If you are eating commercially produced grain for instance, you are complicit in the death of countless mice and other rodents that are killed as the fields are plowed and harvested, as well as killed to prevent them from consuming your food. I don't think you can argue that there is less suffering...

The basic determination of whether abortion should be legal or not legal has always boiled down to a utilitarian one, and arguments on both sides are guilty of straying from this. I never thought that the premise of it being "a woman's right to choose what she does with her body" was strong enough t...

You do have friends, i.e., us. Before there was online, to have a discussion like this you had to go to a bar and imbibe a solvent and breathe the smoke of the tobacco nightshade, all the while having the conversation deteriorate into primal passions. And online you can find friends you never even c...

Next best thing to driving it, maybe!?

I watched the Chronicle show you appeared on shortly after it first aired. I thought you came across as well as anyone could in that kind of presentation.

So let me give another example: Romney has explicitly stated that he will not reduce benefits for those who are currently retired or soon to be retired (or in other words, current members of AARP), so regardless of which presidential candidate is elected, they will support the continued spending of...

According to Roberts' reasoning, corporations have all the rights and privileges of, but not the limitations of, people. Everyone in a corporation already has all rights as presented in our laws. Corporate rights were started to enact vicarious liability. Anything more than that is fascism. But the...

According to Roberts' reasoning, corporations have all the rights and privileges of, but not the limitations of, people.

Just for the sake of accuracy more than truth (which edh did a good job of expressing): The political entity you speak of is not Costa Rica but Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S., Costa Rica is a sovereign country.

I am sure there are a lot of atheists or at least agnostics in government, regardless of whether they admit it. Wow! Something I agree with you on! American politicians' conspicuous displays of religiosity are a particularly buffoonish form of theater. Some, though, are probably quite sincere. Inte...

Voter fraud is essentially impossible to pull off. It simply doesn't happen. The way voting works here in the U.S. (I don't know about elsewhere) is that you go to the voting location, which serves a single precinct (small subdivison) of a town or city's area and you recite the name of your street o...

This cooler stretches the meaning of "asymmetrical", which is neat.

I thought this club didn't allow morons.

Ugh... glad someone else has asked this question. And sad that no one has found a good replacement. I have several of UltraX. I'm ashamed to say the one I'm using right now is so filthy it feels sticky :shock: on humid days. Unfortunately I just do not know of any good replacement for these. UltraX...

The homicide rate charts that andyb linked to are indeed interesting, and everything just screams that it's poverty that's associated with murder. Poverty and social instability. That being said, gun ownership as being practiced by the gun-worshiping segment of American society is just plain bluntly...

It looks like for this device every change in size would require a significantly re-engineered design and a different set RPM. And every change in design would require a different size and RPM. Lots and lotsa computation required.

Just to give people an idea of what another country does : you can get triple play in France for around 30 euros a month (includes 20M internet, 100+ TV channels, free unlimited telephone including a whole lot of international destinations, and of course the modem/router). You can also get quadrupl...

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62667&hilit=sandia I remember that thread well, and I thought that the invention's creator, who participated in the thread, was given a harsh and unfair reception. I'm delighted that it's coming to market so soon, and can't wait to see it in ...

Deregulation of privately owned utilities is a nightmare. And so also is non-regulation of newly emerged utilities that have become essential, i.e. TV service providers and Internet service providers. In any given market there's only one provider of a cable or DSL system. Obviously, you can't have c...

Don't go for any sort of cloning software, as they will not be able to align the SSD drive correctly. Make sure whatever OS you use can do the alignment, or use some software that can if not. What do you mean by "alignment."? Does that mean that the SSDs that come with a migration kit are not recom...

it doesn't seem to reduce the rushing air sound pressure levels by very much, It should reduce whatever sound the microphones pick up.... provided it is tuned to operate in that frequency range. So it is all about microphone placement and circuit tuning. Though my guess would be that as the mass of...

If you look at RotoSub's page, they have photos which allude to the concept of how the noise cancellation might. It could be a relatively simple concept that utilises the fan itself as the out of phase transducer. It appears that the inner edge of the fan frame has an electromagnetic strip which in...

EDIT: Sorry. Thought better of it.

What's hopeful is that the more sublime ideas do eventually catch on, and maybe then the people who champion them regenerate. As for the champions of idiocy, they may come over to the more sensible side and be restored. If not, they fade away into the twilight of irrelevance. A wonderful use of the...

All i know is that it is hard to publicly advocate for, or even consider advocating for, ideas that aren't the most prevailingly popular, whether they are sublime or idiotic or anywhere in between . It can wear you down terribly. It can destroy your health. A mainstream religious adherent can declar...

Studies have shown that Seventh Day Adventists, who don't drink alcohol and also often don't use caffeine, yet still maintain a high level of social interaction, have extraordinarily long life spans. I think if you use caffeine and don't drink (or do something) to calm yourself down then you might b...

Sample frequency of a CD is 44.1 kHz. To sample 22 kHz, you need twice that frequency. A tone of 22 kHz might have harmonics, which will influence the sound wave, but because the sampling frequency doesn't detect those, these harmonics are lost. A pure sine wave of 22 kHz will be very roughly digit...

It's worth doing anything to protect privacy.

However, lest there be no naiveté:

The new National Data Center being built in Utah:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... nter/all/1

A noise-cancelling headphone with a mic sounds like an oxymoron. Because the sound of your voice would be part of the external sound that the noise-cancelling circuitry cancels. You would talk louder to get the accustomed auditory feedback, and the circuitry would cancel more sound the louder you ta...

A quiet computer was little more than a pipe dream (and an almost desperate one) until this site came along. I would never have imagined that I would build a computer (and it takes more knowledge than some here might remember to learn about the science, history, lingo, components, acronyms, supply s...

A sentence in MikeC's "Decade of SPCR" article reminded me of something I've wondered about for a little while: My only contact with tablet PCs has been glancing at them being used on the street or other public place. What kind of noise, if any, do they produce? Do they have fans? Commentators say t...