No, I'm afraid you still don't understand. Any packet-switched radio, is digital by definition. Not "can be", but "is".
Radio, any RF transmission, is analog by nature. But the information you send has to be encoded somehow. You can do that in an analog manner, such as AM, FM, PM methods. Or you can do it in a digital manner: ASK, FSK, PSK, etc. Packet radio used by hams uses AFSK, as did early dial up modems you talk about, and both are a manner of transmitting a digital signal over an analog channel. Go look it up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me: packet radio and modems. Both pages very distinctly state that these are methods for transmitting digital data. Also mentioned in the original post was APRS, which is also specifically stated as being "an amateur radio-based system for real time tactical digital communications."
If you are sending packets over your radio, you are sending digital data.
Pointing your antenna straight up is exactly the worst thing to do in this situation. The type of bipolar antenna most routers come with are omnidirectional, but with weak spots in the coaxial direction (directly out the two ends of the antenna). You would do better to turn your antenna sideways (horizontal) to broadcast in the "up" direction. The problem then is that you are also broadcasting sideways and down, so the up direction gets about 1/4 of total output power. What you really want in that situation (basement installation) is a parabolic antenna pointed upwards. They have very good gain (3 dBi or more) in the forward direction, while rejecting most signals from the sides or rear.
Who's a dolt? Fair use doctrine does indeed allow time shifting (recording for later playback). It was validated by SCOTUS in the early 80's Betamax case, and hasn't been overturned by any subsequent decisions. If you don't believe me, here's the EFF's take on it.
So I guess that makes you a dolt too, spouting off about that which you know so little. It's people like you who are willing to just take whatever bread crumbs they toss us that are allowing them to get away with crap like this in the first place. Get educated about your rights, or shut up.
Well, glad to find that I wasn't taking troll-bait, and glad to see a reasonable response. Hope you consider mine just as reasonable...
If you take any type of signal, and convert it, inherently, there is loss.
Right, that's why I mentioned sampling theory. Look up Nyquist criteria if you want more information.
Oh, and one can carry stereo where the other can carry monoaural.
Missed my point entirely. You stated that the transmission over the airwaves or down the wires/fiber is fundamentally analog. But to transmit any type of data, you have to come up with an encoding scheme. There are many many ways to do this, but they can basically be divided into two basic methods of encoding: analog and digital. The methods used for digitally encoding data tend to be less succeptable to noise, and are also able to use error correction methods to recover from large amounts of noise. To simply claim that digital is really just "... a pure and simple bullshit term." is just sweeping a lot of fundamental differences aside. If you don't catch what I'm trying to point out here, I don't know how to make it any more plain.
Oh, and just because commercial AM (DSB-LC, IIRC) and your shortwave radio (using what, supressed sideband?) don't do it doesn't mean you can't do stereo over AM: you can use independent sidebands, or frequency division multiplexing. QAM for AM is actually pretty close to how they do stereo-FM. You need something a little more complex than a superheterodyning envelope detector, but I can be done.
Resistance and capacitance are very closely related.
Sure, capacitance is closely related to resistance (resistance is the real component and capacitance/inductance is the imaginary, or reactive, component of a complex-valued impedance, anyone who takes a first course in circuits can tell you that). But the funamental point here can be seen in ohm's law for capacitors: i=C*dv/dt (again, introductory level circuits). So, because of the dv/dt term, you can't have instantaneous change in a capacitor. I don't really get your point about the wiring... LCD's work by changing the state of a capacitor, and for the short amount of wiring involved, I don't imagine there is any propogation delay. What am I missing in your explanation?
As for the work-around you suggest, check out Field Emission Displays, or Motorola's experimental Nano Emissive Display (which was mentioned on a slashdot article a few weeks back). I've heard it described as an array of pixels, similar to LCD, but with each pixel basically its own miniature CRT. Might result in a display that gets the best of both the LCD and CRT technologies.
Digital is analog? That's an awfully simplistic view, don't you think you're being a bit naive? Sure, ultimately you have an analog carrier, but the way you encode digital data (RZ, NRZI, AMI, etc...) provides you with more effective methods for dealing with noise in the channel. Even your digital computer uses analog signals (say perhaps "0" = 0-1.5V and "1" = 3.5-5V, while 1.5-3.5 is indeterminate). But those levels give you a margin where noise can be present and not change the detected output. Plus, you can use error correction schemes to make up for those times when too much noise gives a false high or a false low. As long as you don't get too many of those, you end up being able to reconstruct the original signal at the other end (well, within the limits of sampling theory). Analog, on the other hand, noise is noise. You can implement some noise reduction techniques (I was amazed when I first learned how Dolby NR worked), but that really isn't as effective as error correction on digital channels.
By your reasoning, an AM signal has different channel properties than an FM signal, but why bother making that distinction since analog is obviously still analog. Never mind that AM is affected more by atmospheric noise, and that FM SNR can be increased more easily by increasing bandwidth. They're both analog, so who cares? Or maybe you should learn some about communication theory before you start spouting off.
Oh, and CRT vs. LCD? That "refresh rate" isn't due to wire resistance vs. vacuum. LCD's don't need to be refreshed, each pixel is always on or always off. Each pixel has a transistor controlling it (that's what the "TFT" means... Thin Film Transistor). These transistors can only switch states so fast, due to a parasitic capacitance between the gate and the drain of each transistor. Make a faster-switching transistor, and you get less ghosting. So you're comparing apples to oranges.
So, the question I have is, are you a troll, or just spouting off because you don't know any better?
Even if you had a neural link to Google, and could look anything up on the internet from within your brain, I don't think that would result in a situation such as you suggest. While I rather like the idea, like in the Matrix, of buying a CD with a particular skill set, going home, and loading it into my head, the problem is seek time.
See, if I were looking up something on Google, I still have to do the search, find appropriate material, and then read the material to understand it. Even if I was assured of 100% relavance (say if I had an entire Encyclopedia instead of google in my head), there still wouldn't be instant recall. What's really amazing about the human brain is the instantaneous seek and fetch times. Having a huge storage device available in our head just wouldn't work as well unless we could reproduce such instantaneous lookups.
Also, knowledge in most fields is cumulative... for example, to really understand many fields of physics, you need to understand differential equations. To know diffEQ, you need differential and integral calculus. To know calculus you need to understand limits (differential) and Reimann sums (integral). And you don't really understand Reimann sums until you know a bit about sequences and series, and limits again. You don't really understand that until you have algebra... no algebra without addition and subtraction... and so on. So even if you had all the theory for quantum mechanics available via instantaneous lookup in your head, that wouldn't help unless you understood all the underlying concepts. And even if all of those concepts were also available via instantaneous lookup, you still would have to process all that information.
I can go look up and read about quantum computing, qubits, and quantum encryption on Wikipedia, but my understanding of that is still pretty slim because I've only taken two semesters of university physics. I can read Einstein's 1905 papers, but I still don't get any more than the basics of quantum mechanics or special relativity. The information is available to me, I just can't fit enough of it in my processing cache at one time to grasp it.
It really doesn't seem feasable, unless there is a way to grant not only the availability of knowledge, but understanding as well.
I haven't been at Tech since '99 (Electrical Engineering), but the CS department then was still on Wintel boxes. A few years before I arrived, the CS department was using DEC Alphas. Now, they've got the System X supercomputer from Apple, but I wasn't aware that the CS department was recommending Macs for students. In fact, a quick look at the prospective students page shows that the CS department links to the engineering department's computer recommendation page, which is still recommending Wintel boxes.
I can see the reason that a CS department would go to Linux/BSD/OSX boxes, since g++ will work as well or better than anything on Windows (Dev-C++ is good, but still has some faults). For engineering, as stated by another poster, a lot of the required programs are Windows only, which is unfortunate. But I see that things are improving on that front: LabView, MatLab, PSpice... available in OS X now. So maybe things will change...
You must not know very many people then. I know many people who have used walkmans while skiing, and they've been doing it for decades. Some use them on the slopes, while others, like myself, use them on the chairlifts. When you've got a season pass and log close to 100 days a year, that's a lot of lift time, and slow days can be lonely. Music helps that long lift ride up.
And I don't think the rise of mp3 players has anything to do with it. As others have said, this all started with the sony walkman.
Speaking of horrible ideas... do you wear a helmet when you ski? (this isn't totally off topic, as some helmet models have built in headphones now)
yeah, but pulling power erases anything in volatile memory, so anything that had been stored in RAM and not committed to disk gets lost. That's why you don't cut power right away.
What if all the h4x0r tools were being used from a ram-disk location?
Don't. Really. My friends and I bought a bunch of Sega Genesis games and a system a while back. It brought back good memories, and was fun for a few hours. But it was barely worth the $25 we spent on everything (if you figure entertaining 3 people for a few hours would cost at least that doing something else, like going to the movies).
mmmm... Guinness on tap. Those widgets they came up with for the can and the new bottle, brilliant as they say, but still can't compare to getting a true draught Guinness. Maybe it's psychological or something, but I swear the can leaves a slight metallic taste, and both the can and bottled versions taste burnt to me. A nice, warmish pint at the local pub, it's more of a creamy, dark caramel taste than the burnt peat of the stuff off the shelf.
Here in Virginia, I can find Erdinger and Weihenstephaner weissbier quite regularly at the big box supermakets.
A good local (mid-Atlantic) weiss comes from the Weeping Radish brewery in Manteo, NC (outer banks area). The proprietor is from Germany, and adheres to the Reinheitsegebot (sp?... German beer purity law). If you're ever there in person, you can even get it unpastureized (have to keep it cold, though), although I'm not convinced there is much difference in taste.
The one that seems most easy to find though, is Widmer Bros, which you can even find on tap at a lot of bars. A lot of folks like that one, but I'm not a fan.
I don't think anyone has said that someone is "wrong" for liking simple pop music.
I like beer. I enjoy the great variety of beer available, and I go to great lengths and expenses to try new brews. And I won't be caught dead drinking any swill like Bud, Miller, etc. I don't have any problem with other people drinking that stuff, but I like my beer with a little more character and substance. Maybe I'm just being a snob, or maybe I really appreciate the complex depth of flavors available in different beers.
Similarly, I have friends who are very into wine. Me, I'm happy with a $10 bottle of chardonnay. My friends think they are sour and flat. My parents like box wines. I think they are sour and flat. It's all about the development of your pallet, and the ability to appreciate the nuances of the tastes.
Music is the same way. I've been playing classical piano since I was 8. I have extensive ear training, and while I'm no virtuoso, I can hold my own. My ears to used to hearing more complex peices and analysing them, so I likely notice more subtle effects than the general listening public. But I still can enjoy the Ramones or Green Day or the Connells. But I find Brittney and Avril and Vanilla Ice to be flat, predictable, and entirely uninteresting. I would encourage others to develop a more discriminate ear, to broaden their horizons and listen to something a little challenging, but if you're happy with what you like, I don't fault you for that.
Brittney is the Milwaukee's Best of the music world. Frowned upon by anyone with any sort of sophistication, but loved by the indiscriminate masses. If I'm an elitist for thinking that way, so be it. But doesn't that mean that Brittney panders to the lowest common denominator? Argue all you want about how good she is, but I think my argument against her having any sort of quality at all is implicit in your "elitist" accusation.
I know you were trying to be funny, but you're wrong on two counts, a double-wammy:
First off, the swirl of toilet water being a result of the Coriolis effect is a modern myth. The real reason is simply that
Secondly, the Coriolis effect is due to the rotation of the Earth, not the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field. So, if the swirl was due to Coriolis effect, then it would only reverse direction if the entire planet reversed the direction of its rotation.
I have played paintball for years and years, at the rec level in the woods, and at 3, 5, and 10 man pro-am speedball tournaments. I have yet to see anyone break a finger, or any bone, for that matter. In fact, the worst that I've seen happen was when a teammate forgot his cup one day, and so, of course, he got tagged right on one of his testicles. Ended his day right quick. And I once got clotheslined by a tree branch while retreating. Been playing for 12 years now, and that's about the worst of it, aside from the regular bruises and briar-scratches.
And if the broken fingers came from getting hit, maybe your local group should invest in a chronograph, or quit playing with frozen paint.
Have you taken any of these courses you speak of? An introductory EE course usually focuses on circuit theory (Ohm's and Kirchoff's laws, basic RLC circuits). Usually, one needs to get to the electromagnetics courses to start talking about lasing. But that's beside the point.
As far as creating a "coherent laser" (I'd like to see a non-coherent laser), most of the time they ARE created from non-coherent sources. The lasing medium has to be "pumped" (usually with a high-voltage pulse or flash tube) to create a population inversion (more excited atoms than ground-state atoms), which is what starts the stiumlated emission of photons. The amplification comes because the incoming photon is not absorbed by the atom, and you end up with a second emitted photon of identical phase. The atom then has to be pumped again to maintain the population inversion.
Whatever the lasing medium (ruby, HeNe, YAg, blah blah blah), mirrors are used at each end to amplify the light in a particular plane, even though the medium itself will have photons bouncing around inside it in all directions. You get laser light out of the end of the medium, but inside it is still non-coherent.
As for "inefficient, energy wasting filters," actually, dielectric mirrors that reflect close to 100% of the light are often used. Hardly inefficient.
That said, this is just what I remember from sidebar discussions during undergrad electromagnetics and solid state physics. I haven't actually taken an optics class, so my understanding might be a little simplistic, or even slightly misconstrued. Anyone care to elaborate or correct?
Still doesn't work. I can think of at least two problems:
1) The spammer is still taking up resources. My ISP's mail servers still have to accept and store the mail for me, and I have to waste time downloading it before I can filter it to trash. So in the end, I end up paying for it, both with time and by paying more to my ISP because they need to upgrade their infrastructure to support all this "legit" spam.
2) Assume #1 isn't a problem, then what if I want to send a legitimate, non-spam e-mail that has the word "advertisement" in the subject line? It will mistakenly get filtered to trash. A slight modification that might work would be to mandate a spam-specific header instead.
Not to mention that spammers want you to see their spam. They think that you don't know that you need what they are offering, but that if they only show you what you're missing, you'll rush to buy it. They want to get people on impulse buys, so they won't want to give you an easy way to just ignore them. It's the same argument that the telemarketers use, and it is valid because of all the weak-willed compulsive buyers out there.
I believe we need a technical mechanism within the POP/SMTP infrastructure, or a replacement, that locks things down more. What, exactly, does that entail? That's what we've got to figure out.
For instance, gear with a very low output impedence will be relatively unaffected by reactive loads. "Magic" cables sold by the salons are unlikely to have a lot of effect on the sound of such gear.
Got a question here. Now, I understand why the salons tout these magic cables, line impedence. Not sure that it really amounts to what they claim, but it seems to be a sound concept.
However, your claim here implies that output impedence varies significantly from amp to amp. I was under the impression that amps had to be matched to speakers (max power transfer when output impedence = speaker load). So because of industry standards, I figured that most amps matched up with the common speakers out there (4 or 8 ohms). By your claims, this relationship is more complex. Care to enlighten me? Please?
Am I the only one who ever has problems with this? Adding sugar/powdered drink mix/crushed jolly ranchers/pixie sticks to carbonated drinks tends to make the carbonation rapidly precipitate out of solution (since the beverage is a super-saturated solution of CO2, and the sugar is more soluable than the CO2). I've tried it with all manner of soda, and even tried in once as a way to make Zima taste better (was almost successful, actually).
Also, ever notice how adding dry ice to your soda makes it go flat, but will lightly carbonate a non-carbonated drink? Same effect, I'd imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm afraid you still don't understand. Any packet-switched radio, is digital by definition. Not "can be", but "is".
Radio, any RF transmission, is analog by nature. But the information you send has to be encoded somehow. You can do that in an analog manner, such as AM, FM, PM methods. Or you can do it in a digital manner: ASK, FSK, PSK, etc. Packet radio used by hams uses AFSK, as did early dial up modems you talk about, and both are a manner of transmitting a digital signal over an analog channel. Go look it up on Wikipedia if you don't believe me: packet radio and modems. Both pages very distinctly state that these are methods for transmitting digital data. Also mentioned in the original post was APRS, which is also specifically stated as being "an amateur radio-based system for real time tactical digital communications."
If you are sending packets over your radio, you are sending digital data.
Umm... you are aware that packet radio IS digital, right?
Pointing your antenna straight up is exactly the worst thing to do in this situation. The type of bipolar antenna most routers come with are omnidirectional, but with weak spots in the coaxial direction (directly out the two ends of the antenna). You would do better to turn your antenna sideways (horizontal) to broadcast in the "up" direction. The problem then is that you are also broadcasting sideways and down, so the up direction gets about 1/4 of total output power. What you really want in that situation (basement installation) is a parabolic antenna pointed upwards. They have very good gain (3 dBi or more) in the forward direction, while rejecting most signals from the sides or rear.
But you don't have the right to tape them.
Who's a dolt? Fair use doctrine does indeed allow time shifting (recording for later playback). It was validated by SCOTUS in the early 80's Betamax case, and hasn't been overturned by any subsequent decisions. If you don't believe me, here's the EFF's take on it.
So I guess that makes you a dolt too, spouting off about that which you know so little. It's people like you who are willing to just take whatever bread crumbs they toss us that are allowing them to get away with crap like this in the first place. Get educated about your rights, or shut up.
If you take any type of signal, and convert it, inherently, there is loss.
Right, that's why I mentioned sampling theory. Look up Nyquist criteria if you want more information.
Oh, and one can carry stereo where the other can carry monoaural.
Missed my point entirely. You stated that the transmission over the airwaves or down the wires/fiber is fundamentally analog. But to transmit any type of data, you have to come up with an encoding scheme. There are many many ways to do this, but they can basically be divided into two basic methods of encoding: analog and digital. The methods used for digitally encoding data tend to be less succeptable to noise, and are also able to use error correction methods to recover from large amounts of noise. To simply claim that digital is really just "... a pure and simple bullshit term." is just sweeping a lot of fundamental differences aside. If you don't catch what I'm trying to point out here, I don't know how to make it any more plain.
Oh, and just because commercial AM (DSB-LC, IIRC) and your shortwave radio (using what, supressed sideband?) don't do it doesn't mean you can't do stereo over AM: you can use independent sidebands, or frequency division multiplexing. QAM for AM is actually pretty close to how they do stereo-FM. You need something a little more complex than a superheterodyning envelope detector, but I can be done.
Resistance and capacitance are very closely related.
Sure, capacitance is closely related to resistance (resistance is the real component and capacitance/inductance is the imaginary, or reactive, component of a complex-valued impedance, anyone who takes a first course in circuits can tell you that). But the funamental point here can be seen in ohm's law for capacitors: i=C*dv/dt (again, introductory level circuits). So, because of the dv/dt term, you can't have instantaneous change in a capacitor. I don't really get your point about the wiring... LCD's work by changing the state of a capacitor, and for the short amount of wiring involved, I don't imagine there is any propogation delay. What am I missing in your explanation?
As for the work-around you suggest, check out Field Emission Displays, or Motorola's experimental Nano Emissive Display (which was mentioned on a slashdot article a few weeks back). I've heard it described as an array of pixels, similar to LCD, but with each pixel basically its own miniature CRT. Might result in a display that gets the best of both the LCD and CRT technologies.
By your reasoning, an AM signal has different channel properties than an FM signal, but why bother making that distinction since analog is obviously still analog. Never mind that AM is affected more by atmospheric noise, and that FM SNR can be increased more easily by increasing bandwidth. They're both analog, so who cares? Or maybe you should learn some about communication theory before you start spouting off.
Oh, and CRT vs. LCD? That "refresh rate" isn't due to wire resistance vs. vacuum. LCD's don't need to be refreshed, each pixel is always on or always off. Each pixel has a transistor controlling it (that's what the "TFT" means... Thin Film Transistor). These transistors can only switch states so fast, due to a parasitic capacitance between the gate and the drain of each transistor. Make a faster-switching transistor, and you get less ghosting. So you're comparing apples to oranges.
So, the question I have is, are you a troll, or just spouting off because you don't know any better?
Even if you had a neural link to Google, and could look anything up on the internet from within your brain, I don't think that would result in a situation such as you suggest. While I rather like the idea, like in the Matrix, of buying a CD with a particular skill set, going home, and loading it into my head, the problem is seek time.
See, if I were looking up something on Google, I still have to do the search, find appropriate material, and then read the material to understand it. Even if I was assured of 100% relavance (say if I had an entire Encyclopedia instead of google in my head), there still wouldn't be instant recall. What's really amazing about the human brain is the instantaneous seek and fetch times. Having a huge storage device available in our head just wouldn't work as well unless we could reproduce such instantaneous lookups.
Also, knowledge in most fields is cumulative... for example, to really understand many fields of physics, you need to understand differential equations. To know diffEQ, you need differential and integral calculus. To know calculus you need to understand limits (differential) and Reimann sums (integral). And you don't really understand Reimann sums until you know a bit about sequences and series, and limits again. You don't really understand that until you have algebra... no algebra without addition and subtraction... and so on. So even if you had all the theory for quantum mechanics available via instantaneous lookup in your head, that wouldn't help unless you understood all the underlying concepts. And even if all of those concepts were also available via instantaneous lookup, you still would have to process all that information.
I can go look up and read about quantum computing, qubits, and quantum encryption on Wikipedia, but my understanding of that is still pretty slim because I've only taken two semesters of university physics. I can read Einstein's 1905 papers, but I still don't get any more than the basics of quantum mechanics or special relativity. The information is available to me, I just can't fit enough of it in my processing cache at one time to grasp it.
It really doesn't seem feasable, unless there is a way to grant not only the availability of knowledge, but understanding as well.
I haven't been at Tech since '99 (Electrical Engineering), but the CS department then was still on Wintel boxes. A few years before I arrived, the CS department was using DEC Alphas. Now, they've got the System X supercomputer from Apple, but I wasn't aware that the CS department was recommending Macs for students. In fact, a quick look at the prospective students page shows that the CS department links to the engineering department's computer recommendation page, which is still recommending Wintel boxes.
I can see the reason that a CS department would go to Linux/BSD/OSX boxes, since g++ will work as well or better than anything on Windows (Dev-C++ is good, but still has some faults). For engineering, as stated by another poster, a lot of the required programs are Windows only, which is unfortunate. But I see that things are improving on that front: LabView, MatLab, PSpice... available in OS X now. So maybe things will change...
You must not know very many people then. I know many people who have used walkmans while skiing, and they've been doing it for decades. Some use them on the slopes, while others, like myself, use them on the chairlifts. When you've got a season pass and log close to 100 days a year, that's a lot of lift time, and slow days can be lonely. Music helps that long lift ride up.
And I don't think the rise of mp3 players has anything to do with it. As others have said, this all started with the sony walkman.
Speaking of horrible ideas... do you wear a helmet when you ski? (this isn't totally off topic, as some helmet models have built in headphones now)
Well, I think you've got it mixed up then. You don't care about free as in speech, you want free as in beer.
beer: someone gives you some beer (or code they wrote) for free. You get the product of someone else's work; something for nothing.
speech: the freedom to say (or code) whatever it is you would like to, without having to worry about what others might think.
So, if you want code, code, code, you want free as in BEER. At least, that's how I've always understood it. Am I backwards?
yeah, but pulling power erases anything in volatile memory, so anything that had been stored in RAM and not committed to disk gets lost. That's why you don't cut power right away.
What if all the h4x0r tools were being used from a ram-disk location?
hmmm, guess not. I type too slowly.
First post?
Don't. Really. My friends and I bought a bunch of Sega Genesis games and a system a while back. It brought back good memories, and was fun for a few hours. But it was barely worth the $25 we spent on everything (if you figure entertaining 3 people for a few hours would cost at least that doing something else, like going to the movies).
mmmm... Guinness on tap. Those widgets they came up with for the can and the new bottle, brilliant as they say, but still can't compare to getting a true draught Guinness. Maybe it's psychological or something, but I swear the can leaves a slight metallic taste, and both the can and bottled versions taste burnt to me. A nice, warmish pint at the local pub, it's more of a creamy, dark caramel taste than the burnt peat of the stuff off the shelf.
Here in Virginia, I can find Erdinger and Weihenstephaner weissbier quite regularly at the big box supermakets.
A good local (mid-Atlantic) weiss comes from the Weeping Radish brewery in Manteo, NC (outer banks area). The proprietor is from Germany, and adheres to the Reinheitsegebot (sp?... German beer purity law). If you're ever there in person, you can even get it unpastureized (have to keep it cold, though), although I'm not convinced there is much difference in taste.
The one that seems most easy to find though, is Widmer Bros, which you can even find on tap at a lot of bars. A lot of folks like that one, but I'm not a fan.
That's odd... many of the folks I know in IT are currently active musicians, or at least played something or other growing up.
I don't think anyone has said that someone is "wrong" for liking simple pop music.
I like beer. I enjoy the great variety of beer available, and I go to great lengths and expenses to try new brews. And I won't be caught dead drinking any swill like Bud, Miller, etc. I don't have any problem with other people drinking that stuff, but I like my beer with a little more character and substance. Maybe I'm just being a snob, or maybe I really appreciate the complex depth of flavors available in different beers.
Similarly, I have friends who are very into wine. Me, I'm happy with a $10 bottle of chardonnay. My friends think they are sour and flat. My parents like box wines. I think they are sour and flat. It's all about the development of your pallet, and the ability to appreciate the nuances of the tastes.
Music is the same way. I've been playing classical piano since I was 8. I have extensive ear training, and while I'm no virtuoso, I can hold my own. My ears to used to hearing more complex peices and analysing them, so I likely notice more subtle effects than the general listening public. But I still can enjoy the Ramones or Green Day or the Connells. But I find Brittney and Avril and Vanilla Ice to be flat, predictable, and entirely uninteresting. I would encourage others to develop a more discriminate ear, to broaden their horizons and listen to something a little challenging, but if you're happy with what you like, I don't fault you for that.
Brittney is the Milwaukee's Best of the music world. Frowned upon by anyone with any sort of sophistication, but loved by the indiscriminate masses. If I'm an elitist for thinking that way, so be it. But doesn't that mean that Brittney panders to the lowest common denominator? Argue all you want about how good she is, but I think my argument against her having any sort of quality at all is implicit in your "elitist" accusation.
I know you were trying to be funny, but you're wrong on two counts, a double-wammy:
First off, the swirl of toilet water being a result of the Coriolis effect is a modern myth. The real reason is simply that
Secondly, the Coriolis effect is due to the rotation of the Earth, not the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field. So, if the swirl was due to Coriolis effect, then it would only reverse direction if the entire planet reversed the direction of its rotation.
I have played paintball for years and years, at the rec level in the woods, and at 3, 5, and 10 man pro-am speedball tournaments. I have yet to see anyone break a finger, or any bone, for that matter. In fact, the worst that I've seen happen was when a teammate forgot his cup one day, and so, of course, he got tagged right on one of his testicles. Ended his day right quick. And I once got clotheslined by a tree branch while retreating. Been playing for 12 years now, and that's about the worst of it, aside from the regular bruises and briar-scratches.
And if the broken fingers came from getting hit, maybe your local group should invest in a chronograph, or quit playing with frozen paint.
Have you taken any of these courses you speak of? An introductory EE course usually focuses on circuit theory (Ohm's and Kirchoff's laws, basic RLC circuits). Usually, one needs to get to the electromagnetics courses to start talking about lasing. But that's beside the point.
As far as creating a "coherent laser" (I'd like to see a non-coherent laser), most of the time they ARE created from non-coherent sources. The lasing medium has to be "pumped" (usually with a high-voltage pulse or flash tube) to create a population inversion (more excited atoms than ground-state atoms), which is what starts the stiumlated emission of photons. The amplification comes because the incoming photon is not absorbed by the atom, and you end up with a second emitted photon of identical phase. The atom then has to be pumped again to maintain the population inversion.
Whatever the lasing medium (ruby, HeNe, YAg, blah blah blah), mirrors are used at each end to amplify the light in a particular plane, even though the medium itself will have photons bouncing around inside it in all directions. You get laser light out of the end of the medium, but inside it is still non-coherent.
As for "inefficient, energy wasting filters," actually, dielectric mirrors that reflect close to 100% of the light are often used. Hardly inefficient.
That said, this is just what I remember from sidebar discussions during undergrad electromagnetics and solid state physics. I haven't actually taken an optics class, so my understanding might be a little simplistic, or even slightly misconstrued. Anyone care to elaborate or correct?
Still doesn't work. I can think of at least two problems:
1) The spammer is still taking up resources. My ISP's mail servers still have to accept and store the mail for me, and I have to waste time downloading it before I can filter it to trash. So in the end, I end up paying for it, both with time and by paying more to my ISP because they need to upgrade their infrastructure to support all this "legit" spam.
2) Assume #1 isn't a problem, then what if I want to send a legitimate, non-spam e-mail that has the word "advertisement" in the subject line? It will mistakenly get filtered to trash. A slight modification that might work would be to mandate a spam-specific header instead.
Not to mention that spammers want you to see their spam. They think that you don't know that you need what they are offering, but that if they only show you what you're missing, you'll rush to buy it. They want to get people on impulse buys, so they won't want to give you an easy way to just ignore them. It's the same argument that the telemarketers use, and it is valid because of all the weak-willed compulsive buyers out there.
I believe we need a technical mechanism within the POP/SMTP infrastructure, or a replacement, that locks things down more. What, exactly, does that entail? That's what we've got to figure out.
For instance, gear with a very low output impedence will be relatively unaffected by reactive loads. "Magic" cables sold by the salons are unlikely to have a lot of effect on the sound of such gear.
Got a question here. Now, I understand why the salons tout these magic cables, line impedence. Not sure that it really amounts to what they claim, but it seems to be a sound concept.
However, your claim here implies that output impedence varies significantly from amp to amp. I was under the impression that amps had to be matched to speakers (max power transfer when output impedence = speaker load). So because of industry standards, I figured that most amps matched up with the common speakers out there (4 or 8 ohms). By your claims, this relationship is more complex. Care to enlighten me? Please?
Don't you mean a real calculator like the HP-49g (I never liked the TI models much)?
Am I the only one who ever has problems with this? Adding sugar/powdered drink mix/crushed jolly ranchers/pixie sticks to carbonated drinks tends to make the carbonation rapidly precipitate out of solution (since the beverage is a super-saturated solution of CO2, and the sugar is more soluable than the CO2). I've tried it with all manner of soda, and even tried in once as a way to make Zima taste better (was almost successful, actually).
Also, ever notice how adding dry ice to your soda makes it go flat, but will lightly carbonate a non-carbonated drink? Same effect, I'd imagine.