What warrants this obviously lefty post on Slashdot
It's not a "lefty" post - I'm probably closer to a libertarian than anything else, and when it comes to my views on stuff like gun control I imagine that I'd make most right-wingers look like card-carrying members of the Brady bunch.
I just don't have the unconditional (and provably unwarranted) faith in government, be it either Democrat or GOP, that a lot of aforementioned right-wingers do, and I also look at the number of people that died in the 9/11 attacks, then compare that to those things that we continue to tolerate that kill a lot more people, like drunk driving.
Unfortunately, the inability to be completely safe is part of the price you pay for freedom, and if the government can't do its job without breaking the supreme law of the land then smarter people need to be in office.
I believe that if the US had a reasonable foreign policy that took into account how the rest of the world actually operates instead of just the political and financial interests of those who pay for campaigns, there would probably be quite a bit less to worry about.
Let the post speak for itself and if you want to argue about it, do it here NormalVision.
'Tis NormalVisual, not NormalVision.:-)
The lower court issued a 43-page ruling that explaining why it ruled the activity was unconstitutional, so it was a statement of fact and will continue to be so until/unless the appeals court rules otherwise.
22,050 is the Nyquist limit, but there's almost always filtering in the player that will prevent it from being reached in order to preclude artifacts like aliasing, and usually the output amp isn't linear up to that range anyway unless you want to shell out some dough.
Oops. I'd just gotten up when I posted that, so thanks for the good catch. I did mean frequency response. You're right about bit count determining dynamic range, where you optimally get an additional 6db increase in the S/N ratio for every bit of resolution.
And before anyone mentions oversampling - that doesn't give you a better frequency response as the same samples are repeated unless you're interpolating, but the higher sample rate does allow you to digitally filter the signal much more sharply, resulting in less aliasing and other noise. It also saves money as regards analog filtering for the DAC.
CDs have a dynamic range of a little over 20 KHz, not 44. They have a sample rate of 44.1 KHz, but you can't physically have a frequency response that is more than half the sample rate.
I'd also be interested to see some kind of documentation that reinforces your assertion that some early CDs were mastered from vinyl LPs. *Every* CD I own (and quite a few date back to the early days of CD) was mastered from the original studio tapes or first-gen copies of them, or from digitally remastered versions of those. Probably the most unique is the my copy of the soundtrack from "Star Trek II", where the original master was laid down on a very early digital recorder, and as a result it sounds like nasty, unwiped ass.
In particular, a reasonable reading of the Second Amendment. From the ACLU web site:
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
Putting aside their incorrect interpretation of the term "militia" (which has a very specific definition in Federal law) for the moment, let's look at the Bill of Rights. The first eight Amendments have to do with the people, and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are specific limitations on Congress' power. The ACLU maintains that all of the first eight Amendments, save the Second, deal with individual rights. Why then do they consider the Second does not deal with individual rights as the others do? If, as they say, it's proper for the state to license and regulate the bearing of arms, why then would it not be proper for the state to license and regulate speech as well? After all, they're not eliminating it, right? Why then did the ACLU get so bent out of shape regarding the ridiculous "free speech zones" established when the President visits? If it's proper to license and regulate one civil right, why not another? The ACLU makes the ridiculous statement "If we can license and register cars, we can license and register guns.", while apparently failing to note that unlike arms, cars are not mentioned in the Constitution.
It doesn't make sense, and I believe it's a deliberate misreading of the intent of the document to fit in line with the politics of its founders.
I've just turned my notice in after working in such a place for about six months. It's kind of like driving your car everywhere in first gear - you might be able to get away with it for a little while, but it's horribly inefficient and eventually the engine *will* blow up if you try it on the highway (i.e. in a real production environment).
It is very hard to describe the full difference unless you have experinced the BBS world, and can compare that experience to the internet.
Agree 100%. There's not much that compares to the feeling of "woo!" when a single or two-line BBS finally answered after an hour of busy signals, or the joy of stumbling across The Wanderer in Trade Wars. Also, for me there was a certain intimacy that I felt with a simple character-based interface that just isn't there with all the flashy graphics and bitmapped fonts that we have now. I guess it's just nostalgia, but I found BBSing much more fun than the Internet now, even though by any objective measure the Internet offers way more. I guess the telnet BBSs are the closest thing we'll ever be able to keep to the real thing, but I miss the anticipation of not knowing whether you'd get connected when using a real modem.
Fave BBSs - The Nexus and Genesys, both Amiga-based BBSs in the Virginia Beach/Chesapeake area. I was a big Amiga geek back then - C-Net on an Amy absolutely rocked, and I wrote a little terminal door for Genesys that tied their A3000 to an old beater PC running RemoteAccess over a null-modem cable so they could offer PC doors on their board. I actually enjoyed Nexus more, being that it was a tiny little BBS with mostly Amiga geeks on there, but Genesys was *huge* for the early 90s, with something like 14 modems and a gig of storage.
Now I'm missing those days again. Damn this thread.
As I understand it, Las Vegas doesn't look kindly on that and you can go to jail.
Because it's not the same thing. When you go into a casino and purchase chips, you and the casino have an understanding that the chips are merely placeholders for real money, and are exchangeable as such within that casino only by the bearer. Thus, if you steal chips from the casino or from another player it's treated the same as if you took actual money, since there was that pre-agreed understanding that the casino will unconditionally buy the chips back at their face value regardless of who presents them. It's rather like stealing a bearer-only check - the check itself is not currency, but it is understood to represent it.
There is no such understanding regarding currencies in an online game, and the poster that compared it to stealing Monopoly money is exactly correct. The only difference is that there aren't many people willing to pay real money for Monopoly scrip, and thus it has a correspondingly low resale value in the real world. If someone is so wrapped up in some damn game that they're willing to spend real money just to increase their standing, that sounds to me like a problem for a psychiatrist, not the courts.
there's just no WAY it actually costs significantly more than $60/month to route a measly 3 Mb/s
Yes, it does, and the routers aren't generally a huge part of the expense. The vast majority of the cost is in providing a good, solid layer 1 so the routers have something to work with.
You'd certainly be no worse than a bank, which takes people's money and uses it to makes money, only keeping 10% or so of the deposits in liquid funds that are accessible to their customers. Of course, you won't have the government there to bail you out like they would if everyone wanted their money back at once, but hey, it's just an analogy!
Anytime I've been bumped from a flight I've been well compensated by the airline, but I'm usually one of the people that will volunteer since I rarely fly on a tight schedule. Certainly if you have to be someplace at a particular time, that's one thing, but if you don't, waiting the extra couple of hours or so for the next flight can result in a very nice bonus whether it's in the form of cash or tickets.
What the hell are you doing in firefox to require 600MB of RAM?
Double clicking on its desktop icon?:-) Seriously, it's not nearly as bad as it was, but Firefox does like to put a big helping of RAM on its plate. Right now I have four tabs open with mostly text content on each, and FF is eating about 100 MB.
Don't forget that British comedy is generally better too. I propose a knighthood for Ricky Gervais for totally blowing off Paris Hilton recently, and just on general principle.
Looking forward to visiting London again next week.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
What warrants this obviously lefty post on Slashdot
It's not a "lefty" post - I'm probably closer to a libertarian than anything else, and when it comes to my views on stuff like gun control I imagine that I'd make most right-wingers look like card-carrying members of the Brady bunch.
I just don't have the unconditional (and provably unwarranted) faith in government, be it either Democrat or GOP, that a lot of aforementioned right-wingers do, and I also look at the number of people that died in the 9/11 attacks, then compare that to those things that we continue to tolerate that kill a lot more people, like drunk driving.
Is it really unconstitutional?
Yes it is, and in the linked article it clearly explains that the lower court judge took 43 pages to explain why she ruled it was.
Unfortunately, the inability to be completely safe is part of the price you pay for freedom, and if the government can't do its job without breaking the supreme law of the land then smarter people need to be in office.
I believe that if the US had a reasonable foreign policy that took into account how the rest of the world actually operates instead of just the political and financial interests of those who pay for campaigns, there would probably be quite a bit less to worry about.
Let the post speak for itself and if you want to argue about it, do it here NormalVision.
:-)
'Tis NormalVisual, not NormalVision.
The lower court issued a 43-page ruling that explaining why it ruled the activity was unconstitutional, so it was a statement of fact and will continue to be so until/unless the appeals court rules otherwise.
Oh, don't be silly - any civilization advanced enough to perfect interstellar travel would obviously have Rosetta on their systems!
Sheesh, some people...
"Always"? No. "Often enough to notice and for the joke to be funny"? You bet.
I say this as a flabby American that's been to Europe recently.
22,050 is the Nyquist limit, but there's almost always filtering in the player that will prevent it from being reached in order to preclude artifacts like aliasing, and usually the output amp isn't linear up to that range anyway unless you want to shell out some dough.
Oops. I'd just gotten up when I posted that, so thanks for the good catch. I did mean frequency response. You're right about bit count determining dynamic range, where you optimally get an additional 6db increase in the S/N ratio for every bit of resolution.
And before anyone mentions oversampling - that doesn't give you a better frequency response as the same samples are repeated unless you're interpolating, but the higher sample rate does allow you to digitally filter the signal much more sharply, resulting in less aliasing and other noise. It also saves money as regards analog filtering for the DAC.
CDs have a dynamic range of a little over 20 KHz, not 44. They have a sample rate of 44.1 KHz, but you can't physically have a frequency response that is more than half the sample rate.
I'd also be interested to see some kind of documentation that reinforces your assertion that some early CDs were mastered from vinyl LPs. *Every* CD I own (and quite a few date back to the early days of CD) was mastered from the original studio tapes or first-gen copies of them, or from digitally remastered versions of those. Probably the most unique is the my copy of the soundtrack from "Star Trek II", where the original master was laid down on a very early digital recorder, and as a result it sounds like nasty, unwiped ass.
In particular, a reasonable reading of the Second Amendment. From the ACLU web site:
We believe that the constitutional right to bear arms is primarily a collective one, intended mainly to protect the right of the states to maintain militias to assure their own freedom and security against the central government.
Putting aside their incorrect interpretation of the term "militia" (which has a very specific definition in Federal law) for the moment, let's look at the Bill of Rights. The first eight Amendments have to do with the people, and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are specific limitations on Congress' power. The ACLU maintains that all of the first eight Amendments, save the Second, deal with individual rights. Why then do they consider the Second does not deal with individual rights as the others do? If, as they say, it's proper for the state to license and regulate the bearing of arms, why then would it not be proper for the state to license and regulate speech as well? After all, they're not eliminating it, right? Why then did the ACLU get so bent out of shape regarding the ridiculous "free speech zones" established when the President visits? If it's proper to license and regulate one civil right, why not another? The ACLU makes the ridiculous statement "If we can license and register cars, we can license and register guns.", while apparently failing to note that unlike arms, cars are not mentioned in the Constitution.
It doesn't make sense, and I believe it's a deliberate misreading of the intent of the document to fit in line with the politics of its founders.
Problem is, the ACLU only fights for those parts of the Bill of Rights that it agrees with.
Well, what else would you use to hold the tubes together?
I've just turned my notice in after working in such a place for about six months. It's kind of like driving your car everywhere in first gear - you might be able to get away with it for a little while, but it's horribly inefficient and eventually the engine *will* blow up if you try it on the highway (i.e. in a real production environment).
It is very hard to describe the full difference unless you have experinced the BBS world, and can compare that experience to the internet.
Agree 100%. There's not much that compares to the feeling of "woo!" when a single or two-line BBS finally answered after an hour of busy signals, or the joy of stumbling across The Wanderer in Trade Wars. Also, for me there was a certain intimacy that I felt with a simple character-based interface that just isn't there with all the flashy graphics and bitmapped fonts that we have now. I guess it's just nostalgia, but I found BBSing much more fun than the Internet now, even though by any objective measure the Internet offers way more. I guess the telnet BBSs are the closest thing we'll ever be able to keep to the real thing, but I miss the anticipation of not knowing whether you'd get connected when using a real modem.
Fave BBSs - The Nexus and Genesys, both Amiga-based BBSs in the Virginia Beach/Chesapeake area. I was a big Amiga geek back then - C-Net on an Amy absolutely rocked, and I wrote a little terminal door for Genesys that tied their A3000 to an old beater PC running RemoteAccess over a null-modem cable so they could offer PC doors on their board. I actually enjoyed Nexus more, being that it was a tiny little BBS with mostly Amiga geeks on there, but Genesys was *huge* for the early 90s, with something like 14 modems and a gig of storage.
Now I'm missing those days again. Damn this thread.
Is it "Jessica Alba Dance Party"? No, it's "Janet Reno Dance Party"!
And 'real money' is only a placeholder for the banks to pay the bearer the appropriate amount of gold
That's not been the case in the U.S. since 1933.
As I understand it, Las Vegas doesn't look kindly on that and you can go to jail.
Because it's not the same thing. When you go into a casino and purchase chips, you and the casino have an understanding that the chips are merely placeholders for real money, and are exchangeable as such within that casino only by the bearer. Thus, if you steal chips from the casino or from another player it's treated the same as if you took actual money, since there was that pre-agreed understanding that the casino will unconditionally buy the chips back at their face value regardless of who presents them. It's rather like stealing a bearer-only check - the check itself is not currency, but it is understood to represent it.
There is no such understanding regarding currencies in an online game, and the poster that compared it to stealing Monopoly money is exactly correct. The only difference is that there aren't many people willing to pay real money for Monopoly scrip, and thus it has a correspondingly low resale value in the real world. If someone is so wrapped up in some damn game that they're willing to spend real money just to increase their standing, that sounds to me like a problem for a psychiatrist, not the courts.
They expect you to buy, Mr. Bond.
Of all the days not to have mod points....
there's just no WAY it actually costs significantly more than $60/month to route a measly 3 Mb/s
Yes, it does, and the routers aren't generally a huge part of the expense. The vast majority of the cost is in providing a good, solid layer 1 so the routers have something to work with.
You'd certainly be no worse than a bank, which takes people's money and uses it to makes money, only keeping 10% or so of the deposits in liquid funds that are accessible to their customers. Of course, you won't have the government there to bail you out like they would if everyone wanted their money back at once, but hey, it's just an analogy!
Anytime I've been bumped from a flight I've been well compensated by the airline, but I'm usually one of the people that will volunteer since I rarely fly on a tight schedule. Certainly if you have to be someplace at a particular time, that's one thing, but if you don't, waiting the extra couple of hours or so for the next flight can result in a very nice bonus whether it's in the form of cash or tickets.
but I'm not sure I'd like the idea of one failing in a ceiling mount while I wasn't around.
:-)
So turn the lights out when you leave the room.
There's a reason they put heating vents on the floor next to exterior walls, not on the ceiling.
:-)
Except in most homes that have no basement and a concrete slab foundation, you'll find exactly that.
What the hell are you doing in firefox to require 600MB of RAM?
:-) Seriously, it's not nearly as bad as it was, but Firefox does like to put a big helping of RAM on its plate. Right now I have four tabs open with mostly text content on each, and FF is eating about 100 MB.
Double clicking on its desktop icon?
Don't forget that British comedy is generally better too. I propose a knighthood for Ricky Gervais for totally blowing off Paris Hilton recently, and just on general principle.
:-)
Looking forward to visiting London again next week.