Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T
on
Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
BUT, and this is the big but. IP theft has made it a situation where I CANNOT make a living with what I used to. Before 2000 people used to buy books, and they used to buy things. I could make a somewhat ok living. Again I realize that I am not the greatest of writers and speakers.
If you think that IP theft is the reason people are reading less, then you just don't get it. People are reading more. They are just reading more electronic content on the Internet, and that is supplanting their book reading. They aren't getting electronic copies of books, though. They're reading CNN. They're reading Slashdot. They're reading Digg. They're reading xkcd.
It's not theft of IP that is causing the downfall of books, but rather the cumbersome nature of books themselves coupled with a rapidly dwindling attention span resulting from the proliferation of blogs, the proliferation of text messages full of short little bits of text that are barely long enough to convey a complete thought, the replacement of in-depth newspaper articles with short little sound bits on TV news shows, and the increasingly hectic pace of modern life.... People are gravitating towards content that is brief in nature because they've gotten used to that. It should be no surprise, then, that books don't sell as well as they used to in light of the changing entertainment style of the modern public.
Unfortunately, that ends up being pretty close, though not on purpose. The problem is that there are fundamental inequalities in the world. A Libertarian position would be ideal if that were not the case, but as soon as you have one subset of the people (or corporations or unions or...) that have greater power and control due to their financial position, any legal system that does not protect those who are less fortunate/powerful from abuse by those people who are more fortunate/powerful is a system doomed to increasing that inequality until the two ends have nothing in common with each other, which almost inevitably leads to a revolutionary war, historically speaking.
That's why laws that attempt to create a fully free market economy end up wrecking the economy. The individual consumer is relatively powerless compared with a corporation, and without protection against monopolization, collusion, and other anticompetitive actions by those corporations, the consumer gets screwed, but is essentially powerless to create new competitors because of the inherent inequality in the money supply and the huge capital needed to create a competing business in all but the narrowest, most naturally local industries.
By contrast, I use FireWire almost daily. I periodically iChat people into meetings with the built-in camera. I use DVI to hook up to the video projector when doing presentations. And you're right that ports are massively marked up. I do really have to wonder why Lenovo put VGA on a notebook when DVI would probably cost a buck or two. Basically, it seems to be a way to push people to buy their overpriced docking station.
My bad on the video chip. That said, you were talking about a non-user-replaceable battery, which is only true for the latest 17" MBP, not the one that was out a year ago, so I was comparing it with the current MBP's 9600M.
I'm seeing two copies of this story posted on the front page, both posted in the same minute. That has to be some kind of Slashdot record. Even normal user comments can't be duped by the same person less than two minutes apart....
CPU notwithstanding, that machine isn't remotely comparable feature-wise to any Mac built in the past five years or so, much less comparable to the MacBook Pro. It only has FireWire 400, its video is VGA-only, and it has no built-in camera. The MacBook Pro has FireWire 800 and dual-link DVI, has a MUCH better GPU, has a built-in camera, etc. The T61p just isn't in the same league.
The advanced docking station would cost you about another $300-$350 to give you DVI, and AFAIK you would still have a much slower GPU (another couple hundred of that cost) and no FireWire 800 or built-in camera (both of which would probably be $30-50 apiece to add). And there went basically every penny of your savings. That $600 can easily be explained away by differences in the hardware even if you ignore things like battery life, case design, etc.
If you don't care about those extra features, that's fine, but don't delude yourself into believing that the money you saved was because the product was made by Apple. You saved money because of the features you chose not to buy....
I would argue the exact opposite, actually. If a large percentage of jobs are in.Net/C#, there's a good chance that there are equally large numbers of candidates flocking to apply for those jobs, and that the number of applicants is likely to exceed the number of jobs by a significant margin. If you want a job that will be robust against economic problems, specialize in something that requires more unusual specialization. Learn Objective-C, for example. Either start your own company selling iPhone apps or hunt for jobs elsewhere doing Mac programming. Even though the number of jobs seems very limited, companies have a hard time finding qualified candidates in this area, so if you can fill the slot, you have a good chance at getting the job. The same isn't necessarily true for C# jobs.
Even as an individual investor setting up a retirement account, betting an entire investment portfolio on any one type of stock is probably not the best judgment call, IMHO. That said, I was referring to institutional pension plans, not iRAs---talking about companies with pension plans that must remain financially solvent in the long-term while still being able to make payments in the short term choosing to back them with risky growth stocks or put large percentages of their money in certain types of funds like real estate because they are growing more rapidly at the time---looking at the short-term profits in certain areas and saying "let's put everything in that" instead of properly diversifying their portfolios to maximize their ability to ride out problems.
On the loan issue, it's only a smart business decision if you don't look at the bigger economic picture. Banks are hurting now, including banks that never held onto any of those loans. A weaker economy means people save less money. Less money in savings accounts means less interest for banks on those dollars. It means higher interest rates for the banks when they issue new loans, which means they can't issue as many loans and are forced to get less income off the sale of those loans. And so on. Everything a bank does that affects the economy ends up coming back and affecting them if enough banks do it. The only way it is a smart business decision is if you are the only bank engaging in such a practice (or nearly so). Your tragedy of the commons comment very much speaks to this example.
Short selling also has the disadvantage of causing such ripple effects. Again, it's one of those where if you look at it in isolation, it seems like a really smart business decision, but if it drives the economy as a whole down and other stocks that you are holding lose lots of their value, the difference can more than cancel out any gains from the shorting.
Like you said, it's the tragedy of the commons, which is all about looking at the short-term gains for you without considering the long-term damage to the environment in which you must survive.
Oh, and apologies for the subject-verb agreement problem in the first sentence. I suppose if I really cared about typos, I'd quit rewriting sentences eight times before I post them.
The way I see it, if the manufacturers cares about counterfeit goods, they can give them serial numbers. If they don't bother to do that, any counterfeiting is as much their fault as anybody else's. Or, they could quit being cheap bastards and actually pay the manufacturing plant for the overages. Either way.
No, opinions like that are mostly held by people with business experience who see other businesses being run by (overpaid) complete morons. I've seen many, many businesses involved in short-term thinking that screws long-term profitability. Any time I see a new CEO brought in to "fix" a company, as a general rule, that's when it's time to sell the stock. Well, maybe wait until the new executive's short-term thinking has driven it up a bit, then dump the stock before it crashes. Either way. I've seen this too many times to believe that short-term thinking is unusual. It may not be the rule, but it certainly isn't the exception, either.
Indeed, short-term thinking is to blame for most of the current state of the economy. Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments? Short-term thinking. Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway? Short-term thinking. Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock? Short-term thinking. And so on.
I tend to agree with the assessment that most companies, particularly those with entrenched monopolies like telecoms, tend to solely value short-term profit because they know they have little real competition, so their long-term profits are pretty much guaranteed in the absence of a significant disruptive technology (cell phones reducing land line use, for example). The only thing that will ever change this is removal of the monopoly---for example, passing laws that mandated cell phone unlocking after the initial contract period....
There are are two ways of hiding data under the OS (well, three if you count hypervisors). One is permanent (writing to the BIOS) and one is not (running code in SM mode). Code executing in SM mode goes away unless reloaded on the next boot. If you can get to ring 0 (top ring in kernel mode) then you could already write to BIOS and add stuff permanently under the OS. Doing an SM mode escalation from ring 0 merely buys you the ability to inject something under the OS in a temporary (single boot) way without modifying BIOS. If your goal is to modify BIOS, then AFAIK there's no reason to bother jumping to SM mode because you can do that without needing to do the SMM escalation.
I could easily be wrong about being able to write to BIOS from ring 0---I'm pretty sure it can be done, but not 100% positive---I've never written a BIOS flasher.... It is also possible that this might somehow allow you to undo soft write protection of the BIOS, in which case there is an advantage, albeit a small and highly device-specific advantage.... That said, I don't think this is nearly as big an opening as people make it out to be. It's like somebody giving you the key to an individual safe deposit box when you've already broken into the bank, have broken into the safe, and are currently carrying a hatchet. For the most part, ring 0 rules all under its domain, and once bad code is running there, you're screwed.
The hole a couple of years ago where you could get into SM mode from ring 2... that was a big deal. This... might have some impact on security between virtual hosts running on a single server under a hypervisor, but as far as single-user machines are concerned, it seems like small potatoes by comparison.
Ah, but it will make a difference, though how much of a difference depends on how it gets there in the first place. If it comes in through a trojan Mac OS X KEXT, it will matter (read "crash") the moment it tries to trap into a BIOS that isn't there. If it comes through Windows, it will matter when it tries to flash an emulated BIOS.... Either way, even at a low level, there are some differences that could make the more interesting uses of such an attack less than 100% cross-platform.
Also, the virus could use a commonly available BIOS utility to flash malware into the cmos.
Much, much more insidious than a traditional file-based root. Then it's there on every boot.
AFAIK, it can do that from Ring 0, too. About all SM mode does is allow you to temporarily inject yourself under the kernel in an undetectable way for a single boot; if you don't delete yourself from disk, you can still be detected by virus scanners and deleted, at which point your code would go away on the next boot... unless you start sniffing disk block writes and try to hide your files from the virus scanner. Either way, AFAICT, a cold boot from a recovery disk can clean up anything you could do in SM mode that you couldn't do from ring 0.
These attacks have been around for a while. Here's an article about an attack that obtains SMM access (from user space code in that case) from way back in 2006. The only thing that's new is that this is a new/different way to get into SM mode.
The way I read it is this: 57% were companies trying to stifle competition, plus 37% of notices were not (valid) copyright claims. Note the emphasis. That means 37% of the claims were about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with copyright. Seems about right to me. The DMCA is so badly abused that it's not even funny....
I'm well aware of what dynamic range refers to. Yes, to some degree, higher dynamic range devices tend to have greater bit depth, but the concepts are really orthogonal.... A CCD just drives an A/D converter. The bit depth of the converter is determined by the number of threshold gates, while the dynamic range is determined by the relative values of the resistors on the inputs of each threshold gate.
Thus, you could easily have a high dynamic range sensor that represents everything from bright sunlight through night with only 8 bits per subpixel (though in such an extreme example, the resulting device wouldn't be very practical). Similarly, you can have a standard dynamic range sensor that represents the standard range of brightness with 20 bits per subpixel (and you could theoretically get better color accuracy from doing so). Reality tends to be somewhere between those extremes.
Really, most of the color accuracy problems in modern photography are caused by differences in the image compression algorithms. The color space of CCDs is huge compared with the color space of a JPEG file. When that color space reduction occurs, data is lost, and the particular weights chosen in the process makes a huge difference in determining the color balance of the resulting image.... All cameras should support RAW, and the ones that don't are just... wrong.....:-)
Exactly. And this is why humans should not be allowed to drive. Make the cars drive themselves and all this goes away. Vehicles would travel at a speed that is safe for the roads and would know precisely when to slow down for corners that require slower driving, would not brake unnecessarily (the main cause of congestion), etc. Odds are, it would be safe to travel on average 20 MPH faster than the existing posted speed limits on most roads were it not for the meat popsicle behind the wheel. Further, most roads that are congested today would not be nearly so congested because the need for such long stopping distances is largely obviated if you know that the vehicle eight car lengths ahead is about to start braking in five seconds. (Blowouts would still be a risk, but that, too, can be largely obviated by requiring all tires to be of the run-flat variety.)
It also fixes problems like what I had this morning where a car pulled out in front of me to go one block and turn right, got delayed by pedestrians, and blocked my lane, nearly causing me to miss a light. Had we had automated driving systems, the computers would not have allowed that car to pull out in front of me, and further would have prioritized my vehicle because it was going through the light which it could not do on red while the other vehicle was turning right, which it could have done even after the light turned red.
For that matter, if all cars were driven by computers, we wouldn't need traffic-light-like behavior at the vast majority of intersections that have lights currently... except when pedestrians are involved, of course.
I'm not sure what dynamic range has to do with this, really. I'd love to see CCD with much a broader dynamic range so that the range can be compressed later (retaining/bringing out detail in the shadows and in bright areas), but it is orthogonal to the question of low light performance unless you are talking about low light performance in the presence of bright sources of light.
Uh... I said the easiest way. Improving the efficiency of the CCD (at least from the perspective of a company designing the parts as opposed to someone merely assembling the parts) is a LOT harder than bumping up the size of the optics.....
Sure, it's easier to swap out a sensor for one with better efficiency if all you're doing is buying off-the-shelf parts. By that same token, it is easier to make CPUs faster than to add additional CPUs... as a user.... From a design perspective, the reverse is true.
If I understand correctly (and I am not an acoustician, so I could be wrong), the bass drops off faster only in the near field, and thus once you've moved out an inch or three, the bass is no longer falling off at a faster rate. At that point, you have transitioned from the near field into the far field. The distance to that transition is to some degree proportional to the amount of air that the speaker moves.
With a speaker, the excursion is at least an order of magnitude greater than that of a pair of headphones, and probably two orders. Thus, it moves a LOT more air than the tiny glorified tweeter in a pair of headphones can possibly move. When you move a pair of headphones an inch, you've probably moved from the near field way out into the far field. By contrast, the near field for speakers is measured in feet.
Thus, to reproduce this effect with speakers, instead of moving half an inch, you'd have to move maybe ten feet to get the same amount of bass loss. Because the human ear isn't particularly sensitive to small changes in volume in the bass frequencies (and because it's not the absolute change that you perceive, but rather the change relative to the previous level), It is very hard to move your body several feet in a short enough period of time to perceive a similar rate of change in bass response, and it isn't particularly good for your neck either....:-)
Also, the room is an enclosed space, and until your room gets fairly large, reflections of bass frequencies are constructive interference. At 60 Hz, a half wave is nine feet.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that IP theft is the reason people are reading less, then you just don't get it. People are reading more. They are just reading more electronic content on the Internet, and that is supplanting their book reading. They aren't getting electronic copies of books, though. They're reading CNN. They're reading Slashdot. They're reading Digg. They're reading xkcd.
It's not theft of IP that is causing the downfall of books, but rather the cumbersome nature of books themselves coupled with a rapidly dwindling attention span resulting from the proliferation of blogs, the proliferation of text messages full of short little bits of text that are barely long enough to convey a complete thought, the replacement of in-depth newspaper articles with short little sound bits on TV news shows, and the increasingly hectic pace of modern life.... People are gravitating towards content that is brief in nature because they've gotten used to that. It should be no surprise, then, that books don't sell as well as they used to in light of the changing entertainment style of the modern public.
Unfortunately, that ends up being pretty close, though not on purpose. The problem is that there are fundamental inequalities in the world. A Libertarian position would be ideal if that were not the case, but as soon as you have one subset of the people (or corporations or unions or...) that have greater power and control due to their financial position, any legal system that does not protect those who are less fortunate/powerful from abuse by those people who are more fortunate/powerful is a system doomed to increasing that inequality until the two ends have nothing in common with each other, which almost inevitably leads to a revolutionary war, historically speaking.
That's why laws that attempt to create a fully free market economy end up wrecking the economy. The individual consumer is relatively powerless compared with a corporation, and without protection against monopolization, collusion, and other anticompetitive actions by those corporations, the consumer gets screwed, but is essentially powerless to create new competitors because of the inherent inequality in the money supply and the huge capital needed to create a competing business in all but the narrowest, most naturally local industries.
I can't believe Cavil is Admiral Adama's father!
I can't believe Gaius Baltar is Admiral Adama's father!
Sorry. It had to be done. :-D
By contrast, I use FireWire almost daily. I periodically iChat people into meetings with the built-in camera. I use DVI to hook up to the video projector when doing presentations. And you're right that ports are massively marked up. I do really have to wonder why Lenovo put VGA on a notebook when DVI would probably cost a buck or two. Basically, it seems to be a way to push people to buy their overpriced docking station.
My bad on the video chip. That said, you were talking about a non-user-replaceable battery, which is only true for the latest 17" MBP, not the one that was out a year ago, so I was comparing it with the current MBP's 9600M.
I'm seeing two copies of this story posted on the front page, both posted in the same minute. That has to be some kind of Slashdot record. Even normal user comments can't be duped by the same person less than two minutes apart....
CPU notwithstanding, that machine isn't remotely comparable feature-wise to any Mac built in the past five years or so, much less comparable to the MacBook Pro. It only has FireWire 400, its video is VGA-only, and it has no built-in camera. The MacBook Pro has FireWire 800 and dual-link DVI, has a MUCH better GPU, has a built-in camera, etc. The T61p just isn't in the same league.
The advanced docking station would cost you about another $300-$350 to give you DVI, and AFAIK you would still have a much slower GPU (another couple hundred of that cost) and no FireWire 800 or built-in camera (both of which would probably be $30-50 apiece to add). And there went basically every penny of your savings. That $600 can easily be explained away by differences in the hardware even if you ignore things like battery life, case design, etc.
If you don't care about those extra features, that's fine, but don't delude yourself into believing that the money you saved was because the product was made by Apple. You saved money because of the features you chose not to buy....
I would argue the exact opposite, actually. If a large percentage of jobs are in .Net/C#, there's a good chance that there are equally large numbers of candidates flocking to apply for those jobs, and that the number of applicants is likely to exceed the number of jobs by a significant margin. If you want a job that will be robust against economic problems, specialize in something that requires more unusual specialization. Learn Objective-C, for example. Either start your own company selling iPhone apps or hunt for jobs elsewhere doing Mac programming. Even though the number of jobs seems very limited, companies have a hard time finding qualified candidates in this area, so if you can fill the slot, you have a good chance at getting the job. The same isn't necessarily true for C# jobs.
Even as an individual investor setting up a retirement account, betting an entire investment portfolio on any one type of stock is probably not the best judgment call, IMHO. That said, I was referring to institutional pension plans, not iRAs---talking about companies with pension plans that must remain financially solvent in the long-term while still being able to make payments in the short term choosing to back them with risky growth stocks or put large percentages of their money in certain types of funds like real estate because they are growing more rapidly at the time---looking at the short-term profits in certain areas and saying "let's put everything in that" instead of properly diversifying their portfolios to maximize their ability to ride out problems.
On the loan issue, it's only a smart business decision if you don't look at the bigger economic picture. Banks are hurting now, including banks that never held onto any of those loans. A weaker economy means people save less money. Less money in savings accounts means less interest for banks on those dollars. It means higher interest rates for the banks when they issue new loans, which means they can't issue as many loans and are forced to get less income off the sale of those loans. And so on. Everything a bank does that affects the economy ends up coming back and affecting them if enough banks do it. The only way it is a smart business decision is if you are the only bank engaging in such a practice (or nearly so). Your tragedy of the commons comment very much speaks to this example.
Short selling also has the disadvantage of causing such ripple effects. Again, it's one of those where if you look at it in isolation, it seems like a really smart business decision, but if it drives the economy as a whole down and other stocks that you are holding lose lots of their value, the difference can more than cancel out any gains from the shorting.
Like you said, it's the tragedy of the commons, which is all about looking at the short-term gains for you without considering the long-term damage to the environment in which you must survive.
Oh, and apologies for the subject-verb agreement problem in the first sentence. I suppose if I really cared about typos, I'd quit rewriting sentences eight times before I post them.
The way I see it, if the manufacturers cares about counterfeit goods, they can give them serial numbers. If they don't bother to do that, any counterfeiting is as much their fault as anybody else's. Or, they could quit being cheap bastards and actually pay the manufacturing plant for the overages. Either way.
No, opinions like that are mostly held by people with business experience who see other businesses being run by (overpaid) complete morons. I've seen many, many businesses involved in short-term thinking that screws long-term profitability. Any time I see a new CEO brought in to "fix" a company, as a general rule, that's when it's time to sell the stock. Well, maybe wait until the new executive's short-term thinking has driven it up a bit, then dump the stock before it crashes. Either way. I've seen this too many times to believe that short-term thinking is unusual. It may not be the rule, but it certainly isn't the exception, either.
Indeed, short-term thinking is to blame for most of the current state of the economy. Betting your pension plans on high-yield, high-risk investments? Short-term thinking. Issuing loans that pay a high interest rate in spite of the risks because you know you're just going to sell the loan to somebody else anyway? Short-term thinking. Driving the stock market down rapidly because of a high number of people shorting the stock? Short-term thinking. And so on.
I tend to agree with the assessment that most companies, particularly those with entrenched monopolies like telecoms, tend to solely value short-term profit because they know they have little real competition, so their long-term profits are pretty much guaranteed in the absence of a significant disruptive technology (cell phones reducing land line use, for example). The only thing that will ever change this is removal of the monopoly---for example, passing laws that mandated cell phone unlocking after the initial contract period....
There are are two ways of hiding data under the OS (well, three if you count hypervisors). One is permanent (writing to the BIOS) and one is not (running code in SM mode). Code executing in SM mode goes away unless reloaded on the next boot. If you can get to ring 0 (top ring in kernel mode) then you could already write to BIOS and add stuff permanently under the OS. Doing an SM mode escalation from ring 0 merely buys you the ability to inject something under the OS in a temporary (single boot) way without modifying BIOS. If your goal is to modify BIOS, then AFAIK there's no reason to bother jumping to SM mode because you can do that without needing to do the SMM escalation.
I could easily be wrong about being able to write to BIOS from ring 0---I'm pretty sure it can be done, but not 100% positive---I've never written a BIOS flasher.... It is also possible that this might somehow allow you to undo soft write protection of the BIOS, in which case there is an advantage, albeit a small and highly device-specific advantage.... That said, I don't think this is nearly as big an opening as people make it out to be. It's like somebody giving you the key to an individual safe deposit box when you've already broken into the bank, have broken into the safe, and are currently carrying a hatchet. For the most part, ring 0 rules all under its domain, and once bad code is running there, you're screwed.
The hole a couple of years ago where you could get into SM mode from ring 2... that was a big deal. This... might have some impact on security between virtual hosts running on a single server under a hypervisor, but as far as single-user machines are concerned, it seems like small potatoes by comparison.
Ah, but it will make a difference, though how much of a difference depends on how it gets there in the first place. If it comes in through a trojan Mac OS X KEXT, it will matter (read "crash") the moment it tries to trap into a BIOS that isn't there. If it comes through Windows, it will matter when it tries to flash an emulated BIOS.... Either way, even at a low level, there are some differences that could make the more interesting uses of such an attack less than 100% cross-platform.
Imperious... "arrogantly domineering or overbearing".... I'm trying to decide if this is a typo or if this AC is really John Hodgman.
AFAIK, it can do that from Ring 0, too. About all SM mode does is allow you to temporarily inject yourself under the kernel in an undetectable way for a single boot; if you don't delete yourself from disk, you can still be detected by virus scanners and deleted, at which point your code would go away on the next boot... unless you start sniffing disk block writes and try to hide your files from the virus scanner. Either way, AFAICT, a cold boot from a recovery disk can clean up anything you could do in SM mode that you couldn't do from ring 0.
These attacks have been around for a while. Here's an article about an attack that obtains SMM access (from user space code in that case) from way back in 2006. The only thing that's new is that this is a new/different way to get into SM mode.
Just because they're being shellfish doesn't mean you have to be crabby. :-)
Ah. Even more entertaining that way.
The way I read it is this: 57% were companies trying to stifle competition, plus 37% of notices were not (valid) copyright claims. Note the emphasis. That means 37% of the claims were about things that had nothing whatsoever to do with copyright. Seems about right to me. The DMCA is so badly abused that it's not even funny....
Most of those scanners will detect pen or pencil. Why not just mark it with a Marks-A-Lot or other similar wide-tip marker?
I'm well aware of what dynamic range refers to. Yes, to some degree, higher dynamic range devices tend to have greater bit depth, but the concepts are really orthogonal.... A CCD just drives an A/D converter. The bit depth of the converter is determined by the number of threshold gates, while the dynamic range is determined by the relative values of the resistors on the inputs of each threshold gate.
Thus, you could easily have a high dynamic range sensor that represents everything from bright sunlight through night with only 8 bits per subpixel (though in such an extreme example, the resulting device wouldn't be very practical). Similarly, you can have a standard dynamic range sensor that represents the standard range of brightness with 20 bits per subpixel (and you could theoretically get better color accuracy from doing so). Reality tends to be somewhere between those extremes.
Really, most of the color accuracy problems in modern photography are caused by differences in the image compression algorithms. The color space of CCDs is huge compared with the color space of a JPEG file. When that color space reduction occurs, data is lost, and the particular weights chosen in the process makes a huge difference in determining the color balance of the resulting image.... All cameras should support RAW, and the ones that don't are just... wrong..... :-)
Exactly. And this is why humans should not be allowed to drive. Make the cars drive themselves and all this goes away. Vehicles would travel at a speed that is safe for the roads and would know precisely when to slow down for corners that require slower driving, would not brake unnecessarily (the main cause of congestion), etc. Odds are, it would be safe to travel on average 20 MPH faster than the existing posted speed limits on most roads were it not for the meat popsicle behind the wheel. Further, most roads that are congested today would not be nearly so congested because the need for such long stopping distances is largely obviated if you know that the vehicle eight car lengths ahead is about to start braking in five seconds. (Blowouts would still be a risk, but that, too, can be largely obviated by requiring all tires to be of the run-flat variety.)
It also fixes problems like what I had this morning where a car pulled out in front of me to go one block and turn right, got delayed by pedestrians, and blocked my lane, nearly causing me to miss a light. Had we had automated driving systems, the computers would not have allowed that car to pull out in front of me, and further would have prioritized my vehicle because it was going through the light which it could not do on red while the other vehicle was turning right, which it could have done even after the light turned red.
For that matter, if all cars were driven by computers, we wouldn't need traffic-light-like behavior at the vast majority of intersections that have lights currently... except when pedestrians are involved, of course.
I'm not sure what dynamic range has to do with this, really. I'd love to see CCD with much a broader dynamic range so that the range can be compressed later (retaining/bringing out detail in the shadows and in bright areas), but it is orthogonal to the question of low light performance unless you are talking about low light performance in the presence of bright sources of light.
Uh... I said the easiest way. Improving the efficiency of the CCD (at least from the perspective of a company designing the parts as opposed to someone merely assembling the parts) is a LOT harder than bumping up the size of the optics.....
Sure, it's easier to swap out a sensor for one with better efficiency if all you're doing is buying off-the-shelf parts. By that same token, it is easier to make CPUs faster than to add additional CPUs... as a user.... From a design perspective, the reverse is true.
If I understand correctly (and I am not an acoustician, so I could be wrong), the bass drops off faster only in the near field, and thus once you've moved out an inch or three, the bass is no longer falling off at a faster rate. At that point, you have transitioned from the near field into the far field. The distance to that transition is to some degree proportional to the amount of air that the speaker moves.
With a speaker, the excursion is at least an order of magnitude greater than that of a pair of headphones, and probably two orders. Thus, it moves a LOT more air than the tiny glorified tweeter in a pair of headphones can possibly move. When you move a pair of headphones an inch, you've probably moved from the near field way out into the far field. By contrast, the near field for speakers is measured in feet.
Thus, to reproduce this effect with speakers, instead of moving half an inch, you'd have to move maybe ten feet to get the same amount of bass loss. Because the human ear isn't particularly sensitive to small changes in volume in the bass frequencies (and because it's not the absolute change that you perceive, but rather the change relative to the previous level), It is very hard to move your body several feet in a short enough period of time to perceive a similar rate of change in bass response, and it isn't particularly good for your neck either.... :-)
Also, the room is an enclosed space, and until your room gets fairly large, reflections of bass frequencies are constructive interference. At 60 Hz, a half wave is nine feet.