For natural selection you need to following ingredients:
1. inheritance: skills to build boats and their designs are passed from father to son. 2. mutation: not everyone is as good in boat building, some sons didn't listen very well, and some get creative 3. differential replication: methods and designs to build GOOD boats will have more change to be replicated than designs of boats that sink to the bottom. Here, we probalby leave the path of father to son inheritance, and ideas also start to spread horizontally.
Once these ingredients are in place, natural selection automatically kicks in and starts doing its almost magical work. Now BEAR IN MIND that not the boats are replicating here! BUT THE METHODS TO BUILD A BOAT! Building the boat itself and using it to travel across water is just a happy side effect. The method of building the boat, the very knowledge and skills itself are here the "living thing" that tries to survive and convince us to pass our knowledge to other hosts.
To us, that indeed _seems_ to be just good design practice, but that's just because we're part of the equation. A design practice that is good is more likely to be passed than one that is bad. We're both the breeders and the selectors! But it still is natural selection.
What is the most successful recipe for a cake? One that is the most delicious of the entire world but is kept as a secret a dies when its creator is sent to the grave, or a less delicious one but is freely passed from one man to another?
The keyword here is "memes", and you should read the article "The New Replicators" by Daniel Dennet before you make any further comments.
Easy to avoid...
Just shrinkwrap your laptop and put a note on it:
READ CAREFULLY. By removing the wrapping of this object you agree, on behalf of your employer, that you will not copy the data found on this device in any form or by any means blablabla, nor that you will inspect said data in more detail than to confirm that it is indeed data blablabla... Furthermore, you owe the owner of the object 120 USD to replace this shrinkwrap (+ administrative costs)... and a smile too.
For an obvious reason of course... If you know the name of/anything/ (be it a company, band, organisation), the first thing you're gonna try is anything.com. You don't want to remember anything.anywhere because anywhere is rather "arbitrary". Yeah, you could go like.auto is for car dealers and.music is for bands, but where does a dealer of auto radios go? No sir, a wildgrow of top-level domains shall only pollute the domain name landscape.
Domain name parking should be dealt with, that's for sure.
If we look at a DNA sequence, how do we tell the difference between a evolved and a designed sequence? If we look at the functional parts, we probably wouldn't be able to. But, say, I was the "designer". Me, I wouldn't be able to resist leaving some signatures behind. To "watermark" my design. For two reasons: one: to label it to "other" designers as/my/ work, and two: as a puzzle, an easteregg, to see if those little humans would be able to figure it out.
So, what would I use as watermark? You can't simple write "God was here", because the chance that those little humans would understand your language would be rather slim. But even they would share our language (Hebrew perhaps?), you still must encode it in a sequence with only 4 symbols A, T, C and G. Even if we can assume those little humans would understand the concept of encodings in base 4, we hardly can assume that our "ASCII" table would be the same as theirs. So, what would be a good sequence?
I would use the same kind of sequences we would be using as a clearly artificial signal we would be sending to aliens, for example: prime numbers, or a binary sequence like 101001000100001000001... Something that stands out as being purely artificial and not being "evolved" or having any kind of function.
So, if we would find in DNA something like the sequence ATAATAAATAAAATAAAAAT... long enough for not being a product of chance, finding the same species back in different species that would - according to darwinian evolution - not be related, and finding different sequences like CGCCGCCCGCCCCGCCCCCG... in species that would be more related (say like god A designed the horse, but god B designed the donkey, or gorilla vs chimp), then I would be scratching my head and I would see two possibilities:
1. Those animals are genetically manipulated by humans, and closer investigation shows that not _all_ horses and donkeys have the same watermark 2. Maybe horses, donkeys, gorillas and chimps really were designed by some "intelligent designer", whether that be some aliens or a god...
You're right when you state that without mutation there's nothing to select from. I did not suggest that you don't need the mutation part, only that the emphasis should be on the selection part, not the mutation part. It is hard to describe any "effect" like complexity to only one part (mutation or selection), because Darwinian evolution of course is an interaction of both. But you can see it like this: selection=engine, mutation=fuel. Without fuel, the engine won't run, but the fuel is meaningless without the engine. The emphasis is on the engine, because that's the part that actually does what we want to.
About complexity, I'd rather say that the selection part is responsible about creating complexity, because that's the "designer" part that "recognizes" more complex (well, better) mutations. The mutation part is unaware of what it is doing and does not have any grasp of complexity whatsoever.
Furthermore, the mutations don't need to be random at all. If you know anything about Monte Carlo simulations/integrations, you know you can get better results with less samples if you draw your samples from a distribution that is similar to the integrand. Likewise, the mutations can be aimed at "improvements" to get better results in less generations. Of course, this is not the case in nature, or at least nobody knows of it, because there's no way for nature to "aim" the mutations, or at least no one knows of such a mechanism. But it other applications of evolution this might be the case. For example when designing a car, one "master" (the selector) might have 10 designers that - starting from a given design - try to make variations that they think would be better, and then the master would select the best variation. This would give better results faster than - let's say - using 10 monkeys that make the variations in a "uniform" direction.
The real designing part - creating complexity - would be the master that selects the best results, and not the 10 pupils (intelligent or not) that make the variations. So, selection is really the keyword here, where the emphasis should be on. But of course, evolution still is selection _and_ mutation.
1. Religion does _not_ lead to ethics. There was moral before religion. You don't _need_ religion to have ethics. Religion is just a _very_good_ selling argument for ethics. Without religion, you actually have to think why this or that ethic view of point is a good one. With religion, ethics get a virtual "absolute" character so it gets much easier to impose it over a large number of people without them questioning you.
2. The "fittest idea or world" (or using Richard Dawkins word "meme") is not necessarily the one that is "best for the people". Just like there are "evil" viruses than spread over the biological world but that are very bad for its hosts, there are "evil" memes that can spread over the world, catch on, but are very bad for the population itself (politics of fear, limiting freedom for the sake of [...])
It is however still an interesting question whether it would be better to have a society of "fooled" people who might just be happy, or a society of "aware" people that now have a bit more trouble understanding their world.
You seem to incorrectly assume you need multiple mutations at once to apply natural selection on. This however is not true. All you need is mutation (that even doesn't need to be random) and selection. There are no further conditions, although of course some "variants" work better than others, depending on the application. For example, in biology sexual mutations result in faster evolution than asexual mutations. For the last couple of millennia, mankind's evolution is largely cultural driven instead of being a biological evolution. Simply, because cultural evolution is much much faster.
Let me rephrase that mutations in Darwin's theory don't even need to be random. If you can "aim" your mutations in a beneficial direction, your success rate of finding a such one will be much higher than if you "uniformly distribute" your mutations. Compare it to Monte Carlo integration: if you can draw your samples from a distribution that roughly resembles the integrated function, you will have a much better result with less samples than by using a uniform distribution.
So about wikipedia. Are there mutations? Yes, although not exactly random, most of them are "intelligent" mutations, by which I mean that most edits will be "aimed" at being a good mutation. This way, we need less mutations to make real progress. Is there selection? Of course, not all edits are good edits and that's where selection kicks in. All edits are evaluated, and if they are good, they have a much bigger chance to be accepted.
Are you kidding me? Calling Darwin's theory a theory of random mutation show how little you understand of it, because you emphasize the wrong half of his theory. There's basically two parts about Darwin's theory: (1) mutation and (2) selection. Most people consider the first one as most important, but nothing could be further from the truth than that. It's SELECTION that is the keyword here. The mutation part is merely the "fuel" that feeds the selection "engine". In fact, the mutation doesn't even need to be random at all. Let me say that again:
The mutation in Darwin's theory does NOT have to be random!
Although random mutation is perhaps the most effective way compared to its complexity. It surely is the most simple way for nature to "implement" it. And most of the time it results in very good "fuel". About your example: although the mutations are made by intelligent designers, some designs are rejected and some accepted (to be built further upon). The mutations are not random, but the selection is still in place. That's good enough.
So if you don't want to call Darwin's theory a theory of evolution, call it a THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION instead.
Keep in mind: you do not need DNA, big gene pools, parallel mutations, sexual mutations,... to have a Darwinian evolution at work. It doesn't have to reflect the biological method of evolution at all. At its core you only need (1) mutation (2) selection. Once you have that, you have Darwinian evolution. I believe it was Richard Dawkins who coined the term MEME to apply Darwin's theory to cultural evolution! Though it is has entirely different mechanism than biological evolution, it still consists of mutation and selection. Not all variants work equally well though: sexual mutation seem to work better than asexual mutations , cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, because the latter can only pass information between generations what is very slow. The evolution of mankind in the last few thousands of years are mostly cultural driven.
... which proves scientologist will survive (though they will loose the case), spread out through the galaxy and are the basis of the most offensive word in the universe... which is then returned back in time to finally end up in our copy of the hithhikers' guide to the galaxy.
That's not really what I'm aiming at. But I largely agree.
Chances are that your old classical music LPs have been compressed for dynamic range too. But that was simply due to the fact that an LP simply doesn't have the dynamic range required to fully record classical music. So the compression was a technical matter. Compare it to the need of tonemapping to display a perfect HDR image of a physical scene on a monitor or print.
Today however, pop music is compressed for dynamic by design, simply to make it sound louder than other songs when played at the radio or from a jukebox where the volume knob is left untouched. Compare it multiplying your image by a factor ten simply to show it "brighter" than on the monitor next it. It will "appear" brighter if you don't look too closely, but it will have lost much detail simply because it clips to your monitor brightness.
Modern pop music may not have the same dynamical range as classical music, but it still has more potential than you find on most of today's CDs: (a) live performances _do_ have the punchy bass drums and highlighted snares lacking on the album, because the PA can deliver what's requested without clipping. Unless your band is called Cradle of Filth (they suffer the EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE syndrome even on stage). (b) pop albums of 20 years ago don't suffer this problem. They still have lots of headroom. Even trash metal records (Metallica - Kill 'Em All) behave very well with lots of dynamic range and lots of headroom. Yet, the moment they are remastered, that's totally gone. There's suddenly clipping all over the place. It's still the same music!
I challenge you to listen to your compressed ipod sound on the same volume as that live concert. I wonder if you still will think it's better. It probably won't be very good for your ears though! live convert volumes rarely are anyway.
The reason people think compressed music sounds better is actually a short term effect: because it sounds louder at the same volume setting. Think of "turning the volume knob to 11". However, if you tune the volume so that both appear to be as loud (perhaps you can use a sound pressure level to measure this), then you will notice the uncompressed music has much more punch and is much more pleasant to listen to, while the compressed music will sound very flat.
If music is compressed, limited and clipped like it is on many records today, there really isn't much argument for the need of an extra quality carrier. The quest of the artists, producers or record labels to GET THEIR MUSIC LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE, causes the dynamic range of music to be sacrificed in order to bump the sound as close as possible to the zero dB boundary. This loudness war causes severe digital clipping, and the distortion you get from it is much MUCH worse that what you get from the MP3 conversion with a decent bitrate.
Not only that, but the music loses every punch, melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears. It's the same with the super audio CD. why needing a carrier with more bits and higher sample rate if you're even using what's available on a CD today?
A simple question for you: water molecules, are they larger or smaller than the bacteria and spores to be killed?
Last time I've checked, the wavelength used in the microwave is about 12.5 cm. Sure, the bacteria are much smaller than that, but is it at all relevant?
Indeed, he hasn't invented anything new... every computer has always dealt with the matter the way he purposes: 1/+0 = inf, 1/-0 = -inf, 0/0 = NaN. Only he named NaN nullity.
All people breath, so let's tax breathing! 0.1 cent per breath... That should do the trick...
Now we just have to implant them a breathcounting chip, with RFID of course, so we can bill them properly.
Nah, skip the RFID part, otherwise we have to do manual readouts, put some satelite communication in it, so it just sends the count over to our computer network. And add a GPS funtion while we're at it. Sounds fun.
Exactly, MS's solution is to build in an auto self-destruct that's activated the moment malware is detected.
"Hi there, this is Eddy your shipboard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdesktop computer, and I'm delighted to inform you that I'm going to self destruct in 5 seocnds. Sorry, you don't have time to close all applications to save your precious data. We have a real emergency situation here! It would be pointless to save anything anyway, because we're going to format your entire harddisk to make sure every tinsy bit of malware is destroyed. Share and Enjoy!"
1. I don't want to have bend over my fingers to type those freaking chinese characters or a Danish O with a slash, just to go to a website. No, URLs should be plain and simple. No accents, no weird characters. Everyone can read it, everyone can type it.
2. You might remember the unicode URL hack? Now, I don't want that to happen to me!
So instead of expanding the allowed characterset for URIs, they should limit it!
In fact, they should limit URIs to 26 letters, 10 digits, and underscore, a dash and a dot (and the slashes of course)... OK ok, and a few others like ~ and %...
Where's the time you could buy two pieces of hardware and with the max of some resistors, capacitors and inductors, could connect them and play nicely together... without breaking _any_ laws...
Where is it?
How comes I cannot connect a single piece of hardware in my house without hitting a 'for-the-sake-of-copyright-protection' incompatibility issue?
Where's my promised home media system that connects every hardware in my house?
Tristan.
Why would the RIAA actually bother to investigate what songs are downloaded and by whom? Too much trouble for them! Everyone has illegally downloaded before, right? So no one will ever notice if you just...
1. pick up the phone book and choose your victims at random. 2. pick a few popular songs that everyone must have downloaded anyway 3.... 4. profit!
Increased stress levels and heart problems caused by constant noise levels are not pseudoscience! Pulsating noise makes it even worse! If you don't believe, go live under one for a few weeks. I can assure you: you won't like it!
Slashdot Mirror
What would it allow you to do that you couldn't do before?
If it is invented, you can patent it. If it is discovered, you can not.Nonsense!
For natural selection you need to following ingredients:
1. inheritance: skills to build boats and their designs are passed from father to son.
2. mutation: not everyone is as good in boat building, some sons didn't listen very well, and some get creative
3. differential replication: methods and designs to build GOOD boats will have more change to be replicated than designs of boats that sink to the bottom. Here, we probalby leave the path of father to son inheritance, and ideas also start to spread horizontally.
Once these ingredients are in place, natural selection automatically kicks in and starts doing its almost magical work. Now BEAR IN MIND that not the boats are replicating here! BUT THE METHODS TO BUILD A BOAT! Building the boat itself and using it to travel across water is just a happy side effect. The method of building the boat, the very knowledge and skills itself are here the "living thing" that tries to survive and convince us to pass our knowledge to other hosts.
To us, that indeed _seems_ to be just good design practice, but that's just because we're part of the equation. A design practice that is good is more likely to be passed than one that is bad. We're both the breeders and the selectors! But it still is natural selection.
What is the most successful recipe for a cake? One that is the most delicious of the entire world but is kept as a secret a dies when its creator is sent to the grave, or a less delicious one but is freely passed from one man to another?
The keyword here is "memes", and you should read the article "The New Replicators" by Daniel Dennet before you make any further comments.
Easy to avoid ...
Just shrinkwrap your laptop and put a note on it:
READ CAREFULLY. By removing the wrapping of this object you agree, on behalf of your employer, that you will not copy the data found on this device in any form or by any means blablabla, nor that you will inspect said data in more detail than to confirm that it is indeed data blablabla ... Furthermore, you owe the owner of the object 120 USD to replace this shrinkwrap (+ administrative costs) ... and a smile too.
For an obvious reason of course ... If you know the name of /anything/ (be it a company, band, organisation), the first thing you're gonna try is anything.com. You don't want to remember anything.anywhere because anywhere is rather "arbitrary". Yeah, you could go like .auto is for car dealers and .music is for bands, but where does a dealer of auto radios go? No sir, a wildgrow of top-level domains shall only pollute the domain name landscape.
Domain name parking should be dealt with, that's for sure.
Tristan
If we look at a DNA sequence, how do we tell the difference between a evolved and a designed sequence? If we look at the functional parts, we probably wouldn't be able to. But, say, I was the "designer". Me, I wouldn't be able to resist leaving some signatures behind. To "watermark" my design. For two reasons: one: to label it to "other" designers as /my/ work, and two: as a puzzle, an easteregg, to see if those little humans would be able to figure it out.
... Something that stands out as being purely artificial and not being "evolved" or having any kind of function.
... long enough for not being a product of chance, finding the same species back in different species that would - according to darwinian evolution - not be related, and finding different sequences like CGCCGCCCGCCCCGCCCCCG ... in species that would be more related (say like god A designed the horse, but god B designed the donkey, or gorilla vs chimp), then I would be scratching my head and I would see two possibilities:
...
So, what would I use as watermark? You can't simple write "God was here", because the chance that those little humans would understand your language would be rather slim. But even they would share our language (Hebrew perhaps?), you still must encode it in a sequence with only 4 symbols A, T, C and G. Even if we can assume those little humans would understand the concept of encodings in base 4, we hardly can assume that our "ASCII" table would be the same as theirs. So, what would be a good sequence?
I would use the same kind of sequences we would be using as a clearly artificial signal we would be sending to aliens, for example: prime numbers, or a binary sequence like 101001000100001000001
So, if we would find in DNA something like the sequence ATAATAAATAAAATAAAAAT
1. Those animals are genetically manipulated by humans, and closer investigation shows that not _all_ horses and donkeys have the same watermark
2. Maybe horses, donkeys, gorillas and chimps really were designed by some "intelligent designer", whether that be some aliens or a god
Just my thoughts,
Tristan
You're right when you state that without mutation there's nothing to select from. I did not suggest that you don't need the mutation part, only that the emphasis should be on the selection part, not the mutation part. It is hard to describe any "effect" like complexity to only one part (mutation or selection), because Darwinian evolution of course is an interaction of both. But you can see it like this: selection=engine, mutation=fuel. Without fuel, the engine won't run, but the fuel is meaningless without the engine. The emphasis is on the engine, because that's the part that actually does what we want to.
About complexity, I'd rather say that the selection part is responsible about creating complexity, because that's the "designer" part that "recognizes" more complex (well, better) mutations. The mutation part is unaware of what it is doing and does not have any grasp of complexity whatsoever.
Furthermore, the mutations don't need to be random at all. If you know anything about Monte Carlo simulations/integrations, you know you can get better results with less samples if you draw your samples from a distribution that is similar to the integrand. Likewise, the mutations can be aimed at "improvements" to get better results in less generations. Of course, this is not the case in nature, or at least nobody knows of it, because there's no way for nature to "aim" the mutations, or at least no one knows of such a mechanism. But it other applications of evolution this might be the case. For example when designing a car, one "master" (the selector) might have 10 designers that - starting from a given design - try to make variations that they think would be better, and then the master would select the best variation. This would give better results faster than - let's say - using 10 monkeys that make the variations in a "uniform" direction.
The real designing part - creating complexity - would be the master that selects the best results, and not the 10 pupils (intelligent or not) that make the variations. So, selection is really the keyword here, where the emphasis should be on. But of course, evolution still is selection _and_ mutation.
Does this clarify a few things?
I have two things to say:
1. Religion does _not_ lead to ethics. There was moral before religion. You don't _need_ religion to have ethics. Religion is just a _very_good_ selling argument for ethics. Without religion, you actually have to think why this or that ethic view of point is a good one. With religion, ethics get a virtual "absolute" character so it gets much easier to impose it over a large number of people without them questioning you.
2. The "fittest idea or world" (or using Richard Dawkins word "meme") is not necessarily the one that is "best for the people". Just like there are "evil" viruses than spread over the biological world but that are very bad for its hosts, there are "evil" memes that can spread over the world, catch on, but are very bad for the population itself (politics of fear, limiting freedom for the sake of [...])
It is however still an interesting question whether it would be better to have a society of "fooled" people who might just be happy, or a society of "aware" people that now have a bit more trouble understanding their world.
You seem to incorrectly assume you need multiple mutations at once to apply natural selection on. This however is not true. All you need is mutation (that even doesn't need to be random) and selection. There are no further conditions, although of course some "variants" work better than others, depending on the application. For example, in biology sexual mutations result in faster evolution than asexual mutations. For the last couple of millennia, mankind's evolution is largely cultural driven instead of being a biological evolution. Simply, because cultural evolution is much much faster. Let me rephrase that mutations in Darwin's theory don't even need to be random. If you can "aim" your mutations in a beneficial direction, your success rate of finding a such one will be much higher than if you "uniformly distribute" your mutations. Compare it to Monte Carlo integration: if you can draw your samples from a distribution that roughly resembles the integrated function, you will have a much better result with less samples than by using a uniform distribution. So about wikipedia. Are there mutations? Yes, although not exactly random, most of them are "intelligent" mutations, by which I mean that most edits will be "aimed" at being a good mutation. This way, we need less mutations to make real progress. Is there selection? Of course, not all edits are good edits and that's where selection kicks in. All edits are evaluated, and if they are good, they have a much bigger chance to be accepted.
Are you kidding me? Calling Darwin's theory a theory of random mutation show how little you understand of it, because you emphasize the wrong half of his theory. There's basically two parts about Darwin's theory: (1) mutation and (2) selection. Most people consider the first one as most important, but nothing could be further from the truth than that. It's SELECTION that is the keyword here. The mutation part is merely the "fuel" that feeds the selection "engine". In fact, the mutation doesn't even need to be random at all. Let me say that again:
... to have a Darwinian evolution at work. It doesn't have to reflect the biological method of evolution at all. At its core you only need (1) mutation (2) selection. Once you have that, you have Darwinian evolution. I believe it was Richard Dawkins who coined the term MEME to apply Darwin's theory to cultural evolution! Though it is has entirely different mechanism than biological evolution, it still consists of mutation and selection. Not all variants work equally well though: sexual mutation seem to work better than asexual mutations , cultural evolution is much faster than biological evolution, because the latter can only pass information between generations what is very slow. The evolution of mankind in the last few thousands of years are mostly cultural driven.
The mutation in Darwin's theory does NOT have to be random!
Although random mutation is perhaps the most effective way compared to its complexity. It surely is the most simple way for nature to "implement" it. And most of the time it results in very good "fuel". About your example: although the mutations are made by intelligent designers, some designs are rejected and some accepted (to be built further upon). The mutations are not random, but the selection is still in place. That's good enough.
So if you don't want to call Darwin's theory a theory of evolution, call it a THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION instead.
Keep in mind: you do not need DNA, big gene pools, parallel mutations, sexual mutations,
... which proves scientologist will survive (though they will loose the case), spread out through the galaxy and are the basis of the most offensive word in the universe ... which is then returned back in time to finally end up in our copy of the hithhikers' guide to the galaxy.
That's not really what I'm aiming at. But I largely agree.
Chances are that your old classical music LPs have been compressed for dynamic range too. But that was simply due to the fact that an LP simply doesn't have the dynamic range required to fully record classical music. So the compression was a technical matter. Compare it to the need of tonemapping to display a perfect HDR image of a physical scene on a monitor or print.
Today however, pop music is compressed for dynamic by design, simply to make it sound louder than other songs when played at the radio or from a jukebox where the volume knob is left untouched. Compare it multiplying your image by a factor ten simply to show it "brighter" than on the monitor next it. It will "appear" brighter if you don't look too closely, but it will have lost much detail simply because it clips to your monitor brightness.
Modern pop music may not have the same dynamical range as classical music, but it still has more potential than you find on most of today's CDs:
(a) live performances _do_ have the punchy bass drums and highlighted snares lacking on the album, because the PA can deliver what's requested without clipping. Unless your band is called Cradle of Filth (they suffer the EVERYTHING LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE syndrome even on stage).
(b) pop albums of 20 years ago don't suffer this problem. They still have lots of headroom. Even trash metal records (Metallica - Kill 'Em All) behave very well with lots of dynamic range and lots of headroom. Yet, the moment they are remastered, that's totally gone. There's suddenly clipping all over the place. It's still the same music!
So it's not the music. It's the mastering.
I challenge you to listen to your compressed ipod sound on the same volume as that live concert. I wonder if you still will think it's better. It probably won't be very good for your ears though! live convert volumes rarely are anyway.
The reason people think compressed music sounds better is actually a short term effect: because it sounds louder at the same volume setting. Think of "turning the volume knob to 11". However, if you tune the volume so that both appear to be as loud (perhaps you can use a sound pressure level to measure this), then you will notice the uncompressed music has much more punch and is much more pleasant to listen to, while the compressed music will sound very flat.
If music is compressed, limited and clipped like it is on many records today, there really isn't much argument for the need of an extra quality carrier. The quest of the artists, producers or record labels to GET THEIR MUSIC LOUDER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE, causes the dynamic range of music to be sacrificed in order to bump the sound as close as possible to the zero dB boundary. This loudness war causes severe digital clipping, and the distortion you get from it is much MUCH worse that what you get from the MP3 conversion with a decent bitrate.
Not only that, but the music loses every punch, melding all elements in one flat sound, tiring your ears. It's the same with the super audio CD. why needing a carrier with more bits and higher sample rate if you're even using what's available on a CD today?
- Loudness War
- everything louder than everything else
Really, there's no need for ultra high fidelity equipment or sound carriers if the signal is broken by design at the factory!"And hey, it's cheaper than therapy :-D"
Not really: http://www.therapyquestionmark.co.uk/
Very good to sooth your anger! (though not exactly metal)
... how else did _you_ expect it to work?
A simple question for you: water molecules, are they larger or smaller than the bacteria and spores to be killed?
Last time I've checked, the wavelength used in the microwave is about 12.5 cm. Sure, the bacteria are much smaller than that, but is it at all relevant?
KnightTristan
Indeed, he hasn't invented anything new ... every computer has always dealt with the matter the way he purposes: 1/+0 = inf, 1/-0 = -inf, 0/0 = NaN. Only he named NaN nullity.
What he did was simply to name the animal, so you can handle it ... with care!
...
100/0 = inf
10/0 = inf
does not mean 100 == 10
infinity / (infinity - 1) != 1
true, but then again
infinity / infinity != 1
maybe he also should have invented infinity / infinity = infinility?
or
since infinity = 1/0 it means
infinity / infinity = (1/0) / (1/0) = 0/0 = nullity?
In other words, nullity is just your "crazy elite math speek" for NaN.
Tristan.
Well, I dunno, but something says to me that he didn't got his home just yet: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2006/07/intere sting.html
... if he indeed has successfully traded his paperclip for a house, somebody forgot to inform the guy himself.
Or
Cheers,
Tristan
All people breath, so let's tax breathing! 0.1 cent per breath ... That should do the trick ...
Now we just have to implant them a breathcounting chip, with RFID of course, so we can bill them properly.
Nah, skip the RFID part, otherwise we have to do manual readouts, put some satelite communication in it, so it just sends the count over to our computer network. And add a GPS funtion while we're at it. Sounds fun.
Well, I guess that's actually true ... because college students tend to have less money that the working people.
Exactly, MS's solution is to build in an auto self-destruct that's activated the moment malware is detected.
"Hi there, this is Eddy your shipboard^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdesktop computer, and I'm delighted to inform you that I'm going to self destruct in 5 seocnds. Sorry, you don't have time to close all applications to save your precious data. We have a real emergency situation here! It would be pointless to save anything anyway, because we're going to format your entire harddisk to make sure every tinsy bit of malware is destroyed. Share and Enjoy!"
I can't disagree more ... Why? I'll tell you why:
1. I don't want to have bend over my fingers to type those freaking chinese characters or a Danish O with a slash, just to go to a website. No, URLs should be plain and simple. No accents, no weird characters. Everyone can read it, everyone can type it.
2. You might remember the unicode URL hack? Now, I don't want that to happen to me!
So instead of expanding the allowed characterset for URIs, they should limit it! In fact, they should limit URIs to 26 letters, 10 digits, and underscore, a dash and a dot (and the slashes of course) ... OK ok, and a few others like ~ and % ...
Tristan.Where's the time you could buy two pieces of hardware and with the max of some resistors, capacitors and inductors, could connect them and play nicely together ... without breaking _any_ laws ...
Where is it?
How comes I cannot connect a single piece of hardware in my house without hitting a 'for-the-sake-of-copyright-protection' incompatibility issue?
Where's my promised home media system that connects every hardware in my house?
Tristan.
Why would the RIAA actually bother to investigate what songs are downloaded and by whom? Too much trouble for them! Everyone has illegally downloaded before, right? So no one will ever notice if you just ...
...
1. pick up the phone book and choose your victims at random.
2. pick a few popular songs that everyone must have downloaded anyway
3.
4. profit!
Increased stress levels and heart problems caused by constant noise levels are not pseudoscience! Pulsating noise makes it even worse! If you don't believe, go live under one for a few weeks. I can assure you: you won't like it!