This has already been addressed by another poster. I suggest you read previous comments in a topic before posting an objection that has already been covered.
SydShamino wrote in post #23877239
The system we evolved was "good enough" to get us to age 30 or so and pass on our genes. It's not necessarily good enough to recognize someone on the horizon with a shoulder-mounted RPG launcher pointed at you. Sure, we can be trained to recognize the shapes and shadows which indicate that, but then we have to look at it and focus for a second to consciously realize what we're seeing.
Our brains are incredibly good at parallel pattern matching. We can see patterns - real or spurious - in almost anything. But those thousands of parallel pattern matching units have to be funneled through a single consciousness to be useful. If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.
Whether differences are unexistent or unimportant is a purely subjective issue, since they are measured by a sense which has different resolving power in different people and is also affected by training, and the experience it produces in the brain is not simply proportional to a measurement of the physical difference, such as for example a chemical analysis would give you. The relationship is highly variable and nonlinear, as it is for all human senses. Thus, while subjective study has an important application in finding whether there is any difference at all or not, if there does exist, whether it is an improvement or not is a value judgement that is purely subjective, and you have no place on saying anyone is "wasting money" on it. Different people, different pleasures.
Subjective can be measured--that's what blind tests are for. Your analogy is invalid since audiophiles waste money on thinks that don't make a detectable by the human sense difference--it's mostly placebo. With coffee, on the other hand, the difference is trivial to tell in a blind test by anyone with some tasting experience in fine coffee--unlike audio blind tests where most differences suddenly vanish when psychological bias has been removed. A better analogy would be wine snobs; there actually blind testing is even more standard.
Truth is a defence. If the person is indeed shady and morally bankrupt, as can be demonstrated by say interrogating character witnesses, then there's nothing wrong with posting such claims.
Sad thing is that when I was doing my degree in the graphics lab of UBC's comp.sci. department, they actually got a superautomatic espresso machine. Getting decent coffee out of that thing is impossible. The machine uses a piston to tamp and does so with the exact same pressure every time, oblivious to the state of the coffee and grind, and stops extraction whenever X amount of liquid comes out of the spout. It's ridiculous, that's not how you make espresso...
Same thing with the superautomatic espresso machines. To think that the machine would perform proper tamping technique taking into account the age of the coffee, gind fineness, etc., and that it can figure out when to stop extraction when it's not just a matter of a fixed time period but color and shape of the stream, and the look of the crema in the cup, is silly. Yet it's what any good barista does with a manually-controlled espresso machine (good = NOT Starbucks)
In the end, however, espresso made with a modded (PID temperature controller and some piping for preheating) machine, and proper tamping technique, is the pinnacle of coffeedom.
The so called "warmth" in vacuum tube amps has nothing to do with vacuum tubes. Seems some people simply like the distortion of the output transformers needed to drive speakers (which are low impedance) with tubes (which are high impedance). Vacuum tubes themselves are pretty linear (when loaded by a constant current source, a single triode is inherently more linear a voltage gain device than a single transistor) so the only way they can _add_ anything is if they're run at a suboptimal portion of their I-V curve (translation: bad design). I don't think that is normally done, unless it's a guitar amp where you actually want distortion. So the "warmth" can only come from the output transformer. That's not surprising considering the phase nonlinearities and hysteresis they introduce. Tubes are great, however, when driving a very high impedance load such as electrostatic or plasma speakers, since that's done directly instead of through an output transformer. And having built such amplifiers, I can say there's no "warmth" or anything of the sort added by a naked tube. On the contrary, you get a decrease in higher harmonics compared to a transistor amp (to which the ear is quite sensitive) at the expense of an increase in low harmonics (to which the ear is relatively insensitive, something like up to 1% for 2nd harmonic is masked by the ear).
I'm an audiophile and an engineer and I call BS on part of your post: "skin depth". That doesn't come into play at audio frequencies! You'd need to be dealing with gigantic cables to hear any difference due to skin effect (plus, any such difference is linear and so can be fixed with a simple equalizer, rather than spending tons of money on litz or ribbon cables).
I remember an anecdote where someone bought a new power cable and thought it made all this incredible difference to the sound quality from their amplifier. Then the person realized he had actually forgotten to switch in the new cable! LOL
I'm an audiophile myself, but also an engineer and believer in blind tests. The problem though is that most people are turned off by the effort it takes to conduct a proper blind test, and the industry of course is turned off since it gives them less room to make outrageous marketing claims.
Nuclear power is a long term solution as well, in terms of fusion. Fission will easily last the 20 (according to ITER designers) to 50 (really conservative estimate) it will take for fusion to come in to full force. There is a HUGE amount of deuterium that can be extracted from seawater, and the neutron emission from the reactor creates tritium from that, so you have the two things you need for millennia (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
Explain to me why you need firewire when Ethernet leaves it in the dust in terms of speed, and can serve in all the applications you mentioned? Like another poster wrote, USB covers the low end and Ethernet/SATA the high end. Firewire is pointless.
Yet another thing plentiful nuclear energy will solve--cheap power for wide spread desalination plants. Reverse osmosis plants have environmental impact by raising local salinity since they have to dump concentrated salt solutions back in the ocean, but when you can get away with a more energy intensive process, you can take the concentrated solution and heat+vacuum evaporate the remaining water.
The greens are pretty easy to figure out, really (from a psychological standpoint). The reason they are opposed to things like nuclear energy (and not just fission--they hate fusion too and green propaganda against fusion is part of the reason Canada pulled out of the ITER project) is because it takes resources away from development of their pet projects of solar, wind, tide, and other sources that can never hope to meet rising demand that progress requires (not to mention the tenfold jump in energy use we'll get as developing and third world countries become industrialized). But of course, therein is the true agenda of the greens--they want to hurt progress. At best they are go-back-to-nature Luddites, at worst fanatical misanthropes.
Your post is ridiculous. Research into the neural correlates of consciousness has been progressing significantly over the past decade. The explanation is coming together from research in different areas. Damasio's model, for example, is seriously backed up by neurology: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-What-Happens-Emotion-Consciousness/dp/0156010755 On the philosophy side, the usual objections to the reductionist approach and other philosophical nonsense like qualia are crushed by Dennett's well-thought-out arguments. The consciousness problem is well on its way to being solved.
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This has already been addressed by another poster. I suggest you read previous comments in a topic before posting an objection that has already been covered.
SydShamino wrote in post #23877239
The system we evolved was "good enough" to get us to age 30 or so and pass on our genes. It's not necessarily good enough to recognize someone on the horizon with a shoulder-mounted RPG launcher pointed at you. Sure, we can be trained to recognize the shapes and shadows which indicate that, but then we have to look at it and focus for a second to consciously realize what we're seeing. Our brains are incredibly good at parallel pattern matching. We can see patterns - real or spurious - in almost anything. But those thousands of parallel pattern matching units have to be funneled through a single consciousness to be useful. If a computer can sort through the synapses, find the ones that are looking to match "man with RPG in the distance", and figure out when they fire, it can perhaps bring something up on the display faster than the person can. Computers, after all, can process a small number of things faster than we can. They just can't process as many complex things in parallel.
So is there going to be any funding allocated for ITER?
In the first sentence I meant to refer to importance only, not existence, so scratch "unexistant".
Whether differences are unexistent or unimportant is a purely subjective issue, since they are measured by a sense which has different resolving power in different people and is also affected by training, and the experience it produces in the brain is not simply proportional to a measurement of the physical difference, such as for example a chemical analysis would give you. The relationship is highly variable and nonlinear, as it is for all human senses. Thus, while subjective study has an important application in finding whether there is any difference at all or not, if there does exist, whether it is an improvement or not is a value judgement that is purely subjective, and you have no place on saying anyone is "wasting money" on it. Different people, different pleasures.
I mistakenly typed in "thinks" instead of "things" in the second sentence.
Subjective can be measured--that's what blind tests are for. Your analogy is invalid since audiophiles waste money on thinks that don't make a detectable by the human sense difference--it's mostly placebo. With coffee, on the other hand, the difference is trivial to tell in a blind test by anyone with some tasting experience in fine coffee--unlike audio blind tests where most differences suddenly vanish when psychological bias has been removed. A better analogy would be wine snobs; there actually blind testing is even more standard.
Can you elaborate? What do you mean "in one way or another"?
Truth is a defence. If the person is indeed shady and morally bankrupt, as can be demonstrated by say interrogating character witnesses, then there's nothing wrong with posting such claims.
I don't get it.
Sad thing is that when I was doing my degree in the graphics lab of UBC's comp.sci. department, they actually got a superautomatic espresso machine. Getting decent coffee out of that thing is impossible. The machine uses a piston to tamp and does so with the exact same pressure every time, oblivious to the state of the coffee and grind, and stops extraction whenever X amount of liquid comes out of the spout. It's ridiculous, that's not how you make espresso...
Same thing with the superautomatic espresso machines. To think that the machine would perform proper tamping technique taking into account the age of the coffee, gind fineness, etc., and that it can figure out when to stop extraction when it's not just a matter of a fixed time period but color and shape of the stream, and the look of the crema in the cup, is silly. Yet it's what any good barista does with a manually-controlled espresso machine (good = NOT Starbucks)
The press leaves way too much particulate in the coffee. This is significantly better: http://www.hasbean.co.uk/images/aero_press.jpg
In the end, however, espresso made with a modded (PID temperature controller and some piping for preheating) machine, and proper tamping technique, is the pinnacle of coffeedom.
Oh please. A simple Google search of 'clean nuclear energy' gives an enormous number of sites contradicting everything you wrote.
The so called "warmth" in vacuum tube amps has nothing to do with vacuum tubes. Seems some people simply like the distortion of the output transformers needed to drive speakers (which are low impedance) with tubes (which are high impedance). Vacuum tubes themselves are pretty linear (when loaded by a constant current source, a single triode is inherently more linear a voltage gain device than a single transistor) so the only way they can _add_ anything is if they're run at a suboptimal portion of their I-V curve (translation: bad design). I don't think that is normally done, unless it's a guitar amp where you actually want distortion. So the "warmth" can only come from the output transformer. That's not surprising considering the phase nonlinearities and hysteresis they introduce. Tubes are great, however, when driving a very high impedance load such as electrostatic or plasma speakers, since that's done directly instead of through an output transformer. And having built such amplifiers, I can say there's no "warmth" or anything of the sort added by a naked tube. On the contrary, you get a decrease in higher harmonics compared to a transistor amp (to which the ear is quite sensitive) at the expense of an increase in low harmonics (to which the ear is relatively insensitive, something like up to 1% for 2nd harmonic is masked by the ear).
I doubt it. Comet mining is a technological challenge which one can extrapolate from current technology. H-H fusion is not.
I'm an audiophile and an engineer and I call BS on part of your post: "skin depth". That doesn't come into play at audio frequencies! You'd need to be dealing with gigantic cables to hear any difference due to skin effect (plus, any such difference is linear and so can be fixed with a simple equalizer, rather than spending tons of money on litz or ribbon cables).
I remember an anecdote where someone bought a new power cable and thought it made all this incredible difference to the sound quality from their amplifier. Then the person realized he had actually forgotten to switch in the new cable! LOL
I'm an audiophile myself, but also an engineer and believer in blind tests. The problem though is that most people are turned off by the effort it takes to conduct a proper blind test, and the industry of course is turned off since it gives them less room to make outrageous marketing claims.
Nuclear power is a long term solution as well, in terms of fusion. Fission will easily last the 20 (according to ITER designers) to 50 (really conservative estimate) it will take for fusion to come in to full force. There is a HUGE amount of deuterium that can be extracted from seawater, and the neutron emission from the reactor creates tritium from that, so you have the two things you need for millennia (and later on, you can mine comets etc.)
Only somewhat related, but if I manufacture an non-RoHS consumer electronics item in North America, can I sell it to European buyers?
Explain to me why you need firewire when Ethernet leaves it in the dust in terms of speed, and can serve in all the applications you mentioned? Like another poster wrote, USB covers the low end and Ethernet/SATA the high end. Firewire is pointless.
Yet another thing plentiful nuclear energy will solve--cheap power for wide spread desalination plants. Reverse osmosis plants have environmental impact by raising local salinity since they have to dump concentrated salt solutions back in the ocean, but when you can get away with a more energy intensive process, you can take the concentrated solution and heat+vacuum evaporate the remaining water.
Offtopic, but I like your sig... ^5 Like Ezra says, we're winning!
The greens are pretty easy to figure out, really (from a psychological standpoint). The reason they are opposed to things like nuclear energy (and not just fission--they hate fusion too and green propaganda against fusion is part of the reason Canada pulled out of the ITER project) is because it takes resources away from development of their pet projects of solar, wind, tide, and other sources that can never hope to meet rising demand that progress requires (not to mention the tenfold jump in energy use we'll get as developing and third world countries become industrialized). But of course, therein is the true agenda of the greens--they want to hurt progress. At best they are go-back-to-nature Luddites, at worst fanatical misanthropes.
Buy this? The oil companies are too busy buying back their own stocks (preparing for solvency?). Wonder if their overstating of their supply has something to do with it...just one example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25717-2004Jul29.html
Your post is ridiculous. Research into the neural correlates of consciousness has been progressing significantly over the past decade. The explanation is coming together from research in different areas. Damasio's model, for example, is seriously backed up by neurology: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-What-Happens-Emotion-Consciousness/dp/0156010755
On the philosophy side, the usual objections to the reductionist approach and other philosophical nonsense like qualia are crushed by Dennett's well-thought-out arguments. The consciousness problem is well on its way to being solved.