Since we're having the 'right to life' debate, why should we not classify little grey men as human in that sense if they are so capable?
I agree that this discussion may seem to be confusing the two terms, but in context the meaning was made rather clear. The original poster was arguing against the assertion made by many fundamentalists that because fetuses are genetically human they have a right to life. This is obviously false, but is still advocated by many.
How about a multi-tiered republic with a strong judicial check, and constitutions that place limits on the powers of each tier of independent republic governments (from country to region to state to area to county to city to residential area to home).
Would something like that work? That way only the things that concern everybody get voted on by everybody, and everyone else is independent. The judicial system would be able to actively pursue this (without need for a test case) after recieving a petition.
Will never happen. The US will settle on Microsoft War. The British will settle on Microsoft War Express. The rest of Europe will flip-flop back and forth on deciding on either an open source app or MWE.
China will develop their own Sun Tzu battlefield.
Russia will use telnet.
The Middle-east won't really use virtual battlefields, but instead use trojan elements to utilize advance features in Microsoft War to frag harddrives.
It works on my system (Gentoo with bash version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)), and I don't see what would cause it not to work....
What if the main Gentoo file mirror and portage tree server got haxxored and a few new lines were added to the makefiles of a few popular programs (with appropriate md5sums in the portage tree).
This has nothing to do with what the average user would do. With well-made spyware, the user doesn't know any difference at all.
the last entry in the file doesn't get an &. This means that it runs in the foreground. This is a good thing because X will shutdown whenever.xinitrc exits. If you just appended it to the file, it wouldn't run until the window system was about to shutdown. You need to insert it in the file before the last command (and you don't know where comments and control structures are), so you have to put it in the front.
bam! instant spyware. It can interface with the Window manager (and pop up internet ads in konqueror or whatever), it can monitor keystrokes, mouseclicks, and even send a picture of the desktop to a remote location.
There are conditions under which that sequence would be provably finite. If you assume that the AI necessary to monitor another AI is simpler, then eventually you will get to an AI that is infinitely simple.
"The economics change, of course, if a majority of the people employ systems like this. At that point, though the energy you sell back is worth less because so many more people are producing it as well."
But if they're just rolling back the meter (i.e. buying power from you at the same rate they would have charged you) then it won't make a difference.
The problem with your example is it assumes the shell will expand the wildcard '*'. This is not a function of the program, but the way in which it is called. If I saw in a man page that "ls -R *mary*" would list all files with 'mary' in the title, I would assume that the program itself was doing the expansion. If I happened to be a programmer and wanted to execute that program and read from it's output, I would be convinced that [a functional equivalent to] execv("ls","-R","*mary*",0); would provide me with the data I need.
What you're looking for should be in a commandline tutorial, not in the man pages. How would you like it if you had to go through pages of examples just to look up which flags causes find to use case insensitive filename matching and dereference symlinks. Man pages are for reference, not instruction.
Anyway, the most useful stuff as far as man pages go, would be found under the man page for the shell you're using. Apropos can also help.
Anyway, I would probably use "find -iname \*mary\*" to find a file with mary in the title -- find is much better at finding files than ls (and in fact, I don't think your example would actually work since the shell will only expand the current directory, so you wouldn't get the *mary* files in subdirectories). I would probably also use "find" to find all files modified in the last 10 days, but I'd have to review the man page to find the appropriate syntax.
Oscilloscopes don't have keyboards. You can't choose the filename it saves to. They generate really descriptive filenames such as 'TEK00001.TIFF'.
If I want to turn that into something meaningful such as '2708621-1E_1Aload@5V_2Aload@3.3V_5Voutputripple.t iff' (board part number and revision, measurement conditions, what was measured) I have to take it to my computer anyway. Once I get to my computer I might as well put it on a network drive along with all the other measurements and calculations. And network drives are larger and even more portable than USB drives -- you don't even have to pass any hardware around. Furthermore IT tends to backup network drives more often than they would confiscate your USB drive to make a backup.
You say that, but have you looked at the size of some of those documents you're printing? Some of them can get upwards of 50 MB per page. And those fancy smancy laserject printers can print 100s of pages a minute. What's the bandwidth requirement on that?
The trouble with USB is that it doesn't work so well with the 10 year old oscilloscopes and network analyzers I deal with every day at work. And that's the reason I have 10 floppy disks on my desk at work. The equipment I deal with doesn't support USB, but they have integrated floppy drives. And even if they did, I'd feel silly carrying around a couple 10kB tiff's on whatever the smallest USB drive is these days. And replacing this equipment just to eliminate the need for floppy disks isn't really an option (besides I think the floppy disks go well with my 266MHz Pentium 2, Win98 system in my office [oh the perks of being a co-op... but at least my win98 system is stable--the XP machines I have to use in the lab...]).
"You should vote in respect for the people throughout the world who die fighting for their right to vote. It's disrepesctful of those who've died for the right to vote to spoil your ballot."
I believe they were fighting for freedom. And I think such freedom allows me to vote for whoever I choose, including nobody..
Not really. The reason it's a fairer comparison is that they do similar things. Since they have no real effect on the quality of the output, neither is a good indicator of quality. Comparing soundcard channels to resolution is simply a bad comparison: you're comparing something that directly affects the graphical output, with something that in some cases may have small indirect effects on the audio output and claiming that since you can't understand the effects of the second one, audio quality is hard to enumerate.
Soundcards are not speakers. Your CPU doesn't send analog data to the soundcard. The soundcard recieves a digital representation of the sound, mixes it with all the other active channels, converts it into an analog format, and amplifies it enough that it can be sent to your speakers (possibly for further amplification). The format and quality (sample rate, bits per sample) of the digital information sent to the soundcard sets the maximum theoretical quality of the output sound. What formats and qualities a sound card can understand is determined by its hardware (though most just use industry standard formats for compatability). After getting the information, it needs to be mixed with all the other channels. I'm a little fuzzy on this part, but if the mixing isn't very good you can end up with artifacts on the output when multiple sounds are playing. Then the digital data has to be converted to analog. If I wanted to design a soundcard, I would use a predictive interpolation technique to upsample the sound before it goes to the D/A converter (basically take the digital signal, and use the samples you have to estimate the samples that probably should go in between, effectively increasing the output sample rate). After the post-processing, the sound goes to the D/A converter, and is converted to analog (with some distortion from the D/A). Then it goes to an amplifier that amplifies the analog signal (adding more distortion), and then goes to the output. That's how a soundcard works.
Getting back to your original assertion that those qualities are hard to visualize. Try dynamic range. Can it handle loud sounds? Do all loud sounds sound the same volume? Can it play quiet sounds? What about sounds that change from loud to quiet? Try frequency range. Can it play high pitch sounds? Can it play low sounds? Try output impedance (hint lower is better). Can I connect it to the cheap speakers that came with my computer and still get reasonable quality audio? THD is a little harder to visualize. The best way to describe it is how 'clean' the sound is. If you play a pure tone at a certain frequency, the output isn't going to be pure. There are extra tones at n*frequencyofthetone, for integers n. No amplifier can have 0% THD, but different ones can produce different harmonic patterns (some people say the harmonic patterns of vaccum tube amps sounded better [I think they're even order harmonics] than the ones produced by bipolar-junction transistor based amps [odd order harmonics?].
"If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels."
That's not a fair comparison. A fairer comparison would be the effect of the number of parallel pipelines in the gpu on image quality.
And I don't think either of those should have an impact on output quality, but may impact performance (if you have to play more sounds simulataneously than you have channels, you're going to have to do software mixing, slowing the cpu). Or were you talking about output channels (eg. 5.1, 7.1, etc.)? A comparison for that would be comparing the max possible resolution and frequency your video card is capable of sending to a monitor (which is generally not at all useful, since you are almost always limited by your monitor's capabilities, not the video card).
A fairer comparison would be knowing the sample rate, bitrate, amount and type (odd order, even order, etc.--some types sound better than others) of THD, dynamic range, frequency range, output impedance, and hardware mixing losses, and that should give you a good idea of how good a sound card is.
It seems to me that if you you were to just modify an experiment I read about where they were measuring the gravitational force of the sun (or something like that). They had a few large rods with a precisely known mass, and measured the change in forces during the day.
If you were to do something like that and take into account the change in distance from the sun and tidal effects, you could compare the force data to the observed relative position of the sun, find the amount of delay, and then calculate the speed of gravity.
As far as I can tell neither candidate is addressing the freedom issue.
Kerry wants to curtail the freedoms of businesses and business owners to do business as they choose. Bush wants to curtail the rights of ordinary citizens to protect us against terrorists. And I haven't heard either of them say they were going to give americans back their free Either way we lose our precious freedoms and gain nothing.
I have no idea who I'll vote for in this next election because I find 4 years of Kerry to be just as frightening as 4 more years of Bush.
So who knows...(Though I hear Canada is nice this time of year...)..
You can do a lot more useful things with that 750 GB than just mirror the rest. The first thing I would think to do (still mirroring) would be to interleave the mirrored data in such a way that the mirrored segments are as far apart as possible on the disk. Also, instead of mirroring, you could use some error correction codes so that you can detect what a segment should say even if all the redundant sections are damaged. On the extreme end you could use some of the slower (and more advanced) error correcting codes (like turbo codes or ldpc) to store all of the disk's data. Of course this would be amazingly slow, but you can't beat the reliability.
How about a compromise. A format that uses plain text to store both data and metainformation.
You could also store documentation for this format and even source code (in a variety of languages) for a program that converts the metadocument into straight text. Then you won't have to worry about converting each of them painfully or worry about outdated formats.
And even if the worst happens and the format becomes outdated and unreadable, the text is still there, hidden in markup. It wouldn't be that hard for someone to reverse engineer it and write a small program to convert it to a more recent format.
With the markup data separated from the content, you can choose to only show certain portions of the content. It'd be much harder to filter plain text.
Plain text has no real advantage over a sensible format. HTML documents will be readable (maybe not pretty, but readable) just as long as plain text.
Of course eventually when ASCII dies and we all switch to a 32bit character set (endorsed by our alien overlords), neither "plain text" nor any sensible format will be readable by anyone. Heck, even switching to 16bit character unicode would screw it up.
"It is also caused by a very simple rule. If everyone has a certain amount of money, noone cares about that amount anymore as much, meaning they are not as willing to part with goods for so little anymore."
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. Inflation is about the value of that money in relation to goods. If the amount of money in the market increases, you have inflation. If the cost of goods increased, you have inflation. If both the cost of goods and the amount of money stay the same, only the distribution of funds changes, then you don't have inflation. The cost of necessities and raw materials in relation to the value of money is not effected.
If you take your idea of inflation to an extreme, it would say that we needed to give almost all our money to a single man, so no one would have any and it would be worth more. While this may result in a fall in the cost (and quality) of necessities, the buying power of the median individual would have fallen.
"Note though, that it still doesn't account for the fact that even more people were 'rich'."
Yeah, but that's not what it's talking about. That statistic is about the distribution of wealth. You're right, America probably did become more wealthy, and that is not shown in that statistic. What it does show is that the benefits of this wealth were unequal (and even disproportionate to wealth).
Anyway, look at what sort of criteria are you using to determine "rich": "The definition of 'rich'...is people in the highest tax bracket". How was the highest tax bracket determined in the years in question? Did it stay constant the entire time? If it was "income greater than ____", did it take into account inflation (if so, what indices were used)?
It's easy to say that the entire country is getting "rich"er, but harder to prove that people really benefitted, and harder still to prove that it was due to one obscure economic factor. So I guess I have it easy: It's really easy to show the increasing divide between the new aristocracy and peasantry, and say "gee, I don't like where this is going"...
I didn't say there was a prohibition against stating my opinion, just that there was a prohibition against someone else stating their opinion. And yes it is my business if someone else's freedom of expression is restricted. The fact that you don't hear them shows that the censorship is doing its job =P.
"The fact that the owner of the copyrighted material did not grant them a license to use it for broadcast is what makes it such. They could have given a license to anyone they wanted to."
But it doesn't *have* to be unlicensed. Oh, sure in the world of exclusive contracts and artificial monopolies it does, but is that really a good thing? Does it benefit society? Sure you might say that the "freedom" for a content maker to do what they want demands that they be able to form exclusive contracts. But remember that they are a monopoly and are using their monopoly position to pump their profits by limiting supply. Should monopolies really have that right?
"TV stations don't pay license fees to use the highlights in their sports coverage, and their sports anchors comment freely on the games."
The sports anchors get to comment freely? Really? Can they tell you the play-by-play as well? Can they comment on potential strategies as the game is going on? Sports anchors do a completely different type of commentary.
"It costs money to produce an olympics, do you think they ought to spend their money and then give away the video? Shouldn't the investors be able to profit from the risk they are taking?"
Once again you hit a strawman with a rocket launcher. I never said they couldn't make money. I just don't think they should be able to abuse their monopoly position in contract negotiations. If they were to set a price and say that this is how much a license costs to show the Olympics, I'd be fine with it, even if NBC was the only one who bought that license. Though I kind of doubt NBC would be the only one to pick it up. I'm sure an enterprising station that didn't have assholes for commentators would have picked it up, and made a mint.
"Boo hoo you don't get to watch the olympic coin-flipping championship between the Ukranian and Flatvian teams. I think you'll survive. If it is so critical to see an event, pay the price and get a ticket."
Actually I'm not terribly interested in the Olympics (*shrug* Nationalism isn't my thing). I was just using this discussion as a backdrop to preach about the immorality of exclusive contracts (I demand a constitutional amendment.. I mean they're demeaning the definition of contracts everywhere. If god had meant for man to have exclusive contracts, he wouldn't have invented polygamy...)
"One, if spread evenly the value of money lowers, and inflation rises, making both less money availible and money invested worthless."
Wrong. Inflation is caused by many complex factors. Inflation can be caused when more money is introduced to the system, or shortages of key raw materials (like oil) [this reduces the efficiency of the entire market, hence inflation]. An even distribution of wealth wouldn't cause inflation. It would not cause a shortage of key raw materials, result in more money in the market, increase demand for necessities, or bring about th apocalypse. If anything prices for luxury items would fall as that market expands, while necessities would remain about the same.
"Two, most people when they have money spend it. Only a few who are rich, after they spend some money on themselves, then use the extra moey to invest. If spread evenly, everyone would spend on themselves, and nothing would be left over to invest."
I don't know..How many middle class people do you know that own stock? Sometimes it seems to me that I'm the only one that doesn't. It's amazing that they have enough money after spending it all on themselves to invest it. And if money were spread more evenly, more people would have surplus money leftover after expenses to invest.
"Shareholders rarely get anything from a company, other than the ability to sell the stock at a higher rate. That rate is based on the value of the company."
Exactly. Corporations try to maximize the value of their company.
"As a corporation expands, it has more jobs to fill."
That's assuming it expands. Sometimes its not a good idea for a company to expand, even if they can afford it. The fact is while there is a coorelation between corporate profits and corporate expansion, it isn't as strong as you imply.
"Did it mention that more people became rich too? Did it also mention that the economy expanded geometrically? Did it mentioned that with the rate changes more people fell under the brakcet of being 'rich'? You cannot look at only half the facts"
You're the one looking at only half the facts. That statistic already accounts for those effects because it didn't use your bracketed definition of 'rich'. In 1983 the wealthiest 1% of the population of america had 33.8% of America's wealth. In 1989 the wealthiest 1% of the population of america had 37.4% of America's wealth.
Since this is probably to complicated, I'll elaborate. Repeat for 1983 and 1989: 1. Take the number of people in america and multiply it by 1% (0.01). This is the number of people we will consider rich (NUM_RICH). 2. Sort the american population by wealth and select the wealthiest $NUM_RICH people from that list, and call them the "wealthiest 1%". 3. Calculate the total wealth owned by the "wealthiest 1%". (NUM_RICH_WEALTH). 4. Calculate the total wealth owned by the entire American population (NUM_WEALTH). 5. Divide NUM_RICH_WEALTH by NUM_WEALTH to get the percentage of America's wealth owned by the wealthiest 1%.
I won't argue that the standards of living for poor people are worse now than ever or anything like that. But I will argue that not all of America has had an equal share of its success. And the trend has been growing since America began. Based on history, an excessive and increasing disparity of wealth between the few and the many has caused much social unrest and war. I don't think we're near that point quite yet, but I still think we need to take an active role in avoiding such tragedies, if at all possible.
"Actually, it's 39.6, temporarily coming down, this year at 38.6. Of course, that is besides state taxes, which in most cases will make a burden of over 40%."
Fine, the highest tax bracket is 5% higher than I thought. But the post I was responding to was still wrong in saying that the rich people foot 50% of the bill. It's just as impossible at 40% as it is at 35%. There simply are not enough rich people for it to make that much of a difference.
"We live in a capitalist society. Generally, the rich either invest in other companies, or they open ones themselves"
The rich may invest in companies (though I would argue that if you have a lot of money to throw around, the commodities and currencies markets would be better), but what reason would they have to start a company. Most people who start companies are seeking independence or advancement of their career. What reason do the rich have to open a company.
"Guess you don't live in Detroit. Here the "Big Three" either directly or indirectly employ a grerat deal of people. Layoffs are usually in the area of ten thousand."
So if the jobs were diversified in many smaller businesses, like the rest of the US, the job market would be more stable, and less at the whims of GM's CEO.
"And in many cases the venture capitalists are [rich]. And it's the VCs that allow jobs to be created."
Venture capitalists would have nothing to invest in if it weren't for the middle-class business owners. And I don't think it's a rule that venture capitalists have to be rich. If the wealth were distributed more equally, more people could invest.
"If the rich people spend money, the poor get it"
Funny, I thought thought the point of a corporation was to maximize the profits of the shareholders, not maximize the wages of employees. And I wonder how many poor people own large shares of stock in corporations. The fact is if Bill Gates buys a few [hundred] Chevy's, worker 45867 isn't going to see a cent.
And if the rich spending money under Reagan was supposed to spread the wealth about, it didn't. The second site I linked to showed that from 1983-1989, the wealthiest 1% went from having 33.8% of America's wealth to 37.4% of the wealth.
FYI: the highest tax bracket is ~34%. Though because of the way the tax system works, not all of the money is taxed at this rate. The tax scheme has brackets. This means that all the money that anyone makes up the next bracket is taxed at the rate of that bracket. For example: If the 1st bracket has a rate of 5%, and the 2nd bracket was at $2000 with a rate of 7%, and I made $2050, I would pay 5% of $2000 and 7% of $50. This is sort of fair since my first $1000 is taxed just as much as a rich person's first $1000.
"It's the rich people...who create jobs"
Since when do rich people create jobs? Do rich people have magical job-creating powers? Do jobs just pop out of rich people's orfices?
The majority of jobs are created by small-medium sized businesses. Very few of the owners of these businesses would be considered rich. Rich people speculate on the stock and commodities markets. Rich people speculate on the currency markets. Guess who usually ends up on the down side of the rich people's business interests?
As for you question of how can someone create more jobs than there are unemployed people: Unemployment statistics only measure those that are seeking a job. If wages were higher or work conditions were better, many people may decide to stop housewiving or work a second job and would join the masses of people seeking employment. In addition each year a large number of people enter the job market.
Most (nonfanatical) democrats don't base their ideas on taxation on "jealousy and class warfare", but instead on stopping a growing trend. The division of wealth in America is changing. The rich are becoming richer, and everyone else is getting poorer.
The second link also suggests it would be more effective to tax wealth than income (which is not something I've thought of before...so I'll have to think on it...).
Anyway, congrats on the self-employed thing and kudos for not passing the blame.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we're having the 'right to life' debate, why should we not classify little grey men as human in that sense if they are so capable?
I agree that this discussion may seem to be confusing the two terms, but in context the meaning was made rather clear. The original poster was arguing against the assertion made by many fundamentalists that because fetuses are genetically human they have a right to life. This is obviously false, but is still advocated by many.
How about a multi-tiered republic with a strong judicial check, and constitutions that place limits on the powers of each tier of independent republic governments (from country to region to state to area to county to city to residential area to home).
Would something like that work?
That way only the things that concern everybody get voted on by everybody, and everyone else is independent. The judicial system would be able to actively pursue this (without need for a test case) after recieving a petition.
Well?
Will never happen.
The US will settle on Microsoft War.
The British will settle on Microsoft War Express.
The rest of Europe will flip-flop back and forth on deciding on either an open source app or MWE.
China will develop their own Sun Tzu battlefield.
Russia will use telnet.
The Middle-east won't really use virtual battlefields, but instead use trojan elements to utilize advance features in Microsoft War to frag harddrives.
It works on my system (Gentoo with bash version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i686-pc-linux-gnu)), and I don't see what would cause it not to work....
What if the main Gentoo file mirror and portage tree server got haxxored and a few new lines were added to the makefiles of a few popular programs (with appropriate md5sums in the portage tree).
This has nothing to do with what the average user would do. With well-made spyware, the user doesn't know any difference at all.
the last entry in the file doesn't get an &. .xinitrc exits.
This means that it runs in the foreground. This is a good thing because X will shutdown whenever
If you just appended it to the file, it wouldn't run until the window system was about to shutdown.
You need to insert it in the file before the last command (and you don't know where comments and control structures are), so you have to put it in the front.
look. you don't need root access to put spyware on linux.
.xinitrc > tmp$$ && mv tmp$$ .xinitrc
demonstration:
put spyware in some directory that looks innocuous,
like ~/.gnome
then get the shell to execute the following command:
echo ~/.gnome/spyware \& | cat
bam! instant spyware. It can interface with the Window manager (and pop up internet ads in konqueror or whatever), it can monitor keystrokes, mouseclicks, and even send a picture of the desktop to a remote location.
There are conditions under which that sequence would be provably finite. If you assume that the AI necessary to monitor another AI is simpler, then eventually you will get to an AI that is infinitely simple.
But it's in the US's best interest to promote larger militaries in other nations.
5 _arms_exporters_in_1999
After all it's good for the american economy. Consider:
The US is the largest exporter of weapons:
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Arms_trade#Top_1
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0821-02.htm
"The economics change, of course, if a majority of the people employ systems like this. At that point, though the energy you sell back is worth less because so many more people are producing it as well."
But if they're just rolling back the meter (i.e. buying power from you at the same rate they would have charged you) then it won't make a difference.
The problem with your example is it assumes the shell will expand the wildcard '*'. This is not a function of the program, but the way in which it is called.
If I saw in a man page that "ls -R *mary*" would list all files with 'mary' in the title, I would assume that the program itself was doing the expansion. If I happened to be a programmer and wanted to execute that program and read from it's output, I would be convinced that [a functional equivalent to]
execv("ls","-R","*mary*",0);
would provide me with the data I need.
What you're looking for should be in a commandline tutorial, not in the man pages. How would you like it if you had to go through pages of examples just to look up which flags causes find to use case insensitive filename matching and dereference symlinks. Man pages are for reference, not instruction.
Anyway, the most useful stuff as far as man pages go, would be found under the man page for the shell you're using. Apropos can also help.
Anyway, I would probably use "find -iname \*mary\*" to find a file with mary in the title -- find is much better at finding files than ls (and in fact, I don't think your example would actually work since the shell will only expand the current directory, so you wouldn't get the *mary* files in subdirectories). I would probably also use "find" to find all files modified in the last 10 days, but I'd have to review the man page to find the appropriate syntax.
Oscilloscopes don't have keyboards.
t iff' (board part number and revision, measurement conditions, what was measured)
You can't choose the filename it saves to.
They generate really descriptive filenames such as 'TEK00001.TIFF'.
If I want to turn that into something meaningful such as '2708621-1E_1Aload@5V_2Aload@3.3V_5Voutputripple.
I have to take it to my computer anyway.
Once I get to my computer I might as well put it on a network drive along with all the other measurements and calculations. And network drives are larger and even more portable than USB drives -- you don't even have to pass any hardware around. Furthermore IT tends to backup network drives more often than they would confiscate your USB drive to make a backup.
You say that, but have you looked at the size of some of those documents you're printing? Some of them can get upwards of 50 MB per page. And those fancy smancy laserject printers can print 100s of pages a minute. What's the bandwidth requirement on that?
The trouble with USB is that it doesn't work so well with the 10 year old oscilloscopes and network analyzers I deal with every day at work.
And that's the reason I have 10 floppy disks on my desk at work. The equipment I deal with doesn't support USB, but they have integrated floppy drives. And even if they did, I'd feel silly carrying around a couple 10kB tiff's on whatever the smallest USB drive is these days.
And replacing this equipment just to eliminate the need for floppy disks isn't really an option (besides I think the floppy disks go well with my 266MHz Pentium 2, Win98 system in my office [oh the perks of being a co-op... but at least my win98 system is stable--the XP machines I have to use in the lab...]).
"You should vote in respect for the people throughout the world who die fighting for their right to vote. It's disrepesctful of those who've died for the right to vote to spoil your ballot."
I believe they were fighting for freedom. And I think such freedom allows me to vote for whoever I choose, including nobody..
"And either you or i have just proved my point."
Not really. The reason it's a fairer comparison is that they do similar things. Since they have no real effect on the quality of the output, neither is a good indicator of quality. Comparing soundcard channels to resolution is simply a bad comparison: you're comparing something that directly affects the graphical output, with something that in some cases may have small indirect effects on the audio output and claiming that since you can't understand the effects of the second one, audio quality is hard to enumerate.
Soundcards are not speakers. Your CPU doesn't send analog data to the soundcard. The soundcard recieves a digital representation of the sound, mixes it with all the other active channels, converts it into an analog format, and amplifies it enough that it can be sent to your speakers (possibly for further amplification).
The format and quality (sample rate, bits per sample) of the digital information sent to the soundcard sets the maximum theoretical quality of the output sound. What formats and qualities a sound card can understand is determined by its hardware (though most just use industry standard formats for compatability).
After getting the information, it needs to be mixed with all the other channels. I'm a little fuzzy on this part, but if the mixing isn't very good you can end up with artifacts on the output when multiple sounds are playing.
Then the digital data has to be converted to analog. If I wanted to design a soundcard, I would use a predictive interpolation technique to upsample the sound before it goes to the D/A converter (basically take the digital signal, and use the samples you have to estimate the samples that probably should go in between, effectively increasing the output sample rate). After the post-processing, the sound goes to the D/A converter, and is converted to analog (with some distortion from the D/A).
Then it goes to an amplifier that amplifies the analog signal (adding more distortion), and then goes to the output.
That's how a soundcard works.
Getting back to your original assertion that those qualities are hard to visualize.
Try dynamic range. Can it handle loud sounds? Do all loud sounds sound the same volume? Can it play quiet sounds? What about sounds that change from loud to quiet?
Try frequency range. Can it play high pitch sounds? Can it play low sounds?
Try output impedance (hint lower is better). Can I connect it to the cheap speakers that came with my computer and still get reasonable quality audio?
THD is a little harder to visualize. The best way to describe it is how 'clean' the sound is. If you play a pure tone at a certain frequency, the output isn't going to be pure. There are extra tones at n*frequencyofthetone, for integers n. No amplifier can have 0% THD, but different ones can produce different harmonic patterns (some people say the harmonic patterns of vaccum tube amps sounded better [I think they're even order harmonics] than the ones produced by bipolar-junction transistor based amps [odd order harmonics?].
"If you say that a sound system has seven channels then i and a lot of other non-audiophiles will have very little idea what exactly that means or how it differes from more or less channels."
That's not a fair comparison.
A fairer comparison would be the effect of the number of parallel pipelines in the gpu on image quality.
And I don't think either of those should have an impact on output quality, but may impact performance (if you have to play more sounds simulataneously than you have channels, you're going to have to do software mixing, slowing the cpu).
Or were you talking about output channels (eg. 5.1, 7.1, etc.)? A comparison for that would be comparing the max possible resolution and frequency your video card is capable of sending to a monitor (which is generally not at all useful, since you are almost always limited by your monitor's capabilities, not the video card).
A fairer comparison would be knowing the sample rate, bitrate, amount and type (odd order, even order, etc.--some types sound better than others) of THD, dynamic range, frequency range, output impedance, and hardware mixing losses, and that should give you a good idea of how good a sound card is.
It seems to me that if you you were to just modify an experiment I read about where they were measuring the gravitational force of the sun (or something like that). They had a few large rods with a precisely known mass, and measured the change in forces during the day.
If you were to do something like that and take into account the change in distance from the sun and tidal effects, you could compare the force data to the observed relative position of the sun, find the amount of delay, and then calculate the speed of gravity.
Do you honestly think Kerry will be any better?
As far as I can tell neither candidate is addressing the freedom issue.
Kerry wants to curtail the freedoms of businesses and business owners to do business as they choose.
Bush wants to curtail the rights of ordinary citizens to protect us against terrorists.
And I haven't heard either of them say they were going to give americans back their free
Either way we lose our precious freedoms and gain nothing.
I have no idea who I'll vote for in this next election because I find 4 years of Kerry to be just as frightening as 4 more years of Bush.
So who knows...(Though I hear Canada is nice this time of year...)..
You can do a lot more useful things with that 750 GB than just mirror the rest.
The first thing I would think to do (still mirroring) would be to interleave the mirrored data in such a way that the mirrored segments are as far apart as possible on the disk.
Also, instead of mirroring, you could use some error correction codes so that you can detect what a segment should say even if all the redundant sections are damaged.
On the extreme end you could use some of the slower (and more advanced) error correcting codes (like turbo codes or ldpc) to store all of the disk's data. Of course this would be amazingly slow, but you can't beat the reliability.
How about a compromise. A format that uses plain text to store both data and metainformation.
You could also store documentation for this format and even source code (in a variety of languages) for a program that converts the metadocument into straight text. Then you won't have to worry about converting each of them painfully or worry about outdated formats.
And even if the worst happens and the format becomes outdated and unreadable, the text is still there, hidden in markup. It wouldn't be that hard for someone to reverse engineer it and write a small program to convert it to a more recent format.
With the markup data separated from the content, you can choose to only show certain portions of the content. It'd be much harder to filter plain text.
Plain text has no real advantage over a sensible format. HTML documents will be readable (maybe not pretty, but readable) just as long as plain text.
Of course eventually when ASCII dies and we all switch to a 32bit character set (endorsed by our alien overlords), neither "plain text" nor any sensible format will be readable by anyone.
Heck, even switching to 16bit character unicode would screw it up.
"It is also caused by a very simple rule. If everyone has a certain amount of money, noone cares about that amount anymore as much, meaning they are not as willing to part with goods for so little anymore."
Actually, that's not entirely accurate. Inflation is about the value of that money in relation to goods. If the amount of money in the market increases, you have inflation. If the cost of goods increased, you have inflation.
If both the cost of goods and the amount of money stay the same, only the distribution of funds changes, then you don't have inflation. The cost of necessities and raw materials in relation to the value of money is not effected.
If you take your idea of inflation to an extreme, it would say that we needed to give almost all our money to a single man, so no one would have any and it would be worth more. While this may result in a fall in the cost (and quality) of necessities, the buying power of the median individual would have fallen.
"Note though, that it still doesn't account for the fact that even more people were 'rich'."
Yeah, but that's not what it's talking about. That statistic is about the distribution of wealth. You're right, America probably did become more wealthy, and that is not shown in that statistic.
What it does show is that the benefits of this wealth were unequal (and even disproportionate to wealth).
Anyway, look at what sort of criteria are you using to determine "rich":
"The definition of 'rich'...is people in the highest tax bracket".
How was the highest tax bracket determined in the years in question?
Did it stay constant the entire time?
If it was "income greater than ____", did it take into account inflation (if so, what indices were used)?
It's easy to say that the entire country is getting "rich"er, but harder to prove that people really benefitted, and harder still to prove that it was due to one obscure economic factor.
So I guess I have it easy: It's really easy to show the increasing divide between the new aristocracy and peasantry, and say "gee, I don't like where this is going"...
I didn't say there was a prohibition against stating my opinion, just that there was a prohibition against someone else stating their opinion. And yes it is my business if someone else's freedom of expression is restricted. The fact that you don't hear them shows that the censorship is doing its job =P.
"The fact that the owner of the copyrighted material did not grant them a license to use it for broadcast is what makes it such. They could have given a license to anyone they wanted to."
But it doesn't *have* to be unlicensed. Oh, sure in the world of exclusive contracts and artificial monopolies it does, but is that really a good thing? Does it benefit society? Sure you might say that the "freedom" for a content maker to do what they want demands that they be able to form exclusive contracts. But remember that they are a monopoly and are using their monopoly position to pump their profits by limiting supply. Should monopolies really have that right?
"TV stations don't pay license fees to use the highlights in their sports coverage, and their sports anchors comment freely on the games."
The sports anchors get to comment freely? Really? Can they tell you the play-by-play as well? Can they comment on potential strategies as the game is going on?
Sports anchors do a completely different type of commentary.
"It costs money to produce an olympics, do you think they ought to spend their money and then give away the video? Shouldn't the investors be able to profit from the risk they are taking?"
Once again you hit a strawman with a rocket launcher. I never said they couldn't make money. I just don't think they should be able to abuse their monopoly position in contract negotiations. If they were to set a price and say that this is how much a license costs to show the Olympics, I'd be fine with it, even if NBC was the only one who bought that license. Though I kind of doubt NBC would be the only one to pick it up. I'm sure an enterprising station that didn't have assholes for commentators would have picked it up, and made a mint.
"Boo hoo you don't get to watch the olympic coin-flipping championship between the Ukranian and Flatvian teams. I think you'll survive. If it is so critical to see an event, pay the price and get a ticket."
Actually I'm not terribly interested in the Olympics (*shrug* Nationalism isn't my thing). I was just using this discussion as a backdrop to preach about the immorality of exclusive contracts (I demand a constitutional amendment.. I mean they're demeaning the definition of contracts everywhere. If god had meant for man to have exclusive contracts, he wouldn't have invented polygamy...)
"One, if spread evenly the value of money lowers, and inflation rises, making both less money availible and money invested worthless."
Wrong. Inflation is caused by many complex factors. Inflation can be caused when more money is introduced to the system, or shortages of key raw materials (like oil) [this reduces the efficiency of the entire market, hence inflation].
An even distribution of wealth wouldn't cause inflation. It would not cause a shortage of key raw materials, result in more money in the market, increase demand for necessities, or bring about th apocalypse. If anything prices for luxury items would fall as that market expands, while necessities would remain about the same.
"Two, most people when they have money spend it. Only a few who are rich, after they spend some money on themselves, then use the extra moey to invest. If spread evenly, everyone would spend on themselves, and nothing would be left over to invest."
I don't know..How many middle class people do you know that own stock? Sometimes it seems to me that I'm the only one that doesn't. It's amazing that they have enough money after spending it all on themselves to invest it.
And if money were spread more evenly, more people would have surplus money leftover after expenses to invest.
"Shareholders rarely get anything from a company, other than the ability to sell the stock at a higher rate. That rate is based on the value of the company."
Exactly. Corporations try to maximize the value of their company.
"As a corporation expands, it has more jobs to fill."
That's assuming it expands. Sometimes its not a good idea for a company to expand, even if they can afford it.
The fact is while there is a coorelation between corporate profits and corporate expansion, it isn't as strong as you imply.
"Did it mention that more people became rich too? Did it also mention that the economy expanded geometrically? Did it mentioned that with the rate changes more people fell under the brakcet of being 'rich'? You cannot look at only half the facts"
You're the one looking at only half the facts. That statistic already accounts for those effects because it didn't use your bracketed definition of 'rich'.
In 1983 the wealthiest 1% of the population of america had 33.8% of America's wealth.
In 1989 the wealthiest 1% of the population of america had 37.4% of America's wealth.
Since this is probably to complicated, I'll elaborate.
Repeat for 1983 and 1989:
1. Take the number of people in america and multiply it by 1% (0.01). This is the number of people we will consider rich (NUM_RICH).
2. Sort the american population by wealth and select the wealthiest $NUM_RICH people from that list, and call them the "wealthiest 1%".
3. Calculate the total wealth owned by the "wealthiest 1%". (NUM_RICH_WEALTH).
4. Calculate the total wealth owned by the entire American population (NUM_WEALTH).
5. Divide NUM_RICH_WEALTH by NUM_WEALTH to get the percentage of America's wealth owned by the wealthiest 1%.
I won't argue that the standards of living for poor people are worse now than ever or anything like that. But I will argue that not all of America has had an equal share of its success. And the trend has been growing since America began.
Based on history, an excessive and increasing disparity of wealth between the few and the many has caused much social unrest and war. I don't think we're near that point quite yet, but I still think we need to take an active role in avoiding such tragedies, if at all possible.
"Actually, it's 39.6, temporarily coming down, this year at 38.6. Of course, that is besides state taxes, which in most cases will make a burden of over 40%."
Fine, the highest tax bracket is 5% higher than I thought. But the post I was responding to was still wrong in saying that the rich people foot 50% of the bill. It's just as impossible at 40% as it is at 35%. There simply are not enough rich people for it to make that much of a difference.
"We live in a capitalist society. Generally, the rich either invest in other companies, or they open ones themselves"
The rich may invest in companies (though I would argue that if you have a lot of money to throw around, the commodities and currencies markets would be better), but what reason would they have to start a company. Most people who start companies are seeking independence or advancement of their career. What reason do the rich have to open a company.
"Guess you don't live in Detroit. Here the "Big Three" either directly or indirectly employ a grerat deal of people. Layoffs are usually in the area of ten thousand."
So if the jobs were diversified in many smaller businesses, like the rest of the US, the job market would be more stable, and less at the whims of GM's CEO.
"And in many cases the venture capitalists are [rich]. And it's the VCs that allow jobs to be created."
Venture capitalists would have nothing to invest in if it weren't for the middle-class business owners. And I don't think it's a rule that venture capitalists have to be rich. If the wealth were distributed more equally, more people could invest.
"If the rich people spend money, the poor get it"
Funny, I thought thought the point of a corporation was to maximize the profits of the shareholders, not maximize the wages of employees. And I wonder how many poor people own large shares of stock in corporations. The fact is if Bill Gates buys a few [hundred] Chevy's, worker 45867 isn't going to see a cent.
And if the rich spending money under Reagan was supposed to spread the wealth about, it didn't.
The second site I linked to showed that from 1983-1989, the wealthiest 1% went from having 33.8% of America's wealth to 37.4% of the wealth.
FYI: the highest tax bracket is ~34%.
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Though because of the way the tax system works, not all of the money is taxed at this rate. The tax scheme has brackets. This means that all the money that anyone makes up the next bracket is taxed at the rate of that bracket. For example: If the 1st bracket has a rate of 5%, and the 2nd bracket was at $2000 with a rate of 7%, and I made $2050, I would pay 5% of $2000 and 7% of $50.
This is sort of fair since my first $1000 is taxed just as much as a rich person's first $1000.
"It's the rich people...who create jobs"
Since when do rich people create jobs?
Do rich people have magical job-creating powers?
Do jobs just pop out of rich people's orfices?
The majority of jobs are created by small-medium sized businesses. Very few of the owners of these businesses would be considered rich. Rich people speculate on the stock and commodities markets. Rich people speculate on the currency markets.
Guess who usually ends up on the down side of the rich people's business interests?
As for you question of how can someone create more jobs than there are unemployed people: Unemployment statistics only measure those that are seeking a job. If wages were higher or work conditions were better, many people may decide to stop housewiving or work a second job and would join the masses of people seeking employment. In addition each year a large number of people enter the job market.
Most (nonfanatical) democrats don't base their ideas on taxation on "jealousy and class warfare", but instead on stopping a growing trend. The division of wealth in America is changing. The rich are becoming richer, and everyone else is getting poorer.
A little Google digging turns up these links:
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts
http://karmak.org/archive/2004/04/income&wealth.h
The second link also suggests it would be more effective to tax wealth than income (which is not something I've thought of before...so I'll have to think on it...).
Anyway, congrats on the self-employed thing and kudos for not passing the blame.