Go buy the complete works, you can probably even find them used for less than cover price. Then you don't have to be in front of a tube to enjoy them, you aren't at the mercy of their business model, you've got higher resolution print copies, and you don't have to print and bind them yourself if you want all those advantages.
You sound like the old people who don't understand e-mail (and I'm 41, so when I say "old" it really means it). They think that they have to print out their e-mail, photos and all, in order to see it. I sent a color photo to an older relative and she asked me why I sent it to her when she doesn't have a color printer.
If you manage to locate and purchase all of Bloom County in book form, what do you do if you want to e-mail one of the cartoons to a friend. Tear out the page and scan it? How do you read the strips in chronological order? What do you do if you want to be able to see the comics at home and at work? Roll a handtruck of Bloom County books into and out of your office each day? Yeah, that'll impress the boss. While books are nice (I have a house full of them), they are not always ideal.
last step up being "Acoustic Research" OFC with arrows showing "which way 'round" to hook up the cable cable
Don't even get me started. A decade or so ago, I subscribed to a BBS called The Audiophile Network. I will never forget the "warning" that was posted by another subscriber about some interconnects being mislabelled with the arrow pointing the "wrong" direction. How did he know? He turned them around and hear a 'miraculous transformation' in the sound. Others performed the same "experiment" and, lo and behold, they also heard the supposed difference. Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes?
Perhaps I'll try some thicker wire on my speakers rather than EQing them all to hell (hey, they're homebuilt with handwound inductors in the crossover, cut me some slack!:-)
Are the inductors air core? If not, start winding again. Iron and ferrite core inductors have real non-linearity problems. Do you have level controls on the outputs from the crossover? If not, I strongly recommend them. Even if the woofer, tweeter, and mid all claim to be 90db at one watt at one meter, I'd bet that they are not. Acoustic suspension, tuned port, transmission line, folded horn, or some other design? I used to build speakers, so I really love that stuff.
I've got nothing against banana plugs per se, just that if they aren't going to be touched more than once, they're a waste, and every extra junction just provides another place for a fault and more wasted energy.
I like them because they have spring loaded pressure on multiple contact points. Spade lugs and screw terminals, on the other hand, can loosen with vibration (such as one finds in a speaker cabinet). The banana plugs are also really good when one wants to swap speakers, whether to test bookshelf speakers or to verify that a sonic anomaly (like a buzz) was actually in the recording.
It must be nice to have that sort of headroom on a system...
I like having that much power because it keeps me from blowing speakers. "Huh?" many people say. You probably know this, but for the benefit of others, the thing that normally causes speakers to blow is not too much power, it's clipping. More power = less clipping.
That said, I'm using the Hafler and at 200WRMS, it's more than sufficient. I think I prefer the sound with that, but I have not done the double-blind tests that I called for.
"Hypocrite!" they scream. No, I'm not a paid audio reviewer. I'm listening for my own pleasure. If I think an amp sounds better, whether it does or not, it's the right one for me to use. I'm not advising others on which amp to purchase. The fortunes of manufacturers and the bank accounts of listeners don't ride on my decision of which (long-out-of-production) amp I prefer.
While I applaud you for doing the math, a few points need to be brought to light:
1. If you have ten feet of speaker cable, the signal is travelling through 20 feet of wire (+ and - sides of the cable) so your numbers are off by a factor of two.
2. Speakers are not simply a resistive load. They are reactive. The lumped parameters of a cable do matter. Lumped parameters include resistance, inductance, and capacitance. Depending on the output stage of the amp, the cable can have a *measurable* effect.
3. You ignore the effect of impedence on amplifier output. As the resistance in series with the speaker increases, it makes the amplifier look more like a current source. This means the speaker frequency response will tend to follow the rise and fall of its impedance curve. (As you may know, the impedances of most speaker systems vary wildly with frequency). As wire resistance increases, it becomes significant compared to the speaker impedance. It will affect the areas of lower impedance values first and eventually will be audible. Speakers with small impedance variations versus frequency, and that don't dip below the nominal impedance, will be more tolerant of higher resistance in the speaker wire. On the other hand, speakers with large variations in impedance that dip below the nominal value will be much easier to notice. If the speaker actually had constant impedance versus frequency, the only change would be the reduced output to which you alluded.
And any normal person will find 150 watts of RMS power total overkill for anything but a sub.
My primary speakers are VMPS Super Tower/R models. They have a 4 ohm (nominal) impedence and have a -3db point of 20hz with a usable output at 20hz that hits 115db (no, I have not tested that in my home). I have two amps that I use with them (still have not decided which I prefer): A Hafler PRO2400 (a MOSFET-based design for recording studios -- not sold for home audio) and an Adcom GFA-555. The former is capable of pumping 200 watts RMS into four ohms while the latter will do 325. I use heavy speaker cables with banana plugs at each end and find that they are extremely flexible and easy to work with. But, no, I did not spend huge sums of money on them. I got some decent speaker wire and attached some good quality banana plugs.
So, while I basically agree with your conclusions about the suitability of garden-variety wire being suitable for speakers, for those using 4 ohm speakers with ten or more feet of cable, I'd recommend getting 16AWG cable (or thicker). But the "magic" cables are superior when your goal is to get money from gullible audiophiles.
Yes, I know it. I have read some of their writings on lossy compression and also understand human psychology. How the **** do you propose testing for preconceived notions by using a control group? Do control groups give you the ability to read minds?
Or just spouting superior?
Since I understand these things, I am obviously superior to you in this area.
ATRAC was heavily criticized in audio publications such as Stereophile
Stereophile refuses to perform double-blind testing and have been taken in by hoax after hoax. They swore that coloring the edge of a CD green (with a product called "CD Stoplight") improved the sound. I used to subscribe but got sick of the $400 speaker cables, magic line cords, and other unscientific "tweaks."
If Stereophile's reviewers go into a listening session and are told that they are hearing audio that has been subjected to a type of lossy compression, they have a preconceived notion that it will sound inferior. They want, desperately, to hear a difference to prove to themselves, their colleagues, and their readers that they posess both superior hearing and exquisite audio equipment. It's no way to do science and should be rejected as a methodology.
What a beautiful world. 99.99% of the U.S. population slaving away in dead-end jobs to make shiny things for rich people.
For example, find the cure to some strange cancer, and you will see the money coming in.
That's a practical suggestion. Why didn't I cure cancer last week instead of wasting my time on the computer? What a dolt I was.
If the people that own 80% of the wealth do not spend or invest their money then of course you'll have a hard time trying to make a business.
Spend: The wealthiest people save. They don't spend. The middle-class and lower spend. They are the ones that put the vast majority of their paychecks back into the U.S. economy. A rich person still only eats three meals a day, drives one car at a time, and only has two feet on which to put shoes. He's not going to buy 300 cars, 650 meals per day, or 75,000 pairs of shoes. Sure, his car, meals, and shoes will cost more, but one pair of shoes, no matter how expensive, isn't going to do much for employment.
Invest: If a rich person invests in Dell and Dell funnels that investment money into outsourced foreign labor, how much does that help the U.S. economy? If a rich person buys government bonds and the rest of us pay the rich person interest on those bonds (through our federal taxes), how does that help the economy?
Or do you thing the world economy will pay more for your works just because you where born in America?
I don't want to sell my services to the world. I want to sell them to the U.S. -- you know, the rich people you say that I should target.
Capitalism doesn't give a damn about people.
That's why we need legislation that does. Capitalism, unchecked, leads to monopolies, worker abuse, low wages, and ever-growing chasms between the have and the have-nots.
If I have to choose between a Japanise car or an American one, I'd opt for the cheapest.
So, in the U.S., we can put import tariffs on the Japanese cars and, magically, the prices are much more competitive. Now the choice is between the cheaper Ford and the more expensive Toyota.
Want proof that this works? In April of 1983, motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson was able to convince U.S. lawmakers that Japanese bikes were unfair competition for American bikes. As a result, a tariff of 45% was levied against all imported Japanese motorcycles with a displacement of over 700cc. Some of the Japanese manufacturers got around this by assembling their larger models in this country, opening up plants and employing U.S. workers. The end result was that Harley Davidson was able to remain in business, thrive, and continue to assemble motorcycles in the U.S. The same thing has happened in the auto industry, with tariffs causing many Japanese auto manufacturers to open plants in the U.S.
But the thing is you can either protect jobs or protect higher salaries but not both.
Right now, we are protecting neither. Wages are down and unemployment is up.
But I disagree with your premise. In the U.S., we have a situation that simply cannot work. According to the article, programmers in India earn between $250 and $700 per month. In most of the U.S., that won't even cover rent on a studio apartment. On top of that, the Indian workers probably have lower costs for everything from medical care to transportation. We cannot work as cheaply as they do without starving to death in the streets.
Are you telling me that prohibiting Microsoft from hiring foreign programmers would force them out of business? I doubt it. Bill Gates could probably just fit is pile of money into a mansion with lower ceilings.
But not all is lost, in the US you have credit, so use it, start your own comapny, take a risk.
Spoken like a true Republican: Spend borrowed money.
And this hypothetical business would do what? Manufacture goods to be sold to unemployed U.S. workers who lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing? Every U.S. job from the kid working at McDonald's to the guy producing Cadillacs is at risk when there is massive unemployment and little discretionary income.
they can't easily make a profit out of paying lower salaries abroad as EVERY COMPANY can do the same.
And that's the reason why we need legislation to protect American jobs. You could not even rent a studio apartment in this country for what U.S. companies pay Indian IT workers.
But I still disagree. It's one thing for a company to reluctantly turn to foreign outsourcing to remain afloat. It is quite another when they gleefully lay off U.S. workers while they are still a profitable market leader (like Dell).
Lets see. The parents assertion was that republicans are the only people passing censorship legislation.
No, your absurd assertion was that "the biggest driving force behind censorship in the past decade has been Tipper Gore". Don't try to change your argument in mid-stream. Now, I want a public admission from you that your statement was completely wrong.
The is no shortage of demand for skilled workers in the US
Did you even glance at the article or catch the evening news any time in the last year? The unemployment rate among skilled workers is the highest it has been in over a decade.
India can have as many of the $6/hour tech support jobs they want, its not going to affect us in the long run.
Again, did you even glance at the article? One quote:
"I talked about salary with a company last week, and they were paying between $30 and $35 an hour," said Donna Bradley, an IT specialist in Mesa, Ariz., who's been out of work since August 2002. "In August I was making $45 an hour."
It didn't matter; Bradley, 49, didn't get the job and is selling her house and moving to Maryland to live with her daughter while she continues to look for work.
They did work and they worked very well.
Wrong. Reagan and Bush racked up a huge national debt while spending like a drunken sailors in port. Under Reagan, the national debt increased by 2.2 trillion dollars. Bush racked up another 1.4 trillion dollars on top of that. To put that into perspective, the total national debt was $750 billion dollars at then end of the Carter administration -- 204 years after the country was founded. Reagan and Bush increased the national debt from $750 billion to $4.35 trillion dollars in just 12 years!
In essence, Reagan took out a 2.2 trillion dollar loan so that he could dump that money into the economy. It's like going on a spending spree with a credit card. You aren't richer. You might see a temporary increase in your standard of living, but you're going to be raped by interest charges.
Now Dubya is doing the same thing. He's cutting taxes while looking for ways to increase defense spending. His "Axis of Evil" is just a replacement for Reagan's "Evil Empire": An excuse to borrow money against the national debt and funnel that money into the defense sector.
It makes no sense to punish a murderer, protest a war on the grounds of humanity, and then turn around and agree that women should have the right to murder thier children without any recourse.
There were no children murdered during abortions. Anything still in the womb is a fetus and not entitled to the same protections as a person. I hereby decree it.
Silly me. I forgot that only anti-abortionists are allowed to issue decrees based on their personal beliefs and have those decrees be binding on all of society.
I don't know how you can come to this conclusion because the biggest driving force behind censorship in the past decade has been Tipper Gore, a Democrat.
Did Tipper Gore write the Child Online Protection Act? Did she sponsor the Communications Decency Act? Was she behind the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? She did not ask for censorship. She asked that the RIAA voluntarily rate CDs the way that the MPAA rates movies. Don't post if you don't know what you're talking about. It wastes people's time and spreads misinformation.
Workers prosper when corporations prosper.
How is a U.S. "worker" going to prosper when his job is being done by some guy in India?
Its simple "trickle down" economics.
Or "Voodoo Economics" as George Bush referred to it. Reagan's experiments in trickle-down economics proved that they did not work. Under Reagan's stewardship, the country saw the disparity between the wealthiest and poorest grow at an alarming rate while the national debt soared out of control.
By attaching a punishment, you discourage the smart people that don't want to get the punishment attached to the crime.
What moral right do you have to punish a woman for choosing an abortion? Are you sitting in for God on his week off? You have no 'dipstick of humanity' that you can shove up a woman's uterus to determine if what's in there is a fetus or a baby. No one needs you codifying your moral and religious beliefs into law.
As for the war on terror, how many times has Ashcroft come banging on your door to search your house? Aside from it taking 5 minutes longer to get through airport security, my freedoms are the same as they were on September 10th, 2001.
No, they are not. You may not have been detained yet, but you could be. The "war on terror" has lead to the "PATRIOT Act", a vile piece of legislation that gnaws away at all of our Constitutional rights.
Nothing. What's wrong is letting greed for an ever-higher profit leads to a company shipping U.S. jobs overseas, taking money out of the U.S. economy and leaving U.S. workers unemployed.
What makes you more worthy?
Because I'm an American. My tax dollars help support the country in which they exist. Americans have fought and died in wars to protect the economic interests of the corportations. When the government spends our tax dollars to buy goods and services, American companies want, and normally get, preferential consideration. It's even codified into federal law". American corporations have no trouble waving the flag and encouraging us to "buy American", but many of them don't seem to feel that they should reciprocate and buy American labor.
Clearly providing tech support at American wages wasnt sustainable and the positions had to move to India.
Whoa! How did you make that leap of logic?
It seems far more likely to me that corporate executives with seven figure salaries realized that that the company could make an even larger profit if it used cheap foreign labor to replace U.S. workers.
Another hint from the garment industry: Not everyone who uses child labor in sweathshops is doing so just to remain in business. Most of them are doing it out of simple greed.
There is a less extensive legislative option. It's called a "Do Not Email" list.
What about people's rights to privacy? Such legislation would force people to choose between privacy and being included on the "Do Not E-mail" list.
What happens when the "Do Not E-mail" list falls into the hands of overseas spammers (or even U.S. spammers who think that they can hide their identity)? I cannot imagine a more attractive target for a spammer; an immense list of e-mail addresses all in one place and all of the addresses on the list representing people who receive below average amounts of advertising. What's next? A public list of frail, elderly people who live alone and don't want people coming to their doors?
You have this entire thing backwards. The legislation needs to mandate an "I Accept Spam" list and to prohibit sending spam to anyone not on that list. There would be no problem with the list leaking out to spammers. In fact, it could be given to them. The number of people who wish to receive spam is far smaller than the number who do not, so the list would be shorter, less expensive to maintain and transmit, and would inconvenience fewer people with the sign-up process. The privacy issue would be almost non-existent since these are people that wish their e-mail address to be distributed to anonymous third parties. And, finally, the law would reflect the wishes of the majority of people by default. If you are are part of the vast majority who does not wish to receive spam, you would need do nothing.
While most spam is from US-based entities, these people may be able to take advantage of servers outside the US.
I get a spam. It comes from an open relay in Korea. It advertises a toll-free telephone number. I get a subpeona to find out who owns the number. I sue them.
Or perhaps, the headers reveal that the message originated in the U.S. even though the server was in Korea.
Make the advertiser responsible and that addresses the problem of overseas servers.
Agreed (except of course that the Constitution can't "hold" anything.
Check the dictionary: To assert or affirm, especially formally: This doctrine holds that people are inherently good.
And I, and many advocates of free speech, believe that such legislation shouldn't survive a court challenge based on that test.
I, too, am an advocate of free speech, so please don't portray me as being opposed to free speech simply because we disagree on this point.
By affecting everyone, regardless of whether or not they are offended by spam, it is not narrowly tailored to serve the government purpose of stopping those who don't want spam from getting it.
The purpose of such legislation would be to prevent marketers from cost-shifting to recipients and ISPs without the permission of those parties. The Central Hudson test requires that the legislation not be more extensive than is necessary. For it to fail the test, you would need to show that there is a less extensive legislative option that would accomplish the same goals.
As to your comments about those who wish to receive spam: Some small percentage of people would like to receive anonymous, obscene phone calls, but the laws prohibiting obscene phone calls do, and should, exist to protect the interests of the vast majority.
That may be true, but about 40% of the spam I get is in Asian character sets. And that's enough spam to still be annoying even if all of the spam in English went away.
Serves you right for giving your real e-mail address to hotasianchicks.com.
But seriously, I'd rather have legislation that would get rid of a large percentage of the spam even if it could not get rid of all of it.
I know I'm going to regret this, but my beliefs are as strongly held as yours are...
But I haven't seen any laws which don't also block free speech.
The Constitution and the courts have not held that freedom of speech is absolute. For instance, it is not legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater (unless there is a fire). You do not, for example, have a Constitutionally protected right to slander someone. Your freedom of speech does not mean that you can go up to a minor and tell them about your sexual fantasies. You have no right to clip into the phone wires outside my house to make long-distance calls in order to exercise your freedom of speech. You do not have a legal right to call 911 to tell them about your great new multi-level marketing site.
Laws limiting freedom of speech must simply pass the Central Hudson Test. I, and many advocates of anti-spam legislation, believe that such legislation would survive a court challenge based on this test.
It could. I don't get any spam on instant messenger, for instance.
We all agree that legislating Spam out of existance isn't going to work, due to the international design of the Internet.
No, we do not all agree. The majority of spam is "in-country" spam. That is to say that the sender is in the same country as the recipient. Some scammer trying to tell you about his "fantastic" multi-level marketing scheme is probably located in your country. Make the advertiser responsible for the mail and don't worry about whether he sent it through an open relay in Korea or paid someone in Brazil to blast it out.
Legislating child pornography out of existence hasn't worked either, but would you argue in favor of repealing existing laws? Would you argue against passing new laws that crack down on child pornographers?
A technical means to thwart spam is like the lock on your car door: You would not want car theft to be legal if the thief defeated the lock, so why do you want spam to be legal if the spammer defeats your anti-spam measures? We need to approach this problem from both a technical and a legislative means.
Apologies to everyone else for this off-topic thread (which *I* didn't start).
Nor did I start it, but if you feel that it is inappropriate, you need not participate.
And I am well aware of the Emmett Till case.
Sending a message to the LAPD not to trust them isn't exactly the same as sending a message that they hate white people, now is it?
I believe that the "message" was to all white people, not just the police. It was a message to Ron Goldman's family, Nicole Simpson's family, and the loved ones that they left behind. It has to take an extreme form of hate in order to look at the grieving families and then let the murderer go free.
Maybe the message the O.J. Jury sent wasn't "we hate white people", maybe it was "so now you know the outrage we've felt for the last 200 years".
So you feel that racial injustice in the past justifies letting murderers go free today? You believe that it is a valid reason for a juror to vote "not guilty" when they know in their heart that the man on trial committed a brutal double homicide?
Sorry, but I don't believe that it is morally acceptable to let a brutal murderer go free in order to 'send a message' to a police department.
No. I'm not one of the people that let a brutal murderer go just because I hated white cops.
Perhaps you are not old enough t remember the OJ Simpson trial. Read up on it and you will learn that Simpson's attorney, Johnnie Cochran, called on the jury to "send the message" to the LAPD that the black community did not trust them. He didn't ask the jury to consider the evidence and they did not. Despite having a mountain of evidence presented over a period of months, the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in only four hours. As Simpson's own attorney, Robert Shapiro, later told Barbara Walters, "not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck."
The jury was motivated by racial hatred. How does my pointing that well-accepted-fact out make me a racist? Better luck next time at impressing everyone with your faux enlightened observations.
If OJ's isotoner gloves had these, he'd be in jail now.
No he wouldn't. You could have shown that jury a slow-motion videotape of OJ hacking Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman to death and they would still have found OJ innocent. They were presented with DNA evidence, for God's sake, and they even ignored and/or failed to understand that.
The overwelmingly black jury was more interested in trying to "send a message" about how much they hated white people than they were in seeing that a brutal murderer was put in prison where he belongs.
The embedded systems market. I've worked on embedded systems that have CPUs that are older than many Slashdot readers -- and many of those systems are still in use.
Not so much painting Democrats, as pointing out that sometimes election fraud is real. Tho by now I don't recall what the original post that brought this to mind was about:)
Allow me to refresh your memory:
Since when has that been a problem with Democrats? Heck, tell 'em you're an illegal alien and they might let you vote twice.
Actually, no, it WAS 3000 individuals in the Butte incident, not just one ballot-box stuffer (it was a purely union town, and when the miners' union said jump, everyone asked how high on the way up -- likely also how they got 3000 people to participate.)
Then I stand corrected on that part, but that is no reason to paint all Democrats as being evil. It was not modus-operandi for Democrats everywhere in the country. It was some bunch of backwoods, uneducated minors engaging in a criminal activity.
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Go buy the complete works, you can probably even find them used for less than cover price. Then you don't have to be in front of a tube to enjoy them, you aren't at the mercy of their business model, you've got higher resolution print copies, and you don't have to print and bind them yourself if you want all those advantages.
You sound like the old people who don't understand e-mail (and I'm 41, so when I say "old" it really means it). They think that they have to print out their e-mail, photos and all, in order to see it. I sent a color photo to an older relative and she asked me why I sent it to her when she doesn't have a color printer.
If you manage to locate and purchase all of Bloom County in book form, what do you do if you want to e-mail one of the cartoons to a friend. Tear out the page and scan it? How do you read the strips in chronological order? What do you do if you want to be able to see the comics at home and at work? Roll a handtruck of Bloom County books into and out of your office each day? Yeah, that'll impress the boss. While books are nice (I have a house full of them), they are not always ideal.
last step up being "Acoustic Research" OFC with arrows showing "which way 'round" to hook up the cable cable
:-)
Don't even get me started. A decade or so ago, I subscribed to a BBS called The Audiophile Network. I will never forget the "warning" that was posted by another subscriber about some interconnects being mislabelled with the arrow pointing the "wrong" direction. How did he know? He turned them around and hear a 'miraculous transformation' in the sound. Others performed the same "experiment" and, lo and behold, they also heard the supposed difference. Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes?
Perhaps I'll try some thicker wire on my speakers rather than EQing them all to hell (hey, they're homebuilt with handwound inductors in the crossover, cut me some slack!
Are the inductors air core? If not, start winding again. Iron and ferrite core inductors have real non-linearity problems. Do you have level controls on the outputs from the crossover? If not, I strongly recommend them. Even if the woofer, tweeter, and mid all claim to be 90db at one watt at one meter, I'd bet that they are not. Acoustic suspension, tuned port, transmission line, folded horn, or some other design? I used to build speakers, so I really love that stuff.
I've got nothing against banana plugs per se, just that if they aren't going to be touched more than once, they're a waste, and every extra junction just provides another place for a fault and more wasted energy.
I like them because they have spring loaded pressure on multiple contact points. Spade lugs and screw terminals, on the other hand, can loosen with vibration (such as one finds in a speaker cabinet). The banana plugs are also really good when one wants to swap speakers, whether to test bookshelf speakers or to verify that a sonic anomaly (like a buzz) was actually in the recording.
It must be nice to have that sort of headroom on a system...
I like having that much power because it keeps me from blowing speakers. "Huh?" many people say. You probably know this, but for the benefit of others, the thing that normally causes speakers to blow is not too much power, it's clipping. More power = less clipping.
That said, I'm using the Hafler and at 200WRMS, it's more than sufficient. I think I prefer the sound with that, but I have not done the double-blind tests that I called for.
"Hypocrite!" they scream. No, I'm not a paid audio reviewer. I'm listening for my own pleasure. If I think an amp sounds better, whether it does or not, it's the right one for me to use. I'm not advising others on which amp to purchase. The fortunes of manufacturers and the bank accounts of listeners don't ride on my decision of which (long-out-of-production) amp I prefer.
While I applaud you for doing the math, a few points need to be brought to light:
1. If you have ten feet of speaker cable, the signal is travelling through 20 feet of wire (+ and - sides of the cable) so your numbers are off by a factor of two.
2. Speakers are not simply a resistive load. They are reactive. The lumped parameters of a cable do matter. Lumped parameters include resistance, inductance, and capacitance. Depending on the output stage of the amp, the cable can have a *measurable* effect.
3. You ignore the effect of impedence on amplifier output. As the resistance in series with the speaker increases, it makes the amplifier look more like a current source. This means the speaker frequency response will tend to follow the rise and fall of its impedance curve. (As you may know, the impedances of most speaker systems vary wildly with frequency). As wire resistance increases, it becomes significant compared to the speaker impedance. It will affect the areas of lower impedance values first and eventually will be audible. Speakers with small impedance variations versus frequency, and that don't dip below the nominal impedance, will be more tolerant of higher resistance in the speaker wire. On the other hand, speakers with large variations in impedance that dip below the nominal value will be much easier to notice. If the speaker actually had constant impedance versus frequency, the only change would be the reduced output to which you alluded.
And any normal person will find 150 watts of RMS power total overkill for anything but a sub.
My primary speakers are VMPS Super Tower/R models. They have a 4 ohm (nominal) impedence and have a -3db point of 20hz with a usable output at 20hz that hits 115db (no, I have not tested that in my home). I have two amps that I use with them (still have not decided which I prefer): A Hafler PRO2400 (a MOSFET-based design for recording studios -- not sold for home audio) and an Adcom GFA-555. The former is capable of pumping 200 watts RMS into four ohms while the latter will do 325. I use heavy speaker cables with banana plugs at each end and find that they are extremely flexible and easy to work with. But, no, I did not spend huge sums of money on them. I got some decent speaker wire and attached some good quality banana plugs.
So, while I basically agree with your conclusions about the suitability of garden-variety wire being suitable for speakers, for those using 4 ohm speakers with ten or more feet of cable, I'd recommend getting 16AWG cable (or thicker). But the "magic" cables are superior when your goal is to get money from gullible audiophiles.
You know this, tested it with a control group?
Yes, I know it. I have read some of their writings on lossy compression and also understand human psychology. How the **** do you propose testing for preconceived notions by using a control group? Do control groups give you the ability to read minds?
Or just spouting superior?
Since I understand these things, I am obviously superior to you in this area.
ATRAC was heavily criticized in audio publications such as Stereophile
Stereophile refuses to perform double-blind testing and have been taken in by hoax after hoax. They swore that coloring the edge of a CD green (with a product called "CD Stoplight") improved the sound. I used to subscribe but got sick of the $400 speaker cables, magic line cords, and other unscientific "tweaks."
If Stereophile's reviewers go into a listening session and are told that they are hearing audio that has been subjected to a type of lossy compression, they have a preconceived notion that it will sound inferior. They want, desperately, to hear a difference to prove to themselves, their colleagues, and their readers that they posess both superior hearing and exquisite audio equipment. It's no way to do science and should be rejected as a methodology.
For example, do something the rich need.
What a beautiful world. 99.99% of the U.S. population slaving away in dead-end jobs to make shiny things for rich people.
For example, find the cure to some strange cancer, and you will see the money coming in.
That's a practical suggestion. Why didn't I cure cancer last week instead of wasting my time on the computer? What a dolt I was.
If the people that own 80% of the wealth do not spend or invest their money then of course you'll have a hard time trying to make a business.
Spend: The wealthiest people save. They don't spend. The middle-class and lower spend. They are the ones that put the vast majority of their paychecks back into the U.S. economy. A rich person still only eats three meals a day, drives one car at a time, and only has two feet on which to put shoes. He's not going to buy 300 cars, 650 meals per day, or 75,000 pairs of shoes. Sure, his car, meals, and shoes will cost more, but one pair of shoes, no matter how expensive, isn't going to do much for employment.
Invest: If a rich person invests in Dell and Dell funnels that investment money into outsourced foreign labor, how much does that help the U.S. economy? If a rich person buys government bonds and the rest of us pay the rich person interest on those bonds (through our federal taxes), how does that help the economy?
Or do you thing the world economy will pay more for your works just because you where born in America?
I don't want to sell my services to the world. I want to sell them to the U.S. -- you know, the rich people you say that I should target.
Capitalism doesn't give a damn about people.
That's why we need legislation that does. Capitalism, unchecked, leads to monopolies, worker abuse, low wages, and ever-growing chasms between the have and the have-nots.
If I have to choose between a Japanise car or an American one, I'd opt for the cheapest.
So, in the U.S., we can put import tariffs on the Japanese cars and, magically, the prices are much more competitive. Now the choice is between the cheaper Ford and the more expensive Toyota.
Want proof that this works? In April of 1983, motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson was able to convince U.S. lawmakers that Japanese bikes were unfair competition for American bikes. As a result, a tariff of 45% was levied against all imported Japanese motorcycles with a displacement of over 700cc. Some of the Japanese manufacturers got around this by assembling their larger models in this country, opening up plants and employing U.S. workers. The end result was that Harley Davidson was able to remain in business, thrive, and continue to assemble motorcycles in the U.S. The same thing has happened in the auto industry, with tariffs causing many Japanese auto manufacturers to open plants in the U.S.
But the thing is you can either protect jobs or protect higher salaries but not both.
Right now, we are protecting neither. Wages are down and unemployment is up.
But I disagree with your premise. In the U.S., we have a situation that simply cannot work. According to the article, programmers in India earn between $250 and $700 per month. In most of the U.S., that won't even cover rent on a studio apartment. On top of that, the Indian workers probably have lower costs for everything from medical care to transportation. We cannot work as cheaply as they do without starving to death in the streets.
Are you telling me that prohibiting Microsoft from hiring foreign programmers would force them out of business? I doubt it. Bill Gates could probably just fit is pile of money into a mansion with lower ceilings.
But not all is lost, in the US you have credit, so use it, start your own comapny, take a risk.
Spoken like a true Republican: Spend borrowed money.
And this hypothetical business would do what? Manufacture goods to be sold to unemployed U.S. workers who lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing? Every U.S. job from the kid working at McDonald's to the guy producing Cadillacs is at risk when there is massive unemployment and little discretionary income.
Don't be a fool
I'm not a fool, but apparently you may be.
they can't easily make a profit out of paying lower salaries abroad as EVERY COMPANY can do the same.
And that's the reason why we need legislation to protect American jobs. You could not even rent a studio apartment in this country for what U.S. companies pay Indian IT workers.
But I still disagree. It's one thing for a company to reluctantly turn to foreign outsourcing to remain afloat. It is quite another when they gleefully lay off U.S. workers while they are still a profitable market leader (like Dell).
No, your absurd assertion was that "the biggest driving force behind censorship in the past decade has been Tipper Gore". Don't try to change your argument in mid-stream. Now, I want a public admission from you that your statement was completely wrong.
The is no shortage of demand for skilled workers in the US
Did you even glance at the article or catch the evening news any time in the last year? The unemployment rate among skilled workers is the highest it has been in over a decade.
India can have as many of the $6/hour tech support jobs they want, its not going to affect us in the long run.
Again, did you even glance at the article? One quote: They did work and they worked very well.
Wrong. Reagan and Bush racked up a huge national debt while spending like a drunken sailors in port. Under Reagan, the national debt increased by 2.2 trillion dollars. Bush racked up another 1.4 trillion dollars on top of that. To put that into perspective, the total national debt was $750 billion dollars at then end of the Carter administration -- 204 years after the country was founded. Reagan and Bush increased the national debt from $750 billion to $4.35 trillion dollars in just 12 years!
In essence, Reagan took out a 2.2 trillion dollar loan so that he could dump that money into the economy. It's like going on a spending spree with a credit card. You aren't richer. You might see a temporary increase in your standard of living, but you're going to be raped by interest charges.
Now Dubya is doing the same thing. He's cutting taxes while looking for ways to increase defense spending. His "Axis of Evil" is just a replacement for Reagan's "Evil Empire": An excuse to borrow money against the national debt and funnel that money into the defense sector.
It makes no sense to punish a murderer, protest a war on the grounds of humanity, and then turn around and agree that women should have the right to murder thier children without any recourse.
There were no children murdered during abortions. Anything still in the womb is a fetus and not entitled to the same protections as a person. I hereby decree it.
Silly me. I forgot that only anti-abortionists are allowed to issue decrees based on their personal beliefs and have those decrees be binding on all of society.
I don't know how you can come to this conclusion because the biggest driving force behind censorship in the past decade has been Tipper Gore, a Democrat.
Did Tipper Gore write the Child Online Protection Act? Did she sponsor the Communications Decency Act? Was she behind the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? She did not ask for censorship. She asked that the RIAA voluntarily rate CDs the way that the MPAA rates movies. Don't post if you don't know what you're talking about. It wastes people's time and spreads misinformation.
Workers prosper when corporations prosper.
How is a U.S. "worker" going to prosper when his job is being done by some guy in India?
Its simple "trickle down" economics.
Or "Voodoo Economics" as George Bush referred to it. Reagan's experiments in trickle-down economics proved that they did not work. Under Reagan's stewardship, the country saw the disparity between the wealthiest and poorest grow at an alarming rate while the national debt soared out of control.
By attaching a punishment, you discourage the smart people that don't want to get the punishment attached to the crime.
What moral right do you have to punish a woman for choosing an abortion? Are you sitting in for God on his week off? You have no 'dipstick of humanity' that you can shove up a woman's uterus to determine if what's in there is a fetus or a baby. No one needs you codifying your moral and religious beliefs into law.
As for the war on terror, how many times has Ashcroft come banging on your door to search your house? Aside from it taking 5 minutes longer to get through airport security, my freedoms are the same as they were on September 10th, 2001.
No, they are not. You may not have been detained yet, but you could be. The "war on terror" has lead to the "PATRIOT Act", a vile piece of legislation that gnaws away at all of our Constitutional rights.
So what's wrong with making a profit?
Nothing. What's wrong is letting greed for an ever-higher profit leads to a company shipping U.S. jobs overseas, taking money out of the U.S. economy and leaving U.S. workers unemployed.
What makes you more worthy?
Because I'm an American. My tax dollars help support the country in which they exist. Americans have fought and died in wars to protect the economic interests of the corportations. When the government spends our tax dollars to buy goods and services, American companies want, and normally get, preferential consideration. It's even codified into federal law". American corporations have no trouble waving the flag and encouraging us to "buy American", but many of them don't seem to feel that they should reciprocate and buy American labor.
Clearly providing tech support at American wages wasnt sustainable and the positions had to move to India.
Whoa! How did you make that leap of logic?
It seems far more likely to me that corporate executives with seven figure salaries realized that that the company could make an even larger profit if it used cheap foreign labor to replace U.S. workers.
Another hint from the garment industry: Not everyone who uses child labor in sweathshops is doing so just to remain in business. Most of them are doing it out of simple greed.
There is a less extensive legislative option. It's called a "Do Not Email" list.
What about people's rights to privacy? Such legislation would force people to choose between privacy and being included on the "Do Not E-mail" list.
What happens when the "Do Not E-mail" list falls into the hands of overseas spammers (or even U.S. spammers who think that they can hide their identity)? I cannot imagine a more attractive target for a spammer; an immense list of e-mail addresses all in one place and all of the addresses on the list representing people who receive below average amounts of advertising. What's next? A public list of frail, elderly people who live alone and don't want people coming to their doors?
You have this entire thing backwards. The legislation needs to mandate an "I Accept Spam" list and to prohibit sending spam to anyone not on that list. There would be no problem with the list leaking out to spammers. In fact, it could be given to them. The number of people who wish to receive spam is far smaller than the number who do not, so the list would be shorter, less expensive to maintain and transmit, and would inconvenience fewer people with the sign-up process. The privacy issue would be almost non-existent since these are people that wish their e-mail address to be distributed to anonymous third parties. And, finally, the law would reflect the wishes of the majority of people by default. If you are are part of the vast majority who does not wish to receive spam, you would need do nothing.
While most spam is from US-based entities, these people may be able to take advantage of servers outside the US.
I get a spam.
It comes from an open relay in Korea.
It advertises a toll-free telephone number.
I get a subpeona to find out who owns the number.
I sue them.
Or perhaps, the headers reveal that the message originated in the U.S. even though the server was in Korea.
Make the advertiser responsible and that addresses the problem of overseas servers.
Agreed (except of course that the Constitution can't "hold" anything.
Check the dictionary: To assert or affirm, especially formally: This doctrine holds that people are inherently good.
And I, and many advocates of free speech, believe that such legislation shouldn't survive a court challenge based on that test.
I, too, am an advocate of free speech, so please don't portray me as being opposed to free speech simply because we disagree on this point.
By affecting everyone, regardless of whether or not they are offended by spam, it is not narrowly tailored to serve the government purpose of stopping those who don't want spam from getting it.
The purpose of such legislation would be to prevent marketers from cost-shifting to recipients and ISPs without the permission of those parties. The Central Hudson test requires that the legislation not be more extensive than is necessary. For it to fail the test, you would need to show that there is a less extensive legislative option that would accomplish the same goals.
As to your comments about those who wish to receive spam: Some small percentage of people would like to receive anonymous, obscene phone calls, but the laws prohibiting obscene phone calls do, and should, exist to protect the interests of the vast majority.
That may be true, but about 40% of the spam I get is in Asian character sets. And that's enough spam to still be annoying even if all of the spam in English went away.
Serves you right for giving your real e-mail address to hotasianchicks.com.
But seriously, I'd rather have legislation that would get rid of a large percentage of the spam even if it could not get rid of all of it.
I know I'm going to regret this, but my beliefs are as strongly held as yours are...
But I haven't seen any laws which don't also block free speech.
The Constitution and the courts have not held that freedom of speech is absolute. For instance, it is not legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater (unless there is a fire). You do not, for example, have a Constitutionally protected right to slander someone. Your freedom of speech does not mean that you can go up to a minor and tell them about your sexual fantasies. You have no right to clip into the phone wires outside my house to make long-distance calls in order to exercise your freedom of speech. You do not have a legal right to call 911 to tell them about your great new multi-level marketing site.
Laws limiting freedom of speech must simply pass the Central Hudson Test. I, and many advocates of anti-spam legislation, believe that such legislation would survive a court challenge based on this test.
It could. I don't get any spam on instant messenger, for instance.
I have.
We all agree that legislating Spam out of existance isn't going to work, due to the international design of the Internet.
No, we do not all agree. The majority of spam is "in-country" spam. That is to say that the sender is in the same country as the recipient. Some scammer trying to tell you about his "fantastic" multi-level marketing scheme is probably located in your country. Make the advertiser responsible for the mail and don't worry about whether he sent it through an open relay in Korea or paid someone in Brazil to blast it out.
Legislating child pornography out of existence hasn't worked either, but would you argue in favor of repealing existing laws? Would you argue against passing new laws that crack down on child pornographers?
A technical means to thwart spam is like the lock on your car door: You would not want car theft to be legal if the thief defeated the lock, so why do you want spam to be legal if the spammer defeats your anti-spam measures? We need to approach this problem from both a technical and a legislative means.
Apologies to everyone else for this off-topic thread (which *I* didn't start).
Nor did I start it, but if you feel that it is inappropriate, you need not participate.
And I am well aware of the Emmett Till case.
Sending a message to the LAPD not to trust them isn't exactly the same as sending a message that they hate white people, now is it?
I believe that the "message" was to all white people, not just the police. It was a message to Ron Goldman's family, Nicole Simpson's family, and the loved ones that they left behind. It has to take an extreme form of hate in order to look at the grieving families and then let the murderer go free.
Maybe the message the O.J. Jury sent wasn't "we hate white people", maybe it was "so now you know the outrage we've felt for the last 200 years".
So you feel that racial injustice in the past justifies letting murderers go free today? You believe that it is a valid reason for a juror to vote "not guilty" when they know in their heart that the man on trial committed a brutal double homicide?
Sorry, but I don't believe that it is morally acceptable to let a brutal murderer go free in order to 'send a message' to a police department.
Gee, you're not a racist, are you?
No. I'm not one of the people that let a brutal murderer go just because I hated white cops.
Perhaps you are not old enough t remember the OJ Simpson trial. Read up on it and you will learn that Simpson's attorney, Johnnie Cochran, called on the jury to "send the message" to the LAPD that the black community did not trust them. He didn't ask the jury to consider the evidence and they did not. Despite having a mountain of evidence presented over a period of months, the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in only four hours. As Simpson's own attorney, Robert Shapiro, later told Barbara Walters, "not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck."
The jury was motivated by racial hatred. How does my pointing that well-accepted-fact out make me a racist? Better luck next time at impressing everyone with your faux enlightened observations.
If OJ's isotoner gloves had these, he'd be in jail now.
No he wouldn't. You could have shown that jury a slow-motion videotape of OJ hacking Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman to death and they would still have found OJ innocent. They were presented with DNA evidence, for God's sake, and they even ignored and/or failed to understand that.
The overwelmingly black jury was more interested in trying to "send a message" about how much they hated white people than they were in seeing that a brutal murderer was put in prison where he belongs.
Who's going to use the same processor forever?
The embedded systems market. I've worked on embedded systems that have CPUs that are older than many Slashdot readers -- and many of those systems are still in use.
Allow me to refresh your memory:
Actually, no, it WAS 3000 individuals in the Butte incident, not just one ballot-box stuffer (it was a purely union town, and when the miners' union said jump, everyone asked how high on the way up -- likely also how they got 3000 people to participate.)
Then I stand corrected on that part, but that is no reason to paint all Democrats as being evil. It was not modus-operandi for Democrats everywhere in the country. It was some bunch of backwoods, uneducated minors engaging in a criminal activity.