Hating money is a nice way to express your hatred of the bad aspects of our capitalistic system,
Nearly half of US households now receive some sort of assistance/income from government and the interstate commerce clause gives the Federal government ultimate control of the economy.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call our system a mixed economy?
Where do you work? Most every state in the US has at will employment; you can fire whoever you want whenever you want, as long as you aren't doing it in retaliation or to discriminate, and even then the burden is o the fired employee to prove.
Mostly wrong. Your own link shows that 43 states have public policy exceptions that limit at-will employment, and 37 states have implied contract exceptions. There are also covenant of good faith and fair dealing exceptions.
Oh, then there is federal law.
There is no place in the USA with genuine at-will employment. If you fire someone, there's a chance you're going to get sued. Even if the case is without merit, a sympathetic jury can see you as a villain and nail your ass to the wall. Even you win the case, you can expect huge bills from your attorney.
Then there's the issue of being liable for the actions of your employees while they're on the job if they acted on their own and even in opposition to your directions.
Employing another person in the USA is legally hazardous. The law is definitely not on the side of the employer.
I'd argue that roads are slightly more of a basic necessity. And that's a national priority, not just an accident due to a mistake in one government building.
Many more have died for want of proper sanitation than have for want of a road.
Good roads in some sense are actually killing people. The roads we have today are so good that people drive instead of walk and so increase illness and death associated with obesity.
A corrupt government allows one of the most basic necessities of civilization, indoor plumbing, to decay while money is literally spent on wine, clowns, and magicians.
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore.;-)
And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!
Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
Don't forget that Fukishima was TWO events happening at once (or close enough together to be counted as one). I think the design would have been fine if it was JUST an earthquake, or JUST a tsunami. But combined so close to each other was too much for the design.
And this is where treating things probabilistically breaks down: events aren't always statistically independent.
Assuming tsunamis don't correlate with earthquakes is an obvious mistake.
I'm concerned about using digitally compressed images and video for anything serious like trying to positively identify a person involved in a crime. It's claimed that lossy compression schemes only remove unimportant details, but I'm not so sure that's the case. There are also times when removing information can also introduce artifacts.
What happens when the compressor causes a fine identifying scar to disappear? Or worse, maybe a new feature appears as the result of artifacting which matches the feature of someone else?
Images and video are often damning evidence. How do you convince those viewing the images or video that they can't always trust what they're seeing?
I remember once arguing with someone over details that appeared in the digitized images of Obama's birth certificate as a result of artifacting. To someone unfamiliar with distortions introduced by lossy compression, claims that what they're seeing in a image isn't really there sound like complete BS.
All this debate in the USA about health care spending and delivery ignores the biggest factor in predicting lifespan: how much time is spent walking everyday.
Invest in safe, walkable cities today, and future generations will see an increase in lifespan.
As someone who has actually worked with phrase independent speaker identification software, I can tell you it isn't bullshit, but I'd point to a number of limitations I already referred to in previous posts that make me skeptical of the conclusion made in this instance.
Same here. Speaker identification software works great for helping point you in the right direction, but as far as being able to determine who is or is not screaming based on calm voice samples, the technology just isn't that good.
Having seen the full video, I can come to only one conclusion: the video does not show any solid evidence of injuries because the quality is low. I saw some things that may have been injuries, but they could have just as easily been due to the shape of his head.
Interesting thing about the video is that the original source looks like it was recorded on videotape as interlaced NTSC! You can see this when there's a great deal of movement going on. Just look for areas of great contrast like the hood of the police car when it rolls in and you'll notice the odd saw-tooth appearance of the hood's edge. This happens in other places.
What this means is that a lot of what is being seen is what has been filled in by software as it deals with crappy NTSC. Noise, color fringing effects, are all smoothed out. Then lossy compression is used during the conversion to digital video and potentiall important detail is lost.
The result is that the video appears better than it really is.
This is what most people want when they're transferring analog video to digital. But here is it's absolutely essential that we see the raw, unaltered video, if for no other reason than for understanding the limits of equipment used. It possible the equipment just wasn't good enough to pick up the details we're looking for.
I'd be very, very leery of trying to do any sort of "voice print analysis" on the basis of recorded cellphone audio. There's a lot of coding artifacts. After all, the goal is to allow people to communicate, not to convey voice identity.
You can run voice through a fairly low bit rate LPC coder and it's quite intelligible on the other end, and actually "sounds" like the speaker, but if you look at the spectrogram, it's totally different. Your ear hears the dominant formants in the vowels, and you recognize speakers by that. LPC basically encodes the vocal tract as a 8-10 term filter plus a buzz excitation source. "voice print id" depends more on fine structure, which is lost in the encoding/decoding. It would be like trying to identify a paper document that was watermarked by looking at a photocopy. The watermark may or may not come through, but the intelligibility of the document is the same either way.
Absolutely agree. I've actually written audio segmentation code for an alarm system that first obtained audio, not straight from an ADC, but only after the audio had been compressed. Compression absolutely destroys important details.
I'm also skeptical of the software's ability to take calm, slow speech, and from that determine what a scream OUGHT to sound like. Comparing samples generated by a person speaking under similar conditions and looking for similarities isn't that hard. But the science of of voice analysis isn't yet to the point where we can take a sample of audio and from that build a virtual larynx, throat, mouth, and controlling nerve fibers so that we can extrapolate from that what a scream from that might sound like.
This test might have been legitimate had the software been used to compare the scream on the 911 recording with another scream from Zimmerman, but that's not what was done.
This appears to me to be a class issue. Anyone that can afford an IPad isn't seen as needing the protection or help of the state. Maybe the authorities don't view the victim sympathetically.
You don't understand how natural selection or evolution work, do you? The innumerate are winning at the natural selection game because they can't figure out how bad having another kid is going to be for them financially.
Having another kid ISN'T bad for them financially. The welfare state is there to make sure of that.
Schooling and education were once considered important because they provided a way out of poverty. Now the government provides. Why bother with pointless chores like learning arithmetic?
This company seems incredibly stupid. Who gives some stranger with a credit card access to a giant phone bank that can call millions of people and deliver an arbitrary voice message uploaded by cell phone?
Insanity. They're just asking to be used as part of a giant DoS attack. Suppose the listed numbers were for hospitals, airports, or government offices?
Wonderful, a system that will save the company a metric fuckton of cash and they'll pass on some unspecified fraction to us. How noble. I'm not saying it's a useless or immoral thing (quite the contrary), but it's hardly cause for public celebration when a company does something to increase their profits and it coincidentally helps the rest of us.
the fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, BNP Paribas, etc, in one single day dwarfed by a dozen fold the fraud this mortgage guy perpetrated in his whole career.
where do you think they sold all those fraudulent mortgages?
Lehman et al aren't ratings agencies. It was the ratings agencies that vouched for those mortgages. Of course Lehman et al didn't trust those ratings and shorted most of the paper making billions. But they didn't originate the mortgages. It was lending agents and applicants that committed the fraud.
If you remember, all war activities were performed during an existing war, and Russia were allies with the USA at that time. The cold war didn't happen until after the war, during reconstruction.
Hardly. At the beginning of the war, the Soviets and Nazis were allied and partitioned Poland. It was only after the Nazis stabbed the Soviets in the back that the Soviets suddenly became our nominal allies.
Poor input filtering on GPS devices could also be a cause.
Normally, there's very little going on adjacent to 1575.42MHz. A GPS device with a poorly performing input filter would still perform well so long as adjacent bands were void of signal. A designer might even cheat a little by intentionally designing a filter that was had poor filtering at the edges of the band but allowed more signal at the center to get through. This would increase the possibility of acquiring the signal. No one would ever know so long as adjacent bands remained relatively unused.
If I were Lightsquared, I'd ask that each GPS device be tested to see if it was properly ignoring signal outside the GPS bands.
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Hating money is a nice way to express your hatred of the bad aspects of our capitalistic system,
Nearly half of US households now receive some sort of assistance/income from government and the interstate commerce clause gives the Federal government ultimate control of the economy.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to call our system a mixed economy?
Mostly wrong. Your own link shows that 43 states have public policy exceptions that limit at-will employment, and 37 states have implied contract exceptions. There are also covenant of good faith and fair dealing exceptions.
Oh, then there is federal law.
There is no place in the USA with genuine at-will employment. If you fire someone, there's a chance you're going to get sued. Even if the case is without merit, a sympathetic jury can see you as a villain and nail your ass to the wall. Even you win the case, you can expect huge bills from your attorney.
Then there's the issue of being liable for the actions of your employees while they're on the job if they acted on their own and even in opposition to your directions.
Employing another person in the USA is legally hazardous. The law is definitely not on the side of the employer.
Many more have died for want of proper sanitation than have for want of a road.
Good roads in some sense are actually killing people. The roads we have today are so good that people drive instead of walk and so increase illness and death associated with obesity.
A corrupt government allows one of the most basic necessities of civilization, indoor plumbing, to decay while money is literally spent on wine, clowns, and magicians.
And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!
Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
What he should have written is that there is a finite amount of human effort and resources. Money helps us allocate effort and resources.
But there certainly is some kind of trade off. Effort and resources directed towards ocotmoms and the idle must come from somewhere.
And this is where treating things probabilistically breaks down: events aren't always statistically independent.
Assuming tsunamis don't correlate with earthquakes is an obvious mistake.
I'm concerned about using digitally compressed images and video for anything serious like trying to positively identify a person involved in a crime. It's claimed that lossy compression schemes only remove unimportant details, but I'm not so sure that's the case. There are also times when removing information can also introduce artifacts.
What happens when the compressor causes a fine identifying scar to disappear? Or worse, maybe a new feature appears as the result of artifacting which matches the feature of someone else?
Images and video are often damning evidence. How do you convince those viewing the images or video that they can't always trust what they're seeing?
I remember once arguing with someone over details that appeared in the digitized images of Obama's birth certificate as a result of artifacting. To someone unfamiliar with distortions introduced by lossy compression, claims that what they're seeing in a image isn't really there sound like complete BS.
All this debate in the USA about health care spending and delivery ignores the biggest factor in predicting lifespan: how much time is spent walking everyday.
Invest in safe, walkable cities today, and future generations will see an increase in lifespan.
Same here. Speaker identification software works great for helping point you in the right direction, but as far as being able to determine who is or is not screaming based on calm voice samples, the technology just isn't that good.
Interesting thing about the video is that the original source looks like it was recorded on videotape as interlaced NTSC! You can see this when there's a great deal of movement going on. Just look for areas of great contrast like the hood of the police car when it rolls in and you'll notice the odd saw-tooth appearance of the hood's edge. This happens in other places.
What this means is that a lot of what is being seen is what has been filled in by software as it deals with crappy NTSC. Noise, color fringing effects, are all smoothed out. Then lossy compression is used during the conversion to digital video and potentiall important detail is lost.
The result is that the video appears better than it really is.
This is what most people want when they're transferring analog video to digital. But here is it's absolutely essential that we see the raw, unaltered video, if for no other reason than for understanding the limits of equipment used. It possible the equipment just wasn't good enough to pick up the details we're looking for.
And the videos also show blurry hands where fingers should be. Does that mean they don't exist?
Lossy blurry compressed video is lossy and blurry.
Absolutely agree. I've actually written audio segmentation code for an alarm system that first obtained audio, not straight from an ADC, but only after the audio had been compressed. Compression absolutely destroys important details.
I'm also skeptical of the software's ability to take calm, slow speech, and from that determine what a scream OUGHT to sound like. Comparing samples generated by a person speaking under similar conditions and looking for similarities isn't that hard. But the science of of voice analysis isn't yet to the point where we can take a sample of audio and from that build a virtual larynx, throat, mouth, and controlling nerve fibers so that we can extrapolate from that what a scream from that might sound like.
This test might have been legitimate had the software been used to compare the scream on the 911 recording with another scream from Zimmerman, but that's not what was done.
This appears to me to be a class issue. Anyone that can afford an IPad isn't seen as needing the protection or help of the state. Maybe the authorities don't view the victim sympathetically.
Having another kid ISN'T bad for them financially. The welfare state is there to make sure of that.
Schooling and education were once considered important because they provided a way out of poverty. Now the government provides. Why bother with pointless chores like learning arithmetic?
Yeah but usually ineducable == stupid.
Taking care of the soil isn't going to prevent changes in the the tilt of the earth's axis.
This company seems incredibly stupid. Who gives some stranger with a credit card access to a giant phone bank that can call millions of people and deliver an arbitrary voice message uploaded by cell phone?
Insanity. They're just asking to be used as part of a giant DoS attack. Suppose the listed numbers were for hospitals, airports, or government offices?
Last I heard the EM field belonged to everyone, telecoms included.
The FCC is just there to promote cooperative use of a resource owned in common.
But it isn't just a coincidence, is it?
You've got it mostly backwards.
Profits are socialized every quarter in the form of tax payments. And unless you're politically connected, your losses are private.
Lehman et al aren't ratings agencies. It was the ratings agencies that vouched for those mortgages. Of course Lehman et al didn't trust those ratings and shorted most of the paper making billions. But they didn't originate the mortgages. It was lending agents and applicants that committed the fraud.
Why does anyone still believe that democracy means freedom?
Hardly. At the beginning of the war, the Soviets and Nazis were allied and partitioned Poland. It was only after the Nazis stabbed the Soviets in the back that the Soviets suddenly became our nominal allies.
Poor input filtering on GPS devices could also be a cause.
Normally, there's very little going on adjacent to 1575.42MHz. A GPS device with a poorly performing input filter would still perform well so long as adjacent bands were void of signal. A designer might even cheat a little by intentionally designing a filter that was had poor filtering at the edges of the band but allowed more signal at the center to get through. This would increase the possibility of acquiring the signal. No one would ever know so long as adjacent bands remained relatively unused.
If I were Lightsquared, I'd ask that each GPS device be tested to see if it was properly ignoring signal outside the GPS bands.