No, no. It's the right to bear arms. You can have brown bear arms, black bear arms, polar bear arms... but not panda bear arms, because they're endangered. And also not koala bear arms, because they're not actually bears.
Those numbers are actually low, even using heavily compressed audio. Cell phone data is streamed at either single- or low-double-digit kilobits per second. You'd have to record both directions, though, so double it and you get somewhere around 20-30 kbps. That comes to about a hundred megs per customer per month, or around 30 petabytes per month for the whole country.
Uncompressed audio, even assuming a crappy 22 kHz sampling rate and 8-bit call quality, is an order of magnitude higher.
The reason to improve MathML support isn't browsers. It's eBook readers that share the underlying rendering engines. Lots of textbook publishers want to use MathML, but without robust, reliable, visually appealing support, everybody has to do awful hacks with inline images or (hopefully) SVG instead.
Are you looking at the same MathML Acid tests that I am? These are not the same tests as the original Acid and Acid 2 tests.
Chrome Stable, at least on OS X, fails MathML Acid 1 miserably, as does Chrome Canary. All the fractions are shown as the left part followed by a space followed by the right part instead of as a fraction. Safari on OS X is basically correct for MathML Acid 1 (albeit with the ugliest parentheses I've ever seen), but if you reload the page, the curly braces disappear, as do the comma inside the curly braces and the plus sign.
And the MathML Acid 2 test looks like a freaking Picasso on all three browsers.
If this is really true, you are way out in a tail of the statistical distribution; this is good for you, of course, but still not something to generalize from.
Everyone I know who bought the machines I bought had pretty much the same problems I did, assuming they kept the machines long enough. I wasn't unlucky in terms of the failure rate. I was unlucky in terms of consistently picking the wrong years to buy machines.:-)
When they sell you an extended warranty, they're doing it to make money. They have a much broader base to analyze, and they're very good at calculating how much to charge vs. how much they'll have to pay out, to end up with a profit.
Yes, and no. The cost always more than offsets their additional risk, but that is not the same as your additional risk. If a product dies under warranty, the manufacturer eats two-way shipping plus the cost of their repair parts. If a product dies without an extended warranty, you eat one-way shipping and the manufacturer eats one-way shipping. You pay for the repair parts and labor at a significantly inflated price. Therefore, even when there's a lot of padding built into the cost of a manufacturer extended warranty, it is still often cheaper than having the repair done yourself.
For example, a single logic board or display panel replacement from Apple costs more than AppleCare. On many laptops, I got several times as much out of AppleCare as I paid in, once you add up the numbers. Of course, Apple still made money because refurbished parts don't really cost anywhere near what they charge for them.
The equation changes somewhat when you're talking about product replacement warranties, such as those offered by retailers. The difference between their replacement cost and your replacement cost is much less, so it doesn't take much padding before those become more expensive on average than your replacement cost. Thus, these are basically never worthwhile.
Riiiiiight. It's the victim's fault. Clearly. They could have prevented the situation, after all...
Actually, yes. There's such a thing as guilt through sufficiently gross negligence. For example, if you leave your car unlocked and the windows rolled down with a stack of hundred dollar bills in the front seat, you deserve to walk back to find them gone. Chances are, your insurance won't cover such a loss, because it is, at least in large part, your own fault.
Just like it's a hot woman's fault for getting raped... she could choose how she was going to dress, after all...
This is more like choosing not to be dressed at all, while hanging around the front porch of your ex's house on a night when he always comes home drunk. Not saying the rape isn't still wrong, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would give much sympathy....
NYC had major power outages after Sandy. Was it because of all the wires on poles? Nope, it was because the utilities were underground, where it turns out they are vulnerable to floods. Who knew?
Flip that around. NYC doesn't have major power outages a dozen times per year from snow and ice breaking the overhead power lines, tree branches, etc. Instead, every few decades, they lose power because of a flood. Most sane people will gladly take that over the alternative.:-)
Sure they are. Out of the hundred or so members of my church tour group a few years back, I'd guess that there were at least a dozen fanny packs. That's pretty mainstream.
To be fair, most people just don't use them every day, but walk around the streets of any major tourist city, and you'll find people carrying them around. They're good ways to carry crap around when you're going to be walking around the city all day without going back to the hotel.
For example, I'm not even remotely a nerd (geek, yes, nerd, no), yet when I travel, I carry one around as my camera bag. It can either hold my camera and a couple of lenses or a couple of lenses and a flash without room for my camera, depending on my needs. Other folks I know use them to carry food or water around with them. Still others use tiny versions to carry their point-and-shoot cameras, foreign currency, or cell phones. And so on.
Do you seriously think the failed hardware coincidentally (and magically) repaired itself?
Ever take a look at filesystem metadata produced by a computer with bad RAM? I have. It's not pretty. Reinstalling results in a fresh copy of critical system files, which are then (temporarily) not corrupt.
For you, sure. But given that you're the sort of person who reads this site, you almost certainly add lots of aftermarket hardware to your computer. This means that you're not a typical computer user.
The average computer plugs in maybe an external hard drive (which doesn't usually require its own drivers unless you're doing stupid crap like half-***ed encryption), maybe an iPhone/iPod/iPad, and that's about it. And major hardware vendors generally put in a significant amount of QA testing on their drivers to minimize BSODs that occur with any frequency. So for an average computer user, assuming up-to-date drivers and Windows SPs, I'd expect a computer exhibiting BSODs to be caused by bad RAM at least nine times out of ten, even when running older versions of Windows.
Do you really want to live in a world where people have to have no respect for your wishes unless you get them to put their signature on paper? Do you want to end internet commerce as you know it? Do want all of the Internet to suddenly disappear because a whole bunch of shit suddenly becomes impractical to do because everyone spends a bunch of time waiting for the mailman to show up with signed documents?
Do you really want to live in a world where someone who, without modifying a device, without taking any steps that would ordinarily qualify as hacking/cracking, can be brought up on hacking charges? Frankly, even if he had signed a EULA, how are you going to prove that the person knew and remembered that the previous bet was 820:1 and not 8200:1? This is an error that could easily occur innocently. Admittedly, not several times in a row, but it could occur once innocently. And it seems likely that if one person found the problem, other people have been exploiting it for years. Based on that, the correct response is, "Thanks for exploiting the flaw in a way that made it so obvious that we could compel the manufacturer to correct it." In the long run, his actions likely saved the company money.
If i understand the article correctly it's not just going round in a circle like a planet but "jumping" around specific point around the circle like a clock hand. it appears from one point to the other without being in between. But rest of your point still applies.
Isn't that a bit like, to borrow a line from Stargate Atlantis, "looking through a microscope at a cell culture and seeing a thousand dancing hamsters?"
Agreed, Bose makes terrible speakers. It's basically impossible to get good factory made speakers, but bose speakers are a notch bellow anything you can find at walmart. They just color their sound with the preamp to fool the ear of those with little understanding of what their music is supposed to sound like.
That's not true for all Bose speakers, but it is certainly true for things like the Wave radio. They make up for having no bass response by boosting the heck out of the lower mids.
That said, the reason they do that has to do with the limits of the laws of physics, and you aren't going to do any better if you're trying to design a speaker that fits on a bookshelf. Bass response falls off faster as you move from the near field into the far field because of the proximity effect. So when your ears are an inch away from the speaker (headphones), you can do bass response with a tiny little cone, but when you get past a few feet, you need to actually produce enough bass response to carry properly, which basically requires a large cone. Anything less than about an eight-inch cone just doesn't cut it even in the near field, and anything less than about a twelve-inch cone doesn't cut it in the far field.
If you want a good speaker, you need to build it yourself. It's not hard, it's just that each is unique and hard to do right on an assembly line.
That's way overkill. If you want a good speaker, you have to buy one whose size is appropriate for the room. Pioneer, JBL, and Peavey (and really, even Bose) all make decent speaker cabinets in varying sizes, depending you your needs. For most rooms, I would go with a ten inch speaker. For near-field monitoring (e.g. in a recording studio), I would go with a proper set of eight inch powered monitors that are tailored to have a flat response across the frequency range. For outdoors, get the biggest freaking speaker you can afford.
That said, the most important part comes after you buy the speakers. Buy a graphic EQ and take the time to do a frequency sweep to tune the speakers to your room. It's that last step that most people skip. Even a custom built speaker can only do so much in terms of tuning the cabinet to the room. The last bit, you pretty much have to do with EQ.
You are not supposed to be looking out at infinity when you are driving.
Um, yes you are. Infinity, as far as the human eye is concerned, is anything beyond about 20 feet, so except when you're looking in your mirrors (which you really don't need to do constantly, just occasionally), your eyes are almost always going to be at infinity while driving. Anything short of that means you're following too close behind the car in front of you.
The true "ludditism" is the refusal to recognize that the more that distracted driving is studied, the more it is clear that thinking about anything other than driving is a hazard. Distraction by radio is bad enough as it is.
First, that's the opposite of ludditism, which means rejection of technology, not rejection of scientific knowledge. Second, you can have my car radio when you pry it with a crowbar from my cold, dead dashboard. You can't eliminate all distractions, and it is stupid to try.
The goal of any driving-related safety improvements should be to minimize the distraction without being so invasive that people work around whatever solution you put in place. Passing laws against texting causes people to hide their phones while they text, resulting in them looking down even farther from the road, and thus driving even more dangerously. Driving modes that prevent visually reviewing your text messages don't help either, because most people don't want to send out text messages that make them look functionally illiterate, as is often the case with voice dictation under even the best conditions (which a noisy automobile ain't). Using HUDs, by contrast, can dramatically decrease the risk of sending a single text message, mitigating it so much that for the sane 99.9% of drivers who would use such things fairly infrequently, the additional risk of texting in that manner is likely to be lost in the statistical noise.
But of course, the best choice of all is to get the meatbag out from behind the wheel in the first place. That not only eliminates all risk from distractions, but also eliminates all risk from fatigue, illness, sudden cardiac arrest, seizures, sweat getting in your eyes, and probably hundreds of other risk factors.
Focusing on somthing and glancing away are mutually exclusive.
Not at all. A properly designed HUD doesn't require your eyes to change focus. From the driver's perspective, you would be looking out at infinity and would still be able to read the text superimposed over what you're seeing out the window.
Moreover, the mere act of thinking about something other than navigating the immediate environment is a dangerous distraction.
Yes, but that is equally true whether you're parsing a text message or are formulating a counterargument to a particularly compelling discussion on talk radio. The only thing that makes text messaging unique is the fact that your eyes have to leave the road. Period. Remove that, and you've removed the only valid reason for text messaging bans other than ludditism.
Yes, exactly. This is why touchscreen controls in automobiles are a terrible idea, and more to the point, why using anything that cannot be operated almost entirely by feel is a terrible idea. Texting, of course, is one of the most extreme examples of that problem, because the amount of time you have to spend looking at the screen in order to actually read a block of text for correctness is significantly greater than the time it takes to choose an option from a familiar menu or find the volume control "buttons" on a screen.
IMO, there are only two options here: a HUD that lets your eyes stay focused on the road while glancing at the text, or cars that drive themselves. Anything else as a "solution" for the texting-while-driving-is-unsafe problem is pretty much doomed to failure, whether it is speech recognition or mechanical keyboards, because the error rate will always be too high for anyone to trust sending it without reading it first.
I can see the benefit of being able to allocate a GPU/CPU-shared memory region in VRAM for fast passing of information to the GPU without a copy, but apart from making the above concept slightly cheaper to implement, the only benefit I could come up with for allowing the GPU access to main memory is making password theft easier. That and letting their driver developers write sloppier code that doesn't have to distinguish between two types of addresses....
The most hilarious part of this is that while they're doing this, the rest of the world seems to be moving in the opposite direction, towards having separate I/O and physical address spaces that are mapped with an MMU. But I digress.
They talk about passing pointers back and forth as though the GPU and CPU effectively share an MMU. The problem is, GPUs and CPUs don't work the same way. GPUs need to access shared resources that are per-system, whereas CPUs need to limit access to resources on a per-process basis. It would be devastating if a GPU could, for example, allow an arbitrary user-space process to overwrite parts of the kernel and inject virus code that runs with greater-than-root privilege. It would similarly be devastating if some arbitrary process could, for example, read the private RAM that backs your keychain or other security-related processes.
I'm assuming that they're doing something sane like having a separate set of RWX bits on each page table entry to control what the GPU's rights are for that page, so that the GPU would only be allowed to read specifically flagged main-memory pages, but these fuzzy marketing briefs provide just enough information to be terrifying.
Because it doesn't sound so crazy in its original context where it's nationally funded and only one of a group of qualifications that are joined by logical ors, not logical ands.
Whew. They had me worried there. I thought for a moment that they were shutting down the grant program, because by definition, just about anything that benefits national defense is inherently not of utmost importance to society....
My point is that whether you're attaching the hose to the upper part of the base or to a leg, you still have a tube inside the device that the hose screws onto. The only obvious difference here is the length of that tube. Such a trivial change hardly qualifies as patent-worthy. And because it does not functionally change how the device is used, what it is capable of doing, etc., even if the change were non-trivial, IMO, it would still not qualify for a utility patent. A design patent, perhaps, but not a utility patent.
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No, no. It's the right to bear arms. You can have brown bear arms, black bear arms, polar bear arms... but not panda bear arms, because they're endangered. And also not koala bear arms, because they're not actually bears.
Is it bad that the first thing that popped into my head was, "Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb Iran"?
Translation: There's no uncompressed audio anywhere in the phone network.
Those numbers are actually low, even using heavily compressed audio. Cell phone data is streamed at either single- or low-double-digit kilobits per second. You'd have to record both directions, though, so double it and you get somewhere around 20-30 kbps. That comes to about a hundred megs per customer per month, or around 30 petabytes per month for the whole country.
Uncompressed audio, even assuming a crappy 22 kHz sampling rate and 8-bit call quality, is an order of magnitude higher.
The reason to improve MathML support isn't browsers. It's eBook readers that share the underlying rendering engines. Lots of textbook publishers want to use MathML, but without robust, reliable, visually appealing support, everybody has to do awful hacks with inline images or (hopefully) SVG instead.
Are you looking at the same MathML Acid tests that I am? These are not the same tests as the original Acid and Acid 2 tests.
Chrome Stable, at least on OS X, fails MathML Acid 1 miserably, as does Chrome Canary. All the fractions are shown as the left part followed by a space followed by the right part instead of as a fraction. Safari on OS X is basically correct for MathML Acid 1 (albeit with the ugliest parentheses I've ever seen), but if you reload the page, the curly braces disappear, as do the comma inside the curly braces and the plus sign.
And the MathML Acid 2 test looks like a freaking Picasso on all three browsers.
Everyone I know who bought the machines I bought had pretty much the same problems I did, assuming they kept the machines long enough. I wasn't unlucky in terms of the failure rate. I was unlucky in terms of consistently picking the wrong years to buy machines. :-)
Yes, and no. The cost always more than offsets their additional risk, but that is not the same as your additional risk. If a product dies under warranty, the manufacturer eats two-way shipping plus the cost of their repair parts. If a product dies without an extended warranty, you eat one-way shipping and the manufacturer eats one-way shipping. You pay for the repair parts and labor at a significantly inflated price. Therefore, even when there's a lot of padding built into the cost of a manufacturer extended warranty, it is still often cheaper than having the repair done yourself.
For example, a single logic board or display panel replacement from Apple costs more than AppleCare. On many laptops, I got several times as much out of AppleCare as I paid in, once you add up the numbers. Of course, Apple still made money because refurbished parts don't really cost anywhere near what they charge for them.
The equation changes somewhat when you're talking about product replacement warranties, such as those offered by retailers. The difference between their replacement cost and your replacement cost is much less, so it doesn't take much padding before those become more expensive on average than your replacement cost. Thus, these are basically never worthwhile.
Actually, yes. There's such a thing as guilt through sufficiently gross negligence. For example, if you leave your car unlocked and the windows rolled down with a stack of hundred dollar bills in the front seat, you deserve to walk back to find them gone. Chances are, your insurance won't cover such a loss, because it is, at least in large part, your own fault.
This is more like choosing not to be dressed at all, while hanging around the front porch of your ex's house on a night when he always comes home drunk. Not saying the rape isn't still wrong, but you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who would give much sympathy....
I forgot how good that movie was. Too bad they never made any sequels.
Flip that around. NYC doesn't have major power outages a dozen times per year from snow and ice breaking the overhead power lines, tree branches, etc. Instead, every few decades, they lose power because of a flood. Most sane people will gladly take that over the alternative. :-)
Sure they are. Out of the hundred or so members of my church tour group a few years back, I'd guess that there were at least a dozen fanny packs. That's pretty mainstream.
To be fair, most people just don't use them every day, but walk around the streets of any major tourist city, and you'll find people carrying them around. They're good ways to carry crap around when you're going to be walking around the city all day without going back to the hotel.
For example, I'm not even remotely a nerd (geek, yes, nerd, no), yet when I travel, I carry one around as my camera bag. It can either hold my camera and a couple of lenses or a couple of lenses and a flash without room for my camera, depending on my needs. Other folks I know use them to carry food or water around with them. Still others use tiny versions to carry their point-and-shoot cameras, foreign currency, or cell phones. And so on.
Ever take a look at filesystem metadata produced by a computer with bad RAM? I have. It's not pretty. Reinstalling results in a fresh copy of critical system files, which are then (temporarily) not corrupt.
For you, sure. But given that you're the sort of person who reads this site, you almost certainly add lots of aftermarket hardware to your computer. This means that you're not a typical computer user.
The average computer plugs in maybe an external hard drive (which doesn't usually require its own drivers unless you're doing stupid crap like half-***ed encryption), maybe an iPhone/iPod/iPad, and that's about it. And major hardware vendors generally put in a significant amount of QA testing on their drivers to minimize BSODs that occur with any frequency. So for an average computer user, assuming up-to-date drivers and Windows SPs, I'd expect a computer exhibiting BSODs to be caused by bad RAM at least nine times out of ten, even when running older versions of Windows.
Blue screens are statistically almost always caused by hardware failures.
Do you really want to live in a world where someone who, without modifying a device, without taking any steps that would ordinarily qualify as hacking/cracking, can be brought up on hacking charges? Frankly, even if he had signed a EULA, how are you going to prove that the person knew and remembered that the previous bet was 820:1 and not 8200:1? This is an error that could easily occur innocently. Admittedly, not several times in a row, but it could occur once innocently. And it seems likely that if one person found the problem, other people have been exploiting it for years. Based on that, the correct response is, "Thanks for exploiting the flaw in a way that made it so obvious that we could compel the manufacturer to correct it." In the long run, his actions likely saved the company money.
Isn't that a bit like, to borrow a line from Stargate Atlantis, "looking through a microscope at a cell culture and seeing a thousand dancing hamsters?"
That's not true for all Bose speakers, but it is certainly true for things like the Wave radio. They make up for having no bass response by boosting the heck out of the lower mids.
That said, the reason they do that has to do with the limits of the laws of physics, and you aren't going to do any better if you're trying to design a speaker that fits on a bookshelf. Bass response falls off faster as you move from the near field into the far field because of the proximity effect. So when your ears are an inch away from the speaker (headphones), you can do bass response with a tiny little cone, but when you get past a few feet, you need to actually produce enough bass response to carry properly, which basically requires a large cone. Anything less than about an eight-inch cone just doesn't cut it even in the near field, and anything less than about a twelve-inch cone doesn't cut it in the far field.
That's way overkill. If you want a good speaker, you have to buy one whose size is appropriate for the room. Pioneer, JBL, and Peavey (and really, even Bose) all make decent speaker cabinets in varying sizes, depending you your needs. For most rooms, I would go with a ten inch speaker. For near-field monitoring (e.g. in a recording studio), I would go with a proper set of eight inch powered monitors that are tailored to have a flat response across the frequency range. For outdoors, get the biggest freaking speaker you can afford.
That said, the most important part comes after you buy the speakers. Buy a graphic EQ and take the time to do a frequency sweep to tune the speakers to your room. It's that last step that most people skip. Even a custom built speaker can only do so much in terms of tuning the cabinet to the room. The last bit, you pretty much have to do with EQ.
Um, yes you are. Infinity, as far as the human eye is concerned, is anything beyond about 20 feet, so except when you're looking in your mirrors (which you really don't need to do constantly, just occasionally), your eyes are almost always going to be at infinity while driving. Anything short of that means you're following too close behind the car in front of you.
First, that's the opposite of ludditism, which means rejection of technology, not rejection of scientific knowledge. Second, you can have my car radio when you pry it with a crowbar from my cold, dead dashboard. You can't eliminate all distractions, and it is stupid to try.
The goal of any driving-related safety improvements should be to minimize the distraction without being so invasive that people work around whatever solution you put in place. Passing laws against texting causes people to hide their phones while they text, resulting in them looking down even farther from the road, and thus driving even more dangerously. Driving modes that prevent visually reviewing your text messages don't help either, because most people don't want to send out text messages that make them look functionally illiterate, as is often the case with voice dictation under even the best conditions (which a noisy automobile ain't). Using HUDs, by contrast, can dramatically decrease the risk of sending a single text message, mitigating it so much that for the sane 99.9% of drivers who would use such things fairly infrequently, the additional risk of texting in that manner is likely to be lost in the statistical noise.
But of course, the best choice of all is to get the meatbag out from behind the wheel in the first place. That not only eliminates all risk from distractions, but also eliminates all risk from fatigue, illness, sudden cardiac arrest, seizures, sweat getting in your eyes, and probably hundreds of other risk factors.
Not at all. A properly designed HUD doesn't require your eyes to change focus. From the driver's perspective, you would be looking out at infinity and would still be able to read the text superimposed over what you're seeing out the window.
Yes, but that is equally true whether you're parsing a text message or are formulating a counterargument to a particularly compelling discussion on talk radio. The only thing that makes text messaging unique is the fact that your eyes have to leave the road. Period. Remove that, and you've removed the only valid reason for text messaging bans other than ludditism.
Yes, exactly. This is why touchscreen controls in automobiles are a terrible idea, and more to the point, why using anything that cannot be operated almost entirely by feel is a terrible idea. Texting, of course, is one of the most extreme examples of that problem, because the amount of time you have to spend looking at the screen in order to actually read a block of text for correctness is significantly greater than the time it takes to choose an option from a familiar menu or find the volume control "buttons" on a screen.
IMO, there are only two options here: a HUD that lets your eyes stay focused on the road while glancing at the text, or cars that drive themselves. Anything else as a "solution" for the texting-while-driving-is-unsafe problem is pretty much doomed to failure, whether it is speech recognition or mechanical keyboards, because the error rate will always be too high for anyone to trust sending it without reading it first.
I can see the benefit of being able to allocate a GPU/CPU-shared memory region in VRAM for fast passing of information to the GPU without a copy, but apart from making the above concept slightly cheaper to implement, the only benefit I could come up with for allowing the GPU access to main memory is making password theft easier. That and letting their driver developers write sloppier code that doesn't have to distinguish between two types of addresses....
The most hilarious part of this is that while they're doing this, the rest of the world seems to be moving in the opposite direction, towards having separate I/O and physical address spaces that are mapped with an MMU. But I digress.
They talk about passing pointers back and forth as though the GPU and CPU effectively share an MMU. The problem is, GPUs and CPUs don't work the same way. GPUs need to access shared resources that are per-system, whereas CPUs need to limit access to resources on a per-process basis. It would be devastating if a GPU could, for example, allow an arbitrary user-space process to overwrite parts of the kernel and inject virus code that runs with greater-than-root privilege. It would similarly be devastating if some arbitrary process could, for example, read the private RAM that backs your keychain or other security-related processes.
I'm assuming that they're doing something sane like having a separate set of RWX bits on each page table entry to control what the GPU's rights are for that page, so that the GPU would only be allowed to read specifically flagged main-memory pages, but these fuzzy marketing briefs provide just enough information to be terrifying.
Whew. They had me worried there. I thought for a moment that they were shutting down the grant program, because by definition, just about anything that benefits national defense is inherently not of utmost importance to society....
My point is that whether you're attaching the hose to the upper part of the base or to a leg, you still have a tube inside the device that the hose screws onto. The only obvious difference here is the length of that tube. Such a trivial change hardly qualifies as patent-worthy. And because it does not functionally change how the device is used, what it is capable of doing, etc., even if the change were non-trivial, IMO, it would still not qualify for a utility patent. A design patent, perhaps, but not a utility patent.