How about people who enjoy better quality music and/or those with better hearing?
They said the same thing about CD's and albums/tape back in the day and despite any arguments to the contrary, there is a great difference between digital and analog music. Just because you can't hear it (I can't either by the way, but I know it's real) doesn’t make it unperceivable to people with better hearing. Most of todays "pop" crap is designed with low quality digital files in mind and people who don't have an ear for music.
No... at some point, a digital system will outperform an analog system because the analog system is bandwidth-limited by its hardware, and incapable of lossless (and noiseless) generations. If the problem is clipping, throw more sample bits at it (24 is fine) and calibrate for a -12dB "clip level" and you won't lose anything. If it's sample rate, 192k is easily available off the shelf. Performance will be limited by the analog components in the signal path much more than the digital ones. None of this will help if the final product is dynamically compressed to one volume level before release -- it's going to sound like shit regardless of what medium is used to ship it.
The truth is that it is crappy mastering and crappy encoding that causes artifacts. Lossy encoding is used to make it practical to move the audio files around over an Internet connection and to keep a reasonable amount on small portable devices. Bandwidth still hasn't exploded enough for lossless with deep and high sample rates, but storage has if you're willing to load up your device for every trip, just like you'd choose what cassettes to carry. It's just that now the cassettes have no moving parts and are the size of your fingernail.
Once you get the electronic reproduction sufficiently accurate, it's time to turn a critical ear to the other end of the chain -- namely your headphones and/or speakers. These need not be new, an undamaged pair of 1970's Tannoy Dual Concentrics will still outperform most anything new the majority of us can afford. (I have a pair of SRM12Bs, and sitting between them is like wearing headphones -- except no weight on your head and you can feel the bass.)
Thing is, if Iron Dome is truly selective, then it will soon be evident that empty rockets are landing outside of a given radius. The selection criteria for intercepting will be adjusted accordingly, and only those likely to strike high-value targets will be intercepted. Given the poor targeting ability of the missiles at SHORT range, it would seem that extending the range only gives them a lot more room to miss, as well as minimizing any damage when they do find something.
One modest improvement I have seen was a book with both Braille, and printed letters in the same position. This way, both sighted and blind people could read the same book, at the same time. The blind will be unaware of the print, and the sighted will see only deformations of the paper.
Braille is a six-bit binary code. This was done largely because the previous system -- raised type being "read" by fingers -- was slow and inadequate. Whether the input comes through your fingertips or through the optic nerve matters little. If the bandwidth is low, it helps a lot of the content is pre-digitized. That's what Braille does.
Actually there are, and they use the term in a manner identical to the rest of us. The only group you could consider under-represented is women, because there is only one in the band, and she gets the call only a small fraction of the time (we have a rotating selection of trumpet players available).
If you were climbing over a crowd control barrier to get to the stage (because you're late for the set), and someone else said "get your ass up here, monkey"... that's not racism, you're literally acting like a monkey.
All connotations aside, sometimes people use words to mean exactly what they mean.
I have a group of friends in which we frequently call each other "monkeys" -- but there is no racism whatsoever to it. If you see someone imitating someone else (even if it's because it's a good idea), they're a monkey. If they're making lots of noise and gesticulating wildly -- monkey. Repeating something useless out of habit -- monkey. Climbing over furniture or other objects not meant to be traversed -- monkey. Getting on the stage via the scaffolding instead of the stairs (sometimes it's far easier to come on from the back or other unintended route than to wade through people and gear) -- monkey. If anyone asks, we always say "everyone is a monkey part of the time", and if asked about racism we say "who cares, in 500 years, EVERYONE will be brown". One of our group became known as "monkey boy" for his habit of climbing poles or other structures to try to spot people in a crowded room, rather than trying to hunt them down in a crowded venue. (I don't blame him, he's short.)
So no, calling someone a monkey can be completely non-racial.
Tempura is not the fault of the Scottish, it's the fault of the Portuguese. They wanted something they could eat on Fridays (it's no accident "tempura" resembles "tempora", meaning "time" -- as in a dish for the time they can't eat meat) so they introduced deep-frying of large shrimp, scallops, crab, or other seafood to Japan. It proved immensely popular with the natives, and remains so to this day. It's also popular in many other countries now as well, since it's more of a method than an actual dish and many different things can be battered and fried.
I personally love shrimp tempura, but on the vegetable side, green peppers and yams also work quite well.
I've seen plenty of people who behave like psychopaths while under the influence of (or jonesing for) either cocaine or amphetamines. Once they stabilized (got through withdrawal, got their fix, came down and got a night's sleep, whatever), they FELT BAD for what they might have done. Not bad enough to stop them from doing it again, but they DID feel something. The drug or need for the drug outweighed their consciences, but it doesn't mean their consciences were absent. They were just jonesed into irrelevance.
That said, there's plenty of truth to the T-shirt that says "INSTANT ASSHOLE - just add cocaine".
The PC and PC/XT were very commonly retrofitted with an AST Six Pack or generic equivalent. It was expensive, but still cheaper than buying each function on a separate card (and using six slots, which the PC didn't even have, it had just five). Even then it required running a program at startup to read from the RTC and load it into the motherboard clock. Setting the time on the Six Pack also took an executable, as simply setting the time the normal way didn't write it back to the board.
Similarly, "mob" (a generic name for any creature in a game) is supposed to rhyme with "lobe" since the word is short for "mobile entity". Most everyone I know except myself pronounces it to rhyme with "job".
There's no technical reason it can't handle 32 GB of flash -- it just couldn't do that at the $99 price point. Swapping flash is pretty trivial as user upgrades go, so I don't really see that holding it back. The capacity limit of SDHC being reached might pose an issue, if it's not made to accept SDXC. The hardware is the same, and the firmware can probably be hacked -- just like Rockbox did for the Sansa (mine is quite happy with a 16 GB micro-SDHC card when it was built to handle just a 2 GB micro-SD card), so I doubt THAT will be a significant issue either.
Naturally the Ouya will look to replace some settop-box functions, since even new TVs have a finite number of inputs. That doesn't mean it will be particularly optimized for them, or that it needs to be.
They didn't bust him for it either, they busted him for driving infractions they observed before they were aware of the equipment in the car.
Once they became aware of the equipment in the car, they still realized they had no proof (though some suspicion) that the equipment may have had something to do with the erratic driving. It looks like they cited him only for what he did, while pointing out the potential consequences if he was using the equipment while driving. In other words, the system actually worked properly.
If it weren't for his car being moderately interesting to the general public (though frankly I don't really see that it is), this would just be another ticket-and-release traffic stop and you'd never have heard of it -- just like if you had been cited for speeding, and a cop chose to remark on your in-car setup while officially ignoring it.
I think he's trying to say that taking two hours to deliver the power necessary to accelerate a car is not only acceptable but commonplace where he lives. If nobody around you is moving, you don't need to be able to react very quickly either.
I'm sure over years, rappers must accumulate word pairings that rhyme, and phrases that slot into rhythms, much the way a jazz player rehearses patterns. In both cases, the fact is that the brain isn't fast enough to both think and execute in real time. Some of the processing has to be done beforehand, and wired in to be executed on command. The trick is to be spontaneous and assemble things in novel ways in spite of the hard wired tendency to arrange them in friendly and familiar ways over and over.
Follow the George Carlin mantra: Write stoned, edit sober. Maybe for you that means pseudocode stoned, or flowchart, or whatever you do to organize ahead of time. But don't forget to give anything you do the critical, detail-oriented sober eye as well before inflicting it on anyone else. For every great idea you get on drugs, there are at least three times as many bad ones you'd be better off leaving behind.
Similarly, I believe that there may have existed technologically advanced humans prior to known history. Some of them may have even succeeded at getting off the planet permanently. This would make "aliens" plausible -- they're just a split lineage of formerly Earth-based humans. There is no need to explain where they got the energy or time to cross interstellar distances, because they didn't have to.
The main evidence against this idea is that there's still oil in the ground, and no indication it was deliberately placed there for us. It would seem that a previous culture would need energy as badly as we do, and oil didn't take us that much technology (initially) to get at and start consuming. It would seem that the low-hanging fruit would already be gone if we weren't the first. However, I find this objection less of a problem than having to entirely rewrite physics to make interstellar travel practical. *IF* we are being visited by extraterrestrials, my money is on them having descended from terrestrials.
I used to see elderly people and think "I don't want to get old". Most of the time I still feel that way -- but the line of what is old has moved as I see people I have known all my life getting well into their 60s and 70s and not doing too badly. They are doing better than their parents did at the same age, and may well have 10 years or more of reasonably productive and pleasant life that their parents lacked.
At the same time, I look at my grandmother than died in her late 80s, and aside from going mostly deaf, things really weren't that bad for her until the last 18 months. On the flip side I look at my surviving grandmother who is about the same age now, but is miserable most of the time and unable to fully care for herself (though she adamantly believes she still can though she hasn't been able to for 15 years). She refuses to accept much of the help available to her because of this belief that she is still self-sufficient, then complains of being lonely and isolated. My mother said "I don't want to ever get that old", to which I said "no, you don't ever want to get that BAD, the age is irrelevant" (which she agreed with). To me, there is not that much difference between 70 with full mobility, senses, and mind, and 50 with the same.
I guess I'm saying my view has changed. I don't want to get decrepit, but old is just a number.
I think we should go all the way here. Let's be honest -- social security and medicare are not going to be there for us and who wants to be old anyway? I propose that at age 65 (or perhaps earlier as needed) all men be issued two bottles of viagra, a key of pure (98% minimum) Colombian flake cocaine, and a week's worth of services from three strippers.
The advantages should be obvious -- it's cheaper for everyone and certainly more enjoyable. What better way to die than while high as a kite and busting a nut inside a foxy coed? Certainly beats spending months in a hospital bed hooked up to a machine.
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
Los Angeles County uses Inkavote. Basically it's just a little rubber stamp you press into the circle on the ballot. The machines themselves have guides to keep you from putting the stamp anywhere but an oval. You insert the ballot, ink in the correct circles, then remove the ballot and turn it in. There are no moving parts except for the small spring-loading in the stamper and the hinges holding the pages in the machine -- which are themselves identical to the ones in your sample ballot as mailed to you. This means you can mark your sample ballot at home, hold it up alongside the corresponding page in the machine, and simply copy your bubbles from your sample ballot onto the real one.
This has all the advantages I can think of -- it's almost non-mechanical and CAN be done by hand if there are insufficient machines available, it generates human-readable paper ballots, it's faster than a touchscreen system while also being far less complex, and it's easy to understand. There are many things I can gripe about, living in the Los Angeles area. The voting machines are definitely NOT one of them.
Interestingly, this does not even require that the eyes actually MOVE relative to the head. When playing Minecraft, it is often possible to read the intentions of another player based on the movements of their head as a surrogate for the eyes which are fixed in position on that head. It is not at all unusual to be thinking "oh no he can't possibly make that jump from that spot", just before your mining partner comes up half a block short and plunges into lava -- even though he didn't make any explicit mention that this was his intention. If you're quick on your feet, you might already be planning a safe path down to the spot you know he's about to take a hot bath, while readying a bucket of water. Just maybe, this foresight will let you turn that lava to obsidian and put out the flames before he dies. I've been on both ends of this a few times.
I guess the moral is that if you can't read someone's eyes, perhaps because whatever virtual world you're in just isn't that sophisticated, there is often a similar method of obtaining the same information. If we had much less "swing" to our eyes and had to turn our heads more, instinct would probably have us track the face rather than the eyes.
Here's something you can probably convince the mailroom at an office to buy:
Uniball Micro Deluxe. 0.5 mm and waterproof ink. It will start instantly until it gets low on ink but you'll probably ditch it by then anyhow because it starts exhibiting dropouts around the same time.
The one downside is that although the ink is waterproof once dry, it is NOT smudge-proof UNTIL it is dry. If you drag any part of your hand through what you recently wrote, you're going to get a partially black hand and an illegible mess on the page. Once dry though, even leaving your coffee cup on the page will net you nothing more than a coffee ring. The writing won't move. This is why I use it for (now very rare, notation software is SO much easier) hand-written music, and for corrections on documents that are going to be passed around (including corrections to printed music).
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Who uses cd's anymore...
How about people who enjoy better quality music and/or those with better hearing?
They said the same thing about CD's and albums/tape back in the day and despite any arguments to the contrary, there is a great difference between digital and analog music. Just because you can't hear it (I can't either by the way, but I know it's real) doesn’t make it unperceivable to people with better hearing. Most of todays "pop" crap is designed with low quality digital files in mind and people who don't have an ear for music.
No... at some point, a digital system will outperform an analog system because the analog system is bandwidth-limited by its hardware, and incapable of lossless (and noiseless) generations. If the problem is clipping, throw more sample bits at it (24 is fine) and calibrate for a -12dB "clip level" and you won't lose anything. If it's sample rate, 192k is easily available off the shelf. Performance will be limited by the analog components in the signal path much more than the digital ones. None of this will help if the final product is dynamically compressed to one volume level before release -- it's going to sound like shit regardless of what medium is used to ship it.
The truth is that it is crappy mastering and crappy encoding that causes artifacts. Lossy encoding is used to make it practical to move the audio files around over an Internet connection and to keep a reasonable amount on small portable devices. Bandwidth still hasn't exploded enough for lossless with deep and high sample rates, but storage has if you're willing to load up your device for every trip, just like you'd choose what cassettes to carry. It's just that now the cassettes have no moving parts and are the size of your fingernail.
Once you get the electronic reproduction sufficiently accurate, it's time to turn a critical ear to the other end of the chain -- namely your headphones and/or speakers. These need not be new, an undamaged pair of 1970's Tannoy Dual Concentrics will still outperform most anything new the majority of us can afford. (I have a pair of SRM12Bs, and sitting between them is like wearing headphones -- except no weight on your head and you can feel the bass.)
Unlike a lot of things we've paid for, this one demonstrably works as advertised.
Thing is, if Iron Dome is truly selective, then it will soon be evident that empty rockets are landing outside of a given radius. The selection criteria for intercepting will be adjusted accordingly, and only those likely to strike high-value targets will be intercepted. Given the poor targeting ability of the missiles at SHORT range, it would seem that extending the range only gives them a lot more room to miss, as well as minimizing any damage when they do find something.
It was both. Check it out yourself.
One modest improvement I have seen was a book with both Braille, and printed letters in the same position. This way, both sighted and blind people could read the same book, at the same time. The blind will be unaware of the print, and the sighted will see only deformations of the paper.
Braille is a six-bit binary code. This was done largely because the previous system -- raised type being "read" by fingers -- was slow and inadequate. Whether the input comes through your fingertips or through the optic nerve matters little. If the bandwidth is low, it helps a lot of the content is pre-digitized. That's what Braille does.
Actually there are, and they use the term in a manner identical to the rest of us. The only group you could consider under-represented is women, because there is only one in the band, and she gets the call only a small fraction of the time (we have a rotating selection of trumpet players available).
If you were climbing over a crowd control barrier to get to the stage (because you're late for the set), and someone else said "get your ass up here, monkey"... that's not racism, you're literally acting like a monkey.
All connotations aside, sometimes people use words to mean exactly what they mean.
I have a group of friends in which we frequently call each other "monkeys" -- but there is no racism whatsoever to it. If you see someone imitating someone else (even if it's because it's a good idea), they're a monkey. If they're making lots of noise and gesticulating wildly -- monkey. Repeating something useless out of habit -- monkey. Climbing over furniture or other objects not meant to be traversed -- monkey. Getting on the stage via the scaffolding instead of the stairs (sometimes it's far easier to come on from the back or other unintended route than to wade through people and gear) -- monkey. If anyone asks, we always say "everyone is a monkey part of the time", and if asked about racism we say "who cares, in 500 years, EVERYONE will be brown". One of our group became known as "monkey boy" for his habit of climbing poles or other structures to try to spot people in a crowded room, rather than trying to hunt them down in a crowded venue. (I don't blame him, he's short.)
So no, calling someone a monkey can be completely non-racial.
Tempura is not the fault of the Scottish, it's the fault of the Portuguese. They wanted something they could eat on Fridays (it's no accident "tempura" resembles "tempora", meaning "time" -- as in a dish for the time they can't eat meat) so they introduced deep-frying of large shrimp, scallops, crab, or other seafood to Japan. It proved immensely popular with the natives, and remains so to this day. It's also popular in many other countries now as well, since it's more of a method than an actual dish and many different things can be battered and fried.
I personally love shrimp tempura, but on the vegetable side, green peppers and yams also work quite well.
I've seen plenty of people who behave like psychopaths while under the influence of (or jonesing for) either cocaine or amphetamines. Once they stabilized (got through withdrawal, got their fix, came down and got a night's sleep, whatever), they FELT BAD for what they might have done. Not bad enough to stop them from doing it again, but they DID feel something. The drug or need for the drug outweighed their consciences, but it doesn't mean their consciences were absent. They were just jonesed into irrelevance.
That said, there's plenty of truth to the T-shirt that says "INSTANT ASSHOLE - just add cocaine".
The PC and PC/XT were very commonly retrofitted with an AST Six Pack or generic equivalent. It was expensive, but still cheaper than buying each function on a separate card (and using six slots, which the PC didn't even have, it had just five). Even then it required running a program at startup to read from the RTC and load it into the motherboard clock. Setting the time on the Six Pack also took an executable, as simply setting the time the normal way didn't write it back to the board.
Similarly, "mob" (a generic name for any creature in a game) is supposed to rhyme with "lobe" since the word is short for "mobile entity". Most everyone I know except myself pronounces it to rhyme with "job".
Odd animated GIF? There are entire boards dedicated to them, like 4GIFS.com.
There's no technical reason it can't handle 32 GB of flash -- it just couldn't do that at the $99 price point. Swapping flash is pretty trivial as user upgrades go, so I don't really see that holding it back. The capacity limit of SDHC being reached might pose an issue, if it's not made to accept SDXC. The hardware is the same, and the firmware can probably be hacked -- just like Rockbox did for the Sansa (mine is quite happy with a 16 GB micro-SDHC card when it was built to handle just a 2 GB micro-SD card), so I doubt THAT will be a significant issue either.
Naturally the Ouya will look to replace some settop-box functions, since even new TVs have a finite number of inputs. That doesn't mean it will be particularly optimized for them, or that it needs to be.
They didn't bust him for it either, they busted him for driving infractions they observed before they were aware of the equipment in the car.
Once they became aware of the equipment in the car, they still realized they had no proof (though some suspicion) that the equipment may have had something to do with the erratic driving. It looks like they cited him only for what he did, while pointing out the potential consequences if he was using the equipment while driving. In other words, the system actually worked properly.
If it weren't for his car being moderately interesting to the general public (though frankly I don't really see that it is), this would just be another ticket-and-release traffic stop and you'd never have heard of it -- just like if you had been cited for speeding, and a cop chose to remark on your in-car setup while officially ignoring it.
I think he's trying to say that taking two hours to deliver the power necessary to accelerate a car is not only acceptable but commonplace where he lives. If nobody around you is moving, you don't need to be able to react very quickly either.
Problem with a used cop car is that the transmission is probably shot to hell. That's usually why they retire them.
I'm sure over years, rappers must accumulate word pairings that rhyme, and phrases that slot into rhythms, much the way a jazz player rehearses patterns. In both cases, the fact is that the brain isn't fast enough to both think and execute in real time. Some of the processing has to be done beforehand, and wired in to be executed on command. The trick is to be spontaneous and assemble things in novel ways in spite of the hard wired tendency to arrange them in friendly and familiar ways over and over.
Follow the George Carlin mantra: Write stoned, edit sober. Maybe for you that means pseudocode stoned, or flowchart, or whatever you do to organize ahead of time. But don't forget to give anything you do the critical, detail-oriented sober eye as well before inflicting it on anyone else. For every great idea you get on drugs, there are at least three times as many bad ones you'd be better off leaving behind.
Similarly, I believe that there may have existed technologically advanced humans prior to known history. Some of them may have even succeeded at getting off the planet permanently. This would make "aliens" plausible -- they're just a split lineage of formerly Earth-based humans. There is no need to explain where they got the energy or time to cross interstellar distances, because they didn't have to.
The main evidence against this idea is that there's still oil in the ground, and no indication it was deliberately placed there for us. It would seem that a previous culture would need energy as badly as we do, and oil didn't take us that much technology (initially) to get at and start consuming. It would seem that the low-hanging fruit would already be gone if we weren't the first. However, I find this objection less of a problem than having to entirely rewrite physics to make interstellar travel practical. *IF* we are being visited by extraterrestrials, my money is on them having descended from terrestrials.
I used to see elderly people and think "I don't want to get old". Most of the time I still feel that way -- but the line of what is old has moved as I see people I have known all my life getting well into their 60s and 70s and not doing too badly. They are doing better than their parents did at the same age, and may well have 10 years or more of reasonably productive and pleasant life that their parents lacked.
At the same time, I look at my grandmother than died in her late 80s, and aside from going mostly deaf, things really weren't that bad for her until the last 18 months. On the flip side I look at my surviving grandmother who is about the same age now, but is miserable most of the time and unable to fully care for herself (though she adamantly believes she still can though she hasn't been able to for 15 years). She refuses to accept much of the help available to her because of this belief that she is still self-sufficient, then complains of being lonely and isolated. My mother said "I don't want to ever get that old", to which I said "no, you don't ever want to get that BAD, the age is irrelevant" (which she agreed with). To me, there is not that much difference between 70 with full mobility, senses, and mind, and 50 with the same.
I guess I'm saying my view has changed. I don't want to get decrepit, but old is just a number.
I think we should go all the way here. Let's be honest -- social security and medicare are not going to be there for us and who wants to be old anyway? I propose that at age 65 (or perhaps earlier as needed) all men be issued two bottles of viagra, a key of pure (98% minimum) Colombian flake cocaine, and a week's worth of services from three strippers.
The advantages should be obvious -- it's cheaper for everyone and certainly more enjoyable. What better way to die than while high as a kite and busting a nut inside a foxy coed? Certainly beats spending months in a hospital bed hooked up to a machine.
Isn't this known as the John Entwhistle Retirement Plan?
Better use something indellible, like a Sharpie or a Bingo marker.
Los Angeles County uses Inkavote. Basically it's just a little rubber stamp you press into the circle on the ballot. The machines themselves have guides to keep you from putting the stamp anywhere but an oval. You insert the ballot, ink in the correct circles, then remove the ballot and turn it in. There are no moving parts except for the small spring-loading in the stamper and the hinges holding the pages in the machine -- which are themselves identical to the ones in your sample ballot as mailed to you. This means you can mark your sample ballot at home, hold it up alongside the corresponding page in the machine, and simply copy your bubbles from your sample ballot onto the real one.
This has all the advantages I can think of -- it's almost non-mechanical and CAN be done by hand if there are insufficient machines available, it generates human-readable paper ballots, it's faster than a touchscreen system while also being far less complex, and it's easy to understand. There are many things I can gripe about, living in the Los Angeles area. The voting machines are definitely NOT one of them.
For the average /.er, voting IS like "doing it". You get a chance every couple of years, but quite often skip it or mail it in anyhow.
Interestingly, this does not even require that the eyes actually MOVE relative to the head. When playing Minecraft, it is often possible to read the intentions of another player based on the movements of their head as a surrogate for the eyes which are fixed in position on that head. It is not at all unusual to be thinking "oh no he can't possibly make that jump from that spot", just before your mining partner comes up half a block short and plunges into lava -- even though he didn't make any explicit mention that this was his intention. If you're quick on your feet, you might already be planning a safe path down to the spot you know he's about to take a hot bath, while readying a bucket of water. Just maybe, this foresight will let you turn that lava to obsidian and put out the flames before he dies. I've been on both ends of this a few times.
I guess the moral is that if you can't read someone's eyes, perhaps because whatever virtual world you're in just isn't that sophisticated, there is often a similar method of obtaining the same information. If we had much less "swing" to our eyes and had to turn our heads more, instinct would probably have us track the face rather than the eyes.
Here's something you can probably convince the mailroom at an office to buy:
Uniball Micro Deluxe. 0.5 mm and waterproof ink. It will start instantly until it gets low on ink but you'll probably ditch it by then anyhow because it starts exhibiting dropouts around the same time.
The one downside is that although the ink is waterproof once dry, it is NOT smudge-proof UNTIL it is dry. If you drag any part of your hand through what you recently wrote, you're going to get a partially black hand and an illegible mess on the page. Once dry though, even leaving your coffee cup on the page will net you nothing more than a coffee ring. The writing won't move. This is why I use it for (now very rare, notation software is SO much easier) hand-written music, and for corrections on documents that are going to be passed around (including corrections to printed music).