that's why modern medicine is so much more advanced than it was even a hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago? Not even fifty. In the 1960s they used ethyl ether as an anesthetic. Highly falmmable (it's still used as automotive starting fluid) and really NASTY effects. They used it on me when I had a tonsillectomy as a kid, then a couple years later when I broke both my arms. The stuff is a terrible nightmare trip to hell and you wake up sick as a dog.
Now they say "ok, you're going to sleep now" and you say "uh, it's not working" and they reply "we're done, you're in the recovery room."
Tuberculosis meant having a lung removed. No longer. A gall bladder operation left a six inch scar, now half an inch. Polio meant a dead or crippled child. Now it's gone, or nearly so.
In the sixties, McCoy's sick bay was futuristic; they had nothing like his monitors. Today his sick bay looks primitive.
In the eighties, HIV was a death sentence. Now they can control it with drugs and keep you alive for the length of a normal lifetime.
In the fifties, any cancer was a death sentence. TB meant you were never going to be able to do hard work again, if you even survived.
There were no organ transplants. Your kidneys failed, you died. Period. No LASIC, no CrystaLens, no soft contact lenses, no antivirals, no naproxin sodium, no viagra, no SSRIs, no CAT scans, no MRIs.
Today's young people have no idea how primitive it was 50 years ago.
I hauled AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment; power generators, lights, air condistioners, etc) to the BUFs in 1973-4 at Utapao AFB in Thailand. B-52s were commonly known as BUFs -- Big Ugly Fuckers. They certainly were ugly, ugly as in REALLY mean looking.
I got to Thailand 4 days before the congress' mandated end to the bombing, and one took off every thirty seconds from when I got there until the deadline. I thought they were trying to drop as many bombs as they could before the cutoff time, but I later met a man who'd been stationed there five years earlier, and one took off every thirty seconds the whole year he was there.
I was stationed at Beale in California after coming back to the states, and had the best job in the world. It was to take a pickup truck, make sure it was full of gas and everything worked, then play pool, read, play pinball, watch TV while waiting for Armageddon, when I would drive the pilot to his BUF to nuke Russia.
There were more BUFs there than I could count. Every one of them was loaded with nuclear ordinance.
I always referred to Beale as Armageddon Air Force Base.
More interesting were the SR-71s at Beale, they had nine of them. The only louder sound I ever heard was a space shuttle taking off. Watching from a mile away, the ground shook as it shot down the runway, did a wheelie, and looked like a bottlerocket taking off.
Interesting story, but I've heard some old blues from the '40s with distorted guitars. Almost all of John Lee Hooker's songs sound like the amp is cranked up all the way.
You guys are both wrong. If it's in Anerica it's obviously Kentucky, the only place you can make Bourbon, and home of Hicks and rednecks, and if it's in Europe it's obviously Irish.
How many Irish does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to hold the bulb and two to drink until the room spins. Obviously, the Irish will find the Hicks-Boozehound particle, particularly if it's an Irishman who's immigrated to Kentucky.
It seems especially retarded to me, considering that every single one of those networks stream their shows from their own websites! I rarely get a watchable signal for CBS, so I stream Big Bang Theory from CBS' site. It does annoy me that they don't put up the stream until the show is finished airing in California.
Sometimes I think that in order to get a job in the media biz you have to take an IQ test. If you score more than two digits you're disqualified from the job.
Note: I'm an electronics technician and electric guitarist with ~40 years in both fields.
Then you understand and should have added that the reason guitarists want tube amps is because of the clipping distortion. If you look at an overdriven tube amp's output on an oscilloscope, the sine wave is distorted into a square wave with rounded corners, while an overdriven solid state amp's clipping distortion clips the signal sharply, giving it a completely different sound.
A lot of guitarists (again, as you know but many here probably don't) will have a small tube amp cranked to 10, with a microphone directly in front of it feeding a solid state, non-overdriven amp. It doesn't sound quite as good but it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to transport than a single huge tube amp.
The reason analog sounds better than digital is digital's alias distortion. A 15 kHz tone has only three samples at a 44k sample rate, and there's no way to discern the difference between the number of different waveforms with only three samples per crest. If they doubled the bit rate and increased the sampling rate by a factor of 10x, I'm pretty sure digital would blow analog away when it came to fidelity. A saxophone should sound like the saxiphonist wants it to sound, with no distortion that he doesn't deliberately introduce.
Ozzie Osbourne was sued by the distraught father of a teenager who committed suicide because of his song "suicide solution." Osbourne won, because the song was a warning about the dangers of alcohol and had nothing to do with intentionally killing one's self.
Likewise, VH's "Jump" wasn't about jumping off a building, it was about being bossed around by the record label. "Can't you see me standing here with my back against the record machine? I think you know what I mean... I might as well jump." As in "when I say jump, don't ask 'how high', just JUMP!"
Al Gore's wife and teh rest of the PMRC embarrassed themselves in a Senate hearing about evil rock and roll over "Under The Blade". It wasn't a song about murder as the PMRC thought, it was about undergoing surgery.
That's the trouble with poetry. Charles Manson thought the Beatles' Helter Skelter was a call to murder black people and start a race war. Crazy people especially mishear music, moreso than you or I. Lennon said it was about a popular water slide in Britain, but interestingly, if you play it backwards it's about the joys of heroin. Somehow, I think that was deliberate on Lennon's part.
Does that jingle for the sex toy shop say "where fun and fantasy meet" or is it "we're fun and fantasy meat?"
You're absolutely correct, except for "you want the oddities of the tape". No, you do NOT want the oddities of the tape. You want it to sound as much like a live performance as possible, including the tube amp's clipping distortion and the hall's acoustics.
The anechoic chamber is for listening in, not recording in.
It doesn't matter any more, they changed it so that "funny" now gains karma. So the commenter gets his karma and his comment is highly visible. Plus, a comment can be both funny and insightful.
I find it amusing how there's a double standard for quality when it comes to A/V... In a home theater system, marketing a device as "all-digital" implies that it offers uncompromising quality.
Key words here I highlighted. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Marketing is aimed at the half of the population with two digit IQs. The fact is, analog and digital both have their strengths and weaknesses. Analog is higher fidelity than digital (especially when you're talking about high speed tape recorders/players, but it applies to LPs vs CDs too), especially with today's limited digital technologies.
LPs have a far better frequency response than CDs, and CDs suffer from aliasing in the upper frequencies, but CDs have a better dynamic range and no noise. In a low end system, the CD will beat the LP every time. Not so in a high end system. In an expensive setup, CDs sound like shit compared to LPs.
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia
Wrong. The audiophile (I wish I could afford to be one) wants the flute in his recording to sound as much like a flute as possible, and he certainly doesn't want clicks, pops, or hisses.
If the bitrate were doubled and the sampling rate increased tenfold, digital would blow all analog away.
But for low end systems, like I said, your CD is going to be better than an LP. A cheap turntable is going to have rumble, caused by the motor's vibrations travelling to the stylus. A high end turntable's rumble is inaudible. The low end manufacturer is likely to counter this rumble by cutting down the low end, and its fidelity as well. Plus its tonearm is going to be heavier, introducing those pops you get from the needle hitting the record, and otherwise wearing out the LP. Also, the lowered bass response will likely make them compensate by cutting out some of the high end, as well. In either case, your speakers are going to be the biggest limiting factor, and they're also the most expensive part of the system. You're not going to get very good fidelity with two four inch squawkers and a "sub" woofer. With that setup, you're not going to get any better fidelity by increasing the sampling rate and size, because it's already at a higher fidelity than your cheap speakers can deliver.
Aside from the misspelling I find the use of the word missile versus rocket interesting.
It's a rocket when it goes up, a missle when it comes down. A thrown rock is a missle. And this wasn't designed for speceflight, it was designed to carry a destructive payload, which is what makes it a missle.
Don't any of you people have access to a dictionary? From Webster's:
Definition of MISSILE 1: capable of being thrown or projected to strike a distant object 2: adapted for throwing or hurling missiles Origin of MISSILE Latin missilis, from mittere to throw, send First Known Use: 1611
A thrown rock is a missle, but there's no guidance system except your eye-hand coordination. By your (false) definition the Apollo rockets were missles, since they did indeed have guidance systems (BTW this week is the anniversary of Apollo 13).
A missile is a weapon. A rocket isn't necessarily. A rocket whose purpose is destruction is a missile, and if it has a guidance system it's a guided missile. If its purpose is other than destroying something it's just a rocket, guided or not.
The Korean missile was designed for destruction. Missile is a far more accurate term than "rocket" in that context.
The word "missile" has been in use since the 1600s and indeed does mean projectiles, including "shit that an unruly highschool kid throws". Rocks, arrows, bullets, rockets with warheads are all missles. Missiles with guidence systems are "guided missles." Rockets carrying people or sattellites are not. Rockets carrying warheads are.
I'm annoyed that so many are putting their own, INCORRECT definitions of "missile" and "rocket" in comments, and being modded up for it. Sad, folks at slashdot used to be a bit more educated than that.
Projectile is synonymous with missile. Rockeyt is not, even though a rocket can be a projectile.
I was being sarcastic. Since many ( but not all ) religious people would have told him instead to go burn in hell.
I'm glad you said "but not all". You'll find two kinds of people in a Christian church: those who want good for everyone, and hypocrites who don't read the bibles they thump. There are also churches with preachers who are the wolves in sheep's clothing, like a cartain chucrh in Florida demonstrating at soldiers' funerals with "God hates fags" plackards. God loves everyone, and we are supposed to, too.
God even loves atheists. He even loves terrorists. Believe it or not, he even loves Newt Gingrich. Man, that's a hard thing to do.
I spent a year in Thailand, and can say that I never met a single person in that Bhuddist country who would want anyone burning in hell. Those were some of the nicest, friendliest people I ever met.
Forty bucks. Windows? A hell of a lot more; I paid $125 upgrading fron 98 to XP arouond 2005. That's half the cost of a small notebook with Win 7 preinstalled these days.
NASA is about space science, including studying Earth's climate from space. Now that we're starting to get private, commercial space flights I'm happy to have NASA sending robots all over the solar system.
I may live to see the day when I can afford a few orbits in a Virgin Galactic craft. My grandmother was born the year the Wright Brothers first flew, and she was my age when we landed on the moon, I was six or seven when Yuri Gargarin first went to space. So maybe it'll be possible!
I don't think intelligence counts nearly as much as the ability to suffer, but a baboon is likely to suffer far more in the wild than in a researcher's lab. And despite Heinlein's short story's title, baboons aren't human.
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that's why modern medicine is so much more advanced than it was even a hundred years ago.
A hundred years ago? Not even fifty. In the 1960s they used ethyl ether as an anesthetic. Highly falmmable (it's still used as automotive starting fluid) and really NASTY effects. They used it on me when I had a tonsillectomy as a kid, then a couple years later when I broke both my arms. The stuff is a terrible nightmare trip to hell and you wake up sick as a dog.
Now they say "ok, you're going to sleep now" and you say "uh, it's not working" and they reply "we're done, you're in the recovery room."
Tuberculosis meant having a lung removed. No longer. A gall bladder operation left a six inch scar, now half an inch. Polio meant a dead or crippled child. Now it's gone, or nearly so.
In the sixties, McCoy's sick bay was futuristic; they had nothing like his monitors. Today his sick bay looks primitive.
In the eighties, HIV was a death sentence. Now they can control it with drugs and keep you alive for the length of a normal lifetime.
In the fifties, any cancer was a death sentence. TB meant you were never going to be able to do hard work again, if you even survived.
There were no organ transplants. Your kidneys failed, you died. Period. No LASIC, no CrystaLens, no soft contact lenses, no antivirals, no naproxin sodium, no viagra, no SSRIs, no CAT scans, no MRIs.
Today's young people have no idea how primitive it was 50 years ago.
I hauled AGE (Aerospace Ground Equipment; power generators, lights, air condistioners, etc) to the BUFs in 1973-4 at Utapao AFB in Thailand. B-52s were commonly known as BUFs -- Big Ugly Fuckers. They certainly were ugly, ugly as in REALLY mean looking.
I got to Thailand 4 days before the congress' mandated end to the bombing, and one took off every thirty seconds from when I got there until the deadline. I thought they were trying to drop as many bombs as they could before the cutoff time, but I later met a man who'd been stationed there five years earlier, and one took off every thirty seconds the whole year he was there.
I was stationed at Beale in California after coming back to the states, and had the best job in the world. It was to take a pickup truck, make sure it was full of gas and everything worked, then play pool, read, play pinball, watch TV while waiting for Armageddon, when I would drive the pilot to his BUF to nuke Russia.
There were more BUFs there than I could count. Every one of them was loaded with nuclear ordinance.
I always referred to Beale as Armageddon Air Force Base.
More interesting were the SR-71s at Beale, they had nine of them. The only louder sound I ever heard was a space shuttle taking off. Watching from a mile away, the ground shook as it shot down the runway, did a wheelie, and looked like a bottlerocket taking off.
The military has some amazing tech.
Interesting story, but I've heard some old blues from the '40s with distorted guitars. Almost all of John Lee Hooker's songs sound like the amp is cranked up all the way.
I'll have to find the song, but how could it be rock and roll when the term had yet to be coined?
You guys are both wrong. If it's in Anerica it's obviously Kentucky, the only place you can make Bourbon, and home of Hicks and rednecks, and if it's in Europe it's obviously Irish.
How many Irish does it take to change a light bulb? Three. One to hold the bulb and two to drink until the room spins. Obviously, the Irish will find the Hicks-Boozehound particle, particularly if it's an Irishman who's immigrated to Kentucky.
It seems especially retarded to me, considering that every single one of those networks stream their shows from their own websites! I rarely get a watchable signal for CBS, so I stream Big Bang Theory from CBS' site. It does annoy me that they don't put up the stream until the show is finished airing in California.
Sometimes I think that in order to get a job in the media biz you have to take an IQ test. If you score more than two digits you're disqualified from the job.
You're confusing Muddy Waters with the guy who invented his electric guitar, Les Paul.
Note: I'm an electronics technician and electric guitarist with ~40 years in both fields.
Then you understand and should have added that the reason guitarists want tube amps is because of the clipping distortion. If you look at an overdriven tube amp's output on an oscilloscope, the sine wave is distorted into a square wave with rounded corners, while an overdriven solid state amp's clipping distortion clips the signal sharply, giving it a completely different sound.
A lot of guitarists (again, as you know but many here probably don't) will have a small tube amp cranked to 10, with a microphone directly in front of it feeding a solid state, non-overdriven amp. It doesn't sound quite as good but it's a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to transport than a single huge tube amp.
The reason analog sounds better than digital is digital's alias distortion. A 15 kHz tone has only three samples at a 44k sample rate, and there's no way to discern the difference between the number of different waveforms with only three samples per crest. If they doubled the bit rate and increased the sampling rate by a factor of 10x, I'm pretty sure digital would blow analog away when it came to fidelity. A saxophone should sound like the saxiphonist wants it to sound, with no distortion that he doesn't deliberately introduce.
One wonders if the good judge would object to the police having sex with his wife.
Of course not. After all, adultery isn't illegal. The judge would only object if he paid her for it.
Ozzie Osbourne was sued by the distraught father of a teenager who committed suicide because of his song "suicide solution." Osbourne won, because the song was a warning about the dangers of alcohol and had nothing to do with intentionally killing one's self.
Likewise, VH's "Jump" wasn't about jumping off a building, it was about being bossed around by the record label. "Can't you see me standing here with my back against the record machine? I think you know what I mean... I might as well jump." As in "when I say jump, don't ask 'how high', just JUMP!"
Al Gore's wife and teh rest of the PMRC embarrassed themselves in a Senate hearing about evil rock and roll over "Under The Blade". It wasn't a song about murder as the PMRC thought, it was about undergoing surgery.
That's the trouble with poetry. Charles Manson thought the Beatles' Helter Skelter was a call to murder black people and start a race war. Crazy people especially mishear music, moreso than you or I. Lennon said it was about a popular water slide in Britain, but interestingly, if you play it backwards it's about the joys of heroin. Somehow, I think that was deliberate on Lennon's part.
Does that jingle for the sex toy shop say "where fun and fantasy meet" or is it "we're fun and fantasy meat?"
You're absolutely correct, except for "you want the oddities of the tape". No, you do NOT want the oddities of the tape. You want it to sound as much like a live performance as possible, including the tube amp's clipping distortion and the hall's acoustics.
The anechoic chamber is for listening in, not recording in.
It doesn't matter any more, they changed it so that "funny" now gains karma. So the commenter gets his karma and his comment is highly visible. Plus, a comment can be both funny and insightful.
Look at it this way -- you are to God what the software you write is to you. To your software, you are omnipotent. YOU control your computer.
Do you want your software to have complete control over your computer, or do you want your software to do what YOU want IT to do?
I find it amusing how there's a double standard for quality when it comes to A/V... In a home theater system, marketing a device as "all-digital" implies that it offers uncompromising quality.
Key words here I highlighted. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Marketing is aimed at the half of the population with two digit IQs. The fact is, analog and digital both have their strengths and weaknesses. Analog is higher fidelity than digital (especially when you're talking about high speed tape recorders/players, but it applies to LPs vs CDs too), especially with today's limited digital technologies.
LPs have a far better frequency response than CDs, and CDs suffer from aliasing in the upper frequencies, but CDs have a better dynamic range and no noise. In a low end system, the CD will beat the LP every time. Not so in a high end system. In an expensive setup, CDs sound like shit compared to LPs.
I can appreciate that an old audiophile wants things to sound exactly how he expects them, which means keeping his old analog system with all its defects, noise, and nostalgia
Wrong. The audiophile (I wish I could afford to be one) wants the flute in his recording to sound as much like a flute as possible, and he certainly doesn't want clicks, pops, or hisses.
If the bitrate were doubled and the sampling rate increased tenfold, digital would blow all analog away.
But for low end systems, like I said, your CD is going to be better than an LP. A cheap turntable is going to have rumble, caused by the motor's vibrations travelling to the stylus. A high end turntable's rumble is inaudible. The low end manufacturer is likely to counter this rumble by cutting down the low end, and its fidelity as well. Plus its tonearm is going to be heavier, introducing those pops you get from the needle hitting the record, and otherwise wearing out the LP. Also, the lowered bass response will likely make them compensate by cutting out some of the high end, as well. In either case, your speakers are going to be the biggest limiting factor, and they're also the most expensive part of the system. You're not going to get very good fidelity with two four inch squawkers and a "sub" woofer. With that setup, you're not going to get any better fidelity by increasing the sampling rate and size, because it's already at a higher fidelity than your cheap speakers can deliver.
Aside from the misspelling I find the use of the word missile versus rocket interesting.
It's a rocket when it goes up, a missle when it comes down. A thrown rock is a missle. And this wasn't designed for speceflight, it was designed to carry a destructive payload, which is what makes it a missle.
Death is not a penalty. It is a certainty. Everyone dies. Everyone. Would you rather die for a good cause, or from cancer?
Don't any of you people have access to a dictionary? From Webster's:
Definition of MISSILE
1: capable of being thrown or projected to strike a distant object
2: adapted for throwing or hurling missiles
Origin of MISSILE
Latin missilis, from mittere to throw, send
First Known Use: 1611
A thrown rock is a missle, but there's no guidance system except your eye-hand coordination. By your (false) definition the Apollo rockets were missles, since they did indeed have guidance systems (BTW this week is the anniversary of Apollo 13).
A missile is a weapon. A rocket isn't necessarily. A rocket whose purpose is destruction is a missile, and if it has a guidance system it's a guided missile. If its purpose is other than destroying something it's just a rocket, guided or not.
The Korean missile was designed for destruction. Missile is a far more accurate term than "rocket" in that context.
The word "missile" has been in use since the 1600s and indeed does mean projectiles, including "shit that an unruly highschool kid throws". Rocks, arrows, bullets, rockets with warheads are all missles. Missiles with guidence systems are "guided missles." Rockets carrying people or sattellites are not. Rockets carrying warheads are.
I'm annoyed that so many are putting their own, INCORRECT definitions of "missile" and "rocket" in comments, and being modded up for it. Sad, folks at slashdot used to be a bit more educated than that.
Projectile is synonymous with missile. Rockeyt is not, even though a rocket can be a projectile.
I was being sarcastic. Since many ( but not all ) religious people would have told him instead to go burn in hell.
I'm glad you said "but not all". You'll find two kinds of people in a Christian church: those who want good for everyone, and hypocrites who don't read the bibles they thump. There are also churches with preachers who are the wolves in sheep's clothing, like a cartain chucrh in Florida demonstrating at soldiers' funerals with "God hates fags" plackards. God loves everyone, and we are supposed to, too.
God even loves atheists. He even loves terrorists. Believe it or not, he even loves Newt Gingrich. Man, that's a hard thing to do.
I spent a year in Thailand, and can say that I never met a single person in that Bhuddist country who would want anyone burning in hell. Those were some of the nicest, friendliest people I ever met.
Me? I'll stick to my old VW Bug. ;)
My point exactly.
We had PCs in our office for ten years before they were networked together.
Forty bucks. Windows? A hell of a lot more; I paid $125 upgrading fron 98 to XP arouond 2005. That's half the cost of a small notebook with Win 7 preinstalled these days.
If you didn't want to read the story, why did you click the link?
NASA is about space science, including studying Earth's climate from space. Now that we're starting to get private, commercial space flights I'm happy to have NASA sending robots all over the solar system.
I may live to see the day when I can afford a few orbits in a Virgin Galactic craft. My grandmother was born the year the Wright Brothers first flew, and she was my age when we landed on the moon, I was six or seven when Yuri Gargarin first went to space. So maybe it'll be possible!
Jerry Was a Man.
I don't think intelligence counts nearly as much as the ability to suffer, but a baboon is likely to suffer far more in the wild than in a researcher's lab. And despite Heinlein's short story's title, baboons aren't human.