but I think the only meaningful difference is that citizens cannot criticise the government -and don't get me wrong, that's a big difference
That's more than just a big difference - there is one and only one truly important aspect of freedom of speech, and that is the right to criticize the government. I'm not saying other things aren't important to talk about, but any other law can be changed as long as you have citizens who care and have the right to criticize the current laws, so that right is what is truly important.
Indeed, Qwest is far worse than Comcast, and those are my only choices. After giving me the "8 am to 5 pm" time frame for install (i.e. please take the entire day off work and wait for us), the Qwest tech failed to show up in that time frame, with no phone call. Qwest also has far more hidden charges than Comcast (i.e. you pay way more than the advertised price). And their "line backer" service, which is extra and is supposed to cover the internal lines in your house, does not actually cover anything. I hate Comcast, but I hate Qwest more.
The problem is that #4 is ofter #1 in disguise, i.e. nothing much happens to make the transition. And no one is really advocating #2 or #3, they're just used as the bogeyman by the people trying to stop the real #4.
But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)
The universe is 14 billion years old. It's true it was less hospitable in the early days, but it has been hospitable for billions of years before the earth formed, and there were stars and planets forming then. So unless sentience/technology is just highly unlikely to happen at all, it has certainly happened millions of years ago.
Even if all the life-bearing planets formed at the same time, the events that drive evolution forward by big leaps (large asteroid strikes, huge volcanic eruptions, certain genetic mutations that really upset the balance) are more or less random and could easily vary the "end goal" of intelligence by plus or minus 100 million years. So other planets are either millions of years ahead of us (which we couldn't even imagine) or millions or years behind us (monkeys at best).
Jumping off a cliff does not take courage, it takes cowardice.
I wouldn't call that cowardice. It takes stupidity or insanity. In Perelman's case it is clearly not stupidity. (not that you can really compare jumping off a cliff to rejecting $1m, the latter does not kill you - but it does cause you to get lots of attention, which is exactly what he claims he does not want)
Am I the only one who thinks this guy is getting off on all the attention he is getting by pretending to be a recluse who doesn't want any attention or money. If he had just taken the money the world would have forgotten about him by now.
Freedom of press is dangerous for any country in the development world, given how easy it can serve foreign interests from developed countries
Not as dangerous as a lack of freedom of the press. The things you say have a certain degree of truth, but when freedom of the press goes away things always go to hell (if they haven't already).
If in the US some mentions something like that on TV, you bet your ass the FBI would visit the guy and make him dissappear.
The FBI would probably arrest someone in that situation, but they wouldn't make them "disappear". FBI arrest are public knowledge and the people arrested get a trial.
Now the CIA is another matter. But they mostly harass people outside the US.
<pendantic>I believe the term you are looking for is constitutional republic. "Constitutional" is the key here, because the constitution means the majority can't do whatever they want, they have to obey the restrictions in the constitution. "representative" is redundant with "republic", since republic already implies it is not a direct democracy.</pendantic>
(the first point, that democracy implies mob rule, is correct, and is what the founding fathers were afraid of, and why they made the constitution the way it is)
“Federal law protects your privacy and keeps your answers confidential (Title 13, United States Code, Sections 9 and 214). The answers you give on the census form cannot be obtained by law enforcement or tax collection agencies. Your answers cannot be used in court. They cannot be obtained with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. As allowed by law, census data becomes public after 72 years (Title 44, United States Code, Section 2108).”
All other questions (SSN, birth date, birth place) are not part of the census so if anyone asks they are not acting on behalf of the census office.
The census papers I am looking at ask for birthdate (and age since apparently they aren't capable of calculating that from birthdate). They also ask hispanic/non-hispanic (separate from race) and for hispanics they ask for country of origin. It's also not quite clear what you would put down for race if you were middle-eastern - does that count as Asian? They ask for fine-grained racial info if you are Asian, more or less equivalent to asking for your country of origin - I wonder what they might use that info for?
(dividing the world into a few big racial groups is crap, there are thousands of ethnic groups an no clear boundaries between the larger groups)
Have you tried iZotope RX. I haven't actually tried the declipper, but the denoiser is practically magic and the hum removal is pretty sophisticated too. I suppose it depends on how badly it's clipped. (and, yes, mic level is not the same as line-in and you really don't want to mix them up in either direction)
Beware of Behringer gear. Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it is decent when it works. But the build quality is quite shoddy. It will do the job, but something will break or burn out fairly quickly. I was warned about this before I bought a mixer from them, but I figured that it would be in a fairly decently controlled location and not moved around. Barely two years later and it's already blown one channel strip and the headphone-out.
I refer to Behringer as "the best of the cheap shit". We use tons of it for my meditation center (we also produce meditation music and spiritual talks and do live streaming of meditations and other events, so we have mixers, USB converters, expanders/gates, etc). I haven't had bad failure rates. The quality clearly isn't as good as top pro brands, but if you need a pro audio setup on a budget it is the way to go.
That's easy: the connectors are bigger, and there are two of them. The result is higher cost. 1/8" phono jacks are probably cheaper (esp. since you only need one), can handle both L and R on one jack, and take up much less space. As a result, it's easy to stick a phono jack on the back of a computer motherboard, or even on a notebook computer, but adding dual RCA jacks to a computer usually means adding an extra expansion-port plate.
Not to mention that most users think a single 1/8" stereo jack is far more convenient, and virtual all computer speakers use 1/8" plugs.
The only downside is that stereo phono jacks have more noise than separate RCA jacks, since the L and R signals are not isolated from each other in the cable and can have crosstalk. Of course, most people can't hear well enough to notice, or simply don't care, so for 99% of users, phono jacks are better.
If you really wanted to go pro and minimize noise you'd use a pair of balanced lines (TRS or XLR).
p.s. not sure why you keep saying "phono", these jacks usually run at line level, which is not phono.
Behringer UCA202 is a pretty good USB audio interface for $30. It has RCA rather than 1/8 inch jacks, but it's really easy to find adapters to convert between them. You might find something similar with 1/8 inch jacks.
<smug>Or you could get a MacBook Pro which has line-in.</smug>
Stock ratings are not facts. They are at best opinions, although I think it would be better to describe them as works of fiction. And works of fiction are subject to copyright:-)
Y is very small, probably less than 1 on average (some crime scenes have none). I am counting multiple samples which turn out to all be from the same person as 1 sample, since they would not increase the chances of a false match. You would also eliminate samples which matched the victim. And your math is wrong (you can see you could easily arrive at a value greater than 1 depending on the values you plug in, which just isn't possible - you also included crimes per year twice). I believe you want to do 1 - ((1 - P) ^ M) where P is probability of samples from 2 different individuals getting a false positive, and M is the number of pairings, i.e. X*Y*Z*N, and N is the number of people in the database.
In the birthday paradox M is O(N^2), where N is the number of people.
The birthday paradox isn't relevant here. In the case of the birthday paradox you are matching everyone against everyone else. In the case of the DNA crime solving database you are matching everyone against a single person (i.e. the unknown person who left their DNA at the crime scene).
that was meant to be a wikipedia link, something weird happened when I did a preview, edited again, and submitted (I had missed a closing quote before the first preview, but I think that caused slashdot to munge the URL, but I was going quickly). In any case you can search on that in wikipedia.
My point is there are lots of ways to do sex determination. Echidnas and Platypuses are particular weird in this way (and in every other way), even though they are mammal they don't use XY.
And of course, in the most literal real world sense, it is all inherited from instances.
No, the common ancestor of all animals almost certainly reproduced asexually (as do many primitive animals today), so it would not be defined by the root class. There are of course more recent common ancestors between birds and mammals, but XY seems unique to mammals. See ZW sex-determination system and X0 sex-determination system.
Slashdot Mirror
but I think the only meaningful difference is that citizens cannot criticise the government -and don't get me wrong, that's a big difference
That's more than just a big difference - there is one and only one truly important aspect of freedom of speech, and that is the right to criticize the government. I'm not saying other things aren't important to talk about, but any other law can be changed as long as you have citizens who care and have the right to criticize the current laws, so that right is what is truly important.
Indeed, Qwest is far worse than Comcast, and those are my only choices. After giving me the "8 am to 5 pm" time frame for install (i.e. please take the entire day off work and wait for us), the Qwest tech failed to show up in that time frame, with no phone call. Qwest also has far more hidden charges than Comcast (i.e. you pay way more than the advertised price). And their "line backer" service, which is extra and is supposed to cover the internal lines in your house, does not actually cover anything. I hate Comcast, but I hate Qwest more.
The problem is that #4 is ofter #1 in disguise, i.e. nothing much happens to make the transition. And no one is really advocating #2 or #3, they're just used as the bogeyman by the people trying to stop the real #4.
Yes but why would we? Instead of a repair vehicle we would just send a new, faster, better probe.
But, more likely, there are no alien sentients who have developed radio and the light has traveled to us already. (remember, anything we see now from earth is thousands to millions of years out of date) It took 3.5 billion years for life on earth to go from self replicating molecules to us, which is about 25% of the total age of the entire universe. In earlier eras, the Universe was much, much hotter and less hospitable to developing self replicating molecules (too much reactivity for stable self replication)
The universe is 14 billion years old. It's true it was less hospitable in the early days, but it has been hospitable for billions of years before the earth formed, and there were stars and planets forming then. So unless sentience/technology is just highly unlikely to happen at all, it has certainly happened millions of years ago.
Even if all the life-bearing planets formed at the same time, the events that drive evolution forward by big leaps (large asteroid strikes, huge volcanic eruptions, certain genetic mutations that really upset the balance) are more or less random and could easily vary the "end goal" of intelligence by plus or minus 100 million years. So other planets are either millions of years ahead of us (which we couldn't even imagine) or millions or years behind us (monkeys at best).
They shouldn't assume they are the first priest to meet that child.
Jumping off a cliff does not take courage, it takes cowardice.
I wouldn't call that cowardice. It takes stupidity or insanity. In Perelman's case it is clearly not stupidity.
(not that you can really compare jumping off a cliff to rejecting $1m, the latter does not kill you -
but it does cause you to get lots of attention, which is exactly what he claims he does not want)
Andrew who?
It's hilarious to have you call me antisemitic since
1) I am Jewish
2) You are the only one in this thread to mention religion
Maybe leave the guy alone like he wants?
Am I the only one who thinks this guy is getting off on all the attention he is getting by pretending to be a recluse who doesn't want any attention or money. If he had just taken the money the world would have forgotten about him by now.
Freedom of press is dangerous for any country in the development world, given how easy it can serve foreign interests from developed countries
Not as dangerous as a lack of freedom of the press. The things you say have a certain degree of truth, but when freedom of the press goes away things always go to hell (if they haven't already).
If in the US some mentions something like that on TV, you bet your ass the FBI would visit the guy and make him dissappear.
The FBI would probably arrest someone in that situation, but they wouldn't make them "disappear". FBI arrest are public knowledge and the people arrested get a trial.
Now the CIA is another matter. But they mostly harass people outside the US.
<pendantic>I believe the term you are looking for is constitutional republic. "Constitutional" is the key here, because the constitution means the majority can't do whatever they want, they have to obey the restrictions in the constitution. "representative" is redundant with "republic", since republic already implies it is not a direct democracy.</pendantic>
(the first point, that democracy implies mob rule, is correct, and is what the founding fathers were afraid of, and why they made the constitution the way it is)
A letter included with the census form states:
“Federal law protects your privacy and keeps your answers confidential (Title 13, United States Code, Sections 9 and 214). The answers you give on the census form cannot be obtained by law enforcement or tax collection agencies. Your answers cannot be used in court. They cannot be obtained with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. As allowed by law, census data becomes public after 72 years (Title 44, United States Code, Section 2108).”
is that good enough?
All other questions (SSN, birth date, birth place) are not part of the census so if anyone asks they are not acting on behalf of the census office.
The census papers I am looking at ask for birthdate (and age since apparently they aren't capable of calculating that from birthdate). They also ask hispanic/non-hispanic (separate from race) and for hispanics they ask for country of origin. It's also not quite clear what you would put down for race if you were middle-eastern - does that count as Asian? They ask for fine-grained racial info if you are Asian, more or less equivalent to asking for your country of origin - I wonder what they might use that info for?
(dividing the world into a few big racial groups is crap, there are thousands of ethnic groups an no clear boundaries between the larger groups)
there's no good correction for clipped audio
Have you tried iZotope RX. I haven't actually tried the declipper, but the denoiser is practically magic and the hum removal is pretty sophisticated too. I suppose it depends on how badly it's clipped. (and, yes, mic level is not the same as line-in and you really don't want to mix them up in either direction)
Beware of Behringer gear. Yes, it is cheap. Yes, it is decent when it works. But the build quality is quite shoddy. It will do the job, but something will break or burn out fairly quickly. I was warned about this before I bought a mixer from them, but I figured that it would be in a fairly decently controlled location and not moved around. Barely two years later and it's already blown one channel strip and the headphone-out.
I refer to Behringer as "the best of the cheap shit". We use tons of it for my meditation center (we also produce meditation music and spiritual talks and do live streaming of meditations and other events, so we have mixers, USB converters, expanders/gates, etc). I haven't had bad failure rates. The quality clearly isn't as good as top pro brands, but if you need a pro audio setup on a budget it is the way to go.
That's easy: the connectors are bigger, and there are two of them. The result is higher cost. 1/8" phono jacks are probably cheaper (esp. since you only need one), can handle both L and R on one jack, and take up much less space. As a result, it's easy to stick a phono jack on the back of a computer motherboard, or even on a notebook computer, but adding dual RCA jacks to a computer usually means adding an extra expansion-port plate.
Not to mention that most users think a single 1/8" stereo jack is far more convenient, and virtual all computer speakers use 1/8" plugs.
The only downside is that stereo phono jacks have more noise than separate RCA jacks, since the L and R signals are not isolated from each other in the cable and can have crosstalk. Of course, most people can't hear well enough to notice, or simply don't care, so for 99% of users, phono jacks are better.
If you really wanted to go pro and minimize noise you'd use a pair of balanced lines (TRS or XLR).
p.s. not sure why you keep saying "phono", these jacks usually run at line level, which is not phono.
Behringer UCA202 is a pretty good USB audio interface for $30. It has RCA rather than 1/8 inch jacks, but it's really easy to find adapters to convert between them. You might find something similar with 1/8 inch jacks.
<smug>Or you could get a MacBook Pro which has line-in.</smug>
Stock ratings are not facts. They are at best opinions, although I think it would be better to describe them as works of fiction. And works of fiction are subject to copyright :-)
Y is very small, probably less than 1 on average (some crime scenes have none). I am counting multiple samples which turn out to all be from the
same person as 1 sample, since they would not increase the chances of a false match. You would also eliminate samples which matched the victim.
And your math is wrong (you can see you could easily arrive at a value greater than 1 depending on the values you plug in, which just isn't possible -
you also included crimes per year twice).
I believe you want to do
1 - ((1 - P) ^ M)
where P is probability of samples from 2 different individuals getting a false positive,
and M is the number of pairings, i.e. X*Y*Z*N, and N is the number of people in the database.
In the birthday paradox M is O(N^2), where N is the number of people.
The birthday paradox isn't relevant here. In the case of the birthday paradox you are matching everyone against everyone else. In the case of the DNA crime solving database you are matching everyone against a single person (i.e. the unknown person who left their DNA at the crime scene).
I still think it is a profoundly bad idea.
But Microsoft created Bob and Clippy. How can you say they are not user friendly?
that was meant to be a wikipedia link, something weird happened when I did a preview, edited again, and submitted (I had missed a closing quote before the first preview, but I think that caused slashdot to munge the URL, but I was going quickly). In any case you can search on that in wikipedia.
My point is there are lots of ways to do sex determination. Echidnas and Platypuses are particular weird in this way (and in every other way), even though they are mammal they don't use XY.
And of course, in the most literal real world sense, it is all inherited from instances.
No, the common ancestor of all animals almost certainly reproduced asexually (as do many primitive animals today), so it would not be defined by the root class. There are of course more recent common ancestors between birds and mammals, but XY seems unique to mammals.
See ZW sex-determination system and X0 sex-determination system.