Frankly I really don't care. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume she's reached puberty. Maybe I'm wrong but it isn't the impression that I got from reading his comment.
In which case, it's up to him and her (or her and him) and everyone else (except perhaps their respective families) should fuck right off. Sex is a very personal and private thing and is no business of the state.
I know this doesn't jive with current American mores but I'm past the point of caring. I'm just so sick of it all.:(
You're looking too far into this. The goal and effect of irrational sexual legislation is to promote hysteria, and instill a sense of guilt into young people. The religious nuts can't burn us anymore (legally), so they use the legal system to promote their sick, twisted views of humanity. It is the same reason they abhor sexual education in schools - they would rather teenagers die of STDs than fuck outside of marriage.
Using the logic of these laws, we should charge any child who has seen him/herself naked with possesion of kiddie porn.
Don't laugh. It is a sick society we live in - tolerant of bloodshed, violent TV and movies, celebrations of war and police brutality. We fear nudity and we fear sex. It is not inconceivable that one day we will be forced by the religious fundamentalists to wear clothing to conceal ourselves from each other (sound familiar?) or even ourselves.
Note that the law makes absolutely no distinction between pictures depicting an 8 year old, and pictures depicting a 16 year old.
There's a reason for that: it is not relevant.
The purpose of sexual hysteria laws is to cause hysteria - by causing hysteria, you turn otherwise healthy, normal people against each other. People who fight each other are easier to control, manipulate, and tax. Injecting "sense" or "reason" into such laws is counterproductive for the most vocal mouthpieces who support them (in their current state).
No need to lower it. I'd be willing to bet that nearly all of us break a half dozen laws or more each day. Just thinking about it, I can come up with about 10 infractions for me today, and those are of laws I know about. Most are of crap no sane law enforcement officer would ever do anything about, but the point is they're still on the books and they could, at any moment, decide to enforce them.
And this is my big argument against surveillance.
Often the question is asked: if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?
This ignores an entire category of people. What if you have done something wrong?
I smoke drugs with friends (occasionally), I have had sex with people (my age) when it was illegal for us to, I have consumed alcohol while under the legal drinking age, and I have cracked DVDs that I've bought to watch them. I've idled my car for longer than 5 minutes (to charge my battery), I've watched a torrent download, and I've played music at a party after 11pm.
As a potential criminal, I appreciate the fact that I can run from my crimes, and not get caught. There are far too many moralists and politicians to create a legal system that is just - or at least just enough that surveillance is safe and right to deploy.
So now I'm labeled a pure hardcore sex offender. I'm on the website here in my state, my glorious picture is up there, they put posters all around my white color suburbanite neighborhood, my neighbors who knew me couldn't believe it, the ones who didn't' saw me and pulled their kids aside like I was going to eat them alive when it was the farthest thing from the truth. I've had people spit upon my father who has a lawn business, mom who gets harrassed at her school from other teachers cause of it, my friends got hassled and dropped me like the plague. I got to see who my true friends and people were. People who were still there, still loyal, looked past my stupid mistake and realized "Hey, he did something really dumb, but he didn't rape some kid or kidnap a school bus full of girl scouts."
You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything dumb.
The people trying to convince you otherwise are sick - plain and simple. If it weren't for people like you, we wouldn't be here as a species. You are attracted to females in their sexual prime, and this makes you normal.
One must seriously question *why* it is considered wrong. Surly much of what is bad about it comes from the fact it is so illegal and taboo that the only way it can be done is in the most painful way to those involved. If it was legal, it would become a business like any other (and thus regulated, unlike the black-market crap that goes on now) and I predict that much of the secret photographing/abductions/etc would stop because they would be too costly and hard compared to the legal way.
With all due respect, I believe you misunderstand. The intent of these laws isn't entirely to protect children. It is very easy to realize when you see them being used to attack children - the very people they were supposedly created to protect.
This is one case, but there have been many, where children were charged for having sex with each other, or possessing images of people their own age.
The purpose of this law, at least to some extent, is to teach "morals" to young people. If you delay the onset of sexual maturity long enough, what results is a frustrated, easily manipulated adult populace that seeks other forms of acceptance and understanding. This is a service the church seeks to provide, and the main mouthpieces of the sexual repression crowd are religious fundamentalists.
On a side note - and I mean this not as a troll, but as an expression from the very core of my being - I truly feel that anyone involved in this case that supported the prosecution of this "child" deserves two in the chest, and one in the head.
Claiming that you fight for someone, while in fact ruining their lives (ie. Iraq) is despicable.
Moi aussi..:) This attention the "conservatives" have been paying to us is utter bullshit. It shames me our hatered for the liberals allowed them into power. I mean I hope one day to call a sovereign Quebec my country, but damn this is no way to achieve that.
As a Quebecer I can't describe how terrible it would feel to know our government used us as an excuse to damage copyright law in Canada.:(
Here's a letter I wrote in 1999 when this issue last came up:
Subject: CPCDI concern
Hello,
I am a Canadian citizen residing in Montreal, QC. I recently learned of your request for comments regarding the implementation of a Canadian version of the controversial American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), through provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI). I would like to voice my concern.
To anyone who has studied the history of the United States - from the inception of an independent democracy to the frequent creation and repeal of unjust law - the DMCA appears to be a gross perversion of both copyright law (practically, and in spirit) and the American constitution.
It seeks to impose the criminal status on individuals who would otherwise be practicing constitutionally protected freedoms, while having a questionable effect, if any, on those who are already criminals - those who wilfully violate copyright law. It allows for the criminalization of the act of making fair use (media excerpts, backup copies, transfers of ownership, research for the purpose of publishing, use under unsupported or unapproved digital devices, and others) of copyrighted material, because these fair uses can be controlled through the use of encryption.
Where formerly these would have been civil issues (contract violation), they become criminal issues.
This, as we have seen recently in the United States, has already begun to have a chilling effect on scientific research (see the cases regarding Dmitry Sklyrov, Dr. Felten, and Jon Johansen - all of whom were enguaged in previously protected activities for the good of the public). Of course, the frightening commonality in each of these cases is that the requests for prosecution were perpetrated by large media centric, for-profit corporations.
At the end of the day, many criminal acts can be prevented through proactive prosection, criminalization of related activity, and errosion of fundamental privacy.
But as a citizen of Canada, I oppose these excessive measures. To me, living in a free country means being given the choice to use tools for good or bad purposes. It is the trust instilled by the Canadian government and the Canadian people which makes this country great.
I urge the Canadian government to maintain the fair, delicate balance between copyright holders and individuals, and to remove the overbroad, anti-consumer provisions of CPDCI.
Sincerely,
etc.
I'm working on the next one right now. It's a shame we have to keep doing this.
Corrosion on the outside surface of a wire has negligible effects on the signals being carried by that wire at audio frequencies (20 - 20 KHz). If you are refering to corrosion at the connecting ends, then in a car stereo setting, the connecting ends of the wires are usually soldered to either the speaker posts or soldered to a connector... so again even in that situation, corrosion on the outside surface of the wire metal has no effect.
You've clearly never worked on a boat. Yes - in general you're right. The lifespan most consumers expect from their gear is exceeded by the time pure copper cables will last in most environments. In harsh environments, plating cables does extend their life and transmission quality over time. Terminal blocks and crimped cables are common enough.
In your second statement about electrolytics.. Electrolytic caps are used for decoupling power leads to ground mostly and they have to have a DC bias maintained on them to work.. they can only pass AC if the signal does not reverse bias the capacitor. They are almost never used in audio filtering circuits for passing audio signals.
Uh.. speaker level crossovers? There are many applications where the signal will not reverse-bias the capacitor. In cases where they do, people will often use bipolar electrolytics.
Somehow I don't believe that you really are an electrical engineer.
Agreed. Tantalum capacitors have much better performance than electrolytics in most circumstances. However, there is outstanding debate about whether the use of tantalum capacitors is ethical, as tantalum is just about the rarest element that's actually used in the electronics industry and most of the deposits are in developing countries. Accusations have been levelled that electronics manufacturers are going to inordinate lengths to secure tantalum deposits, and the people who live there are the losers (especially since the by-products of processing tantalum ore are decidedly unpleasant).
I try to avoid using tantalum capacitors in my own designs as far as possible, trying to keep to NASA's guidelines for component derating when using electrolytics. Where I need precision capacitances I design the circuit so that a ceramic NP0 or similar EIA Class 1 capacitor can be used instead. I haven't had any capacitors fail yet.
Interesting.. I've never heard that. I'll have to read up.
It sounds frustrating because the one area where tantalums are good is where neither ceramics or electrolytics are good - right around the 10uF-100uF range. Ceramics/polyproylenes are huge, electrolytics are crappy.
Also, I've got a friend who does psycho-acoustics research, and he did an interesting series of experiments a couple of years ago that indicated that systems that performed technically very well (almost perfect filter characteristics, no harmonic errors) actually were rated worse than a system that had all sorts of junk spewing out of it, when the audiophiles participating weren't told which system they were listening to...
Yes I've heard of this mythical study myself. *shrug*. There are plenty of people with tin ears and they're not hard to find. Some people prefer the sound of greater distortion, so long as it's primarily low-order. Think valve based guitar amplifiers, vs. bipolar transistors. It doesn't mean they picked the one with the lowest distortion or most accurate presentation, it means the picked the one which was most pleasing to their ear.
Speaking as an "audio dick," I feel I should come to the defense of both "solid capacitors" and gold plated speaker wire.
Firstly, gold plated speaker wire isn't gold plated to improve the capacitance or resistance properties of the wire - it's done to prevent corrosion. If you've ever heard the crackling sound an old car stereo tends to make, it's often because of corroded copper wires. It's particularly noticeable when you live near saltwater areas or in marine applications in general.
Secondly, there is no outstanding debate in the industry on whether or not polypropylene, film, or even tantalum capacitors (what they're referring to as solid, though they're probably talking about tantalums) are of superior quality to electrolytics for audio applications. Electrolytics have changing thermal characteristics, worse tolerances, and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them. Yes, these properties are measurable with the right equipment and are not generally questioned.
What we end up with is a reserve of people who cannot, under any circumstances, recover from the punishment they have received and re-integrate with society.
I'm sorry; I'm so jaded at this point in my life, I can't help but believe that this was the intent. I just think the system is failing, because they have abused it too much.
It's really simple: create classes of people that you can use as scapegoats and targets. You can't (unfairly) rule a united people, so divide them. It happens everywhere: at work, school, and in government. Find a way to split a large group of people down easily identifyable lines, and keep hammering your talking points home. One side will fear the other, and the other side will fear for their lives. As a leader, you can then step in, and provide both sides with what they "need."
On the plus side, the sex offender registry has been so damaged by abuse (adding scores of people who aren't dangerous, or even "sex" offenders), it will soon be to the point where there's no shame being on the list.
"Says here you're a sex offender."
"Yep; I pissed on my neighbor's car when he parked on my side of the lot."
Whoaaaa dude. Sorry. I didn't mean it in any particular order.
I agree with you and you are 100% right. I'm sorry, I just personally know more about the Arab-Israeli conflict than I do about genocide in Darfur and I did not mean to prioritize. It's just the first one that came to mind.
I have no idea whether Iranian police normally herd student protesters into "Free Speech" Zones well away from President Ahmadinejad, as is common practice in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) or whether the Iranian government enforces huge protest exclusion zones in Tehran, using the threat of terrorism as some kind of bizarre justification.
It's sad to see this so widely tolerated in the US. Perhaps I tend to wear rose-coloured glasses when thinking about the US as it was 10 or 20 years ago. I remember people who would never have allowed this to occur.
I was recently in an argument with someone who thought they were a good idea, for precisely the reason you gave. To protect us from the libera^H^H^Hterrorists. That they wanted to destroy the US, and these measures would prevent it.
I asked him what exactly it was about the US he felt was worth preserving, if it wasn't freedom, and the rule of law? He stood like a dear in headlights.:)
If you're using rm recursively, always type the modifier *AFTER* the path.
#rm/a/b/c -rf
If you accidentally hit enter after typing "rm/", you get "rm: cannot remove directory `/': Is a directory".
This behavior isn't standard across unix platforms. Sun file utilities, for example, will not accept parameters in just any particular order. This is something mainly the GNU tools do well.
It would surprise me if this method worked on GNU tools, as GNU getopt has a very specific protocol for command line interpretation.. this would be a nonstandard way of handling it (not like it would be the first, however).
On a tangent.. it's funny how lawyers have become the new priests against progress.
Some of the things you could NEVER realistically build and test legally, as a home scientist, in the united states (and to be fair, many other places):
- The wright brothers' first plane
- A (small scale) fission reactor
- An experimental, home-built car
- A high powered rocket
- A radar
- A high powered laser
- A medical test lab
I'm not saying it's good or bad... I'm just saying. We used to fear studying science because the religious guys would come burn us, or throw us down a well. Now we risk getting shot, imprisoned, sued, etc., by the state (not just by individuals who were harmed in the process).
It sometimes saddens me to think how many Edisons, Einsteins, Teslas, or DiVincis have passed us by in the last 50 years, because, as you say, working on science is often illegal.
The human race is fascinating... here we are in the midst of the following events:
- An ongoing, unjustified war in Iraq which has killed between 100,000 and 750,000 people,
- The ongoing occupation of Palestine which has, just in the past 6 months, resulted in hundreds of assassinations and "collateral" deaths
- The recent war in Lebanon which killed over 300 children under 12 (you are concerned about the children, right?)
- The use of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, leaving hundreds of thousands of minelets on school grounds, in forests, and in back yards,
- The ongoing massacres in Darfur,
- The ongoing war between the Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers,
- The potential threat of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel,
- The growing national debt and deficit of the United States,
- Global climate change,
- Governmental interference with scientific studies, and non-scientific policy decisions
- The return of so-called "morality" (read: christian morality, highly offensive to an atheist like me) into the US legal system
- The depletion of our world's natural resources at an alarming rate
- The erosion of the public domain and privatization of all information
- Continual attacks on the US electoral system
And what are we talking about? Sex. Children are dying and being horribly maimed from the bombs we build, sell, and drop. And we're concerned with sex. The US has 1/4 of the world's prison population, and we're concerned with Sex. Be it gay marriage, under-18 porn, or buying sex toys in Texas. We're on the verge of running out of oil - a mainstay of our global economy. Our environment is heating more quickly than ever witnessed by humans. We have leader-fueled rhetoric causing the destruction of entire neighborhoods. And we talk about Sex.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly I really don't care. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume she's reached puberty. Maybe I'm wrong but it isn't the impression that I got from reading his comment.
In which case, it's up to him and her (or her and him) and everyone else (except perhaps their respective families) should fuck right off. Sex is a very personal and private thing and is no business of the state.
I know this doesn't jive with current American mores but I'm past the point of caring. I'm just so sick of it all.You're looking too far into this. The goal and effect of irrational sexual legislation is to promote hysteria, and instill a sense of guilt into young people. The religious nuts can't burn us anymore (legally), so they use the legal system to promote their sick, twisted views of humanity. It is the same reason they abhor sexual education in schools - they would rather teenagers die of STDs than fuck outside of marriage.
I wish I was joking.Using the logic of these laws, we should charge any child who has seen him/herself naked with possesion of kiddie porn.
Don't laugh. It is a sick society we live in - tolerant of bloodshed, violent TV and movies, celebrations of war and police brutality. We fear nudity and we fear sex. It is not inconceivable that one day we will be forced by the religious fundamentalists to wear clothing to conceal ourselves from each other (sound familiar?) or even ourselves.
Note that the law makes absolutely no distinction between pictures depicting an 8 year old, and pictures depicting a 16 year old.
There's a reason for that: it is not relevant.
The purpose of sexual hysteria laws is to cause hysteria - by causing hysteria, you turn otherwise healthy, normal people against each other. People who fight each other are easier to control, manipulate, and tax. Injecting "sense" or "reason" into such laws is counterproductive for the most vocal mouthpieces who support them (in their current state).No need to lower it. I'd be willing to bet that nearly all of us break a half dozen laws or more each day. Just thinking about it, I can come up with about 10 infractions for me today, and those are of laws I know about. Most are of crap no sane law enforcement officer would ever do anything about, but the point is they're still on the books and they could, at any moment, decide to enforce them.
And this is my big argument against surveillance.
Often the question is asked: if you've done nothing wrong, what do you have to hide?
This ignores an entire category of people. What if you have done something wrong?
I smoke drugs with friends (occasionally), I have had sex with people (my age) when it was illegal for us to, I have consumed alcohol while under the legal drinking age, and I have cracked DVDs that I've bought to watch them. I've idled my car for longer than 5 minutes (to charge my battery), I've watched a torrent download, and I've played music at a party after 11pm.
As a potential criminal, I appreciate the fact that I can run from my crimes, and not get caught. There are far too many moralists and politicians to create a legal system that is just - or at least just enough that surveillance is safe and right to deploy.
My $0.02.
So now I'm labeled a pure hardcore sex offender. I'm on the website here in my state, my glorious picture is up there, they put posters all around my white color suburbanite neighborhood, my neighbors who knew me couldn't believe it, the ones who didn't' saw me and pulled their kids aside like I was going to eat them alive when it was the farthest thing from the truth. I've had people spit upon my father who has a lawn business, mom who gets harrassed at her school from other teachers cause of it, my friends got hassled and dropped me like the plague. I got to see who my true friends and people were. People who were still there, still loyal, looked past my stupid mistake and realized "Hey, he did something really dumb, but he didn't rape some kid or kidnap a school bus full of girl scouts."
You didn't do anything wrong. You didn't do anything dumb.
The people trying to convince you otherwise are sick - plain and simple. If it weren't for people like you, we wouldn't be here as a species. You are attracted to females in their sexual prime, and this makes you normal.
Stay strong. Karma is real. :)
Well said.
One must seriously question *why* it is considered wrong. Surly much of what is bad about it comes from the fact it is so illegal and taboo that the only way it can be done is in the most painful way to those involved. If it was legal, it would become a business like any other (and thus regulated, unlike the black-market crap that goes on now) and I predict that much of the secret photographing/abductions/etc would stop because they would be too costly and hard compared to the legal way.
With all due respect, I believe you misunderstand. The intent of these laws isn't entirely to protect children. It is very easy to realize when you see them being used to attack children - the very people they were supposedly created to protect.
This is one case, but there have been many, where children were charged for having sex with each other, or possessing images of people their own age.
The purpose of this law, at least to some extent, is to teach "morals" to young people. If you delay the onset of sexual maturity long enough, what results is a frustrated, easily manipulated adult populace that seeks other forms of acceptance and understanding. This is a service the church seeks to provide, and the main mouthpieces of the sexual repression crowd are religious fundamentalists.
On a side note - and I mean this not as a troll, but as an expression from the very core of my being - I truly feel that anyone involved in this case that supported the prosecution of this "child" deserves two in the chest, and one in the head.
Claiming that you fight for someone, while in fact ruining their lives (ie. Iraq) is despicable.
Moi aussi.. :) This attention the "conservatives" have been paying to us is utter bullshit. It shames me our hatered for the liberals allowed them into power. I mean I hope one day to call a sovereign Quebec my country, but damn this is no way to achieve that.
As a Quebecer I can't describe how terrible it would feel to know our government used us as an excuse to damage copyright law in Canada. :(
Here's a letter I wrote in 1999 when this issue last came up:
Subject: CPCDI concern
Hello,
I am a Canadian citizen residing in Montreal, QC. I recently learned of your request for comments regarding the implementation of a Canadian version of the controversial American DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), through provisions of the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues (CPCDI). I would like to voice my concern.
To anyone who has studied the history of the United States - from the inception of an independent democracy to the frequent creation and repeal of unjust law - the DMCA appears to be a gross perversion of both copyright law (practically, and in spirit) and the American constitution.
It seeks to impose the criminal status on individuals who would otherwise be practicing constitutionally protected freedoms, while having a questionable effect, if any, on those who are already criminals - those who wilfully violate copyright law. It allows for the criminalization of the act of making fair use (media excerpts, backup copies, transfers of ownership, research for the purpose of publishing, use under unsupported or unapproved digital devices, and others) of copyrighted material, because these fair uses can be controlled through the use of encryption.
Where formerly these would have been civil issues (contract violation), they become criminal issues.
This, as we have seen recently in the United States, has already begun to have a chilling effect on scientific research (see the cases regarding Dmitry Sklyrov, Dr. Felten, and Jon Johansen - all of whom were enguaged in previously protected activities for the good of the public). Of course, the frightening commonality in each of these cases is that the requests for prosecution were perpetrated by large media centric, for-profit corporations.
At the end of the day, many criminal acts can be prevented through proactive prosection, criminalization of related activity, and errosion of fundamental privacy.
But as a citizen of Canada, I oppose these excessive measures. To me, living in a free country means being given the choice to use tools for good or bad purposes. It is the trust instilled by the Canadian government and the Canadian people which makes this country great.
I urge the Canadian government to maintain the fair, delicate balance between copyright holders and individuals, and to remove the overbroad, anti-consumer provisions of CPDCI.
Sincerely,
etc.
I'm working on the next one right now. It's a shame we have to keep doing this.I would imagine they're more concerned with the Americans starting a global nuclear war, not Islamic "terrorists."
Corrosion on the outside surface of a wire has negligible effects on the signals being carried by that wire at audio frequencies (20 - 20 KHz). If you are refering to corrosion at the connecting ends, then in a car stereo setting, the connecting ends of the wires are usually soldered to either the speaker posts or soldered to a connector... so again even in that situation, corrosion on the outside surface of the wire metal has no effect.
You've clearly never worked on a boat. Yes - in general you're right. The lifespan most consumers expect from their gear is exceeded by the time pure copper cables will last in most environments. In harsh environments, plating cables does extend their life and transmission quality over time. Terminal blocks and crimped cables are common enough.
In your second statement about electrolytics.. Electrolytic caps are used for decoupling power leads to ground mostly and they have to have a DC bias maintained on them to work.. they can only pass AC if the signal does not reverse bias the capacitor. They are almost never used in audio filtering circuits for passing audio signals.
Uh.. speaker level crossovers? There are many applications where the signal will not reverse-bias the capacitor. In cases where they do, people will often use bipolar electrolytics.
Somehow I don't believe that you really are an electrical engineer.
Fair enough.Agreed. Tantalum capacitors have much better performance than electrolytics in most circumstances. However, there is outstanding debate about whether the use of tantalum capacitors is ethical, as tantalum is just about the rarest element that's actually used in the electronics industry and most of the deposits are in developing countries. Accusations have been levelled that electronics manufacturers are going to inordinate lengths to secure tantalum deposits, and the people who live there are the losers (especially since the by-products of processing tantalum ore are decidedly unpleasant).
I try to avoid using tantalum capacitors in my own designs as far as possible, trying to keep to NASA's guidelines for component derating when using electrolytics. Where I need precision capacitances I design the circuit so that a ceramic NP0 or similar EIA Class 1 capacitor can be used instead. I haven't had any capacitors fail yet.
Interesting.. I've never heard that. I'll have to read up.
It sounds frustrating because the one area where tantalums are good is where neither ceramics or electrolytics are good - right around the 10uF-100uF range. Ceramics/polyproylenes are huge, electrolytics are crappy.
Also, I've got a friend who does psycho-acoustics research, and he did an interesting series of experiments a couple of years ago that indicated that systems that performed technically very well (almost perfect filter characteristics, no harmonic errors) actually were rated worse than a system that had all sorts of junk spewing out of it, when the audiophiles participating weren't told which system they were listening to...
Yes I've heard of this mythical study myself. *shrug*. There are plenty of people with tin ears and they're not hard to find. Some people prefer the sound of greater distortion, so long as it's primarily low-order. Think valve based guitar amplifiers, vs. bipolar transistors. It doesn't mean they picked the one with the lowest distortion or most accurate presentation, it means the picked the one which was most pleasing to their ear.
Gold Plated Speaker wire crowd will love this.
Ahem. :)
Speaking as an "audio dick," I feel I should come to the defense of both "solid capacitors" and gold plated speaker wire.
Firstly, gold plated speaker wire isn't gold plated to improve the capacitance or resistance properties of the wire - it's done to prevent corrosion. If you've ever heard the crackling sound an old car stereo tends to make, it's often because of corroded copper wires. It's particularly noticeable when you live near saltwater areas or in marine applications in general.
Secondly, there is no outstanding debate in the industry on whether or not polypropylene, film, or even tantalum capacitors (what they're referring to as solid, though they're probably talking about tantalums) are of superior quality to electrolytics for audio applications. Electrolytics have changing thermal characteristics, worse tolerances, and tend to introduce a small amount of phase shift into whatever AC signal you're passing through them. Yes, these properties are measurable with the right equipment and are not generally questioned.
And yes I am an electrical engineer!What we end up with is a reserve of people who cannot, under any circumstances, recover from the punishment they have received and re-integrate with society.
I'm sorry; I'm so jaded at this point in my life, I can't help but believe that this was the intent. I just think the system is failing, because they have abused it too much.
It's really simple: create classes of people that you can use as scapegoats and targets. You can't (unfairly) rule a united people, so divide them. It happens everywhere: at work, school, and in government. Find a way to split a large group of people down easily identifyable lines, and keep hammering your talking points home. One side will fear the other, and the other side will fear for their lives. As a leader, you can then step in, and provide both sides with what they "need."On the plus side, the sex offender registry has been so damaged by abuse (adding scores of people who aren't dangerous, or even "sex" offenders), it will soon be to the point where there's no shame being on the list.
"Says here you're a sex offender."
"Yep; I pissed on my neighbor's car when he parked on my side of the lot."
"Hilarious. Ah well, anyway, you're hired."
Whoaaaa dude. Sorry. I didn't mean it in any particular order.
I agree with you and you are 100% right. I'm sorry, I just personally know more about the Arab-Israeli conflict than I do about genocide in Darfur and I did not mean to prioritize. It's just the first one that came to mind.So from "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave," to "Land of those doing better than Iran."
How nice.The difference being, of course, that the Dixie Chicks were not put to death for expressing views not in line with those of the government
Give it time. Iran wasn't always the way it is now.
He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it...I have no idea whether Iranian police normally herd student protesters into "Free Speech" Zones well away from President Ahmadinejad, as is common practice in the US. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) or whether the Iranian government enforces huge protest exclusion zones in Tehran, using the threat of terrorism as some kind of bizarre justification.
It's sad to see this so widely tolerated in the US. Perhaps I tend to wear rose-coloured glasses when thinking about the US as it was 10 or 20 years ago. I remember people who would never have allowed this to occur.
I was recently in an argument with someone who thought they were a good idea, for precisely the reason you gave. To protect us from the libera^H^H^Hterrorists. That they wanted to destroy the US, and these measures would prevent it.
I asked him what exactly it was about the US he felt was worth preserving, if it wasn't freedom, and the rule of law? He stood like a dear in headlights. :)
Damn you... this has had me giggling for the last 10 minutes. :)
If you're using rm recursively, always type the modifier *AFTER* the path.
#rm /a/b/c -rf
If you accidentally hit enter after typing "rm /", you get "rm: cannot remove directory `/': Is a directory".
This behavior isn't standard across unix platforms. Sun file utilities, for example, will not accept parameters in just any particular order. This is something mainly the GNU tools do well.
It would surprise me if this method worked on GNU tools, as GNU getopt has a very specific protocol for command line interpretation.. this would be a nonstandard way of handling it (not like it would be the first, however).
On a tangent.. it's funny how lawyers have become the new priests against progress.
Some of the things you could NEVER realistically build and test legally, as a home scientist, in the united states (and to be fair, many other places):
- The wright brothers' first plane- A (small scale) fission reactor
- An experimental, home-built car
- A high powered rocket
- A radar
- A high powered laser
- A medical test lab
I'm not saying it's good or bad... I'm just saying. We used to fear studying science because the religious guys would come burn us, or throw us down a well. Now we risk getting shot, imprisoned, sued, etc., by the state (not just by individuals who were harmed in the process).
It sometimes saddens me to think how many Edisons, Einsteins, Teslas, or DiVincis have passed us by in the last 50 years, because, as you say, working on science is often illegal.
The human race is fascinating... here we are in the midst of the following events:
- An ongoing, unjustified war in Iraq which has killed between 100,000 and 750,000 people,- The ongoing occupation of Palestine which has, just in the past 6 months, resulted in hundreds of assassinations and "collateral" deaths
- The recent war in Lebanon which killed over 300 children under 12 (you are concerned about the children, right?)
- The use of cluster bombs in southern Lebanon, leaving hundreds of thousands of minelets on school grounds, in forests, and in back yards,
- The ongoing massacres in Darfur,
- The ongoing war between the Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers,
- The potential threat of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel,
- The growing national debt and deficit of the United States,
- Global climate change,
- Governmental interference with scientific studies, and non-scientific policy decisions
- The return of so-called "morality" (read: christian morality, highly offensive to an atheist like me) into the US legal system
- The depletion of our world's natural resources at an alarming rate
- The erosion of the public domain and privatization of all information
- Continual attacks on the US electoral system
And what are we talking about? Sex. Children are dying and being horribly maimed from the bombs we build, sell, and drop. And we're concerned with sex. The US has 1/4 of the world's prison population, and we're concerned with Sex. Be it gay marriage, under-18 porn, or buying sex toys in Texas. We're on the verge of running out of oil - a mainstay of our global economy. Our environment is heating more quickly than ever witnessed by humans. We have leader-fueled rhetoric causing the destruction of entire neighborhoods. And we talk about Sex.