I think that this is primarily an issue in the Midwest, where Lake Effect snowfalls tend to be windblown, heavy and wet. The snow tends to stick to surfaces, not simply build up in nooks and crannies. Where I live, we get as much or more snow than the Midwest, but it's dry powdery snow. It's extremely rare to have a traffic light obscured by snow; I can't remember a particular instance where I've seen it on more than one or two lights, during the heaviest storms, all winter.
You are on the right track... traffic lights need to be designed to avoid buildup of snow obscuring the signal element. Apparently in the past, heat played a role. That does not mean we need to necessarily employ heat in LED lighting, but certainly it's an option to explore.
I would suggest another option is to explore coatings that shed wet snow rather than offering an attractive surface.
Regardless, this is simply a description of a problem that needs to be properly engineered to solve. Nothing more radical than that (and perhaps not an issue of giving up energy savings of modern lighting technology at all... that's simply a criticism of one possible solution, not the whole set of possible solutions).
On the surface this sounds like a great "power to the people" type democratic initiative. Certainly there is much good in public disclosure.
Where I see issues is in exactly how it's implemented. Broadly speaking, not every citizen, when given the chance to comment, takes that opportunity to make an actionable comment. In fact the majority of comments on newspaper stories, forums, or government communication channels, when they're allowed and implemented in a web-enabled method, tend to be of the angry, snide, or generally unhelpful kind.
The problem then becomes you have to get people to read these things for it to be of any actual value. Slashdot, for all the (often justified) complaints by users that there is a lot of chaff per grain of wheat, is amongst the better examples when it comes to useful posts. Newspaper story comments, at least the ones I read online, tend to be more-or-less useless venting or political grandstanding and sniping, or broad challenges to the competency of this organization or that one. Even when valid, they are not actually helpful in solving whatever issue may be at stake.
Even when there are professionals involved, an open submission policy may result in the sheer number of comments and objections tending to bog down any useful work. I'm reminded of the WiFi implementation saga; the very companies with a stake in the outcome and the IEEE which was just trying to get a standard set, were plagued by verbose and often redundant comments that had to be waded through and followed up on, making the typical Government Committee seem, remarkably, swift and efficient by comparison.
With the right limits, it might work. But, care would have to be taken so that a certain number of hoops had to be jumped through to discourage flippant public input. This (rightly so) is frowned upon by democracy advocates; it's a form of elitism and there is always the danger that people with valuable input may be suspicious of leaving identifying information associated with their input.
Even then, it would definitely add a time penalty to any useful resolution; if none of the public input was valuable, and especially if it were.
I don't see how you could simply release information and not allow people to give a response to that information. I think it's an issue that has yet to be addressed satisfactorily in the modern connected world we live in.
"... From the article Lala's streaming contracts aren't transferrable, but then Apple has the ability to negotiate them again...."
Or Apple could simply sign a contract with Lala, while at the same time directing Lala towards Apple's goal. Apple (as owner or major shareholder) will almost certainly have it's agents on Lala's Board of Directors, enabling such guidance or business direction. There is nothing that says Apple will fold Lala into Apple itself; they can (and have; ie Filemaker, PA Semiconductor, etc) owned firms without doing so.
Apple never, and I repeat never, does anything without a reason. You can bet the farm that Lala has something Apple wants or needs. More interestingly, when industry watchers cannot quite put their finger on whatever that might be, it usually means that experts are thinking inside the box, and Apple is thinking outside said box. If Lala has software or technology Apple wants, it's probably because buying it now will save time over developing it in-house. That's been a pattern in the past. If Lala has contracts or agreements Apple wants, that points to a future business or an expansion of an existing business. Sometimes Apple goes into something obliquely, through a quiet channel that isn't under the magnifying glass like the mother ship inevitably is. If Lala unknowingly has something that will fit with an existing or future Apple hardware project, well... it would help to know what that hardware was. Apple won't tell you. And it may be as mundane as some suggest; that Apple want personnel to fold into a project they are working on. It's happened before as well. Because of Apple's longstanding policy of not commenting on anything speculative, it might be hard to figure out the angle, even in the future; sometimes with Apple the cards are never laid on the table, and whatever it was quietly dies.
I'm most intrigued in the possibility that they are up to something that isn't obvious and can't be inferred from Lala's previous business. We shall see, I guess.
But, you can be sure there is something going on. More grist for the rumor mill!
Salon, like others have mentioned, was on my radar at one time. Then came the paywall... then came "I'm never going there again."
When click on a link and that link goes to anything annoying, I just close the window with a quick finger-and-thumb key combination and move on. Paywalls are not the only kind of annoying page that gets that response, or even the most common [*cough* flash *cough*] but it's now an entrenched part of my surfing habits to leave and never come back when the site fights me.
I always load my browsing session with links that load behind the main window, and there's always other on-topic pages there when any particular one closes. With Google searches, I choose the more relevant dozen or so links from the first five pages or so, loading them behind the Google search results page, before I start checking the pages Google sent me to. If I have to kill a page, there's either another relevant page right behind it, or If somehow the pages all seem weak, I do a revised search.
As for Salon, I'm still on the "never going there again" because, well, I understand what "never" means, and a promise is a promise, even if it's just to myself.
It seems as though perhaps the paywall was some kind of experiment. Well, the experiment failed, apparently. Perhaps they somehow forgot that writers would rather be read than ignored, which is not quite the same thing as 'writers would rather be read than paid', but you can see it from there. If people read and like you work, you will eventually land a paying writing gig. If no-one ever gets to the "read" part, the money isn't coming. Ever.
I wish Salon luck in whatever they plan to do next. If they want me to hear about it, I suggest posting another/. topic. Otherwise, I'll never hear about it.
No surprise... price variations based on cookies... is old news. I remember reading about how cookies resident on the user's machine can cause different quoted prices to appear years ago... probably five years ago at least. I was able to test it at the time using two browsers with different cookie loads. It's definitely happening. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure it was a/. story years ago that first mentioned it.
According to IBM, they are referring to "... [conversion of] English to and from Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish...."
IBM also mentions that they have developed speech recognition sw for Hindi, one of the major languages of India. Speech Recognition, of course, is not translation, so it's not directly applicable to the parent post's topic.
The access should have been priced at the Teleco's wholesale cost; it's not particularly relevant what that cost is, as long as everyone attempting to enter the market faces it equally. If you say that the integrated companies had lower costs simply because they were integrated, then perhaps those two parts of the business should have been separated, so that the provider division paid the supplier division as if it were an independent entity. Mandating the cost is a mistake; it is what it is, and there's nothing particularly anti-competitive in that.
I think the conclusion, however, that the mandated price was responsible for all that failed is a little short of the whole story, and assigns too much blame to one factor alone.
"... End result was that Ameritech (former Illinois Bell company that owned the lines) would get a request to put a different company's DSLAM into their CO and they would sit on it for a while hoping it would just go away. If it did get installed, provisioning the lines to connect to it would be made dead last priority - as you would expect...."
Your description clearly shows the Telcos are a clever lot, and faced with the letter of the law, complied with the letter of the law, while blatently ignoring the intent of the law, by stonewalling connections.
Now, that looks like anti-competitive behavior.
Perhaps the good people of Illinois should buy the state Attourney General a hooker and see if a Elliot Sptizer-type comes calling and gets the job done.
"... The consensus among climatologists is that we'll see warming over the next century. You can see the results of... a survey which shows that 97% of active climatologists agree humans are causing warming [cnn.com]...."
The "survey which shows 97% of active climatologists agree humans are causing global warming"... says that 82% of those polled agreed with the second question in the poll: " has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?". Climatologists were a subset of those polled, as were meteorologists.
The first question refers to temperature rise since some time before 1800 ("... Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels?...") 97% of those polled agreed.
And they should... the climate models show the rise trend began more than 200 years ago; most of those same scientists would place the start date of temperature rise more than 300 years ago, which is what the long term data says. I would suggest that the vast majority agree that the long term data is correct; I know of no significant objections to that data from any scientist, including those who agree with the IPCC conclusions and those who do not.
As always, there is a story in the gap between the 97% of climatologists and the 64% of the meteorologists who agreed with question two. What is it that differentiates Petroleum geologists, where a slight majority disagreed with question two, from those two? You of course can assume they are in the pocket of the oil companies. The CNN reporter does, making the simplest leap, as the modern Journalism School and his Sound-bite driven employer encourage him to do.
One pines for the day when a journalist might probe the obvious, but un-investigated story staring them in the face there, but alas, this is the modern world. Modern Journalists are a pale shadow of their former clever and inquisitive selves.
Scientists are a funny lot, compared to the average Joe. They go by exactly what you ask, and reply with the exact answer to the very question you pose. Had the first question not said "significant factor" I would bet you could have gotten a higher response in the affirmative, but it did, and being the kind of folk they are, they read the question carefully and responded to the exact question asked of them with what they believe is the best answer.
Nobody asked what any other possible "significant factor" might there be. If you did form the question, you would get a reply from many that they think that there is another "significant" factor involved, and that factor might be described as "that's just the way the world works, and we happen to be living in the warming trend of the cycle".
Why the sudden jump in the last 50 years or less? They might respond, again going back to the long term data, that suggests in the past there was always a slow rise or fall, and then a sudden jump, lasting less than 50 years, whenever the climate changed since humans began migrating out from Africa. This is followed by an equilibrium period and then the opposite trend begins, marked towards it's end by another sudden jump, an equilibrium.... and so on.
I suggest that the few Petroleum engineers who are not complete sell-outs beholden to their masters, in contrast to Climatologists, who obviously have nothing to gain by promoting Global Warming and thus are beyond reproach, are in the business of studying long term trends in climate and are more familiar with all the other times the earth rose or fell in average temperature. Thus, they have doubts about human intervention being able to prevent what they see is a normal, long term trend.
Personally, I don't have much doubt that human activity has played a role in the current warming trend; count me as agreeing with the 97% of Climatologists. Where I agree with the others, however, is that the rise is a natural long term tren
"... Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide Corinne Le Quéré, Michael R. Raupach, Josep G. Canadell, Gregg Marland et al.24
Abstract Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This can only be achieved through a drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions. Yet fossil fuel emissions increased by 29% between 2000 and 2008, in conjunction with increased contributions from emerging economies, from the production and international trade of goods and services, and from the use of coal as a fuel source. In contrast, emissions from land-use changes were nearly constant. Between 1959 and 2008, 43% of each year's CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere on average; the rest was absorbed by carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability. Changes in the CO2 sinks are highly uncertain, but they could have a significant influence on future atmospheric CO2 levels. It is therefore crucial to reduce the uncertainties...."
Not a word in the abstract about 6 degrees of anything.
I'm not sure what the common practice is in a modern recording studio, since it's been a while since I've spent time behind a console.
However, the points you've raised are not new to digital processes, by any means. At one time every competent studio worldwide had a pair of speakers that might be described as "industry standard crappy speakers". They were made by a company called "Auritone" and were ugly little boxes that cost like $90 each. You can Google them if you want. They saturated at something like 95dB SPL and would acoustically compress everything. This would be in addition to whatever standard studio monitors that would normally be used for monitoring, mastering and mixing.
Every mix in the mixing and mastering stage would be auditioned and referenced against these "bad" speakers, to insure that the radio mix over the tabletop radio, or via the factory car radio, was able to punch through the limited equipment the label knew most listeners would be exposed to during the marketing phase; ie the making of a hit, which was purely a radio airplay thing.
I would be very surprised to learn that the process has been abandoned in the modern digital studio. The tools may change, but the process stays the same.
You say there is a debate... I find that amazing, personally. There should be no debate; you need to sell to the masses as much today as ever. I would expect that a competent engineer would take both into consideration; ie the sound on a good home playback system via CD or HiRez disk, and via the usual limited fidelity systems such as mp3 or whatever through an iPod, sat radio and over-the-air radio or audio "channels" on cable and sat TVs (where compression processing is in addition to that found on mp3s).
In the "old days" it was pretty much standard to mix with a bias toward the radio over the home hifi, at least on the tracks the label had identified as having hit potential. In some cases that resulted in albums where tracks were wildly inconsistent track to track, at least in terms of sound quality. Looking at the standard dynamic range levels common in modern pop music (Ie essentially no dynamic range) it doesn't seem to me that anything has changed.
I would encourage you to embrace the same practices in your engineering career. Better studios with label contracts will want engineers that understand practical business needs. Few, if any, labels want the very best sounding recordings committed to CD. It might be described as a battle between being right versus being rich. There will always be clients who insist on good fidelity, but they won't be in the majority. I think if you take the time and effort to learn both camps, you will have a great career ahead of you.
The one thing that is very much different in the digital world that really wasn't an issue in the past is standardization on studio equipment, in particular monitors. It's a good thing... it insures that if you master some tracks in this studio and then do more processing in another studio a thousand miles away, that you are not fighting the equipment. If I were a young budding engineer, I'd seek out a pair of auritones on eBay. I guarantee that Phil Spector, in his other live outside the prison walls, couldn't produce without them.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "take the... effect into account", but certainly mp3 has limited all frequency response to the generally accepted limits of human hearing of steady-state signals.
This is partly by design, going back to the decision to limit CD RedBook response to 22.05 Khz; no CD can have any content above this frequency.
The hypersonic effect, regardless of what you think about whether it is real or not, is not a product of steady state signals. There is considerable debate, and certainly some research that suggests it is audible, but almost by definition it is dynamic content of very brief duration, and can be a component of a given musical performance in a live performance. High resolution digital formats (eg 88.2 Khz sampling rate and above) could possibly contain such information from a recorded live performance, but a CD or mp3 with a cutoff frequency of 22.05 Khz cannot. If a listener hears something attributable to the hypersonic effect when listening to an mp3, it almost certainly must be a distortion component of the recording and playback chain.
To illustrate, and take some liberties with an analogy, let's describe a crash cymbal with a fundamental of 10 Khz and we will arbitrarily say the volume of the fundamental tone is at "100". The second harmonic must be at 20Khz, and perhaps a volume of "10" in relation to the fundamental. The third, at 40 Khz with a volume of "1". This is not an accurate description of a cymbal's sonic signature, and such a cymbal may not sound good at all, but I don't know off hand what the correct harmonic structure would be, and if I manage get my point across, it's moot.
Suffice it to say that the harmonic structure of any instrument gives it the character we describe as belonging to an instrument; it's the content of the harmonics that make a violin sound different than a piano playing the same note (eg an "A"), and the harmonics are small fractions in level to that fundamental. Each instrument's sonic signature will be made of many fundamental tones, and their corresponding harmonics, but the note it's playing will be the most prevalent. If you strip out all the frequency information except for the most significant fundamental, you would be left with an A-440 tone and neither the piano or the violin will sound like themselves, but instead sound like identical pure tones.
Going back to the analogy, it's clear that the third harmonic in my crude construction is much smaller in level than the fundamental. If the third, at 1/100 the level, is not below the noise floor, then the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth will be. When we speak of the hypersonic effect, we're talking about the audibility of these later harmonics; at some point one of them must be very low in level and above the generally accepted limit of human hearing of steady-state signals. The argument against says in a reproduction chain it's beyond audibility or alternately, it's buried in noise, the argument for says there are people who can tell two seemingly identical cymbals from the same manufacturer apart. Professional drummers choose cymbals this way, from a selection provided by the manufacturer, who did the same thing, separating the "better" sounding ones from the poorer. (The rest they ship to the music stores, where unwary buyers take their chances).
This despite the fact that professional drummers are unlikely to be able to maintain good HF hearing ability, which is measured by pure tones only, over a career; (perhaps over a few years of just practice with no career potential). The argument for and against the hypersonic effect are based on whether, or to what extent, a reproducing chain can reproduce each enough (and other audio content of similar above-steady-state-hearing frequency, vanishingly low level and fleeting duration) to discern those subtle differences.
I'm not sure if that counts as "taking [it into] effect"; I would describe it more along the lines of "not a problem we need to consider at all" if your goal is to fit a musical performance within the 16/44.1 limits. It would be something to consider if you were talking about higher resolution digital formats.
Fraunhofer spent considerable time and effort to build a lossy codec that was indistinguishable, to most listeners, from uncompressed music (44.1/16-bit) files. mp3 codecs (and the improved codecs that followed, such as AAC or Ogg) all craft the file in such a way as to make the parts "thrown out" the least noticeable and the parts "we keep" the most important cues. Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.
That they succeeded is hardly groundbreaking news. That some listeners can tell the difference is also hardly groundbreaking news; there were a significant minority amongst Franuhofer's listening panels who were almost always able to discern which was which. At some point the majority of casual listeners were not able to do so with any consistency. That's when they said "OK, we'll use this method, then."
There is nothing wrong with well engineered lossy codecs, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with sat radio or mp3 via computer or music player can easily attest. To say there is no difference, or that an mp3 is "CD quality", is the kind of hyperbole that can't go unchallenged. To be a bit more honest and say "it sounds pretty good" or "I like the way it sounds" is fine, however.
Most people are OK with some form of lossy codec; in the environment we most often listen these days, it's limitations are not drawbacks, and possibly not even evident (i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio; and as anyone who has ever used a sound pressure meter in a running vehicle on even a deserted road can tell you, the low-frequency noise of any automobile just going about it's business is very high and much of it is subsonic, which we can't normally hear but none the less masks lower-level detail information on music we might be listening to). It's not a crime to say you're OK with mp3, even if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats.
There's a saying in the sound industry: "Musicians have the worst stereos". And, generally, they do. The reason has more to do with how they listen than what they're listening on: musicians will mentally fill in the sound by following the notes themselves, and things like the beat, the rhythm, the tone, and the timing of the players and their instruments. It's as if they are playing the notes themselves, in their heads, and they need only the elemental cues to do so.
If you love a song, you don't have to hear it under ideal conditions to enjoy the performance. These are the kinds of things Fraunhofer concentrated on making sure remained in the mp3 after compression. It's supposed to sound good; that was the whole point, and that's why the Fraunhofer codecs succeeded, despite the royalty payments due.
All that still does not take away from the enjoyment of uncompressed formats, reproduced competently by accurate equipment, in the appropriate environment. Your car or via earbuds on the street are not those types of environments, and mp3s etc are perfectly reasonable compromises between quality and the need for reduced data footprints. There is a place for both uncompressed and compressed formats; they are not mutually exclusive.
Well, I was only referring to a specific subset of those who follow Peak Oil's logic. I couldn't help it... the idea of that particular group staring furiously at their furry bicycle seats was too good an image to leave out. You were supposed to laugh...
Certainly there are others who follow Peak Oil proponents and concur with their point of view.
Were that all there was to "their arguments" I couldn't possibly have a problem with Peak Oil and it's conclusions.
Trouble is, Peak Oil only counts conventional oil that falls within a narrow definition of proven reserves and extractability.
Some 10% of the oil the US currently consumes every month comes from Canadian non-conventional oil... oil that according to Peak Oil, simply doesn't exist. Canada still has large amounts of conventional oil... and every month that supplies another 15% of current US consumption.
Peak Oil ignores all non-conventional oil; Canada is currently producing from it's known non-conventional reserves, which exceed Saudi Arabia's proven conventional reserves. The US has large amounts; Venezuela has many times more than Canada, other nations also possess non-conventional reserves.
Peal Oil ignores much conventional oil that is being developed... did you know Cuba is pumping oil these days? Neither does Peak Oil.
I've read Peak Oil's information extensively, and I also check their figures against sources like the USGS and Petroleum Institutes the world over. They get where they are by ignoring oil, plain and simple. They do not count most of the Bakken field that straddles the US/Canadian border, despite the fact that they pump that oil on the Canadian side as we speak, and sell it to US refiners. The Bakken play is all high quality conventional crude, not bitumen.
The US side, which remains essentially untapped, is estimated by the USGS to contain 8 times Saudi Arabia's known reserves. Peak OIl? According to the rules they use, this oil may as well be on Mars; using their criteria, it doesn't exist.
You can compare Peak Oil's numbers with Petroleum Institutes across the globe, with production figures for oil that someone paid a hundred bucks a barrel for... they are not fiction. I do take the time to check out the data when someone tries to convince me of something, and I'm not Googling some nutbar or Wikipedia either. I want to see real numbers from bona fide, audited sources; peer-reviewed journals; annual reports of public companies. Yet, there is a consistent under-reporting in Peak Oil's numbers.
It's not crazy, or fear-mongering, or reckless to soberly ascertain what and where our energy needs will have to come from, and how we need to plan for any and every energy eventuality.
Clearly it won't last forever, clearly energy conservation is a good thing to do for a host of reasons that merely the fear of running out doesn't come close to addressing. I just hate it when a group is faced with a choice between the truth and the gospel to insist on the gospel. We're big people. You don't need to stretch it.
Real scientists take the data for what it is, regardless of how that affects the predicted outcome. What's worse, is it's probably unnecessary to fudge the numbers in the first place. Yet they do, and make no mistake about it... they know full well they do. Still trust them?
Virtually everything in a modern home, a modern hospital, a modern medicine cabinet, our modern lives are made from petroleum. The Peak Oil proponents rarely mention that most of the stuff they intend to have us use to "Go Green" is made from Oil. Their fancy CFL bulbs depend on Oil for the components. Most "Green" solutions rely on Oil-derived materials to be manufactured. The very bicycles they want us to peddle, the stroller they push, the mosquito repellant they use to keep their hippy kids free of West Nile, are all petroleum based at one component level or another.
I can't wait for the day the PETA-loving Peak Oil blabbering tree huggers realize the only oil-free option for a new bicycle seat is leather. May as well leave the fur on.
I used to use 3rd party encryption and password keeper tools, until one of the paid apps I relied on introduced a bug in an update that corrupted the encrypted data. If you are well versed in IT you probably know what that means, but for the regular folk out there I'll spell it out: Your data is unrecoverable, forever, if an encrypted file becomes corrupted even by a small amount. So, Rule Number One:
BACKUP YOUR ENCRYPTED DATA
If you use a password manager, know how to find the password file and know how to back it up, how to recover it, how to use it on another system with the same tools installed.
Bitten by that bug, where everything I could not re-create from memory was essentially gone, I looked once again at the tools the OS provided me.
Using OSX's system-wide Keychain support and utilities, I created a user keychain, set a robust password on it, and created appropriately titled secure notes. All my login credentials, all my banking info, all secure data is stored there. You can back it up, you can carry it on a USB drive and use it on another Mac, you can sync it across multiple machines. The text formatting abilities are rudimentary, but I can live with it.
It's encrypted and unusable by anyone who does not know the username and password of the owner, and isn't visible to other users. It has OS and OS-vendor level support, and that same level of troubleshooting and testing... it works and obscure bugs, if there are any, will be found and fixed (in the case of my paid app, the developer just gave up and left us all staring at empty wallets and useless apps with unusable data).
The latest version of FileVault (10.5 or later) has had major improvements. I never had problems with FileVault on my laptop going back 7 years, but others I know have. The later version encrypts in 10MB sections, and therefore if there are issues (eg drive or data corruption), most of your data will be recoverable. It's also much faster since it only deals with changed data during certain normal operations (eg recovering free space).
The Criminal Records Act, which you refuse to either check or cannot comprehend; lately it seems more likely the latter. "... Criminal Records Act (R.S., 1985, c. C-47)... Discharges
6.1 (1) No record of a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code that is in the custody of the Commissioner or of any department or agency of the Government of Canada shall be disclosed to any person, nor shall the existence of the record or the fact of the discharge be disclosed to any person, without the prior approval of the Minister, if (a) more than one year has elapsed since the offender was discharged absolutely; or (b) more than three years have elapsed since the offender was discharged on the conditions prescribed in a probation order. Purging C.P.I.C.
(2) The Commissioner shall remove all references to a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code from the automated criminal conviction records retrieval system maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the expiration of the relevant period referred to in subsection (1). 1992, c. 22, s. 6; 1995, c. 22, s. 17(E)...."
"... Either a person has a criminal record, or they don't...." You are absolutely correct.
"... An absolute discharge granted at the time of trial means they do NOT have a criminal record..." You are absolutely wrong.
What does the phrase "the existence of a record" found within "The Criminal Records Act" mean to you? Apparently not the same as what it means to people who work in the administration of Justice.
Tell it to the judge, indeed. Know any? Ask him. Sounds like you do know a few lawyers. Ask one.
"... So stop with the bullshit...." Well said. Can't take your own advice?
"... Obviously criminal code convictions can (but not necessarily) result in a criminal record, but you're TOTALLY wrong in saying that summary convictions mean you will automatically have a criminal record; this is an outright lie, and another indication that you either don't know what you're talking about, or are just trolling. The court is allowed, where there is no minimum penalty, to grant an absolute discharge, which - guess what - means you don't get a criminal record...."
The relevant information can be found by referring to the Criminal Records Act (of Canada).
Records are kept by the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) is managed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Upon first contact with Police, local police will create a file for their records. If the charge is an Indictable or Hybrid Offense (can proceed by a choice between Summary Conviction or Indictment) then a temporary file will usually be forwarded to CPIC. This file is accessible only by the charging police department, and exists until further action is taken by the courts. It will consist of a hard copy and a storage copy (microfiche, currently). If no further action is taken by the courts, this temporary file in the CPIC database is destroyed after five years. Local police are under no obligation to destroy their own file.
The CPIC database allows authorized personnel to access: Vehicle Information Criminal Records (Adult and Youth) Dental Records and Offender Information held by the Correctional Service of Canada Wandering and Missing persons Motor Vehicle information specific to each Province and Territory Records in the United States National Crime Information Centre
Once you have a conviction for an offense in the Criminal Code of Canada, you have a Criminal Record. A Criminal Record is permanent, unless you receive a Pardon, with the exception of Absolute Discharges and Conditional Discharges, where special rules apply. They are:
If you receive an Absolute or Conditional Discharge, there is no conviction entered into CPIC. However, there is a Criminal Record in CPIC, including the fact you were charged with the offense. If an Absolute Discharge, all reference is removed after one year, after which it's existence cannot be disclosed. If a Conditional Discharge, all reference is removed after three years, after which it's existence cannot be disclosed.
The above only applies to the RCMP, and to the departments and agencies of the Government of Canada.
It does not apply to the following who can none the less access CPIC: Agencies authorized under the Young Offenders Act Canadian Pacific Railway Police Citizenship and Immigration Canada Correctional Service of Canada Department of Agriculture Federal and Provincial ministries of the Environment Insurance Crime Prevention Bureaus Parks Canada Provincial Correctional Services Provincial Courts Provincial Securities Commissions Canada Customs and Revenue Agency United States Customs United States Immigration All State Police
There is legislation requiring Police to submit information to CPIC with regard to Young Offenders, but there is no legislation in place that requires local police to submit criminal information to CPIC for adult offenders. Therefore, CPIC does not represent the totality of records that exist.
When Criminal Records are removed from the accessible database, they are not destroyed. They are moved to a separate record keeping system in Ottawa and kept an additional five years minimum. If your records are kept in the separate repository after being purged from CPIC, they can be accessed when fingerprints of a discharged person are found at the scene of a crime, or to discover the identity of a dead or amnesic person. That information will include the name, date of birth, and last known address.
If the discharge occoured before July 24, 1992 when newer legislation came into force, a
Sexual assault is a dual-mode or hybrid offense. It can be a felony or a misdemeanor. It's up to the prosecutor to decide how to proceed - I've posted links to the federal prosecutors' handbook elsewhere in this thread for those who want the gritty details...."
You make distinctions and conclusions that do not exist in Canadian Law.
Offenses punishable by Indictment, Offenses punishable by Summary Conviction (Part XXVII, Criminal Code of Canada), or hybrid offenses (where the prosecutor can choose between either) are all part of The Criminal Code of Canada. All convictions under any statues of the Criminal Code of Canada, where by indictment or summary conviction result in a Criminal Record. Appeals of decisions where the Crown proceeded by Summary Conviction are by Indictment (PART XXI APPEALS -- INDICTABLE OFFENCES, 675; 1,1)
The closest the Criminal Code ever gets to the word "misdemeanor" is when it refers to "less serious offenses" of the Criminal Code. The word "misdemeanor" never appears at any time in the Criminal Code of Canada.
It is your word, which you interpret rather freely.
"... I saw a TV show where they interviewed people this happened to. One was on a test drive! Another recalled the smell of the brakes burning, as the motor has so much torque at 0rpm that the brakes are useless. One even put the transmission in park, to no avail...."
I was about to call Bullshit, when it occurred to me that you must be talking about a Prius, or some other electric car. Conventional (internal combustion) engines develop relatively little torque at low RPM and none at 0 RPM. Exactly where the torque peak happens is mostly a function of engine event timing, but even vehicles that develop maximum torque at relatively low RPM (tow trucks, heavy vehicles, diesel engines, etc) are still moving fairly well if equipped with auto transmissions (manuals don't normally have a Park function).
As for putting the transmission in Park, with a conventional drivetrain this is very difficult to do, in most cases near impossible or truly impossible, as there is a pin that locks the planetary gear-set (or some other moving part directly connected to the output) when in Park that would have to be sheared off if the engine was rotating at any appreciable legal (street, i.e. less than highway) speed, at moderate speeds it probably wouldn't find the corresponding hole necessary for engagement, and compounding the problem, generally the linkages simply are not strong enough, even if you are, to pull this off by manipulating the shift lever... something will bend instead. If you do pull it off, you will damage the transmission, and the vehicle will from that point on roll when stopped and in Park unless the parking brake is engaged. It's not a cheap fix.
But, energized electric engines do develop maximum torque (potential) at rest, falling as the motor speed increases, although not to anywhere near zero within the operational RPM. (Horsepower increases, because Horsepower is torque x RPM, and therefore higher RPM tends to give higher horsepower values).
[Hot tip: torque is always equal to horsepower at 5252 rpm; it's one way to describe the formula, and horsepower is a calculated value derived from measured torque; we don't actually measure horsepower itself directly. If the HP & Torque vs RPM chart you are looking at doesn't cross at 5250 (the practical point, given that the scale probably divisible by 10), it's not drawn properly or possibly is simply bogus].
An electric motor driven car also may have a non-mechanical transmission shift lever; you might be able to put it into a Park position at a moving speed. However, the Park pin (if there was an actual transmission; electric motors can drive wheels directly and/or use electric means to bring the drive motor to a stop); almost certainly would not engage until the control system decided it was appropriate; in essence "Park' would not actually be "Park" until the vehicle was at rest. As you implied, putting it in Park could conceivably do nothing.
So, what you didn't say (Electric car) makes sense of your post.
XEROX PARC gave Apple full reign to implement anything they saw, and Apple Engineers had open access to PARC, making several visits. PARC was not charged by XEROX to bring products to market. When Apple decided to implement ideas first seen at PARC, in particular GUI first seen in the Lisa and later, Macintosh, they gave XEROX stock as consideration for value received. XEROX was okay with the deal 100%. XEROX did try to re-open the deal by suing Apple over GUI implementation, but only after Apple sued Microsoft for taking elements of System7 into Windows when a licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft covered only the GUI elements in System6. After Apple's suit against Microsoft went nowhere, XEROX dropped the suit against Apple, since the value of the GUI was already established by the courts as, essentially, not much.
"... BTW, the maximum sentence for sexual assault [rapereliefshelter.bc.ca] when tried as a misdemeanor in Canada is $2,000 + 6 months...."
There is no misdemeanor sexual assault charge in Canada. You are referring to a Criminal Code (in the US, Felony) procedure by Summary Conviction. I could go on, but I'm done. You don't know what you're talking about, and you aren't on topic.
"... Truth be told the only reason why I won't buy a Mac is the price of the hardware,..."
Yeah, we know.
"... Yeah Apple needs the Mac Clones again..."
I think you meant that you need Mac clones again, to save money and get the best the world offers, for as little as possible. A full install boxed set of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard sells retail for $29.00.
Apple, on the other hand, relies on hardware sales to carry on it's business. I'm pretty sure you, I and Apple can figure out where this is going to lead. You won't be an Apple customer; and two of the three parties mentioned are OK with that.
Why don't you run Linux on generic x86 hardware; I have and still do it. It does a great job of the work I assign it; and it's within the budget you are willing to commit. Is there something wrong with a solution that works for you and meets your budget conditions? I fail to see a problem here.
But, Linux doesn't do a great job on the work I assign my OSX box; that's why I have the OSX box.
I recently went out and bought a used PPC 1.42 GHz Mini for under $300; the Intel boxes, due to pipeline issues with the architecture, were choking on certain audio tasks, which must be done in order and in near-real time. The PPC chip might be slower, but I can assign a batch downsampling process on 10,000 high resolution (24/96) audio files, and not one resulting file will have a data dropout or waveform error a week later (actually, 8 days, 24/7, unattended).
A multicore Intel machine with 2~4x the RAM pulls the same job off in about 5 days. But, no Intel machine, OSX or Windows (the necessary tools are not available on Linux) that I'm aware of has so far pulled that particular job off without errors; errors you have to spend 40,000 minutes listening to discover, and more time to correct, at $60/hr.
Life's too short. One job, at 3 cents a minute = total hardware outlay. Done, and done right.
You wouldn't want to be using OSX to write eMails, surf the web, play with a database, would you? Use your Linux box for that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that this is primarily an issue in the Midwest, where Lake Effect snowfalls tend to be windblown, heavy and wet. The snow tends to stick to surfaces, not simply build up in nooks and crannies. Where I live, we get as much or more snow than the Midwest, but it's dry powdery snow. It's extremely rare to have a traffic light obscured by snow; I can't remember a particular instance where I've seen it on more than one or two lights, during the heaviest storms, all winter.
You are on the right track ... traffic lights need to be designed to avoid buildup of snow obscuring the signal element. Apparently in the past, heat played a role. That does not mean we need to necessarily employ heat in LED lighting, but certainly it's an option to explore.
I would suggest another option is to explore coatings that shed wet snow rather than offering an attractive surface.
Regardless, this is simply a description of a problem that needs to be properly engineered to solve. Nothing more radical than that (and perhaps not an issue of giving up energy savings of modern lighting technology at all ... that's simply a criticism of one possible solution, not the whole set of possible solutions).
" ... They would have been far better off with building a better pure electric motorcycle. ..."
Then it wouldn't have made Slashdot with the "world's first" headline. Electric bikes are made worldwide by a number of manufacturers already.
On the surface this sounds like a great "power to the people" type democratic initiative. Certainly there is much good in public disclosure.
Where I see issues is in exactly how it's implemented. Broadly speaking, not every citizen, when given the chance to comment, takes that opportunity to make an actionable comment. In fact the majority of comments on newspaper stories, forums, or government communication channels, when they're allowed and implemented in a web-enabled method, tend to be of the angry, snide, or generally unhelpful kind.
The problem then becomes you have to get people to read these things for it to be of any actual value. Slashdot, for all the (often justified) complaints by users that there is a lot of chaff per grain of wheat, is amongst the better examples when it comes to useful posts. Newspaper story comments, at least the ones I read online, tend to be more-or-less useless venting or political grandstanding and sniping, or broad challenges to the competency of this organization or that one. Even when valid, they are not actually helpful in solving whatever issue may be at stake.
Even when there are professionals involved, an open submission policy may result in the sheer number of comments and objections tending to bog down any useful work. I'm reminded of the WiFi implementation saga; the very companies with a stake in the outcome and the IEEE which was just trying to get a standard set, were plagued by verbose and often redundant comments that had to be waded through and followed up on, making the typical Government Committee seem, remarkably, swift and efficient by comparison.
With the right limits, it might work. But, care would have to be taken so that a certain number of hoops had to be jumped through to discourage flippant public input. This (rightly so) is frowned upon by democracy advocates; it's a form of elitism and there is always the danger that people with valuable input may be suspicious of leaving identifying information associated with their input.
Even then, it would definitely add a time penalty to any useful resolution; if none of the public input was valuable, and especially if it were.
I don't see how you could simply release information and not allow people to give a response to that information. I think it's an issue that has yet to be addressed satisfactorily in the modern connected world we live in.
" ... From the article Lala's streaming contracts aren't transferrable, but then Apple has the ability to negotiate them again. ..."
Or Apple could simply sign a contract with Lala, while at the same time directing Lala towards Apple's goal. Apple (as owner or major shareholder) will almost certainly have it's agents on Lala's Board of Directors, enabling such guidance or business direction. There is nothing that says Apple will fold Lala into Apple itself; they can (and have; ie Filemaker, PA Semiconductor, etc) owned firms without doing so.
Apple never, and I repeat never, does anything without a reason. You can bet the farm that Lala has something Apple wants or needs. More interestingly, when industry watchers cannot quite put their finger on whatever that might be, it usually means that experts are thinking inside the box, and Apple is thinking outside said box. ... it would help to know what that hardware was. Apple won't tell you.
If Lala has software or technology Apple wants, it's probably because buying it now will save time over developing it in-house. That's been a pattern in the past.
If Lala has contracts or agreements Apple wants, that points to a future business or an expansion of an existing business. Sometimes Apple goes into something obliquely, through a quiet channel that isn't under the magnifying glass like the mother ship inevitably is.
If Lala unknowingly has something that will fit with an existing or future Apple hardware project, well
And it may be as mundane as some suggest; that Apple want personnel to fold into a project they are working on. It's happened before as well.
Because of Apple's longstanding policy of not commenting on anything speculative, it might be hard to figure out the angle, even in the future; sometimes with Apple the cards are never laid on the table, and whatever it was quietly dies.
I'm most intrigued in the possibility that they are up to something that isn't obvious and can't be inferred from Lala's previous business. We shall see, I guess.
But, you can be sure there is something going on. More grist for the rumor mill!
Salon, like others have mentioned, was on my radar at one time. Then came the paywall ... then came "I'm never going there again."
When click on a link and that link goes to anything annoying, I just close the window with a quick finger-and-thumb key combination and move on. Paywalls are not the only kind of annoying page that gets that response, or even the most common [*cough* flash *cough*] but it's now an entrenched part of my surfing habits to leave and never come back when the site fights me.
I always load my browsing session with links that load behind the main window, and there's always other on-topic pages there when any particular one closes. With Google searches, I choose the more relevant dozen or so links from the first five pages or so, loading them behind the Google search results page, before I start checking the pages Google sent me to. If I have to kill a page, there's either another relevant page right behind it, or If somehow the pages all seem weak, I do a revised search.
As for Salon, I'm still on the "never going there again" because, well, I understand what "never" means, and a promise is a promise, even if it's just to myself.
It seems as though perhaps the paywall was some kind of experiment. Well, the experiment failed, apparently. Perhaps they somehow forgot that writers would rather be read than ignored, which is not quite the same thing as 'writers would rather be read than paid', but you can see it from there. If people read and like you work, you will eventually land a paying writing gig. If no-one ever gets to the "read" part, the money isn't coming. Ever.
I wish Salon luck in whatever they plan to do next. If they want me to hear about it, I suggest posting another /. topic. Otherwise, I'll never hear about it.
No surprise ... price variations based on cookies ... is old news. I remember reading about how cookies resident on the user's machine can cause different quoted prices to appear years ago ... probably five years ago at least. I was able to test it at the time using two browsers with different cookie loads. It's definitely happening. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure it was a /. story years ago that first mentioned it.
According to IBM, they are referring to " ... [conversion of] English to and from Arabic, simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. ..."
IBM also mentions that they have developed speech recognition sw for Hindi, one of the major languages of India. Speech Recognition, of course, is not translation, so it's not directly applicable to the parent post's topic.
The access should have been priced at the Teleco's wholesale cost; it's not particularly relevant what that cost is, as long as everyone attempting to enter the market faces it equally. If you say that the integrated companies had lower costs simply because they were integrated, then perhaps those two parts of the business should have been separated, so that the provider division paid the supplier division as if it were an independent entity. Mandating the cost is a mistake; it is what it is, and there's nothing particularly anti-competitive in that.
I think the conclusion, however, that the mandated price was responsible for all that failed is a little short of the whole story, and assigns too much blame to one factor alone.
" ... End result was that Ameritech (former Illinois Bell company that owned the lines) would get a request to put a different company's DSLAM into their CO and they would sit on it for a while hoping it would just go away. If it did get installed, provisioning the lines to connect to it would be made dead last priority - as you would expect. ..."
Your description clearly shows the Telcos are a clever lot, and faced with the letter of the law, complied with the letter of the law, while blatently ignoring the intent of the law, by stonewalling connections.
Now, that looks like anti-competitive behavior.
Perhaps the good people of Illinois should buy the state Attourney General a hooker and see if a Elliot Sptizer-type comes calling and gets the job done.
" ... The consensus among climatologists is that we'll see warming over the next century. You can see the results of ... a survey which shows that 97% of active climatologists agree humans are causing warming [cnn.com]. ..."
The "survey which shows 97% of active climatologists agree humans are causing global warming" ... says that 82% of those polled agreed with the second question in the poll: " has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?". Climatologists were a subset of those polled, as were meteorologists.
The first question refers to temperature rise since some time before 1800 (" ... Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels? ...") 97% of those polled agreed.
And they should ... the climate models show the rise trend began more than 200 years ago; most of those same scientists would place the start date of temperature rise more than 300 years ago, which is what the long term data says. I would suggest that the vast majority agree that the long term data is correct; I know of no significant objections to that data from any scientist, including those who agree with the IPCC conclusions and those who do not.
As always, there is a story in the gap between the 97% of climatologists and the 64% of the meteorologists who agreed with question two. What is it that differentiates Petroleum geologists, where a slight majority disagreed with question two, from those two? You of course can assume they are in the pocket of the oil companies. The CNN reporter does, making the simplest leap, as the modern Journalism School and his Sound-bite driven employer encourage him to do.
One pines for the day when a journalist might probe the obvious, but un-investigated story staring them in the face there, but alas, this is the modern world. Modern Journalists are a pale shadow of their former clever and inquisitive selves.
Scientists are a funny lot, compared to the average Joe. They go by exactly what you ask, and reply with the exact answer to the very question you pose. Had the first question not said "significant factor" I would bet you could have gotten a higher response in the affirmative, but it did, and being the kind of folk they are, they read the question carefully and responded to the exact question asked of them with what they believe is the best answer.
Nobody asked what any other possible "significant factor" might there be. If you did form the question, you would get a reply from many that they think that there is another "significant" factor involved, and that factor might be described as "that's just the way the world works, and we happen to be living in the warming trend of the cycle".
Why the sudden jump in the last 50 years or less? They might respond, again going back to the long term data, that suggests in the past there was always a slow rise or fall, and then a sudden jump, lasting less than 50 years, whenever the climate changed since humans began migrating out from Africa. This is followed by an equilibrium period and then the opposite trend begins, marked towards it's end by another sudden jump, an equilibrium .... and so on.
I suggest that the few Petroleum engineers who are not complete sell-outs beholden to their masters, in contrast to Climatologists, who obviously have nothing to gain by promoting Global Warming and thus are beyond reproach, are in the business of studying long term trends in climate and are more familiar with all the other times the earth rose or fell in average temperature. Thus, they have doubts about human intervention being able to prevent what they see is a normal, long term trend.
Personally, I don't have much doubt that human activity has played a role in the current warming trend; count me as agreeing with the 97% of Climatologists. Where I agree with the others, however, is that the rise is a natural long term tren
" ...
Trends in the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide
Corinne Le Quéré, Michael R. Raupach, Josep G. Canadell, Gregg Marland et al.24
Abstract ..."
Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. This can only be achieved through a drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions. Yet fossil fuel emissions increased by 29% between 2000 and 2008, in conjunction with increased contributions from emerging economies, from the production and international trade of goods and services, and from the use of coal as a fuel source. In contrast, emissions from land-use changes were nearly constant. Between 1959 and 2008, 43% of each year's CO2 emissions remained in the atmosphere on average; the rest was absorbed by carbon sinks on land and in the oceans. In the past 50 years, the fraction of CO2 emissions that remains in the atmosphere each year has likely increased, from about 40% to 45%, and models suggest that this trend was caused by a decrease in the uptake of CO2 by the carbon sinks in response to climate change and variability. Changes in the CO2 sinks are highly uncertain, but they could have a significant influence on future atmospheric CO2 levels. It is therefore crucial to reduce the uncertainties.
Not a word in the abstract about 6 degrees of anything.
I'm not sure what the common practice is in a modern recording studio, since it's been a while since I've spent time behind a console.
However, the points you've raised are not new to digital processes, by any means. At one time every competent studio worldwide had a pair of speakers that might be described as "industry standard crappy speakers". They were made by a company called "Auritone" and were ugly little boxes that cost like $90 each. You can Google them if you want. They saturated at something like 95dB SPL and would acoustically compress everything. This would be in addition to whatever standard studio monitors that would normally be used for monitoring, mastering and mixing.
Every mix in the mixing and mastering stage would be auditioned and referenced against these "bad" speakers, to insure that the radio mix over the tabletop radio, or via the factory car radio, was able to punch through the limited equipment the label knew most listeners would be exposed to during the marketing phase; ie the making of a hit, which was purely a radio airplay thing.
I would be very surprised to learn that the process has been abandoned in the modern digital studio. The tools may change, but the process stays the same.
You say there is a debate ... I find that amazing, personally. There should be no debate; you need to sell to the masses as much today as ever. I would expect that a competent engineer would take both into consideration; ie the sound on a good home playback system via CD or HiRez disk, and via the usual limited fidelity systems such as mp3 or whatever through an iPod, sat radio and over-the-air radio or audio "channels" on cable and sat TVs (where compression processing is in addition to that found on mp3s).
In the "old days" it was pretty much standard to mix with a bias toward the radio over the home hifi, at least on the tracks the label had identified as having hit potential. In some cases that resulted in albums where tracks were wildly inconsistent track to track, at least in terms of sound quality. Looking at the standard dynamic range levels common in modern pop music (Ie essentially no dynamic range) it doesn't seem to me that anything has changed.
I would encourage you to embrace the same practices in your engineering career. Better studios with label contracts will want engineers that understand practical business needs. Few, if any, labels want the very best sounding recordings committed to CD. It might be described as a battle between being right versus being rich. There will always be clients who insist on good fidelity, but they won't be in the majority. I think if you take the time and effort to learn both camps, you will have a great career ahead of you.
The one thing that is very much different in the digital world that really wasn't an issue in the past is standardization on studio equipment, in particular monitors. It's a good thing ... it insures that if you master some tracks in this studio and then do more processing in another studio a thousand miles away, that you are not fighting the equipment. If I were a young budding engineer, I'd seek out a pair of auritones on eBay. I guarantee that Phil Spector, in his other live outside the prison walls, couldn't produce without them.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "take the ... effect into account", but certainly mp3 has limited all frequency response to the generally accepted limits of human hearing of steady-state signals.
This is partly by design, going back to the decision to limit CD RedBook response to 22.05 Khz; no CD can have any content above this frequency.
The hypersonic effect, regardless of what you think about whether it is real or not, is not a product of steady state signals. There is considerable debate, and certainly some research that suggests it is audible, but almost by definition it is dynamic content of very brief duration, and can be a component of a given musical performance in a live performance. High resolution digital formats (eg 88.2 Khz sampling rate and above) could possibly contain such information from a recorded live performance, but a CD or mp3 with a cutoff frequency of 22.05 Khz cannot. If a listener hears something attributable to the hypersonic effect when listening to an mp3, it almost certainly must be a distortion component of the recording and playback chain.
To illustrate, and take some liberties with an analogy, let's describe a crash cymbal with a fundamental of 10 Khz and we will arbitrarily say the volume of the fundamental tone is at "100". The second harmonic must be at 20Khz, and perhaps a volume of "10" in relation to the fundamental. The third, at 40 Khz with a volume of "1". This is not an accurate description of a cymbal's sonic signature, and such a cymbal may not sound good at all, but I don't know off hand what the correct harmonic structure would be, and if I manage get my point across, it's moot.
Suffice it to say that the harmonic structure of any instrument gives it the character we describe as belonging to an instrument; it's the content of the harmonics that make a violin sound different than a piano playing the same note (eg an "A"), and the harmonics are small fractions in level to that fundamental. Each instrument's sonic signature will be made of many fundamental tones, and their corresponding harmonics, but the note it's playing will be the most prevalent. If you strip out all the frequency information except for the most significant fundamental, you would be left with an A-440 tone and neither the piano or the violin will sound like themselves, but instead sound like identical pure tones.
Going back to the analogy, it's clear that the third harmonic in my crude construction is much smaller in level than the fundamental. If the third, at 1/100 the level, is not below the noise floor, then the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth will be. When we speak of the hypersonic effect, we're talking about the audibility of these later harmonics; at some point one of them must be very low in level and above the generally accepted limit of human hearing of steady-state signals. The argument against says in a reproduction chain it's beyond audibility or alternately, it's buried in noise, the argument for says there are people who can tell two seemingly identical cymbals from the same manufacturer apart. Professional drummers choose cymbals this way, from a selection provided by the manufacturer, who did the same thing, separating the "better" sounding ones from the poorer. (The rest they ship to the music stores, where unwary buyers take their chances).
This despite the fact that professional drummers are unlikely to be able to maintain good HF hearing ability, which is measured by pure tones only, over a career; (perhaps over a few years of just practice with no career potential). The argument for and against the hypersonic effect are based on whether, or to what extent, a reproducing chain can reproduce each enough (and other audio content of similar above-steady-state-hearing frequency, vanishingly low level and fleeting duration) to discern those subtle differences.
I'm not sure if that counts as "taking [it into] effect"; I would describe it more along the lines of "not a problem we need to consider at all" if your goal is to fit a musical performance within the 16/44.1 limits. It would be something to consider if you were talking about higher resolution digital formats.
Fraunhofer spent considerable time and effort to build a lossy codec that was indistinguishable, to most listeners, from uncompressed music (44.1/16-bit) files. mp3 codecs (and the improved codecs that followed, such as AAC or Ogg) all craft the file in such a way as to make the parts "thrown out" the least noticeable and the parts "we keep" the most important cues. Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.
That they succeeded is hardly groundbreaking news. That some listeners can tell the difference is also hardly groundbreaking news; there were a significant minority amongst Franuhofer's listening panels who were almost always able to discern which was which. At some point the majority of casual listeners were not able to do so with any consistency. That's when they said "OK, we'll use this method, then."
There is nothing wrong with well engineered lossy codecs, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with sat radio or mp3 via computer or music player can easily attest. To say there is no difference, or that an mp3 is "CD quality", is the kind of hyperbole that can't go unchallenged. To be a bit more honest and say "it sounds pretty good" or "I like the way it sounds" is fine, however.
Most people are OK with some form of lossy codec; in the environment we most often listen these days, it's limitations are not drawbacks, and possibly not even evident (i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio; and as anyone who has ever used a sound pressure meter in a running vehicle on even a deserted road can tell you, the low-frequency noise of any automobile just going about it's business is very high and much of it is subsonic, which we can't normally hear but none the less masks lower-level detail information on music we might be listening to). It's not a crime to say you're OK with mp3, even if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats.
There's a saying in the sound industry: "Musicians have the worst stereos". And, generally, they do. The reason has more to do with how they listen than what they're listening on: musicians will mentally fill in the sound by following the notes themselves, and things like the beat, the rhythm, the tone, and the timing of the players and their instruments. It's as if they are playing the notes themselves, in their heads, and they need only the elemental cues to do so.
If you love a song, you don't have to hear it under ideal conditions to enjoy the performance. These are the kinds of things Fraunhofer concentrated on making sure remained in the mp3 after compression. It's supposed to sound good; that was the whole point, and that's why the Fraunhofer codecs succeeded, despite the royalty payments due.
All that still does not take away from the enjoyment of uncompressed formats, reproduced competently by accurate equipment, in the appropriate environment. Your car or via earbuds on the street are not those types of environments, and mp3s etc are perfectly reasonable compromises between quality and the need for reduced data footprints. There is a place for both uncompressed and compressed formats; they are not mutually exclusive.
Well, I was only referring to a specific subset of those who follow Peak Oil's logic. ... the idea of that particular group staring furiously at their furry bicycle seats was too good an image to leave out. You were supposed to laugh ...
I couldn't help it
Certainly there are others who follow Peak Oil proponents and concur with their point of view.
Were that all there was to "their arguments" I couldn't possibly have a problem with Peak Oil and it's conclusions.
Trouble is, Peak Oil only counts conventional oil that falls within a narrow definition of proven reserves and extractability.
Some 10% of the oil the US currently consumes every month comes from Canadian non-conventional oil ... oil that according to Peak Oil, simply doesn't exist. ... and every month that supplies another 15% of current US consumption.
Canada still has large amounts of conventional oil
Peak Oil ignores all non-conventional oil; Canada is currently producing from it's known non-conventional reserves, which exceed Saudi Arabia's proven conventional reserves. The US has large amounts; Venezuela has many times more than Canada, other nations also possess non-conventional reserves.
Peal Oil ignores much conventional oil that is being developed ... did you know Cuba is pumping oil these days? Neither does Peak Oil.
I've read Peak Oil's information extensively, and I also check their figures against sources like the USGS and Petroleum Institutes the world over. They get where they are by ignoring oil, plain and simple. They do not count most of the Bakken field that straddles the US/Canadian border, despite the fact that they pump that oil on the Canadian side as we speak, and sell it to US refiners. The Bakken play is all high quality conventional crude, not bitumen.
The US side, which remains essentially untapped, is estimated by the USGS to contain 8 times Saudi Arabia's known reserves. Peak OIl? According to the rules they use, this oil may as well be on Mars; using their criteria, it doesn't exist.
You can compare Peak Oil's numbers with Petroleum Institutes across the globe, with production figures for oil that someone paid a hundred bucks a barrel for ... they are not fiction. I do take the time to check out the data when someone tries to convince me of something, and I'm not Googling some nutbar or Wikipedia either. I want to see real numbers from bona fide, audited sources; peer-reviewed journals; annual reports of public companies. Yet, there is a consistent under-reporting in Peak Oil's numbers.
It's not crazy, or fear-mongering, or reckless to soberly ascertain what and where our energy needs will have to come from, and how we need to plan for any and every energy eventuality.
Clearly it won't last forever, clearly energy conservation is a good thing to do for a host of reasons that merely the fear of running out doesn't come close to addressing.
I just hate it when a group is faced with a choice between the truth and the gospel to insist on the gospel. We're big people. You don't need to stretch it.
Real scientists take the data for what it is, regardless of how that affects the predicted outcome. What's worse, is it's probably unnecessary to fudge the numbers in the first place. Yet they do, and make no mistake about it ... they know full well they do. Still trust them?
Virtually everything in a modern home, a modern hospital, a modern medicine cabinet, our modern lives are made from petroleum. The Peak Oil proponents rarely mention that most of the stuff they intend to have us use to "Go Green" is made from Oil. Their fancy CFL bulbs depend on Oil for the components. Most "Green" solutions rely on Oil-derived materials to be manufactured. The very bicycles they want us to peddle, the stroller they push, the mosquito repellant they use to keep their hippy kids free of West Nile, are all petroleum based at one component level or another.
I can't wait for the day the PETA-loving Peak Oil blabbering tree huggers realize the only oil-free option for a new bicycle seat is leather. May as well leave the fur on.
I used to use 3rd party encryption and password keeper tools, until one of the paid apps I relied on introduced a bug in an update that corrupted the encrypted data. If you are well versed in IT you probably know what that means, but for the regular folk out there I'll spell it out: Your data is unrecoverable, forever, if an encrypted file becomes corrupted even by a small amount. So, Rule Number One:
BACKUP YOUR ENCRYPTED DATA
If you use a password manager, know how to find the password file and know how to back it up, how to recover it, how to use it on another system with the same tools installed.
Bitten by that bug, where everything I could not re-create from memory was essentially gone, I looked once again at the tools the OS provided me.
Using OSX's system-wide Keychain support and utilities, I created a user keychain, set a robust password on it, and created appropriately titled secure notes. All my login credentials, all my banking info, all secure data is stored there. You can back it up, you can carry it on a USB drive and use it on another Mac, you can sync it across multiple machines. The text formatting abilities are rudimentary, but I can live with it.
It's encrypted and unusable by anyone who does not know the username and password of the owner, and isn't visible to other users. It has OS and OS-vendor level support, and that same level of troubleshooting and testing ... it works and obscure bugs, if there are any, will be found and fixed (in the case of my paid app, the developer just gave up and left us all staring at empty wallets and useless apps with unusable data).
The latest version of FileVault (10.5 or later) has had major improvements. I never had problems with FileVault on my laptop going back 7 years, but others I know have. The later version encrypts in 10MB sections, and therefore if there are issues (eg drive or data corruption), most of your data will be recoverable. It's also much faster since it only deals with changed data during certain normal operations (eg recovering free space).
I give up.
You won't read the applicable statues, or do any research yourself; you just blindly repeat your incorrect mantra. So, I'll hand it to you on a silver platter.
http://www.mceachin.com/index.php/cdn_pub_rec/criminal Consult a lawyer
http://www.canadianlegal.org/canadian_pardons.php#8 Refer to an organization that is in the business of securing pardons
http://www.johnhoward.ab.ca/PUB/A5.htm Ask the John Howard Society
The Criminal Records Act, which you refuse to either check or cannot comprehend; lately it seems more likely the latter. ... ...
"
Criminal Records Act (R.S., 1985, c. C-47)
Discharges
6.1 (1) No record of a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code that is in the custody of the Commissioner or of any department or agency of the Government of Canada shall be disclosed to any person, nor shall the existence of the record or the fact of the discharge be disclosed to any person, without the prior approval of the Minister, if
(a) more than one year has elapsed since the offender was discharged absolutely; or
(b) more than three years have elapsed since the offender was discharged on the conditions prescribed in a probation order.
Purging C.P.I.C.
(2) The Commissioner shall remove all references to a discharge under section 730 of the Criminal Code from the automated criminal conviction records retrieval system maintained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the expiration of the relevant period referred to in subsection (1). ..."
1992, c. 22, s. 6; 1995, c. 22, s. 17(E).
" ... Either a person has a criminal record, or they don't. ..." You are absolutely correct.
" ... An absolute discharge granted at the time of trial means they do NOT have a criminal record ..." You are absolutely wrong.
What does the phrase "the existence of a record" found within "The Criminal Records Act" mean to you? Apparently not the same as what it means to people who work in the administration of Justice.
Tell it to the judge, indeed. Know any? Ask him. Sounds like you do know a few lawyers. Ask one.
" ... So stop with the bullshit. ..." Well said. Can't take your own advice?
" ... Obviously criminal code convictions can (but not necessarily) result in a criminal record, but you're TOTALLY wrong in saying that summary convictions mean you will automatically have a criminal record; this is an outright lie, and another indication that you either don't know what you're talking about, or are just trolling. The court is allowed, where there is no minimum penalty, to grant an absolute discharge, which - guess what - means you don't get a criminal record. ..."
The relevant information can be found by referring to the Criminal Records Act (of Canada).
Records are kept by the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) is managed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
Upon first contact with Police, local police will create a file for their records.
If the charge is an Indictable or Hybrid Offense (can proceed by a choice between Summary Conviction or Indictment) then a temporary file will usually be forwarded to CPIC. This file is accessible only by the charging police department, and exists until further action is taken by the courts.
It will consist of a hard copy and a storage copy (microfiche, currently).
If no further action is taken by the courts, this temporary file in the CPIC database is destroyed after five years.
Local police are under no obligation to destroy their own file.
The CPIC database allows authorized personnel to access:
Vehicle Information
Criminal Records (Adult and Youth)
Dental Records and Offender Information held by the Correctional Service of Canada
Wandering and Missing persons
Motor Vehicle information specific to each Province and Territory
Records in the United States National Crime Information Centre
Once you have a conviction for an offense in the Criminal Code of Canada, you have a Criminal Record.
A Criminal Record is permanent, unless you receive a Pardon, with the exception of Absolute Discharges and Conditional Discharges, where special rules apply. They are:
If you receive an Absolute or Conditional Discharge, there is no conviction entered into CPIC.
However, there is a Criminal Record in CPIC, including the fact you were charged with the offense.
If an Absolute Discharge, all reference is removed after one year, after which it's existence cannot be disclosed.
If a Conditional Discharge, all reference is removed after three years, after which it's existence cannot be disclosed.
The above only applies to the RCMP, and to the departments and agencies of the Government of Canada.
It does not apply to the following who can none the less access CPIC:
Agencies authorized under the Young Offenders Act
Canadian Pacific Railway Police
Citizenship and Immigration Canada
Correctional Service of Canada
Department of Agriculture
Federal and Provincial ministries of the Environment
Insurance Crime Prevention Bureaus
Parks Canada
Provincial Correctional Services
Provincial Courts
Provincial Securities Commissions
Canada Customs and Revenue Agency
United States Customs
United States Immigration
All State Police
There is legislation requiring Police to submit information to CPIC with regard to Young Offenders, but there is no legislation in place that requires local police to submit criminal information to CPIC for adult offenders. Therefore, CPIC does not represent the totality of records that exist.
When Criminal Records are removed from the accessible database, they are not destroyed. They are moved to a separate record keeping system in Ottawa and kept an additional five years minimum. If your records are kept in the separate repository after being purged from CPIC, they can be accessed when fingerprints of a discharged person are found at the scene of a crime, or to discover the identity of a dead or amnesic person. That information will include the name, date of birth, and last known address.
If the discharge occoured before July 24, 1992 when newer legislation came into force, a
" ... You're so full of shit. ..." ... What an idiot. ..."
"
Well, at least now I see why you prefer to post via cut-and-paste. When you use your own words, the Tourettes' takes over.
" ... Indictments == felonies. Summary convictions == misdemeanors.
Sexual assault is a dual-mode or hybrid offense. It can be a felony or a misdemeanor. It's up to the prosecutor to decide how to proceed - I've posted links to the federal prosecutors' handbook elsewhere in this thread for those who want the gritty details. ..."
You make distinctions and conclusions that do not exist in Canadian Law.
Offenses punishable by Indictment, Offenses punishable by Summary Conviction (Part XXVII, Criminal Code of Canada), or hybrid offenses (where the prosecutor can choose between either) are all part of The Criminal Code of Canada.
All convictions under any statues of the Criminal Code of Canada, where by indictment or summary conviction result in a Criminal Record.
Appeals of decisions where the Crown proceeded by Summary Conviction are by Indictment (PART XXI APPEALS -- INDICTABLE OFFENCES, 675; 1,1)
The closest the Criminal Code ever gets to the word "misdemeanor" is when it refers to "less serious offenses" of the Criminal Code. The word "misdemeanor" never appears at any time in the Criminal Code of Canada.
It is your word, which you interpret rather freely.
Search of all acts at http://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/
" ...
Act(s) match your query for:
Text >
Results 0 - 0 of 0
Sorry no results were found matching your request. ..."
Edit Search
All this stuff about drive-by-wire failing, blaming the computer, and all that is clearly impossible.
Didn't you read the parent post? The NHTSA has investigated SIX of these computers and the controlling software, and found no issues.
" ... I saw a TV show where they interviewed people this happened to. One was on a test drive! Another recalled the smell of the brakes burning, as the motor has so much torque at 0rpm that the brakes are useless. One even put the transmission in park, to no avail. ..."
I was about to call Bullshit, when it occurred to me that you must be talking about a Prius, or some other electric car. Conventional (internal combustion) engines develop relatively little torque at low RPM and none at 0 RPM. Exactly where the torque peak happens is mostly a function of engine event timing, but even vehicles that develop maximum torque at relatively low RPM (tow trucks, heavy vehicles, diesel engines, etc) are still moving fairly well if equipped with auto transmissions (manuals don't normally have a Park function).
As for putting the transmission in Park, with a conventional drivetrain this is very difficult to do, in most cases near impossible or truly impossible, as there is a pin that locks the planetary gear-set (or some other moving part directly connected to the output) when in Park that would have to be sheared off if the engine was rotating at any appreciable legal (street, i.e. less than highway) speed, at moderate speeds it probably wouldn't find the corresponding hole necessary for engagement, and compounding the problem, generally the linkages simply are not strong enough, even if you are, to pull this off by manipulating the shift lever ... something will bend instead. If you do pull it off, you will damage the transmission, and the vehicle will from that point on roll when stopped and in Park unless the parking brake is engaged. It's not a cheap fix.
But, energized electric engines do develop maximum torque (potential) at rest, falling as the motor speed increases, although not to anywhere near zero within the operational RPM. (Horsepower increases, because Horsepower is torque x RPM, and therefore higher RPM tends to give higher horsepower values).
[Hot tip: torque is always equal to horsepower at 5252 rpm; it's one way to describe the formula, and horsepower is a calculated value derived from measured torque; we don't actually measure horsepower itself directly. If the HP & Torque vs RPM chart you are looking at doesn't cross at 5250 (the practical point, given that the scale probably divisible by 10), it's not drawn properly or possibly is simply bogus].
An electric motor driven car also may have a non-mechanical transmission shift lever; you might be able to put it into a Park position at a moving speed. However, the Park pin (if there was an actual transmission; electric motors can drive wheels directly and/or use electric means to bring the drive motor to a stop); almost certainly would not engage until the control system decided it was appropriate; in essence "Park' would not actually be "Park" until the vehicle was at rest. As you implied, putting it in Park could conceivably do nothing.
So, what you didn't say (Electric car) makes sense of your post.
XEROX PARC gave Apple full reign to implement anything they saw, and Apple Engineers had open access to PARC, making several visits.
PARC was not charged by XEROX to bring products to market.
When Apple decided to implement ideas first seen at PARC, in particular GUI first seen in the Lisa and later, Macintosh, they gave XEROX stock as consideration for value received.
XEROX was okay with the deal 100%.
XEROX did try to re-open the deal by suing Apple over GUI implementation, but only after Apple sued Microsoft for taking elements of System7 into Windows when a licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft covered only the GUI elements in System6.
After Apple's suit against Microsoft went nowhere, XEROX dropped the suit against Apple, since the value of the GUI was already established by the courts as, essentially, not much.
" ... BTW, the maximum sentence for sexual assault [rapereliefshelter.bc.ca] when tried as a misdemeanor in Canada is $2,000 + 6 months. ..."
There is no misdemeanor sexual assault charge in Canada. You are referring to a Criminal Code (in the US, Felony) procedure by Summary Conviction. I could go on, but I'm done. You don't know what you're talking about, and you aren't on topic.
" ... Truth be told the only reason why I won't buy a Mac is the price of the hardware, ..."
Yeah, we know.
" ... Yeah Apple needs the Mac Clones again ..."
I think you meant that you need Mac clones again, to save money and get the best the world offers, for as little as possible. A full install boxed set of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard sells retail for $29.00.
Apple, on the other hand, relies on hardware sales to carry on it's business. I'm pretty sure you, I and Apple can figure out where this is going to lead. You won't be an Apple customer; and two of the three parties mentioned are OK with that.
Why don't you run Linux on generic x86 hardware; I have and still do it. It does a great job of the work I assign it; and it's within the budget you are willing to commit. Is there something wrong with a solution that works for you and meets your budget conditions? I fail to see a problem here.
But, Linux doesn't do a great job on the work I assign my OSX box; that's why I have the OSX box.
I recently went out and bought a used PPC 1.42 GHz Mini for under $300; the Intel boxes, due to pipeline issues with the architecture, were choking on certain audio tasks, which must be done in order and in near-real time. The PPC chip might be slower, but I can assign a batch downsampling process on 10,000 high resolution (24/96) audio files, and not one resulting file will have a data dropout or waveform error a week later (actually, 8 days, 24/7, unattended).
A multicore Intel machine with 2~4x the RAM pulls the same job off in about 5 days. But, no Intel machine, OSX or Windows (the necessary tools are not available on Linux) that I'm aware of has so far pulled that particular job off without errors; errors you have to spend 40,000 minutes listening to discover, and more time to correct, at $60/hr.
Life's too short. One job, at 3 cents a minute = total hardware outlay. Done, and done right.
You wouldn't want to be using OSX to write eMails, surf the web, play with a database, would you? Use your Linux box for that.