In the galley, I'd buy that explanation. In an overhead bin? Nobody has any business unloading anything within ten feet of the nearest overhead bin. AFAIK, the only things that go in the passenger section of the aircraft are magazines, an emergency first aid kid (which is almost never touched), sometimes an emergency oxygen tank (IIRC), and people's luggage.
I'd be more likely to assume that either a clumsy maintenance person had it in his/her hand and needed both hands to repair a seat or some such. Either that or somebody forgot they had it in his/her bag, walked through security, found it while digging for something, crapped hi/sher pants, and left it on the plane to make sure that he/she wouldn't get caught with it later....
Yes, it was probably innocuous, but the point is that if we're serious about security at all, we have to assume someone is testing our security, that they successfully breached it, and that they have co-conspirators who work for one of the airports that the plane in question flew through recently. Questioning anyone who has recently been within a hundred feet of that aircraft would be a reasonable precaution, along with recording that list of names for future reference in case it happens again. Checking the logs against the 9/10–9/11/2001 repair logs would similarly be a good idea.
Fair enough. Scares probably wasn't the right word. Horrifies is probably the right word. Horrifies me that we have to put up with all the bullshit and get nothing out of it. And scares me that they aren't even looking for the things that they say that they're looking for, which suggests that our air security is probably substantially worse than it was before 9/11.
As I've said elsewhere, I always assumed that the baggage scanners and the metal detectors were at least moderately useful. I'm forced to conclude that even that assumption might have been naïve, which is a bit scary.
Yeah. I was worried about the TSA folks having a cow about my valve oil, so I dutifully packed it in a plastic bag for my first post-9/11 trip with an instrument, wondering if I'd have to dispose of it anyway. I don't think anyone else brought bags, and as far as I could tell, nobody got pulled aside. (I waited around as folks went through just in case I needed to pass somebody a spare plastic bag.)
It's kind of scary to realize (in hindsight) that between the couple of dozen brass players, we probably walked through the TSA checkpoint with between fifty and a hundred fluid ounces of light petroleum distillates (basically kerosene) without comment....
If we had been terrorists, I suspect that the plane would not have reached its destination. It scares the crap out of me to realize that in spite of all their amateur theatrics, we're really not significantly safer than we were before.
Just look anywhere there are skeptics and you'll see people crying "as long as it keeps me safe on my flight from Omaha to Kansas City!"
And this is why we as the people who understand the technology must take the time to educate the masses about what it can and cannot do. And by that, I mean we have to club them over the head with the harsh reality that these things are no more effective than a dowsing rod at catching real terrorists.
A terrorist who is actually planning to blow himself up anyway would simply do so between the scan and the pat down upon detection—probably diving into the security line to maximize the casualties. The body scanners are thus completely and utterly ineffectual as a deterrent.
More to the point, the terrorists weren't afraid to bring box cutters onto an aircraft; the metal detectors were obviously not a deterrent. Based on that bit of history, what possible reason could you have for believing that this magic tiger-repelling rock will work better than the last one?
There's one obvious remaining course of action we can take to rein in all the government waste and corruption. Can anyone think of things to try before we take that last drastic step? I'm out of ideas...
Yes, but you're not going to like it. It involves people like you banding together to run for office, then passing laws banning all non-medical use of X-ray or millimeter wave imaging within the bounds of your community or state. If every state did this, the TSA and the companies it supports would eventually wither and die on the vine. Even if they started overturning the laws in the supreme court, after about the twentieth state passed such a law, they'd have their hands full in court for decades—a big enough money sink that it just might be enough to extricate their crania from their recta.
Remember: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Soap hasn't worked. Jury hasn't worked. Yet we as a society seem to have skipped over the most important one on our way to the fourth. Never forget the second.
And it will double the exposure (at minimum), or to adequately cover the interior and exterior surfaces of both legs, probably triple or quadruple it.
Next step: TSA body scanner twister. In the first shot, you have your arms and legs spread. Then one leg pulled up over your head with the opposite arm while the other arm sticks forwards. Then....
We were pretty sure that there was a problem with metal objects taped to the inside or outside of people's bodies when Adam Savage walked through with two 12" razor blades. This story just provides an explanation of why the scanners don't work.
I have not done double-blind tests, but I have recorded at 44.1 kHz and at 96 kHz, and the difference in the sound of individual tracks while tracking is quite audible. Thus, I'm inclined to believe that the failure to detect the difference had more to do with the original source material than with the limits of human hearing....
Because the article is paywalled, I'm curious what the original signal was, as that makes a big difference. Psychoacoustics teaches us that one sound can mask another. Thus, a recording of a symphony orchestra concert might be complex enough that your brain can't perceive the difference in high frequency content between 44.1 kHz and higher rates. A recording of a single solo instrument, by contrast, might result in an easily perceptible difference, depending on the instrument.
And the microphone choice makes a difference, too. The mass of the diaphragm (and anything that the diaphragm moves, in the case of a moving coil dynamic mic) makes a big difference in high frequency response. It could very well be the case that there was no difference in perception because the signal contained almost no high frequency content to begin with.
Without a very broad range of tests, all this test proves is that given that particular set of source material, nobody in their test group could tell the difference. This suggests that nobody can tell the difference for that particular set of source material. It does not answer the more general question of whether sound quality is reduced by sampling at 44.1 kHz instead of a higher rate.
Either way, I have personally tested my hearing and can hear beyond 22 kHz, which means that there are sounds that I can hear that are provably not reproducible at 44.1 kHz. Therefore, the claim that no one can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz is preposterous on the surface, even if you had a theoretically perfect antialiasing filter and a theoretically perfect reconstruction filter.
What was your source material? Encoding at a higher sampling rate is irrelevant if you're starting out with a signal that was already sampled at 44.1 kHz (e.g. a CD). The information loss occurs during the recording/encoding process, not during the playback process.
I have no problem whatsoever hearing the difference between tracks recorded at 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz in my home studio. The 96 kHz tracks preserve the upper harmonics better. The difference is particularly obvious with complex sound sources like crash cymbals. If you're doing the same tests and can't hear a difference, your signal chain is probably rolling off the top end. Either that or you don't record enough rock music.:-)
Many days, my round-trip commute is around a hundred miles. Thus, for me, this vehicle would basically be a hybrid, running on gas about half the time. Hybrids are fine and all, but I don't want a hybrid. I want an electric vehicle, which the Chevy Volt would not be for someone like me.
Of course, it's somewhat moot because I regularly drive on a road that has a high accident rate, so I wouldn't drive a mid-sized car even if they paid me.:-) I'm waiting for something more like the upcoming RAV4 EV, ideally with a bit better range, but it at least starts to be in the right ballpark.
Either way, my point was not that the Chevy Volt is a bad vehicle. My point was that with low-double-digit pure-electric range, it is disingenuous to claim that it isn't effectively a hybrid or to claim that MPG on the gas engine isn't important under the dubious assumption that most people will use it as a pure EV. The range is nowhere near good enough for that.
You're actually wrong. Human ears are relatively good at hearing phase relationships and volume relationships between sounds, as these are key components in determining a sound's direction. Thus, even though you cannot hear the fact that it has turned into a sawtooth wave, you can at least potentially hear that the peak is at the wrong point in time, and you can almost certainly hear that the amplitude is reduced inconsistently from wave to wave.
This paper is also wrong in its claim that 20 kHz is "generous". It isn't. I've done listening tests and have successfully heard high-pitched whines up to... it was either 22 or 23 kHz (which was where I stopped trying, not where I stopped being able to hear), and I'm not even all that young. Admittedly, this is at relatively high amplitude, but the notion that most people can't hear 20 kHz is just plain wrong, and if you start out with that fundamentally wrong premise, you pretty much have to question all the other assumptions, too.
They also make the fundamentally incorrect claim that everything below the nyquist limit is sampled perfectly. This is also provably and trivially false. The Nyquist theorem says no such thing. It merely says that signals above that limit will result in "folding", causing aliased frequencies below the limit, which means that any frequency below the Nyquist limit can be captured without aliasing. However, music is not a single frequency in isolation; it is a bunch of frequencies interacting in complex ways. The Nyquist theorem says nothing about the phase of a signal near the Nyquist limit being consistent relative to other signals at lower frequencies, and in fact, it is not. Nor does the Nyquist theorem state that the frequency will be captured in a way that maintains consistent amplitude as you approach the limit; indeed, it isn't.
Read the Wikipedia article about the Kell factor in display technology, and you'll understand why this is a problem. Notice that with display technology, there is no anti-aliasing filtering involved (because the signal is a known signal that is entirely below the Nyquist limit), so this roughly maps onto what would happen if you could magically create a perfect anti-aliasing filter on the input side. You don't become nearly artifact-free until the frequency you are sampling is about 2/3rds of the Nyquist limit. This is an indisputable fact.
Admittedly, these artifacts are less objectionable in audio because of the anti-aliasing filtering that occurs (both on input and output), but no filter can magically "fix" that inconsistent amplitude. It represents actual information loss—the signal is equally likely to be a constant 15 kHz tone with constant amplitude as it is to be a signal that varies on either side of 15 kHz with a variable amplitude—and once that precise phase and amplitude information is lost, it is impossible to definitively reconstruct it.
In other words, this article is just plain wrong, almost top to bottom.
Besides, the real question is not whether 44.1 kHz is "good enough". It provably isn't, if you care about faithful reproduction over the entire human hearing range. The question is whether the information in the top octave of human hearing is in any way useful or important, to which the answer is "probably not". That's not the same thing as saying that 44.1 kHz or even 48 kHz sampling rate faithfully reproduces the entire range of human hearing, though, but rather it is merely saying that most people don't care about its deficiencies. A 48 kHz sampling rate is "close enough" up to about 16 kHz, which is a broad enough frequency range to be "good enough" for all practical purposes.
Sue all three. The porn company for employing a company that was grossly negligent (because by doing so, they implicitly assume liability for that other company's actions on their behalf), the IP troll company (which probably has no assets) for making the false claim, and Flickr for failing to correctly reinstate content after a fraudulent DMCA takedown.
I fail to see why vote changing is required for security, and why it would break anonymity.
Without vote changing, you could prove that you voted for a particular candidate by pointing a camera at your screen while you voted. A key goal of a proper voting system is for such proof to be impossible to prevent anyone from pressuring people to vote a certain way.
Allowing vote changing is an easy way to prevent the camera footage from being actual proof of your vote; the footage at that point merely proves that you voted that way at some point in time, not that it was your final vote. It is a weak, but marginally acceptable alternative to the privacy of a booth.
The reason that allowing vote changing tends to break anonymity is that the most obvious way requires some value that identifies the voter to be stored as part of the vote itself in some form (whether through a signature, a column in a table, or whatever). Further, those keys must be identifiably tied to a voter record. Were that not the case, it would not be possible to update the in situ address of that voter to allow him or her to vote for candidates in a new city when he or she moves. Therefore, someone with access to both the list of votes and the database of voter keys could then determine who you voted for.
I can think of one possible way to solve both problems, but it's ugly. As part of the voting process, the server uses the user's PK signature or similar to verify the voter's identity, then discards that association. It provides, in response, a token consisting of a server-signed copy of a random nonce (which is stored in the database along with the vote). If the voter wishes to update his or her vote, he or she need only provide the signed token. The server could look up the nonce in the database and verify the signature, thus allowing the server to replace an existing vote without identifying the original voter. This does, however, introduce significant complexity in that it requires the voter to somehow keep a copy of a fairly long string of pseudo-random gibberish data.
This also must be stored in some electronic form such as a USB stick or an email message. If it is automatically printed out on paper, it risks having the same problem as the camera—you could videotape yourself shredding the stub as proof that it was your final vote.
If it truly had an "extended range" by any useful definition, people wouldn't be trying to compare it with the Prius. The fact of the matter is that it is a half-assed compromise between a proper hybrid and a proper EV, with all the disadvantages of both.
The Chevy Volt's battery-only range is a paltry 25-50 miles, which in the worst case is less than twice the battery-only range for a Prius. If you drain the battery to the bottom (which you probably can't before the gasoline engine kicks in to charge it back up), that means that when new, the battery will barely handle the average daily commute in the U.S. (32 miles). After a few years, you would expect a significantly lower capacity, at which point the average driver will be using the engine every day.
I desperately want an electric vehicle. However, I would never even consider an EV with double-digit range. I want some assurance that with ten-year-old batteries, I'll still be able to get a hundred mile round trip. That means EVs will become interesting when they can get, on average, 300 miles to a charge—an order of magnitude greater than the joke of a range that the Chevy Volt can achieve. Until then, they're really just glorified hybrids, not usable EVs. Thus, it is completely fair to treat them like hybrids for review purposes.
Consider: If you're 150 pounds overweight, it's likely to cut 20 years off of your life. If you'[re 150 pounds underweight, you're probably already dead and your skeleton picked clean. At some point, being under weight got a lot more unhealthy than being over weight.
This is in part a problem with using absolute numbers instead of percentages.... If an average 5'6 male were 150 pounds underweight, he would weigh less than zero, which would be quite amazing....
As I have said, not all problems are solved yet, but I haven't seen one that looks impossible.
The problem is not that any single problem is impossible, but that certain problems are fundamentally at odds with one another such that solving certain pairs of problems are either impossible or nearly so.
Your solution lacks verifiability. Because the server does not verify that your vote was accepted, there is no way to determine whether your vote counted. This makes it a fundamentally unacceptable solution.
It is fundamentally impossible for an election system to be simultaneously verifiable and secret (impossible to prove how you voted) unless you either have physical security (a private voting booth) or allow voters to change their votes (making it impossible to prove that a given vote was the last one you cast). However, making it possible to change votes makes it necessary to store the voter's identity in the database, which in turn breaks the anonymity requirement. You end up chasing your tail, with the fix for each problem breaking something else.
A hyphen would probably be more correct. An en dash is used for ranges of numbers, and for showing relationships between two otherwise unrelated things, e.g. the Apple–Microsoft rivalry, the Epstein–Barr wedding, etc. Neither of those two rules appears to apply here.
The initial problem was a string interpolation vulnerability in a modified Ruby library that executes a shell command to encrypt PDF ballots. That's a pretty basic mistake that has nothing really to do with Ruby or Rails. If you interpolate into a string (or concatenate data into a string) without sanitizing the data, and then execute it, you're asking for trouble, no matter whether it's Rails or Java or C.
Not really. In C, you'd have gotten called an idiot within a few seconds if you used system() or popen(). Properly written C code using fork() and exec() does not require you to sanitize the string in any way.
Who said anything about skills? Skills are something learnable. When it comes to computer architecture, there are fundamental differences between people who are good at it and people who aren't. Those differences are difficult to overcome.
Good code architects see a tool and immediately can describe how it works. There's no thought process, no practiced skill; they simply see the complete system and instinctively know approximately what the parts are that must make it up. That initial transition from nothing to a rough architecture occurs in a single quantum leap, or at most, a handful of quantum leaps for distinct, separable parts of the architecture. Some people can make that leap, some can't. If you can't, no amount of studying the whole and the parts that make it up is likely to change that. You're either naturally curious or you aren't.
There is a second aspect to architecture, of course, which is the refining stage. As you figure out additional requirements/features, the architecture must be adjusted to support it. That part is a skill that can be significantly improved with practice. Similarly, reasoning through what sorts of additional features you might want to add in the future is a skill that improves with practice. However, you must be able to imagine the first approximation before it is possible to refine it. And even if your job is to poke holes in somebody else's design, you're either naturally skeptical and cynical or you aren't. You either tend to look for flaws or you don't. Someone who doesn't naturally look for flaws is unlikely to be good at refining other people's architectural designs.
IMO, a good way (or at least a good first approximation of a way) to determine whether you'll be a good software architect is to buy pretty much any piece of furniture from IKEA. If you can't assemble it at all without reading the directions, you probably won't be a good software architect. That's not saying that you shouldn't read the directions to avoid making painful mistakes (splitting the veneer by using a screw that's too long, for example), but you should be able to closely approximate a correct result without looking at them. You should be able to see the parts and "just know" approximately how most of the parts (at least the bigger ones) fit together to form the whole.
Also, although it's okay to get pissed off when the directions don't clearly distinguish between similar parts, a good architect tends to be unafraid to try it one way and see if it works, then try it the other way if it doesn't (but does so with some care to avoid actively causing harm). If you constantly live in fear of breaking something, you'll never be a good software architect; you can't realistically learn without making lots of mistakes. More to the point, the best way to learn is to deliberately break things and see how they break. It is possible to overcome such psychological inhibitions, but it isn't easy.
To be fair, many of the limitations I'm talking about here could conceivably be overcome with years of study, but it makes more sense to steer people who are innately talented in those areas towards jobs that maximize their potential rather than trying to shoehorn someone into a position that will be a constant struggle.
I've never heard that term before today, and I consider myself to be fairly well versed in threading and operating systems theory. The standard computer science term is "lock contention". Or, in particularly heinous examples, I often hear it called the "big giant lock problem"....
They did this to me, too, just now, on my cell phone that is listed on the national do-not-call registry. I encourage you to file a complaint at https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx. Even if your phone is not on the DNC list, robocalling is not generally allowed for telemarketers unless you have a prior business relationship with the company.
Most people of at least average intelligence can learn the basics, yes. Where good programmers distinguish themselves is in their ability to look at something that already exists and figure out how it works. This not only makes it much, much easier to figure out how to fix a bug in a piece of code that you wrote five years ago, but also makes it much easier to understand how other applications were written by examining their behavior. This, in turn, makes it easier to figure out how to go quickly from a concept to a working piece of code.
Thus, anyone can easily learn to be a code monkey. Not everyone can easily learn to be a software architect. This is an important distinction because unless your goal is to be a cog in the machine, you're going to need to design software from the ground up.
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In the galley, I'd buy that explanation. In an overhead bin? Nobody has any business unloading anything within ten feet of the nearest overhead bin. AFAIK, the only things that go in the passenger section of the aircraft are magazines, an emergency first aid kid (which is almost never touched), sometimes an emergency oxygen tank (IIRC), and people's luggage.
I'd be more likely to assume that either a clumsy maintenance person had it in his/her hand and needed both hands to repair a seat or some such. Either that or somebody forgot they had it in his/her bag, walked through security, found it while digging for something, crapped hi/sher pants, and left it on the plane to make sure that he/she wouldn't get caught with it later....
Yes, it was probably innocuous, but the point is that if we're serious about security at all, we have to assume someone is testing our security, that they successfully breached it, and that they have co-conspirators who work for one of the airports that the plane in question flew through recently. Questioning anyone who has recently been within a hundred feet of that aircraft would be a reasonable precaution, along with recording that list of names for future reference in case it happens again. Checking the logs against the 9/10–9/11/2001 repair logs would similarly be a good idea.
Fair enough. Scares probably wasn't the right word. Horrifies is probably the right word. Horrifies me that we have to put up with all the bullshit and get nothing out of it. And scares me that they aren't even looking for the things that they say that they're looking for, which suggests that our air security is probably substantially worse than it was before 9/11.
As I've said elsewhere, I always assumed that the baggage scanners and the metal detectors were at least moderately useful. I'm forced to conclude that even that assumption might have been naïve, which is a bit scary.
I didn't believe in any of the post-9/11 changes, but I always assumed that at least their baggage X-ray people must be semi-competent....
Untrue. Pocket knives were legal. Box cutters and straight razors have never been allowed as best I can determine. (Source: planesafe.org)
Besides, there's reason to suspect that they were never taken through security in the first place, making the entire question moot.
By the way, it might be happening again.
Yeah. I was worried about the TSA folks having a cow about my valve oil, so I dutifully packed it in a plastic bag for my first post-9/11 trip with an instrument, wondering if I'd have to dispose of it anyway. I don't think anyone else brought bags, and as far as I could tell, nobody got pulled aside. (I waited around as folks went through just in case I needed to pass somebody a spare plastic bag.)
It's kind of scary to realize (in hindsight) that between the couple of dozen brass players, we probably walked through the TSA checkpoint with between fifty and a hundred fluid ounces of light petroleum distillates (basically kerosene) without comment....
If we had been terrorists, I suspect that the plane would not have reached its destination. It scares the crap out of me to realize that in spite of all their amateur theatrics, we're really not significantly safer than we were before.
And this is why we as the people who understand the technology must take the time to educate the masses about what it can and cannot do. And by that, I mean we have to club them over the head with the harsh reality that these things are no more effective than a dowsing rod at catching real terrorists.
A terrorist who is actually planning to blow himself up anyway would simply do so between the scan and the pat down upon detection—probably diving into the security line to maximize the casualties. The body scanners are thus completely and utterly ineffectual as a deterrent.
More to the point, the terrorists weren't afraid to bring box cutters onto an aircraft; the metal detectors were obviously not a deterrent. Based on that bit of history, what possible reason could you have for believing that this magic tiger-repelling rock will work better than the last one?
Yes, but you're not going to like it. It involves people like you banding together to run for office, then passing laws banning all non-medical use of X-ray or millimeter wave imaging within the bounds of your community or state. If every state did this, the TSA and the companies it supports would eventually wither and die on the vine. Even if they started overturning the laws in the supreme court, after about the twentieth state passed such a law, they'd have their hands full in court for decades—a big enough money sink that it just might be enough to extricate their crania from their recta.
Remember: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Soap hasn't worked. Jury hasn't worked. Yet we as a society seem to have skipped over the most important one on our way to the fourth. Never forget the second.
And it will double the exposure (at minimum), or to adequately cover the interior and exterior surfaces of both legs, probably triple or quadruple it.
Next step: TSA body scanner twister. In the first shot, you have your arms and legs spread. Then one leg pulled up over your head with the opposite arm while the other arm sticks forwards. Then....
We were pretty sure that there was a problem with metal objects taped to the inside or outside of people's bodies when Adam Savage walked through with two 12" razor blades. This story just provides an explanation of why the scanners don't work.
I have not done double-blind tests, but I have recorded at 44.1 kHz and at 96 kHz, and the difference in the sound of individual tracks while tracking is quite audible. Thus, I'm inclined to believe that the failure to detect the difference had more to do with the original source material than with the limits of human hearing....
Because the article is paywalled, I'm curious what the original signal was, as that makes a big difference. Psychoacoustics teaches us that one sound can mask another. Thus, a recording of a symphony orchestra concert might be complex enough that your brain can't perceive the difference in high frequency content between 44.1 kHz and higher rates. A recording of a single solo instrument, by contrast, might result in an easily perceptible difference, depending on the instrument.
And the microphone choice makes a difference, too. The mass of the diaphragm (and anything that the diaphragm moves, in the case of a moving coil dynamic mic) makes a big difference in high frequency response. It could very well be the case that there was no difference in perception because the signal contained almost no high frequency content to begin with.
Without a very broad range of tests, all this test proves is that given that particular set of source material, nobody in their test group could tell the difference. This suggests that nobody can tell the difference for that particular set of source material. It does not answer the more general question of whether sound quality is reduced by sampling at 44.1 kHz instead of a higher rate.
Either way, I have personally tested my hearing and can hear beyond 22 kHz, which means that there are sounds that I can hear that are provably not reproducible at 44.1 kHz. Therefore, the claim that no one can hear the difference between 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz is preposterous on the surface, even if you had a theoretically perfect antialiasing filter and a theoretically perfect reconstruction filter.
What was your source material? Encoding at a higher sampling rate is irrelevant if you're starting out with a signal that was already sampled at 44.1 kHz (e.g. a CD). The information loss occurs during the recording/encoding process, not during the playback process.
I have no problem whatsoever hearing the difference between tracks recorded at 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz in my home studio. The 96 kHz tracks preserve the upper harmonics better. The difference is particularly obvious with complex sound sources like crash cymbals. If you're doing the same tests and can't hear a difference, your signal chain is probably rolling off the top end. Either that or you don't record enough rock music. :-)
Many days, my round-trip commute is around a hundred miles. Thus, for me, this vehicle would basically be a hybrid, running on gas about half the time. Hybrids are fine and all, but I don't want a hybrid. I want an electric vehicle, which the Chevy Volt would not be for someone like me.
Of course, it's somewhat moot because I regularly drive on a road that has a high accident rate, so I wouldn't drive a mid-sized car even if they paid me. :-) I'm waiting for something more like the upcoming RAV4 EV, ideally with a bit better range, but it at least starts to be in the right ballpark.
Either way, my point was not that the Chevy Volt is a bad vehicle. My point was that with low-double-digit pure-electric range, it is disingenuous to claim that it isn't effectively a hybrid or to claim that MPG on the gas engine isn't important under the dubious assumption that most people will use it as a pure EV. The range is nowhere near good enough for that.
You're actually wrong. Human ears are relatively good at hearing phase relationships and volume relationships between sounds, as these are key components in determining a sound's direction. Thus, even though you cannot hear the fact that it has turned into a sawtooth wave, you can at least potentially hear that the peak is at the wrong point in time, and you can almost certainly hear that the amplitude is reduced inconsistently from wave to wave.
This paper is also wrong in its claim that 20 kHz is "generous". It isn't. I've done listening tests and have successfully heard high-pitched whines up to... it was either 22 or 23 kHz (which was where I stopped trying, not where I stopped being able to hear), and I'm not even all that young. Admittedly, this is at relatively high amplitude, but the notion that most people can't hear 20 kHz is just plain wrong, and if you start out with that fundamentally wrong premise, you pretty much have to question all the other assumptions, too.
They also make the fundamentally incorrect claim that everything below the nyquist limit is sampled perfectly. This is also provably and trivially false. The Nyquist theorem says no such thing. It merely says that signals above that limit will result in "folding", causing aliased frequencies below the limit, which means that any frequency below the Nyquist limit can be captured without aliasing. However, music is not a single frequency in isolation; it is a bunch of frequencies interacting in complex ways. The Nyquist theorem says nothing about the phase of a signal near the Nyquist limit being consistent relative to other signals at lower frequencies, and in fact, it is not. Nor does the Nyquist theorem state that the frequency will be captured in a way that maintains consistent amplitude as you approach the limit; indeed, it isn't.
Read the Wikipedia article about the Kell factor in display technology, and you'll understand why this is a problem. Notice that with display technology, there is no anti-aliasing filtering involved (because the signal is a known signal that is entirely below the Nyquist limit), so this roughly maps onto what would happen if you could magically create a perfect anti-aliasing filter on the input side. You don't become nearly artifact-free until the frequency you are sampling is about 2/3rds of the Nyquist limit. This is an indisputable fact.
Admittedly, these artifacts are less objectionable in audio because of the anti-aliasing filtering that occurs (both on input and output), but no filter can magically "fix" that inconsistent amplitude. It represents actual information loss—the signal is equally likely to be a constant 15 kHz tone with constant amplitude as it is to be a signal that varies on either side of 15 kHz with a variable amplitude—and once that precise phase and amplitude information is lost, it is impossible to definitively reconstruct it.
In other words, this article is just plain wrong, almost top to bottom.
Besides, the real question is not whether 44.1 kHz is "good enough". It provably isn't, if you care about faithful reproduction over the entire human hearing range. The question is whether the information in the top octave of human hearing is in any way useful or important, to which the answer is "probably not". That's not the same thing as saying that 44.1 kHz or even 48 kHz sampling rate faithfully reproduces the entire range of human hearing, though, but rather it is merely saying that most people don't care about its deficiencies. A 48 kHz sampling rate is "close enough" up to about 16 kHz, which is a broad enough frequency range to be "good enough" for all practical purposes.
Sue all three. The porn company for employing a company that was grossly negligent (because by doing so, they implicitly assume liability for that other company's actions on their behalf), the IP troll company (which probably has no assets) for making the false claim, and Flickr for failing to correctly reinstate content after a fraudulent DMCA takedown.
Without vote changing, you could prove that you voted for a particular candidate by pointing a camera at your screen while you voted. A key goal of a proper voting system is for such proof to be impossible to prevent anyone from pressuring people to vote a certain way.
Allowing vote changing is an easy way to prevent the camera footage from being actual proof of your vote; the footage at that point merely proves that you voted that way at some point in time, not that it was your final vote. It is a weak, but marginally acceptable alternative to the privacy of a booth.
The reason that allowing vote changing tends to break anonymity is that the most obvious way requires some value that identifies the voter to be stored as part of the vote itself in some form (whether through a signature, a column in a table, or whatever). Further, those keys must be identifiably tied to a voter record. Were that not the case, it would not be possible to update the in situ address of that voter to allow him or her to vote for candidates in a new city when he or she moves. Therefore, someone with access to both the list of votes and the database of voter keys could then determine who you voted for.
I can think of one possible way to solve both problems, but it's ugly. As part of the voting process, the server uses the user's PK signature or similar to verify the voter's identity, then discards that association. It provides, in response, a token consisting of a server-signed copy of a random nonce (which is stored in the database along with the vote). If the voter wishes to update his or her vote, he or she need only provide the signed token. The server could look up the nonce in the database and verify the signature, thus allowing the server to replace an existing vote without identifying the original voter. This does, however, introduce significant complexity in that it requires the voter to somehow keep a copy of a fairly long string of pseudo-random gibberish data.
This also must be stored in some electronic form such as a USB stick or an email message. If it is automatically printed out on paper, it risks having the same problem as the camera—you could videotape yourself shredding the stub as proof that it was your final vote.
If it truly had an "extended range" by any useful definition, people wouldn't be trying to compare it with the Prius. The fact of the matter is that it is a half-assed compromise between a proper hybrid and a proper EV, with all the disadvantages of both.
The Chevy Volt's battery-only range is a paltry 25-50 miles, which in the worst case is less than twice the battery-only range for a Prius. If you drain the battery to the bottom (which you probably can't before the gasoline engine kicks in to charge it back up), that means that when new, the battery will barely handle the average daily commute in the U.S. (32 miles). After a few years, you would expect a significantly lower capacity, at which point the average driver will be using the engine every day.
I desperately want an electric vehicle. However, I would never even consider an EV with double-digit range. I want some assurance that with ten-year-old batteries, I'll still be able to get a hundred mile round trip. That means EVs will become interesting when they can get, on average, 300 miles to a charge—an order of magnitude greater than the joke of a range that the Chevy Volt can achieve. Until then, they're really just glorified hybrids, not usable EVs. Thus, it is completely fair to treat them like hybrids for review purposes.
This is in part a problem with using absolute numbers instead of percentages.... If an average 5'6 male were 150 pounds underweight, he would weigh less than zero, which would be quite amazing....
The problem is not that any single problem is impossible, but that certain problems are fundamentally at odds with one another such that solving certain pairs of problems are either impossible or nearly so.
Your solution lacks verifiability. Because the server does not verify that your vote was accepted, there is no way to determine whether your vote counted. This makes it a fundamentally unacceptable solution.
It is fundamentally impossible for an election system to be simultaneously verifiable and secret (impossible to prove how you voted) unless you either have physical security (a private voting booth) or allow voters to change their votes (making it impossible to prove that a given vote was the last one you cast). However, making it possible to change votes makes it necessary to store the voter's identity in the database, which in turn breaks the anonymity requirement. You end up chasing your tail, with the fix for each problem breaking something else.
A hyphen would probably be more correct. An en dash is used for ranges of numbers, and for showing relationships between two otherwise unrelated things, e.g. the Apple–Microsoft rivalry, the Epstein–Barr wedding, etc. Neither of those two rules appears to apply here.
Not really. In C, you'd have gotten called an idiot within a few seconds if you used system() or popen(). Properly written C code using fork() and exec() does not require you to sanitize the string in any way.
Who said anything about skills? Skills are something learnable. When it comes to computer architecture, there are fundamental differences between people who are good at it and people who aren't. Those differences are difficult to overcome.
Good code architects see a tool and immediately can describe how it works. There's no thought process, no practiced skill; they simply see the complete system and instinctively know approximately what the parts are that must make it up. That initial transition from nothing to a rough architecture occurs in a single quantum leap, or at most, a handful of quantum leaps for distinct, separable parts of the architecture. Some people can make that leap, some can't. If you can't, no amount of studying the whole and the parts that make it up is likely to change that. You're either naturally curious or you aren't.
There is a second aspect to architecture, of course, which is the refining stage. As you figure out additional requirements/features, the architecture must be adjusted to support it. That part is a skill that can be significantly improved with practice. Similarly, reasoning through what sorts of additional features you might want to add in the future is a skill that improves with practice. However, you must be able to imagine the first approximation before it is possible to refine it. And even if your job is to poke holes in somebody else's design, you're either naturally skeptical and cynical or you aren't. You either tend to look for flaws or you don't. Someone who doesn't naturally look for flaws is unlikely to be good at refining other people's architectural designs.
IMO, a good way (or at least a good first approximation of a way) to determine whether you'll be a good software architect is to buy pretty much any piece of furniture from IKEA. If you can't assemble it at all without reading the directions, you probably won't be a good software architect. That's not saying that you shouldn't read the directions to avoid making painful mistakes (splitting the veneer by using a screw that's too long, for example), but you should be able to closely approximate a correct result without looking at them. You should be able to see the parts and "just know" approximately how most of the parts (at least the bigger ones) fit together to form the whole.
Also, although it's okay to get pissed off when the directions don't clearly distinguish between similar parts, a good architect tends to be unafraid to try it one way and see if it works, then try it the other way if it doesn't (but does so with some care to avoid actively causing harm). If you constantly live in fear of breaking something, you'll never be a good software architect; you can't realistically learn without making lots of mistakes. More to the point, the best way to learn is to deliberately break things and see how they break. It is possible to overcome such psychological inhibitions, but it isn't easy.
To be fair, many of the limitations I'm talking about here could conceivably be overcome with years of study, but it makes more sense to steer people who are innately talented in those areas towards jobs that maximize their potential rather than trying to shoehorn someone into a position that will be a constant struggle.
I've never heard that term before today, and I consider myself to be fairly well versed in threading and operating systems theory. The standard computer science term is "lock contention". Or, in particularly heinous examples, I often hear it called the "big giant lock problem"....
I guess "lock convoy" is a Microsoft term.
They did this to me, too, just now, on my cell phone that is listed on the national do-not-call registry. I encourage you to file a complaint at https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx. Even if your phone is not on the DNC list, robocalling is not generally allowed for telemarketers unless you have a prior business relationship with the company.
Most people of at least average intelligence can learn the basics, yes. Where good programmers distinguish themselves is in their ability to look at something that already exists and figure out how it works. This not only makes it much, much easier to figure out how to fix a bug in a piece of code that you wrote five years ago, but also makes it much easier to understand how other applications were written by examining their behavior. This, in turn, makes it easier to figure out how to go quickly from a concept to a working piece of code.
Thus, anyone can easily learn to be a code monkey. Not everyone can easily learn to be a software architect. This is an important distinction because unless your goal is to be a cog in the machine, you're going to need to design software from the ground up.