Some of the more disturbing aspects to divorce court:

1)No right to trial by jury and no right to representation by a court appointed lawyer if you cannot afford a private attorney. Your fate is solely in the hands of one judge.

2)Lawyers are essentially completely immune from prosecution for fraud, libel, defamation, excessive litigation and more.

3)Family courts are not courts of law but rather courts of equity. This amplifies the risk and damage that a corrupt judge can do to you exponentially by giving that judge virtually unlimited power to interpret the law according to his or her opinion as to what is 'right' as opposed to what might be actually written in the law.

Kafka's The Trial pales in comparison to the reality of modern day family court.

I think this is both right and wrong...natural selection CAN be even faster (but is not always) at forcing evolutionary change than 'breeding for traits' is, because breeders are not perfect and may allow unwanted traits or incomplete but wanted traits to continue, but nature is a horrible bitch goddess and if your traits really don't work for her, you simply die. That's certainly not always the case, but when it is nature is better at 'selecting' than humans. The rate of reproduction makes either process move faster.
It's true that humans have artificially created more breeds than nature would likely create alone, because we sometimes like traits that would hinder survival and through breeding amplify them to create a 'new breed'.
Nature forces the one's most suited for their environment to thrive, while humans often allow those less suited to live in their environment to survive for human reasons, erasing natural selection from the equation. Without our 'guiding hand' in their evolution, I think it's likely they would likely have even MORE change in some areas (and less in others) because environments are drastically different and different traits would evolve in different places, creating different 'dogs' such as wild dogs in Africa and/or dingos in Australia, which I think (but may be wrong) have evolved so separately that they can't breed with non-"wild dogs". It may lead to less variation in specific areas/populations, but more variation between those from different areas.

@Chairman_woo, agreed on pretty much everything. I try not to get into the whole "european vs japanese sword" debate, because I think the whole point is moot. Guns > swords

I study the sword for three reasons.
1. meditative practice. Doing a few hundred cuts is a great way to clear the mind.
2. as an aide to empty-handed work. Using a weapon is a great way to amplify flaws in your technique.
3. Swords are awesome.

I'm under no illusions as to how I'd fare against someone who really knew what they were doing, and given a choice, I'd run the hell away

*related=http://videosift.com/video/No-Sleep-Til-Brooklyn-Beastie-Boys-1986

I love this tune - I know it by heart - or at least know by heart how I though the lyrics went when I listened to it as a kid.



Bedtime boys!
Oh mom!

Now hey there people, won't you lend an ear?
'cause I've a story to tell and I'm telling it here
I was born in a town in the great UK
From a baby to a boy to a man today
And I'm a musical man, and I'm a man of verse
But I've got a little problem and it's getting worse

Well my life was so well planned
Survivin' and a-jivin' in a f-f-funk band
'cause rappin', it's my, bread and butter
But it's hard to rap when you're born with a st-st-st, st, st-st, st,
st-t, st-t, stutter!

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen
We've all been caught in a m-m-mouth trap
So join with us and do the st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stutter rap

Well it was '82 when I joined the boys
And I was hip, and I was cool, but now I've lost my poise
The kids, our fans, are starting to doubt
When you open your mouth and nothing comes out
(..)

And it breaks my heart that we're not on the chart
'cause the record's nearly over when the vocals start
And I'm down and out, and I'm down on my luck
And I'm livin' on my own and I'm dying for a fr-riend to say "You're great!" But I'm under the hammer
'cause all I seem to do is s-s-s-stee-
(..)
Come on man!
(..)
s-s-s-st-stammer!

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen
We've all been caught in a m-m-mouth trap
So join with us and do the st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stutter rap

Neighbours..

Well interviewers turn away
Who wants to be covered with spray?
Talkin' to me for more than an hour
Is equivalent to an April shower
It's tough! Tough! Tougher than tough!
It's worse than Benny Hill and that's bad enough!
Something must be wrong with your vocal technique
When the twelve inch mix goes on for a week

I was rappin' in my club the other night
When nothin' I said was comin' out right
The crowd got angry, and this one man
He was gonna throw a bottle
He was gonna chuck a can, chuck a can, chuck a, chuck a, chuck a,
chuck a

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen
We've all been caught in a m-m-mouth trap
So join with us and do the st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stutter rap

N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-NO, NEED, FOR SHOUTING!

W-w-w-w-why's that then?

Well, you'll wake Mr Whittaker at number thirty-two

Besides, it's not very good for the voice

(An amplifier or similar shorts out)

Uuhhh!

That's a bit harsh isn't it?

NO, SLEEP, 'TIL BEDTIME!

Talking of which - it's ten-thirty already!

Is it? Ooooh!

What time do they stay up 'til in America?

(I mean)

Oh, very late. Sometimes quarter to eleven

(Ahhhh)

Well actually I've heard in New York they sometimes even stay up 'til midnight

No! No wonder they do all that shouting

(I mean)

Yes, they must be very snappy and irritable

That's right

(Ahhhh)

Do you know, I heard a story that those Toastie Boys stayed up 'til
quarter past twelve!

Really? Well that's just silly!

They're just gonna get burnt out

Burnt out!

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen
We've all been caught in a m-m-mouth trap
So join with us and do the st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stutter rap

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen
We've all been caught in a m-m-mouth trap
So join with us and do the st-st-st-st-st-st-st-stutter rap

Well no-one's ever seen what I mean
From the age of n-n-n-n-n-n-thirteen...

(Fades out)

No....hotter. This girl is insanely gorgeous, amplified by her insanely multi-faceted talent.

Good lord.

@poolcleaner
i fucking love you man!

once innocence is lost,
it can never be re-aquired.
disillusion has a sister called cynicism.
a vile woman who seduces her lover "despair" like a desperate dive-bar trollop.

do not engage these corrupt entities,
for they only seek to expose your inadequacies and feed off your fears.
they amplify the conflicting messages we are all subjected to daily.
they rejoice in your anxiety and call it truth.

but thats the lie.

the scattered remnants of a splintered childhood dream,
fed by people who walked in that very dream...
and believed in its seductions...
reveals the truth....of the lie.

grieve if you must,
but allow that lie to sink into the ocean of oblivion and irrelevance,
and embrace the truth.

you are no longer bound.
you are free.

how many can say that with conviction?

*edit*sighs.meant that to be on your page..i am so fail.

You are thinking about QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Thats an interesting question because QAM essentially produces the same results that the prof talks about in this video. By using interesting ways to change the beat and phase of a single carrier, one can represent a whole array of numbers greater than just a 1 or a zero with a single pulse, case in point.

In QAM, lets just use the easy example of QAM, QPSK (4QAM), where there are 4 possible binary positions for any given 'carrier' signal at a known frequency.

By shifting both phase and amplitude, you can get a 0, 1, 2 or 3, where each position represents a power of 2, up to a total value of 16 unique numbers.

Rather than just a 0 or a 1, you can have 0 through to 15. However doing this requires both a timeslot, and a known carrier window.

The fastest the QAM transmitter can encode onto a carrier is limited by the nyquist rate, that is, less than half the frequency which the receiver can sample at its fastest rate (on the remote end). As you increase the speed of the encoding, you also increase the error rate, and introduce more noise into the base carrier signal, in turn, reducing your effective available bandwidth.

So it then becomes a balancing act, do I want to encode faster, or do I want to increase my constellation density? The obvious answer is the one we went with, increase in constellation density.

There are much more dense variants, I think the highest ive heard of was 1024 QAM, where a single carrier of 8MHz wide could represent 1024 bits (1,050,625 unique values for a given 'pulse' within a carrier).

I actually had a lot more typed out here, but the maths that goes into this gets very ugly, and you have to account for noise products that are introduced as you increase both your transmission speed, and your receiver sensitivty, thus lowering your SNR, reducing your effective bandwidth for a given QAM scheme.

So rather than bore you with the details, the Shannon Hartley theorem is the hard wired physical limitation.

Think of it as an asymptote, that QAM is one method of trying to milk the available space of.

You can send encoded pulses very fast, but you are limited by nyquist, and your receivers ability to determine noise from signal.

The faster you encode, the more noise, the less effective bandwidth....and so begins the ritule of increasing constellation density, and receivers that can decode them....etc....

There is also the aspect of having carriers too close to one another that you must consider. If you do not have enough of a dead band between your receivers cut off for top end, and the NEXT carrier alongs cutoff for deadband at its LOW end, you can induce what is known as a heterodyne. These are nasty, especially so when talking about fibre, as the wavelengths used can cause a WIDE BAND noise product that results in your effective RF noise floor to jump SUBSTANTIALLY, destroying your entire network in the process.

So not only can you not have a contiguous RF bandwidth of carriers, one directly after another...if you try and get them close, you end up ruining everyones day.

I am sure there will be newer more fancy ways to fill that spectrum with useable numbers, but I seriously doubt they will ever go faster than the limit I proposed earlier (unless they can get better SNR, again that was just a stab in the dark).

It gives you a good idea of how it works though.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest checking wikipedia for the following;

Shannon Hartley theorem.
Nyquist Rate
Quadrature Phase Shift Key
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
Fibre Optic Communication Wavelengths
Stimulated Brillouin Scattering
Ebrium Doped Fibre Amplifiers

Fibre can go a pretty long distance before it affects the signal though...

Fibre is comprised mainly of silicone, the more pure the fibre, the less dispersion issues occur at or around 1550nm (one of the main wavelengths used for long distance transmission, as we can easily and cheaply amplify this using ebrium doped segments and some pumps!)

Any impurities in the fibre will absorb the 1550 at a greater rate than other wavelengths, causing linear distortions in the received carrier along greater distances. This is called Brillouin scattering.

In the context of the above video, consider a paralell cable sending data over 100m. If one of those lines is 98m, then every bit that is sent down that line, will be out of order.

Same deal with Brillouin scattering, only on the optical level. Thats one of the main issues we gotta deal with at distance, however it only ever occurs at or around 1550nm, and only ever when you are driving that carrier at high powers (i.e. launching into the fibre directy from an ebrium doped amplifier at +15 dBm)

Theres some fancy ways of getting around that, but its not cheap.

Anywhere from say around 1260 to 1675nm is the typical bandwidth window we use today.

So, say 415nm of available bandwidth.
If we want that in frequency to figure out the theoritcal bits/sec value from the shannon-hartley theory, then we just take the inverse of the wavelength and times it by the speed of light.

7.2239e+14 hz is the available spectrum.

...thats 7.2239e+5 terahertz....

Assume typical signal to noise on fibre carrier of +6dB (haha, not a chance in hell it would be this good across this much bandwidth, but whatever..)

For a single fibre you would be looking at an average peak bandwidth of around 20280051221451.9 mbps.

Thats 19,340,564 Terabits per second, or 18,887.3 Petabits per second.

You can fudge that +/- a couple of million Tbps based on what the actual SnR would be, but thats your average figure.....thats a lot of Terabits.

On one fibre.

Source: Im a telecoms engineer

Being unable to vote is not the same thing as being denied the right to vote. Saying a three year old is a suffragist is kind of...well, silly. But it's true based on the idea that she is "denied the right to vote."

Because the definition is so broad, it really means NOTHING at all (As John Stewart said, "When you amplify everything, you hear nothing." The definition as you use it is the same vein.)

Are corporations, declared real people by the supreme court, suffragists. Publix maybe, but not Walmart! (That was facetious, not intended to be sarcastic.)

For example Jigga, we are both poor suffragists because we can't vote--in the Iraqi elections. Poor us, being held back. I don't apply suffragist to reasonable expectations. You should have to be a citizen of the country you vote in. A certain age (Which doesn't imply you should or should not be allowed to pre-register...) A certain mental capacity (Ie., not in a coma. Ie., have the ability to spell capacity and not "compacity," like I apparently cannot do )

I do think tests on intellect make for suffragists. I do think gender and gender identification make for suffragists. I do think religious bias makes for suffragists. I do think being arrested and paying for your time yet being released and unable to vote makes for suffragists.

I don't think this girl in any way shape or form is a suffragist.

Yo-when Japan gets completely packed with slow-movin' geriatrics we can sneak over and steal back all the vintage Harley Davidsons, and cherry tube amplifiers, and Fender Stratocasters!

When you amplify everything you hear nothing... - John Stewart

The SIGINT side of this all is still completely overlooked. You can copy every bit coming from fibers without anyone noticing it in either end. Hell, you can't see it happening between two closest nodes... All you see is a slight drop in the signal levels as few photons are separated from the original stream and then amplified before it's sent thru the same network as regular traffic.

Absolutely, men are abused, and absolutely that fact needs much more attention, but the situation for men and that for women is not the same. On average, men are stronger, which gives them a kind of power in a relationship that most women do not have. When we focus on domestic violence perpetrated by men, we are mainly focusing on acts that stem from that power. That is a fundamental and Important part of the reality, and lumping all discussion of domestic abuse into the same gender-free pile would do a disservice to our understanding of the topic.
You imply that because there are other evils in the world, that this one should receive less attention than it does. That's not the case. What the captain was saying shouldn't be tempered; if anything should be amplified. Violence and other abuse perpetrated by women against men deserves special focus As Well. If you find a good video about that, I'll happily promote it.

Crazy, baby! Thanks for the flashback....

(Used to do rock covers onna Sitar I bought in the north bay area-First arrangement I worked out was The Who's, "See For Miles.")

The U.S. and Japan are joined at the cultural hip in a lotta ways-Rock & Roll, Jazz, Harley Davidsons, tube amplifiers.....and GREAT BIG TITTIES!!

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