The uses go way beyond windshields. How about full-length transparent SWAT shields? If it'll take a.50-cal, should be more than safe enough.
As long as you consider a crushed wrist to be "safe"... The force of the bullet doesn't just disappear when it hits the shield. It will be transferred into whatever is holding the shield -- in this case, somebody's hand. Bye bye hand.
Higher frequencies have shorter wavelengths and are much more directional.
Yes, but your point is? There are sound cancellation systems in service which operate over the entire audible range. So clearly this is possible. As you said, latency is not necessarily a problem. So the cancellation may occur within a specific volume, not everywhere, but that's fine as long as the destructive interference occurs near the listener's ear.
My point is that the spectral variations of certain types of sounds are predictable and thus cancellable, not everywhere but at least in the places that matter.
The other issue is that it will only work on low pitched sounds, the lower the better. The slower the frequency, the more time you have to do the math and output your opposite signal. High frequency sounds you can pretty much forget about being able to process.
This is wrong. It's not the frequency of the sound that matters, but rather the rate of change in the spectrum. Imagine a constant, 15,000 hertz tone. Are you saying this cannot be cancelled? Of course it can. But a noise which has a rapidly and unpredictably changing spectrum cannot be cancelled unless the system is able to react faster than the signal is changing.
White noise, obviously, cannot be cancelled easily unless the system response is as fast as the fastest phasing component. But not all noise is white.
Now this is way offtopic, I know, but it irks me to hell. Please don't abuse the concept of Darwinism.
Just because an idiot's computer explodes doesn't prevent him/her from having children who are also idiots.
Similarly, it's in vogue on Fark to call Darwin on some moron who kills himself in a ridiculous fashion. Ha ha, except that if said moron has already begotten a few children, then Darwin didn't win in that case, did he?
It's only Darwinism if you're killed before you have a chance to produce offspring. "78 year old dies in fiery jet ski accident" inevitably leads to cries of "Darwin wins again!" And yet this 78 year old has 9 grandchildren. My God, people cannot grasp this concept.
The problem with people like you, however, is that you so quickly flip-flop when the parents do try and monitor/control their kids behaviour. It's people like you who scream "1984!" at any suggestion of a GPS-enabled cell phone that parents can track, or RFID school passes that make sure kids are in class, or any other tools created to help parents do exactly what you (at least for now) are demanding parents do.
I think this deserves a name -- let's call it the Slashdot Fallacy: The erroneous equation of one group of people with another group of people merely because the two groups happen to cohabitate on a certain website.
So it's the same people who are taking one position and then another? Do you have links to comments to back that up?
I hate to turn a joke into something serious (actually, I don't really), but...
Alcohol was probably discovered in its natural state, just as cannabis was. What came first -- wine or beer? Who knows for sure, but it was probably beer.
It's not really a stretch. Somebody forgot about the bowl of barley that they'd left out in the rain. A few days later, the grain was germinated, sugars were being released, and a wild yeast took hold and began fermentation. Intrigued by the heady aroma, somebody tried to drink it... And was the first person on earth to become drunk.
So, how to replicate the process? Well, just let some grain sit out in the rain. It took millenia for it to go beyond that point. But many anthropologists theorize that beer was a key factor in the formation of agrarian societies -- in order to make beer, you need a large quantity of barley, and this encouraged people to settle down and give up their nomadic ways, in order to enjoy alcohol. Alcohol essentially created modern civilization.
none of them are meant to be smoked. They are supposed to be ingested.
Leaving aside the utterly ridiculous idea that anything in the natural world is "supposed" to be a particular way, how exactly do you think the intoxicating effects of pot were discovered?
Do you think somebody one day stumbled on a cannabis plant, saw a big stinky cola bud and thought "Hey, I think I'll grind that up and throw it into my flatbread?" No. I can pretty much guarantee you that pot was discovered when people used some dried cannabis to kindle their campfire, and suddenly everybody was high.
Have you ever eaten pot? It's not something you would do twice. And it doesn't even have any effect on you unless it's been cooked. So clearly it was discovered by smoking. Is this the best way to ingest it? Probably not. Is smoking it the "wrong way" to use it? Don't be insane.
Not that I want to debunk those results or anything, but saying that two similar substances of the same kind have the same effect would also imply that ethanol and methanol would have roughly the same effect.
Interesting that you chose that analogy. Ethanol and methanol do have very similar effects on the nervous system. The fact is, methanol is not toxic any more than ethanol is toxic. The damage comes from the metabolic byproducts of methanol.
Ethanol is metabolized into acetaldehyde, a relatively innocuous byproduct. Methanol, on the other hand, is metabolized into FORMALDEHYDE. It is the formaldehyde which wreaks havoc on your body, not the methanol.
Maybe humans are responsible, but maybe not - so just change laws and lives to do something that may or may not help or even hurt? What, is this a religion now? When did rationality fly out the door?
A rational person listens to science. I made no mention of changing laws. Changing my life is something I'm perfectly willing to do. It doesn't take anything drastic.
You have no clue what is going on with the temperature of the earth - AND I CAN GUARANTEE THAT MUCH.
I do have a clue: it's rising. Anyone disputing this is simply an idiot. How can you look at the data and say "I'm simply NOT going to believe this?"
No one knows - it is a complex nonlinear system. You ever take upper level math courses? I bet not. The systems that climatologists are so sensitive to round off error that the usual computer arithmetic will be USELESS to compute the answers. This is chaos theory.
Which is precisely the reason we shouldn't be forcing the system any more than we have to. If you actually knew anything about chaos, which I doubt, you'd have heard of something called the Lyapunov exponent, which dictates how quickly the trajectory of a chaotic system diverges given infinitesimal perturbations. A chaotic system is not going to respond to forcing by doing nothing.
You have a simple-minded view of science and I'm personally very worried that opinions such as yours are being accepted by otherwise intelligent people. You're literally going to sit back and do NOTHING. Not so much as drive one mile less each day. That's astonishing.
These unpredictable changes may be changes for the better just as they may be changes for the worse.
Death may be a change for the better (heaven or somesuch), or it might be a change for the worse (an eternity of nothingness). Yet somehow, I don't want to die right now just because there's a possibility that I'll go somewhere better...
But I think even if global warming is real, it's not a big problem. We just came out of an ice age recently, I'd rather have it be more warm and cold. We'll just spend more time outdoors playing sports, enjoying the warm summer breeze, rather than freeze and shiver in the cold.
This sounds great until you realize that more atmospheric energy implies more extreme weather. And that it will shift climate zones so that regions which were once temperate become deserts, or deserts become rainforests. A shift in the atmospheric equilibrium will lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere, and more intense rains and flooding. The sudden melting of vast quantities of land-locked ice will release pressure from the earth and potentially lead to earthquakes (did you know that the island of Great Britain is slowly tilting because of the enormous weight of ice that was lifted during the last Ice Age? And that happened gently over thousands of years.)
You know, maybe humans are responsible for global warming, and maybe they're not. But it's happening, and perhaps it would be prudent to do what we can to not enhance the warming any further. Because you know, why fuck with the one planet we've got?
Look what happened with the "open standard" of Usenet. It is SO informative and so readily useful, isn't it?
Not every newsgroup is a spam shithole. rec.crafts.brewing for instance has a nearly infinite signal to noise ratio. There's only a single troll, and we all know who he is.
Why some groups attract spammers and trolls and other do not, I haven't grasped yet.
For a time, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I were seperated by a distance of about 8000 miles. We'd chat on IRC every day, patiently waiting for when our two time zones lined up and we were both awake. And once a week, we'd indulge ourselves with a half hour phone conversation.
I would have happily given up the daily contact via IRC for just a few extra minutes of voice time each week. It was infinitely more satisfying and helped us hang in there until we got back on the same continent again.
First off coding is something anybody can learn and is improved by simple practice. Now there is no "anybody else" if people would just take the effort to learn a little.
Bullshit. Anybody can learn to write "Hello, world," just like anybody can cut a tree down with an axe. But not just anybody can write a high performance 28-tap comb filter, any more than just anybody can hack a stump into a work of art with a hatchet.
Even if a person was theoretically capable of doing it themselves, it would take months or years of trial and error and experience. That's months or years that are spent on bullshit not relating to the task at hand.
But I fear for society in a world where people refuse to learn because they don't want to, instead of can't.
You fear a world where musicians don't understand signal deconvolution?
First, why are you singling out kids based on their race? Second, why are you telling these kids that race is important, and they can only look to people of the same race/color as "good role models". That is racism. Racism is not acceptable, period.
Whether you like it or not, race is an important issue in the world (I think a few people have died because of it). Sweeping the issue under the rug, refusing to discuss issues of race, and hurling the term "racist" at anyone who attempts to bring up the subject is counterproductive. You can't just sit back, stick your fingers in your ears, and holler "Blah blah, I can't hear you! Everyone is equal!"
Everybody is not fucking equal. And that sucks. And it needs to change. And it's never going to change as long as brainwashed simpletons like yourself go around berating everybody who attempts to bring up the topic. Why would a non-white person want a role model of their own race? Who knows, maybe it has something to do with the historic domination of the white race over the non-white ones throughout history.
We are not going to flip a switch and suddenly snap between a world full of racism, and one where everyone is blind to race. This transition into an enlightened world is going to take centuries, and it might not ever be complete. Accept the fact that along the way toward that lofty goal, there are going to be things like "Hispanic Business" which attempt to create communities among minority races in an effort to help elevate them into the world where whites have already had so much success.
Why does the arrangement have to be parabolic? I thought the advantage of parabolic reflectors was that they keep the signal in phase. Will the light cancel out if out of phase? If so, where does the energy go?
Sunlight is spatially coherent on a very small scale, much smaller than the size of these mirrors. So interference would not produce a fringe pattern.
As to the question of where the energy goes, it goes to a location where the interference is constructive rather than destructive. For every region where interference has reduced the wave amplitude, there must be another region where it is increased -- otherwise energy would not be conserved. Where, specifically, the constructive interference occurs obviously depends on the geometry of the particular situation.
So, a guy who famously became the richest person in the world by skipping college and leaving a technical career in favour of business is now trying to persuade people to go to college and study technology?
While it is true that some people without college degrees become incredibly successful, that's not the norm. P(Success|Graduate) is much much greater than P(Success|~Graduate).
For every Bill Gates who drops out and becomes a billionaire, there are thousands more who end up working minimum wage jobs.
Gates is smart enough to understand that his situation is not typical, and so the advice he gives is solid, not hypocritical. People who fall out of airplanes and survive (and this has happened) would probably not recommend that all people jump out of airplanes sans parachute.
2. I don't think these sorts of laws are a reasonable or effective way to deal with social problems. But the original poster (the one who was told to Fuck Off) made no mention of the law either -- he just related an incident in a store. From that, you made an assumption that may not be correct in his case, and certainly is not for mine. You unfairly simplify people's views when you assume that because they hold one idea (the idea that kids probably shouldn't be playing games like this), they must therefore hold another (the idea that we need laws to enforce this).
3. Yes, and of course, your 1st Amendment right is more important than the 1st Amendment right of whomever you're about to get a "STFU" from. Point out where I said or implied anything of the sort. Of course the guy had a right to tell him to Fuck Off.
Slashdot Mirror
I do. You're welcome to associate to it, hell, you can even sniff my traffic if you want. Anything of any real value is already going over SSH or SSL.
WEP/WPA is for tinfoil-hat wearers. If you wanted security, you would not be using wireless.
As long as you consider a crushed wrist to be "safe"... The force of the bullet doesn't just disappear when it hits the shield. It will be transferred into whatever is holding the shield -- in this case, somebody's hand. Bye bye hand.
Yes, but your point is? There are sound cancellation systems in service which operate over the entire audible range. So clearly this is possible. As you said, latency is not necessarily a problem. So the cancellation may occur within a specific volume, not everywhere, but that's fine as long as the destructive interference occurs near the listener's ear.
My point is that the spectral variations of certain types of sounds are predictable and thus cancellable, not everywhere but at least in the places that matter.
This is wrong. It's not the frequency of the sound that matters, but rather the rate of change in the spectrum. Imagine a constant, 15,000 hertz tone. Are you saying this cannot be cancelled? Of course it can. But a noise which has a rapidly and unpredictably changing spectrum cannot be cancelled unless the system is able to react faster than the signal is changing.
White noise, obviously, cannot be cancelled easily unless the system response is as fast as the fastest phasing component. But not all noise is white.
Sorry, they meant to write 2^10. Your IPv6 will be ready in 1024 years, sir. Hell, that's probably more accurate anyway.
Just because an idiot's computer explodes doesn't prevent him/her from having children who are also idiots.
Similarly, it's in vogue on Fark to call Darwin on some moron who kills himself in a ridiculous fashion. Ha ha, except that if said moron has already begotten a few children, then Darwin didn't win in that case, did he?
It's only Darwinism if you're killed before you have a chance to produce offspring. "78 year old dies in fiery jet ski accident" inevitably leads to cries of "Darwin wins again!" And yet this 78 year old has 9 grandchildren. My God, people cannot grasp this concept.
I think this deserves a name -- let's call it the Slashdot Fallacy: The erroneous equation of one group of people with another group of people merely because the two groups happen to cohabitate on a certain website.
So it's the same people who are taking one position and then another? Do you have links to comments to back that up?
Alcohol was probably discovered in its natural state, just as cannabis was. What came first -- wine or beer? Who knows for sure, but it was probably beer.
It's not really a stretch. Somebody forgot about the bowl of barley that they'd left out in the rain. A few days later, the grain was germinated, sugars were being released, and a wild yeast took hold and began fermentation. Intrigued by the heady aroma, somebody tried to drink it... And was the first person on earth to become drunk.
So, how to replicate the process? Well, just let some grain sit out in the rain. It took millenia for it to go beyond that point. But many anthropologists theorize that beer was a key factor in the formation of agrarian societies -- in order to make beer, you need a large quantity of barley, and this encouraged people to settle down and give up their nomadic ways, in order to enjoy alcohol. Alcohol essentially created modern civilization.
Leaving aside the utterly ridiculous idea that anything in the natural world is "supposed" to be a particular way, how exactly do you think the intoxicating effects of pot were discovered?
Do you think somebody one day stumbled on a cannabis plant, saw a big stinky cola bud and thought "Hey, I think I'll grind that up and throw it into my flatbread?" No. I can pretty much guarantee you that pot was discovered when people used some dried cannabis to kindle their campfire, and suddenly everybody was high.
Have you ever eaten pot? It's not something you would do twice. And it doesn't even have any effect on you unless it's been cooked. So clearly it was discovered by smoking. Is this the best way to ingest it? Probably not. Is smoking it the "wrong way" to use it? Don't be insane.
Interesting that you chose that analogy. Ethanol and methanol do have very similar effects on the nervous system. The fact is, methanol is not toxic any more than ethanol is toxic. The damage comes from the metabolic byproducts of methanol.
Ethanol is metabolized into acetaldehyde, a relatively innocuous byproduct. Methanol, on the other hand, is metabolized into FORMALDEHYDE. It is the formaldehyde which wreaks havoc on your body, not the methanol.
Well, at least it gives the Good Cop enough time to load his musket...
What did he/she say?
A rational person listens to science. I made no mention of changing laws. Changing my life is something I'm perfectly willing to do. It doesn't take anything drastic.
You have no clue what is going on with the temperature of the earth - AND I CAN GUARANTEE THAT MUCH.
I do have a clue: it's rising. Anyone disputing this is simply an idiot. How can you look at the data and say "I'm simply NOT going to believe this?"
No one knows - it is a complex nonlinear system. You ever take upper level math courses? I bet not. The systems that climatologists are so sensitive to round off error that the usual computer arithmetic will be USELESS to compute the answers. This is chaos theory.
Which is precisely the reason we shouldn't be forcing the system any more than we have to. If you actually knew anything about chaos, which I doubt, you'd have heard of something called the Lyapunov exponent, which dictates how quickly the trajectory of a chaotic system diverges given infinitesimal perturbations. A chaotic system is not going to respond to forcing by doing nothing.
You have a simple-minded view of science and I'm personally very worried that opinions such as yours are being accepted by otherwise intelligent people. You're literally going to sit back and do NOTHING. Not so much as drive one mile less each day. That's astonishing.
Death may be a change for the better (heaven or somesuch), or it might be a change for the worse (an eternity of nothingness). Yet somehow, I don't want to die right now just because there's a possibility that I'll go somewhere better...
This sounds great until you realize that more atmospheric energy implies more extreme weather. And that it will shift climate zones so that regions which were once temperate become deserts, or deserts become rainforests. A shift in the atmospheric equilibrium will lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere, and more intense rains and flooding. The sudden melting of vast quantities of land-locked ice will release pressure from the earth and potentially lead to earthquakes (did you know that the island of Great Britain is slowly tilting because of the enormous weight of ice that was lifted during the last Ice Age? And that happened gently over thousands of years.)
You know, maybe humans are responsible for global warming, and maybe they're not. But it's happening, and perhaps it would be prudent to do what we can to not enhance the warming any further. Because you know, why fuck with the one planet we've got?
Because ash tends to block the sun? This has been documented time and again for over a hundred years. Large eruptions cool the earth.
A bunch of independent, innovative companies merging into one fat bloated piece of shit megacorp over time? Yeah, sounds "Interesting."
Not every newsgroup is a spam shithole. rec.crafts.brewing for instance has a nearly infinite signal to noise ratio. There's only a single troll, and we all know who he is.
Why some groups attract spammers and trolls and other do not, I haven't grasped yet.
I would have happily given up the daily contact via IRC for just a few extra minutes of voice time each week. It was infinitely more satisfying and helped us hang in there until we got back on the same continent again.
Bullshit. Anybody can learn to write "Hello, world," just like anybody can cut a tree down with an axe. But not just anybody can write a high performance 28-tap comb filter, any more than just anybody can hack a stump into a work of art with a hatchet.
Even if a person was theoretically capable of doing it themselves, it would take months or years of trial and error and experience. That's months or years that are spent on bullshit not relating to the task at hand.
But I fear for society in a world where people refuse to learn because they don't want to, instead of can't.
You fear a world where musicians don't understand signal deconvolution?
Whether you like it or not, race is an important issue in the world (I think a few people have died because of it). Sweeping the issue under the rug, refusing to discuss issues of race, and hurling the term "racist" at anyone who attempts to bring up the subject is counterproductive. You can't just sit back, stick your fingers in your ears, and holler "Blah blah, I can't hear you! Everyone is equal!"
Everybody is not fucking equal. And that sucks. And it needs to change. And it's never going to change as long as brainwashed simpletons like yourself go around berating everybody who attempts to bring up the topic. Why would a non-white person want a role model of their own race? Who knows, maybe it has something to do with the historic domination of the white race over the non-white ones throughout history.
We are not going to flip a switch and suddenly snap between a world full of racism, and one where everyone is blind to race. This transition into an enlightened world is going to take centuries, and it might not ever be complete. Accept the fact that along the way toward that lofty goal, there are going to be things like "Hispanic Business" which attempt to create communities among minority races in an effort to help elevate them into the world where whites have already had so much success.
Sunlight is spatially coherent on a very small scale, much smaller than the size of these mirrors. So interference would not produce a fringe pattern.
As to the question of where the energy goes, it goes to a location where the interference is constructive rather than destructive. For every region where interference has reduced the wave amplitude, there must be another region where it is increased -- otherwise energy would not be conserved. Where, specifically, the constructive interference occurs obviously depends on the geometry of the particular situation.
While it is true that some people without college degrees become incredibly successful, that's not the norm. P(Success|Graduate) is much much greater than P(Success|~Graduate).
For every Bill Gates who drops out and becomes a billionaire, there are thousands more who end up working minimum wage jobs.
Gates is smart enough to understand that his situation is not typical, and so the advice he gives is solid, not hypocritical. People who fall out of airplanes and survive (and this has happened) would probably not recommend that all people jump out of airplanes sans parachute.
2. I don't think these sorts of laws are a reasonable or effective way to deal with social problems. But the original poster (the one who was told to Fuck Off) made no mention of the law either -- he just related an incident in a store. From that, you made an assumption that may not be correct in his case, and certainly is not for mine. You unfairly simplify people's views when you assume that because they hold one idea (the idea that kids probably shouldn't be playing games like this), they must therefore hold another (the idea that we need laws to enforce this).
3. Yes, and of course, your 1st Amendment right is more important than the 1st Amendment right of whomever you're about to get a "STFU" from. Point out where I said or implied anything of the sort. Of course the guy had a right to tell him to Fuck Off.
If letting people know that I believe they are behaving incorrectly makes me a prick, then I'm proud to be one.