This is funny, because the other day I filed an 'obscenity complaint' at the FCC's website complaining about the 'obscene' way all the stations crank up the volume on commercials and suggesting that the average volume of commercials be required to roughly match the average volume of the previous 30 minutes of programming/commercials.
I filed the complaint under obscenity because the 'General Complaint' form seemed to apply only to telephone issues... And the loudness of commercials - especially ones featuring alarm clocks ( I avoid Irving gas station nowadays because of this, and anyone who buys HeadOn is contributing to giving ME a headache )
Anyway, this goes to show that those who draft the FCC regulations are either not experts about what they regulate, or are in fact experts hired by the regulated industry's lobby. I am fairly ignorant of sound processing, but even I knew enough to specifically define volume as average volume rather than peak volume.
Not defining volume as average volume is completely ineffective. I was completely unaware that commercial volume was even regulated at all until reading this article. The current state of affairs is as if there were no regulation at all.
A drug like this one could be used by criminals to wipe the memories of their victims. This drug would leave obvious traces such as obvious amnesia.
But the other memory drug the article links to works diferently - by preventing the formation of new memories. So that drug would seem like a more likely candidate to be abused as a date-rape drug. Leaving someone retarded and not knowing their own name is far more conspicuous than leaving them not knowing what they did the night before - especially if they were drinking.
Umm.. Hiding complexity is a GOOD THING. Think about this, internalize it, and embrace it.
Most of the time, if confronted with a function that makes a peanut butter sandwich, say called make_pb_and_j() then we expect to find simple high level instructions on how to make a pb_and_j, something like:
make_pb_and_j() { var plate:= get_plate_from_cupboard(); var knife:= get_knife_from_drawer(); var bread:= get_slices_of_bread_from_bag( -slices=>2 ); var pb:= get_peanut_butter_from_cupboard(); var j:= get_jelly_from_fridge();
var sandwich:= put_sandwich_halves_together( -halves=>bread );
return sandwich; }
We don't want to find instructions on how to go to the grocery store and buy the bread, or AI on how to earn money with which to buy the bread, or instructions on how to grow the wheat or till the field, or even to make the bread. ( or peanuts or the strawberries for the jelly, or how to fire clay into a plate or smelt ore into steel to make the knife etc )
All those complex actions are necessary in order to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I don't need to know about them to make a pb and j because in the above example this complexity was nicely hidden in the get_xxx_from_xxx functions. Given a get_fluff() function, then if I want to make a fluffernutter, then I need only change a few lines.
What too often happens is that someone is given a make_pb_and_j function and they need to make it into a make_peanut_sandwich( -topping ) function that can either make a fluffernutter or a pb_and_j. Instead of creating a get_fluff function, since fluff is pretty simple to make, they lazily add the logic of what would have been a get_fluff function inside an if block: ( I had to delete the example because of the lameness filter )
That expanding out all the steps into if-blocks makes for hard to read code is obvious. They teach programmers not to do this in CS 101, but that course is hardly necessary to appreciate the common sense fact that information hiding is a good idea.
Now if a programmer wants to be able to maintain their code, then they follow common sense good practices, but in a group, this falls apart. The goal of a programmer is usually not to create maintainable code. It is to collect another paycheck without getting fired. Writing good, or maintainable code is bad for one's career. Writing good, elegant, maintainable code and working efficiently are only good goals when you yourself reap the benefits and suffer the consequences resulting from the quality of the code - i.e. you are your own boss.
Consider what happens to the 'good programmer' who insists on writing good code, in a group of 'bad programmers' who don't insist on any such thing:
Someone, a 'good programmer' who takes the time to produce easy to read, maintainable code takes on the extra work entailed by producing quality product. But they are measured against 'bad programmers' who just add another nested if statement to whatever 20 page long pile of crap method they are coding..
Now every bit of 'good code' that the 'good programmer' produces is MUCH easier to read and work on than the crap everyone else produces. Everyone who has the pleasure of being assigned to work on it gets their project done either ahead of schedule or with time to fart around on slashdot. Working on good code makes you look good.
But working on bad code makes you look bad because you have to read and understand horribly byzantine piles of interconnected, pasted and unfactored crap to m
The author of the article doesn't seem to understand that 'X negative' is synonymous with 'Type X, RH negative' where X can be A, B, AB or O.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type
The positive or negative in a blood type refers to the blood being either positive or negative for the Rhesus (RH) Factor.
So there is no such thing as being AB-positive but negative for the RH factor. The preceeding is an oxymoron.
Since the author of the article evidently does not understand this, the whole article is unclear and not to be trusted. Either the treated blood is ok for everyone ( both the A, B and also the RH antigens are removed by the enzyme ) or the enzymes remove A and B antigens but not RH antigens. In that case, the blood is not universally safe. Given the author's confusion, I would not hazard to guess which the actual case is.
I heard that if someone throws a grenade at you then the best thing to do is to lay flat on the ground next to it. The theory is that the blast will reflect off the ground and blow all the shrapnel up at a 45 degree angle. You will be safe because you are under the flying shrapnel.
Commercial companies are aimed at one thing: separating you from your money. With Linux, I don't have to worry about some company designing the operating system I use in such a way as to make me dependent on them. If you become dependent on a for-profit entity, be assured they will use that leverage to extract cash. Don't have the cash? Too bad.
Windows has a long history of doing what it can to tie you in. They withhold features in their 'cheapo' versions of their operating systems in order to sell that feature in a more expensive version. Think about how long it took preemptive multitasking to be ubiquitous amongst all versions. Vista is set up the same way: create artificial problems that you have to shell out to fix.
The business strategy of Mac has always been: Make your operating system and user experience the best it can be. Make your operating system only run on their hardware, and then take advantage of the user's dependence on you as a source for the hardware in order to gouge them on price for a given class of machine. Like MS, they are using technology to make you dependent on them so that you have to give them money.
Innovation serves the interests of the innovator.
Windows innovates to create new features in order to create new things that others must interoperate with in the hope that users will become dependant on these features and unable to tell MS to take a hike when they charge more money. Windows incorporates others innovations to give users no compelling reason to switch.
Macintosh innovates to set itself apart from the crowd. It must offer a better product on the software side in order to be able to overcharge on the hardware side. On the whole macs have been ahead of the curve in terms of truely useful innovations. There was a time towards the end of the pre-OSx era when they were decidedly not ahead of the curve, but they have remedied that. However, Mac users are Mac's bitch so to speak. They've traded their ability to shop for hardware for not being raped in software on a daily basis so to speak.
Linux incorporates the best of what out there. Basically, if it's good, linux ( or really oss ) gets it. Someone re-implements it learning from past mistakes and without the manipulative garbage that can come from the commercial side of things. Innovation is mostly in the how of how things get done rather than in the what of what gets done. The innovations serve the interests of the innovators who are precicely the open source software developers. They create a system that is good for developing on. If you ever had a truely innovative idea, you would want to develop it on linux and then find a way to port it to environments where you can make money, or sell it as a service running on your linux server. You as a user can use the many free pieces of software that there are to innovate in whatever area you wish. And, free from the business need to trap as many novices into being dependant on a piece of software, oss application designers are free to try and create the 'best' interface. Think of VI or Emacs: they are hard to learn at first, but once you do, you realize they rock better than the fancy looking and easy to use at first alternatives that are in comparison horrible for heavy continued use.
And with OSS, you know your investment in learning the expert features won't be turned against you to empty your wallet. A decent piece of Open source software will be there forever, and so your gained skills are cumulative. It really CAN take years to become semi-proficient at really using computers. But so what? You inexorably become very powerful, as you continue to reap the benefits of your cumulative experience forever.
Fischer-Tropsch of Coal is inevitable if Oil prices can be
predicted with confidence to remain at or above $50/barrel in the
future. That is when Fischer-Tropsch of Coal becomes economic.
Because energy drives the economy and all of politics is 'the
economy stupid', concerns about Global Warming won't affect it's
widespread adoption at all.
For those who don't know, Fischer-Tropsch is a process that has
been used in countries where Oil is hard to come by but Coal is
abundant, notably Nazi Germany and South Africa under Apartheid.
The process can be used to convert any carbonaceous material into
either diesel or ethanol. The quality of the artificial diesel
produced this way is actually superior to diesel from pumped oil
because it is free from impurities like sulfur.
In the past people have put their heads in their ovens with the
gas on but no flame to commit suicide. Natural gas will kill you
at high enough concentrations - eventually, but not quickly enough
to make this a painless death. But in the past, ovens were not
fueled by Natural Gas. They were fueled by Town Gas. Town Gas is a
50/50 mixture of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide. Carbon monoxide
will put you down like a lightswitch being turned off. It is
considered as lethal as the Hydrogen Cyanide they use in the gas
chamber.
Both Carbon Monoxide ( CO ) and Hydrogen ( H2 ) are clean burning
cooking fuels. The mixure was produced by having a large metal can
full of coal with an inlet pipe and an outlet pipe. Underneath,
burining coal heated the can-full-of-coal to a red heat. Steam was
fed into the can of non-burning red-hot coal. In the can the
following chemical reaction takes place: H2O + C -> H2 + CO
Town Gas has been replaced by the ( safer - both toxicity and
explosion wise ) Natural Gas for cooking. But this mixture of
Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide is called by the refining industry by
the name 'Synthesis gas'. Basically, using Fischer Tropsch, this
can be converted into any hydrocarbons / ethanol /
whatever-you-may-want
This reaction can turn not only Coal, but ANY carbonaceous
material into liquid fuel. It works on 'Stranded Natural Gas' ( NG
which is too far away from civilization to economically transport
as gas ) or even biomass. When used on biomass, say to convert
switchgrass ( a non-agrigultural crop that grows on non-arable
land ) to ethanol, it is carbon-neutral. In fact this method of
producing diesel/ethanol would work with algae too. It holds the
potential to make ethanol from biodiesel actually economic without
government subsidies someday as opposed to distilling ethanol from
corn which would be better used as feed/food/fertilizer.
Fischer-Tropsch on Stranded Natural gas produces a fuel that when
burned amounts to somewhat more CO2 being released than from
pumped oil. The liquid fuel itself is no worse than pumped fuel,
but more carbon was released to produce the fuel than is released
to produce pumped-outta-ground fuel.
However converting Coal into Oil via Fischer-Tropsch releases
about twice as much CO2 into the air as burning Oil pumped out of
the ground. This is because Oil is a HYDROCarbon meaning it has
hydrogen and carbon. Extracting energy from Oil by burning it
produces H2O + CO2 + approx 2 energy. Coal is pure carbon with no
hydrogen. Extracting 2 energy from Coal means 2O2 + 2C -%gt; 2CO2 + 2
energy . Plus there are the inherent energy losses that you get
when converting anything into anything.
Oil has recently been over 75 dollars a barrel. If investors could
be sure Oil would stay that high, they might invest in
Fischer-Tropsch. But it is likely that oil will not consistently
Who was it that said something to the effect of: "Either the universe is a deterministic process and so we have no free will, or the universe is not deterministic and subject to unpredictable random noise and so we have no free will." ?
The whole idea of free will is dumb.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes there is an objective measure of 'loudness' it's the Root Mean Square average volume. RTFA
This is funny, because the other day I filed an 'obscenity complaint' at the FCC's website complaining about the 'obscene' way all the stations crank up the volume on commercials and suggesting that the average volume of commercials be required to roughly match the average volume of the previous 30 minutes of programming/commercials.
I filed the complaint under obscenity because the 'General Complaint' form seemed to apply only to telephone issues... And the loudness of commercials - especially ones featuring alarm clocks ( I avoid Irving gas station nowadays because of this, and anyone who buys HeadOn is contributing to giving ME a headache )
Anyway, this goes to show that those who draft the FCC regulations are either not experts about what they regulate, or are in fact experts hired by the regulated industry's lobby. I am fairly ignorant of sound processing, but even I knew enough to specifically define volume as average volume rather than peak volume.
Not defining volume as average volume is completely ineffective. I was completely unaware that commercial volume was even regulated at all until reading this article. The current state of affairs is as if there were no regulation at all.
A drug like this one could be used by criminals to wipe the memories of their victims. This drug would leave obvious traces such as obvious amnesia.
But the other memory drug the article links to works diferently - by preventing the formation of new memories. So that drug would seem like a more likely candidate to be abused as a date-rape drug. Leaving someone retarded and not knowing their own name is far more conspicuous than leaving them not knowing what they did the night before - especially if they were drinking.
Umm.. Hiding complexity is a GOOD THING. Think about this, internalize it, and embrace it.
Most of the time, if confronted with a function that makes a peanut butter sandwich, say called make_pb_and_j() then we expect to find simple high level instructions on how to make a pb_and_j, something like:
We don't want to find instructions on how to go to the grocery store and buy the bread, or AI on how to earn money with which to buy the bread, or instructions on how to grow the wheat or till the field, or even to make the bread. ( or peanuts or the strawberries for the jelly, or how to fire clay into a plate or smelt ore into steel to make the knife etc )
All those complex actions are necessary in order to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I don't need to know about them to make a pb and j because in the above example this complexity was nicely hidden in the get_xxx_from_xxx functions. Given a get_fluff() function, then if I want to make a fluffernutter, then I need only change a few lines.
What too often happens is that someone is given a make_pb_and_j function and they need to make it into a make_peanut_sandwich( -topping ) function that can either make a fluffernutter or a pb_and_j. Instead of creating a get_fluff function, since fluff is pretty simple to make, they lazily add the logic of what would have been a get_fluff function inside an if block: ( I had to delete the example because of the lameness filter )
That expanding out all the steps into if-blocks makes for hard to read code is obvious. They teach programmers not to do this in CS 101, but that course is hardly necessary to appreciate the common sense fact that information hiding is a good idea.
Now if a programmer wants to be able to maintain their code, then they follow common sense good practices, but in a group, this falls apart. The goal of a programmer is usually not to create maintainable code. It is to collect another paycheck without getting fired. Writing good, or maintainable code is bad for one's career. Writing good, elegant, maintainable code and working efficiently are only good goals when you yourself reap the benefits and suffer the consequences resulting from the quality of the code - i.e. you are your own boss.
Consider what happens to the 'good programmer' who insists on writing good code, in a group of 'bad programmers' who don't insist on any such thing:
Someone, a 'good programmer' who takes the time to produce easy to read, maintainable code takes on the extra work entailed by producing quality product. But they are measured against 'bad programmers' who just add another nested if statement to whatever 20 page long pile of crap method they are coding..
Now every bit of 'good code' that the 'good programmer' produces is MUCH easier to read and work on than the crap everyone else produces. Everyone who has the pleasure of being assigned to work on it gets their project done either ahead of schedule or with time to fart around on slashdot. Working on good code makes you look good.
But working on bad code makes you look bad because you have to read and understand horribly byzantine piles of interconnected, pasted and unfactored crap to m
The author of the article doesn't seem to understand that 'X negative' is synonymous with 'Type X, RH negative' where X can be A, B, AB or O. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type The positive or negative in a blood type refers to the blood being either positive or negative for the Rhesus (RH) Factor. So there is no such thing as being AB-positive but negative for the RH factor. The preceeding is an oxymoron. Since the author of the article evidently does not understand this, the whole article is unclear and not to be trusted. Either the treated blood is ok for everyone ( both the A, B and also the RH antigens are removed by the enzyme ) or the enzymes remove A and B antigens but not RH antigens. In that case, the blood is not universally safe. Given the author's confusion, I would not hazard to guess which the actual case is.
I heard that if someone throws a grenade at you then the best thing to do is to lay flat on the ground next to it. The theory is that the blast will reflect off the ground and blow all the shrapnel up at a 45 degree angle. You will be safe because you are under the flying shrapnel.
Fischer-Tropsch of Coal is inevitable if Oil prices can be predicted with confidence to remain at or above $50/barrel in the future. That is when Fischer-Tropsch of Coal becomes economic. Because energy drives the economy and all of politics is 'the economy stupid', concerns about Global Warming won't affect it's widespread adoption at all.
For those who don't know, Fischer-Tropsch is a process that has been used in countries where Oil is hard to come by but Coal is abundant, notably Nazi Germany and South Africa under Apartheid. The process can be used to convert any carbonaceous material into either diesel or ethanol. The quality of the artificial diesel produced this way is actually superior to diesel from pumped oil because it is free from impurities like sulfur.
In the past people have put their heads in their ovens with the gas on but no flame to commit suicide. Natural gas will kill you at high enough concentrations - eventually, but not quickly enough to make this a painless death. But in the past, ovens were not fueled by Natural Gas. They were fueled by Town Gas. Town Gas is a 50/50 mixture of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide. Carbon monoxide will put you down like a lightswitch being turned off. It is considered as lethal as the Hydrogen Cyanide they use in the gas chamber.
Both Carbon Monoxide ( CO ) and Hydrogen ( H2 ) are clean burning cooking fuels. The mixure was produced by having a large metal can full of coal with an inlet pipe and an outlet pipe. Underneath, burining coal heated the can-full-of-coal to a red heat. Steam was fed into the can of non-burning red-hot coal. In the can the following chemical reaction takes place: H2O + C -> H2 + CO Town Gas has been replaced by the ( safer - both toxicity and explosion wise ) Natural Gas for cooking. But this mixture of Hydrogen and Carbon Monoxide is called by the refining industry by the name 'Synthesis gas'. Basically, using Fischer Tropsch, this can be converted into any hydrocarbons / ethanol / whatever-you-may-want
This reaction can turn not only Coal, but ANY carbonaceous material into liquid fuel. It works on 'Stranded Natural Gas' ( NG which is too far away from civilization to economically transport as gas ) or even biomass. When used on biomass, say to convert switchgrass ( a non-agrigultural crop that grows on non-arable land ) to ethanol, it is carbon-neutral. In fact this method of producing diesel/ethanol would work with algae too. It holds the potential to make ethanol from biodiesel actually economic without government subsidies someday as opposed to distilling ethanol from corn which would be better used as feed/food/fertilizer.
Fischer-Tropsch on Stranded Natural gas produces a fuel that when burned amounts to somewhat more CO2 being released than from pumped oil. The liquid fuel itself is no worse than pumped fuel, but more carbon was released to produce the fuel than is released to produce pumped-outta-ground fuel.
However converting Coal into Oil via Fischer-Tropsch releases about twice as much CO2 into the air as burning Oil pumped out of the ground. This is because Oil is a HYDROCarbon meaning it has hydrogen and carbon. Extracting energy from Oil by burning it produces H2O + CO2 + approx 2 energy. Coal is pure carbon with no hydrogen. Extracting 2 energy from Coal means 2O2 + 2C -%gt; 2CO2 + 2 energy . Plus there are the inherent energy losses that you get when converting anything into anything.
Oil has recently been over 75 dollars a barrel. If investors could be sure Oil would stay that high, they might invest in Fischer-Tropsch. But it is likely that oil will not consistently
Who was it that said something to the effect of: "Either the universe is a deterministic process and so we have no free will, or the universe is not deterministic and subject to unpredictable random noise and so we have no free will." ? The whole idea of free will is dumb.
See this old post..