Re:By the sound of it, they will be using optics
on
Looking for Life in Light
·
· Score: 2, Informative
To separate the light from a planet and it's sun you need a telescope with sufficent resolution. It's just like the problem of 'splitting' multiple star systems into their separate stars, you need a large enough telescope. In this case though, we need a REALLY BIG telescope. We can't make one large enough, but we can combine the light from several telescopes separated by a long base line to get the same result. In fact such scopes are already being built and the first ones have already seen first light. We might need to put such a multi-telescope system in space to get a long enough baseline, but it could be done.
Now imagine being able to actually see an exo-solar planet orbiting some distant star. We see it's night side and see some lights on the surface of the night side of the planet. The spectrum from that light is rich in Tungsten, Mercury, and Sodium. I'd say THAT would be a sign of intelligent life (at least they had created electric outdoor lighting).
If the CO2 produced by burning fossel fuels could somehow be recycled into new fuel instead of being vented into the atmosphere then the continued use of such fuels would be acceptable. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source, it is at best a good way to store and transport energy. This is because hydrogen must be made (actually liberated from other compounds) and this process uses energy. Hydrogen could be a useful fuel for automobiles if there were only a good way to store it safely. IC engines run just fine on Hydrogen, but safe hydrogen storage tanks are heavy since the gas must be compressed or liquified for storage. Another option for autos would be electric power if only suitable fast charge, high capacity, lightweight batteries could be developed. We need to reduce the net CO2 emission from all power sources. Extending the emission of CO2 by the production of hydrocarbons isn't the answer, but I suspect the use of such fuels produce less CO2 emission then the burning of pure carbon (coal) due to the added engery of the hydrogen. Using nuclear power to produce industrial hydrogen is a good idea as it does reduce co2 emission, and as you say we need the hydrogen. Now we need a way to bottle up the co2 emissions from burning HC based fuels.
The existing socket 939 dual core cpu designs will probably be available for a while yet. So you will be able to upgrade. Consider that you can't use DDR2 memory in DDR sockets, so you would STILL need a new MB even if AMD kept the same socket for the new cpu.
Of course the best solution is to use this energy to free up hydrogen which we can combine with carbon to produce synthetic oil (syncrude!). We need about 75 GWe reactors right now here in Alberta. We have a terrible hydrogen shortage. The price of gasoline at the pumps is a symptom of this problem.
Bad idea. Just what we need, making MORE hydrocarbons and then MORE CO2. Didn't you ever hear of GLOBAL WARMING???? The whole idea of atomic energy is to be a replacement for fossil fuels, not to MAKE MORE FOSSEL FUEL!!! (DUH!)
My company sells gasoline. I discover that an inventor has discovered a way to make a car that gets 200 mpg. I offer him a kings ransom for his invention and he sells it to me. I now plan on using the patent to keep anybody from making and selling this invention so I can sell more gas. I guess this makes me a troll and this ruling makes it unlikely for me to succeed on this plan?
NOTE...sounds like a your classic urban myth??????
Well not exactly. The Macintosh is a different beast than the Windows. You do things differenly on a Mac than on Windows and switching from Windows to a Mac would involve relearning how to do things. Macheads would tell you it would be worth the effort, but for many users it would just not be so.
Switching from Windows to Linux is almost the same idea. The big difference is that Mac's already do everything multimedia very well (probably BETTER than Windows) and Linux still has some catching up to do. Also on a Mac the OS install has already been worked out for you (limited hardware choices to worry about, the advangage of a closed hardware platform).
So I think the red guy holding the pitchfork will be freezing his brass balls off before Linux gets DRM built into the kernel.
And there's no need to insult BSD:-) Wasn't my intention. I meant that it would be VERY cold in you know where before Linux gets DRM. (I actually like that little red guy with the pitchfork. NOT SO his big brother.....)
Don't use the Realplayer binary! Use the Helix player built from source. I have this package on my Gentoo box and it works fine. Real strange about how two faced RealNutworks is, they have this nice open source package, yet are such trolls with their binary package.
If DRM must be built into the kernel then it will be in open source format or it WON'T be there. Most people agree that the GPL will prohibit binary kernel modules and I think Linus feels this way too. So if RealNutworks wants DRM in the kernel, fine post the source to Linus as a patch and we'll consider it!
Of course having the source code for a Linux DRM kernel module out there on the net ISN'T what these guys want! So I think the red guy holding the pitchfork will be freezing his brass balls off before Linux gets DRM built into the kernel.
We had some key employees jump ship to take jobs with Alienware, leaving us having to work super overtime to get a project completed in time. Now these guys may be putting their resumes out because they are worried about being laid off in the merger. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA !!!!!!!!!
Ebay is BOTH an auction house AND an online store. Dealers selling with buy it now are not really using the auction feature, but rather the online store. The problem comes with an auction that has both the biding AND buy it now enabled.
There is nothing wrong with the buy it now in an auction, provided that the feature dissolves as soon as the first bid above any possible reserve price is received. Also, buy it now should NOT be allowed (in an auction) when the reserve price is equal to the buy it now price (or less than it by an amount less than the bid increment). This case is NOT an auction, it is an online store, and the seller should be forced into such (with higher selling fees).
Finally Ebay should allow the buyers to have the search engine ONLY find auctions, online stores, or both at the buyers choice.
Edison DID improve Bell's telephone with the carbon grain transmitter. Perhaps this is the reference to Edison inventing the telephone. Edision also missed something else, though it might have been obvious in hindsight, it would have been hard to see at the time.
The telephone in Edison's time was limited in range. At the time he improved the telephone transmitter there was still the problem of long distance phone circuits, too much power lost in the wires. A way to recover the lost signal was needed. Induction coils helped to a point, but range was still limited to a few hundred miles, not enough for a cross country circuit.
At the time he was doing the telephone work, Edison also was working on the electric lamp. The early carbon filament bulbs turned black on the inside due to the carbon boiling off the filament and being deposited on the inside of the bulb. There was a shadow on the side of the bulb in line with the filament, but on ONLY ONE side of the bulb. Edison inserted a wire into the bulb between the legs of the filament. He discovered that a current would flow between this wire and the positive side of the filament, but not the negative side. He had discovered thermionic-emission, the Edison Effect. He didn't understand how current could flow in a vacuum, but there it was.
The atomic theory of matter was in it's infancy at the time, but it was assumed that electricity was the flow of small negativly charged particles of matter. They even had a name, electrons. With a bit of a reasoning, Edison could have figured that the negativly charged electrons were attracted to the positivly connected wire and were repeled by a negatively connected one. Then... if he added a third element between the filament and the anode wire, he could control the flow of the current. In fact he would find that a small change in voltage of the control element would cause the same change in current as a large change in voltage on the anode element. This is the same ratio as the Mu of a triode vacuum tube!
This bit of reasoning would have given Edison an amplifier to enable him to build long distance phone circuits. It would have to wait until Lee Deforest and Westen Electric in 1910 to put the Edison Effect to work here.
Edison wasn't Enstein. He couldn't perform the needed thought experiments to streach the Edison Effect into a triode amplifier, but the required thought process is very simple and could have been done with what was known about electricity and matter at the time.
Edison lost because he couldn't send his DC long distance. Long distance needs high voltage, and you can't deliver that to the customer. In Edison's day the only way to rasie or lower DC voltages was the use of rotating converters, really a motor and a generator on the same shaft, often sharing the same field and maybe the same armature. The NY subway system usedrotating converters to get DC for their trains from AC mains. These gizmos are not as efficient as a transformer so a DC distribution system would burn more coal than an AC one. So Edison also lost on price.
Today we have ignitrons, SCR's and other solid state switches that can convert DC to AC and back again so DC-DC voltage converters are almost as efficient as transformers. Enough so that DC power lines are now practical (at least for very long runs with very high voltage).
more expensive media and released product -- why is a consumer going to pay more for a BluRay movie than a DVD? I bet the movie studios will say "because that will be their only choice"..
It will be a long time before DVD is dethroned as the dominate form of video media. It will probably take as long (if not longer) as it took for DVD to kill of VHS. Longer because DVD had the advantage of being backward compatible with VHS, DVD's would play on all TV's that VHS could. (In some cases a video modulator was required, but by the time DVD came out most tv's had composite video input jacks or SVideo or compoenent. DVD works with all of these.
The new HD and BLURAY machines won't work with anything but the new digital tv's so right away their market share is limited. Only the hardware geeks will buy them for the first few years.
1. How long has it been since you bought a physical music CD? Probaby the last time we were in Costco. My wife and I only buy those "best of" collections. We can't stand the 'rap crap' that is passed off as music these days. I'll buy some classical CD's once in a while too.
2. How long has it been since you were in an actual music store? A LONG time ago. True music stores are ripoffs. When I buy CD's I look for the bargins to be found at Costco, Overstock.com, in bookstores such as Barns & Nobel (where I have a discount card), and of course, EBAY.
3. How long has it been since you bought a physical movie DVD? My wife and I stopped buying most DVD's a while ago when we realizied that we had too many on the shelf that were bought on impulse and we never had time to watch. BUT, most were bought at Wal-Mart (from their $5 discount bin), EBAY, or Overstock.com. So we didn't pay too much. Just a few weeks ago I HAD to buy a copy of "the High and the Might" to replace a crummy vhs copy made off Cineimax about 20 years ago. (Ha! I bought a LEGAL copy to replace a shitty PIRATE one!).
The larger surface mount parts are ok, but most of the latest stuff is almost too small to see and pick up, let alone read the gd part number!
You need good eyes (or a powerfull magnifier with low distortion) and steady hands to work with this stuff. Again, in the larger sm packages this can be done by the average joe, but most of the real interresting parts are now only available in the micro-mini size packages which have to be handled by robots.
www.partsexpress.com (dayton, electronic parts and lots of speaker builder stuff) www.surplussales.com (all sorts of surplus electronics, military and commericial) www.fairradio.com (also surplus stuff) www.oselectronics.com (like all electronics but bigger) www.goldmine-elec.com (lots of surplus goodies) www.tubesandmore.com (for people restoring radios and building junk with fire-bottles) www.radiodaze.com (more old radio parts)
Well I built an OSI400 series from bare boards and a chip set purchased from Mos Technology (6502 and a TIM monitor). It had 16k of ram (surplus 2102 chips) and ran tiny basic. I had a single board terminal (forget who made it, but it was a little better than a tv typewriter).
My second computer was a DEC PDP11/03 which I built out of thrown out circuit boards (I was working for DEC at the time). It had 64kb of ram and a dual floppy disk drive (rx01 also stolen from the scrap heap). I did have to repair a few of the boards, but most were tossed because they were simply "out of rev".
I also found a KIM-1 at a hamfest fleamarket. Didn't do much with it.
I then bought a z80 single board ("big board") kit, and finally a PC clone. Since then it's been nothing but pc clones running Linux.
And I forgot one other thing. True Microsoft is charging $49 / year for updates compared to $29/year by Norton. BUT...Nortons price is PER COMPUTER, Microsofts price is for up to THREE computers. In my case (3 computers running XP) Microsoft is the BETTER DEAL!
How much does Norton or Mcaffe charge per year for their update service? Microsoft isn't being out of line here.
On my home computers both Norton and Mcaffe SUCK. They slow down the computer and pop up warnings for no reason. It would be hard to imagine that Microsoft COULDN'T do a better job then both of those worthless packages.
If I read the article correctly, all the patents that NTP is holding over RIM's head have been declared NFG, yet NTP STILL is seeking an injunction agains RIM to shut them down for infringement! Are they smoking crack? Is the judge trying the infringement case on drugs? This should be a slam dunk get the F#$! out of my courtroom verdict against NTP!
I just hit forty -- and I have squealing (tinnitus) in both ears, and have a little trouble decoding speech if the background's a little noisy.
It may be impossible to tell what loss of hearing is caused by exposure to loud noises, and what to aging. The sad fact is that it's normal to lose some hearing as we age, the bones in the middle ear become less plyable and don't transmit sound as well, The nerves in the ear may detoriate with age,the fluid in the inner ear that transmits sound to the nerve endings can become thicker, and the hairs lining the inner ear which pick up the vibrations harden.
I know that in my 30's I could still hear the flyback transfomer in my tv and in computer monitors, today my hearing won't reach that high. I'm sure I've experienced some possible damage due to noise riding the subways in NYC in my youth and from other sources (power tools, etc). I'm also sure that some of my hearing loss is just due to the fact that I'm now in my 50's. Also not everyone ages at the same rate in this regard.
Slashdot Mirror
To separate the light from a planet and it's sun you need a telescope with sufficent resolution. It's just like the problem of 'splitting' multiple star systems into their separate stars, you need a large enough telescope. In this case though, we need a REALLY BIG telescope. We can't make one large enough, but we can combine the light from several telescopes separated by a long base line to get the same result. In fact such scopes are already being built and the first ones have already seen first light.
We might need to put such a multi-telescope system in space to get a long enough baseline, but it could be done.
Now imagine being able to actually see an exo-solar planet orbiting some distant star. We see it's night side and see some lights on the surface of the night side of the planet. The spectrum from that light is rich in Tungsten, Mercury, and Sodium.
I'd say THAT would be a sign of intelligent life (at least they had created electric
outdoor lighting).
If the CO2 produced by burning fossel fuels could somehow be recycled into new fuel
instead of being vented into the atmosphere then the continued use of such fuels
would be acceptable. Hydrogen is NOT an energy source, it is at best a good way
to store and transport energy. This is because hydrogen must be made (actually
liberated from other compounds) and this process uses energy. Hydrogen could be
a useful fuel for automobiles if there were only a good way to store it safely.
IC engines run just fine on Hydrogen, but safe hydrogen storage tanks are heavy
since the gas must be compressed or liquified for storage. Another option for
autos would be electric power if only suitable fast charge, high capacity, lightweight
batteries could be developed. We need to reduce the net CO2 emission from all
power sources. Extending the emission of CO2 by the production of hydrocarbons
isn't the answer, but I suspect the use of such fuels produce less CO2 emission
then the burning of pure carbon (coal) due to the added engery of the hydrogen.
Using nuclear power to produce industrial hydrogen is a good idea as it does reduce
co2 emission, and as you say we need the hydrogen. Now we need a way to bottle
up the co2 emissions from burning HC based fuels.
The existing socket 939 dual core cpu designs will probably
be available for a while yet. So you will be able to
upgrade. Consider that you can't use DDR2 memory in DDR sockets,
so you would STILL need a new MB even if AMD kept the same
socket for the new cpu.
Of course the best solution is to use this energy to free up hydrogen which we can combine with carbon to produce synthetic oil (syncrude!). We need about 75 GWe reactors right now here in Alberta. We have a terrible hydrogen shortage. The price of gasoline at the pumps is a symptom of this problem.
Bad idea. Just what we need, making MORE hydrocarbons and then MORE CO2. Didn't
you ever hear of GLOBAL WARMING???? The whole idea of atomic energy is to be a
replacement for fossil fuels, not to MAKE MORE FOSSEL FUEL!!! (DUH!)
My company sells gasoline. I discover that an inventor has discovered a way to
make a car that gets 200 mpg. I offer him a kings ransom for his invention and he
sells it to me. I now plan on using the patent to keep anybody from making and selling
this invention so I can sell more gas. I guess this makes me a troll and this ruling makes
it unlikely for me to succeed on this plan?
NOTE...sounds like a your classic urban myth??????
Well not exactly. The Macintosh is a different beast than the Windows. You do things differenly on a Mac than on Windows and switching from Windows to a Mac would involve relearning how to do things. Macheads would tell you it would be worth the effort, but for many users it would just not be so.
Switching from Windows to Linux is almost the same idea. The big difference is that Mac's already do everything multimedia very well (probably BETTER than Windows) and Linux still has some catching up to do. Also on a Mac the OS install has already been worked out for you (limited hardware choices to worry about, the advangage of a closed hardware platform).
"Freedom of speech is the right to cry theatre in a crowded fire."
So I think the red guy holding the pitchfork will be freezing his brass balls off before Linux gets DRM built into the kernel.
:-)
And there's no need to insult BSD
Wasn't my intention. I meant that it would be VERY cold in you know where
before Linux gets DRM. (I actually like that little red guy with the pitchfork.
NOT SO his big brother.....)
Don't use the Realplayer binary! Use the Helix player built from
source. I have this package on my Gentoo box and it works fine.
Real strange about how two faced RealNutworks is, they have this
nice open source package, yet are such trolls with their
binary package.
If DRM must be built into the kernel then it will be in open source format or
it WON'T be there. Most people agree that the GPL will prohibit binary kernel
modules and I think Linus feels this way too. So if RealNutworks wants DRM in
the kernel, fine post the source to Linus as a patch and we'll consider it!
Of course having the source code for a Linux DRM kernel module out there on the net ISN'T what these guys want! So I think the red guy holding the pitchfork will
be freezing his brass balls off before Linux gets DRM built into the kernel.
We had some key employees jump ship to take jobs with Alienware, leaving us
having to work super overtime to get a project completed in time. Now these
guys may be putting their resumes out because they are worried about being
laid off in the merger. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA !!!!!!!!!
Ebay is BOTH an auction house AND an online store. Dealers selling with buy it now are not really using the auction feature, but rather the online store. The problem comes with an auction that has both the biding AND buy it now enabled.
There is nothing wrong with the buy it now in an auction, provided that the feature dissolves as soon as the first bid above any possible reserve price is received. Also, buy it now should NOT be allowed (in an auction) when the reserve price is equal to the buy it now price (or less than it by an amount less than the bid increment). This case is NOT an auction, it is an online store, and the seller should be forced into such (with higher selling fees).
Finally Ebay should allow the buyers to have the search engine ONLY find auctions, online stores, or both at the buyers choice.
Edison DID improve Bell's telephone with the carbon
... if he added a third element between the filament and the anode wire,
grain transmitter. Perhaps this is the reference to Edison
inventing the telephone. Edision also missed something else,
though it might have been obvious in hindsight, it would have
been hard to see at the time.
The telephone in Edison's time was limited in range. At the
time he improved the telephone transmitter there was still the
problem of long distance phone circuits, too much power
lost in the wires. A way to recover the lost signal was needed.
Induction coils helped to a point, but range was still limited
to a few hundred miles, not enough for a cross country circuit.
At the time he was doing the telephone work, Edison also was
working on the electric lamp. The early carbon filament bulbs
turned black on the inside due to the carbon boiling off the filament
and being deposited on the inside of the bulb. There was a shadow
on the side of the bulb in line with the filament, but on ONLY ONE
side of the bulb. Edison inserted a wire into the bulb between the
legs of the filament. He discovered that a current would flow between
this wire and the positive side of the filament, but not the negative side.
He had discovered thermionic-emission, the Edison Effect. He didn't understand
how current could flow in a vacuum, but there it was.
The atomic theory of matter was in it's infancy at the time, but it was
assumed that electricity was the flow of small negativly charged particles
of matter. They even had a name, electrons. With a bit of a reasoning,
Edison could have figured that the negativly charged electrons were attracted
to the positivly connected wire and were repeled by a negatively connected one.
Then
he could control the flow of the current. In fact he would find that a small
change in voltage of the control element would cause the same change in current
as a large change in voltage on the anode element. This is the same
ratio as the Mu of a triode vacuum tube!
This bit of reasoning would have given Edison an amplifier to enable him to
build long distance phone circuits. It would have to wait until Lee Deforest
and Westen Electric in 1910 to put the Edison Effect to work here.
Edison wasn't Enstein. He couldn't perform the needed thought experiments
to streach the Edison Effect into a triode amplifier, but the required thought
process is very simple and could have been done with what was known about
electricity and matter at the time.
Great! But does it work with Linux? (can you sync it with a Linux box?)
Edison lost because he couldn't send his DC long distance.
Long distance needs high voltage, and you can't deliver that
to the customer. In Edison's day the only way to rasie or
lower DC voltages was the use of rotating converters, really
a motor and a generator on the same shaft, often sharing the
same field and maybe the same armature. The NY subway system
usedrotating converters to get DC for their trains from AC
mains. These gizmos are not as efficient as a transformer
so a DC distribution system would burn more coal than an AC
one. So Edison also lost on price.
Today we have ignitrons, SCR's and other solid state switches
that can convert DC to AC and back again so DC-DC voltage
converters are almost as efficient as transformers. Enough so
that DC power lines are now practical (at least for very long
runs with very high voltage).
more expensive media and released product -- why is a consumer going to pay more for a BluRay movie than a DVD? I bet the movie studios will say "because that will be their only choice"..
It will be a long time before DVD is dethroned as the dominate form of video media. It will probably take
as long (if not longer) as it took for DVD to kill of VHS. Longer because DVD had the advantage of being
backward compatible with VHS, DVD's would play on all TV's that VHS could. (In some cases a video modulator
was required, but by the time DVD came out most tv's had composite video input jacks or SVideo or compoenent.
DVD works with all of these.
The new HD and BLURAY machines won't work with anything but the new digital tv's so right away their market share is limited. Only the hardware geeks will buy them for the first few years.
1. How long has it been since you bought a physical music CD?
Probaby the last time we were in Costco. My wife and I only buy
those "best of" collections. We can't stand the 'rap crap' that
is passed off as music these days. I'll buy some classical CD's
once in a while too.
2. How long has it been since you were in an actual music store?
A LONG time ago. True music stores are ripoffs. When I buy CD's
I look for the bargins to be found at Costco, Overstock.com,
in bookstores such as Barns & Nobel (where I have a discount card),
and of course, EBAY.
3. How long has it been since you bought a physical movie DVD?
My wife and I stopped buying most DVD's a while ago when we
realizied that we had too many on the shelf that were bought on
impulse and we never had time to watch. BUT, most were bought
at Wal-Mart (from their $5 discount bin), EBAY, or Overstock.com.
So we didn't pay too much. Just a few weeks ago I HAD to buy
a copy of "the High and the Might" to replace a crummy vhs copy
made off Cineimax about 20 years ago.
(Ha! I bought a LEGAL copy to replace a shitty PIRATE one!).
The larger surface mount parts are ok, but most of the latest stuff is
almost too small to see and pick up, let alone read the gd part number!
You need good eyes (or a powerfull magnifier with low distortion) and
steady hands to work with this stuff. Again, in the larger sm packages
this can be done by the average joe, but most of the real interresting
parts are now only available in the micro-mini size packages which
have to be handled by robots.
www.partsexpress.com (dayton, electronic parts and lots of speaker builder stuff)
www.surplussales.com (all sorts of surplus electronics, military and commericial)
www.fairradio.com (also surplus stuff)
www.oselectronics.com (like all electronics but bigger)
www.goldmine-elec.com (lots of surplus goodies)
www.tubesandmore.com (for people restoring radios and building junk with fire-bottles)
www.radiodaze.com (more old radio parts)
Must be more....
His cpu is going to melt. The way he installed the cpu fan he got the power cable
stuck in the fan blades and the fan ain't going to turn!
Well I built an OSI400 series from bare boards and a chip set
purchased from Mos Technology (6502 and a TIM monitor).
It had 16k of ram (surplus 2102 chips) and ran tiny basic.
I had a single board terminal (forget who made it, but it
was a little better than a tv typewriter).
My second computer was a DEC PDP11/03 which I built out of
thrown out circuit boards (I was working for DEC at the time).
It had 64kb of ram and a dual floppy disk drive (rx01 also
stolen from the scrap heap). I did have to repair a few of the
boards, but most were tossed because they were simply "out of rev".
I also found a KIM-1 at a hamfest fleamarket. Didn't do much with it.
I then bought a z80 single board ("big board") kit, and finally
a PC clone. Since then it's been nothing but pc clones running
Linux.
And I forgot one other thing. /year
True Microsoft is charging $49 / year for updates compared to $29
by Norton. BUT...Nortons price is PER COMPUTER, Microsofts price is for
up to THREE computers. In my case (3 computers running XP) Microsoft
is the BETTER DEAL!
(weird huh?)
How much does Norton or Mcaffe charge per year for their update service?
Microsoft isn't being out of line here.
On my home computers both Norton and Mcaffe SUCK. They slow down the computer
and pop up warnings for no reason. It would be hard to imagine that
Microsoft COULDN'T do a better job then both of those worthless packages.
If I read the article correctly, all the patents that NTP is holding over RIM's
head have been declared NFG, yet NTP STILL is seeking an injunction agains RIM to
shut them down for infringement! Are they smoking crack? Is the judge trying the
infringement case on drugs? This should be a slam dunk get the F#$! out of my
courtroom verdict against NTP!
I just hit forty -- and I have squealing (tinnitus) in both ears, and have a little trouble decoding speech if the background's a little noisy.
It may be impossible to tell what loss of hearing is caused by exposure to loud noises, and what
to aging. The sad fact is that it's normal to lose some hearing as we age, the bones in the middle
ear become less plyable and don't transmit sound as well, The nerves in the ear may detoriate with
age,the fluid in the inner ear that transmits sound to the nerve endings can become thicker, and the
hairs lining the inner ear which pick up the vibrations harden.
I know that in my 30's I could still hear the flyback transfomer in my tv and in computer monitors, today
my hearing won't reach that high. I'm sure I've experienced some possible damage due to noise riding
the subways in NYC in my youth and from other sources (power tools, etc). I'm also sure that some
of my hearing loss is just due to the fact that I'm now in my 50's. Also not everyone ages at the same
rate in this regard.