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Comment Re:Just how powerful *IS* faith? (Score 1) 217

I personally know 3 religious people who have each had, at one time in their lives, a medically diagnosed condition which was being monitored carefully by their physician after discovery, and that spontaneously disappeared from existence after a period of time ranging from a few weeks to almost a year with absolutely no evident medical explanation

Are you sure they weren't raptured? ...Oh, you mean the *condition* disappeared! Silly me.

Just kidding. Were any of them amputees by any chance?

Comment Re:Easy... (Score 1) 1121

But you slashtards think it's more likely that life evolved by coincidence and random chance. That's about as fucking dumb as thinking humans rose up from dust on the ground.

Belief isn't important to science. The scientific question is: "if life did evolve by coincidence and random chance, how could we tell?"

Comment Re:They get it (Score 3, Interesting) 404

Substitute "mobile computer that can make phone calls" for "phone" and your perspective may shift.

Our mobile devices are more powerful than our desktops of 10 years ago, and the trend will only continue. Eventually we won't need separate "computers" or "game consoles" at all. Most point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, and PDAs have already been subsumed by "phones." What you get for your $650 is nothing short of incredible - even if it's more expensive than competing devices.

Comment Re:True, but.. (Score 1) 1145

My point is, it was called "spam" because it was repetitive and clogging up forums (e.g. cross-posting the same ad to 1000 different newsgroups), not because it was unsolicited. Not even because it was commercial; people got chastised for "spamming" multiple newsgroups even if their message was on topic in a group or two. And every new thread someone starts is technically "unsolicited."

So unsolicited commercial emails are a form of spam, but not the only one.

Comment Re:True, but.. (Score 1) 1145

If that's a perfect example then this simply proves you don't know what spam is. Spam is unsolicited e-mail

The term originally meant any message repeated to excess in newsgroups, chat rooms and forums. It was a reference to Monty Python, whence "Spam, Spam, Spam Spam..."

When people started getting their e-mail inboxes flooded with commercial e-mails, they called that "spam" too, but the confusion led to the more specific term "unsolicited commercial email" (UCE) being introduced, not leastwise because Hormel objected to their brand name being misused.

Comment Re:All Biofuels are a crock.. (Score 1) 238

I think methane is the way to go. It's the simplest hydrocarbon, it can be converted to liquid (LNG) or methanol for transport, and we already have the infrastructure to handle it.

Plus, it can be made from water and atmospheric CO2 . There are already bacteria doing it with nothing but electricity. We just need to hack the little buggers and see how they're doing it.

Comment Re:Depends on the source (Score 1) 749

"However, dither doesn't change the fact that once a signal sinks below the noise floor, it should effectively disappear. How is the -105dB tone still clearly audible above a -96dB noise floor?

"The answer: Our -96dB noise floor figure is effectively wrong; we're using an inappropriate definition of dynamic range. (6*bits)dB gives us the RMS noise of the entire broadband signal, but each hair cell in the ear is sensitive to only a narrow fraction of the total bandwidth. As each hair cell hears only a fraction of the total noise floor energy, the noise floor at that hair cell will be much lower than the broadband figure of -96dB.

"Thus, 16 bit audio can go considerably deeper than 96dB. With use of shaped dither, which moves quantization noise energy into frequencies where it's harder to hear, the effective dynamic range of 16 bit audio reaches 120dB in practice [13], more than fifteen times deeper than the 96dB claim.

"120dB is greater than the difference between a mosquito somewhere in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away.... or the difference between a deserted 'soundproof' room and a sound loud enough to cause hearing damage in seconds.

"16 bits is enough to store all we can hear, and will be enough forever."

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

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