I do not identify myself as an atheist. Technically, I am agnostic, because I know that there is no way to disprove the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient entity. I have no objection to people discussing their theories about such an entity, and I will even admit that some are a lot more entertaining than others. On the other hand, I hate it when people try to use their religious beliefs as arguments for or against anything in the real world. "This man has to die because he is an asshole" is a valid argument, "This man has to die because my Holy Book says the penalty for what he's done is death" is not. Thus, I am only 'unconcerned' with theism and theists as long as they do not pretend that their religious beliefs are in any way relevant to me. As soon as that line is crossed, I become, indeed, an anti-theist.

That said, could you please explain why the Atheist League should be called the Antichrist league, as opposed to the Anti-Kali, Anti-Mohammedan, or Anti-Pastafarian league? Sure, there are tons of different sects that profess the divinity of Christ - Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants, Mormons, members of the Unification Church, etc... But there are also a lot of sects that do not consider Christ divine, and frankly, I feel a lot more threatened by some of the latter.

The guys who keep trying to bring me to Christ on the streets of Glendora are polite, clean, and well dressed. They bother me a lot less than people who think that I could be killed without spilling blood to fuel a religious rite, that I should pay higher taxes because I am an unbeliever, or that mocking their fairy tales is a capital offense.

So, again, why should people identify as antichrists, instead of atheists if they have no more beef with Christians than they have with other, less... grown-up theists?

That was kind of his point. Those who end up working for such agencies either start or end up the kind of people who do not feel like shit while doing so.

What that says about them (and him) is a different story.

I admit, I have not thought about this, but it sounds beyond stupid to me.

The whole point of the dozens of 'Tell Humans from Bots' methods is that it is relatively easy to automatically generate the challenge, but (ideally) it takes human intelligence to solve it. As an example,
(1) it is easy for an algorithm to randomly choose a few letters, and add colors, extra lines, etc... to the picture.
(2) it is easy for a human to see the letters through all the obfuscation.
(3) it is hard for a OCR (optical character recognition) algorithm to tell the letters from the random crap.

But, in this case:
(1) it is very hard for an algorithm to generate and label the test cases. "body builder lady with mustache and goofy in the center" indeed.
(2) it is quite hard for a human to tell them apart.
(3) sure, it is very much impossible for an algorithm to do so, but at this point, who cares?

That said, the idea may have something going for it. Taking stock images that have already been labeled, and applying obfuscating algorithms can work.

But this particular crap set my bullshit detector... oh, wait, it's actually my stupidity detector.

There is a huge difference between driving for range, driving sanely on the highway, and driving on the track. Here are my numbers, and they are real, recorded on the spot, as opposed to remembered.

The car: Volvo S60-R, modded to 460hp at the wheels, AWD fuse pulled.

Average MPG as of this morning: 29.7mpg. (It got smogged on Saturday, the guy took two tries and two hours, lowering my MPG by a full mile)
Usual average MPG: 31mpg
Best MPG from a trip: 36mpg (Chino Hills/San Diego and back)
MPG from a highway trip where I was driving like a moron: 8.7mpg (Chino Hills/Las Vegas)
Worst MPG ever: 3.3mpg on the track.

I've done 560 miles on a tank, and I have emptied my tank in under 60 miles. It really matters how you drive...

No they do not. They raise your premiums. My S60R has a bigger turbo and downpipe, a second intercooler, and quite a few bigger pipes where it matters. Stuff had to go in the trunk, I had to limit my front wheels' travel... but now I get 460hps at the wheels with the AWD fuse pulled.

I have declared it all, and the premium rose quite a bit... but then, so did the coverage. The car is still street legal.

My last car was a heavily modified Toyota Supra. Its frame was ruined when a cop (on a cellphone, out of his jurisdiction) rear ended me. The county paid the car's stated value and even a bit over... which was still a lot lower than the sum of what I had put into it. So before I even started working on my Volvo, I decided that it will be all above board.

Hmm? In case you missed it (or have trouble reading an exponential graph) the power output if the "on-board extra-shitty über-crappy audio" holds up significantly better than the power output of the Macbook Pro outside human hearing range.

As for your comment about filtering above 22kHz, did you miss the part that we are talking about communicating at frequencies that human cannot hear?

What the Hell. Did I just get trolled, or are you really missing every single point?

Hmm... never mind about my PC not being anything special. Here is a Mac Book Pro graph I just googled:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/attachments/so-much-gear-so-little-time/285773d1333712202-what-frequency-response-typical-built-laptop-speakers-mbp15.jpg

Clearly desktops have a much better range than laptops.

I just tested my PC's speakers / microphone... The power output is rock steady up to 15kHz, then falls to 75% by 20kHz, 50% by 30kHz, and about 10% by 40kHz. Then it stays that way to fiftish kHz, which is as far as my loop went.

I could already not hear it by 14kHz... damn I'm old. Last time I did something like this, I was OK up to 17kHz, and back at the Institute I was fine at 19kHz.

I think that no one hear 30 kHz, and you still get 50% power on my PC... which is nothing special. You can definitely get decent communication outside of hearing range.

I think many of the commentators both here and on Ars Technica are making a basic mistake. No one claims that the machine is infected through its microphones. Duh! How would it know to listen and interpret noise as instructions. The claim is that once infected, the machines communicate using their speakers and microphones.

Is it possible? Sure. Do I consider it likely? No. It's one Hell of an effort for very little gain... in general. But we all have hobbies, so someone may have written a virus that infects through USB drives, overwrites BIOS, and resists the clean up of physically disconnected machines by communicating via sound.

Do I believe this particular story? Hmm... no. Mostly because, despite the reputation of the author, the article makes it sounds that basic mistakes were made during the cleanup process, and because not enough information has been shared with the community.

But if I was told the story is true, I could come with a great conspiracy theory to explain it. The author tries to keep all the fame for himself, the author is being threatened by the high tech agency that developed the strain but let it escape, the virus has alien origin...

Which planet do you live on? There are hundreds of examples when one consents to give rights away. In the US, joining the military is one of the most glaring examples - you give away hundreds of rights.

> Back up cameras / displays do fit.

Which is why, on my car and probably on most cars, you cannot turn on the rearview camera while you are driving forward above a certain speed.

> Seems california legislatures are for killing kids.

Exaggerating much? You are talking about a law that would make a rather expensive piece of equipment mandatory on hundreds of thousands of vehicles... some of which are cheap enough for it to result in a non-trivial price increase.

Sure, many such laws are a good idea, but I certainly would not like politicians to be passing them without any discussion because otherwise they would be seen as "for killing kids". You know what else would save a hundred lives per year? Mandating that all vehicles are surrounded by a foam ring with a square meter cross-section. Sure, it would cost a bit, especially to double all roads' width, but being against it would mean that you want to kill people, right?

Who needs grounds? Employment at will - you can fire anyone as long as you are not firing him for belonging to a protected category, like being over a certain age. And of course, you CAN fire someone for anything, just do not tell anyone why.

As for precedent, beer companies have fired their drivers for always drinking a competitor's brand, and that's a lot less damning in my book. And yeah, it was perfectly legal.

11520 = 3 x 3840

If _you_ had read the damn article, you would have noticed that the resolution is for THREE 4K monitors, side to side.

I'm not saying it's a graceful turn of phrase, or particularly clear, but most people would have been able to tell where he got it from...

1. Satellite orbits are offset, because of launch details, and precisely so that the ridiculous snowball effect does not occur... but the movie needs a problem, so these old reliable villains the Russians oblige by forgetting what space agencies have known for at least half a century.

Actually, I recall an article on this very subject some months ago that it's a real possibility NASA has (and continues to) study. The theory posits that one (or perhaps a very few) satellite could get shredded, the debris from which collides with other satellites which get shredded, and so forth until the debris field is vast enough to be a threat to anything orbiting at or near the same altitude and inclination. You don't even need "head on" collision speeds. When you're whipping around the Earth at 18,000mph, even minor differences in speed of a few 100mph are enough to do major damage.

Yes, the danger is real, and has been known forever, which why people try to offset orbits, and why before anyone decided do something like what the Russians did, people would check to see what may happen. Seriously, is your paragraph attacking or supporting my paragraph?!

2. Debris would not be completing their orbit nearly as quickly, but the movie needs a recurring danger, so they do.

The movie depicts the debris orbiting every 90 minutes. The ISS orbits every 90 minutes. NASA.gov confirms this, or would if the website wasn't shut down. So this isn't an error in the movie.

Oh, yes, it is an error, and a huge one. The actors have orbital speed already. The debris whip by every time they have completed two of their orbits for one of the actors. If the actors are orbiting at the ISS's speed, the debris are doing about twice that. The orbits cannot possibly not matched, that's understood. They could, theoretically still intersect, and boy, what a stretch and what rotten luck that would be. But the debris could still not achieve that double speed from the events in the movie.

So stop making excuses. EVERY single plot point is because of one of two things: physics not working, or characters not knowing physics.

This is a matter of personal preference. In gravity, the WHOLE story is due to bad physics. If the movie was realistic, there would have been no movie whatsoever.

1. Satellite orbits are offset, because of launch details, and precisely so that the ridiculous snowball effect does not occur... but the movie needs a problem, so these old reliable villains the Russians oblige by forgetting what space agencies have known for at least half a century.

2. Debris would not be completing their orbit nearly as quickly, but the movie needs a recurring danger, so they do.

3. The orbits of the installations in the movie are nowhere close to each other, but the movie needs to visit interesting places, so the actors travel ridiculous distances and match speeds unattainable with what they have.

4. Once Clooney is hanging off Bullocks, they have stopped relative to the station, which means they have achieved orbital speed, but the movie needs a heroic sacrifice, so...

The problem is that everything in this movie happens because someone who should know physics does not, or because physics do not work the way they do in real life. I would not particularly care to watch a movie about a cute couple trying to escape Cannibalistic Papists, or one about a cute couple using the scientific method to prove their is no god. This movie is at the same level of 'story', as far as I am concerned. Nice visuals, though. Wish they did not have all the morons obscuring the view and babbling to distract me.