Facebook provides an easy way to keep up with a network of friends and acquaintances, as well as a convenient way to invite those people to events, both your own and others' that you may be attending, such as concerts. For instance, I'm going to a concert later this month, and I know some of my friends that I don't talk to every single day could be interested in going as well. With a couple of clicks, I've invited them to join. It's also been very handy to get in contact with old friends from school etc., that I've not seen in a long time, but have just moved to the area, and I only knew this from a mutual friend's update. You may know this kind of thing as "social networking".
Once you hide all the game invites and ads and shit, it becomes a pretty handy tool for those things, so much easier than manually sending out email invites and maintaining various mailing lists for events. You just have to be critical about which persons you connect to and which pages you follow, so you don't get drowned in shit.
And don't ever EVER post anything to Facebook that you don't want to become public knowledge. I don't mind people knowing which concerts and events I attend, but anything more personal than that is completely off-limits, and my profile is only visible to my friends.
It's not my proclamations, it's the scientific consensus.
If you think the consensus is wrong for some reason, you're very welcome to disprove it. I'm rooting for you, because if you actually manage to do so, science as a whole will have moved forward. I'm not getting my hopes up, though.
You would expect that most records would be broken in the early years of registration.
And, maybe, they were — but no one would profit from emphasizing the fact, so we do not know about it.
We can say with quite high certainty that they were, because right at the beginning you hit a new record every time you see a temperature increase, but as the observation period becomes longer, the amount of record-breaking temperatures lessen, because they have more previous records to be compared against.
But the last 20-25 years, there has been a enormous increase in temperature records being broken, completely disproportionate to how the distribution has been before. And you're saying all of this has been faked, for profits? Whose profits? Certainly not the hugely influential fossil fuel industries with their enormous lobbying power, who are fighting every single day to quash the publication of climate change studies, because it cuts into their profits.
But even if it really is true, that temperatures rose 1 degree since 1850 — so what? 10 thousands years ago Tasmania was attached to mainland Australia. It was also possible for bears to cross from mainland Alaska to the islands of Kodiak archipelago (either over land or ice-fields). Then something substantial enough happened to isolate these lands. Whatever it was, it was not the humans discovering fire, was it?
That is an average temperature rise, the fluctuations in temperature are much greater. That's why we're getting 50+ degrees celsius in the shade in India, while the winters in the northern countries are getting colder and harsher. We're seeing many more cyclones and extreme storms, the weather is getting more extreme. It's not just global warming, it's climate change. Putting all of that carbon back into the atmosphere in a single instant (in geological terms) is our fault.
You would expect that most records would be broken in the early years of registration. You have less historic data to compare to, so it's more likely that a freak heatwave or something breaks a record. But as time goes on, you gather more and more data, from a longer period of time, so the record-breaking tends to taper off gradually.
Over the last 20-25 years, we've seen a disproportionate amounts of records being broken, which is very unusual. We're seeing the records for highest average temperature being broken again and again, and while you may think a 1 degree celcius increase is not a lot, an increase in average temperature of 1 or 2 degrees is massive on a global scale.
Well, obviously you have to trust that Google are actually telling the truth when they say it opts you out of GA. That's why I use uBlock and Privacy Badger, too:-)
And if they're tracking "hey, this guy doesn't want to be tracked by GA", that's OK with me.
It's called "climate change" because the climate is becoming more extreme, not just warmer.
For instance, it could cause the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift to shut down and stop carrying warm water to Northern Europe, which would cause our local climate to change, bringing it much close to what it should be at our latitude, without those warm currents. Loot at a map how northerly Scandinavia is compared to northern US (even Alaska) and Canada, and then compare our climates.
Should the currents stop, Scandinavia will become a frozen wasteland.
The solution is to decrease energy consumption and a move away from fossil fuels.
Taxes can be a method, we can start by ending the fossil fuel subsidies and apply them to renewable energy instead.
But the most important thing we can all do is to conserve as much energy as we can, on all levels from private individuals to big industry. Unfortunately, it seems like the carrot doesn't work, so we'll have to use the stick, by increasing taxes on fossil fuels and reducing them on renewables.
There have been some rumblings here about radically changing our world-infamous super-high car tax (up to 150%), which are currently based on the base price of the vehicle, and replacing it with a tax that's based directly on the emissions, weight and safety of the car. So a very safe and clean car would be taxed very little, but a huge gas guzzler would be taxed heavily. It would be a real boon for electric cars and hybrids, which are currently very expensive due to the current outdated system.
I disagree on the terrorism part when looked at over a longer period of time. It's only currently that a lot of terrorist are muslims, most likely due to the wars we're fighting in the middle east.
But what the hell's up with the greenhouse gas argument? Do you get gassy from schawarma or something?
I have never had an issue with streaming sites while blocking Google Analytics, using Privacy Badger. I also have the GA opt-out cookie set, just in case it slips through anyway.
They say the cutoff is ~2 years, but the Chromebook 13 is not supported, despite being a less than 2 year old model and having an ARM processor. Perhaps it's because that processor is only 32 bits, but it still sucks.
With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.
If the LPF part of the crossover doesn't work correctly, you get all the treble sent to the woofer as well, which can cause noticeable distortion. And if the HPF part doesn't work, you get all the bass sent to the tweeter, which is likely to kill it.
And there have been significant advances in speaker construction over the past few decades. My late-70s JBL 4410s are wonderful speakers, especially for rock, but they can't hold a candle to my Adam A5Xs when it comes to accuracy and clean sound.
Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.
Pro tip: Don't try to act smart if you don't know what you're talking about:-)
The decibel is a logarithmic unit. When I say a dynamic range of 96 dB, that is the different between the noise floor and a full-scale signal. 96 dB of difference is simple a relative value. Talking about dynamic range in decibel-milliwatts as you're doing, makes absolutely no sense at all. DBm is a measurement of absolute power, so you can't use it to talk about relative dynamic range.
Quantization error exists everywhere, even in analog media. But unless you're editing the audio, 16 bit audio puts the noise floor due to quantization around -96 dBFS, which is more than good enough and very very small indeed. A -96 dBFS noise floor is equivalent to Total Harmonic Distortion less than 0.002%. In other words, completely inaudble. The inherent noise from devices such as microphones is a lot higher and exists in all recordings of non-artificial music. And no, it doesn't turn a sine wave into a stairstep, it just makes it "fuzzy". You can see this with a sufficiently good oscilloscope.
You're either delusional, or you've completely forgotten everything you should have learned about analog and digital signal theory.
No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high. If you actually could hear frequencies that high under normal conditions, you are either a dog or a genuine medical curiosity. What you probably heard is distortion manifesting itself in the audible range, due to equipment that was unable to either handle ultrasonic content correctly and didn't remove it using a low pass filter.
This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor. And even if you did hear anything that high up, it would have been more like a sensation or feeling, not an actual identifiable sound. Either way, it would have been completely drowned out by the actual musical content, which obviously has a ton more energy in the audible frequency range.
The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.
I always preferred the Quake games to the Unreal games. They just *felt* better, more meaty and less floaty.
And the sound effects in Quake are some of the best ever. They're right up there with the original Diablo for some of the most iconic game sound effects of all time.
It's so obvious when looking at Unreal and listening to the music, that a lot of the developers at Epic came from the demoscene. Those fire/water/lightning effects, that MOD music, it was all proper old-school stuff.
You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?
First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.
Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.
You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook provides an easy way to keep up with a network of friends and acquaintances, as well as a convenient way to invite those people to events, both your own and others' that you may be attending, such as concerts. For instance, I'm going to a concert later this month, and I know some of my friends that I don't talk to every single day could be interested in going as well. With a couple of clicks, I've invited them to join. It's also been very handy to get in contact with old friends from school etc., that I've not seen in a long time, but have just moved to the area, and I only knew this from a mutual friend's update. You may know this kind of thing as "social networking".
Once you hide all the game invites and ads and shit, it becomes a pretty handy tool for those things, so much easier than manually sending out email invites and maintaining various mailing lists for events. You just have to be critical about which persons you connect to and which pages you follow, so you don't get drowned in shit.
And don't ever EVER post anything to Facebook that you don't want to become public knowledge. I don't mind people knowing which concerts and events I attend, but anything more personal than that is completely off-limits, and my profile is only visible to my friends.
Good, we agree then.
I'm just getting sick and tired of people painting Islam as "evil" and Christianity as "good", when they're equally shitty.
Yeah, it is.
That's why I prefer to buy music through Bandcamp or similar deals, where more of the money goes directly to the artist.
And it would be all kinds of great and awesome, if they could actually be bothered to pay the artists more than an insulting pittance.
I don't think so, but I bet a facility of the required size would look metal as fuck.
And you could start by looking into ALL of human history.
We are in a uniquely peaceful period in time, all things considered.
According to TFA, this has the potential to be more efficient that using water.
Tetris: The Movie is coming soon, no shit.
It's not my proclamations, it's the scientific consensus.
If you think the consensus is wrong for some reason, you're very welcome to disprove it. I'm rooting for you, because if you actually manage to do so, science as a whole will have moved forward. I'm not getting my hopes up, though.
And, maybe, they were — but no one would profit from emphasizing the fact, so we do not know about it.
We can say with quite high certainty that they were, because right at the beginning you hit a new record every time you see a temperature increase, but as the observation period becomes longer, the amount of record-breaking temperatures lessen, because they have more previous records to be compared against.
But the last 20-25 years, there has been a enormous increase in temperature records being broken, completely disproportionate to how the distribution has been before. And you're saying all of this has been faked, for profits? Whose profits? Certainly not the hugely influential fossil fuel industries with their enormous lobbying power, who are fighting every single day to quash the publication of climate change studies, because it cuts into their profits.
But even if it really is true, that temperatures rose 1 degree since 1850 — so what? 10 thousands years ago Tasmania was attached to mainland Australia. It was also possible for bears to cross from mainland Alaska to the islands of Kodiak archipelago (either over land or ice-fields). Then something substantial enough happened to isolate these lands. Whatever it was, it was not the humans discovering fire, was it?
That is an average temperature rise, the fluctuations in temperature are much greater. That's why we're getting 50+ degrees celsius in the shade in India, while the winters in the northern countries are getting colder and harsher. We're seeing many more cyclones and extreme storms, the weather is getting more extreme. It's not just global warming, it's climate change. Putting all of that carbon back into the atmosphere in a single instant (in geological terms) is our fault.
I'm not sure you really looked into Christian history. It's rife with war and slavery, and not just the crusades.
Substitute "Christian" for "viking", "Roman", "Greek", "American" etc. etc.
You would expect that most records would be broken in the early years of registration. You have less historic data to compare to, so it's more likely that a freak heatwave or something breaks a record. But as time goes on, you gather more and more data, from a longer period of time, so the record-breaking tends to taper off gradually.
Over the last 20-25 years, we've seen a disproportionate amounts of records being broken, which is very unusual. We're seeing the records for highest average temperature being broken again and again, and while you may think a 1 degree celcius increase is not a lot, an increase in average temperature of 1 or 2 degrees is massive on a global scale.
Well, obviously you have to trust that Google are actually telling the truth when they say it opts you out of GA. That's why I use uBlock and Privacy Badger, too :-)
And if they're tracking "hey, this guy doesn't want to be tracked by GA", that's OK with me.
It's called "climate change" because the climate is becoming more extreme, not just warmer.
For instance, it could cause the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift to shut down and stop carrying warm water to Northern Europe, which would cause our local climate to change, bringing it much close to what it should be at our latitude, without those warm currents. Loot at a map how northerly Scandinavia is compared to northern US (even Alaska) and Canada, and then compare our climates.
Should the currents stop, Scandinavia will become a frozen wasteland.
The solution is to decrease energy consumption and a move away from fossil fuels.
Taxes can be a method, we can start by ending the fossil fuel subsidies and apply them to renewable energy instead.
But the most important thing we can all do is to conserve as much energy as we can, on all levels from private individuals to big industry. Unfortunately, it seems like the carrot doesn't work, so we'll have to use the stick, by increasing taxes on fossil fuels and reducing them on renewables.
There have been some rumblings here about radically changing our world-infamous super-high car tax (up to 150%), which are currently based on the base price of the vehicle, and replacing it with a tax that's based directly on the emissions, weight and safety of the car. So a very safe and clean car would be taxed very little, but a huge gas guzzler would be taxed heavily. It would be a real boon for electric cars and hybrids, which are currently very expensive due to the current outdated system.
Look at how many temperature records have been broken over the last 20-25 years.
http://imgur.com/gallery/5IbCK...
I disagree on the terrorism part when looked at over a longer period of time. It's only currently that a lot of terrorist are muslims, most likely due to the wars we're fighting in the middle east.
But what the hell's up with the greenhouse gas argument? Do you get gassy from schawarma or something?
I have never had an issue with streaming sites while blocking Google Analytics, using Privacy Badger. I also have the GA opt-out cookie set, just in case it slips through anyway.
They say the cutoff is ~2 years, but the Chromebook 13 is not supported, despite being a less than 2 year old model and having an ARM processor. Perhaps it's because that processor is only 32 bits, but it still sucks.
With speakers that old, it's possible you're hearing distortion from the speakers due to the capacitors in the crossover being old and crappy, or due to the crossover itself being cheaply made.
If the LPF part of the crossover doesn't work correctly, you get all the treble sent to the woofer as well, which can cause noticeable distortion. And if the HPF part doesn't work, you get all the bass sent to the tweeter, which is likely to kill it.
And there have been significant advances in speaker construction over the past few decades. My late-70s JBL 4410s are wonderful speakers, especially for rock, but they can't hold a candle to my Adam A5Xs when it comes to accuracy and clean sound.
Or maybe you're simply hearing clipping and overcompression, which is a plague on any kind of modern music, due to bad production. But that's not a technical issue, it's a wetware issue that can only be fixed by beating the responsible sound techs with a clue-by-four.
Pro tip: Don't try to act smart if you don't know what you're talking about :-)
The decibel is a logarithmic unit. When I say a dynamic range of 96 dB, that is the different between the noise floor and a full-scale signal. 96 dB of difference is simple a relative value. Talking about dynamic range in decibel-milliwatts as you're doing, makes absolutely no sense at all. DBm is a measurement of absolute power, so you can't use it to talk about relative dynamic range.
Quantization error exists everywhere, even in analog media. But unless you're editing the audio, 16 bit audio puts the noise floor due to quantization around -96 dBFS, which is more than good enough and very very small indeed. A -96 dBFS noise floor is equivalent to Total Harmonic Distortion less than 0.002%. In other words, completely inaudble. The inherent noise from devices such as microphones is a lot higher and exists in all recordings of non-artificial music. And no, it doesn't turn a sine wave into a stairstep, it just makes it "fuzzy". You can see this with a sufficiently good oscilloscope.
You're either delusional, or you've completely forgotten everything you should have learned about analog and digital signal theory.
No, you probably couldn't hear up to 30 kHz, since that sort of thing is only possible under ideal laboratory conditions, with very loud signals. The human auditory system simply doesn't have any kind of meaningful receptors for frequencies that high. If you actually could hear frequencies that high under normal conditions, you are either a dog or a genuine medical curiosity. What you probably heard is distortion manifesting itself in the audible range, due to equipment that was unable to either handle ultrasonic content correctly and didn't remove it using a low pass filter.
This can happen with non-oversampling DACs in some cases. But given your age, you were probably listening to LPs or reel-to-reel tape, which did have some ultrasonic capability, but it was mostly drowned out by the noise floor. And even if you did hear anything that high up, it would have been more like a sensation or feeling, not an actual identifiable sound. Either way, it would have been completely drowned out by the actual musical content, which obviously has a ton more energy in the audible frequency range.
The stuff you're talking about with frequency "foldback" etc. (aliasing) is only applicable to shitty equipment without properly implemented low pass filters, such as NOS and filterless DACs, but only simple-minded audiophiles use those. Either that, or ultra-shitty production with bad downsampling from the master to the final CD-quality product.
I always preferred the Quake games to the Unreal games. They just *felt* better, more meaty and less floaty.
And the sound effects in Quake are some of the best ever. They're right up there with the original Diablo for some of the most iconic game sound effects of all time.
It's so obvious when looking at Unreal and listening to the music, that a lot of the developers at Epic came from the demoscene. Those fire/water/lightning effects, that MOD music, it was all proper old-school stuff.
You're 60 years old, and you claim to be able to hear the distortion from high-frequency sounds?
First of all, it's exceedingly unlikely that you can even hear anything at all above ~12-14 kHz or so, due to completely normal age-related hearing loss.
Secondly, what you're mentioning has nothing to do with inherent limitations in 44.1 kHz digital audio. It's much more likely to be a result of bad recording practices, bad production or bad equipment on your end.
You say you can DEFINITELY hear the difference. Have you put it to a double-blind test? Because it's extremely likely that you're simply deluding yourself.