WikiLeaks, Assange, Fallujah, Afghanistan and all that..
While news-media seem to focus on silly things like the accusations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, did you know that the people in Fallujah are worse off than those around Hiroshima after the bombing there? Coincidentally, what former marine Matt Howard says might be more true than we would like to believe: A year ago I attended a festival for and by hackers, called Hacking At Random. Among many of the interesting people camping there were the WikiLeaks team. They were involved in some inspiring talks there, of which you can still download the videos. During my stay at HAR I even had a short conversation about gevulde koeken and some other superficial things related to the festival with mister Assange. I think of myself as being a pretty good judge of character, and this is certainly not the type of man that goes around treating women like shit, which becomes even more clear when you see this character analysis of Julian. Meanwhile, WikiLeaks recently leaked: A clip from their website: The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of…
Audiophoolery
excerpt from Ethan Winer's website:THE CABLE GUY The earliest audio scam I can recall is fancy wire for connecting loudspeakers, and it's still going strong. These days vendors claim their wire yields better sound quality when compared to normal wire, and, of course, it's much more expensive than normal wire. In truth, the most important property of speaker wire is resistance, which is a function of its thickness. The resistance must be low to pass the high-current signals a power amplifier delivers, and is exactly analogous to a large water pipe allowing more flow than a small pipe. For short distances - say, up to five feet - 16 gauge wire of any type is adequate, though thicker wire is needed for longer runs. The three other wire parameters are inductance, capacitance, and skin effect. But those are not a factor with usual cable lengths at audio frequencies, especially when connecting speakers to a power amplifier. Low capacitance wire can be important in special cases, like between a phonograph cartridge and its preamp. But high quality, low capacitance wire can be had for pennies per foot. Wire scams are very popular because wire is a low-tech device that's simple to…