Suppose a child came up to you and confessed to feelings of inadequacy because of how dissimilar Harry P's life was to the child's. Some kids would be talking about the fact that they couldn't fly and turn invisible, and those kids would benefit from a talk about reality vs fantasy.
I know I'm picking a point out of your paragraph that wasn't too importent, but there's something worth pointing out to such children: We do live in an age of magic!
Televisions, video games, calling someone on the other side of the world and talking in real time, even listening to MP3s on a whim all seem mundane (Muggle-y?) merely because we can do them. But in another age, many of these things would be pure magic.
I'm sure if you talked to Hermione, flicking feathers around is just dreadfully boring. I'm sure she wishes for something else just as much as everybody else does.
To stick with the actual spirit of your message, I find it amusing how rapidly and far we've advanced, even in my lifetime, yet the psychogical problems you discuss are exactly the same as the ones from two hundred years ago... the more things change...
It is at least in theory easy to transmit securely, even over a totally unencrypted wireless link. There must be something that receives these transmissions and sends them to the monitor on the computer's end, and of course you have the equipment on the monitor itself that can move around. A symmetric key could be placed on both of those and used with highly secure and fast (with the right hardware) symmetric ciphers.
Because you can secure the endpoints, the middle hardly matters from a reasonable security standpoint. (The signal can still be interfered with, but that's true no matter what. You can get some data just from how often data is transmitted, and how much, but it's really hard to extract meaningful info from that.)
The reason WEP is so bad is that so much Internet-level traffic is sent unencrypted (telnet, www, ftp, etc.). Even if the wireless link is totally insecure, if everything is well-encrypted (over ssh for instance), you would gain little from the sniffing.
People really underestimate encryption; IMHO, it should be a standard feature of any network library, such that you have to actively turn it off if you want unencrypted transmissions.
You may be able to locate a Community Gardening plot. I don't know how you'd find one in your local area, but around here, it's attached to the local Food Bank project.
It's cool, but the downside is that you can't do anything that takes more then one season, including growing certain things (like anything involving trees;-) ), or embarking on multi-year soil quality projects. You're stuck with what you get. Still, it may help you work the greeness out of your thumb, if it's bothering you.
We did that this year, and it's the first garden my wife and I have ever cared about (as opposed to being forced to help with the family garden)... it's impressive what you can do with just 625 square feet.
You should read this. It may not seem directly related at first, but it is.
The root problem is unless you can measure EXACTLY what you are trying to measure, people will optimize to improve their standing with the measurement, rather then real quality.
Your proposed optimizations would cause someone to create two accounts, one that they use to completely trash a page, and another to "correct" it, boosting the second account's rating at the expense of the first. (You can't force people to do pages they don't want to do, or you'll drop participation through the floor.)
I know you mean well, but it is often better just to leave these statistics out completely, and deal with the fact that you are only attracting serious people to the project who will do it without the carrot of being in "first place" over everybody else on the stats page.
22050 is an absolute upper cutoff in the encoding system, and in theory you could encode a 22,049 Hz signal into Red Book audio. I said it's not a perfect cutoff because it's impossible to build an audio filter to cut off precisely at 22050 Hz, which is beyond the scope of a Slashdot comment; please consult a signal processing resource on how signal filtering works.
At the recorder, you must cutoff signals over 22050 or risk the horrible problem of aliasing (again, out of scope of a Slashdot post but pretty interesting). Since you can't have a perfect cutoff filter, you generally can't record 22049Hz signals except with extreme attenuation (in the specific case of 22049, it will well below the noise floor). Generally, when the CD players re-construct the sound, they will also do some filtering as a side-effect of how they do it. So you can't generally play back a 22049Hz signal either, even if you directly encode it onto a CD.
So while you can encode it, you can't record it directly and you can't play it back, so in a very real practical sense, 22049Hz is not usable with CDs. And so on and so forth for the other frequencies between 20000 and 22050. It's a smooth curve (and not necessarily the same one for two pieces of equipment, though my impression is that they have standardized somewhat because it's cheaper that way), so in a real-world CD recording and playback application, in a very real way there's no particular cutoff frequency you can directly point at, even though there's one in theory.
In general, it's a pretty pedantic point.;-) I just like to be precise when possible, and prefer practical realities to theoretical ones, which is why I'm in Engineering college.
This, by the way, is part of the reason that CD's sample at 44100, instead of 40000. 40000 would be somewhat more efficient with the storage medium, but you'd have problems with the fact that you have no room to filter out the higher frequencies without hitting "good" ones as well. There are other concerns too, that's not the whole story, but it is a very significant part of it. In fact that goes for this whole post; I'm skimming over a lot because this is only a Slashdot post. (Like "20-20,000 is only a convenient fiction", the exact way filters behave, etc.)
Are you referring to FM? (It looks like it; that sounds like way too much for AM.) Thanks for the info.
Because of the erratic nature of psycho-acoustics, the amount of data they can safely stuff in the psycho-acoustically "masked" portions of the signal will vary widely, second-by-second, depending on the signal being sent. Playing with the variable-rate MP3 encoders can give you a feel for that. Conservatively speaking, I think they could only really depend on hundreds of bits per second, even if they could spike to two or three thousand bits with some signals.
Computing the exact bandwidth they could get depends too much on your initial assumptions, in particular what they consider the threshold of detectability and what they consider an "average" signal, so it's impossible to compute without a lot of potentially faulty assumptions. It won't be a lot, but it will be plenty to send small text messages, or URLs for loadable resources.
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Others have already observed that it's not a frequency thing, but let me expand on that.
Frequencies are already optimized for human hearing, and it's not usually possible to send, say, a 40,000Hz signal on most anything you can think of, analog or digital. Standard phones have a bandwidth of something like 3KHz. CDs of course top out around 20,000Hz, give or take a bit. (It's not a perfect cutoff at 22050, it's a curve, so there isn't quite a point you can say is "the limit".) I don't know for certain but I'd bet FM can't transmit those frequencies and be compliant with FCC regulations. (Of course the tech could do it in theory, but the radio station may have to leave their allocated frequencies to do it; I don't know for certain.) AM could do it in theory but based on the low quality of the signal I hypothesize that something is preventing high frequencies from getting through.
Finally, the coup de grace is that our speakers are optimized for human hearing, pretty much no matter what. Covering the bases from 20Hz - 20,000Hz is a hard enough problem without pushing the required range up another couple of octaves.
In fact, what the company is proposing seems to be in some sense the inverse of MP3 coding. MP3 coding strips the signal of things that you can't hear through by analysing what is psychoacoustically masked in the original signal. The MP3 encoding process can then focus on just the parts of the signal you do hear, which is obviously going to require less space, except in some pathological cases where the whole sound is perceivable (like a pure sine wave tone).
From what I understand of the marketing, the part of the signal that an MP3 encoder strips out is exactly where they would place their data. They can stick any data they want in there and we just plain won't hear it, but a computer+microphone doesn't have this problem.
Interesting corrolary: The time frame this will work in is limited, as digital transmission usually uses compressed audio, and the act of compressing the audio will preferentially eliminate this data. (Or does digital radio transmit an uncompressed stream?) They'd better get marketing this now, so that there's an installed base and they can try to later create receivers that will re-add their signal on the receiving side. Of course, if all anybody is using this for is advertising, I can't imagine we're going to go out of our way to buy "Advertising Enabled!" digital radio receivers.
You're boxing with air having this debate on Slashdot. Since this voting structure was quite deliberately selected by intelligent people who were kind enough to document their decision process, I'd strongly recommend you go read the relevant Federalist papers and other works of that time to see why this system was chosen. The direct representation that you seem to be implicitly calling for (though maybe not, you might just be critiquing the current system without thought for what should replace it (which is valid); it's hard to tell from a single paragraph) has its own many and well-documented problems.
After learning about the issue, you may still very well feel our system is sub-optimal (hey, it is; all systems are, see Theodore Logan's post of Arrow's Theorum), but it is not transparently obvious that it is necessarily a bad thing, or that direct representation is desirable.
"Fair share of representation" is, regrettably, mathematically provably an oxymoron. There is no such beast. A voting system that tries to place that above all else will generally be the worse for placing an impossible priority on the top of its list.
There are two different kind of swap "spaces": Partition-based and file-based.
File-based is what you are used to, and what Windows tends to use.
Linux uses partition-based. It's faster, since you don't have to deal with a filesystem, and more space-efficient, same reason. However, it does mean that it completely consumes your partition and fills it with what will look like random garbage to anything trying to access it like the partition has a filesystem.
Thus, there is technically nothing stopping you from using a windows partition as a swap partition; in fact, I once did that as a joke, on purpose. But you should be aware that you will completely and unrecoverably blow away anything residing on that partition the moment you use it. (Later I re-partitioned the disk to shrink the swap down, as using the whole Windows space as swap was too much. It was just sort of funny, the idea of Linux using Windows as a scratch space...)
I remember the threat; I do not recall the source exactly. I remember it as humanity simply rotting away, which fits with the rest of the series. For example, there's a lot of hints in Dune that the Jihad is humanity's collective reaction to the stagnation, and the need to "mingle genes", and that it would have occurred with or without Paul, which is one of the major reasons he couldn't stop it.
However, I've misplaced my copy of God Emperor of Dune and have not read it in a while, so I can't guarentee that a machine-based threat doesn't fit the description. (I am pretty sure he's vague about it, so it's not a matter of arguing whether it "is" or "isn't" a machine threat, merely a discussion on whether it makes sense.) I really need to locate a copy of that for myself again.
No. I don't accept it as canon unless it can prove itself. My point is that IMHO there is no hole in the universe there; not only does it not directly matter what the HM's were fleeing from, we have a very, very good candidate in the form of the independent face dancers. Filling in a non-existant hole in the universe does not impress me as to the possible "canonicity" of the Butlerian Jihad book. In fact, one could make a case that this is just a contradiction, since indeed, they are "filling in" the hole with something other then what the canonical books seem to imply to me.
Not to mention the very act of filling in this "hole" doesn't impress me. Part of the very point of the Scattering was to make humanity too big for any one force to understand (and thereby potentially influence), let alone explain in the span of a book or series of books. This child-like need to "fill in" the universe and make sure everything is explained to the n-th degree betrays much of what makes the Dune universe so cool in the first place.
And it's not just "face dancers"... it's what some independent face dancers became, which were capable of overthrowing their masters, out there in the unregulated chaos that was the Scattering. Goodness only knows how many hundreds of other forces there are at work in the Scattering, which were never even hinted at in the book.
From my reading, the Honored Maitres, which went out during the great dispersion after the death of The Tyrant, just got the snot beaten out of them by another group that went out after the death of The Tyrant, probably the face dancer splinter group shown at the very end of the last book, though IIRC we never really know what they are running from.
There's no need for another force to wait mysteriously in the wings for 14-15 thousand years, when the whole point of Leto's reign was that humanity was "stagnating" on its multiple hundreds of thousands of planets, and nobody was expanding anymore, because there was no mysterious force (or anything else) to encourage humanity to grow. His "Golden Path" was a means of forcibly holding down humanity, so they would explode outward when he died. (He acts all mysterious about it but it's not that hard to see.)
In a fricken' universe of some hundreds of thousands or millions of worlds (don't recall which off hand, don't care), the only IMPORTENT ones are the ones which exist in the other books! Wow, 10,000 years eariler and the only importent planets are Giedi Prime and Salusa Secundus. And look, the only social institutions that exist other then The Big Bad guys are the ones that exist in later books: Mentats, Bene Gessirit, the Suk, and if the League of Nobels doesn't eventually become the Royalty of Dune's time, I'd be stunned.
Ten thousand years and nothing changes.
I don't know about everyone else, but I find this a distinct marker of lack of imagination on the part of the authors. Herbert himself was not so limited... in the last two books (best two of the series, IMHO), he brings in numerous players that have no existence in the earlier books. He wasn't limited by the stuff he established in later books.
Star Wars fiction also often suffers this problem, though not always. Some of it is very good and actually explores things not directly in the movies. Others would lead an impartial outside observer to believe that either A: There are only two planets in the entire galaxy or B: Endor is the capital of the galaxy, and Ewoks are the dominant race, because they never have any imagination and step outside of previous work. Oh, and the galaxy has a sum total of about 30 or 40 people in it, etc. etc. You get the idea.
Look, budding authors, if all I wanted to do was revisit the universe, I'd just re-read the books! Let me explore a bit... show me something new.
Maybe you need to look outside of your local chain megastore.
I don't want to link to their website because there's no reason for them to sustain the bandwidth hit, but my local little chain store has a TNT2 32MB for $40, and that's still a lot of graphics card if you're not a FPS player. Heck, my little TNT2 8MB I got at that price a year ago is still respectable for most uses.
They have a pretty smooth progression from that up to top-of-the-line cards, such as a GeForce2 MX200 32MB for $60, a GeForce4 MX 64MB DDR for $120, and so on up to $350 TI4600 128MB. In all, there are 8 nVidia-based choices and 10 ATI choices ranging from $60-$400.
I don't think the problem you complain about exists for real.
To play Devil's advocate, from a journalistic point of view, Wired's primary responsibility is to validate the source of the info. Once that is done, you can make a very good case that this is, at least potentially, the sort of thing that People Must Know, which overrides most other considerations.
The contents were probably awfully mundane, perhaps too much so to qualify for The People Must Know, but one could imagine at least in theory that they might have found something interesting in there.
There is precedent for this: For a big example, consider the Watergate scandal. The New York Times wasn't "supposed" to be in possession of that material, and they certainly weren't "supposed" to publish it, but The People Must Know overrode their reservations, and most of us would consider that the right decision based on the info they had at the time.
On the other hand, hacking into my email and telling the world about it would be unethical; there is no need for anybody to know what's in there, so they'd just be rumormongering.
What, you say this "The People Need To Know" is an awfully fuzzy criterion to be using? Damn straight! These ethical things are hard.
(Remember, I'm playing devil's advocate here; I don't believe it's black and white, but I do think there is a strong kernel of truth here.)
As long as the hull is reasonably solid, it's not necessarily as bad as you might think. It might not breach if it's a weapon specially designed to be fired inside of a standard hull, if it's a soft projectile. At worst, it puts an easily-patched small hole into the hull, which is probably not the only hole in the 'rickety old spacecraft', which probably long ago gave up "hull integrity" as a binary, on-off value.
Windows may not be such a good idea to shoot out, as shown in the third (I think?) episode, but most hulls as shown should handle it pretty well.
Don't compare Firefly-era spacecraft with modern spacecraft, or even modern consumer airplanes. The structure looks much more like a modern battleship in style, which can function with quite a lot of holes in it.
(Still using gunpowder, but somehow they have excellent gravity generators and inertial dampeners)
This is one of the many ways Star Trek has simply ruined people's understanding of science. The fact of the matter is that given the place where Firefly takes place, using guns makes perfect sense.
Guns are cheap, they have around 1500 years of experience making and caring for them, cheap, they are easy to use, easy to make very durable, and did I mention cheap?
As I have written for a probably never-to-be-published game's guide,
One of the nice things about old technology is that it is easy to maintain. Sure, in a firefight, you might prefer a laser-guided smart rail-gun, but it's a bitch to find parts for it when it breaks. A shotgun, on the other hand, still kills people dead, and it's a lot easier to come by both parts and ammunition....
There's a certain *elegence* in the inelegence of a good firearm. Lasers can be reflected, guidance systems can be scrambled, electronics of all kinds can be confused or outright destroyed, particle beams can be deflected, but a bullet can only be stopped, generally not without doing damage to the thing stopping it. (I'd recommend against using your own flesh to do the job.) Very few things, even in 2088 [time setting of this game], can stand up to a concentrated barrage of firepower.
Simple is beautiful.
Firearms have an excellent bang-for-the-buck, pun fully intended, and are likely to continue to have it for a long time to come. The only real mystery is why Serenity doesn't have at least one hull-mounted machine gun.
Ancient comp-sci quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Take a reasonable collection of digital media that any of us own, and compute the bandwidth obtained when moving from one residence to another. Depending on how much you collect and how short the move is, you can easily twiddle the numbers to get into the terabytes per hour... even higher if you're willing to fudge a bit.
Just moving around the pathetic 20GB drive in the laptop I'm writing this on four out of seven days between school and home racks up quite a lot of bandwidth... and lest ye think this is just an academic exercise, I'd point out it's real, fully usable bandwidth: I quite frequently use this bandwidth to transfer large chunks of data in preference to my cable modem, esp. for home->school, since I'm stuck with 15KB/s upstream. It is much, much faster to transfer my MP3 collection by driving to school and dumping it there, then by uploading it from home.
That wasn't the point I was making. My point is that these technologies simply have made it easier to aquire their product without paying for it.
And his point was that they did, on average, pay for it more then they did when Napster wasn't present.
That's true, but neither Napster nor any of the P2P software makers are paying royalties for the distribution of their product.
The point is motivation. From a strict profit motivation, Napster made the record companies money, according to several independent studies. It is transparently obvious that the record companies did not shut down Napster because of money. Royalties are one instituted system of payment; there is nothing holy about them in copyright law or morality. On average, Napster users did pay for their music, in terms of money in the music distributors coffers, which is what really counts from a moral point of view.
Please do me the courtesy of carefully reading that paragraph before replying with a knee-jerk reaction. Make sure you read what I said and not what you think I said. (This is not directed at goldspider personally, I'm just sick in general of people reading their pre-conceived notions of "what people like that say" into debates like this. How can you think you understand the opposition when you never actually read what they have to say?)
And I may be too young to remember, but I don't recall any music company suing a radio station over listeners who were recording songs from the airwaves.
Rest assured that had the MPAA won their VCR suit where they wanted to prevent people from taping off of the television (as exact a match as you can hope for), this would have followed. With such a clear precedent, it wasn't worth bothering with, they know they would have lost.
Now imagine the outcry from those who do have a security clue if they are left vulnerable because Microsoft decided it was in their best interests not to allow them to install the patch because it was unsigned.
With all due respect, because everything you say is literally true, you are not thinking like a lawyer-driven beauracracy.
In fact, the exact same evidence that you present for why unsigned drivers must be allowed will be interpreted as evidence that only signed drivers must be allowed by the buearacracy. The more things might go wrong in the system, the more evidence that centralized control is necessary, and should not be possible to bypass.
Because remember, once a beauracracy has signed off on something, it IS perfect, even after it has been proven it is not. Whereas things not signed off on are worthless. The problem is always the stuff not under its control. Beauracracies are apparently incapable of realizing that mistakes are possible, and by assuming their impossibility, make the ones they make that much worse.
Note I'm not speaking of Microsoft, specifically; this applies equally to lot of other things, most notably many large Government agencies.
One of the ways of doing a direct controlled comparision is to pick up the DVD of a television show and compare the experience to watching it on television without commercials.
So far, I've purchased all the Stargate SG-1 available in the US, and my wife has purchased the two seasons of Friends. Bearing in mind that neither of us is particularly fond of the other show, we both agree that both are significantly more enjoyable on DVD, with no commercials to interfere.
Even after 60+ (?) years of adapting to commercials, they still do nothing but get in the way of the program. I even kinda like Friends on DVD, even though I don't care much for it on TV. Even with the TiVo, it's not the same; the interruption is serious.
A simple, controlled experiment you can do on your own. I won't conclude that television would be better without commercials, but I do think we'd all enjoy it more, and that the best theature in that world would exceed the best in the advertising world we live in now.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose a child came up to you and confessed to feelings of inadequacy because of how dissimilar Harry P's life was to the child's. Some kids would be talking about the fact that they couldn't fly and turn invisible, and those kids would benefit from a talk about reality vs fantasy.
I know I'm picking a point out of your paragraph that wasn't too importent, but there's something worth pointing out to such children: We do live in an age of magic!
Televisions, video games, calling someone on the other side of the world and talking in real time, even listening to MP3s on a whim all seem mundane (Muggle-y?) merely because we can do them. But in another age, many of these things would be pure magic.
I'm sure if you talked to Hermione, flicking feathers around is just dreadfully boring. I'm sure she wishes for something else just as much as everybody else does.
To stick with the actual spirit of your message, I find it amusing how rapidly and far we've advanced, even in my lifetime, yet the psychogical problems you discuss are exactly the same as the ones from two hundred years ago... the more things change...
It is at least in theory easy to transmit securely, even over a totally unencrypted wireless link. There must be something that receives these transmissions and sends them to the monitor on the computer's end, and of course you have the equipment on the monitor itself that can move around. A symmetric key could be placed on both of those and used with highly secure and fast (with the right hardware) symmetric ciphers.
Because you can secure the endpoints, the middle hardly matters from a reasonable security standpoint. (The signal can still be interfered with, but that's true no matter what. You can get some data just from how often data is transmitted, and how much, but it's really hard to extract meaningful info from that.)
The reason WEP is so bad is that so much Internet-level traffic is sent unencrypted (telnet, www, ftp, etc.). Even if the wireless link is totally insecure, if everything is well-encrypted (over ssh for instance), you would gain little from the sniffing.
People really underestimate encryption; IMHO, it should be a standard feature of any network library, such that you have to actively turn it off if you want unencrypted transmissions.
You may be able to locate a Community Gardening plot. I don't know how you'd find one in your local area, but around here, it's attached to the local Food Bank project.
;-) ), or embarking on multi-year soil quality projects. You're stuck with what you get. Still, it may help you work the greeness out of your thumb, if it's bothering you.
It's cool, but the downside is that you can't do anything that takes more then one season, including growing certain things (like anything involving trees
We did that this year, and it's the first garden my wife and I have ever cared about (as opposed to being forced to help with the family garden)... it's impressive what you can do with just 625 square feet.
You should read this. It may not seem directly related at first, but it is.
The root problem is unless you can measure EXACTLY what you are trying to measure, people will optimize to improve their standing with the measurement, rather then real quality.
Your proposed optimizations would cause someone to create two accounts, one that they use to completely trash a page, and another to "correct" it, boosting the second account's rating at the expense of the first. (You can't force people to do pages they don't want to do, or you'll drop participation through the floor.)
I know you mean well, but it is often better just to leave these statistics out completely, and deal with the fact that you are only attracting serious people to the project who will do it without the carrot of being in "first place" over everybody else on the stats page.
22050 is an absolute upper cutoff in the encoding system, and in theory you could encode a 22,049 Hz signal into Red Book audio. I said it's not a perfect cutoff because it's impossible to build an audio filter to cut off precisely at 22050 Hz, which is beyond the scope of a Slashdot comment; please consult a signal processing resource on how signal filtering works.
;-) I just like to be precise when possible, and prefer practical realities to theoretical ones, which is why I'm in Engineering college.
At the recorder, you must cutoff signals over 22050 or risk the horrible problem of aliasing (again, out of scope of a Slashdot post but pretty interesting). Since you can't have a perfect cutoff filter, you generally can't record 22049Hz signals except with extreme attenuation (in the specific case of 22049, it will well below the noise floor). Generally, when the CD players re-construct the sound, they will also do some filtering as a side-effect of how they do it. So you can't generally play back a 22049Hz signal either, even if you directly encode it onto a CD.
So while you can encode it, you can't record it directly and you can't play it back, so in a very real practical sense, 22049Hz is not usable with CDs. And so on and so forth for the other frequencies between 20000 and 22050. It's a smooth curve (and not necessarily the same one for two pieces of equipment, though my impression is that they have standardized somewhat because it's cheaper that way), so in a real-world CD recording and playback application, in a very real way there's no particular cutoff frequency you can directly point at, even though there's one in theory.
In general, it's a pretty pedantic point.
This, by the way, is part of the reason that CD's sample at 44100, instead of 40000. 40000 would be somewhat more efficient with the storage medium, but you'd have problems with the fact that you have no room to filter out the higher frequencies without hitting "good" ones as well. There are other concerns too, that's not the whole story, but it is a very significant part of it. In fact that goes for this whole post; I'm skimming over a lot because this is only a Slashdot post. (Like "20-20,000 is only a convenient fiction", the exact way filters behave, etc.)
Are you referring to FM? (It looks like it; that sounds like way too much for AM.) Thanks for the info.
Because of the erratic nature of psycho-acoustics, the amount of data they can safely stuff in the psycho-acoustically "masked" portions of the signal will vary widely, second-by-second, depending on the signal being sent. Playing with the variable-rate MP3 encoders can give you a feel for that. Conservatively speaking, I think they could only really depend on hundreds of bits per second, even if they could spike to two or three thousand bits with some signals.
Computing the exact bandwidth they could get depends too much on your initial assumptions, in particular what they consider the threshold of detectability and what they consider an "average" signal, so it's impossible to compute without a lot of potentially faulty assumptions. It won't be a lot, but it will be plenty to send small text messages, or URLs for loadable resources.
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Others have already observed that it's not a frequency thing, but let me expand on that.
Frequencies are already optimized for human hearing, and it's not usually possible to send, say, a 40,000Hz signal on most anything you can think of, analog or digital. Standard phones have a bandwidth of something like 3 K Hz. CDs of course top out around 20,000Hz, give or take a bit. (It's not a perfect cutoff at 22050, it's a curve, so there isn't quite a point you can say is "the limit".) I don't know for certain but I'd bet FM can't transmit those frequencies and be compliant with FCC regulations. (Of course the tech could do it in theory, but the radio station may have to leave their allocated frequencies to do it; I don't know for certain.) AM could do it in theory but based on the low quality of the signal I hypothesize that something is preventing high frequencies from getting through.
Finally, the coup de grace is that our speakers are optimized for human hearing, pretty much no matter what. Covering the bases from 20Hz - 20,000Hz is a hard enough problem without pushing the required range up another couple of octaves.
In fact, what the company is proposing seems to be in some sense the inverse of MP3 coding. MP3 coding strips the signal of things that you can't hear through by analysing what is psychoacoustically masked in the original signal. The MP3 encoding process can then focus on just the parts of the signal you do hear, which is obviously going to require less space, except in some pathological cases where the whole sound is perceivable (like a pure sine wave tone).
From what I understand of the marketing, the part of the signal that an MP3 encoder strips out is exactly where they would place their data. They can stick any data they want in there and we just plain won't hear it, but a computer+microphone doesn't have this problem.
Interesting corrolary: The time frame this will work in is limited, as digital transmission usually uses compressed audio, and the act of compressing the audio will preferentially eliminate this data. (Or does digital radio transmit an uncompressed stream?) They'd better get marketing this now, so that there's an installed base and they can try to later create receivers that will re-add their signal on the receiving side. Of course, if all anybody is using this for is advertising, I can't imagine we're going to go out of our way to buy "Advertising Enabled!" digital radio receivers.
You're boxing with air having this debate on Slashdot. Since this voting structure was quite deliberately selected by intelligent people who were kind enough to document their decision process, I'd strongly recommend you go read the relevant Federalist papers and other works of that time to see why this system was chosen. The direct representation that you seem to be implicitly calling for (though maybe not, you might just be critiquing the current system without thought for what should replace it (which is valid); it's hard to tell from a single paragraph) has its own many and well-documented problems.
After learning about the issue, you may still very well feel our system is sub-optimal (hey, it is; all systems are, see Theodore Logan's post of Arrow's Theorum), but it is not transparently obvious that it is necessarily a bad thing, or that direct representation is desirable.
"Fair share of representation" is, regrettably, mathematically provably an oxymoron. There is no such beast. A voting system that tries to place that above all else will generally be the worse for placing an impossible priority on the top of its list.
There are two different kind of swap "spaces": Partition-based and file-based.
File-based is what you are used to, and what Windows tends to use.
Linux uses partition-based. It's faster, since you don't have to deal with a filesystem, and more space-efficient, same reason. However, it does mean that it completely consumes your partition and fills it with what will look like random garbage to anything trying to access it like the partition has a filesystem.
Thus, there is technically nothing stopping you from using a windows partition as a swap partition; in fact, I once did that as a joke, on purpose. But you should be aware that you will completely and unrecoverably blow away anything residing on that partition the moment you use it. (Later I re-partitioned the disk to shrink the swap down, as using the whole Windows space as swap was too much. It was just sort of funny, the idea of Linux using Windows as a scratch space...)
I remember the threat; I do not recall the source exactly. I remember it as humanity simply rotting away, which fits with the rest of the series. For example, there's a lot of hints in Dune that the Jihad is humanity's collective reaction to the stagnation, and the need to "mingle genes", and that it would have occurred with or without Paul, which is one of the major reasons he couldn't stop it.
However, I've misplaced my copy of God Emperor of Dune and have not read it in a while, so I can't guarentee that a machine-based threat doesn't fit the description. (I am pretty sure he's vague about it, so it's not a matter of arguing whether it "is" or "isn't" a machine threat, merely a discussion on whether it makes sense.) I really need to locate a copy of that for myself again.
Jerf: have you read The Butlerian Jihad?
No. I don't accept it as canon unless it can prove itself. My point is that IMHO there is no hole in the universe there; not only does it not directly matter what the HM's were fleeing from, we have a very, very good candidate in the form of the independent face dancers. Filling in a non-existant hole in the universe does not impress me as to the possible "canonicity" of the Butlerian Jihad book. In fact, one could make a case that this is just a contradiction, since indeed, they are "filling in" the hole with something other then what the canonical books seem to imply to me.
Not to mention the very act of filling in this "hole" doesn't impress me. Part of the very point of the Scattering was to make humanity too big for any one force to understand (and thereby potentially influence), let alone explain in the span of a book or series of books. This child-like need to "fill in" the universe and make sure everything is explained to the n-th degree betrays much of what makes the Dune universe so cool in the first place.
And it's not just "face dancers"... it's what some independent face dancers became, which were capable of overthrowing their masters, out there in the unregulated chaos that was the Scattering. Goodness only knows how many hundreds of other forces there are at work in the Scattering, which were never even hinted at in the book.
The Scattering was huge...
From my reading, the Honored Maitres, which went out during the great dispersion after the death of The Tyrant, just got the snot beaten out of them by another group that went out after the death of The Tyrant, probably the face dancer splinter group shown at the very end of the last book, though IIRC we never really know what they are running from.
There's no need for another force to wait mysteriously in the wings for 14-15 thousand years, when the whole point of Leto's reign was that humanity was "stagnating" on its multiple hundreds of thousands of planets, and nobody was expanding anymore, because there was no mysterious force (or anything else) to encourage humanity to grow. His "Golden Path" was a means of forcibly holding down humanity, so they would explode outward when he died. (He acts all mysterious about it but it's not that hard to see.)
In a fricken' universe of some hundreds of thousands or millions of worlds (don't recall which off hand, don't care), the only IMPORTENT ones are the ones which exist in the other books! Wow, 10,000 years eariler and the only importent planets are Giedi Prime and Salusa Secundus. And look, the only social institutions that exist other then The Big Bad guys are the ones that exist in later books: Mentats, Bene Gessirit, the Suk, and if the League of Nobels doesn't eventually become the Royalty of Dune's time, I'd be stunned.
Ten thousand years and nothing changes.
I don't know about everyone else, but I find this a distinct marker of lack of imagination on the part of the authors. Herbert himself was not so limited... in the last two books (best two of the series, IMHO), he brings in numerous players that have no existence in the earlier books. He wasn't limited by the stuff he established in later books.
Star Wars fiction also often suffers this problem, though not always. Some of it is very good and actually explores things not directly in the movies. Others would lead an impartial outside observer to believe that either A: There are only two planets in the entire galaxy or B: Endor is the capital of the galaxy, and Ewoks are the dominant race, because they never have any imagination and step outside of previous work. Oh, and the galaxy has a sum total of about 30 or 40 people in it, etc. etc. You get the idea.
Look, budding authors, if all I wanted to do was revisit the universe, I'd just re-read the books! Let me explore a bit... show me something new.
Plus, I could do all sorts of neat things that I can't do now--like make money...
;-)
*chuckle* I like that one.
If I ever do happen to pass the bar, I promise not to become unconcionable scum.
OK, but we're going to hold you to that.
Actually, I wish you good luck. We need more good people being lawyers.
"I am not a lawyer, but I wish I was one ?"
;-). Plus I'm hoping that there's another interpretation that I don't see...)
Please leave immediately.
(For the humor impaired,
Maybe you need to look outside of your local chain megastore.
I don't want to link to their website because there's no reason for them to sustain the bandwidth hit, but my local little chain store has a TNT2 32MB for $40, and that's still a lot of graphics card if you're not a FPS player. Heck, my little TNT2 8MB I got at that price a year ago is still respectable for most uses.
They have a pretty smooth progression from that up to top-of-the-line cards, such as a GeForce2 MX200 32MB for $60, a GeForce4 MX 64MB DDR for $120, and so on up to $350 TI4600 128MB. In all, there are 8 nVidia-based choices and 10 ATI choices ranging from $60-$400.
I don't think the problem you complain about exists for real.
To play Devil's advocate, from a journalistic point of view, Wired's primary responsibility is to validate the source of the info. Once that is done, you can make a very good case that this is, at least potentially, the sort of thing that People Must Know, which overrides most other considerations.
The contents were probably awfully mundane, perhaps too much so to qualify for The People Must Know, but one could imagine at least in theory that they might have found something interesting in there.
There is precedent for this: For a big example, consider the Watergate scandal. The New York Times wasn't "supposed" to be in possession of that material, and they certainly weren't "supposed" to publish it, but The People Must Know overrode their reservations, and most of us would consider that the right decision based on the info they had at the time.
On the other hand, hacking into my email and telling the world about it would be unethical; there is no need for anybody to know what's in there, so they'd just be rumormongering.
What, you say this "The People Need To Know" is an awfully fuzzy criterion to be using? Damn straight! These ethical things are hard.
(Remember, I'm playing devil's advocate here; I don't believe it's black and white, but I do think there is a strong kernel of truth here.)
As long as the hull is reasonably solid, it's not necessarily as bad as you might think. It might not breach if it's a weapon specially designed to be fired inside of a standard hull, if it's a soft projectile. At worst, it puts an easily-patched small hole into the hull, which is probably not the only hole in the 'rickety old spacecraft', which probably long ago gave up "hull integrity" as a binary, on-off value.
Windows may not be such a good idea to shoot out, as shown in the third (I think?) episode, but most hulls as shown should handle it pretty well.
Don't compare Firefly-era spacecraft with modern spacecraft, or even modern consumer airplanes. The structure looks much more like a modern battleship in style, which can function with quite a lot of holes in it.
This is one of the many ways Star Trek has simply ruined people's understanding of science. The fact of the matter is that given the place where Firefly takes place, using guns makes perfect sense.
Guns are cheap, they have around 1500 years of experience making and caring for them, cheap, they are easy to use, easy to make very durable, and did I mention cheap?
As I have written for a probably never-to-be-published game's guide,
Firearms have an excellent bang-for-the-buck, pun fully intended, and are likely to continue to have it for a long time to come. The only real mystery is why Serenity doesn't have at least one hull-mounted machine gun.
Ancient comp-sci quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Take a reasonable collection of digital media that any of us own, and compute the bandwidth obtained when moving from one residence to another. Depending on how much you collect and how short the move is, you can easily twiddle the numbers to get into the terabytes per hour... even higher if you're willing to fudge a bit.
Just moving around the pathetic 20GB drive in the laptop I'm writing this on four out of seven days between school and home racks up quite a lot of bandwidth... and lest ye think this is just an academic exercise, I'd point out it's real, fully usable bandwidth: I quite frequently use this bandwidth to transfer large chunks of data in preference to my cable modem, esp. for home->school, since I'm stuck with 15KB/s upstream. It is much, much faster to transfer my MP3 collection by driving to school and dumping it there, then by uploading it from home.
I especially enjoyed the hidden joke about U S B.... (hint: what does the S stand for?)
Cute!
That wasn't the point I was making. My point is that these technologies simply have made it easier to aquire their product without paying for it.
And his point was that they did, on average, pay for it more then they did when Napster wasn't present.
That's true, but neither Napster nor any of the P2P software makers are paying royalties for the distribution of their product.
The point is motivation. From a strict profit motivation, Napster made the record companies money, according to several independent studies. It is transparently obvious that the record companies did not shut down Napster because of money. Royalties are one instituted system of payment; there is nothing holy about them in copyright law or morality. On average, Napster users did pay for their music, in terms of money in the music distributors coffers, which is what really counts from a moral point of view.
Please do me the courtesy of carefully reading that paragraph before replying with a knee-jerk reaction. Make sure you read what I said and not what you think I said. (This is not directed at goldspider personally, I'm just sick in general of people reading their pre-conceived notions of "what people like that say" into debates like this. How can you think you understand the opposition when you never actually read what they have to say?)
And I may be too young to remember, but I don't recall any music company suing a radio station over listeners who were recording songs from the airwaves.
Rest assured that had the MPAA won their VCR suit where they wanted to prevent people from taping off of the television (as exact a match as you can hope for), this would have followed. With such a clear precedent, it wasn't worth bothering with, they know they would have lost.
Now imagine the outcry from those who do have a security clue if they are left vulnerable because Microsoft decided it was in their best interests not to allow them to install the patch because it was unsigned.
With all due respect, because everything you say is literally true, you are not thinking like a lawyer-driven beauracracy.
In fact, the exact same evidence that you present for why unsigned drivers must be allowed will be interpreted as evidence that only signed drivers must be allowed by the buearacracy. The more things might go wrong in the system, the more evidence that centralized control is necessary, and should not be possible to bypass.
Because remember, once a beauracracy has signed off on something, it IS perfect, even after it has been proven it is not. Whereas things not signed off on are worthless. The problem is always the stuff not under its control. Beauracracies are apparently incapable of realizing that mistakes are possible, and by assuming their impossibility, make the ones they make that much worse.
Note I'm not speaking of Microsoft, specifically; this applies equally to lot of other things, most notably many large Government agencies.
One of the ways of doing a direct controlled comparision is to pick up the DVD of a television show and compare the experience to watching it on television without commercials.
So far, I've purchased all the Stargate SG-1 available in the US, and my wife has purchased the two seasons of Friends. Bearing in mind that neither of us is particularly fond of the other show, we both agree that both are significantly more enjoyable on DVD, with no commercials to interfere.
Even after 60+ (?) years of adapting to commercials, they still do nothing but get in the way of the program. I even kinda like Friends on DVD, even though I don't care much for it on TV. Even with the TiVo, it's not the same; the interruption is serious.
A simple, controlled experiment you can do on your own. I won't conclude that television would be better without commercials, but I do think we'd all enjoy it more, and that the best theature in that world would exceed the best in the advertising world we live in now.