jrabone

You get to fight my bacteria, and every humans bacteria, every day of your life.

Not to a significant extent. In cases where people are exposed to other people's bacteria in quantity, they generally become (mildy) ill quite quickly while developing immunity - see fresher's flu etc.

If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.

And HOPING that N.Eutropha will out-compete their dangerous-to-others bacteria.

And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.

I'm not suggesting you shower in bleach, just that you wash yourself with something more effective than fairy dust.

No, it's standard UK practice, especially for the first 2 years after splenectomy. It does seem to vary around the world though.

For hopefully the last time, I'm not talking about the bacteria in the product. All human beings defecate. Many (most?) clean themselves afterwards with their hands. If you do not practise adequate hygiene with a surfactant-based cleanser, those faecal bacteria are still stuck to the skin afterwards and transfer to anything you touch, where they may be picked up by someone else who is not in a position to deal with them. This is not an appeal to emotion, it is a fact which I happen to have had personal experience of.

We provide them a home, and in return they protect and clean us. They don't want to destroy their home, they would die, too.

Sorry but that is absolute, unmitigated rubbish. I spent 2 weeks in intensive care, with a surgical scar from my sternum to my groin which de-hisced (burst open) because my own bacteria tried to kill me.

While they might be symbiotic in the right place (eg. the gut), they'll kill you pretty quickly if they get out.

Not talking about the bacteria in the product, I'm talking about the faecal bacteria (your own personal gut microbes) that are still stuck to the skin afterwards due to not using a surfactant-based washing product. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785997 further down the thread.

Soap and water is very good at removing faecal contamination. In the absence of small children and pets, and the taking of a prophylactic dose of antibiotics daily, my main concern is whether the people I share work and living space with are spreading their own faeces over surfaces I interact with. If their cleansing regime is as effective as soap and hot water, all is well.

TFA doesn't contain enough detail about hand-washing as opposed to body & hair, in much the same way that most people don't like talking about wiping their backsides vs washing them after defecating.

Thank you (I'm not religious either). I'm sorry you feel uncomfortable, that's not my intent at all. In purely objective terms, there's obviously a benefit to culling the weak.

I wouldn't necessarily advocate for _increased_ use of soap and shampoo (and certainly not for antibiotics). I also believe there is an argument that partial disinfection is much worse than nothing, when viewed in terms of selection pressure on a microbial population, and I don't think daily use of antibiotic soap is a good idea (although Triclosan is actually pretty useless anyway).

However, I definitely don't think we should be encouraging _less_ hygiene, even though I'm obviously biased.

I can't reply directly to "rosser" due to max comment depth, but fecal transplants don't generally involve introducing gut bacteria to anywhere other than the gut.

Your fecal coliforms will kill other people, simply because they're yours, not theirs. They'll kill you if they don't stay in the gut (mine tried, along with a carbapenem-resistant strain of streptococcus introduced via a central line).

I'm still alive, that's as far as it goes. 30% + chance of recurrence and it's not like I can have those organs removed a second time. However, it's an improvement on the initial diagnosis which was stage 4 adenocarcinoma with peritoneal metastasis (ie. a Kaplan-Meyer survival of about 5 years max).

It's not just immuno-suppressed people, it's everyone, and a risk/benefit comparison with peanut allergies is spurious. If everyone smeared themselves in peanut butter before they left the house each morning, you'd have a closer comparison.

Plenty of studies at http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/publications-data-stats.html - click on "Improved Health".

So anybody who happens to have a compromised immune system gets to fight your personalised microbes, perhaps fatally? How very ... Darwinian ... of you.

Soap and water have saved more lives than any medication, ever. I now have no spleen (6 months ago I lost spleen, gallbladder and half my stomach as well as sundry peritoneal membranes to cancer) and nearly died as a result of post-operative infections. I take daily antibiotics, possibly forever. As a society, we don't just cleanse ourselves for our own well-being, we wash for others.

Yep. I run Privoxy and a DNS resolver configured to be authoritative for the worst 5000 or so ad farms. Zips along nicely, and works for every machine on the LAN or via remote VPN.

Fuck ads. Find a different business model.

It's UTF-8 being interpreted as raw bytes: "a-hat" is the 0x80 marker byte. A common fail is forgetting that Microsoft Word auto-corrects straight quotes (which are in ASCII) to curly double quotes (which need Unicode), and serving the resulting text as CP1252 or ASCII or some such.

UTF-8 / GMT / ISO8601 people. It's (should be) law.

Anecdotally, tests for skin-contact carcinogens can be skewed because the lab mice are prone to develop skin cancers anyway.

I think OP meant, "Why does the experiment always succeed on mice", not "Why do we perform experiments on mice".

Presumably not ones assembled with lead-free solder? (not that the plastics are likely much safer by Californian standards, but still)

I find it quite ironic that the 'machine' has failed dismally to reproduce this text correctly, by making the usual pigs ear of character encodings and rendering Ælfrid as �lfrid in my browser, the latter being corrupted beyond trivial machine recovery.

We (or at least speakers of languages that don't fit into ASCII) are doomed.

No, no they won't. Not my users, anyway, because I block your ads at the DNS resolver level by redirecting queries to my own Apache instance, which serves single pixel images or empty JS as necessary.

Despite protestations in TFA to the contrary, publishers CAN'T be trusted not to create a tunnel for bad actors via adservers. They don't have the level of control required to do so. If you want the $$$, change your business model. If it turns out that no-one wants to pay for your content, perhaps it's not worth anything?

...right up to about 20 kHz, whereafter YOU CAN'T HEAR THEM. Hence 44 kHz sampling.

Seriously, A/B test this, you might be surprised.

Also if you think that's anything like a square wave coming out of a guitar speaker (or that that is even desirable in the most case), I've got a bridge to sell you. And yes, I do play.

First off, forget about MP3; I'm not arguing for a lossy standard.

You can't get an 18 kHz square wave out of a system with 44 kHz sampling. You need at least 1 harmonic before it'll even LOOK square, and that requires a frequency response out to 54 kHz, ie. a sampling frequency of 108 kHz. You CERTAINLY won't find one in a reverb tail, even assuming you had a generator for one in the first place (you might JUST get one from a cymbal crash, but I don't think the physics works)

The point being, your source material can't contain an 18 kHz square wave either since it's been through a studio production system with the same antialiasing filters.

Since you know nothing about me but seem to be making assumptions anyway, here's some background. I've worked in broadcast audio; I own studio recordings in 24 bit / 192 kHz (Linn release of Mozart's Requiem, studio master series). I also own studio equipment that can actually play it. Audiophiles are, by and large, cash cows for companies with no scruples.

That's actually good design - the intention being that any clipping can only be due to software (which you can fix), not underpowered amplification hardware (which you can't).

An 18 kHz square wave sampled at 44 kHz looks like an 18 kHz sine wave, everything after the fundamental frequency is well outside the Nyquist limit and will have been thrown away by anti-aliasing filters. And furthermore you couldn't hear it even if it wasn't. Fourier decomposition of a square wave gives the sum of odd multiples of the fundamental, the next frequency is 3 x 18 kHz = 54 kHz.

From previous discussion, quoting 'jbk'

VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation. ... snip ... At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware.

Except it can - because the saturation skews the power distribution towards higher frequencies which weren't designed for. This is very, very well known - it's the reason why one always chooses an amplifier with higher output rating than the speakers, often by a factor of two. It's counter-intuitive but driving a low-rated amp into saturation can overheat and destroy tweeters. (Guitar amps get away with it by having massive voice coils on a speaker which will only ever need to reproduce up to about 5kHz.)

https://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-starcraft-path-finding-... is a great article on the woes of path finding even when given a good basic algorithm. Nice contrast of theory and practice.

The test is most likely invalid - unless told otherwise SoX adds dither. Try adding -D, I expect the results will be different.

One thing that is alluded to but perhaps not explored fully is the use of noise-shaping dither techniques which rely on pushing the noise out into the ultrasonic region. Xiph mentions it in the context of 16 bit resolution, but I believe it interacts with the discussion of 192 kHz sampling.

Significant noise power at ultrasonic frequencies (or even a skewing towards higher audible frequencies) represents a problem for tweeters & amplifiers both in terms of the intermodulation distortion mentioned in Xiph's article and in terms of power dissipation at the business end. IIRC Dell and VLC are having a falling-out because VLC's soft clipping is damaging the speakers in certain Dell laptops.

I've had good results with OSH Park and 10mil trace / ground plane isolation, FWIW - and they take Eagle 6.5 natively (although depending on third-party library setup you'll probably want gerbers anyway).

The silkscreen might be a bit smudged. To be honest unless you've spent the effort to tweak your CAD package defaults, it'll be suboptimal anyway whoever you get to fab it unless you're paying them to tidy it up. In Eagle I found it's real easy to get the font ratio wrong or sizes too small and end up with a mediocre silk-screen result.

Google might have fixed it but Facebook haven't - the sidebar on the desktop site is full off bottom-feeder adverts for weight loss, hot dates etc. using non ASCII lookalike glyphs (usually accents or composing diacritics). I wonder if they are working around some Facebook ban on certain ads?

Spammers are still using this trick in email (usually subject lines) - I actually started writing a decomposer / normaliser plugin for SpamAssassin, then realised it was cheaper to just penalise Unicode-encoded subjects. This is why we can't have nice things.