Re: Watermarks/records

>>cancer risk...will take decades to reveal itself

No, it will never "reveal" itself. The increased risk of cancer is so small that it will not show up against the 20-30% chance of people getting cancer anyway. See the various studies on Chernobyl to get an idea of how varied the results can be for the same data.

re: Wankdorf

Perhaps you mean Wank, a small village outside of Nesselwang in Bavaria, not far from the famous picture postcard castle of Neuschwanstein?

re: hugely overrated as a format.

Bollocks.

I pretty much gave up my audiophile aspirations 20 years ago after spending 3 days, and finally 2 grand on a factory refurbished ex-demo Musical Fidelity pre/power combo. As a joke I asked, what comes next. They swapped out the pre-amp for one costing 4 grand. The difference was incredible. For 3 days we had listened to a Decca LP of Bach's Toccata and Fugue, and for the first time, we could hear the individual caps closing on the organ pipes. Other LPs were also improved, but this was a real difference you could point out to anyone.

I decided to bail out before the single crystal silver cables took over my life, but but I now know there is a whole world of HiFi out there way beyond what people normally get to hear. Hell, they wouldn't even demo this stuff unless I had spent 2 grand in the first place.

Since then, if anyone says they can't hear the difference, I simply assume it is because their hearing is shot. As mine is too, 20 years later, but it doesn't mean the difference isn't there.

Graphene is the new carbon?

Drinking pure water generally isn't a problem

Not 100% sure about that. High purity deionized water even feels strange as it strips the salts and fats out of your skin. Never tried drinking any though.

Iron clad evidence that the weather was better back then!

I would have though that the link is pretty obvious. The link between "perpetrators of violent crime" and "the USERS of violent video games" is not so well documented.

@Condiment

I will agree that a car might be more than „56 feet” out, but this is usually due to buildings or mountain getting in the way, and not a specifically error GPS.

AFAIK, the GPS receiver does not need a particularly accurate clock to calculate the position; the accurate clocks are in the satellites. Any local clock is synchronized to the satellite clocks after all calculations have been done to account for their speed and position.

The is just his 3 dimensional projection for god sake!

It is more like a filter, you pump in radiation at around the right frequency and tune it until the cesium atoms wobble the most.

@another_vulture

And you are mentioning this just in case the guys at CERN don't read wikipedia?

Search your feelings

Kirk IS his father.....

Nooooooo.

Earth's gravity

It is already being affected by Earth's gravity. Think of it like a rollercoaster, it will roll down one side gathering speed and the up and out of the other side.

Dolphin in sweet cream sauce?

But

Didn't your mother tell you never to play with your food?

re: guilty of employee theft

Maybe, maybe not. He may have asked his boss if he could take the little grain and the boss said yes. Maybe he even got a receipt. After all, back in those days I expect NASA were intending to go back and get a few more tonnes of the stuff.

But, since they are a cartel

As soon as they get wind of an investigation, they select one member to "fess up" and get their shared fines cut but a 1/4.

I thought we were talking about porn?

re: almost entirely preventable

Yes, but preventable by doing (or not doing) what?

You mention coffee causing cancer, yet this esteemed publication posted information indicating that coffee drinking actually prevents prostate cancer.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/18/coffee_saves/

re: Last Harry Potter was a waste of time in 3D; it added nothing.

Actually it made the film worse. HP and Voldemort jumping of a castle? Only there to showcase their wonderful 3D tech.

@Giles Jones

Cook probably doesn't need this money to make him stay. This is about convincing everyone else that this is a 10 year plan and not a short term patch up until they find someone better.

Pictures or it didn't happen

or on second thoughts, perhaps not.

re: symmetrical

The problem is not so much the waist as the bouquet. If they had just reflected her left arm, then it would not have been long enough to reach behind the bouquet. They would have probably needed to jig both arms and the bouquet around so that she relatively symmetrical arms, or the pose would look wrong. Of course, they could have just mirrored the left arm and increased the size of the bouquet to cover the mess.

@Willington

I am not bothered about a last word, but I will reply.

You say, "I don't care that you don't understand my argument:", but actually I do care. I would like to understand, but rather than explaining, you have simply posted a string of insults.

"Closed minded"

"righteously indignant"

"hysterical"

The one explanation you did make sounded very much like circular reasoning to me, like I said at the time, but you have provided nothing further apart from the above mentioned insults.

You have said I am "righteously indignant about the actions of the rioters", yet I have made not comment about the rioters themselves. I have not made any calls for stocks, hangings or deportation which could earn the title "Hysterical".

My point as previously stated is simply that the term "Mass Hysteria" implies some kind of majority and I see the rioters as a minority. I asked the question "who joins the riot and who turns away", which I see as central to supporting your mass hysteria argument, but rather than answering sensibly, I get another insult.

Finally, to being closed minded. You have continually misrepresented my posts as mentioned above, although none of them could be considered hysterical by a normal person. The only reason I can see for this is that you yourself are so closed minded that you that you cannot engage in rational conversation with anybody whose views diverge even one iota from yours.

If you do care to continue the conversation, I am open minded enough to listen to your rephrased arguments, perhaps even answering some of my previous questions, but I would prefer it if you could avoid the insults next time.

@Wellington

To recap

The original assertion from Danny 5 was that the people were caught up in this mass hysteria, and this could happen to anybody. A number of people responded that they did not think they would get so easily caught up in this and were told they were delusional.

>>they were not caught up in the hysteria

That is exactly my point. Sure the rioters themselves were caught up in hysteria. But what of those looking on, why didn't they join in? What causes one person to look at a riot and join in but another to turn away? You say - they "didn't have any urge to resist [because] they were not caught up in the hysteria". But that is very convenient and sounds rather circular - they didn't have to resist the hysteria because they had not succumbed to hysteria? It still doesn't explain why they were not involved.

Many people above have posted that regardless of the situation, they would not have become involved. They were called delusions.

My assertion is that plenty of people saw the riots and looting and made a conscious decision not to become involved. Proof, as I see it, that it is possible to resist the urge to join the riot.

>>mass hysterical outburst.

Complete bollocks - how can disagreeing with Danny5 in any way be considered hysteria - maybe you should be the one looking it up in a dictionary.

>>I'd put money on it that you do.

You would lose - a lot (or was that loose :-)

@jimmy

Ah, caveats. I have no doubt that <25s are more likely to go out and do something stupid and also get caught up in the hysteria. Been there, done that. But why should a group of probably >25 IT professionals (*) be called delusional for saying that they would not join in the fun?

(*) I am aware that not everybody here is >25 and not all are IT professionals but I will go out on a limb and assume that describes fair number of people here.

@Willington

>>all the people decrying Danny5...are actually now suffering from mass hysteria.

Really, all of them? No, I don't think so.

>>It's a bandwagon thing

There is one big logical problem with saying mass hysteria caused all those poor people to do bad things and that is all the people who resisted the urge. Was everybody out on the streets looting, or was it just a minority? What did the others do to resist the urge - sit inside a pentacle?

>>They all now love the Met

No, not really. They have don't plenty of dubious stuff over the years. Being out on the streets trying to stop riots, looting and arson is what they are there for, so it at least gets them some plus points on the balance sheet. I don't recall seeing anybody saying that balances out everything else.

>>Flame on to prove me right.

Complete bollocks.

re: 1 million+ components!

True, but 95% of those are probably standard sized screws.

re: Not a sign of loudness

Yes the quality of the headphone does make a difference to how much another person can hear.

If I can't hear your headphones then that might be because you are listening to quiet music or because they are good headphones and don't emit much sound, in which case I can't tell how load they are for you.

But if another person can hear it well from a distance then it is definitely too loud 1cm from you eardrum. Unless the headphones as so badly made that they emit much more sound to the outside than to the inside, which is unlikely.

Anyone living in a city gets more noise

Though it's got to be a bit of a bugger if you move off to the country for the quite life and someone builds a wind farm in the next field.

Or a bypass for that matter.

re: telephoto

Do you have a reputable source to back up that definition? A quick Google turns up a number of definitions for the word telephoto, and only Wikipedia and it's reference really come up with a similar definition. The important part seems to be the inclusion of a negative lens group at the rear. The 15-55 II IS in question is a complex design with zoom capability and image stabilisation, but is also has a negative lens group towards the rear.

So the important question would seem to be: is the design shorter than an equivalent lens with zoom and IS elements but without a "telephoto group".

My assumption is yes, but I have nothing to actually back that up!

Ouch

now that could be distracting, especially the metal versions if the sparks start flying.

ERNIE is not truly random?

>>merely based on physical processes

But surely the various noise signals used are random physical processes, so unless there is some fault in the construction, this randomness should apply to the output too.

>>a physicist would consider anything atom sized or larger to be considered to be in the "large object"...and thus well defined by classical mechanics

But the noise is basically from electrons, which are small.

happening outside your window

I assume you are writing from the USA, here in Europe there weather outside my window is distinctly chilly.

Of course, local weather is not necessarily an indicator of global climate.

fondleSvetlana

Ummmm, lovely big tubes

Very Potent Potion

No, no, you have it all wrong. it is not the dilution which makes it potent - it is all the shaking in between - apparently.

really don't want batteries in a fire

fireproof battery powered....?

re: Experiment is at the heart of science

Are you suggesting we simply double the CO2 in the atmosphere to see what happens?

Probably not, we only have one atmosphere and we don't want to break it.

>>Make a proposal test its validity - simples

Or make a proposal, make a mathematical model as an expression of your proposal, make some predictions with the model and do experiments to see if the predictions were correct.