I clearly didn't read the links correctly. You know what I said about 15 million primes and/or 40% of primes? I take that back. Here's the relevant quote from the utm.edu link:
The unproved Riemann hypothesis is that all of the nontrivial zeros are actually on the critical line... In 1986 it was shown that the first 1,500,000,001 nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function do indeed have real part one-half [VTW86]... Hardy proved in 1915 that an infinite number of the zeros do occur on the critical line and in 1989 Conrey showed that over 40% of the zeros in the critical strip are on the critical line [Conrey89].
Sorry about that. My point stands, though, that we don't necessarily need to wait for a proof of the hypothesis itself to start deriving any benefits from its claims.
Foreman: I didn't pay you to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis, I paid you to hammer some nails into some wood! Get back to work or you'll be begging for work at the local university again.
Based on some replies it's clear I should reprhase what I said here. Before:
Riemann's Hypothesis has been been thought to be true, or at least very likely, for a long time, because it has proven true by example. For example, we know that it's true for the first 1.5 million primes; we know that it's true for at least 40% of all primes.
After:
Riemann's Hypothesis has been thought to be true, or at least very likely, for a long time. For example, it has been proven to be true for the first 1.5 million primes by exhaustive search. In addition, it has been proven that it must be true for at least 40% of all primes.
Sorry, I reread my post and I did seem to imply that it had been proven true by example. Whoops. What I meant to say was that those two results(1.5 million primes, and the 40% proof) have demonstrated that it is likely to be true. Sorry.
You will note the semicolon in my statement. I did not imply that 1.5 million was 40% of infinite. It turns out that people have exhaustively verified the Riemann Hypothesis for the first 1.5 million or so prime numbers. Someone separately has proven that the hypothesis it holds for at least 40% of all primes. Obviously, that person didn't do so by exhaustive verification:-)
Zenith, I wasn not attempting to suggest you could prove something by experimental evidence alone (unless it is exhaustive).
I was simply saying that the proof may not be necessary from practical standpoint. If someone claims to be able to use the Riemann Zeta function to crack public/private key codes, because of its prime number properties, then he doesn't need to wait for the proof. He can just try out his technique to see if it works.
If his technique works, the proof is irrelevant to him (but still worth pursuing by others). If it doesn't work, then either his technique is flawed, or the Zeta function does not behave as we have theorized it does.
if we could rationalise prime numbers, PGP encryption would suddenly become (overnight) about as strong as a password on a zip file, or a world readable/etc/shadow. you could calculate anyones private key from their public one.
I don't buy this at all. Riemann's Hypothesis has been been thought to be true, or at least very likely, for a long time, because it has proven true by example. For example, we know that it's true for the first 1.5 million primes; we know that it's true for at least 40% of all primes.
So if it could be used to break encryption keys as you say, we would not need a proof to start doing so. We could just use it now to generate keys; and its effectiveness would be evident. So no, I don't think that the proof of Riemann's Hypothesis has any sort of bearing on encryption algorithms.
Now it could be that some of the techniques used in the proof itself could provide some insights into prime factorization methods. But again, we don't need a proof itself to get those insights, we just need the techniques themselves.
It's almost as good as the Kaiser coverage Almost as good as Kaiser? That's like saying that a burger is almost as good as McDonald's (or insert your least favorite fast food joint here). If that's what UK is stuck with, I don't feel so bad about not having national health care.
No, I don't feel a parallel, because there is none.
In the case you're stating, the Church was preventing people from seeing the original artwork---even if they wanted to, and were fully aware of its supposedly "naughty" bits. In this case, there is no such force involved. Nobody is preventing anyone from seeing the unedited version. In fact, this DVD player can in all likelihood play both the edited and unedited versions!
This is about enabling choice, not restricting it. Just like I can buy the director's cut of Apocalypse now, now it would seem I can buy the preacher's cut as well:)
http://www.neurosaudio.com/ I don't believe it can do timed recording, but it seems like something it could be upgraded to do...
Re:Wouldn't this be patenting the alphabet?
on
Palm Kills Off Graffiti
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· Score: 4, Insightful
im sure some people write in uni-strokes as it is with a pen and paper without even knowing what it is.
No, they don't. Quite a few printed letters we write every day require multiple strokes to write them cleanly and properly.
But it's not just a matter of correctness; it's also a matter of efficiency: it takes far more movement of your pen/stylus to write standard letters. So even if you expended the effort to keep your pen on the paper to draw the entire letter, it would take you a lot longer to do that than to write the Graffiti equivalent.
That's why the Graffiti system was considered innovative: it provided simple characters that were quicker to write, and easier to write consistently---but which still resembled the original letters enough to be somewhat easy to learn.
Look, people thought that the Graffiti system was inventive at the time it was introduced. Nobody back then said "oh, some people just write like this anyway, what's so cool about that?" Now that this patent dispute has come about, we can't just go back and decide otherwise.
and who the hell rips to just vob, that's like ripping to wav with a CD, you just don't do it.
What in the world are you talking about? People rip CDs uncompressed, and leave them that way, all the time. You may not have heard of people doing it. And there are darn good reasons for it, too.
Lossy compression always compromises sound quality. If you want it to be inaudible for most material, then with LAME's --preset settings for MP3 and Ogg's high -q levels, you can get, oh, a 5:1-6:1 compression ratio without a problem.
But no encoder is perfect. So every once in awhile, a musical passage will fool the psychoacoustic algorithms in the compressor, and suddently you've introduced an audible, undesirable sonic artifact. Personally, I don't want to have to audition every single one of my CDs after I rip them to make sure that hasn't happened. So my only choice is to use even less compression, say 4:1.
Lossless compression, on the other hand, does not change the sound quality at all, and provides compression ratios of about 2:1. (OK, that is a bit optimistic). This is certainly the safest compression choice, because you can be sure that every CD you rip will be free of compression artifacts.
So now let's add things up. Let's say I have 100GB of raw, uncompressed music. Here's what I need in each case:
6:1 -- 17GB
4:1 -- 25GB
2:1 -- 50GB That's really not that much of a difference if you consider how fast hard drive capacity is increasing. My gosh, for the same price, we can get three times the disk space in, say, about a year. So if you don't have the money for lossless compression now, wait a year and you will. In fact, wait 15 months and you won't even have to bother with compression at all.
For me, the savings in both CPU time and personal hassle make the idea of waiting for the disk space more than worthwhile, and let me assure you that many people share my reasoning. In fact, some people store a highly compressed MP3/Ogg version of their music alongside an uncompressed version. That way, they can use the compressed version in their favorite portable/car player, while keeping the uncompressed versionl around for home use and/or backups in case they want to re-encode their music with the newest compressor in the future.
Ripping DVDs can follow the same logic, but it's even more clear to me. First of all, DVDs are already heavily compressed; yes, you can do better with MPEG4, but not that much better if your purpose is to avoid any visual quality reduction. Secondly, in truth the best way to save space is to rip out the portions of the material that you'll never use: the alternate audio tracks (foreign languages, commentaries, etc.), maybe the special features, etc. But that's a manpower-intensive task! Think about how easy it is to just rip a DVD to the VOBs, or even easier just rip an ISO of it, and be done with it.
Again, because disk space per dollar is dropping so fast, it doesn't take long for it to make economical sense, if you value your time and effort, not to bother with significant compression or reduction.
Cult: A religion with no supreme being. Read your dictionary.
What dictionary are you reading? Did you even look it up yourself before posting? The absence of a supreme being is not the litmus test for cult status, although it is a common characteristic of cults.
More properly, it is simply the unorthodox nature of its religious system that determines its "cult" status. Of course, orthodoxy is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the term is often used in Christian circles to refer to highly unorthodox forms of Christianity such as the one practiced by David Koresh and his followers. Some refer to the LDS (Mormon) church or the Jehovah's Witness faith as cults for the same reason. An atheist, on the other hand, might refer to any belief of a supreme being as cultic.
Not that it's the final authority or anything, but here's what Merriam-Webster has to say. Note that the absence of a supreme being appears nowhere in this list. Definitions #2 and #3 are the relevant ones here.
1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP 2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents 3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents 4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator 5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
shut up with your bigotry.Will you assholes ever learn to respect other religions or do you need a few more 9/11s to get it through your thik skulls. So if I make up a new religion right now completely from scratch, does that mean the world has to immediately respect it under your moral system? What if I use my powers of persuasion to convince 5 people that it is true; does that change things? What does it take: 5 believers, 50, 500, 5000?
WTF is that supposed to mean? Supposedly? Is there some doubt that ogg-vorbis is patent free?
Did you even bother to read the next sentence? Here, I'll do it for you:
Until somebody actually discovers that they have a patent for something that it is using, that is.:)
regebro's statement here reflects the common understanding that confirming a technology is "patent-free" is a difficult, tedious task that is next to impossible to perform 100% exhaustively and perfectly. So it should not surprise any of us if someone unearths a patent that Ogg/Vorbis is alleged to infringe upon some time in the future. We can hope that won't happen---or that if it does, the patent holder proves sympathetic---but it might.
The People's Republic of China Oooh, it's the People's Republic of China defense! Wow, you must be right, then!
Seriously, Apple is far from the only company with a supposed "history" of going after people to maintain what they call "trade secrets." Trade secrets are probably the most underappreciated intellectual property protection device to those who really don't spend their time thinking about it. Does anyone here know the formula for Coke? Kentucky Fried Chicken's Original Recipe Chicken? The secret sauce on the steak frites at La Relais d'Entrecote in Paris?
We talk about patents all the time on Slashdot, but for every patent a company pursues, there are loads of trade secrets they are protecting through secrecy. It has real advantages to patents, becuase unlike a patent you don't have to reveal a trade secret to get legal protection for it---you just have to be diligent about keeping it a secret. On the other hand, if someone obtains information about a trade secret through legal means---usually as a result of negligence on the part of the company or its employees---then that protection is gone. Legal trade secret protection actually requires that a company such as Apple be reasonably diligent about plugging leaks.
I don't care where you start. I only assumed two genetically distinct initial ancestors. Heck, even that assumption may be flawed if I was trying too hard to follow Genesis 1, which implies that Eve was formed from Adam's tissue. Presumably she was basically a clone of Adam, genetically modified (at the very least) to be female.
But I posted my analysis not to defend Adam and Eve, but to make the very specific, very hypothetical point out that there is quite signficant variation in the gene pool even if you start with just two parents.
The fact that I did this at the chromosomal level instead of the gene level gives numbers that are very conservative---as was the assumption that there are no mutations.
Other people have pointed out that there are sub-chromosomal issues, possible gene exchanges, and so forth, but frankly that only serves to increase the variation. (And I would have eliminated such effects in my assumptions anyway had I known about them. I don't claim to be a genetecist.)
Other people suggested that shared genetic information reduces the variation, but they don't change my numbers. My numbers are valid as long as entire chromosomes are distinct... In other words, each pair of chromosomes could differ by only one or two genes, and my numbers would still be valid.
I'd suggest that using Adam and Eve as the sole basis for the entire human gene pool is factually, provably impossible.
I'm not so sure that you can say this. Even some scientists who don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve have posited the existence of a single mother to all currently living humans, through the tracing of mitochondrial DNA (which inherit genetic infomation only through the mother.)
From a numerical standpoint, though, it is entirely possible. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the human race began from two genetically distinct humans, one male and one female.
Each parent contributes a single chromosome from each of 23 pairs; they each therefore can produce 2^23 distinct gametes. Therefore such a couple is capable of producing 2^46---or over 70 trillion---genetically distinct offspring.
Assuming no genetic mutations, subsequent generations of offspring would recombine the chromosomes in ways not possible for the first generation. With 23 pairs of chromosomes to select, and 4 choices to choose from in each pair, there is the potential for (4!/2!2!)^23 = 6^23---or almost 800 quadrillion---genetically distinct individuals.
That is of course assuming no mutation occurs; with mutation, these numbers can only increase. These numbers might decrease if the first man and woman were not fully genetically distinct, but I think we have some headroom to spare.
I won't debate the honest differneces of opinion here, they have been expressed in other places.
But I should point out that all of the songs are offered in Liquid Audio format, which uses the AAC codec. I believe this codec, or one very similar to it, is in the new MPEG-4 standard. It's quite good, actually, although like any lossy format it depends on the quality of the encoder itself and the bitrate.
Actually, I was an EMusic subscriber too until I basically downloaded just about everything I cared to get from them. Their service isn't the best in the world for just "browsing around," I found---but perhaps that would be the problem with any decent-sized catalog. I recommend it heartily.
Why I find the UMG service a step in the right direction is that the catalog is more up-to-date. If I hear a song on the radio that I like a lot, I don't want to have to buy the whole damn album to get it. A buck a song is, to me, a reasonable price.
And while I sympathize with those on other OS platforms, I am certain that a Mac OS/Linux client will be forthcoming if 1) enough people demand it and 2) the Windows service brings in revenue.
As for the DRM, at least I have the option of burning it to CD, and at that point I'm free to copy it or transcode to MP3 if I'm willing to put up with the loss in sound quality. Heck hard drives are big so lossless compression is fine. But that's just me. We'll see if the market agrees with me.
Even if this isn't everything we might want in a downloadable music service, I think that supporting this service will help convince UMG and other companies of the effectiveness of this business model. This is a step in the right direction...
The identity of self is an illusion, as is ownership. To believe that you "own" an idea manifested out of the Immaterial Firmament is folly. It is only our acceptance of the established societal institutions that convinces us otherwise.
You feed us this unprovable, pseudo-intellectual garbage while accusing someone else of passing off statements of judgement as fact? That's rich.
Point taken, dumbass---but your implication that the modern era has some sort of monopoly on twisted copyright laws is still invalid. Nor is it the least bit credible that a different copyright structure is somehow causally related to the quality of the work being performed at the time.
It's pretty easy to see the difference between the Rennaisance (pre-copyright) and the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards (post-copyright).
BZZT! Try again. Or more importantly, try reading the article. Here, I'll help (emphasis mine):
That way we would never end up with a system of hereditary privilege, similar to the printers guilds of
Renaissance England, who tied up rights to dead authors and tightly controlled what could or could not be printed and who could or could not use literary material.
Re:Using up all the channels.
on
19 megabits on 3G
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· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, the 4 antennas do use the same channel---the same frequency band. BLAST uses space-time coding techniques to increase the capacity of a single channel. Each antenna transmits a different signal on the same frequency band; the signal processing on the receive end separates them out.
In general it works well, although it's quite nonintuitive for a number of reasons.
For example, you might imagine that you could achieve similar data rates if you just transmitted 4 times the power with a single antenna instead. Unfortunately, due to multipath (reflections off buildings, trees, etc.), the average received power will vary so much that you can't be as aggressive with your data rate. With 4 antennas, the average received power will be much more even; when one antenna isn't coming in too well, the other three are likely not to have the same problem.
Secondly, amplifier costs don't scale linearly with power. So at those power levels, multiple lower-power amps can be significantly cheaper than one higher-power amp. The cost difference can be large enough that it's worth all the extra signal processing.
Finally, FCC rules are often kinder to systems which distribute power across multiple antennas than they are with a single antenna transmitting the same power. I don't know if that's the case with 3G but I can imagine so.
Those of you who study this please forgive the oversimplification.
Slashdot Mirror
Foreman: I didn't pay you to discuss the Riemann Hypothesis, I paid you to hammer some nails into some wood! Get back to work or you'll be begging for work at the local university again.
Sorry, I reread my post and I did seem to imply that it had been proven true by example. Whoops. What I meant to say was that those two results(1.5 million primes, and the 40% proof) have demonstrated that it is likely to be true. Sorry.
You will note the semicolon in my statement. I did not imply that 1.5 million was 40% of infinite. It turns out that people have exhaustively verified the Riemann Hypothesis for the first 1.5 million or so prime numbers. Someone separately has proven that the hypothesis it holds for at least 40% of all primes. Obviously, that person didn't do so by exhaustive verification :-)
Zenith, I wasn not attempting to suggest you could prove something by experimental evidence alone (unless it is exhaustive).
I was simply saying that the proof may not be necessary from practical standpoint. If someone claims to be able to use the Riemann Zeta function to crack public/private key codes, because of its prime number properties, then he doesn't need to wait for the proof. He can just try out his technique to see if it works.
If his technique works, the proof is irrelevant to him (but still worth pursuing by others). If it doesn't work, then either his technique is flawed, or the Zeta function does not behave as we have theorized it does.
So if it could be used to break encryption keys as you say, we would not need a proof to start doing so. We could just use it now to generate keys; and its effectiveness would be evident. So no, I don't think that the proof of Riemann's Hypothesis has any sort of bearing on encryption algorithms.
Now it could be that some of the techniques used in the proof itself could provide some insights into prime factorization methods. But again, we don't need a proof itself to get those insights, we just need the techniques themselves.
It's almost as good as the Kaiser coverage
Almost as good as Kaiser? That's like saying that a burger is almost as good as McDonald's (or insert your least favorite fast food joint here). If that's what UK is stuck with, I don't feel so bad about not having national health care.
No, I don't feel a parallel, because there is none.
:)
In the case you're stating, the Church was preventing people from seeing the original artwork---even if they wanted to, and were fully aware of its supposedly "naughty" bits. In this case, there is no such force involved. Nobody is preventing anyone from seeing the unedited version. In fact, this DVD player can in all likelihood play both the edited and unedited versions!
This is about enabling choice, not restricting it. Just like I can buy the director's cut of Apocalypse now, now it would seem I can buy the preacher's cut as well
http://www.neurosaudio.com/
I don't believe it can do timed recording, but it seems like something it could be upgraded to do...
im sure some people write in uni-strokes as it is with a pen and paper without even knowing what it is.
No, they don't. Quite a few printed letters we write every day require multiple strokes to write them cleanly and properly.
But it's not just a matter of correctness; it's also a matter of efficiency: it takes far more movement of your pen/stylus to write standard letters. So even if you expended the effort to keep your pen on the paper to draw the entire letter, it would take you a lot longer to do that than to write the Graffiti equivalent.
That's why the Graffiti system was considered innovative: it provided simple characters that were quicker to write, and easier to write consistently---but which still resembled the original letters enough to be somewhat easy to learn.
Look, people thought that the Graffiti system was inventive at the time it was introduced. Nobody back then said "oh, some people just write like this anyway, what's so cool about that?" Now that this patent dispute has come about, we can't just go back and decide otherwise.
and who the hell rips to just vob, that's like ripping to wav with a CD, you just don't do it.
What in the world are you talking about? People rip CDs uncompressed, and leave them that way, all the time. You may not have heard of people doing it. And there are darn good reasons for it, too.
Lossy compression always compromises sound quality. If you want it to be inaudible for most material, then with LAME's --preset settings for MP3 and Ogg's high -q levels, you can get, oh, a 5:1-6:1 compression ratio without a problem.
But no encoder is perfect. So every once in awhile, a musical passage will fool the psychoacoustic algorithms in the compressor, and suddently you've introduced an audible, undesirable sonic artifact. Personally, I don't want to have to audition every single one of my CDs after I rip them to make sure that hasn't happened. So my only choice is to use even less compression, say 4:1.
Lossless compression, on the other hand, does not change the sound quality at all, and provides compression ratios of about 2:1. (OK, that is a bit optimistic). This is certainly the safest compression choice, because you can be sure that every CD you rip will be free of compression artifacts.
So now let's add things up. Let's say I have 100GB of raw, uncompressed music. Here's what I need in each case:
6:1 -- 17GB
4:1 -- 25GB
2:1 -- 50GB
That's really not that much of a difference if you consider how fast hard drive capacity is increasing. My gosh, for the same price, we can get three times the disk space in, say, about a year. So if you don't have the money for lossless compression now, wait a year and you will. In fact, wait 15 months and you won't even have to bother with compression at all.
For me, the savings in both CPU time and personal hassle make the idea of waiting for the disk space more than worthwhile, and let me assure you that many people share my reasoning. In fact, some people store a highly compressed MP3/Ogg version of their music alongside an uncompressed version. That way, they can use the compressed version in their favorite portable/car player, while keeping the uncompressed versionl around for home use and/or backups in case they want to re-encode their music with the newest compressor in the future.
Ripping DVDs can follow the same logic, but it's even more clear to me. First of all, DVDs are already heavily compressed; yes, you can do better with MPEG4, but not that much better if your purpose is to avoid any visual quality reduction. Secondly, in truth the best way to save space is to rip out the portions of the material that you'll never use: the alternate audio tracks (foreign languages, commentaries, etc.), maybe the special features, etc. But that's a manpower-intensive task! Think about how easy it is to just rip a DVD to the VOBs, or even easier just rip an ISO of it, and be done with it.
Again, because disk space per dollar is dropping so fast, it doesn't take long for it to make economical sense, if you value your time and effort, not to bother with significant compression or reduction.
Cult: A religion with no supreme being. Read your dictionary.
What dictionary are you reading? Did you even look it up yourself before posting? The absence of a supreme being is not the litmus test for cult status, although it is a common characteristic of cults.
More properly, it is simply the unorthodox nature of its religious system that determines its "cult" status. Of course, orthodoxy is in the eye of the beholder. For example, the term is often used in Christian circles to refer to highly unorthodox forms of Christianity such as the one practiced by David Koresh and his followers. Some refer to the LDS (Mormon) church or the Jehovah's Witness faith as cults for the same reason. An atheist, on the other hand, might refer to any belief of a supreme being as cultic.
Not that it's the final authority or anything, but here's what Merriam-Webster has to say. Note that the absence of a supreme being appears nowhere in this list. Definitions #2 and #3 are the relevant ones here.
1 : formal religious veneration : WORSHIP
2 : a system of religious beliefs and ritual; also : its body of adherents
3 : a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious; also : its body of adherents
4 : a system for the cure of disease based on dogma set forth by its promulgator
5 a : great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work (as a film or book); especially : such devotion regarded as a literary or intellectual fad b : a usually small group of people characterized by such devotion
shut up with your bigotry.Will you assholes ever learn to respect other religions or do you need a few more 9/11s to get it through your thik skulls.
So if I make up a new religion right now completely from scratch, does that mean the world has to immediately respect it under your moral system? What if I use my powers of persuasion to convince 5 people that it is true; does that change things? What does it take: 5 believers, 50, 500, 5000?
The People's Republic of China
Oooh, it's the People's Republic of China defense! Wow, you must be right, then!
Seriously, Apple is far from the only company with a supposed "history" of going after people to maintain what they call "trade secrets." Trade secrets are probably the most underappreciated intellectual property protection device to those who really don't spend their time thinking about it. Does anyone here know the formula for Coke? Kentucky Fried Chicken's Original Recipe Chicken? The secret sauce on the steak frites at La Relais d'Entrecote in Paris?
We talk about patents all the time on Slashdot, but for every patent a company pursues, there are loads of trade secrets they are protecting through secrecy. It has real advantages to patents, becuase unlike a patent you don't have to reveal a trade secret to get legal protection for it---you just have to be diligent about keeping it a secret. On the other hand, if someone obtains information about a trade secret through legal means---usually as a result of negligence on the part of the company or its employees---then that protection is gone. Legal trade secret protection actually requires that a company such as Apple be reasonably diligent about plugging leaks.
I don't care where you start. I only assumed two genetically distinct initial ancestors. Heck, even that assumption may be flawed if I was trying too hard to follow Genesis 1, which implies that Eve was formed from Adam's tissue. Presumably she was basically a clone of Adam, genetically modified (at the very least) to be female.
But I posted my analysis not to defend Adam and Eve, but to make the very specific, very hypothetical point out that there is quite signficant variation in the gene pool even if you start with just two parents.
The fact that I did this at the chromosomal level instead of the gene level gives numbers that are very conservative---as was the assumption that there are no mutations.
Other people have pointed out that there are sub-chromosomal issues, possible gene exchanges, and so forth, but frankly that only serves to increase the variation. (And I would have eliminated such effects in my assumptions anyway had I known about them. I don't claim to be a genetecist.)
Other people suggested that shared genetic information reduces the variation, but they don't change my numbers. My numbers are valid as long as entire chromosomes are distinct... In other words, each pair of chromosomes could differ by only one or two genes, and my numbers would still be valid.
I'd suggest that using Adam and Eve as the sole basis for the entire human gene pool is factually, provably impossible.
I'm not so sure that you can say this. Even some scientists who don't believe in a literal Adam and Eve have posited the existence of a single mother to all currently living humans, through the tracing of mitochondrial DNA (which inherit genetic infomation only through the mother.)
From a numerical standpoint, though, it is entirely possible. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the human race began from two genetically distinct humans, one male and one female.
Each parent contributes a single chromosome from each of 23 pairs; they each therefore can produce 2^23 distinct gametes. Therefore such a couple is capable of producing 2^46---or over 70 trillion---genetically distinct offspring.
Assuming no genetic mutations, subsequent generations of offspring would recombine the chromosomes in ways not possible for the first generation. With 23 pairs of chromosomes to select, and 4 choices to choose from in each pair, there is the potential for (4!/2!2!)^23 = 6^23---or almost 800 quadrillion---genetically distinct individuals.
That is of course assuming no mutation occurs; with mutation, these numbers can only increase. These numbers might decrease if the first man and woman were not fully genetically distinct, but I think we have some headroom to spare.
I won't debate the honest differneces of opinion here, they have been expressed in other places.
But I should point out that all of the songs are offered in Liquid Audio format, which uses the AAC codec. I believe this codec, or one very similar to it, is in the new MPEG-4 standard. It's quite good, actually, although like any lossy format it depends on the quality of the encoder itself and the bitrate.
Actually, I was an EMusic subscriber too until I basically downloaded just about everything I cared to get from them. Their service isn't the best in the world for just "browsing around," I found---but perhaps that would be the problem with any decent-sized catalog. I recommend it heartily.
Why I find the UMG service a step in the right direction is that the catalog is more up-to-date. If I hear a song on the radio that I like a lot, I don't want to have to buy the whole damn album to get it. A buck a song is, to me, a reasonable price.
And while I sympathize with those on other OS platforms, I am certain that a Mac OS/Linux client will be forthcoming if 1) enough people demand it and 2) the Windows service brings in revenue.
As for the DRM, at least I have the option of burning it to CD, and at that point I'm free to copy it or transcode to MP3 if I'm willing to put up with the loss in sound quality. Heck hard drives are big so lossless compression is fine. But that's just me. We'll see if the market agrees with me.
Even if this isn't everything we might want in a downloadable music service, I think that supporting this service will help convince UMG and other companies of the effectiveness of this business model. This is a step in the right direction...
You feed us this unprovable, pseudo-intellectual garbage while accusing someone else of passing off statements of judgement as fact? That's rich.
Point taken, dumbass---but your implication that the modern era has some sort of monopoly on twisted copyright laws is still invalid. Nor is it the least bit credible that a different copyright structure is somehow causally related to the quality of the work being performed at the time.
Actually, the 4 antennas do use the same channel---the same frequency band. BLAST uses space-time coding techniques to increase the capacity of a single channel. Each antenna transmits a different signal on the same frequency band; the signal processing on the receive end separates them out.
In general it works well, although it's quite nonintuitive for a number of reasons.
For example, you might imagine that you could achieve similar data rates if you just transmitted 4 times the power with a single antenna instead. Unfortunately, due to multipath (reflections off buildings, trees, etc.), the average received power will vary so much that you can't be as aggressive with your data rate. With 4 antennas, the average received power will be much more even; when one antenna isn't coming in too well, the other three are likely not to have the same problem.
Secondly, amplifier costs don't scale linearly with power. So at those power levels, multiple lower-power amps can be significantly cheaper than one higher-power amp. The cost difference can be large enough that it's worth all the extra signal processing.
Finally, FCC rules are often kinder to systems which distribute power across multiple antennas than they are with a single antenna transmitting the same power. I don't know if that's the case with 3G but I can imagine so.
Those of you who study this please forgive the oversimplification.