The biggest determinant of sound quality is the recording and mastering. Most music coming out these days is mixed for portable players, and is made to be heard through a torrent of street noise. It doesn't matter how good your bitrate or bit depth are, if the track has a 10-15dB dynamic range, and clips throughout the song.
A great recording, on the other hand, demands an adequate sound system. On my reasonably expensive system (MSB DAC, Aragon preamp, B&K amp, Klipsch speakers), I have done blind A/B testing, and was able to tell the difference between a 320kbit MP3 and WAV. On the other hand, using OGG, I was reduced to only being able to tell the difference up to 256kbit at best (depending on source material). My mom, who's a conservatory-trained musician, was able to pick out 256 kbit OGG from WAV 100% of the time (total of 10 tracks), and 320kbit OGG vs. WAV on about half of them. My guess is that a professional musician might do even better.
Your body can be reasonably simplified as a closed system. As far as losing or gaining weight, the math still works. If you eat less than you burn in a day (either by eating less or using more), you will lose weight. There is no magic here at all. If you think that you are not eating enough, and are still gaining weight, you are deluding yourself.
That's not "Insightful" in any way. There is no absolute "end the war", not only because the conflict in question is not nearly as cleanly delineated as many other wars we've fought, but also because "end the war" could be via win, loss, or truce.
I have to say, releasing information that would "end the war" by virtue of losing the war (by having the last few Afghans that are trying to build a better future beheaded and their families killed), is defined simply as "treason" for a soldier, and an "act of military counter-intelligence in the course of a war" by anyone not. Considering that the documents do little other than show the chaotic state of affairs in Afghanistan, and are in no way revealing of any atrocities committed by American presence there, this exercise in publicity doesn't qualify as whistle blowing in any way shape or form. Anyone with the intelligence of a tree stump can see that the war isn't going well. But it takes a real asshole to doom the few non-insane Afghan leaders left to painful death.
If the US military wants to court martial the soldier(s) who leaked the info and have him(them) shot, c'est la vie. If they want to hunt down Assange and get the passwords via thermorectal cryptanalysis, well... he knew the game he started.
If the documents revealed something truly appalling, I'd be the first in line to defend them... but since that's not the case, the people involved can burn in hell.
There is also another important benefit, that is really easy to understand if you just read a few science, and especially healthcare stories on Slashdot. Just reading the associated comments should generally be sufficient to realize how exquisitely important it is to have some sort of a moderating filter of an "academic community" of professionals. Yes it stifles dissent a bit, and yes there are other downsides that aim to preserve status quo. But the penalties we pay for having such a system pale in comparison to the fact that the upcoming professionals are in general guided to the more reliable sources, and are at least partially shielded from the self-important Charybdis of the "internet knowledge".
Yes, he is right - all the information is out there on the Internet... somewhere. But where you need peer review, and a structured learning environment, is for the Sisyphean task of filtering out the noise... and the amount of noise has gone up exponentially with the advent of the internet and the complete absence of barriers to publication. It's easy enough to spend weeks, months, years on the Internet, perusing websites that are dedicated to supporting strictly one's own point of view, and have it become an essential part of one's worldview. That's how we would up with Vaccines/Autism and HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crowd.
Furthermore, for all its failures, the academic environment does TEACH the students the skills they will need to acquire to be able to interpret primary data on their own, which is a far more important role, compared to teaching the students facts.
If we let the Internet loose on the population to an even greater extent, I shudder to think of the kind of idiocracy we'll be living in, just one generation from now.
Food allergies are on the rise and they seem to correspond with Genetically engineered foods. Soybeans are a particularly good example. Google it.
That's it. I quit Slashdot. If I didn't despise you idiots so much, or want to ensure that my children live in a world where your voices weren't the only ones left, I would off myself now.
Why don't you weed-smoking vaccines-cause-autism and HIV-doesn't-cause AIDS motherfuckers go live somewhere in the wild Amazon. Shit... I'll pay out of my own pocket to send you there.
im repeating this over and over whenever similar nonsense comes up. there is no evading capitalism come to this point. from property rights, to ownership of ideas, to ownership of genes, and then to ownership of entire species. if you 'let businesses be', this happens.
this, has to be the point where the sane realizes that this does not work.
This reductio ad absurdum diatribe was marked "insighful"? Seriously, Slashdot?
I assume DHS will be raiding libraries nationwide, removing books on bomb making, explosives, etc?
And of course many chemistry texts, especially those which focus on such experiments?
Then they can go and visit our colleges, universities, and technical schools, so that these institutions can discontinue any teaching of such dangerous and unacceptable subjects?
It's already happening. So many new organisms have made it onto "select agent lists" that I am surprised any decent virology is still being done in the US. Soon we'll be left with no human pathogens outside the list that can be used for research.
And to do work on something that's on the list, you have to go through a process that takes so long that the student or post-doc would want to be leaving by the time they are cleared to do the work.
They are, though. As soon as you enter into a social contract that gives one class of people a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, you give them the ability to remove lots of these "rights". The only thing stopping them from doing it is that same social contract -- the Constitution, etc. It's a "We'll give you the ability to violate our rights as long as you promise not to use it" sort of thing.
The trouble is that the only thing stopping the ruling group from breaching this contract is the fear that if they do anything egregious then they'll get voted out, and that if they try to not abide by the results of an election then they'll lose support of enough people (including some of the ones they rely on to execute their license to use violence) that they'll lose power anyway.
Unfortunately, they've gotten good at breaking their end of the social contract and still getting elected.
That's why a critically-important part of this contract should be that those who have not been given direct power to exercise violence, still have the means to do so in a critical situation. I am of course talking about retaining one's right to bear arms.
In the absence of this one right, all others are moot, since the only rights you have, are the ones you can defend.
In the absence of the right to self-defense and the means to do so, the criminals are the ones who have rights, since they can clearly defend them very well. The government, on the other hand, may impose arbitrary rules to preserve the ruling class and the status quo, without any fear whatsoever.
I disagree. Occasionally I wonder over to that website, and it makes me remember why I am a human being, why I love the people I love, and how life is fragile and must be both enjoyed and protected.
Also, knowledge is NEVER harmful, unless it's used to harm.
Generally speaking... Start earlier, plan instead of react, gather your obligations and commitments timewise... If you can't do this, perhaps it's worth re-considering how you've arranged your life. Very few folks on slashdot are short of mental resources. If your life sucks, perhaps a reboot is called for.
So if you can't take six weeks off at once your life sucks?
I know you won't let facts interfere with your words, but repeat after me: "This was not a production well"
Repeat it like 500 times and see if that sinks in. The well that blew was an exploration well. Nobody was trying to suckle on it to sell the few barrels of oil they managed to capture. It wasn't the goal of BP, or anyone else.
BP are guilty of a lot of things in this mess: inadequate safety mechanisms, excessive micromanagement of the drilling team by corporate, ensuring poor oversight by the regulatory commission.
There's a lot you could talk about. There really is no need to invent more reason to hate "corporations". It just makes you look like a dumb disingenuous hippie.
Speaking in broad terms that clearly don't account for every person in either situation, rural people don't want to give up an important tool, and urban people want the freedom to not be shot more than they want the freedom to own a gun.
I know it's offtopic, but wanted to address it. I know you mean well, but you are deeply misguided. True, "guns is how people in your neighborhood get killed". But that's a function of criminals. At no point is there any indication that legal gun ownership levels affect gun crime. I've done the statistics for the U.S. myself using gov't data, and there is no statistically-significant correlation... much rather a causative relationship.
For a nice example, consider the state of Florida, with its quite liberal firearm laws, where several million concealed carry permits have been issued in the past 20 years. Only 300 or so have been stripped of their permits due to violent crime convictions... which is substantially LOWER than the general population.
Furthermore, every study I have seen demonstrates that even where gun ownership is prevalent, crime is almost universally committed with illegal firearms anyway, and when you limit the crime to that which occurs between people who don't know each other (essentially to exclude domestic violence) it turns out that gun owners who've gone through the process of obtaining their weapons legally almost never commit crimes with their guns.
Yet the anti-gun groups continuously ignore these vital facts (how appropriate given the topic of this discussion).
Finally, "freedom not to be shot" is something I hear on an everyday basis... and given the facts it's little more than a red herring. While there are some cases of stray bullets killing people in this country, these are such a tiny minority, that to raise it as a key issue in the debate is a facetious tactic, which aims to replace reason with emotion.
Most people who are not in a gang, and are murdered with a firearm, get shot during a robbery, etc... and they are killed at hardly more than an arm's length.
So instead of "freedom from getting shot", let's talk about the "freedom to be armed no less well than the criminal element that is willing to disregard the law anyway".
Perhaps you should consider that some people have values that are different from yours. It doesn't make them bad people. Actually, a lot of the "right-wingers" are really nice people, who value their rights and responsibilities, have strong family ties, and would be far more willing to directly help someone in need than a lot of leftist liberals.
The fact that you automatically paint anyone who disagrees with you into being your enemy both says a lot about your level of maturity, and explains why in the last decade the politics has gotten so polarized.
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured.
Never mind me. The grandparent is at +5 Insightful already for his Flamebait post (that borders on Troll, really). I guess the children woke up.
It's hard to blame them though. They feel that this issue is very important, and that the Democrats' stance on this basic right is merely a sign of a deeper disregard for personal rights in general. Given the deeply-ingrained "save-the-children" zero-tolerance mentality of the people whom the people in question vote against, I am not sure I could disagree.
On the other hand, along with the pro-gun candidates, we usually get anti-evolution and anti-gay stances... which is nails-on-a-chalkboard to a small-government, fiscal conservative, individual rights Republican.
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured. Although I am considering that the perceived difference is due to the fact that the 10:00AM EST Slashdot is different from the 4:00PM EST Slashdot.
In any case, reading through the article I found that it was a nice conversation, but really didn't tell us much of what we don't already know: people are social animals, and love to congregate in tight, defensive groups. In politics, this often means that they adopt a wholesale party line, without either thinking about the facts involved, or considering each tenet independently (what does denying gays the right to receive the benefits of marriage have to do with a policy of financial conservatism, that at this point exists only as a hypothetical construct?).
On the other side of the political spectrum, I've repeatedly seen those who identify with the liberal ideology come up with varying excuses for restricting gun ownership, who became rather aggressive when confronted with statistics about the level of violent crime among legal firearm owners.
I'm not even going to get started on the 9/11-Truth or Vaccines-Autism movements, because they attract the deeply delusional, but extremely aggressive and assertive members of the population.
Unfortunately I think that within the last 15 years I have seen this behavior worsen significantly, as the Internet has made it possible for people to interact exclusively with those who share their delusions, no matter how inane and obscure. As such, they can keep bouncing between the various websites and forums that support their point of view until it is so firmly cemented in their consciousness, that even when faced with overwhelming facts, they absolutely refuse to accept reality.
The only way we would be able to reverse this trend, is through educating the new generation about rational skepticism and the scientific method. Unfortunately, many of the deeply deluded members of my own political party (sigh... the party I joined in order to have a say in which candidates get through the primaries) have decided that a scientific education would be immoral for the children, while the other party has decided that it would be too hard. As a result, I can only see the current divides getting deeper, and the political spectrum becoming even more polarized than it is right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest determinant of sound quality is the recording and mastering. Most music coming out these days is mixed for portable players, and is made to be heard through a torrent of street noise. It doesn't matter how good your bitrate or bit depth are, if the track has a 10-15dB dynamic range, and clips throughout the song.
A great recording, on the other hand, demands an adequate sound system. On my reasonably expensive system (MSB DAC, Aragon preamp, B&K amp, Klipsch speakers), I have done blind A/B testing, and was able to tell the difference between a 320kbit MP3 and WAV. On the other hand, using OGG, I was reduced to only being able to tell the difference up to 256kbit at best (depending on source material). My mom, who's a conservatory-trained musician, was able to pick out 256 kbit OGG from WAV 100% of the time (total of 10 tracks), and 320kbit OGG vs. WAV on about half of them. My guess is that a professional musician might do even better.
Your body can be reasonably simplified as a closed system. As far as losing or gaining weight, the math still works. If you eat less than you burn in a day (either by eating less or using more), you will lose weight. There is no magic here at all. If you think that you are not eating enough, and are still gaining weight, you are deluding yourself.
That's not "Insightful" in any way. There is no absolute "end the war", not only because the conflict in question is not nearly as cleanly delineated as many other wars we've fought, but also because "end the war" could be via win, loss, or truce.
I have to say, releasing information that would "end the war" by virtue of losing the war (by having the last few Afghans that are trying to build a better future beheaded and their families killed), is defined simply as "treason" for a soldier, and an "act of military counter-intelligence in the course of a war" by anyone not. Considering that the documents do little other than show the chaotic state of affairs in Afghanistan, and are in no way revealing of any atrocities committed by American presence there, this exercise in publicity doesn't qualify as whistle blowing in any way shape or form. Anyone with the intelligence of a tree stump can see that the war isn't going well. But it takes a real asshole to doom the few non-insane Afghan leaders left to painful death.
If the US military wants to court martial the soldier(s) who leaked the info and have him(them) shot, c'est la vie. If they want to hunt down Assange and get the passwords via thermorectal cryptanalysis, well... he knew the game he started.
If the documents revealed something truly appalling, I'd be the first in line to defend them... but since that's not the case, the people involved can burn in hell.
The USMLE, and the bar exams aren't open-book either.
There is also another important benefit, that is really easy to understand if you just read a few science, and especially healthcare stories on Slashdot. Just reading the associated comments should generally be sufficient to realize how exquisitely important it is to have some sort of a moderating filter of an "academic community" of professionals. Yes it stifles dissent a bit, and yes there are other downsides that aim to preserve status quo. But the penalties we pay for having such a system pale in comparison to the fact that the upcoming professionals are in general guided to the more reliable sources, and are at least partially shielded from the self-important Charybdis of the "internet knowledge".
Yes, he is right - all the information is out there on the Internet... somewhere. But where you need peer review, and a structured learning environment, is for the Sisyphean task of filtering out the noise... and the amount of noise has gone up exponentially with the advent of the internet and the complete absence of barriers to publication. It's easy enough to spend weeks, months, years on the Internet, perusing websites that are dedicated to supporting strictly one's own point of view, and have it become an essential part of one's worldview. That's how we would up with Vaccines/Autism and HIV-doesn't-cause-AIDS crowd.
Furthermore, for all its failures, the academic environment does TEACH the students the skills they will need to acquire to be able to interpret primary data on their own, which is a far more important role, compared to teaching the students facts.
If we let the Internet loose on the population to an even greater extent, I shudder to think of the kind of idiocracy we'll be living in, just one generation from now.
Food allergies are on the rise and they seem to correspond with Genetically engineered foods. Soybeans are a particularly good example. Google it.
That's it. I quit Slashdot. If I didn't despise you idiots so much, or want to ensure that my children live in a world where your voices weren't the only ones left, I would off myself now.
Why don't you weed-smoking vaccines-cause-autism and HIV-doesn't-cause AIDS motherfuckers go live somewhere in the wild Amazon. Shit... I'll pay out of my own pocket to send you there.
im repeating this over and over whenever similar nonsense comes up. there is no evading capitalism come to this point. from property rights, to ownership of ideas, to ownership of genes, and then to ownership of entire species. if you 'let businesses be', this happens.
this, has to be the point where the sane realizes that this does not work.
This reductio ad absurdum diatribe was marked "insighful"? Seriously, Slashdot?
This is a marketing strategy known as the Push Poll (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_poll).
You ask the questions in such a way as to get the answer you want.
That is incorrect.
In thermal distillation, you're removing the alcohol from the mix (to condense it).
Using this process, you're removing water from the mix.
They were just thinking of the children. Isn't that what you want your government officials to do?
I thought they were the party that's big on censoring. I guess libel-cases don't push the "morality" button like pr0n does.
Because Democrats don't do any censoring...
No zero-tolerance chilling effects... or "think-of-the-children" surveillance...
At least we know that Obama has been successful in getting the world to blame a specific subset of Americans for everything...
I assume DHS will be raiding libraries nationwide, removing books on bomb making, explosives, etc?
And of course many chemistry texts, especially those which focus on such experiments?
Then they can go and visit our colleges, universities, and technical schools, so that these institutions can discontinue any teaching of such dangerous and unacceptable subjects?
It's already happening. So many new organisms have made it onto "select agent lists" that I am surprised any decent virology is still being done in the US. Soon we'll be left with no human pathogens outside the list that can be used for research.
And to do work on something that's on the list, you have to go through a process that takes so long that the student or post-doc would want to be leaving by the time they are cleared to do the work.
They are, though. As soon as you enter into a social contract that gives one class of people a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, you give them the ability to remove lots of these "rights". The only thing stopping them from doing it is that same social contract -- the Constitution, etc. It's a "We'll give you the ability to violate our rights as long as you promise not to use it" sort of thing.
The trouble is that the only thing stopping the ruling group from breaching this contract is the fear that if they do anything egregious then they'll get voted out, and that if they try to not abide by the results of an election then they'll lose support of enough people (including some of the ones they rely on to execute their license to use violence) that they'll lose power anyway.
Unfortunately, they've gotten good at breaking their end of the social contract and still getting elected.
That's why a critically-important part of this contract should be that those who have not been given direct power to exercise violence, still have the means to do so in a critical situation. I am of course talking about retaining one's right to bear arms.
In the absence of this one right, all others are moot, since the only rights you have, are the ones you can defend.
In the absence of the right to self-defense and the means to do so, the criminals are the ones who have rights, since they can clearly defend them very well. The government, on the other hand, may impose arbitrary rules to preserve the ruling class and the status quo, without any fear whatsoever.
with no false positives etc)
Any AI that was that capable would eliminate humans as a distraction very fast.
I disagree. Occasionally I wonder over to that website, and it makes me remember why I am a human being, why I love the people I love, and how life is fragile and must be both enjoyed and protected.
Also, knowledge is NEVER harmful, unless it's used to harm.
I thought that was the definition of "browsing the Internet".
how is this flaimbait - seriously? can we not have a discussion on the egregious practices of big industry corporate America here on /.?
How old are you? And who is your weed dealer?
Generally speaking... Start earlier, plan instead of react, gather your obligations and commitments timewise... If you can't do this, perhaps it's worth re-considering how you've arranged your life. Very few folks on slashdot are short of mental resources. If your life sucks, perhaps a reboot is called for.
So if you can't take six weeks off at once your life sucks?
Boy, you must be a schoolteacher.
Does it make me look like a dumb disingenuous hippie? With +5 insightful?
Are you serious? Are you really saying that 3 people modding you on Slashdot makes your point a valid one?
Must be a bunch of us dumb disingenuous hipppies out there.
There are indeed.
I know you won't let facts interfere with your words, but repeat after me:
"This was not a production well"
Repeat it like 500 times and see if that sinks in. The well that blew was an exploration well. Nobody was trying to suckle on it to sell the few barrels of oil they managed to capture. It wasn't the goal of BP, or anyone else.
BP are guilty of a lot of things in this mess: inadequate safety mechanisms, excessive micromanagement of the drilling team by corporate, ensuring poor oversight by the regulatory commission.
There's a lot you could talk about. There really is no need to invent more reason to hate "corporations". It just makes you look like a dumb disingenuous hippie.
Speaking in broad terms that clearly don't account for every person in either situation, rural people don't want to give up an important tool, and urban people want the freedom to not be shot more than they want the freedom to own a gun.
I know it's offtopic, but wanted to address it. I know you mean well, but you are deeply misguided. True, "guns is how people in your neighborhood get killed". But that's a function of criminals. At no point is there any indication that legal gun ownership levels affect gun crime. I've done the statistics for the U.S. myself using gov't data, and there is no statistically-significant correlation... much rather a causative relationship.
For a nice example, consider the state of Florida, with its quite liberal firearm laws, where several million concealed carry permits have been issued in the past 20 years. Only 300 or so have been stripped of their permits due to violent crime convictions... which is substantially LOWER than the general population.
Furthermore, every study I have seen demonstrates that even where gun ownership is prevalent, crime is almost universally committed with illegal firearms anyway, and when you limit the crime to that which occurs between people who don't know each other (essentially to exclude domestic violence) it turns out that gun owners who've gone through the process of obtaining their weapons legally almost never commit crimes with their guns.
Yet the anti-gun groups continuously ignore these vital facts (how appropriate given the topic of this discussion).
Finally, "freedom not to be shot" is something I hear on an everyday basis... and given the facts it's little more than a red herring. While there are some cases of stray bullets killing people in this country, these are such a tiny minority, that to raise it as a key issue in the debate is a facetious tactic, which aims to replace reason with emotion.
Most people who are not in a gang, and are murdered with a firearm, get shot during a robbery, etc... and they are killed at hardly more than an arm's length.
So instead of "freedom from getting shot", let's talk about the "freedom to be armed no less well than the criminal element that is willing to disregard the law anyway".
I don't want to feed the Troll, but I'll bite.
Perhaps you should consider that some people have values that are different from yours. It doesn't make them bad people. Actually, a lot of the "right-wingers" are really nice people, who value their rights and responsibilities, have strong family ties, and would be far more willing to directly help someone in need than a lot of leftist liberals.
The fact that you automatically paint anyone who disagrees with you into being your enemy both says a lot about your level of maturity, and explains why in the last decade the politics has gotten so polarized.
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured.
Never mind me. The grandparent is at +5 Insightful already for his Flamebait post (that borders on Troll, really). I guess the children woke up.
It's hard to blame them though. They feel that this issue is very important, and that the Democrats' stance on this basic right is merely a sign of a deeper disregard for personal rights in general. Given the deeply-ingrained "save-the-children" zero-tolerance mentality of the people whom the people in question vote against, I am not sure I could disagree.
On the other hand, along with the pro-gun candidates, we usually get anti-evolution and anti-gay stances... which is nails-on-a-chalkboard to a small-government, fiscal conservative, individual rights Republican.
To be honest I am surprised that on Slashdot this article hasn't resulted in a full-blown trash-the-conservatives-fest. I'm impressed actually... perhaps the group here has matured. Although I am considering that the perceived difference is due to the fact that the 10:00AM EST Slashdot is different from the 4:00PM EST Slashdot.
In any case, reading through the article I found that it was a nice conversation, but really didn't tell us much of what we don't already know: people are social animals, and love to congregate in tight, defensive groups. In politics, this often means that they adopt a wholesale party line, without either thinking about the facts involved, or considering each tenet independently (what does denying gays the right to receive the benefits of marriage have to do with a policy of financial conservatism, that at this point exists only as a hypothetical construct?).
On the other side of the political spectrum, I've repeatedly seen those who identify with the liberal ideology come up with varying excuses for restricting gun ownership, who became rather aggressive when confronted with statistics about the level of violent crime among legal firearm owners.
I'm not even going to get started on the 9/11-Truth or Vaccines-Autism movements, because they attract the deeply delusional, but extremely aggressive and assertive members of the population.
Unfortunately I think that within the last 15 years I have seen this behavior worsen significantly, as the Internet has made it possible for people to interact exclusively with those who share their delusions, no matter how inane and obscure. As such, they can keep bouncing between the various websites and forums that support their point of view until it is so firmly cemented in their consciousness, that even when faced with overwhelming facts, they absolutely refuse to accept reality.
The only way we would be able to reverse this trend, is through educating the new generation about rational skepticism and the scientific method. Unfortunately, many of the deeply deluded members of my own political party (sigh... the party I joined in order to have a say in which candidates get through the primaries) have decided that a scientific education would be immoral for the children, while the other party has decided that it would be too hard. As a result, I can only see the current divides getting deeper, and the political spectrum becoming even more polarized than it is right now.