Brew up some well known explosives, touch them off and tell me that stuff that's well understood can't be fun if done yourself.

Dangerous? Hell yeah. So? As long as you can make sure that you're alone should you blow up, more power to you and have fun!

Africa looks more and more appealing...

No, seriously. If people have real problems, they don't concern themselves with non-problems.

From the European's perspective it's more a right leaning industry protecting government, but since either side would fuck us over, who cares which branch of The Party is in charge currently?

One side doesn't want you to know because with the knowledge you could possibly create something that endangers lives, the other side doesn't want you to know because with the knowledge you could possibly create something that endangers profits.

The high school one from the 1950s, no doubt about that. It also has the much more interesting experiments. Problem is just that you can't get 9 out of 10 chemicals you need anymore due to "safety concerns" and trying to get the tenth puts you on a no-fly list and grants you a personal visit from guys that come at 6am.

I'd say eBay it, buy a Nexus 7/10, and explain it like this: "It's like buying an Xbox game for someone who has a Wii." Or if they're too old to know game consoles, they might be familiar with a past format war: "It's like buying a Beta tape for someone who has a VHS deck."

Saruman, Saruman, does whatever a Saru can, but how will that be enough?

So did the writing reform that came out of Beleriand, where vowels were promoted from tehtar (points) to full letters. Remember Durin's gate on the west side of Moria, noted for the weak default password that Narvi set and Celebrimbor leaked? The inscription on that was written with vowels as letters.

Not all the devaluation need happen at once because not all the conversion need happen at once. Mr. Nakamoto could just go on a BTC-to-fiat exchange once a month and withdraw enough to live on for a month. Few people would care.

We can. It's called Dwolla. And at the current exchange rate, its 0.25 USD transaction fee isn't that much higher than the 0.0001 BTC transaction fee of Bitcoin.

You have a serious problem with anything other than boolean logic, huh? Good luck with that.

The outer limits of knowledge will always be filled with low-hanging fruit. It is only perceived as difficult because it's at the outer limits. Maybe if they'd called it the Twilight Zone instead it would have helped. The diminishing returns is only true if you scour the same patch of ground time and time again, working towards completeness within some minute specific topic. You will never reach 100% completion and some problems are so specific that they are better solved "just in time" rather than in advance then forgotten.

Don't people need to understand all the details before they can get to the outer edges? No, not really. The number line is a special case of an infinite group, but it can be mastered by any five year old. By age six, in Britain, most kids will have plotted graphs, worked on Venn diagrams and set theory, and learned that you can transform one operation into one or more others (eg: multiply = multiple adds). By seven, they'll probably have done mappings from one group into another.

If you can comprehend an "add one machine" that takes an input and adds one, then you can comprehend a machine where you pass in the value and a mapping. it's exactly the same, except you don't have to remember what adding is, or even what one is.

So you can jump a decade, by skipping specific transforms and jumping straight to the abstract and a bunch of lookup table.

CD has a ~93 dB theoretical SNR, but noise shaping pushes most of that noise above 16 kHz where the human auditory system isn't so sensitive. In practice, CDs can be mastered with 120 dB of dynamic range in those frequencies where it matters. It appears TigerPlish is referring to a 24-bit processing chain, which reduces the noise that each generation of digital signal processing adds, resulting in a cleaner 20-bit master heading into the 16-bit noise shaper. Monty explains.

Or look at it another way. Imagine a 1-bit format that uses heavy dithering to represent signals using pulse density modulation. How much dynamic range does a 1-bit signal have? If not much, why would Sony have chosen 1-bit PDM at 2.8 MHz for SACD?

That's because level compression in LP mastering works differently from CD. LP uses RCA Victor's New Orthophonic preemphasis curve, which allows bass to go louder than treble, while CD uses no preemphasis.

I listen to NPR's classical station, you insensitive clod! :p But seriously, recordings destined for pop radio are mastered with very little dynamic range because they have to be audible over a motor vehicle engine that allows very little dynamic range.

The field goes on forever. The local bits are well-mapped, sure, but the outer edges are mostly blank spaces. And beyond? Just "Here be dragons" on the charts.

This is true for every discipline, be it science, the humanities or anything else. Schools teach kids to stay in the safe zones, where it is boring. I wouldn't call it safe, mistakes can and do kill people, but it is well-understood danger. There is no incentive amongst the beancounters to remove the dangers (it's costly, and besides, most of those killed are worryingly smart and might find New Stuff to think of) and there is no incentive within schools to push people out into the fringes (textbooks contain errors, especially creationist ones, so it has nothing to do with accurate information).

By the time a child is 16, they aught to have contributed one original idea in something. It is perfectly doable and would take away the fear of New Stuff.

If Google wants my data in Google+, Google needs to make it less expensive to send my data over the air to Google+. Selling Nexus phones at cost won't help as much as somehow keeping the carriers in Google's, Microsoft's, and Slashdot's home country from gouging.

Came here to post the same thing. Also, Dwarvish is a secret language, and even if Radagast knew it he wouldn't publish a paper in it (nor would anyone writing on paper in whatever language use the Cirth, since the Tengwar were designed for that.)