Typical people can hear up to about 18 to 20kHz, and it's likely some people can hear higher, and possible that our perception is subconsciously altered by frequencies slightly higher than ones we are consciously aware of. Now consider that a 44.1kHz sample rate could sample a 22.05kHz wave at the zero every time (and on average, the sampled wave would have 70% the amplitude of the input wave). Yes, a digital medium can produce any frequency up to the Nyquist frequency, but that is a different problem than accurately reproducing any input, even one that has been low-pass filtered at the Nyquist frequency.
WTF are you even talking about? Google should release its source code because it runs on open source platforms? Google makes a few changes to actual OSS, like this article is talking about, and they do release that code back to the community (they open source some internal projects, like GWT). But that's not the same as what runs on top of it. By your logic, nobody should sell commercial software for Linux - it runs on an open platform, so it should be open! Because development is free and companies should be able to make money off of work done by others! And anyway, what's a "meaningful competitor" who just uses code Google open sourced? Wouldn't they just be another Google running in separate datacenters?
The downside is that if the filter machine goes down then the two endpoints cannot communicate.
These two options are a bit of an oversimplification. Why not have a filter with a device that routes around it if it goes down? You can claim that the device is just "part of the filter" and so the same logic applies - but the point is it's a very simple device so it won't go down. It's no more a potential point of failure than any number of other machines I have to go through to get through my ISP.
So when your employee goes to playboy.com you can hit both sides with a RST and stop that from happening.
I don't pay my employer to provide internet service. My employer does not have a contract to provide me with such service. Not a good analogy.
When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
Why can't Comcast just throttle my connection if I'm using a lot of bandwidth and choking other connections? Is this any harder than monitoring all packets and seeing that I'm using it in the first place? They own the network, so they can do whatever they want - there's no reason that I should get a share of the bandwidth proportional to the number of connections I have open. Additionally, doing that would be a solution to all bandwidth hogs, not just a stopgap measure to address one specific application.
Fundamentally, what Comcast is doing is fraud, regardless of why they are doing it and what the end effect is. What you're saying sounds like Comcast is just taking the easy route because they don't want to put in the engineering effort to actually address the concerns you bring up, and more to the point, they're doing so without thinking about the legal ramifications or possible unintended effects (Lotus notes, WoW, and whatever else they're impeding by doing this). Not only that, they're lying about it now. If they are just using a common practice filtering technique mandated by technical considerations to satisfy their obligations to customers, as you suggest, and if they are doing so legally, why the secrecy?
The signature on a credit card is NOT a form of ID. The cashier is NOT required (and should not) compare your signature on a receipt to the signature on the card. The signature indicates that you have accepted the cardholder agreement, thus making the card legitimate (otherwise you would not be liable for charges to the card).
What the cashier is supposed to do is ask for a photo ID such as a driver's license, to compare with the name on the card. For a large enough purchase, they will always do this.
The real reason you don't need to sign or show ID for small purchases is that the bank figures, at a certain incidence rate of fraudulent charges, and with the cost of investigating fraudulent charges and initiating proceedings to recover the money, for charges less than a certain amount it is cheaper for them to eat the loss from fraud than to try to prevent it. Really, you as the end consumer shouldn't really care one way or the other - as long as the bank says you are not liable for fraudulent charges (most do), and they are reasonable about handling fraud complaints (i.e. don't try too hard to screw you), then security is the bank's problem, not yours. And since banks are large businesses with lots of books to keep, they are probably pretty good at figuring out what it worth doing or not as far as preventing fraud.
You apparently lack knowledge on the subject too.
If you desposit $100 in a bank with a reserve ratio of 10%, they can loan $90. Not $900. The way that (theoretically) that deposit creates $900 of "funny money" is that if they lend me $90, I buy something with it, and the seller then deposits that $90 in the same bank, they can then loan another $81. They can keep loaning progressively smaller amounts as long as the money comes back to them, up to a limit of $900. This is *not* the unbounded system you and so many other people seem to think, where the bank can loan more than it has and grow its IOUs exponentially. Every dollar loaned is a real paper dollar deposited by someone. The "inflation" comes from the fact that the bank doesn't actually keep enough in the vault to back all of its own IOUs. As long as people don't all rush the bank simultaneously to withdraw their money, this isn't a problem.
It also doesn't matter a whole lot which bank the money goes to. They're all part of one reserve system. And if there's enough economic activity, then the loaned money *will* come back to the bank indirectly. If a bank is loaning out more than is coming back to it, that means they have a decreasing share of deposits, so if the market is stable, the money has to come back.
Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
Wrong. The Nyquist Theorem states only that a sample rate of double the highest expected frequency is the minimum required to avoid aliasing. Meaning that, if you sample 22kHz at 44kHz, it won't come out sounding like something other than 22kHz. But you could theoretically be sampling at the 0 every time. The Nyquist Theorem isn't really about faithful reproduction.
And in reality, there's no such thing as a perfect low-pass filter. This is why CDs are at 44kHz and not 40kHz, given that we can't hear anything above about 20kHz. But that still doesn't mean they reproduce 20kHz well, just that we can use a low-pass filter which doesn't significantly attenuate 20kHz and sample it to a CD without audible aliasing.
What drove me insane was the stupid "breathing" LED on sleeping Macs. Mac LEDs are way too bright, and annoying as all hell in a dark room since some genius decided the light should pulsate just fast enough to keep your pupil response 90 degrees out of phase...
You have to understand that products are designed with a particular market in mind, though. Some people can't handle more than one button. Some people just don't want to pay extra for a better layout because it's not that important to them. I think in general a lot more attention could be paid to usability issues, but cheap commodity junk and marketing gimmicks will always exist, and you can't expect them to be something more. Higher-end products are designed with the sort of considerations you mention, but there isn't generally a consumer market for them, and if it's really that important to you, expect to pay a premium.
It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency.
Not really. The more money people have (whether it's electronic or real paper money, and whether it's backed by gold or chickens or not), the less purchasing power a unit of currency has, everything else being equal. That's basic economics. Taking money out of circulation is entirely different from using it to buy chickens.
That being said, I agree that the GP argument is worthless. It's like saying paying off your auto loan is not paying for your car but merely supporting the stability of banks. By that logic, tolls don't pay for bridges - after all, they're already built before anyone pays a toll to use them.
Not to mention that modern society and medicine don't really have much to do with our current state of evolution. It's maybe for the last few hundred years or so that "even our paraplegics" can survive and reproduce, unless you're royalty or something. Even if it were several thousand years, that's not a whole lot on the evolutionary scale, especially for a species with as long a gap between generations as ours. In early hunter-gatherer human societies, it's probably more likely that a paraplegic would be left to die or killed by fellow tribesmen.
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Typical people can hear up to about 18 to 20kHz, and it's likely some people can hear higher, and possible that our perception is subconsciously altered by frequencies slightly higher than ones we are consciously aware of. Now consider that a 44.1kHz sample rate could sample a 22.05kHz wave at the zero every time (and on average, the sampled wave would have 70% the amplitude of the input wave). Yes, a digital medium can produce any frequency up to the Nyquist frequency, but that is a different problem than accurately reproducing any input, even one that has been low-pass filtered at the Nyquist frequency.
WTF are you even talking about? Google should release its source code because it runs on open source platforms? Google makes a few changes to actual OSS, like this article is talking about, and they do release that code back to the community (they open source some internal projects, like GWT). But that's not the same as what runs on top of it. By your logic, nobody should sell commercial software for Linux - it runs on an open platform, so it should be open! Because development is free and companies should be able to make money off of work done by others! And anyway, what's a "meaningful competitor" who just uses code Google open sourced? Wouldn't they just be another Google running in separate datacenters?
The downside is that if the filter machine goes down then the two endpoints cannot communicate.
These two options are a bit of an oversimplification. Why not have a filter with a device that routes around it if it goes down? You can claim that the device is just "part of the filter" and so the same logic applies - but the point is it's a very simple device so it won't go down. It's no more a potential point of failure than any number of other machines I have to go through to get through my ISP.
So when your employee goes to playboy.com you can hit both sides with a RST and stop that from happening.
I don't pay my employer to provide internet service. My employer does not have a contract to provide me with such service. Not a good analogy.
When their neighbors are running BitTorrent 24/7 they can no longer do this. Increasing the bandwidth does not help because BitTorrent will proceed to soak that up.
Why can't Comcast just throttle my connection if I'm using a lot of bandwidth and choking other connections? Is this any harder than monitoring all packets and seeing that I'm using it in the first place? They own the network, so they can do whatever they want - there's no reason that I should get a share of the bandwidth proportional to the number of connections I have open. Additionally, doing that would be a solution to all bandwidth hogs, not just a stopgap measure to address one specific application.
Fundamentally, what Comcast is doing is fraud, regardless of why they are doing it and what the end effect is. What you're saying sounds like Comcast is just taking the easy route because they don't want to put in the engineering effort to actually address the concerns you bring up, and more to the point, they're doing so without thinking about the legal ramifications or possible unintended effects (Lotus notes, WoW, and whatever else they're impeding by doing this). Not only that, they're lying about it now. If they are just using a common practice filtering technique mandated by technical considerations to satisfy their obligations to customers, as you suggest, and if they are doing so legally, why the secrecy?
You do have an opt-out. Nobody is forcing you to get an RFID credit card. And if they do, there's always a microwave. :)
The signature on a credit card is NOT a form of ID. The cashier is NOT required (and should not) compare your signature on a receipt to the signature on the card. The signature indicates that you have accepted the cardholder agreement, thus making the card legitimate (otherwise you would not be liable for charges to the card). What the cashier is supposed to do is ask for a photo ID such as a driver's license, to compare with the name on the card. For a large enough purchase, they will always do this. The real reason you don't need to sign or show ID for small purchases is that the bank figures, at a certain incidence rate of fraudulent charges, and with the cost of investigating fraudulent charges and initiating proceedings to recover the money, for charges less than a certain amount it is cheaper for them to eat the loss from fraud than to try to prevent it. Really, you as the end consumer shouldn't really care one way or the other - as long as the bank says you are not liable for fraudulent charges (most do), and they are reasonable about handling fraud complaints (i.e. don't try too hard to screw you), then security is the bank's problem, not yours. And since banks are large businesses with lots of books to keep, they are probably pretty good at figuring out what it worth doing or not as far as preventing fraud.
You apparently lack knowledge on the subject too. If you desposit $100 in a bank with a reserve ratio of 10%, they can loan $90. Not $900. The way that (theoretically) that deposit creates $900 of "funny money" is that if they lend me $90, I buy something with it, and the seller then deposits that $90 in the same bank, they can then loan another $81. They can keep loaning progressively smaller amounts as long as the money comes back to them, up to a limit of $900. This is *not* the unbounded system you and so many other people seem to think, where the bank can loan more than it has and grow its IOUs exponentially. Every dollar loaned is a real paper dollar deposited by someone. The "inflation" comes from the fact that the bank doesn't actually keep enough in the vault to back all of its own IOUs. As long as people don't all rush the bank simultaneously to withdraw their money, this isn't a problem. It also doesn't matter a whole lot which bank the money goes to. They're all part of one reserve system. And if there's enough economic activity, then the loaned money *will* come back to the bank indirectly. If a bank is loaning out more than is coming back to it, that means they have a decreasing share of deposits, so if the market is stable, the money has to come back.
Nothing below 22kHz is misrepresented in CD-quality audio.
Wrong. The Nyquist Theorem states only that a sample rate of double the highest expected frequency is the minimum required to avoid aliasing. Meaning that, if you sample 22kHz at 44kHz, it won't come out sounding like something other than 22kHz. But you could theoretically be sampling at the 0 every time. The Nyquist Theorem isn't really about faithful reproduction.
And in reality, there's no such thing as a perfect low-pass filter. This is why CDs are at 44kHz and not 40kHz, given that we can't hear anything above about 20kHz. But that still doesn't mean they reproduce 20kHz well, just that we can use a low-pass filter which doesn't significantly attenuate 20kHz and sample it to a CD without audible aliasing.
What drove me insane was the stupid "breathing" LED on sleeping Macs. Mac LEDs are way too bright, and annoying as all hell in a dark room since some genius decided the light should pulsate just fast enough to keep your pupil response 90 degrees out of phase... You have to understand that products are designed with a particular market in mind, though. Some people can't handle more than one button. Some people just don't want to pay extra for a better layout because it's not that important to them. I think in general a lot more attention could be paid to usability issues, but cheap commodity junk and marketing gimmicks will always exist, and you can't expect them to be something more. Higher-end products are designed with the sort of considerations you mention, but there isn't generally a consumer market for them, and if it's really that important to you, expect to pay a premium.
It's true that paying taxes "supports the perceived value" of the currency. So does any use of the currency. Not really. The more money people have (whether it's electronic or real paper money, and whether it's backed by gold or chickens or not), the less purchasing power a unit of currency has, everything else being equal. That's basic economics. Taking money out of circulation is entirely different from using it to buy chickens. That being said, I agree that the GP argument is worthless. It's like saying paying off your auto loan is not paying for your car but merely supporting the stability of banks. By that logic, tolls don't pay for bridges - after all, they're already built before anyone pays a toll to use them.
Not to mention that modern society and medicine don't really have much to do with our current state of evolution. It's maybe for the last few hundred years or so that "even our paraplegics" can survive and reproduce, unless you're royalty or something. Even if it were several thousand years, that's not a whole lot on the evolutionary scale, especially for a species with as long a gap between generations as ours. In early hunter-gatherer human societies, it's probably more likely that a paraplegic would be left to die or killed by fellow tribesmen.