Welcome to the current limiting and mastering preferences that take much of the dynamics out of a recording. This is done out of fear that a quieter song, or one with varying dynamics, won't grab the attention of listeners on the radio. However, in tests it's been shown that the lack of dynamics produces "listener fatigue", following which the listener stops really paying attention to what they're hearing.
That is not why it is done. Compression of the dynamic range makes the song listenable in a car or on an ipod in a noisy environment. That is where MOST people listen to MOST of their music.
Yes yes, I realize that the acoustics are excellent in your mother's basement... but have you ever tried to listen to a song with a large dynamic range while driving a car? Or listen to an ipod on earbuds while shopping? You have to turn the volume up in order to heart the quiet parts, and then you get your ears blasted by the loud parts. My old CDs, which are often uncompressed, drive me nuts on this aspect.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
It wasn't until bitcoin that I understood the point of constant inflation: it makes credit feasible. You can only borrow safely if you can be almost certain money won't increase in relative value in the future, and to make a borrower feel truly safe currency value should have a near certainty of decreasing somewhat. With significant deflation a possibility you can't even take out a car loan without simultaneously risking indentured servitude; it would be insane to take home or business loans, and I don't mean figuratively insane, either.
Not true. In a deflationary period, loans will simply carry a negative interest rate.
Deflation isn't the problem here; the problem is uncertainty.
Inflation also encourages lending and investing. It's like the Red Queen hypothesis: with inflation eating the valuation of your cash you have to put it to work somehow in hopes of earning more than the rate of inflation.
Yes, this is THE reason to prefer inflation over deflation.
Color me skeptical that this virus is purely venal in nature.
Governments have far more to lose from bitcoin than J. Random Crimeshop has to gain from stealing bitcoin wallets (with the associated hassle of converting them to cash). A purely electronic money that is peer-to-peer can easily evade taxation. Governments would collapse within the year of bitcoin's widespread acceptance.
I think this was one of the background premises of _Snowcrash_ and _The Diamond Age_. Without the ability to tax transactions, or even to track them to individuals, governments crash and burn. So even if this particular virus was not born in Langley, Virginia, sooner or later the CIA absolutely MUST craftily squash bitcoin.
Arguments are won by the person(s) with the loudest voices, and failing that - the biggest sticks. This is called "politics" [...]
According to an article we saw here recently, arguments are often won by the person(s) with the lowest voice. Anything that James Earl Jones says I need, I'll buy.:)
[Politics] also travels under other guises like "religion", "nationalism", "sports fanaticism", etc. If you want evidence you merely have to look at human history, or even current events in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. A lot of "reasoning" is going on there.
Actually we are seeing plenty of reasoning there. All humans want exactly four things: Pride, Power (money/land), Play (amusement/novelty), and Partner (sex/reproduction). All involved parties are seeking these things during the Libyan upheaval, and most are being rational about their quest for those things. Don't confuse reason with "the dispassionate decisions of a philosopher king seeking peace and harmony for the tribe".
Personally, I'd prefer it if the stem cell researchers could find a way to reverse the damage and bring him up to full health. It's not an either-or situation.
Unlikely that stem cells could reverse such damage. You could grow new neurons of course, even a new brain, but then you'll be a different person.
That's actually why we are a representative democratic republic and not a pure democracy. The "mob" doesn't always know what's best for itself and tends to be just a wee bit reactionary at times.
You can define 'democracy' and 'republic' in terms of the voting mechanism, if you wish. But that is a small distinction out of larger distinctions to be made.
A more useful set of definitions is: a democracy can pass any law it wishes (by whichever voting mechanism it chooses), whereas a republic has design limits on what can be voted on. In a democracy we can vote to round up the Jews, whereas in a republic the constitution says no way.
America began as a republic but has evolved into a democracy, in the sense that we no longer care about the constitution or limits on government except when such limits are personally profitable.
Iran's native population is indeed Persian, but the current ruling party and its enforcers is mostly Arab. Arabs have a tight grip on Islam on account of its history, and when the Persians fell for the religion, it gave the Arabs ideological power over them. From ideological power eventually comes political and then physical power.
This is one of the motivators for the recent uprising: Persians who are fed up with their mostly-Arab government and its Arab goon squads.
Can you go to the US government and have your dollars exchanged for gold or land?
Excellent reply. I was hoping somebody would point out the hilarious fallacy of "backed by a government".
Goes to show how effective the propaganda is: a dollar is, in reality, dysbacked by our government, in the sense that its value is continuously reduced by the fed via issuance of additional M3.
If I found one of these attached to my car I think I'd simply throw it in a box and mail it somewhere. Perhaps to an FBI office on the other side of the country. Let the FBI blindly trace the path it takes through the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.
Either that or I'd let a dog run around the neighborhood with it.
Keep in mind, the current generation of GPS tracking devices look NOTHING like the model they dissected for FTA. The FBI said so when the device was first found on that poor student's car -- a statement along the lines of "If it was one of our modern units, he never would've found it". The guy who said that probably got a reprimand afterwars, too.
Be glad you can even do something about it. In the UK all vehicles are tracked all the time by automatic numberplate recognition using images from traffic cameras. They don't have them quite everywhere yet but they are working on that.
Most people don't know this, but Houston's red-light cameras also do that. EMS and Police have live access to the database, and can issue queries along the lines of "Which intersection last observed license plate XXX-YYY?" whenever they wish.
Re:This only addresses one aspect of altruism...
on
Robots 'Evolve' Altruism
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Except people *aren't* just altruistic towards people they are related to. In fact, quite often it's just the opposite... particularly among young people who happen to be an ideal breeding age.
The genetic reward is proportionate to how much of one's genes the recipient shares. Thus altriustic behavior will (and should) drop off outside of children, of family, of relatives, of tribe, finally of all of humanity... however, it never reaches zero as long as the recipient is approximately inside our species.
And there is the confounding variable that because society rewards altriusm (for obvious reasons), individuals will invest in appearing to be altruistic, especially if they actually are not altruistic. Such behavior will overwhelm the very mild altruism that we are looking to observe between strangers. You need to track down some of those "subject is not aware he is being observed" experiments.
But if we can't have FTL then pretty much we are prisoners of our star system. Perhaps generation ships can export our genes to other stars, but that is unlikely, and we will never [in practical terms] know how they fared. Ping times of thousands of years are simply out of our time scale, until we all become cyborgs or beings of pure energy.
You talk as though meat-based intelligence is the stable outcome. The intelligence to come after us will look back on meat-based computation as a flash in the evolutionary pan.
Meant to say you can concentrate megawatts into less than 1 Hz of bandwidth and then multiply the power by using a very high gain antenna. The big problem in SETI is not knowing where to look or where to tune your receiver.
You probably know this already, but for the benefit of anyone following along: antenna gain does not produce extra power. The purpose of gain is (when transmitting) to send all input power in a desired direction, and (when receiving) reject incoming signals from undesired directions.
When receiving, you will also need an antenna with a very large effective area so as to capture as many photons as possible. That's why Aricebo is so large; and being a dish antenna, it is also very high gain.
"Of all of the classes offered in high school, Algebra II is the leading predictor of college and work success, according to research that has launched a growing national movement to require it of graduates."
Maybe we should require Probability and Statistics, then, since people still think they can reverse cause and effect.
"Look! Successful people drive expensive cars! Tell your brother to go buy one, that ought to get his business back on its feet in no time!"
In which Bianca150 last year posted that they had discovered Stealth KeyLogger 5.0 on a brand new Samsung laptop but assumed it was legit because you could download it from CNET!
Hey, congrats on making a bad situation worse! If you had actually read that webpage, you'd discover that it too was a false-positive. Somebody's cheap AV found a single registry key that was created by the Atheros driver, and flagged it as belonging to a keylogger... a keylogger which, curiously, was missing all of its other registry keys and files.
GP: "Considering that the hobby is basically dying out [ . . . ]"
P: "I'm curious why you say it's dying out [ . . . ]"
Me: "Everybody's on teh internets LOL"
You: "ham radio has been growing steadily for the past 6 years, with more new licenses issued each year than the last.. all during the same timeframe that social web sites became popular"
Context is essential when judging deception. In the context of a discussion about the decline of ham radio, your post is deception. You meant for it to refute the idea that ham radio is in decline... yet the "steady growth" is only just now recapturing the losses beginning in 2003... and was surely due to the end of the morse code requirement in 2007. After the pent-up demand for no-code licenses (of which I was a part) is relieved, what do you predict for the license rates?
As well, your post ignores the critical issue of active versus inactive licensees. How do you suppose the rate of activity per license has changed over time? Don't take my word for it -- hop on the airwaves, which thirty years ago (on my father's set) were totally choked with traffic, and see how long it takes you to find a conversation. With 700,000 licenses, growing steadily for the past 6 years, the airwaves ought to still be clogged. Or at least busy. Are they?
So tell me again that my "rationalizations and guesses do not have any foundation in reality", whereas yours do.
I specifically said "new licenses issued" and mentioned "new members". If you are going to claim that I am "lying", please at least read what I wrote. Do you have some evidence that my claim in untrue? I'd be happy to know about it.
I graphed it in Excel. Send me your email dress and I'll mail you the graph. The data is flat, except for a gradual dip between 2004 and 2010. Hence your ability to claim an increase over the past five years.
One interesting thing the graph shows: decreases in A and N tickets with attendant increases in G and E.
sorry, your rationalizations and guesses do not have any foundation in reality.
ham radio has been growing steadily for the past 6 years, with more new licenses issued each year than the last.. all during the same timeframe that social web sites became popular. Last year saw twice as many new ham licenses issued as 5 years prior. So.. the hobby doubled it's rate of new members during social networking's biggest boom. Doesn't seem to me that the communications options available online are having much effect on hma radio's popularity, although perhaps the increases in new hams would have been even larger if it weren't for the net
I did some research and figured out how you are lying.
What you call "licenses issued" includes renewals of older licenses held by inactive hams; renewal is practically free, and so the renewal rate does not reflect actual ham activity. My father, for example, just renewed his Extra two years ago, despite having not owned a radio in two decades.
That said, I just got my General this past weekend. But there is a reason why the local bands are so quiet that they've got to pipe in other cities on the repeaters, just to keep a conversation.going.
The second risk is the long term risk of cancers. These show up years later and due to this delay in time and the difficulty of measuring cumulative radiation exposure, it is hard to predict cancer risk. There have been numerous studies trying to quantify the risk and all of them show an increase in cancer with increasing radiation exposure. However, it is difficult to sort out how much exposure is "safe" and the answer is probably that any exposure to radiation (including "background" radiation) causes some increase in cancer.
Total bulls***. And now you have made our species 0.000014% less wise.
Ten seconds of googling for "hormesis" should clear your head significantly.
but now James Mason at NASA Ames Research Center has come up with the much cheaper option of zapping individual pieces of junk with a ground-based laser
Pfah, this is an old idea: it's called a laser broom.
NASA was even talking about this a decade ago, though it had a $200M price tag at the time: SpaceDaily article from 2000.
They are different at ends of the spectrum, but too much of either is bad. 4chan is worthless, plain and simple (that includes so-called Anonymous). Facebook is a not worthless, but abuses what they have/know.
Much like politics, you never want someone too far right or too far left.
Yep yep.
Republican: Society needs less sharing in order to create incentives!
Democrat: Society needs more sharing in order to create a middle class!
Me: Shut up, you're both right.
Likewise, we need anonymity in some contexts, and identity in others.
I actually just got licensed, and have been building the tech for over a decade. I love being able to communicate over huge distances using only what I built myself.
My guess is that the internet (forums / email / IM / SMS / IRC / chatrooms) is feeding the hunger for social contact. It was that hunger that originally drove a lot of ham activity. Now that chatting on the internet has zero marginal cost, why would anyone spend a week studying for a license, as well as $500 on gear, for the same result?
Plus, there is no anonymity on ham radio: any transmitting station must be willing to announce their callsign. On the internet, everyone can dynamically manage how much of their identity to expose, based on the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to the current limiting and mastering preferences that take much of the dynamics out of a recording. This is done out of fear that a quieter song, or one with varying dynamics, won't grab the attention of listeners on the radio. However, in tests it's been shown that the lack of dynamics produces "listener fatigue", following which the listener stops really paying attention to what they're hearing.
That is not why it is done. Compression of the dynamic range makes the song listenable in a car or on an ipod in a noisy environment. That is where MOST people listen to MOST of their music.
Yes yes, I realize that the acoustics are excellent in your mother's basement... but have you ever tried to listen to a song with a large dynamic range while driving a car? Or listen to an ipod on earbuds while shopping? You have to turn the volume up in order to heart the quiet parts, and then you get your ears blasted by the loud parts. My old CDs, which are often uncompressed, drive me nuts on this aspect.
It wasn't until bitcoin that I understood the point of constant inflation: it makes credit feasible. You can only borrow safely if you can be almost certain money won't increase in relative value in the future, and to make a borrower feel truly safe currency value should have a near certainty of decreasing somewhat. With significant deflation a possibility you can't even take out a car loan without simultaneously risking indentured servitude; it would be insane to take home or business loans, and I don't mean figuratively insane, either.
Not true. In a deflationary period, loans will simply carry a negative interest rate.
Deflation isn't the problem here; the problem is uncertainty.
Inflation also encourages lending and investing. It's like the Red Queen hypothesis: with inflation eating the valuation of your cash you have to put it to work somehow in hopes of earning more than the rate of inflation.
Yes, this is THE reason to prefer inflation over deflation.
They will simply transfer the tax burden from transactions (sales tax) to incomes (income tax).
With bitcoins, how would a government know what your income is?
See the problem yet?
Color me skeptical that this virus is purely venal in nature.
Governments have far more to lose from bitcoin than J. Random Crimeshop has to gain from stealing bitcoin wallets (with the associated hassle of converting them to cash). A purely electronic money that is peer-to-peer can easily evade taxation. Governments would collapse within the year of bitcoin's widespread acceptance.
I think this was one of the background premises of _Snowcrash_ and _The Diamond Age_. Without the ability to tax transactions, or even to track them to individuals, governments crash and burn. So even if this particular virus was not born in Langley, Virginia, sooner or later the CIA absolutely MUST craftily squash bitcoin.
Arguments are won by the person(s) with the loudest voices, and failing that - the biggest sticks. This is called "politics" [...]
According to an article we saw here recently, arguments are often won by the person(s) with the lowest voice. Anything that James Earl Jones says I need, I'll buy. :)
[Politics] also travels under other guises like "religion", "nationalism", "sports fanaticism", etc. If you want evidence you merely have to look at human history, or even current events in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. A lot of "reasoning" is going on there.
Actually we are seeing plenty of reasoning there. All humans want exactly four things: Pride, Power (money/land), Play (amusement/novelty), and Partner (sex/reproduction). All involved parties are seeking these things during the Libyan upheaval, and most are being rational about their quest for those things. Don't confuse reason with "the dispassionate decisions of a philosopher king seeking peace and harmony for the tribe".
Personally, I'd prefer it if the stem cell researchers could find a way to reverse the damage and bring him up to full health. It's not an either-or situation.
Unlikely that stem cells could reverse such damage. You could grow new neurons of course, even a new brain, but then you'll be a different person.
That's actually why we are a representative democratic republic and not a pure democracy. The "mob" doesn't always know what's best for itself and tends to be just a wee bit reactionary at times.
You can define 'democracy' and 'republic' in terms of the voting mechanism, if you wish. But that is a small distinction out of larger distinctions to be made.
A more useful set of definitions is: a democracy can pass any law it wishes (by whichever voting mechanism it chooses), whereas a republic has design limits on what can be voted on. In a democracy we can vote to round up the Jews, whereas in a republic the constitution says no way.
America began as a republic but has evolved into a democracy, in the sense that we no longer care about the constitution or limits on government except when such limits are personally profitable.
Iranians are not Arabs.
Iran's native population is indeed Persian, but the current ruling party and its enforcers is mostly Arab. Arabs have a tight grip on Islam on account of its history, and when the Persians fell for the religion, it gave the Arabs ideological power over them. From ideological power eventually comes political and then physical power.
This is one of the motivators for the recent uprising: Persians who are fed up with their mostly-Arab government and its Arab goon squads.
How is the dollar backed by the US government?
Can you go to the US government and have your dollars exchanged for gold or land?
Excellent reply. I was hoping somebody would point out the hilarious fallacy of "backed by a government".
Goes to show how effective the propaganda is: a dollar is, in reality, dysbacked by our government, in the sense that its value is continuously reduced by the fed via issuance of additional M3.
If I found one of these attached to my car I think I'd simply throw it in a box and mail it somewhere. Perhaps to an FBI office on the other side of the country. Let the FBI blindly trace the path it takes through the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.
Either that or I'd let a dog run around the neighborhood with it.
Keep in mind, the current generation of GPS tracking devices look NOTHING like the model they dissected for FTA. The FBI said so when the device was first found on that poor student's car -- a statement along the lines of "If it was one of our modern units, he never would've found it". The guy who said that probably got a reprimand afterwars, too.
Be glad you can even do something about it. In the UK all vehicles are tracked all the time by automatic numberplate recognition using images from traffic cameras. They don't have them quite everywhere yet but they are working on that.
Most people don't know this, but Houston's red-light cameras also do that. EMS and Police have live access to the database, and can issue queries along the lines of "Which intersection last observed license plate XXX-YYY?" whenever they wish.
The genetic reward is proportionate to how much of one's genes the recipient shares. Thus altriustic behavior will (and should) drop off outside of children, of family, of relatives, of tribe, finally of all of humanity... however, it never reaches zero as long as the recipient is approximately inside our species.
And there is the confounding variable that because society rewards altriusm (for obvious reasons), individuals will invest in appearing to be altruistic, especially if they actually are not altruistic. Such behavior will overwhelm the very mild altruism that we are looking to observe between strangers. You need to track down some of those "subject is not aware he is being observed" experiments.
But if we can't have FTL then pretty much we are prisoners of our star system. Perhaps generation ships can export our genes to other stars, but that is unlikely, and we will never [in practical terms] know how they fared. Ping times of thousands of years are simply out of our time scale, until we all become cyborgs or beings of pure energy.
You talk as though meat-based intelligence is the stable outcome. The intelligence to come after us will look back on meat-based computation as a flash in the evolutionary pan.
Meant to say you can concentrate megawatts into less than 1 Hz of bandwidth and then multiply the power by using a very high gain antenna. The big problem in SETI is not knowing where to look or where to tune your receiver.
You probably know this already, but for the benefit of anyone following along: antenna gain does not produce extra power. The purpose of gain is (when transmitting) to send all input power in a desired direction, and (when receiving) reject incoming signals from undesired directions.
When receiving, you will also need an antenna with a very large effective area so as to capture as many photons as possible. That's why Aricebo is so large; and being a dish antenna, it is also very high gain.
Maybe we should require Probability and Statistics, then, since people still think they can reverse cause and effect.
"Look! Successful people drive expensive cars! Tell your brother to go buy one, that ought to get his business back on its feet in no time!"
I browsed around a bit and found this thread in a forum: http://www.pctools.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-66173.html
In which Bianca150 last year posted that they had discovered Stealth KeyLogger 5.0 on a brand new Samsung laptop but assumed it was legit because you could download it from CNET!
Hey, congrats on making a bad situation worse! If you had actually read that webpage, you'd discover that it too was a false-positive. Somebody's cheap AV found a single registry key that was created by the Atheros driver, and flagged it as belonging to a keylogger... a keylogger which, curiously, was missing all of its other registry keys and files.
Then let's recap:
GP: "Considering that the hobby is basically dying out [ . . . ]"
P: "I'm curious why you say it's dying out [ . . . ]"
Me: "Everybody's on teh internets LOL"
You: "ham radio has been growing steadily for the past 6 years, with more new licenses issued each year than the last.. all during the same timeframe that social web sites became popular"
Context is essential when judging deception. In the context of a discussion about the decline of ham radio, your post is deception. You meant for it to refute the idea that ham radio is in decline... yet the "steady growth" is only just now recapturing the losses beginning in 2003... and was surely due to the end of the morse code requirement in 2007. After the pent-up demand for no-code licenses (of which I was a part) is relieved, what do you predict for the license rates?
As well, your post ignores the critical issue of active versus inactive licensees. How do you suppose the rate of activity per license has changed over time? Don't take my word for it -- hop on the airwaves, which thirty years ago (on my father's set) were totally choked with traffic, and see how long it takes you to find a conversation. With 700,000 licenses, growing steadily for the past 6 years, the airwaves ought to still be clogged. Or at least busy. Are they?
So tell me again that my "rationalizations and guesses do not have any foundation in reality", whereas yours do.
I specifically said "new licenses issued" and mentioned "new members". If you are going to claim that I am "lying", please at least read what I wrote. Do you have some evidence that my claim in untrue? I'd be happy to know about it.
Data on ARS license statistics: http://www.ah0a.org/FCC/Licenses.html
I graphed it in Excel. Send me your email dress and I'll mail you the graph. The data is flat, except for a gradual dip between 2004 and 2010. Hence your ability to claim an increase over the past five years.
One interesting thing the graph shows: decreases in A and N tickets with attendant increases in G and E.
sorry, your rationalizations and guesses do not have any foundation in reality.
ham radio has been growing steadily for the past 6 years, with more new licenses issued each year than the last.. all during the same timeframe that social web sites became popular. Last year saw twice as many new ham licenses issued as 5 years prior. So.. the hobby doubled it's rate of new members during social networking's biggest boom. Doesn't seem to me that the communications options available online are having much effect on hma radio's popularity, although perhaps the increases in new hams would have been even larger if it weren't for the net
I did some research and figured out how you are lying.
What you call "licenses issued" includes renewals of older licenses held by inactive hams; renewal is practically free, and so the renewal rate does not reflect actual ham activity. My father, for example, just renewed his Extra two years ago, despite having not owned a radio in two decades.
That said, I just got my General this past weekend. But there is a reason why the local bands are so quiet that they've got to pipe in other cities on the repeaters, just to keep a conversation.going.
The second risk is the long term risk of cancers. These show up years later and due to this delay in time and the difficulty of measuring cumulative radiation exposure, it is hard to predict cancer risk. There have been numerous studies trying to quantify the risk and all of them show an increase in cancer with increasing radiation exposure. However, it is difficult to sort out how much exposure is "safe" and the answer is probably that any exposure to radiation (including "background" radiation) causes some increase in cancer.
Total bulls***. And now you have made our species 0.000014% less wise.
Ten seconds of googling for "hormesis" should clear your head significantly.
Pfah, this is an old idea: it's called a laser broom.
NASA was even talking about this a decade ago, though it had a $200M price tag at the time: SpaceDaily article from 2000.
They are different at ends of the spectrum, but too much of either is bad. 4chan is worthless, plain and simple (that includes so-called Anonymous). Facebook is a not worthless, but abuses what they have/know.
Much like politics, you never want someone too far right or too far left.
Yep yep.
Republican: Society needs less sharing in order to create incentives!
Democrat: Society needs more sharing in order to create a middle class!
Me: Shut up, you're both right.
Likewise, we need anonymity in some contexts, and identity in others.
Clearly, this event justifies a limerick:
A student at Limerick college
Expanded our stout beer knowledge,
As a means to the end
of drinking with friends;
This much he should acknowledge.
Courts should recognize that going to court in the first place is an imposition worthy of remuneration.
Cognitive Dissonance prevents them from recognizing that fact.
I'm curious why you say it's dying out?
I actually just got licensed, and have been building the tech for over a decade. I love being able to communicate over huge distances using only what I built myself.
My guess is that the internet (forums / email / IM / SMS / IRC / chatrooms) is feeding the hunger for social contact. It was that hunger that originally drove a lot of ham activity. Now that chatting on the internet has zero marginal cost, why would anyone spend a week studying for a license, as well as $500 on gear, for the same result?
Plus, there is no anonymity on ham radio: any transmitting station must be willing to announce their callsign. On the internet, everyone can dynamically manage how much of their identity to expose, based on the situation.