming that even if the equipment won't reproduce it, and even if it could you wouldn't hear it.
So yes, those elevators do solve an actual problem. They're not the best solution (hooks and/or screws are cheaper and at least as effective, probably more so, while taking up less floorspace), but they are a solution. For suckers.
But one of the reviews says: "The damn things do lower noise, increase dynamics, remove haze, and open up the top octaves. Once you listen to their effects, even a skeptic like me has to admit that it is hard to take them back out of the system. Music sounds more like music with the Cable Elevators in place. I recommend them strongly, especially given their price!".
How can you argue with that? LOL
Well, you are elevating them to a point of lower gravitational field (1/r^2 and all that) and of course, relativistically that means less time dilation, so of course it will be more accurate. Same as losing weight, your lowered mass in the listening room will diminish the gravitional field around the wiring and improve the sound.
So, let me get this straight. A "professional" pop artist today walks into a studio to drop a track, which is then Autotuned, excited, boosted, compressed, and otherwise destroyed by post-processing...
...and we're now worried about macro-levels of electrical noise coming from the memory card?
Perhaps we should worry more about what we define as an "artist" these days.
Exactly. I remember when CDs were the New Thing (Christ am I old) and people were enthusing about you could recognize them on the car stereo because they sounded so clear; and I was thinking if you can recognize them through the junk that makes up a commercial pop recording, played on a pop radio station through their equipment, through the average car stereo of that era...... then they must really be cranking out some very noticeable distortion. From what I understand, we went through the exact same thing when solid state replaced tubes, "list to the crystal clarity" which turned to be high freq distortions, of course. Thank God I'm not That Old to remember it myself though.
you need a gold plated magic marker, and you need to demagnetize it.
of course, on a literal basis, if somebody pays $300 for a gold plated AC plug and thinks it makes it sound better, then if does sound better, to him. The rest of us are sadly unable to appreciate the improvement, because we are stuck on the material plane. we can't do objective analysis of his mental processes. listening to music is all about emotions and other such intangibles; if you're sitting there doing fourier analysis of the waveforms from the speaker and judging how accurate they are, you're not really enjoying it. or: ignorance is bliss. expensive, but bliss.
You see things sometimes in equipment that makes you go "?" For instance, decoupling capacitors for the power supply outputs, but instead of putting them on the actual boards, they put them all back on the power supply board so that the inductance of the wiring to the boards would fight them, ?
indeed; in what we use for atmosphere over here, phono connectors and the like become low grade semiconductors after a year. phono connectors are my candidate for the optimally worst connector, anyway. but the gold plating needs to be sufficiently thick as to make a difference other than visually. heck, just solder the damn cables to the equipment, make more difference than any high performance connectors, and how often do you connect and disconnect them anyway?
digital stuff generates so much switching noise, that can get picked up on the analog side and have bad effects. A trick from the earliest days of hotrodding cd players was just to move the audio parts out from the whole digital end, with their own power supply.
Why do you think that "anyone out there that we encounter is very likely to be even more aggressive" than humans? D'you realize that a remarkable thing about people is not how aggressive people are, but rather how well people actually get along? Pretty much only colony insects are as capable of getting along as we are. It is not aggressiveness that makes humans globally dominant.
When technology has advanced to the point where an INDIVIDUAL has the power to bring down the entire planetary civilization (and I'd argue that we are at that point right now), low aggression seems like a rather key survival trait. I'd argue that a civilization that has survived longer than us is probably FAR less aggressive, FAR more willing to take the long view, and FAR more willing to work out cooperative everyone-wins solutions rather than indulging in exploitative zero-sum behavior.
--PM
Exactly. The average wild animal probably encounters more violence in a day than the average human does in a year.
Hawkings, one could argue is out of his league on many topics and/or issues he has opinions about. But seems to always get the media attention he doesn't deserve. There is no exception here. Move along.
We need the papers to report on what athletes and actors think.
well then it won't become a polite society.
800 volts on the plates of all those old heathkit transmitters using 6146 tubes. 3000 on most linear amps. ooh, and dig those metal-ceramic power tubes with beryllium oxide ceramics, or the insulator blocks for conducted cooling tubes being beryllium oxide.
or hunting. those .22 rifles can put an eye out!
scouting, perhaps? axes, knives, and pack saws, not to mention building fires.
I won't even start with farm kids, all those types of poo, power take-offs, barn roofs, tools, welders...
and this texting and Facebook thing, well, get somebody riled enough to punch you into Jello.
there is always a way for a kid to get into trouble. don't leave them to the TV, be around and guide them.
The great classic: the ubiquitous tube-type radio found in every kitchen, the "all-American five", which featured one lug of the unpolarized power plug directly connected to the metal chassis; normally situated where it was nice and handy to grab with one hand while turning the tap on and off with the other.
When it says "the most dangerous toy" I laughed thinking this product never disabled kids or sent them to the hospital like LAWN DARTS (Jarts) which was responsible for 1000's of injures and even disabilities... don't know if any one died but this toy was certainly much more dangerous that the kits described in the article.
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/7...
Especially the scare-mongering over depleted uranium being somehow seen as more toxic than lead is entirely political theater ungrounded in any science.
Not all heavy metal poisoning is the same.
Why, you must be mad as a hatter.
Once again, slashcode blows goats. Instead of Beta, how about we get the ability to edit posts?
You don't have to go far - just take the americium for a smoke detector and you've got a radiation source.
The most stable isotope of americium (243) has a half-life of 7370 years, so barely radioactive (not sure what they use in smoke detectors, but even 242 has a half-life of 141 years and thus isn't exactly hot.
Uranium 238, which is the vast majority of natural uranium (and basically all of "depleted" uranium) has a half-life of 4.47 billion years. No one rational is afraid of it's radioactivity - it's entirely scare-mongering. This is why no one cares about the uranium in granite countertops. Especially the scare-mongering over depleted uranium being somehow seen as more toxic than lead is entirely political theater ungrounded in any science.
Depleted Uranium, mainly U238, is primarily a source of alpha particles, which are not very penetrating and even skin will keep you relatively safe. The subatomic version of somebody chucking bricks at you, as opposed to shooting you with bullets (beta particles) or lasers (gamma rays).
However, once internalized by the body, it can directly irradiate lung tissue or your digestive epithelium, both of which are highly susceptible to carcinogenesis. Thus the dangers of depleted uranium weapons are embedded fragments to some degree, but more importantly inhalation of uranium dust, and/or uranium oxide smoke. In that this hasn't been a serious public health concern for too long, we don't have a really large background of studies, and the epidemiological studies on humans have a hard time calibrating how much exposure the person may have had; nobody's measuring the uranium content of the smoke on the battlefield. At this point the data is largely exploratory. http://www.ehjournal.net/conte...
I guess unless you like having tumors.
At first I didn't like the idea of having tumors, but it's growing on me.
The Fleetwood Mac album?
From wikipedia: "The major natural source of radioactivity in plant tissue is potassium: 0.0117% of the naturally-occurring potassium is the unstable isotope potassium-40 (40K). This isotope decays with a half-life of about 1.25 billion years (4×1016 seconds), and therefore the radioactivity of natural potassium is about 31 Bq/g – meaning that, in one gram of the element, about 31 atoms will decay every second.[2][3] Plants naturally contain other radioactive isotopes, such as carbon-14 (14C), but their contribution to the total activity is much smaller.[citation needed] Since a typical banana contains about half a gram of potassium,[4] it will have an activity of roughly 15 Bq.[5] Although the amount in a single banana is small in environmental and medical terms, the radioactivity from a truckload of bananas is capable of causing a false alarm when passed through a Radiation Portal Monitor used to detect possible smuggling of nuclear material at U.S. ports."
The potassium in our bodies represents ~ 5,000 Bq of K40.
Carrying it in your pocket could become the latest birth control technique :-)
is that radioactivity in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?
You can get some for free if you want to take a trip. Right outside of Moab, UT is an old Uranium Mine. There's a tailings pile nearby and you can pick up a piece of it. It's mostly combined in other rocks and has very little radioactivity. It's not the refined, ultra-pure stuff, 5 minutes of exposure will kill you type; that's what they did with all the other stuff they didn't think was crap.
NOTE: While it's not VERY radioactive is still IS radioactive. Don't plan a long camping trip there, or decide carry a piece of it around in your pocket. Ummm... I guess unless you like having tumors.
Probably how Saddam got his WMDs.
You don't have to go far - just take the americium for a smoke detector and you've got a radiation source.
Or you can buy it from the US Atomic Energy Commission for $1500 per gram. Or you can order (really) small amounts online, exempt from USNRC and State licensing. They produce sufficient count-rate to check survey meters or conduct most nuclear science experiments in normal lab periods using standard Geiger Mueller counters or scintillation detectors, yet low enough so as not to present any radiation hazard.
Or you can order directly from the government. Now that I've done all those searches for "radioisotopes for sale" I'm probably on a few watch lists :-)
Yeah; and americium is not trivial.
And of course the Gilbert chemistry sets with potassium cyanide. I remember when we were requested to bring it to the local fire department to dispose of. As an indication of how innocent I was then, I actually complied.
It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from ... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.
In case you missed the previous thousand posts, 1)there is more and more stuff around, cheaper and cheaper 2)at the same time as fewer and fewer people are working 3)also we have robots now whose productivity is pretty high and need very few humans involved
The cost of that is not particular burdensome
...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.
The poor are not the cause of the growing national debt. Endless wars, defense spending, and corporate welfare make up the lion's share of the national debt.
You mean that collecting money from Americans to give to Americans who spend it in America so that other Americans collect it does not make America less wealthy? You'll never get a rightwinger to agree with that.
For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.
Day labor construction, for example. A robot that could do framing for a house unsupervised would have to be extremely sophisticated and expensive; a human to do it can be extremely unsophisticated and inexpensive.
Of course, this represents the difference between the way we mass produce cars, and the way we mass produce houses. If a car was built by a truck dumping a bunch of sheet metal and other hardware in your driveway and then a crew swarmed over it for a month, cars would cost as much as a house and be as unreliable, but the business of automobile construction would still be the province of humans, not robots. On the other hand, if houses were all built as prefabs in factories and sent to be setup on site, they could be assembled by robots and would cost less than $100K (not including the real estate).