If you're the sort of person so convinced in the reality and greatness of Allah that you'll willingly go to your own death, does that not imply something in the way of confidence in what you're doing?
I know it's all Allah-be-praised on the propaganda side, but a frequent motivation for many suicide bombers (at least on the ground) is actually money. Umbrella organizations like Al Quaeda, Hammas and the like frequently offer a sizable payout to your next-of-kin for services rendered in the name of the jihad. So, you get the virgins, your mom and dad get lifted out of eternal poverty and god's will is done. Everybody wins!
But your comment is certainly not lacking in insight.. though I might suggest that since the almighty has consistently failed to rout the infidels from his lands, he might not be completely trusted with your safe passage through the TSA screening. Flashes of uncertainty and doubt may well run through the mind of the pre-martyr, and it's the facial evidence of these brief lapses which are the subject of interest.
From what I'm reading (yourself not included) most/.ers seem to be missing the point.
Prior to the introduction of these new behavior observation techniques, people were taken aside for more intensive scrutiny based on things like race, manner of dress (perhaps traditional religious garb), funny accents and good old fashioned random choice.
With the new techniques, the TSA can waste less valuable time (yours and mine!) and resources, by introducing a modicum of scientific protocol to their selection process. Less scattergunning, more specificity.
And enough with the Facecrime references.. it's not illegal to look nervous and uncomfortable in an airport, nor will it ever be so. If it earns you a few minutes chat with the TSA, so it goes.. when I was pulled aside for secondary screening, my interview amounted to nothing more than that. In my case, they were perplexed by the Tandy Model 100 laptop I was carrying.. felt that it could serve no functional purpose as a computer in this era, so it seemed odd. Great little machines, btw.
And I'm sorry - but if you have outstanding warrants, are carrying weapons or contraband, you're just a stupid asshole who's going to get what you deserve. Not that I have anything against weapons or contraband - just stupid assholes who try to take them aboard airplanes and get caught.
First and foremost, they are screening for suicide bombers and hijackers.. I think it goes without saying that it's difficult to become a seasoned, experienced suicide bomber. Likewise, with a few notable exceptions, hijackers have a pretty long track record of getting busted on their first go-round.
While I'm sure the TSA would be perfectly happy to catch slippery international career criminals, it's the disposable cannon fodder which most concerns them. Just a guess, but I suspect that the TSA officers receive considerably more training in detecting the behavior of these types, than the criminals themselves receive in suppressing the same.
Just take a look at what frequency domain corrections used to correct the horrible bias of LPs.
Yes, and just look at how easily and elegantly they are dealt with. A simple pair of R-C filter networks which are, in essence, a mirror-image of the RIAA pre-emphasis networks used in the amplifier(s) driving the cutter head on the record lathe. The RIAA emphasis curve is a true open standard, and with careful selection of components, it's trivial to execute a proper de-emphasis stage.
So, no bit-juggling, no psychoacoustic algorithms, just smooth analog correction that can easily be within 1% of standard across the entire audio frequency band. And the RIAA curve isn't the first attempt at getting this right - there were other emphasis schemes in the early days (old Columbia, RCA, others) which proved less effective than the RIAA standard which was eventually adopted universally. But all of this was worked out 50 years ago..
To sum up, I have no idea what you're on about with this 'horrible bias of LPs' comment. Those issues were dealt with long, long ago.
Since you pretty well said everything that was on my mind, I thought I'd drop in a few ancillary comments.
I practically cringe every time one of these 'audiophile' flamebait / troll articles appears on/... This is one of those subjects with which/. has become a parody of itself. You know the up-modded posts about expensive wooden knobs and fancy cables are just a few lines down the page amidst a Slashgasm of smug, self-congratulatory back-patting by users all to quick to dismiss the finer, more subtle qualities of proper audio reproduction.
Again, this is one of those areas where the/. system of on-the-fly peer review is almost guaranteed to provide sharp negative bias, much of it just repeated from similarly uninformed discussions past. Unfortunately, it's just no longer geek-chic to be all about your music system - and I have no idea when or particularly why it went out of style. Before the proliferation of computer hardware, geeks used to build their own HAM radios and stereos.. a fact apparently lost to the 'objectivist' historical revision of the NeoGeek crowd and/. in particular. Sorry kids, your loss!
Hey guys, guess what? I have an incredibly flippin' wicked stereo here at home - and I built every last piece of analog electronics in the chain, as well as the phonograph and CD transport. It was a great deal of fun to build, taught me a hell of a lot about what does and doesn't work for audio and continues to reward me (and my friends) every time I sit down to listen. And as a plus, I can personally hear (or demonstrate for that matter) just what kind of garbage you're left with when you resort to crappy digital compression methods, recording methods and playback hardware.
So when these articles come up, I normally just sit back and watch the ignorance snowball.. hoping that a few wise comments might get modded up - or modding them myself, if I happen to have points that day. But as the saying goes "you don't know what you're missing"..
Now what was I saying again? Oh hell, just get off my lawn already!
(...)and ability to dimly illuminate the immediate area, not to mention a way to visually detect dead units
In the world of vacuum tube failure modes, filament burnout isn't very high on the list. One exception is series-string filament setups (most TVs, some radios) where production variances in heaters inevitably cause one or more tubes to experience an excessive voltage drop. Excessive voltage can considerably shorten heater life. Problem is, like series-string Christmas lights - when one heater burns out, the whole string (often every tube in the chassis except for the rectifier) goes dark. Interestingly enough, insufficient heater voltage can also cause a tube to fail, through a process known as cathode stripping
More commonly, tubes fail for other reasons including depletion of the cathode (loss of emission), contamination of the grid(s) (with material from the cathode), gas contamination (offgassing of internal elements, seal failure), shorts between internal elements or fracture of the envelope.
So, just because the light is on, doesn't mean anyone is home
In case you aren't aware, gasoline-ethanol blends are subject to a little trick known as the water scam. As you are probably aware, water is not soluble in gasoline - but water is soluble in ethanol, and this ethanol-water mix is partially soluble in gasoline. In short, water can be mixed into gasoline-ethanol blends.. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
As high-ethanol blends such as E85 become more widespread, and fuel prices climb, the opportunity and ability to scam the consumer will multiply. Fortunately, testing for water in gasoline blends is relatively simple, requiring only a simple, inexpensive test kit.
Believe it or not, I actually managed to get an Amoco station shut down (temporarily) in the late 1980s for pulling just this scam. I was in tech school at the time, and noticed that fuel from this station had a way of making my fuel-finicky BMW motorbike run very badly. Did the test, found something like 8-10% water, and called the regulatory authority. Saw the closed sign on the station several days later..
You took the words right out of my mouth.. well, most of them anyway.
Recall the 1985-86 Honda CRXe; this little Japanese gem was capable of better than 50mpg with careful operation (window sticker said 53MPG - if I recall). Don't like tiny econo-cars you say? My full-size 1987 Ford Taurus LX (loaded, all the power options) got a fantastic 31-32MPG on the freeway.. and did so up until the day that the 4-spd automatic finally bit the dust and sent the car to the scrapheap.
The fact that in 2007, we are striving for 35MPG average by 2020, seems almost surreal. Now feel free to mod me down for saying this, but in general, hybrids get stupidly bad mileage for a "hot, new, green" engine design because people want to have their cake and eat it, too. These cars are over-powered and overloaded with bells and whistles. Strip these designs down and plug small, efficient hybrid drives into chassiswork akin to that 80's CRX, and watch the average MPG soar to the 70s.
Hybrids designs, at least as they are currently implemented and sold, are a lame disingenuous joke.
I'm wondering if this is actually a change. In the original, it's a beautiful bit of ambiguity: Hauer slurs the word, so that it sounds halfway between "father" and "fucker", neatly summing up his feelings towards Tyrell.
I've watched this film thirty-plus times, and it sounds like 'fucker' to me, every time. Really not sure where people get this idea of a slurred / doubled pronunciation. Don't forget that Hauer is a Nederlander by birth and despuie all his work and training, isn't immune from occasional inflections.
FWIW, wikiquote "I want more life, fucker" points to an IMDB 'trivia' entry, which could have been added or edited by just about anyone. Personally, I just don't hear this..
I was under the impression the the primary limiting factor for the size of an arthropod was the creature's copper-based blood. Copper based blood, when compared to iron based, is a much poorer carrier of oxygen - hence the size of the creature must remain relatively small, else the blood will be depleted of oxygen by the time it reaches the extremities.
Do scorpions, lobsters, shrimp have some form of de-centralized respiratory intake, such that the blood could be re-oxygenated at several sites around the circulatory loop?
While that is the right thing to do, why on earth would you tell your current employer where you are going next?
That information is embedded in your "You guys can suck it, I'm going to ______.." speech.
Larfs aside, you raise an interesting question.. how exactly does MS know where an employee is heading, when they're on the way out the door? Do MS employees have some contractual responsibility along these lines?
..always wanted to build a steam cannon or something quiet to lob ball bearings at it from the far shore against its stainless steel exterior. Hm, artillery.. hadn't thought of that. Shoot me a mail, k?
Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum. The 'tin man' as it's known is sore-thumb public eyesore #1 in the U of M campus area.
Eyesore - figuratively and literally. Not only is this one of the ugliest, most mis-placed pieces of architecture in the metro, its reflective stainless steel skin blinds drivers crossing the Washington Avenue bridge in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind them and they're headed eastbound. Nice planning, folks.
Oh, and about the skin.. it's badly wrinkled, due to "unforeseen" issues with thermal expansion and contraction. Basically, the building looks like a crushed aluminum take-out box, about to litter itself into the Mississippi river.
Not to go too far OT with this, but.. there is much more to the "tubes vs. transistors" thing, than the sonic performance of a given tube vs. a given transistor. This is one area where the/. membership is willfully ignorant..
Spend a little time learning about the design differences between complete tube and transistor circuits, and you'll soon discover that tube circuits allow the designer to select passive components which offer greater sonic advantage than the passive components populating a typical transistor circuit. Here are a couple of clues to get you started: high impedances, low current densities.
Even if all tubes sounded exactly the same as all transistors (which they do not, this is objective fact) the tube-based circuits would still offer design advantages.
Excuse me. I think we can manage to keep ourselves "safe" without sanctioning a big business / government conspiracy that systematically deprives us of our 4th amendment rights.
Slashdot Mirror
How did it manage to overlook Henry Rollins? Not to say that he's exactly evil, but he's not really all that good, either..
But this headline should have read "Rotten news, Public Images Limited."
Congratulations on completely overlooking the obvious positive outcome:
And in case you weren't aware, the first killing is always the hardest one - it tends to get easier after that first big hurdle.
That's one more down, god knows how many more to go. Guess we'll just have to keep chipping away at it..
I know it's all Allah-be-praised on the propaganda side, but a frequent motivation for many suicide bombers (at least on the ground) is actually money. Umbrella organizations like Al Quaeda, Hammas and the like frequently offer a sizable payout to your next-of-kin for services rendered in the name of the jihad. So, you get the virgins, your mom and dad get lifted out of eternal poverty and god's will is done. Everybody wins!
But your comment is certainly not lacking in insight.. though I might suggest that since the almighty has consistently failed to rout the infidels from his lands, he might not be completely trusted with your safe passage through the TSA screening. Flashes of uncertainty and doubt may well run through the mind of the pre-martyr, and it's the facial evidence of these brief lapses which are the subject of interest.
From what I'm reading (yourself not included) most /.ers seem to be missing the point.
Prior to the introduction of these new behavior observation techniques, people were taken aside for more intensive scrutiny based on things like race, manner of dress (perhaps traditional religious garb), funny accents and good old fashioned random choice.
With the new techniques, the TSA can waste less valuable time (yours and mine!) and resources, by introducing a modicum of scientific protocol to their selection process. Less scattergunning, more specificity.
And enough with the Facecrime references.. it's not illegal to look nervous and uncomfortable in an airport, nor will it ever be so. If it earns you a few minutes chat with the TSA, so it goes.. when I was pulled aside for secondary screening, my interview amounted to nothing more than that. In my case, they were perplexed by the Tandy Model 100 laptop I was carrying.. felt that it could serve no functional purpose as a computer in this era, so it seemed odd. Great little machines, btw.
And I'm sorry - but if you have outstanding warrants, are carrying weapons or contraband, you're just a stupid asshole who's going to get what you deserve. Not that I have anything against weapons or contraband - just stupid assholes who try to take them aboard airplanes and get caught.
First and foremost, they are screening for suicide bombers and hijackers.. I think it goes without saying that it's difficult to become a seasoned, experienced suicide bomber. Likewise, with a few notable exceptions, hijackers have a pretty long track record of getting busted on their first go-round.
While I'm sure the TSA would be perfectly happy to catch slippery international career criminals, it's the disposable cannon fodder which most concerns them. Just a guess, but I suspect that the TSA officers receive considerably more training in detecting the behavior of these types, than the criminals themselves receive in suppressing the same.
Yes, and just look at how easily and elegantly they are dealt with. A simple pair of R-C filter networks which are, in essence, a mirror-image of the RIAA pre-emphasis networks used in the amplifier(s) driving the cutter head on the record lathe. The RIAA emphasis curve is a true open standard, and with careful selection of components, it's trivial to execute a proper de-emphasis stage.
So, no bit-juggling, no psychoacoustic algorithms, just smooth analog correction that can easily be within 1% of standard across the entire audio frequency band. And the RIAA curve isn't the first attempt at getting this right - there were other emphasis schemes in the early days (old Columbia, RCA, others) which proved less effective than the RIAA standard which was eventually adopted universally. But all of this was worked out 50 years ago..
To sum up, I have no idea what you're on about with this 'horrible bias of LPs' comment. Those issues were dealt with long, long ago.
Since you pretty well said everything that was on my mind, I thought I'd drop in a few ancillary comments.
I practically cringe every time one of these 'audiophile' flamebait / troll articles appears on /. .. This is one of those subjects with which /. has become a parody of itself. You know the up-modded posts about expensive wooden knobs and fancy cables are just a few lines down the page amidst a Slashgasm of smug, self-congratulatory back-patting by users all to quick to dismiss the finer, more subtle qualities of proper audio reproduction.
Again, this is one of those areas where the /. system of on-the-fly peer review is almost guaranteed to provide sharp negative bias, much of it just repeated from similarly uninformed discussions past. Unfortunately, it's just no longer geek-chic to be all about your music system - and I have no idea when or particularly why it went out of style. Before the proliferation of computer hardware, geeks used to build their own HAM radios and stereos.. a fact apparently lost to the 'objectivist' historical revision of the NeoGeek crowd and /. in particular. Sorry kids, your loss!
Hey guys, guess what? I have an incredibly flippin' wicked stereo here at home - and I built every last piece of analog electronics in the chain, as well as the phonograph and CD transport. It was a great deal of fun to build, taught me a hell of a lot about what does and doesn't work for audio and continues to reward me (and my friends) every time I sit down to listen. And as a plus, I can personally hear (or demonstrate for that matter) just what kind of garbage you're left with when you resort to crappy digital compression methods, recording methods and playback hardware.
So when these articles come up, I normally just sit back and watch the ignorance snowball.. hoping that a few wise comments might get modded up - or modding them myself, if I happen to have points that day. But as the saying goes "you don't know what you're missing"..
Now what was I saying again? Oh hell, just get off my lawn already!
Humbly, please tag as "disimprovement"
In the world of vacuum tube failure modes, filament burnout isn't very high on the list. One exception is series-string filament setups (most TVs, some radios) where production variances in heaters inevitably cause one or more tubes to experience an excessive voltage drop. Excessive voltage can considerably shorten heater life. Problem is, like series-string Christmas lights - when one heater burns out, the whole string (often every tube in the chassis except for the rectifier) goes dark. Interestingly enough, insufficient heater voltage can also cause a tube to fail, through a process known as cathode stripping
More commonly, tubes fail for other reasons including depletion of the cathode (loss of emission), contamination of the grid(s) (with material from the cathode), gas contamination (offgassing of internal elements, seal failure), shorts between internal elements or fracture of the envelope.
So, just because the light is on, doesn't mean anyone is home
In case you aren't aware, gasoline-ethanol blends are subject to a little trick known as the water scam. As you are probably aware, water is not soluble in gasoline - but water is soluble in ethanol, and this ethanol-water mix is partially soluble in gasoline. In short, water can be mixed into gasoline-ethanol blends.. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
As high-ethanol blends such as E85 become more widespread, and fuel prices climb, the opportunity and ability to scam the consumer will multiply. Fortunately, testing for water in gasoline blends is relatively simple, requiring only a simple, inexpensive test kit.
Believe it or not, I actually managed to get an Amoco station shut down (temporarily) in the late 1980s for pulling just this scam. I was in tech school at the time, and noticed that fuel from this station had a way of making my fuel-finicky BMW motorbike run very badly. Did the test, found something like 8-10% water, and called the regulatory authority. Saw the closed sign on the station several days later..
You took the words right out of my mouth.. well, most of them anyway.
Recall the 1985-86 Honda CRXe; this little Japanese gem was capable of better than 50mpg with careful operation (window sticker said 53MPG - if I recall). Don't like tiny econo-cars you say? My full-size 1987 Ford Taurus LX (loaded, all the power options) got a fantastic 31-32MPG on the freeway.. and did so up until the day that the 4-spd automatic finally bit the dust and sent the car to the scrapheap.
The fact that in 2007, we are striving for 35MPG average by 2020, seems almost surreal. Now feel free to mod me down for saying this, but in general, hybrids get stupidly bad mileage for a "hot, new, green" engine design because people want to have their cake and eat it, too. These cars are over-powered and overloaded with bells and whistles. Strip these designs down and plug small, efficient hybrid drives into chassiswork akin to that 80's CRX, and watch the average MPG soar to the 70s.
Hybrids designs, at least as they are currently implemented and sold, are a lame disingenuous joke.
I've watched this film thirty-plus times, and it sounds like 'fucker' to me, every time. Really not sure where people get this idea of a slurred / doubled pronunciation. Don't forget that Hauer is a Nederlander by birth and despuie all his work and training, isn't immune from occasional inflections.
FWIW, wikiquote "I want more life, fucker" points to an IMDB 'trivia' entry, which could have been added or edited by just about anyone. Personally, I just don't hear this..
This is a very up-beat version, so - Nope, Pris shoots first and we get to hear a LOT about Leon's mother.
Also, get ready for replicans.
Do you really want to learn once and for all how a dinosaur runs? If this isn't the best $999 DNA scan you've ever used, I'll return your money.
Try my product.
"Negroponte said.."
"Oyegbola said.."
Where's the hard news, here? This just has a tattle-tale, tabloid feel to it. Who greenlit the story?
.. suggests that they are migrating
But I can't swallow it.
I was under the impression the the primary limiting factor for the size of an arthropod was the creature's copper-based blood. Copper based blood, when compared to iron based, is a much poorer carrier of oxygen - hence the size of the creature must remain relatively small, else the blood will be depleted of oxygen by the time it reaches the extremities.
Do scorpions, lobsters, shrimp have some form of de-centralized respiratory intake, such that the blood could be re-oxygenated at several sites around the circulatory loop?
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft acts on rumors about you!
That information is embedded in your "You guys can suck it, I'm going to ______.." speech.
Larfs aside, you raise an interesting question.. how exactly does MS know where an employee is heading, when they're on the way out the door? Do MS employees have some contractual responsibility along these lines?
..always wanted to build a steam cannon or something quiet to lob ball bearings at it from the far shore against its stainless steel exterior. Hm, artillery.. hadn't thought of that. Shoot me a mail, k?Gehry won't be receiving much sympathy from the residents of Minneapolis, who are forced to live with the Weisman Museum. The 'tin man' as it's known is sore-thumb public eyesore #1 in the U of M campus area.
Eyesore - figuratively and literally. Not only is this one of the ugliest, most mis-placed pieces of architecture in the metro, its reflective stainless steel skin blinds drivers crossing the Washington Avenue bridge in the late afternoon, when the sun is behind them and they're headed eastbound. Nice planning, folks.
Oh, and about the skin.. it's badly wrinkled, due to "unforeseen" issues with thermal expansion and contraction. Basically, the building looks like a crushed aluminum take-out box, about to litter itself into the Mississippi river.
Not to go too far OT with this, but.. there is much more to the "tubes vs. transistors" thing, than the sonic performance of a given tube vs. a given transistor. This is one area where the /. membership is willfully ignorant..
Spend a little time learning about the design differences between complete tube and transistor circuits, and you'll soon discover that tube circuits allow the designer to select passive components which offer greater sonic advantage than the passive components populating a typical transistor circuit. Here are a couple of clues to get you started: high impedances, low current densities.
Even if all tubes sounded exactly the same as all transistors (which they do not, this is objective fact) the tube-based circuits would still offer design advantages.
Do you think it might have included members of congress?
Historically, this is one corrupt group of people. Has Bush got the drop on enough key players, that he can win the push-and-shove when he needs to?
Excuse me. I think we can manage to keep ourselves "safe" without sanctioning a big business / government conspiracy that systematically deprives us of our 4th amendment rights.