That's boring. Assault weapon shooting, though, is lots of fun.
If, like many Slashdotters, you enjoy hobbies with lots of neat-o gear, where perfectionism and in-depth arcane knowledge lead to success and the respect of your peers, the shooting sports are perfect for you. For those nasty assault rifles, Highpower rifle competition is one of the most popular shooting sports for the precision-minded. For the precision-minded who border on (or go well over the border to) obsessive-compulsive, look into benchrest competition. For shorter-range, fast shooting look into practical rifle. For the ultimate in slow, long-range work, look into 1000-yard benchrest or F-class competition.
If you prefer pistols, there's a plethora of options with targets ranging from big 'uns just 10 feet away to little 'uns out at 500 meters.
Just an overview. If you want more specifc info, reply and I'll post back.
OTOH, if you were just trying to be sarcastic, you failed miserably, at least with me and all the other assault rifle collectors in the audience.
If you dont renounce your citizenship you get to file income tax returns with Uncle Sam in perpetuity...
True, but...
Keep in mind that you can't unilaterally renounce your citizenship and be done with it. The Dept of State has to accept that renouncement. It is illegal to renounce citizenship for the purpose of evading taxes. If there's even a hint of that in your motivation, State will refuse. How will they know? It might come out in the interview. Renouncing your citizenship is something you have to do in person and there will be questions. Lots of them.
...the Founding Fathers expected and wanted...a white, Christian, land-owning, upper-class in control... The first president of the US was an avid slave owner...
The first president of the US wasn't a Christian. He, like some other FFs, was a Deist. He thought there was a higher power. He went to church because that was the accepted way of expressing one's spirituality in those days. But he left before Communion, always, because that would have been a symbolic acceptance of the whole set of Christian beliefs, something he simply didn't accept.
Can you imagine a Presidential candidate today getting up and leaving church before communion and being quoted in the press as saying "Well, I believe in a higher power and all, but this whole 'body of Christ' thing is more than I can swallow.* I think those Christians are nice people and I'll share their meetings, but I'm not really one of them"? He'd be pilloried. He couldn't get elected dog catcher.
(*) - That's humor, for those of you who didn't recognize it.
Do you really mean to imply that Shrub is a spiritual descendant of Washington? That both of them share similar goals and visions for this country? Washington had the strength of his convictions and enough humanity to admit that he didn't know all the answers and, certainly, enough good sense not to intimate that his actions were the result of God whispering in his ear.
I find your assertion that Bush is "fulfilling the original American dream" offensive on a dozen levels. He wouldn't know "the original American dream" if it bit him in the ass.
I was always intrigued by something I once read on the way the Soviets had planned, back during the cold war, in negating our satellites. We had a huge lead in satellites and their satellites were of negligible worth to them, so they came up with a plan to simply wipe the sky clean. Using their heavy-lift rockets (and they've always had good ones), they would launch a giant pod of, essentially, BBs. Millions of little ball bearings. By dispersing a cloud of these things, everything orbiting at the same altitude would eventually get punched full of holes and ultimately knocked out.
After doing a quick google, I see that this sort of simple anti-sat concept is still seriously considered; lots of on-point URLS turn up when you search on "Soviet "ball bearing" anti-satellite."
The main error in the parent post is a failure to understand the aggregated and unworkable nature of DHS.
To create DHS, a bunch of agencies were thrown together and wrapped in a new layer of bureauracry. (I won't go into how the employees of those agencies got screwed, what with the administration taking this as an opportunity to strip away most of the civil service protections that prevent govt employees from being used quite as easily for evil purposes because their jobs are protected and they can't be capriciously threatened with firing if they don't unquestioningly act to further political agendas.) This has created turf wars, overlapping work, work that doesn't get done after attempts to eliminate overlapping work, and a host of other problems.
The FBI could never absorb that many people, so that isn't a solution, either.
I we had wanted a real, functional DHS, we should have passed enabling legislation to staff an new agency with a few thousand investigators who had broad powers to access the records of OTHER GOVT AGENCIES. They could have been tasked with, in the simplest of terms, just talking to everybody - FBI, SS, local cops, anybody they wanted to. They then could be responsible for the data mining, if you will, that would bring to the fore the kind of intelligence that's needed to prevent attacks. If, for example, someone had just put the pieces together about the 9/11 hijackers, there might have been enough info to start investigations that could have prevented the attacks.
An effective DHS would have been a bunch of professional gossip junkies who made the rounds of the various agencies, developed contacts, and then talked to each other. When too many suspicious coincidences popped up, they could call up the FBI and say "Here's something you should take a look at." A wetware google function for law enforcement, if you will.
Instead, we've just got a mess, a boondoggle, and a less-than-optimally efficient political machine.
These guys did some weird stuff. For example, they spammed our internal email addresses at the IRS with offers to host child porn sites. For example, here's one of the emails they sent to an IRS employee, namely me.
From: ipadmin@eng.xo.com
[mailto:ipadmin@eng.xo.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 4:48 AM
To: b*******.b.o****@irs.gov
Subject: Need to host child porn, illegal content, Spam advert site
Need to host child porn, illegal content, Spam advert site? Try www.hopone.net you will be able to host anything you desire.
Our site will be usefull for the those who want to wash their money also:) (If you don't want to pay taxes or you need to buy something illegal like weapons or drugs).
But here's where I run out of expertise in how these things work. What on earth were they hoping to accomplish by sending out these spams? Are people actually dumb enough to dial up a phone number sent to them in spam and say "I'd like to host a child porn site. Please set it up for me. Here's my credit card info."?
Or is that phone number one of those things that charges you outrageous sums just for calling it? I wouldn't know; I certainly didn't ring 'em up out of curiosity.
These shadowcrew folks just strike me as weird. I wish I understood their "business model." OTOH, I'm just glad I won't be getting any more emails from them that I have to forward to our investigators.
I've taken one polygraph in my life. I was 19 and full of that sort of moral superiority that comes from the false certainty of youth. I answered all the questions truthfully, especially the one about whether I'd ever smoked pot. I hadn't and thought anyone who did was a loser. In fact, I felt strongly about the subject.
Afterward, the guy puts his arm around me and tells me I passed and that one lie that I told about the pot wouldn't be held against me. He patted me on the back and sent me on my may.
One anomalous response was interpreted as a lie. A faulty technology had convinced a total stranger that I smoked pot when I never had. The report of that session went to my new employer who didn't fire me but did make the report available to another employee who happened to be my sister. To this day, she thinks I've experimented with drugs when I haven't. After all, what's my word balanced against a neat-o cool technology with all those scribbling pens and sensors and stuff, right?
Polygraphs are bunk. People who make their living in that industry are, by my definition, liars and should be shunned.
Yes, I know I'm only one data point. But sometimes it only takes one data point to know when a technology has failed and is not trustworthy in broad application.
One of the big insights in the last few years...is that data with no meaningful structure can still be very powerful if the tools...are good.
Yep. Ask anybody who ever used askSam for their desktop database needs back in the day. Lordy, I miss that software. When was that, anyway? Back in the late 1980s? The brain's a little foggy today...
Yeah, this is OT, but I just love telling this story, so...
There was a market here in Houston some years ago that got in some new, stupid management who managed to drive the place out of business. Under the old management, the store maintained a huge excess of shopping carts. The people in the poor surrounding neighborhood didn't have cars, so they'd use the carts to push their purchases all the way back home. The store hired a team to drive around the neighborhood with a pickup truck towing a low flatbed trailer. Those guys would gather up the carts and return them to the store. Everybody was happy.
New management comes in and freaks out. "These poor people are stealing our carts!" They set up speed bumps at the parking lot entrances and put disablers on the shopping carts so that if you lifted the front of the cart over the bump, a rod woud drop out of the front of the cart and prevent it from being rolled. Soon, people figured out that if they taped the rods in place, they could get the carts out of the parking lot.
Management responded with abusive security guards and calling the police. A number of ugly confrontations happened, completely poisoning the relationship between this store and the community. Eventually, management put up crash barrier poles in a small circle around the entrance to the store. The space between them was so narrow, you couldn't get a cart through them. If you had a load of groceries, you'd have to have a family member watch your cart while you went to go get the car, bring it to the front, and load out your groceries.
Finally, the new management had found a way to keep those pesky poor people from stealing their carts. Unfortunately for them, those pesky poor people were the majority of their customers. Those customers started walking a much further distance to another store that wasn't run by idiots. Add to this the traffic jam at the store entrance, the short tempers this caused, and it just got to the point where people didn't want to deal with the stress of shopping at that store, even if it was the only conveniently located full-size grocery store for several neighborhoods. People literally started carpooling to other markets and a secondary market in unlicensed taxis grew up to meet their needs. Basically, anybody in the surrounding apartment complexes who had a car could put up a note in the laundry advertising when they would be making runs to the grocery store and fill their car with passengers who'd pay 2 or 3 bucks to ride along.
The phrase "penny-wise and pound-foolish" comes to mind.
Anyway, I'm reminded of this story because, somehow, to me, a shopping cart should be something to carry groceries. It just seems oddly wrong that people try to use shopping carts to carry advertising, computers, or to enforce their ability to control the actions of their customers.
This is an old, old topic. It was widely discussed in the aftermath of the Mitchell brothers trial for a murder that happened in 1991. Some observers felt that the use by the prosecution of a sophisticated (for the time) animated recreation of their version of events unduly swayed the jury.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Look, I'm from Texas. Around here, we call Bush "The Texas Twit" or just plain ol' "Shrub." I have no respect for the guy.
But...
You characterized him as "a religious extremist." That's just flat wrong. If he was anything close to well-immersed in Christianity he would have understood the need to stay out of wars in the Middle East. He'd certainly have known better than to have started one. He would have understood the religious motivations that have produced conflict in the region for thousands of years and he wouldn't have seriously considered for more than a nano-second sticking his nose into that quagmire.
If he were a religious extremist, he would have just kept up support for Israel, made a few peace gestures that would produce good photo ops, and prayed that nobody over there chose to nuke anybody else until he was out of office.
A real Christian, someone who understands the history of his religion, would have known better.
Bush says he's a Christian. This gets him votes and, in this country, makes him seem like a nicer, more principled person. However, the evidence that he really gives a rat's ass about his faith is feeble to non-existent.
That's the same way I feel about idiots who actually try to tell me that the New York Times is a good newspaper. Yes, that's right, there are actually people who think the New York Times is a good newspaper. Can you believe it?
You'd be surprised. Over the years, I've seen plenty of pictures of people with money toting cameras that were, for them, ridiculous. It's almost a joke in the used camera world how second-hand Linhofs (incredibly expensive, breathtakingly well-made cameras) always seem to be in such great condition because they were bought by rich doctors who thought such a fancy camera made them look cool. That it will do, but they never ran more than a few rolls of film through them before the cameras got stuck in a closet and forgotten. For goodness sake, I actually saw a television story with footage of that talk radio DJ, Don Imus, using a panoramic Linhof to take family snapshots. *Really* expensive cameras have always sold well both to pros who need their advanced capabilities and big-money dunderheads who want an 8-thousand-dollar ornament to hang around their neck.
Don't underestimate the coolness factor. Don't underestimate the "some people got more money than sense" factor.
Let me slightly re-edit and repeat something I previously posted to/.
Concerning Freenet, countless times I've read that once you've been online for a while you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience. However, after a couple of weeks of continuous use, my Freenet experience is no better than at the beginning - awful. It's slow. It's impossible to browse around at random to get the feel of the place. It's extremely difficult to find anything. Unless I'm missing something major, it's nigh onto unuseable.
Would somebody please tell me how Freenet is supposed to work? I must be missing something because what I'm seeing surely isn't what was intended unless the designers just happen to like dishing out pain...
Kodak had an ultra-high pixel count SLR a while back that was generally judged to be a dog because of battery life problems. The machine took so long to turn on it was only useful if you left it on all the time but if you left it on all the time the battery died in an hour. Not good.
Anybody have any idea what the battery life is on this Canon? The specs say 800 pictures at a freezing ambient temperature, but I'm going to be curious exactly how much they're exaggerating.
Anything that cuts down on poaching is a good thing. But there are better ways.
The best is hunting. The history of hunting bans and poaching is a very sad one but one thing made clear a long time ago is that where hunting is legal (and, more arguably, where taking ivory is legal), poaching is far less likely.
It works like this: Where hunting is legal, men (they're almost always men) on safari pay utterly ridiculous amounts of money for the privilege of shooting an elephant. The governments hit these guys up for ungodly fees. Professional hunters make money and employ locals. Everybody profits and everybody appreciates that ensuring a permanent supply of elephants is absolutely mandatory. No more elephants == no more hunters == no more incoming money. Governments will field enough rangers, anti-poaching folks with guns, to keep the poachers away because if they don't commit to protecting the elephants, the gravy train dries up.
But if ivory and hunting are illegal, the ivory becomes very expensive. Poachers are then highly motivated. Protecting the elephants becomes expensive; they aren't bringing in any money so they become a fiscal liability. You have to spend money to protect them, money that those nations don't have. Do you think poor African countries will be sufficiently motivated by their love of Mother Earth to spend enough non-eixtent money to protect the animals? Not likely. Far more likely is that bribes will be paid to find out when the few rangers will be where so the poachers can be killing animals elsewhere. Corruption ensues. Elephants don't get hunted; they get wasted. The elephants are far worse off, as a whole.
Any sort of measures to fight poaching are good. Props to the people doing this DNA work. But in the real world, it's been shown over and over again that when you make it in the financial interest of the government (and everyone else) to preserve animals, that's when animals get protected.
Hunters are the true conservationists in this world. Google on Pittman-Robertson Act if you want a good example of that principle in action.
How is it overblown are there only a few dozen kids abducted / molested a year instead of hundreds so it is no big deal?
Exactly.
Freedom has a price. The freedom to travel freely, however you want to, means that a few thousand people a year will die in car accidents. The freedom to speak your mind means that somewhere, sometime, some folks are going to abuse that freedom and incite a riot during which people die. The freedom to keep and bear arms means that some people will be wrongfully shot.
You can't have the good without the bad.
So, yeah, it's not exactly no big deal that only a few dozen kids get hurt a year, but that's certainly nowhere near enough justification to sanction any mechanism that may be even a precursor (as has been pointed out in other postings) to restraining the electronic means of exercising our right to freedom of speech and association.
Once you've been online for a while... you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience.
Countless times, I've read the same thing about Freenet. But after a couple of weeks of continuous use, my Freenet experience is no better than at the beginning - awful. It's slow. It's impossible to browse around at random to get the feel of the place. It's extremely difficult to find anything. Unless I'm missing something major, it's nigh onto unuseable.
So, folks, if you find eDonkey painful, I suggest you try Freenet for a while. After that experience, virtually any other network dedicated to any other purpose will seem downright speedy.
You're onto some excellent points. Really excellent.
First, when it comes to double-blind tests, that's a near-infinite mine field. If you'd like to discuss it (a potentially lengthy exchange), just say so and I'll dive in. My short take on double-blind tests for audio reproduction quality is that every one I've ever seen was so poorly structured that the results were meaningless. Deciding if there's a subtle problem in the way an audio system sounds takes a great deal of time that I've never seen anyone invest when using a double-blind method. Most testers want to do a "Listen to this, and this, and this. Any difference?" sort of test that can be wrapped up in an afternoon. That just won't fly when it comes to judging audio.
As for your question "Are you saying science has found no way to build equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear?", you're striking right at the heart of the matter. I'm not saying that, exactly. What I'm saying is that, in general, science builds equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear ONLY AFTER being led to what needs to be measured by people listening with those ears.
Take jitter, for instance. The people who used their ears said "This stuff sounds bad." That wasn't good enough for the scientists who knew it all, knew their measurements were perfect, knew their instruments had superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear, and had all sorts of charts and graphs to back it up. The people who relied on their ears, who believed their ears were more sensitive to some thus-far unquantified problem that the lab equipment THEN EXTANT did not measure, were dismissed as cranks and romantic fools. But they persisted. They made up all sorts of romantic, foolish language to discuss what they were hearing. They made vague, almost mystical allusions to "time errors" and "soundstaging anomalies." They continued to be dismissed for a long while. A few researchers, though, thought that they just might be hearing something wrong, too. So they started looking for problems that weren't measured by their current instruments. They found jitter and a host of other problems, they found ways to measure them, and, sure enough, when they started designing circuits with the new measurements in mind, the cranks and romantic fools who relied on their ears started to say "Yeah, that's the ticket; that's improved." The new measuring equipment that results from this process is far more sensitive than the human ear but that equipment would never come into existence without people who were first willing to trust their ears.
Yet, despite the lessons of history, whenever someone claims to hear a problem that doesn't show up on a spec sheet they get ignored and belittled. So my answer to your original question is yes and no. Yes, ears are more sensitive than testing equipment when it comes to identifying when *something* is wrong, that being something that the engineers and psychoacouticians are not yet measuring. And no, once a few engineers have taken the time to listen to their ears and figure out what to measure and design equipment to do that measuring, human ears are not more sensitive than that new equipment.
Of course, now that you've solved some problems, ever-more-subtle ones that were previously masked by the more gross errors just corrected will be revealed. Human ears will hear those new problems long before science comes up with equipment to measure them. The people that hear those problems will be dismissed as fools for a while. Finally, scientists will trust their ears and come up with equipment to measure the new phenomena. Corrections will be made and the cycle will start over.
Excellent point and you're absolutely correct about the placebo effect. What irks me in this debate, though, (and I've been participating in it for 20 years) are the people that assume that *every* instance of someone hearing a difference is the placebo effect. It's not. As we saw, just to use one basic example, in the development of ways to measure jitter there were people hearing problems with digital sound who were dismissed by the experts for years until *some* of those experts figured out that, yes, there was something wrong and we could measure it.
In far more cases than the pure objectivist side in this debate is willing to admit, when people have heard differences in sound even though those differences weren't measurable, it eventually turned out that the people doing the measuring just didn't have the knowledge and instrumentation to quantify what was being heard.
Yes, much of high-end audio is a cross between a flim-flam and a pernicious disease. But it's just wrong to say "There's no measurable difference so what you're hearing must be a placebo effect." Often enough to make life interesting, the problem in those situations is simply that we don't yet understand what needs to be measured. The researchers who have done great things in this field are the ones who listen and trust their ears. What they hear doesn't always pan out as something real, but it happens often enough to make being dismissive of claims of difference terribly shortsighted.
This idea that the ears are better than any instruments is romantic nonsense.
That's exactly what the experts said back when CDs first came out. Those of us listening on good equipment, though, kept saying "Gee, these things sound really bad. Are you sure there's nothing wrong with the technology?" We were repeatedly assured nothing was wrong and that it was impossible for there to be any problems because the sampling rate was high enough that no human ears could possibly hear a problem and all the measurements were SOOOO much better than LPs. We were told that THD, for example, had been reduced to a total non-issue. For any objection we had, the "experts" pointed to other parts of the sound reproduction chain. The digital technology, though, was perfect. End of discussion. If you thought otherwise, you were engaged in laughable romantic nonsense.
You know what? After all these years we've come to find out that those CDs DID sound bad, DID have audible problems directly attributable to digital technology, and generally WERE crap. Nowadays we measure lots more things and CDs sound much better. Much of the romantic nonsense we were hearing turned out to be instrument-measurable problems but back then the engineers didn't know what to measure. Human ears, though, were capable of discerning the existence of problems, even if they couldn't quantify it on some engineer-approved scale of numbers.
As time goes by, human ears will hear problems in sound recordings. Technological apologists will say there are no problems because they can't be measured. Open-minded scientists and engineers who believe in technology as a tool and not as a God will do good research and find out that there are more things that need to be measured. Those things will be quantified, tested, and corrected. Then recordings will sound better.
We'll know they sound better because we'll use our ears to judge.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with most of your post. Just running a signal through tubes doesn't make it better.
But...
You go way too far when you ridicule people who say they hear differences that can't be seen on instruments.
It's just wrong to couch this in terms of "If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion." Fact is, when someone says they hear a difference, the "thing" IS being detected. The difference IS being measured. It's being detected by the listener's ears. It's being measured on a scale defined by that listener.
The problem is that human ears are not calibrated against any objective standard. In the best cases, they are the finest detectors of subtle differences in sound available to us, far surpassing the sensitivity of the best mikes and racks of measuring equipment. They are also, unfortunately, completely non-standard in their reaction to input, subject to variation depending on a host of external and internal factors, and their results are not repeatable from instrument to instrument. That doesn't mean they are insensitive. That doesn't mean they don't actually hear a difference. It just means that the difference may or may not be obvious to another listener and may or may not be meaningful to anyone except the person listening at that moment.
I have no doubt that if you have good hearing and a love of music, you could listen to a particular orchestra play a particular piece in a particular venue many times over the course of years. That piece could then be recorded by that orchestra in that venue. As a fully-qualified judge, then, you could listen to the recordings through tubes and solid-state, planar and box speakers, etc., and be able to tell not only which ones were different and which you prefer, but which recordings and playback setups are more accurate. Just using your ears. And your results may not track in any meaningful way with the measurements produced by that bench full of instruments.
In that case, I'd consider the conclusions of the qualified listener to be far more authoritative than those of the technician who simply looks at the output of test instruments.
To translate to a more general case: By far, when everything is right, you'll be better guided in your choices of audio gear if you use your ears rather than just look at specs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's boring. Assault weapon shooting, though, is lots of fun.
If, like many Slashdotters, you enjoy hobbies with lots of neat-o gear, where perfectionism and in-depth arcane knowledge lead to success and the respect of your peers, the shooting sports are perfect for you. For those nasty assault rifles, Highpower rifle competition is one of the most popular shooting sports for the precision-minded. For the precision-minded who border on (or go well over the border to) obsessive-compulsive, look into benchrest competition. For shorter-range, fast shooting look into practical rifle. For the ultimate in slow, long-range work, look into 1000-yard benchrest or F-class competition.
If you prefer pistols, there's a plethora of options with targets ranging from big 'uns just 10 feet away to little 'uns out at 500 meters.
Just an overview. If you want more specifc info, reply and I'll post back.
OTOH, if you were just trying to be sarcastic, you failed miserably, at least with me and all the other assault rifle collectors in the audience.
True, but...
Keep in mind that you can't unilaterally renounce your citizenship and be done with it. The Dept of State has to accept that renouncement. It is illegal to renounce citizenship for the purpose of evading taxes. If there's even a hint of that in your motivation, State will refuse. How will they know? It might come out in the interview. Renouncing your citizenship is something you have to do in person and there will be questions. Lots of them.
The first president of the US wasn't a Christian. He, like some other FFs, was a Deist. He thought there was a higher power. He went to church because that was the accepted way of expressing one's spirituality in those days. But he left before Communion, always, because that would have been a symbolic acceptance of the whole set of Christian beliefs, something he simply didn't accept.
Can you imagine a Presidential candidate today getting up and leaving church before communion and being quoted in the press as saying "Well, I believe in a higher power and all, but this whole 'body of Christ' thing is more than I can swallow.* I think those Christians are nice people and I'll share their meetings, but I'm not really one of them"? He'd be pilloried. He couldn't get elected dog catcher.
(*) - That's humor, for those of you who didn't recognize it.
Do you really mean to imply that Shrub is a spiritual descendant of Washington? That both of them share similar goals and visions for this country? Washington had the strength of his convictions and enough humanity to admit that he didn't know all the answers and, certainly, enough good sense not to intimate that his actions were the result of God whispering in his ear.
I find your assertion that Bush is "fulfilling the original American dream" offensive on a dozen levels. He wouldn't know "the original American dream" if it bit him in the ass.
I was always intrigued by something I once read on the way the Soviets had planned, back during the cold war, in negating our satellites. We had a huge lead in satellites and their satellites were of negligible worth to them, so they came up with a plan to simply wipe the sky clean. Using their heavy-lift rockets (and they've always had good ones), they would launch a giant pod of, essentially, BBs. Millions of little ball bearings. By dispersing a cloud of these things, everything orbiting at the same altitude would eventually get punched full of holes and ultimately knocked out.
After doing a quick google, I see that this sort of simple anti-sat concept is still seriously considered; lots of on-point URLS turn up when you search on "Soviet "ball bearing" anti-satellite."
Joe job? OK. That's reasonable. The email was so over the top that your explanation strikes me as a good one.
Interesting, nonetheless, to see what sort of drivel people will send out in your name if they don't like you.
Thanks for the heads up.
The main error in the parent post is a failure to understand the aggregated and unworkable nature of DHS.
To create DHS, a bunch of agencies were thrown together and wrapped in a new layer of bureauracry. (I won't go into how the employees of those agencies got screwed, what with the administration taking this as an opportunity to strip away most of the civil service protections that prevent govt employees from being used quite as easily for evil purposes because their jobs are protected and they can't be capriciously threatened with firing if they don't unquestioningly act to further political agendas.) This has created turf wars, overlapping work, work that doesn't get done after attempts to eliminate overlapping work, and a host of other problems.
The FBI could never absorb that many people, so that isn't a solution, either.
I we had wanted a real, functional DHS, we should have passed enabling legislation to staff an new agency with a few thousand investigators who had broad powers to access the records of OTHER GOVT AGENCIES. They could have been tasked with, in the simplest of terms, just talking to everybody - FBI, SS, local cops, anybody they wanted to. They then could be responsible for the data mining, if you will, that would bring to the fore the kind of intelligence that's needed to prevent attacks. If, for example, someone had just put the pieces together about the 9/11 hijackers, there might have been enough info to start investigations that could have prevented the attacks.
An effective DHS would have been a bunch of professional gossip junkies who made the rounds of the various agencies, developed contacts, and then talked to each other. When too many suspicious coincidences popped up, they could call up the FBI and say "Here's something you should take a look at." A wetware google function for law enforcement, if you will.
Instead, we've just got a mess, a boondoggle, and a less-than-optimally efficient political machine.
Such a shame.
Shadowcrew. I knew I recognized that name.
These guys did some weird stuff. For example, they spammed our internal email addresses at the IRS with offers to host child porn sites. For example, here's one of the emails they sent to an IRS employee, namely me.
But here's where I run out of expertise in how these things work. What on earth were they hoping to accomplish by sending out these spams? Are people actually dumb enough to dial up a phone number sent to them in spam and say "I'd like to host a child porn site. Please set it up for me. Here's my credit card info."?
Or is that phone number one of those things that charges you outrageous sums just for calling it? I wouldn't know; I certainly didn't ring 'em up out of curiosity.
These shadowcrew folks just strike me as weird. I wish I understood their "business model." OTOH, I'm just glad I won't be getting any more emails from them that I have to forward to our investigators.
No, no, no. I *WAS* an angry young man all those years ago.
:-)
Now, I'm just a crotchety old fart.
I've taken one polygraph in my life. I was 19 and full of that sort of moral superiority that comes from the false certainty of youth. I answered all the questions truthfully, especially the one about whether I'd ever smoked pot. I hadn't and thought anyone who did was a loser. In fact, I felt strongly about the subject.
Afterward, the guy puts his arm around me and tells me I passed and that one lie that I told about the pot wouldn't be held against me. He patted me on the back and sent me on my may.
One anomalous response was interpreted as a lie. A faulty technology had convinced a total stranger that I smoked pot when I never had. The report of that session went to my new employer who didn't fire me but did make the report available to another employee who happened to be my sister. To this day, she thinks I've experimented with drugs when I haven't. After all, what's my word balanced against a neat-o cool technology with all those scribbling pens and sensors and stuff, right?
Polygraphs are bunk. People who make their living in that industry are, by my definition, liars and should be shunned.
Yes, I know I'm only one data point. But sometimes it only takes one data point to know when a technology has failed and is not trustworthy in broad application.
Yep. Ask anybody who ever used askSam for their desktop database needs back in the day. Lordy, I miss that software. When was that, anyway? Back in the late 1980s? The brain's a little foggy today...
Yeah, this is OT, but I just love telling this story, so ...
There was a market here in Houston some years ago that got in some new, stupid management who managed to drive the place out of business. Under the old management, the store maintained a huge excess of shopping carts. The people in the poor surrounding neighborhood didn't have cars, so they'd use the carts to push their purchases all the way back home. The store hired a team to drive around the neighborhood with a pickup truck towing a low flatbed trailer. Those guys would gather up the carts and return them to the store. Everybody was happy.
New management comes in and freaks out. "These poor people are stealing our carts!" They set up speed bumps at the parking lot entrances and put disablers on the shopping carts so that if you lifted the front of the cart over the bump, a rod woud drop out of the front of the cart and prevent it from being rolled. Soon, people figured out that if they taped the rods in place, they could get the carts out of the parking lot.
Management responded with abusive security guards and calling the police. A number of ugly confrontations happened, completely poisoning the relationship between this store and the community. Eventually, management put up crash barrier poles in a small circle around the entrance to the store. The space between them was so narrow, you couldn't get a cart through them. If you had a load of groceries, you'd have to have a family member watch your cart while you went to go get the car, bring it to the front, and load out your groceries.
Finally, the new management had found a way to keep those pesky poor people from stealing their carts. Unfortunately for them, those pesky poor people were the majority of their customers. Those customers started walking a much further distance to another store that wasn't run by idiots. Add to this the traffic jam at the store entrance, the short tempers this caused, and it just got to the point where people didn't want to deal with the stress of shopping at that store, even if it was the only conveniently located full-size grocery store for several neighborhoods. People literally started carpooling to other markets and a secondary market in unlicensed taxis grew up to meet their needs. Basically, anybody in the surrounding apartment complexes who had a car could put up a note in the laundry advertising when they would be making runs to the grocery store and fill their car with passengers who'd pay 2 or 3 bucks to ride along.
The phrase "penny-wise and pound-foolish" comes to mind.
Anyway, I'm reminded of this story because, somehow, to me, a shopping cart should be something to carry groceries. It just seems oddly wrong that people try to use shopping carts to carry advertising, computers, or to enforce their ability to control the actions of their customers.
This is an old, old topic. It was widely discussed in the aftermath of the Mitchell brothers trial for a murder that happened in 1991. Some observers felt that the use by the prosecution of a sophisticated (for the time) animated recreation of their version of events unduly swayed the jury.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Look, I'm from Texas. Around here, we call Bush "The Texas Twit" or just plain ol' "Shrub." I have no respect for the guy.
But...
You characterized him as "a religious extremist." That's just flat wrong. If he was anything close to well-immersed in Christianity he would have understood the need to stay out of wars in the Middle East. He'd certainly have known better than to have started one. He would have understood the religious motivations that have produced conflict in the region for thousands of years and he wouldn't have seriously considered for more than a nano-second sticking his nose into that quagmire.
If he were a religious extremist, he would have just kept up support for Israel, made a few peace gestures that would produce good photo ops, and prayed that nobody over there chose to nuke anybody else until he was out of office.
A real Christian, someone who understands the history of his religion, would have known better.
Bush says he's a Christian. This gets him votes and, in this country, makes him seem like a nicer, more principled person. However, the evidence that he really gives a rat's ass about his faith is feeble to non-existent.
That's the same way I feel about idiots who actually try to tell me that the New York Times is a good newspaper. Yes, that's right, there are actually people who think the New York Times is a good newspaper. Can you believe it?
Amazing.
Idiots.
Bastards.
You'd be surprised. Over the years, I've seen plenty of pictures of people with money toting cameras that were, for them, ridiculous. It's almost a joke in the used camera world how second-hand Linhofs (incredibly expensive, breathtakingly well-made cameras) always seem to be in such great condition because they were bought by rich doctors who thought such a fancy camera made them look cool. That it will do, but they never ran more than a few rolls of film through them before the cameras got stuck in a closet and forgotten. For goodness sake, I actually saw a television story with footage of that talk radio DJ, Don Imus, using a panoramic Linhof to take family snapshots. *Really* expensive cameras have always sold well both to pros who need their advanced capabilities and big-money dunderheads who want an 8-thousand-dollar ornament to hang around their neck.
Don't underestimate the coolness factor. Don't underestimate the "some people got more money than sense" factor.
Let me slightly re-edit and repeat something I previously posted to /.
Concerning Freenet, countless times I've read that once you've been online for a while you will find that you achieve downloads more quickly, and you will have a better experience. However, after a couple of weeks of continuous use, my Freenet experience is no better than at the beginning - awful. It's slow. It's impossible to browse around at random to get the feel of the place. It's extremely difficult to find anything. Unless I'm missing something major, it's nigh onto unuseable.
Would somebody please tell me how Freenet is supposed to work? I must be missing something because what I'm seeing surely isn't what was intended unless the designers just happen to like dishing out pain...
Kodak had an ultra-high pixel count SLR a while back that was generally judged to be a dog because of battery life problems. The machine took so long to turn on it was only useful if you left it on all the time but if you left it on all the time the battery died in an hour. Not good.
Anybody have any idea what the battery life is on this Canon? The specs say 800 pictures at a freezing ambient temperature, but I'm going to be curious exactly how much they're exaggerating.
Anything that cuts down on poaching is a good thing. But there are better ways.
The best is hunting. The history of hunting bans and poaching is a very sad one but one thing made clear a long time ago is that where hunting is legal (and, more arguably, where taking ivory is legal), poaching is far less likely.
It works like this: Where hunting is legal, men (they're almost always men) on safari pay utterly ridiculous amounts of money for the privilege of shooting an elephant. The governments hit these guys up for ungodly fees. Professional hunters make money and employ locals. Everybody profits and everybody appreciates that ensuring a permanent supply of elephants is absolutely mandatory. No more elephants == no more hunters == no more incoming money. Governments will field enough rangers, anti-poaching folks with guns, to keep the poachers away because if they don't commit to protecting the elephants, the gravy train dries up.
But if ivory and hunting are illegal, the ivory becomes very expensive. Poachers are then highly motivated. Protecting the elephants becomes expensive; they aren't bringing in any money so they become a fiscal liability. You have to spend money to protect them, money that those nations don't have. Do you think poor African countries will be sufficiently motivated by their love of Mother Earth to spend enough non-eixtent money to protect the animals? Not likely. Far more likely is that bribes will be paid to find out when the few rangers will be where so the poachers can be killing animals elsewhere. Corruption ensues. Elephants don't get hunted; they get wasted. The elephants are far worse off, as a whole.
Any sort of measures to fight poaching are good. Props to the people doing this DNA work. But in the real world, it's been shown over and over again that when you make it in the financial interest of the government (and everyone else) to preserve animals, that's when animals get protected.
Hunters are the true conservationists in this world. Google on Pittman-Robertson Act if you want a good example of that principle in action.
Exactly.
Freedom has a price. The freedom to travel freely, however you want to, means that a few thousand people a year will die in car accidents. The freedom to speak your mind means that somewhere, sometime, some folks are going to abuse that freedom and incite a riot during which people die. The freedom to keep and bear arms means that some people will be wrongfully shot.
You can't have the good without the bad.
So, yeah, it's not exactly no big deal that only a few dozen kids get hurt a year, but that's certainly nowhere near enough justification to sanction any mechanism that may be even a precursor (as has been pointed out in other postings) to restraining the electronic means of exercising our right to freedom of speech and association.
Countless times, I've read the same thing about Freenet. But after a couple of weeks of continuous use, my Freenet experience is no better than at the beginning - awful. It's slow. It's impossible to browse around at random to get the feel of the place. It's extremely difficult to find anything. Unless I'm missing something major, it's nigh onto unuseable.
So, folks, if you find eDonkey painful, I suggest you try Freenet for a while. After that experience, virtually any other network dedicated to any other purpose will seem downright speedy.
You're onto some excellent points. Really excellent.
First, when it comes to double-blind tests, that's a near-infinite mine field. If you'd like to discuss it (a potentially lengthy exchange), just say so and I'll dive in. My short take on double-blind tests for audio reproduction quality is that every one I've ever seen was so poorly structured that the results were meaningless. Deciding if there's a subtle problem in the way an audio system sounds takes a great deal of time that I've never seen anyone invest when using a double-blind method. Most testers want to do a "Listen to this, and this, and this. Any difference?" sort of test that can be wrapped up in an afternoon. That just won't fly when it comes to judging audio.
As for your question "Are you saying science has found no way to build equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear?", you're striking right at the heart of the matter. I'm not saying that, exactly. What I'm saying is that, in general, science builds equipment that has superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear ONLY AFTER being led to what needs to be measured by people listening with those ears.
Take jitter, for instance. The people who used their ears said "This stuff sounds bad." That wasn't good enough for the scientists who knew it all, knew their measurements were perfect, knew their instruments had superior audio sensitivity compared to the human ear, and had all sorts of charts and graphs to back it up. The people who relied on their ears, who believed their ears were more sensitive to some thus-far unquantified problem that the lab equipment THEN EXTANT did not measure, were dismissed as cranks and romantic fools. But they persisted. They made up all sorts of romantic, foolish language to discuss what they were hearing. They made vague, almost mystical allusions to "time errors" and "soundstaging anomalies." They continued to be dismissed for a long while. A few researchers, though, thought that they just might be hearing something wrong, too. So they started looking for problems that weren't measured by their current instruments. They found jitter and a host of other problems, they found ways to measure them, and, sure enough, when they started designing circuits with the new measurements in mind, the cranks and romantic fools who relied on their ears started to say "Yeah, that's the ticket; that's improved." The new measuring equipment that results from this process is far more sensitive than the human ear but that equipment would never come into existence without people who were first willing to trust their ears.
Yet, despite the lessons of history, whenever someone claims to hear a problem that doesn't show up on a spec sheet they get ignored and belittled. So my answer to your original question is yes and no. Yes, ears are more sensitive than testing equipment when it comes to identifying when *something* is wrong, that being something that the engineers and psychoacouticians are not yet measuring. And no, once a few engineers have taken the time to listen to their ears and figure out what to measure and design equipment to do that measuring, human ears are not more sensitive than that new equipment.
Of course, now that you've solved some problems, ever-more-subtle ones that were previously masked by the more gross errors just corrected will be revealed. Human ears will hear those new problems long before science comes up with equipment to measure them. The people that hear those problems will be dismissed as fools for a while. Finally, scientists will trust their ears and come up with equipment to measure the new phenomena. Corrections will be made and the cycle will start over.
Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.
You're right. See my reply to Have Blue for my thoughts.
Excellent point and you're absolutely correct about the placebo effect. What irks me in this debate, though, (and I've been participating in it for 20 years) are the people that assume that *every* instance of someone hearing a difference is the placebo effect. It's not. As we saw, just to use one basic example, in the development of ways to measure jitter there were people hearing problems with digital sound who were dismissed by the experts for years until *some* of those experts figured out that, yes, there was something wrong and we could measure it.
In far more cases than the pure objectivist side in this debate is willing to admit, when people have heard differences in sound even though those differences weren't measurable, it eventually turned out that the people doing the measuring just didn't have the knowledge and instrumentation to quantify what was being heard.
Yes, much of high-end audio is a cross between a flim-flam and a pernicious disease. But it's just wrong to say "There's no measurable difference so what you're hearing must be a placebo effect." Often enough to make life interesting, the problem in those situations is simply that we don't yet understand what needs to be measured. The researchers who have done great things in this field are the ones who listen and trust their ears. What they hear doesn't always pan out as something real, but it happens often enough to make being dismissive of claims of difference terribly shortsighted.
That's exactly what the experts said back when CDs first came out. Those of us listening on good equipment, though, kept saying "Gee, these things sound really bad. Are you sure there's nothing wrong with the technology?" We were repeatedly assured nothing was wrong and that it was impossible for there to be any problems because the sampling rate was high enough that no human ears could possibly hear a problem and all the measurements were SOOOO much better than LPs. We were told that THD, for example, had been reduced to a total non-issue. For any objection we had, the "experts" pointed to other parts of the sound reproduction chain. The digital technology, though, was perfect. End of discussion. If you thought otherwise, you were engaged in laughable romantic nonsense.
You know what? After all these years we've come to find out that those CDs DID sound bad, DID have audible problems directly attributable to digital technology, and generally WERE crap. Nowadays we measure lots more things and CDs sound much better. Much of the romantic nonsense we were hearing turned out to be instrument-measurable problems but back then the engineers didn't know what to measure. Human ears, though, were capable of discerning the existence of problems, even if they couldn't quantify it on some engineer-approved scale of numbers.
As time goes by, human ears will hear problems in sound recordings. Technological apologists will say there are no problems because they can't be measured. Open-minded scientists and engineers who believe in technology as a tool and not as a God will do good research and find out that there are more things that need to be measured. Those things will be quantified, tested, and corrected. Then recordings will sound better.
We'll know they sound better because we'll use our ears to judge.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with most of your post. Just running a signal through tubes doesn't make it better.
But...
You go way too far when you ridicule people who say they hear differences that can't be seen on instruments.
It's just wrong to couch this in terms of "If it's some mystical thing that can't be measured or detected in any way, it's no more than some poor man's religion." Fact is, when someone says they hear a difference, the "thing" IS being detected. The difference IS being measured. It's being detected by the listener's ears. It's being measured on a scale defined by that listener.
The problem is that human ears are not calibrated against any objective standard. In the best cases, they are the finest detectors of subtle differences in sound available to us, far surpassing the sensitivity of the best mikes and racks of measuring equipment. They are also, unfortunately, completely non-standard in their reaction to input, subject to variation depending on a host of external and internal factors, and their results are not repeatable from instrument to instrument. That doesn't mean they are insensitive. That doesn't mean they don't actually hear a difference. It just means that the difference may or may not be obvious to another listener and may or may not be meaningful to anyone except the person listening at that moment.
I have no doubt that if you have good hearing and a love of music, you could listen to a particular orchestra play a particular piece in a particular venue many times over the course of years. That piece could then be recorded by that orchestra in that venue. As a fully-qualified judge, then, you could listen to the recordings through tubes and solid-state, planar and box speakers, etc., and be able to tell not only which ones were different and which you prefer, but which recordings and playback setups are more accurate. Just using your ears. And your results may not track in any meaningful way with the measurements produced by that bench full of instruments.
In that case, I'd consider the conclusions of the qualified listener to be far more authoritative than those of the technician who simply looks at the output of test instruments.
To translate to a more general case: By far, when everything is right, you'll be better guided in your choices of audio gear if you use your ears rather than just look at specs.