Of the people I know that refuse to buy (or in practice don't buy) anything from iTunes, I've only *once* heard quality-concerns even mentioned. What I *have* heard, repeatedly, is:
Poor value. $0.99 is *more* expensive than buying the CD for older music. *much* more expensive than buying used CDs. People expect to see *some* of the savings of digital distribution.
Doesn't work on all player-devices, forcing you to essentially use iTunes and iPod. (I know this ain't strictly true, buy the general impression is in this direction)
No resale-value whatsoever. Nor is it trivial to do simple innocent stuff that people are used to, like for example give music that you are tired of to your friend that isn't. (again, I know this ain't strictly true, nevertheless, people don't feel confident they'll be able to do these things)
AAC ? What's an AAC ? I know mp3s, may even have heard of Ogg. But AAc ? What's that ? (simply lack of brand-recognition, even the iPod is refered to as an "mp3-player" not an "aac-player")
Some may have heard arguments from their nerdier friends involving the word DRM and sounding negative. (if they understood the arguments is a different matter, but they're aware that there's something there that many of the "experts" say will bite you)
Many (especially older people) are still not ready for non-physical distribution. This will change over time, but presently it's so. I can't see my grandmother buy iTunes-songs for the birthday of any of her grandchildren, she frequently buys CDs if such are on the wishlist though.
Some (the more technologically clueful) *do* know what DRM is and what it does and just flat out refuse. "You can have my unencumbered digital music-files when you pry them from my cold hands" sort of people. These aren't many, but there's been a *sharp* increase the last 2-3 years.
It's a monopoly. In practice, going for an AAC-library means marrying apple. Apple players. Apple Software. Apple-approved operating-systems. If you instead go with mp3, you have literally hundreds of players on a much more even playing-field.
Last, there's also a few that consider the current music-business a near-mafia, and see it as *more* unethical to support them financially than it is to ignore copyrigth-law.
Notice how none of this has anything to do with sound-quality. If sound-quality was the huge selector you make it out to be, 128Kbps mp3 would *never* have been the stellar success it actually was (and is)
People are incredible. True. Nevertheless, people tend to take notice of events that directly impact their wallet. They may posture and complain about it in public, nevertheless if it is clear that ultimately they *do* have to actually pay for it, they are very likely to change their behaviour in the future. (quite possibly while all the time claiming that someone else is to blame).
My brother somehow managed to install antivirus, and managed to introduce the (then good-habit) of physically turning off the power to the modem while not surfing after a virus cost him $300 in calls to somewhere in east-asia. Sure he complained about it. Sure he claimed that someone else was to blame. But in the end, he adjusted his behaviour to reduce the risk of having to pay for similar crap in the future.
I would consider that a good thing. If people *noticed* that their computer sent a million spams in the last week, the chances would be much better that they actually did something about it.
No. That is completely wrong. The landscape is littered with standards that are merely good-enough. If 99% of all users see no reason to upgrade from one standard to another, teorethically sligthly superior one that cover the wishes of the last 1%, then the new "standard" will remain marginal and irrelevant.
Witness SACD. There's no doubt whatsoever that it is "better" than standard audio-cd. But the advantages are irrelevant to 99% of all listeners. I predict it'll *never* become dominant over CD, despite being technically superior. The same may very well be true for Ogg versus Mp3. (If Ogg *does* win, it'll likely be because of political issues more than because of any property of the codecs used or flexibility of the file-format)
I too can see CDs being replaced with "something better". There are lots of disadvantages of CDs that *are* relevant to normal people, if a new format comes along that fixes a significant numer of those, without introducing new worse problems, there's no reason it couldn't take over. Problems include:
Physically fragile. Most people have scratched CDs.
Small capacity. 70 minutes of music is tiny in an age where people are used to 1000 hours in ipod-size thingie.
Requires moving-parts to read, problematic for mobile usage.
Too physically large. Problematic for mobile usage. Leads to shock-sensitivity and increased battery-consumption.
Inadequate support for additional content beyond music. Not even *songtitles* and *artistnames* are universally coded in a way that all players understand. (yes I know about CDTEXT)
Witness how SACD fails to solve basically all of these real-world problems. In contrast, for most people, the 16-bit sampling-depth and the frequency-limitation of 22Khz are *NOT* significant problems, nor is the 2-channel limitation. The fraction of people that *do* consider these three serious problems is shown in the uptake of SACD-players versus mp3-players. (the latter solves most of my problemlist, but actually typically *degrade* soundquality)
The logical choice that solves all of these and then som problems is the non-physical downloaded unencumbered mp3 or ogg-file. People love those. Even enough to use them in millions despite a very limited array of legal ways of aquiring them. Hell, most people I know that *do* still buy CDs do it explicitly for the purpose of converting them into files for their mp3-players.
I agree with you that it's quite reasonable to expect video-bitrates significantly higher than 10GB/hour in the next few years.
The bigness is relevant, but not for any of the reasons you state.
The problem is *political* not *technical*. The US is politically diverse, and has tons of states, all with individual politicians, lobbyists, special-interest-groups and ideas.
It is *politically* difficult to agree on a single unified well-maintained register. It's not in the least technically difficult.
Norway and other countries have had such registers since the 70ies, and frankly, handling a 300 million-record database with a total size of less than a single TB is not in any way shape or form a technological problem. Nor is handling the transaction-rates. Norway has on the order of 0.5 writes/year pro record and 50 reads/year pro record, which means USA would have on the order of 5 writes/second and on the order of 500 reads/second. Probably triple that in business-hours and near-zero in the nigth. Nevertheless, the challenge here ain't technical.
And as long as they don't there's no value to them of having the 40 channels required. The overhead is simply not going to be worth it.
OK, fine, I too can perhaps see an upgrade to say 5.1 sound becoming common, but even that is "only" a factor of 5 larger.
Besides, I was assuming lossless compression. That is, frankly, overkill for end-users. A CD (uncompressed) is on the order of 10MB/minute. With modern codecs you can compress that down to 320kbps or even 256kbps and the quality is still such that even the critical listener, in a silent environment, with excellent components, is unlikely to hear the difference.
The SCO/IBM litigation may be long, but could ultimatley produce a seminal opinion that influences contract and copyright cases for years to come,
How so ? There are no interesting questions that are even *asked* in the SCO case. So it's beyond me how any interesting questions could be *answered* by this case.
What we have is a company that after several years are still not even close to actually stating a claim, much less providing evidence for anything. In what way is this supposed to influence anything ?
Make many wild claims publically an in court.
Go trough years of discovery, now claiming that this is needed to provide evidence (despite having claimed in the first step that you *had* evidence)
Ultimately, end up claiming something almost entirely unrelated to what you claimed in the first step.
Provide no evidence whatsoever, even of the new claims in the following step.
Get summarily dismissed.
This teaches someone something ? A bloody waste of time is all I see.
Actually, there's natural limits to that kind of storage.
The limits are set by our senses, more concretely, our ears and our eyes.
Our ears are only capable of hearing up to about 20Khz (less than that for most people) and 16-bit samplings are enough that most people cannot hear the difference with anything more. Thus CD-quality is, if not perfect, then good enough that further improvements are ignorable for most people. CD-quality losslessly-compressed music is around 300MB/hour.
In a year, there's 8760 hours, so you'd need on the order of 2.5 TB to store a year worth of around-the-clock never-repeateing losslessly-compressed music. If computers keep getting replaced at the current rate, this means you'll never need more than about 10TB to store sound. This assumes you don't store more than you listen to, if you choose to for example store all music ever produced for convenience, despite never listening to more than a tiny fraction of it, then this requirement goes up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Still, there's good reason to suppose that 10TB will suffice for most peoples sound-storage needs. (even if you wanted to store all the sound you've *ever* heard in your life, including traffic at nigth, that'd still only be 200TB or so)
The real killer is video. We can take in a *lot* more data with our eyes. 10GB/hour is in the ballpark of what you'd need for the sort of quality a modern cinema can deliver. (and there's no particular reason we couldn't go higher.)
That works out to 100TB/year, more or less. A lifetime of high-quality video is thus on the order of 10PB.
In short, it is unlikely that an individual (or family) will be able to fill a 1000PB disc with sound and video-recordings. Infact it's unlikely they'll be able to fill it with anything, if that anything is to be consumed only trough their 2 eyes and 2 ears.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. Only that it'll be filled with something more. Once we fire up the holodecks all bets are off. I don't even want to try to estimate the bandwith needed for that kind of immersive experience.
Harddiscs are, as you say currently superior to other storage-technologies.
So, you make backups to hard-disc then. Simple. Quick. Affordable.
Yes, the lifetime is limited, so you should make sure to have atleast 2 independent backups (that's true for any media, all media can go bad) and you should change them every 3 years or so.
The thing is, capacity is growing so rapidly, that in 3 years, what is now a hard-disc full of backup will be a hard-disc 10% full of backup.
I need a single hard-disc now to backup all my data. I have two, and store the two in physically separate buildings to ensure against fire, robbery or similar.
I expect to be able to make do with 2 hard-discs for the rest of my life. By the time the current 2 are old, I'll be able to buy 2 new ones with 10 times the capacity for the same price.
Where is the problem ?
Miss messing around with unreliable, slow, crappy, noisy, sensitive tapedrives all that much ?
How about instead stopping the idiocy of confusing identification with authenthication ?
A SSN is a perfectly fine and perfectly way to establish that we're talking about the same person. Names, adresses, birthdates whatever all break down here. (there is more than one "John Smith", there could even be more than one with the same birthdate, furthermore it's perfectly possible that "Ann Smith" is the same person as "Ann Kulstad", she could've married.)
For this purpose, making certain that two records really refer to the same person, SSN is fine. A unique key that refers to an individual.
Now, where you guys went wrong where in confusing this with authenthication.
The very fact that you use your SSN to *identify* which person you're talking about means that lots of different organisations and individuals *MUST* know your SSN. That ain't a problem. The problem is in assuming that whoever is aware of your SSN *IS* you, or is authorized to order credit-cards in your name, or whatever else.
We've got SSNs in Norway too. They're not particularily secret. The tax-people have them. Your employer has it. Your bank has it. They all even *need* to have it, to *identify* you. Your employer, for example, pays taxes, and uses your SSN when communicating with the tax-people so that it's clear for which individual these taxes are.
But here's the rub: Knowing the SSN is never *ever* considered authentication. You cannot order a credit-card in someones name just by knowing it. Nor access their bank-account, or infact do *anything* you couldn't just aswell have done without it. Except for ONE thing: If you know the SSN, you can use it to refer to an individual, in such a way that all involved will know for sure precisely *which* individual you're talking about.
The account is owned by individual X, the taxes are paid by individual X, the drivers-licence was issued to individual X, and we all (the bank, the employer, the drivers-license-people, etc) agree that this is infact one and the same individual, despite the fact that one of us spelled his name wrong, he has married, he has moved, and there's 17 other people with that precise name in Norway.
*THAT* is the point of a SSN.
You cannot at the same time give your SSN to dozens of different organisations (which you need to do if using it as an identificator shall work) and at the SAME time pretend that it's a secret that only the individual himself would ever know.
The problem is usually cost. Does two 24" display make them twice as productive as one 24" display? Likely not.
Definitely not. But that's the wrong question.
That's $1000(USD) for the display,
The correct question is: "Do they save enough time, over the lifetime of the second monitor, to earn back the purchase-cost of the second monitor ?
Assume, for example, adding a second monitor costs the company $1000, the person using the setup costs the company $5000/month and the monitors have to pay for themselves inside of 2 years.
In those 2 years the worker will have cost the company $120.000. So, the question is, does it increase productivity enough that he saves atleast $1000 worth of time ? The required productivity-increase for that is less than 1%.
This is even conservative. Many workers cost significantly more than $5000/month (including all expenses, not just salary), and many companies keep computer-hardware for 3 years rather than 2.
Yes. But that still means they retain most disadvantages of a fork:
Their improvements are not back-ported to Wikipedia. (though if the licensing allows, I suppose they could be)
Once they touch an article, even in a trivial way (fix a single typo) they stop receiving benefits from improvements made on Wikipedia. (they could perhaps be *manually* integrated, but that's still a maintenance-nigthmare)
Over time, as more and more articles are touched by them, they'll have to maintain a larger and larger fraction of articles themselves. (since improvements on the WP side is no longer auto-imported after they touch them).
It puts them in a bind with regards to articles which are currently improving rapidly in WP. To not miss out on the improvements that will happen in the following weeks, they'll have to *deliberately* keep their hands off. (because move a single comma, and you stop benefiting from the work of the wikipedians.)
I'd much have prefered a system where all contributions go to WP, and they merely maintain a system where they attach a quality-score to a certain version of certain wp-articles. That way you could have a view of wikipedia which included only those articles that are scored atleast "good", or atleast "excellent". This view would show only rated articles, and only the precise version that was rated.
Wikipedia is already working on such a project though, blessed version. This will allow anyone to form a group, and approve certain versions of certain articles.
Thus you could get together with a group of math-experts, review and bless a certain set of math-related articles, and then publish (automatically) a version of wp consisting only of those precise versions of those precise articles.
Here in Norway it's already definitely the case that the *proportion* of reading, writing, and sending-documents-around that ever hit paper is decreasing. However, at the same time the total amount of documents and correspondence increase, so the actual paperconsumption is probably not falling.
Nevertheless, unlike 10 years ago you'll do all of the following without causing any paper to be consumed:
File your wussname-tax-declaration.
Get a bill from your telephone-company and pay it.
Same for insurance, electricity, gas and basically all recurring bills.
Register a new car.
Report a change of adress, have the government, the post, the banks and others take note of your new adress.
Register for VAT as a business. Report VAT-relevant numbers and pay VAT.
Buy a plane-ticket for your vacation, and a hotel reservation. Use both. (no, not even the "ticket" itself will be on paper, your VISA-card that you used for paying will serve as your "ticket"
There's a gazillion examples. We really do more paperless every day. Measured in fraction, I'd say 90% of my correspondence and about 75% of my bills are completely paperless.
Made up for by the fact that I receive 5 times as much paper-marketing in my mailbox every day as I did a decade ago though.
Stereo audio is very low bandwith by todays standard. CDs, for example, are sampled at 2 channels, 16 bit depth at a frequency of 44.1 Khz. This works out to 44100*2*16 = 1411200bps, or about 150KB/second.
This is an itsy-bitsy tiny-winy part of a current USB or Firewire-connection. There's no issues that I'm aware of with realtime audio over either USB or Firewire.
In Star-Trek the "technologicaly immature" species are like a.d. 1500 on earth, or at worst like the stone-age some 10.000 years ago. 10000 years is a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things.
Next step: Witness all the most desirable employees go work for someone else.
Seriously, they're talking about an average of wasted time a few minutes/week. That is down in the noise.
I don't think I know many workers, in private companies or working for the state, that don't in one way or another "waste" 5-10% of their work-time or more. This ain't nothing new, and it's not even particularily wrong.
There's a few slackers that really aren't pulling their weigth, but that's a different matter.
I think it's a question about what you do *not* do. I don't think gaming in itself hurts. But I *do* think it hurts if any one activity dominates to the point where you miss out on other activities.
Staring at a screen is something quite a few kids do 5 hours a day. That amount of *anything* will cut into all other activities.
Playing football, reading, talking in the phone or riding for the same amount of time will leave you similarily one-sided, it's just that there aren't all that many kids that play football 5 hours a day.
It's neyond question that you can learn something from using computers and playing games. It depends on the game, in general more complex games where you have to think are probably better than simple games where it's all about reflexes.
Playing Sim-City forces you to, among other things:
Prioritize different tasks.
Keep an overview.
Deal with financing. Income needs to be larger than expenses. Loans carry (significant!) interest. Investments can sometimes pay off very well.
Conflicting interests. For every choice there are 10 reasons *for* doing it an 10 *against*
It exposes you to city-planning, pollution and lots of other concepts. Yes its simplified, but what you learn is still applicable to the real world to a certain degree.
People really *do* like to live somewhere with a nice view, or near the sea.
Pollution really *will* make a neighbourhood less desirable. The same is true for bad traffic or high crime-rates.
Spending money on educaiton really *does* improve the chances that "desirable" industries establish in a country.
Setting up a trash-incinerator nearby really *is* fairly certain to make land-value in a neighbourhood fall.
The basic argument is that an action is unethical if it causes suffering, and that many classes of animals can suffer (although generally not as much as humans). Therefore, it's unethical to cause the suffering of animals.
Fine. But if that's so, then surely it's also unethical not to prevent suffering when you have the opportunity to do so ?
Problem is, it's really hard to quantify suffering. I challenge you to come up with a definition of "suffering" where say a Norwegian cow does suffer whereas a moose does not.
The Norwegian cow has:
Access to nutritious tasty food each and every day of its life.
Shelter from weather.
Soft dry place to sleep.
Vacation (I'm not kidding!) a minimum of 3 months every year.
Access to antibiotics, painkillers, birth-helpers and in general healthcare better than most poor people in the third world.
Protection from predators.
The moose has none of this. A full third of them dies of starvation, illness and/or predators before even becoming a single year old.
What definition of "suffering" do you use, if you consider the situation of the cow unacceptable, but that of the moose acceptable ?
We specifically know that they consider one-way-tickets "suspicious" and return-tickets "less suspicious", so the determined terrorist actually goes and buys a return-ticket, knowing full well that he'll never use the return. There's no forgery involved. So the chance that the "forgery" gets discovered is null.
Similarily, he knows that they consider paying cash "suspicious", so he actually pays for his tickets in some other way, for example by credit-card or by bank-transfer. No forgery involved, just a change of behaviour to appear less suspicious.
Similarily, he knows that they want to know the email-adress used (if any) so he registers and actually uses the adress "whatever@gmail.com" and uses that rather than "i_love_osama@al-qaida.iq". No forgery involved, so chance that the "forgery" gets discovered is -- you guessed it -- zero.
Ok, so a few points may need to be forged. Thing is, you'll present forged papers to the local check-in counter, not to the US search-for-terrorists people. All *they* get is the data from your papers, they don't even get to look at the physical papers. (until you land, and by then it's too lage anyway) so there's no way it could be discovered by them.
It *could* offcourse be discovered by the people in the check-in. But that's a separate risk, and unaffected by the transmission of the 31 pieces of information. (i.e. even if EU-airlines did *NOT* send the 31 datapoints, they'd have exactly the same chances of catching say a fake passport)
Sure it can be. In 10 years your current computer, assuming it ain't broken, will work just like it does today.
Which is to say it'll be completely useless next to a current model. Infact it's quite likely that just the extra power-budget for keeping your current machine will outstrip the cost of changing to a more modern machine with more power.
If your current computer uses 300W, then that is 2500kwh for a year (assuming it runs 24/7, which most folding@home machines do).
In 10 years its a given that you can (if you so choose) find a more powerful machine that nevertheless consumes only 100W. Infact my 20W Via Epia machine today is much more powerful than *ANY* 200W machine was 10 years ago, so I'm being conservative here...
So, buying a new machine is the *cheaper* alternative assuming you can (in 10 years) find a machine that costs no more than $1500 while being more powerful than your current machine *and* consuming less than 100W. My guess is you'll be able to do this for $500, not $1500, so it's a $1000 win for you to toss the old machine out.
I was talking about the fact that the US politicians *choose* to suggest, discuss, vote on, and sometimes pass, single-bills with contents like "Supporting Iraqi operations with another $500 million, and outlaw online gambling".
There's a lot more ridicolous examples than this out there. The question is why they choose to do this. Obviously the *majority* of politicians must consider it to make sense, or they'd just torpedo it. Which they don't. And the *reason* they don't is what I don't get.
One *could* raise a suggestion like this in Norway too (or in any other country, I suppose). Thing is, it'd get laughed out. The first thing that'd happen is someone (anyone!) would take the stand and suggest an express-vote to deny the suggestion, and suggest the issues get re-submitted as separate items.
The thing is, terrorists aren't generally idiots. Everyone (everyone who cares to know anyway) know exactly which 31 pieces of information are gathered, so it's an relatively easy thing to make sure you come out looking golden.
For example:
They collect info on if you have a return-fligth or only one-way. So, you make sure to book a return-fligth.
They want to know your email-adress, so you make sure to use an average-looking one never associated with anything fishy.
They specifically want to know if the ticket was paid for in cash. So you don't do that.
They want to know if you have a history of booking and then not-showing for fligths. So you make sure not to have such a history. (and if you do, you establish a new fake identity that doesn't.)
The list is longer, infact the list is 31 points long. But literally 25 or so of the 31 datas are easy to manipulate by the determined flyer, and it's a near *certanity* that exactly that will be done. This means that even *if* profiling based on these data could bring something (which I doubt) it now *certainly* doesn't bring anything, since any data you do get on a terrorist is virtually guaranteed to be manipulated.
Profiling works sorta, some of the time. It does however *NOT* work when used against an extremely small, but extremely determined group of people who:
A) Know they are being profiled.
B) Know what pieces of information are gathered.
C) Can easily change 80% or so of the information that are gathered.
D) Are very determined to do so to appear like an average passenger.
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Of the people I know that refuse to buy (or in practice don't buy) anything from iTunes, I've only *once* heard quality-concerns even mentioned. What I *have* heard, repeatedly, is:
Notice how none of this has anything to do with sound-quality. If sound-quality was the huge selector you make it out to be, 128Kbps mp3 would *never* have been the stellar success it actually was (and is)
My brother somehow managed to install antivirus, and managed to introduce the (then good-habit) of physically turning off the power to the modem while not surfing after a virus cost him $300 in calls to somewhere in east-asia. Sure he complained about it. Sure he claimed that someone else was to blame. But in the end, he adjusted his behaviour to reduce the risk of having to pay for similar crap in the future.
I would consider that a good thing. If people *noticed* that their computer sent a million spams in the last week, the chances would be much better that they actually did something about it.
Witness SACD. There's no doubt whatsoever that it is "better" than standard audio-cd. But the advantages are irrelevant to 99% of all listeners. I predict it'll *never* become dominant over CD, despite being technically superior. The same may very well be true for Ogg versus Mp3. (If Ogg *does* win, it'll likely be because of political issues more than because of any property of the codecs used or flexibility of the file-format)
I too can see CDs being replaced with "something better". There are lots of disadvantages of CDs that *are* relevant to normal people, if a new format comes along that fixes a significant numer of those, without introducing new worse problems, there's no reason it couldn't take over. Problems include:
Witness how SACD fails to solve basically all of these real-world problems. In contrast, for most people, the 16-bit sampling-depth and the frequency-limitation of 22Khz are *NOT* significant problems, nor is the 2-channel limitation. The fraction of people that *do* consider these three serious problems is shown in the uptake of SACD-players versus mp3-players. (the latter solves most of my problemlist, but actually typically *degrade* soundquality)
The logical choice that solves all of these and then som problems is the non-physical downloaded unencumbered mp3 or ogg-file. People love those. Even enough to use them in millions despite a very limited array of legal ways of aquiring them. Hell, most people I know that *do* still buy CDs do it explicitly for the purpose of converting them into files for their mp3-players.
I agree with you that it's quite reasonable to expect video-bitrates significantly higher than 10GB/hour in the next few years.
The problem is *political* not *technical*. The US is politically diverse, and has tons of states, all with individual politicians, lobbyists, special-interest-groups and ideas.
It is *politically* difficult to agree on a single unified well-maintained register. It's not in the least technically difficult.
Norway and other countries have had such registers since the 70ies, and frankly, handling a 300 million-record database with a total size of less than a single TB is not in any way shape or form a technological problem. Nor is handling the transaction-rates. Norway has on the order of 0.5 writes/year pro record and 50 reads/year pro record, which means USA would have on the order of 5 writes/second and on the order of 500 reads/second. Probably triple that in business-hours and near-zero in the nigth. Nevertheless, the challenge here ain't technical.
OK, fine, I too can perhaps see an upgrade to say 5.1 sound becoming common, but even that is "only" a factor of 5 larger.
Besides, I was assuming lossless compression. That is, frankly, overkill for end-users. A CD (uncompressed) is on the order of 10MB/minute. With modern codecs you can compress that down to 320kbps or even 256kbps and the quality is still such that even the critical listener, in a silent environment, with excellent components, is unlikely to hear the difference.
Overwhelmingly, the diffs contribute more positive than negative. There are backslides, but those are generally dwarfed by the improvements.
How so ? There are no interesting questions that are even *asked* in the SCO case. So it's beyond me how any interesting questions could be *answered* by this case.
What we have is a company that after several years are still not even close to actually stating a claim, much less providing evidence for anything. In what way is this supposed to influence anything ?
This teaches someone something ? A bloody waste of time is all I see.
The limits are set by our senses, more concretely, our ears and our eyes.
Our ears are only capable of hearing up to about 20Khz (less than that for most people) and 16-bit samplings are enough that most people cannot hear the difference with anything more. Thus CD-quality is, if not perfect, then good enough that further improvements are ignorable for most people. CD-quality losslessly-compressed music is around 300MB/hour.
In a year, there's 8760 hours, so you'd need on the order of 2.5 TB to store a year worth of around-the-clock never-repeateing losslessly-compressed music. If computers keep getting replaced at the current rate, this means you'll never need more than about 10TB to store sound. This assumes you don't store more than you listen to, if you choose to for example store all music ever produced for convenience, despite never listening to more than a tiny fraction of it, then this requirement goes up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Still, there's good reason to suppose that 10TB will suffice for most peoples sound-storage needs. (even if you wanted to store all the sound you've *ever* heard in your life, including traffic at nigth, that'd still only be 200TB or so)
The real killer is video. We can take in a *lot* more data with our eyes. 10GB/hour is in the ballpark of what you'd need for the sort of quality a modern cinema can deliver. (and there's no particular reason we couldn't go higher.) That works out to 100TB/year, more or less. A lifetime of high-quality video is thus on the order of 10PB.
In short, it is unlikely that an individual (or family) will be able to fill a 1000PB disc with sound and video-recordings. Infact it's unlikely they'll be able to fill it with anything, if that anything is to be consumed only trough their 2 eyes and 2 ears.
That doesn't mean it won't happen. Only that it'll be filled with something more. Once we fire up the holodecks all bets are off. I don't even want to try to estimate the bandwith needed for that kind of immersive experience.
Harddiscs are, as you say currently superior to other storage-technologies.
So, you make backups to hard-disc then. Simple. Quick. Affordable.
Yes, the lifetime is limited, so you should make sure to have atleast 2 independent backups (that's true for any media, all media can go bad) and you should change them every 3 years or so.
The thing is, capacity is growing so rapidly, that in 3 years, what is now a hard-disc full of backup will be a hard-disc 10% full of backup.
I need a single hard-disc now to backup all my data. I have two, and store the two in physically separate buildings to ensure against fire, robbery or similar.
I expect to be able to make do with 2 hard-discs for the rest of my life. By the time the current 2 are old, I'll be able to buy 2 new ones with 10 times the capacity for the same price.
Where is the problem ?
Miss messing around with unreliable, slow, crappy, noisy, sensitive tapedrives all that much ?
A SSN is a perfectly fine and perfectly way to establish that we're talking about the same person. Names, adresses, birthdates whatever all break down here. (there is more than one "John Smith", there could even be more than one with the same birthdate, furthermore it's perfectly possible that "Ann Smith" is the same person as "Ann Kulstad", she could've married.)
For this purpose, making certain that two records really refer to the same person, SSN is fine. A unique key that refers to an individual.
Now, where you guys went wrong where in confusing this with authenthication.
The very fact that you use your SSN to *identify* which person you're talking about means that lots of different organisations and individuals *MUST* know your SSN. That ain't a problem. The problem is in assuming that whoever is aware of your SSN *IS* you, or is authorized to order credit-cards in your name, or whatever else.
We've got SSNs in Norway too. They're not particularily secret. The tax-people have them. Your employer has it. Your bank has it. They all even *need* to have it, to *identify* you. Your employer, for example, pays taxes, and uses your SSN when communicating with the tax-people so that it's clear for which individual these taxes are.
But here's the rub: Knowing the SSN is never *ever* considered authentication. You cannot order a credit-card in someones name just by knowing it. Nor access their bank-account, or infact do *anything* you couldn't just aswell have done without it. Except for ONE thing: If you know the SSN, you can use it to refer to an individual, in such a way that all involved will know for sure precisely *which* individual you're talking about.
The account is owned by individual X, the taxes are paid by individual X, the drivers-licence was issued to individual X, and we all (the bank, the employer, the drivers-license-people, etc) agree that this is infact one and the same individual, despite the fact that one of us spelled his name wrong, he has married, he has moved, and there's 17 other people with that precise name in Norway.
*THAT* is the point of a SSN.
You cannot at the same time give your SSN to dozens of different organisations (which you need to do if using it as an identificator shall work) and at the SAME time pretend that it's a secret that only the individual himself would ever know.
I dunno why USA persists in the stupidity.
Definitely not. But that's the wrong question.
That's $1000(USD) for the display,
The correct question is: "Do they save enough time, over the lifetime of the second monitor, to earn back the purchase-cost of the second monitor ?
Assume, for example, adding a second monitor costs the company $1000, the person using the setup costs the company $5000/month and the monitors have to pay for themselves inside of 2 years.
In those 2 years the worker will have cost the company $120.000. So, the question is, does it increase productivity enough that he saves atleast $1000 worth of time ? The required productivity-increase for that is less than 1%.
This is even conservative. Many workers cost significantly more than $5000/month (including all expenses, not just salary), and many companies keep computer-hardware for 3 years rather than 2.
I'd much have prefered a system where all contributions go to WP, and they merely maintain a system where they attach a quality-score to a certain version of certain wp-articles. That way you could have a view of wikipedia which included only those articles that are scored atleast "good", or atleast "excellent". This view would show only rated articles, and only the precise version that was rated.
Wikipedia is already working on such a project though, blessed version. This will allow anyone to form a group, and approve certain versions of certain articles.
Thus you could get together with a group of math-experts, review and bless a certain set of math-related articles, and then publish (automatically) a version of wp consisting only of those precise versions of those precise articles.
Nevertheless, unlike 10 years ago you'll do all of the following without causing any paper to be consumed:
There's a gazillion examples. We really do more paperless every day. Measured in fraction, I'd say 90% of my correspondence and about 75% of my bills are completely paperless.
Made up for by the fact that I receive 5 times as much paper-marketing in my mailbox every day as I did a decade ago though.
This is an itsy-bitsy tiny-winy part of a current USB or Firewire-connection. There's no issues that I'm aware of with realtime audio over either USB or Firewire.
In Star-Trek the "technologicaly immature" species are like a.d. 1500 on earth, or at worst like the stone-age some 10.000 years ago. 10000 years is a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things.
Seriously, they're talking about an average of wasted time a few minutes/week. That is down in the noise.
I don't think I know many workers, in private companies or working for the state, that don't in one way or another "waste" 5-10% of their work-time or more. This ain't nothing new, and it's not even particularily wrong.
There's a few slackers that really aren't pulling their weigth, but that's a different matter.
Not thousands. Millions to billions.
Staring at a screen is something quite a few kids do 5 hours a day. That amount of *anything* will cut into all other activities.
Playing football, reading, talking in the phone or riding for the same amount of time will leave you similarily one-sided, it's just that there aren't all that many kids that play football 5 hours a day.
It's neyond question that you can learn something from using computers and playing games. It depends on the game, in general more complex games where you have to think are probably better than simple games where it's all about reflexes.
Playing Sim-City forces you to, among other things:
Fine. But if that's so, then surely it's also unethical not to prevent suffering when you have the opportunity to do so ?
Problem is, it's really hard to quantify suffering. I challenge you to come up with a definition of "suffering" where say a Norwegian cow does suffer whereas a moose does not.
The Norwegian cow has:
The moose has none of this. A full third of them dies of starvation, illness and/or predators before even becoming a single year old.
What definition of "suffering" do you use, if you consider the situation of the cow unacceptable, but that of the moose acceptable ?
We specifically know that they consider one-way-tickets "suspicious" and return-tickets "less suspicious", so the determined terrorist actually goes and buys a return-ticket, knowing full well that he'll never use the return. There's no forgery involved. So the chance that the "forgery" gets discovered is null.
Similarily, he knows that they consider paying cash "suspicious", so he actually pays for his tickets in some other way, for example by credit-card or by bank-transfer. No forgery involved, just a change of behaviour to appear less suspicious.
Similarily, he knows that they want to know the email-adress used (if any) so he registers and actually uses the adress "whatever@gmail.com" and uses that rather than "i_love_osama@al-qaida.iq". No forgery involved, so chance that the "forgery" gets discovered is -- you guessed it -- zero.
Ok, so a few points may need to be forged. Thing is, you'll present forged papers to the local check-in counter, not to the US search-for-terrorists people. All *they* get is the data from your papers, they don't even get to look at the physical papers. (until you land, and by then it's too lage anyway) so there's no way it could be discovered by them.
It *could* offcourse be discovered by the people in the check-in. But that's a separate risk, and unaffected by the transmission of the 31 pieces of information. (i.e. even if EU-airlines did *NOT* send the 31 datapoints, they'd have exactly the same chances of catching say a fake passport)
If you made a linear accelerator that accelerated at 2000G (gentler) then that one would only need to be 5km long.
Which is to say it'll be completely useless next to a current model. Infact it's quite likely that just the extra power-budget for keeping your current machine will outstrip the cost of changing to a more modern machine with more power.
If your current computer uses 300W, then that is 2500kwh for a year (assuming it runs 24/7, which most folding@home machines do).
In 10 years its a given that you can (if you so choose) find a more powerful machine that nevertheless consumes only 100W. Infact my 20W Via Epia machine today is much more powerful than *ANY* 200W machine was 10 years ago, so I'm being conservative here...
So, buying a new machine is the *cheaper* alternative assuming you can (in 10 years) find a machine that costs no more than $1500 while being more powerful than your current machine *and* consuming less than 100W. My guess is you'll be able to do this for $500, not $1500, so it's a $1000 win for you to toss the old machine out.
I was talking about the fact that the US politicians *choose* to suggest, discuss, vote on, and sometimes pass, single-bills with contents like "Supporting Iraqi operations with another $500 million, and outlaw online gambling".
There's a lot more ridicolous examples than this out there. The question is why they choose to do this. Obviously the *majority* of politicians must consider it to make sense, or they'd just torpedo it. Which they don't. And the *reason* they don't is what I don't get.
One *could* raise a suggestion like this in Norway too (or in any other country, I suppose). Thing is, it'd get laughed out. The first thing that'd happen is someone (anyone!) would take the stand and suggest an express-vote to deny the suggestion, and suggest the issues get re-submitted as separate items.
For example:
- They collect info on if you have a return-fligth or only one-way. So, you make sure to book a return-fligth.
- They want to know your email-adress, so you make sure to use an average-looking one never associated with anything fishy.
- They specifically want to know if the ticket was paid for in cash. So you don't do that.
- They want to know if you have a history of booking and then not-showing for fligths. So you make sure not to have such a history. (and if you do, you establish a new fake identity that doesn't.)
The list is longer, infact the list is 31 points long. But literally 25 or so of the 31 datas are easy to manipulate by the determined flyer, and it's a near *certanity* that exactly that will be done. This means that even *if* profiling based on these data could bring something (which I doubt) it now *certainly* doesn't bring anything, since any data you do get on a terrorist is virtually guaranteed to be manipulated.Profiling works sorta, some of the time. It does however *NOT* work when used against an extremely small, but extremely determined group of people who: