It is bribery if the money is used to pay blackmail to a mistress.
Even if the mistress is a paid agent of the politician's opponents, and the blackmail payment is to outbid them? Two (or is it three?) wrongs don't make a right IMO, just wondering about other people's views on using the money counteract someone else's dirty tricks/use of bribe money...
Exactly; saying "X has increased since Y, therefore Y caused the increase in X" is simplistic nonsense because it ignores previously existing trends and other confounding factors (for example, I'd say that the consistent correlation between arrests for amphetamine possession and assault rates suggests a greater probability of a direct causal link, but that doesn't make it true).
I'm not sure it's correct to say the 1996 ban on semiautomatic long arms* didn't do anything: the previously existing trend suggests there should have been a few mass shootings since then, but the number dropping to zero overnight could also be explained by dealers voluntarily tightening up their practices or some other factor, so that's a "maybe". The wider ramifications for other violent crime are even harder to quantify, since semiautomatic long arms aren't typically used for self defence...not even the criminologists and statisticians with access to finer grained data and years to study it can agree, I doubt there's greater expertise here. And trying to relate it to the US, which has a completely different attitude to guns and historically far higher ownership rates, is probably futile.
*Handguns have been restricted since 1901 in New South Wales and for similar times in other states. It hasn't been legal to carry a gun without a valid reason (which doesn't include self defence) anywhere in Australia for over 100 years, so it's improbable that the 1996 ban on semiautomatics made any real difference to crime rates at all.
It was once believed that the female orgasm didn't exist because it served no conceivable (pardon the pun) purpose, but that was wrong on both counts. Positive feedback seems like a perfectly plausible reason for making noise, and it wouldn't necessarily be measurable as a distinct biological process. Besides, the article was in the Daily Mail...their view is that a woman's role is to lie back and think of England.
I'm not sure if the behaviour of bonobos is relevant, since they're a different species. For example, you can grin at a human without having your arms ripped off...
Haven't you learned anything from sci-fi? Always build any robot with a critical design flaw so there's a way of defeating them when they turn against their squishy masters.
Does anybody know what sort of bandwidth a record can manage?
An Ortofon DSS731 cutting head has a usable response from 5Hz to 25kHz, but typical playback systems fall short of this.
Telephone lines were never good enough
Telephone lines have a frequency response from 300Hz to 3kHz.
Do records have enough bandwidth that you could coax 128kb/s, or even more, out of a suitably formatted recording using the various modem techniques?
The bit rate of compressed audio isn't directly related to frequency response. A 64kb/s MP3 can reproduce a discrete 20kHz tone, provided no lower frequencies deemed more important by the psychoacoustic processing are present (the "swooshing" from hi-hats on low bit rate MP3s is the encoder deciding you don't need to hear those frequencies).
But to answer the question, a fresh vinyl recording played on a properly balanced tone arm should be indistinguishable from 48kHz uncompressed audio because it's uncompressed audio.
Slashdot Mirror
It is bribery if the money is used to pay blackmail to a mistress.
Even if the mistress is a paid agent of the politician's opponents, and the blackmail payment is to outbid them? Two (or is it three?) wrongs don't make a right IMO, just wondering about other people's views on using the money counteract someone else's dirty tricks/use of bribe money...
And spiders. Sadly ThinkGeek doesn't sell those any more...
Exactly; saying "X has increased since Y, therefore Y caused the increase in X" is simplistic nonsense because it ignores previously existing trends and other confounding factors (for example, I'd say that the consistent correlation between arrests for amphetamine possession and assault rates suggests a greater probability of a direct causal link, but that doesn't make it true).
I'm not sure it's correct to say the 1996 ban on semiautomatic long arms* didn't do anything: the previously existing trend suggests there should have been a few mass shootings since then, but the number dropping to zero overnight could also be explained by dealers voluntarily tightening up their practices or some other factor, so that's a "maybe". The wider ramifications for other violent crime are even harder to quantify, since semiautomatic long arms aren't typically used for self defence...not even the criminologists and statisticians with access to finer grained data and years to study it can agree, I doubt there's greater expertise here. And trying to relate it to the US, which has a completely different attitude to guns and historically far higher ownership rates, is probably futile.
*Handguns have been restricted since 1901 in New South Wales and for similar times in other states. It hasn't been legal to carry a gun without a valid reason (which doesn't include self defence) anywhere in Australia for over 100 years, so it's improbable that the 1996 ban on semiautomatics made any real difference to crime rates at all.
The only part of that I actually wrote was
no correlation with incidence of rape
The rest you made up.
The Australian experience of an increase in forcible rape after guns were banned.
False. There was no appreciable increase in the three years after the ban came into effect. There has been an increase since, however that follows a trend line that started before the gun ban, so there is no correlation between the ban and the incidence of rape.
Sweden's population growth rate has been under 1% for the last 50 years. Doesn't look like the policy is successfully encouraging much to me.
Tomatoes and potatoes are indigenous to the Americas.
Wow, six downmods three days later. It seems belief in God also correlates with having no sense of humour and lurking like cowards.
Sign writers charge by the word.
OMG! Ponisaurs!!!
It was once believed that the female orgasm didn't exist because it served no conceivable (pardon the pun) purpose, but that was wrong on both counts. Positive feedback seems like a perfectly plausible reason for making noise, and it wouldn't necessarily be measurable as a distinct biological process. Besides, the article was in the Daily Mail...their view is that a woman's role is to lie back and think of England.
I'm not sure if the behaviour of bonobos is relevant, since they're a different species. For example, you can grin at a human without having your arms ripped off...
Yes, unless your partner is both the religious and jealous type (Joseph was OK with it, apparently).
I just hope he's mad enough to file suit. Groklaw/Popehat/NYCL's writeup of APK having his ass handed to him by a judge will be hilarious.
How about "Penguin Powered"?
Haven't you learned anything from sci-fi? Always build any robot with a critical design flaw so there's a way of defeating them when they turn against their squishy masters.
But Randi is so amazing even his arse-groove is entertaining to watch.
Um, that sounded a lot less questionable in my head...
That said, some tech-savvy people may be able to beat us, but the general population won't.
You mean tech-savvy enough to look up your Facebook account and administer said beating? That's not a particularly high bar...
Yeah, but I'm trying to quit.
But to be fair, Kim Jong Un is a model of sanity compared to APK.
So the people living in low coastal areas will have a few hundred years to mull over things before thinking about moving.
You're absolutely positive about that?
But then every time it is played, it degrades just a little bit. If it ever gets scratched, add even more noise.
Yes, Captain Obvious, that's why I specified fresh vinyl.
Does anybody know what sort of bandwidth a record can manage?
An Ortofon DSS731 cutting head has a usable response from 5Hz to 25kHz, but typical playback systems fall short of this.
Telephone lines were never good enough
Telephone lines have a frequency response from 300Hz to 3kHz.
Do records have enough bandwidth that you could coax 128kb/s, or even more, out of a suitably formatted recording using the various modem techniques?
The bit rate of compressed audio isn't directly related to frequency response. A 64kb/s MP3 can reproduce a discrete 20kHz tone, provided no lower frequencies deemed more important by the psychoacoustic processing are present (the "swooshing" from hi-hats on low bit rate MP3s is the encoder deciding you don't need to hear those frequencies).
But to answer the question, a fresh vinyl recording played on a properly balanced tone arm should be indistinguishable from 48kHz uncompressed audio because it's uncompressed audio.
...concentrating on...sigh...
...who wants to make Red?
Boris. Which leads me to think that MS is now concentrating the visual effects business.
Indeed, getting their peters out is what gets them into so much trouble.