Wait... you actually think the Iranian army could hold up against the US military in conventional warfare?
You do realize that Iran is a lot bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan, right? If it came down to war, I believe we would eventually control the skies over Iran. We'd take significant losses because Iran has a much better SAM network than Iraq did. The Iranian air force is also better equipped and trained than the Iraqis were. (Money problems have reduced training recently). They may still have stockpiles AAMs that have longer range than US planes carry. Iran has more hardened and buried facilities and more located in difficult terrain than Iraq did. A ground invasion would be a problem, and I don't think it could be done with existing force levels. We'd need to institute a draft before such an invasion.
Man, that's the dumbest comment I've seen this week.
You obviously haven't been paying attention to the wars we are currently involved in because you think military might is the only important part of war. You also haven't thought about where the trillions of dollars to support a war in Iran would come. The answer is that the people who would lend us that money are dependent upon Iranian oil. And there are nuclear armed states dependent upon Iranian oil that wouldn't want the US to have control of it. Iran's best friend is Russia, remember.
You also haven't thought about what a hold Iran has over the population of Iraq. Or what Iran could do to Afghanistan. At the first surgical strike Iran would call up the Shiite militias in Iraq and tell them to take over the Capital and form a new government. Then Iran could send tanks into southwest Afghanistan. If you didn't see either of those as being likely, you really have no business commenting on what wars the US can and can't win.
In other words, think beyond step one if you are capable. Don't you think there just might be a reason that even Darth Cheney wasn't able to get support for an attack on Iran?
I have glanced at the documents on the WikiLeaks cable release pages, and I can categorically say that these documents should not have been released.
I have also glanced at the documents on the WikiLeaks cable release pages, and I can categorically say that these documents for the most part are relatively uninteresting and probably not very damaging to U.S. interests, since most of the information in them was fairly widely known already. You can give me an example of one that was strategically damaging if you wish. And then explain why none of the other 2.5 Million people that had access to it sold it to an interested party.
We know what Chancellor Merkel thought about W. Is it all that bad that we know what some diplomat thought of her? None of this lives up to Hillary running around like Jar Jar Binks yelling "Weeza All Gonna Die!"
The existing plan has done nothing but embolden the regime by making them think they have more friends than they really do.
No, the regime is emboldened by knowing that under the current circumstances the US could not win a war against Iran. If the US makes limited strikes Iran will make a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan. We're being bled dry by limited wars in little countries with half the population of Iran. A real war would cause a major economic collapse in the US. And what has prevented war, despite the urging of the Israelis and the Saudis, is that we know that we would lose.
It's not like Iran didn't know the feelings of its Arab neighbors. Is there anyone who couldn't guess that the Saudis would want the destruction of their major competitor for regional domination? And you can be damn sure the Saudis want someone else to do the deed and foot the bill.
Aside from the Arabs pressing for the attack of Iran, nothing there was of any news to me.
That's only news to people who don't understand that Iranians aren't Arabs, and don't understand that Iran is the only real threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel as regional powers. (In other words 75% of the US population.) Israel and the Saudis have nothing to lose from a US war with Iran and a lot to gain (money, expansion of their influence). The US wouldn't be able to win full on conventional war with Iran at this point. And the Iranians know it, hence their attitude on uranium enrichment.
how do you know lives haven't been put at risk? Are you privy to the vast intelligence network of people who keep you safe everyday?
Not a clue, although our government has said no lives were put at risk by the prior leak. On the other hand, with the leak of Valerie Plame's name everyone we ever shared a meal with her or washed her car was suddenly suspected of being complicit in espionage.
You can't publish the names of civilian informants and think it doesn't effect our national security now and ability to recruit future informants.
How about we don't put the names of civilian informants in documents that can be easily leaked? Even in stupid spy novels they are smart enough to use code names or non-descriptive identifiers in diplomatic cable. Maybe then it would be easier to recruit informants. When recruited to be an informant, I might ask "are you going to transmit my name along with everything I tell you?" If the answer is "Yes" I would tell the recruiters to fuck off.
Got tired of all the speculation. The resolution of a 100m dish at geosynchronous orbit to 1GHz is 107km. At 10GHz it would be 10.7km. Both those numbers are significantly larger than a scan line. They are also large compared to the distance between cell phones and wifi stations in a suburb. They might be able to get the cell tower half of a conversation, or intercept long distance microwave links.
Hard to tell with the professionally paranoid, how do you know this one isn't designed to look out rather than in, something they are not likely to admit any time soon.
Because there are dishes on the ground perfectly capable of doing that job that don't cost nearly as much.
Actually, it's pretty easy to figure out the max it could be capable of just from the dish diameter. Angular FWHM and antenna gain pop out just from that. Assume a receiver at liquid nitrogen temps (A closed cycle refrigerator probably). Figure out what the footprint of the beam would be on the ground to see whether you'll have confusion problems in a city or suburb. Anyhow they aren't pointing this at the U.S. A van is a whole lot cheaper for that.
Once you've figured out the gain you need and have a receiver design, the big impediment to design is the unfurling dish antenna. Second design issue pointing something that big in a stable manner such that you can keep terrestrial coordinates in the beam. Third would be data recording and processing (onboard vs simple limited band relay). Full design of such a craft are left as exercises for the reader.
The aliasing in music is exactly like the aliasing in a digital photo.
Well, that clears it up. You're confused about the terminology. The equivalent in photography is not the jagged edges you get on lines and circles (which is a result of the pixels having boundaries that are sharp compared to the pixel spacing and not a sampling effect.) The comparison you want is the Moire pattern you get when you display a repeating pattern that is close to the pixel scale in period. In both audio and video applications that Moire effect can be corrected with appropriate filtering and resampling/oversampling. Just because something is sampled at 44.1kHz doesn't mean you can't play it back at 88.2kHz with the upper half of the band zeroed out. (CD player oversampling is a crude but easy way to do this. 8X oversampling means that playback is at 352.8kHz which means no aliases below that 330.75kHz. Not even Superman can hear that.)
And no, you can't hear frequencies at or above 22kHz, but tones above that which are harmonics will color the frequencies that are audible.
No harmonic above 22kHz will "color" an audible frequency. Your ear and your audio system would filter such "color" out. The only way such "color" could occur is if the tone above 22kHz had harmonics below 22kHz. In which case those harmonics get recorded and sampled even though the primary tone is lost.
Well, be surprised then, because I can definitely tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a CD on a good stereo system.
I'm not surprised at what you're telling, which is me is not that you can hear a difference, but that you think you can hear a difference. People say the same thing about their $5000 patch cables, too. For the most part, audiophiles delude themselves about their hearing abilities and the capabilities of their equipment. In a blind test on a good audio system with a good mp3 decoder that up-converts by the same amount that the CD player oversamples I highly doubt you'd be able to identify the mp3.
I'm not sure if you're unclear on the terminology or the technology. You've mention aliasing a couple of times, but I'm not sure how you think aliasing works. Aliasing is like wrap around at the Nyquist frequency.
Let's take that 15kHz tone. With a real valued data stream sampled at 44.1kHz you can't tell whether its actual frequency is 15kHz or (44.1-15)=29.1 kHz. As you get to the Nyquist frequency the frequency and its alias get closer together. It's not a problem for a couple reasons. 1) You can't hear above 22.05kHz, in fact you probably can't hear 15kHz very well 2) Your hardware has a 22.05kHz lowpass filter in to keep the neighborhood dogs from ripping your throat out.
Now I could go into a detailed physical explanation (involving ears and speakers and electronics) of why a 15kHz sine wave sampled at 44.1 kHz sounds a lot like a 15kHz sine wave, or why an mp3 of a 15kHz sine wave might be even more sinusoidal in the output of a good upsampling decode algorithm than the original sampling was, but it would take too long.
Why are SO many people willing to have all their communication logged and data-mined by for-profit companies?
For the features, of course. Grepping through 7GB of email is slower than hell. I have yet to find a mail client that will import and index that much mail without crashing. Even if one exists it will be damn slow when searching. It also won't be very useful from my phone for maintaining a merged email/phone/postal address book. That PC based client also won't store SMS texts with included images. Or translate my voicemails into text emails.
There's certainly a market for an email system that does all that without storing data non-locally. Nobody has developed it yet, and it won't gain wide acceptance unless it is marketed by Microsoft. And there you're back to having trust issues again.
I'm from Canada and I don't see any visible changes to the messaging system whatsoever... and Places was launched back in the summer and yet there's no sign of it either... so I anticipate we'll see these features approximately.... never?
The new messaging system is being deployed by invite only. And I'm in the U.S. and I've never seen Places either.
The lack of competence goes all the way to the top. Facebook is coasting on inertia at this point and surviving on the lack of a decent competitor. As far as I can tell the current business model is based upon taking away the features users like and adding ones they don't want. And somehow some businesses still advertise there.
Just because this guy isn't qualified to do that sort of work, doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there doing it and making a good living at it. If there's a need, someone will fill it, whether or not it's moral, legal, or safe. Welcome to Econ 101. I sure that the guy from TFA above writes papers for that class.
The important and insightful part is who his clientelle is because it tells a lot about what's wrong with our schools and our society.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
There were no downloads then, and LPs are far superior to any lossily compressed music.
Yeah, that's the popular meme. But of course the process of making LPs is lossy, as is recording to magnetic tape. When the music was remastered in the 80s, they tried to boost the low gain frequency bands, which annoyed the LP listeners who like the "warm" sound you get without high frequencies.. But you can always fix that digitally if you want. With appropriate band cuts, and addition of some hiss and pop, you too can make a CD sound like an LP. You might have to add some more band modification and some 60Hz hum to model that 1970s era amplifier and speakers. I'll be surprised if you could tell "lossy" 256kbps MP3 from the CD.
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Wait... you actually think the Iranian army could hold up against the US military in conventional warfare?
You do realize that Iran is a lot bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan, right? If it came down to war, I believe we would eventually control the skies over Iran. We'd take significant losses because Iran has a much better SAM network than Iraq did. The Iranian air force is also better equipped and trained than the Iraqis were. (Money problems have reduced training recently). They may still have stockpiles AAMs that have longer range than US planes carry. Iran has more hardened and buried facilities and more located in difficult terrain than Iraq did. A ground invasion would be a problem, and I don't think it could be done with existing force levels. We'd need to institute a draft before such an invasion.
Man, that's the dumbest comment I've seen this week.
You obviously haven't been paying attention to the wars we are currently involved in because you think military might is the only important part of war. You also haven't thought about where the trillions of dollars to support a war in Iran would come. The answer is that the people who would lend us that money are dependent upon Iranian oil. And there are nuclear armed states dependent upon Iranian oil that wouldn't want the US to have control of it. Iran's best friend is Russia, remember.
You also haven't thought about what a hold Iran has over the population of Iraq. Or what Iran could do to Afghanistan. At the first surgical strike Iran would call up the Shiite militias in Iraq and tell them to take over the Capital and form a new government. Then Iran could send tanks into southwest Afghanistan. If you didn't see either of those as being likely, you really have no business commenting on what wars the US can and can't win.
In other words, think beyond step one if you are capable. Don't you think there just might be a reason that even Darth Cheney wasn't able to get support for an attack on Iran?
I have glanced at the documents on the WikiLeaks cable release pages, and I can categorically say that these documents should not have been released.
I have also glanced at the documents on the WikiLeaks cable release pages, and I can categorically say that these documents for the most part are relatively uninteresting and probably not very damaging to U.S. interests, since most of the information in them was fairly widely known already. You can give me an example of one that was strategically damaging if you wish. And then explain why none of the other 2.5 Million people that had access to it sold it to an interested party.
We know what Chancellor Merkel thought about W. Is it all that bad that we know what some diplomat thought of her? None of this lives up to Hillary running around like Jar Jar Binks yelling "Weeza All Gonna Die!"
The existing plan has done nothing but embolden the regime by making them think they have more friends than they really do.
No, the regime is emboldened by knowing that under the current circumstances the US could not win a war against Iran. If the US makes limited strikes Iran will make a mess of Iraq and Afghanistan. We're being bled dry by limited wars in little countries with half the population of Iran. A real war would cause a major economic collapse in the US. And what has prevented war, despite the urging of the Israelis and the Saudis, is that we know that we would lose.
It's not like Iran didn't know the feelings of its Arab neighbors. Is there anyone who couldn't guess that the Saudis would want the destruction of their major competitor for regional domination? And you can be damn sure the Saudis want someone else to do the deed and foot the bill.
The difference is that today's politicians aren't smart enough to see that there's no difference.
I wish I had mod points.
Aside from the Arabs pressing for the attack of Iran, nothing there was of any news to me.
That's only news to people who don't understand that Iranians aren't Arabs, and don't understand that Iran is the only real threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel as regional powers. (In other words 75% of the US population.) Israel and the Saudis have nothing to lose from a US war with Iran and a lot to gain (money, expansion of their influence). The US wouldn't be able to win full on conventional war with Iran at this point. And the Iranians know it, hence their attitude on uranium enrichment.
how do you know lives haven't been put at risk? Are you privy to the vast intelligence network of people who keep you safe everyday?
Not a clue, although our government has said no lives were put at risk by the prior leak. On the other hand, with the leak of Valerie Plame's name everyone we ever shared a meal with her or washed her car was suddenly suspected of being complicit in espionage.
You can't publish the names of civilian informants and think it doesn't effect our national security now and ability to recruit future informants.
How about we don't put the names of civilian informants in documents that can be easily leaked? Even in stupid spy novels they are smart enough to use code names or non-descriptive identifiers in diplomatic cable. Maybe then it would be easier to recruit informants. When recruited to be an informant, I might ask "are you going to transmit my name along with everything I tell you?" If the answer is "Yes" I would tell the recruiters to fuck off.
Got tired of all the speculation. The resolution of a 100m dish at geosynchronous orbit to 1GHz is 107km. At 10GHz it would be 10.7km. Both those numbers are significantly larger than a scan line. They are also large compared to the distance between cell phones and wifi stations in a suburb. They might be able to get the cell tower half of a conversation, or intercept long distance microwave links.
Hard to tell with the professionally paranoid, how do you know this one isn't designed to look out rather than in, something they are not likely to admit any time soon.
Because there are dishes on the ground perfectly capable of doing that job that don't cost nearly as much.
Actually, it's pretty easy to figure out the max it could be capable of just from the dish diameter. Angular FWHM and antenna gain pop out just from that. Assume a receiver at liquid nitrogen temps (A closed cycle refrigerator probably). Figure out what the footprint of the beam would be on the ground to see whether you'll have confusion problems in a city or suburb. Anyhow they aren't pointing this at the U.S. A van is a whole lot cheaper for that.
Once you've figured out the gain you need and have a receiver design, the big impediment to design is the unfurling dish antenna. Second design issue pointing something that big in a stable manner such that you can keep terrestrial coordinates in the beam. Third would be data recording and processing (onboard vs simple limited band relay). Full design of such a craft are left as exercises for the reader.
Well, both the ISS and the moon are satellites. With dish unfurled, this may be bigger than the ISS. But certainly not more massive.
I stand corrected.
The aliasing in music is exactly like the aliasing in a digital photo.
Well, that clears it up. You're confused about the terminology. The equivalent in photography is not the jagged edges you get on lines and circles (which is a result of the pixels having boundaries that are sharp compared to the pixel spacing and not a sampling effect.) The comparison you want is the Moire pattern you get when you display a repeating pattern that is close to the pixel scale in period. In both audio and video applications that Moire effect can be corrected with appropriate filtering and resampling/oversampling. Just because something is sampled at 44.1kHz doesn't mean you can't play it back at 88.2kHz with the upper half of the band zeroed out. (CD player oversampling is a crude but easy way to do this. 8X oversampling means that playback is at 352.8kHz which means no aliases below that 330.75kHz. Not even Superman can hear that.)
And no, you can't hear frequencies at or above 22kHz, but tones above that which are harmonics will color the frequencies that are audible.
No harmonic above 22kHz will "color" an audible frequency. Your ear and your audio system would filter such "color" out. The only way such "color" could occur is if the tone above 22kHz had harmonics below 22kHz. In which case those harmonics get recorded and sampled even though the primary tone is lost.
Well, be surprised then, because I can definitely tell the difference between a 256kbps mp3 and a CD on a good stereo system.
I'm not surprised at what you're telling, which is me is not that you can hear a difference, but that you think you can hear a difference. People say the same thing about their $5000 patch cables, too. For the most part, audiophiles delude themselves about their hearing abilities and the capabilities of their equipment. In a blind test on a good audio system with a good mp3 decoder that up-converts by the same amount that the CD player oversamples I highly doubt you'd be able to identify the mp3.
the number of the beast is 616. The next(or may the recent one?) printing of KJB will have the correct translation.
Wow, King James sure is a slow editor. What's he been doing for the last 380 years? Playing video games?
Most of the Pantheon shows up in the devil. Don't forget Prometheus, the light bringer (aka Lucifer).
The naming convention behind SCSI was originally intending on it to be pronounced Sexy (secsi).
I believe Steve Jobs was behind that proposed pronunciation. The properly descriptive "scuzzy" won out.
The "warm" sound comes from the lack of aliasing.
I'm not sure if you're unclear on the terminology or the technology. You've mention aliasing a couple of times, but I'm not sure how you think aliasing works. Aliasing is like wrap around at the Nyquist frequency.
Let's take that 15kHz tone. With a real valued data stream sampled at 44.1kHz you can't tell whether its actual frequency is 15kHz or (44.1-15)=29.1 kHz. As you get to the Nyquist frequency the frequency and its alias get closer together. It's not a problem for a couple reasons. 1) You can't hear above 22.05kHz, in fact you probably can't hear 15kHz very well 2) Your hardware has a 22.05kHz lowpass filter in to keep the neighborhood dogs from ripping your throat out.
Now I could go into a detailed physical explanation (involving ears and speakers and electronics) of why a 15kHz sine wave sampled at 44.1 kHz sounds a lot like a 15kHz sine wave, or why an mp3 of a 15kHz sine wave might be even more sinusoidal in the output of a good upsampling decode algorithm than the original sampling was, but it would take too long.
Why are SO many people willing to have all their communication logged and data-mined by for-profit companies?
For the features, of course. Grepping through 7GB of email is slower than hell. I have yet to find a mail client that will import and index that much mail without crashing. Even if one exists it will be damn slow when searching. It also won't be very useful from my phone for maintaining a merged email/phone/postal address book. That PC based client also won't store SMS texts with included images. Or translate my voicemails into text emails.
There's certainly a market for an email system that does all that without storing data non-locally. Nobody has developed it yet, and it won't gain wide acceptance unless it is marketed by Microsoft. And there you're back to having trust issues again.
I'm from Canada and I don't see any visible changes to the messaging system whatsoever... and Places was launched back in the summer and yet there's no sign of it either... so I anticipate we'll see these features approximately.... never?
The new messaging system is being deployed by invite only. And I'm in the U.S. and I've never seen Places either.
The lack of competence goes all the way to the top. Facebook is coasting on inertia at this point and surviving on the lack of a decent competitor. As far as I can tell the current business model is based upon taking away the features users like and adding ones they don't want. And somehow some businesses still advertise there.
Just because this guy isn't qualified to do that sort of work, doesn't mean that there isn't someone out there doing it and making a good living at it. If there's a need, someone will fill it, whether or not it's moral, legal, or safe. Welcome to Econ 101. I sure that the guy from TFA above writes papers for that class.
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
There were no downloads then, and LPs are far superior to any lossily compressed music.
Yeah, that's the popular meme. But of course the process of making LPs is lossy, as is recording to magnetic tape. When the music was remastered in the 80s, they tried to boost the low gain frequency bands, which annoyed the LP listeners who like the "warm" sound you get without high frequencies.. But you can always fix that digitally if you want. With appropriate band cuts, and addition of some hiss and pop, you too can make a CD sound like an LP. You might have to add some more band modification and some 60Hz hum to model that 1970s era amplifier and speakers. I'll be surprised if you could tell "lossy" 256kbps MP3 from the CD.