LionMage:
I'm shocked that nobody else checked TFA to verify your claims; even more shocked that you got modded +5 Informative when your comments are actually factually false. Actually it looks like I'm victim of the "mind-bogglingly complex workaround" that the summary talked about. I misread the table and thought that you had to put in each value listed there to allow a specific blocked format, rather than putting in a value and all the lower values were automatically included.
If you read the knowledge base article, you'll see that the default allowed old-version goes back to before even Word 95. PowerPoint 95, but not 97, is blocked. It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point. Intrestingly enough, it looks like this update blocks ALL versions of files saved by Word for the Mac. It even blocks the most current version of Word for the Mac, Word 2004 for Mac.
Hmm, can anyone say anti-competitive abuse of a monopoly? Yes, I know there are some alternatives to Word but I've had nothing but odd problems when I use Open Office or Apple's Pages. In the business world you are pretty much required to send people Word documents, even if you are sending them a resume. If you don't use Word you are playing russian roulette with your file, maybe it will work, maybe there will be some odd issue like the page headers not printing properly.
I really wish we could all get on the same page and come up with a good, highly accepted, replacement format to Microsoft Word and Excel. I know that alternative formats are being worked on but they all look like they have a snowball's chance in hell at getting accepted over the Word document format.
I can promise one thing. If a music company stops selling music through the iTunes Store then I'm gonna stop buying their music altogether.
Before the iTunes Store opened up I had pretty much stopped buying music. I was just too busy to take the time to go seek out music at a store and most of the time I wouldn't remember what I wanted when I got there. Once the iTunes Store opened it was so easy, I'd hear something on TV or on the web, go over to the iTunes store and buy it immediately. I quickly doubled my music collection because it was so simple, inexpensive, and immediate.
Right now, if the music isn't on the iTunes store then I'll never bother to get it.
I know I'm not alone in this, a lot of people's shopping habits are similar to mine. Just look at the success of Amazon.com and other online retailers. People want stuff quickly and they want to buy it as soon as they think of it. The music store in the mall will still be around but it definitely has much less impact on consumers than it used to.
Any company which doesn't buy into the iTunes Store is just shutting itself off of a huge source of income. Apple's terms are not that harsh and you'll lose a lot more money by being greedy and leaving the iTunes than you'll ever gain by going off on your own.
Changing a non-public interface is one thing. But it sounds like in this case that Apple went out of its way to add the hash, in order to lock out non-iTunes programs specifically. Or maybe the code to put the hash in the file was there for a long time and accidently got turned on with the last compile of iTunes. We just don't know. You'd have to ask Apple if this is new policy of theirs in order to be sure.
Constitutionally speaking, your right to free speech ends where it steps on someone else's right. Just like my right to swing my arm ends before it connects with your nose.
The classic example is why you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- the real reason is that it intrudes on the private property owner's rights to operate his business in a peaceful manner. Ahh no, the real reason is because shouting "fire" in a crowded theater was judged to be an imminent lawless action. The act of shouting about a nonexistent fire in a crowded area is likely to cause a riot and damage to property and people. In that case it would not be considered free speech but would instead be treated as a crime.
You can shout whatever you want on private property, unless you are threatening violence or performing some other lawless action all the property owner can do is ask you to leave and then call the police to have you removed if you won't leave.
My arm-chair understand of Entanglement suggests that it should violate causality. Quantum entanglement can't violate causality. The reason for this is that entanglement can't transmit information alone, it needs to be performed in conjunction with a classical, non-entangled information channel. This is explained in the No-Communication Theorem. It boils down to the fact that you can't tell the difference between random fluctuations in the particles and the signal you are trying to transmit, in order to separate the two you need to transmit some additional information by classical means. Take a look at this discussion on quantum teleportation.
The end result is that information transmitted through entanglement travels at the fastest speed allowed by conventional means. Until we create a warp drive that limit is the speed of light.
If you read down the link that I posted then you'll see this bit of text:
The language "not being generally known to and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by other persons" does not require that information be generally known to the public for trade secret rights to be lost. If the principal persons who can obtain economic benefit from information are aware of it, there is no trade secret. A method of casting metal, for example, may be unknown to the general public but readily known within the foundry industry. This means that if the material is generally known to an industry then it is not considered to be a trade secret. As a chemist I can tell you that it is pretty unlikely that Draeger, the manufacturer of the device, has come up with a novel way of testing for ethanol. The device uses infrared spectroscopy and oxidation by a fuel cell to determine the amount of ethanol and both methods are generally well understood testing methods by the chemical industry.
The likelihood is that Draeger is just using the words "trade secret" to obfuscate the operation of their device to head off lawsuits.
Then what DOES make something a trade secret? According to the Uniform Trade Secrets Act:
(4) "Trade secret" means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that: (i) derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use, and (ii) is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy. Now in this case the algorithms in the breathalyzer code are generally known to the rest of the industry so the likelihood that the code contains trade secrets is pretty low. If the breathalyzer used a revolutionary, and probably patentable, method to measure the blood alcohol level then the code would be covered under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and other relevant civil law.
It's very likely that the breathalyzer manufacturer is just using the concept of a trade secret in order to obstruct any potential court cases from using the code to nullify the breath tests. In the case of this code it seems that it is deeply flawed and the results will very likely be thrown out of court.
Oh sure, that's why I didn't bother getting into how you could use the command-line to monitor the computer. You could also do it through VNC or something similar and it also wouldn't be hard to throw together a simple keylogger or whatever.
That's one of the nice things about Mac OS X, it leverages a lot of technologies that can be fit together in novel ways to solve problems. I can't tell you how many quick and dirty Automater/Applescript/command-line solutions I've thrown together to solve tasks.
OS X really sucks for kids as my boss has just discovered. He wanted to run some spyware software to monitor his 13 year old daughter. There are some child monitoring solutions out for Mac OS X. First of all Leopard will have some nifty integrated features for child safety. For some solutions for Mac OS X 10.0 to 10.4 take a look here.
There are also a lot of tools available in the command-line environment, as well as open source software that can be compiled for Mac OS X. I'll leave it to the user to hunt them down because I haven't used any of them for monitoring.
Come to the event with a big sign illustrating your message and objections to his status as a distinguished alum. Have a group of students do the same as well as boo and chant before/during/after the event. Engage in civil disobedience by bringing a notebook and helping friends make backups of their own DVDs in his plain sight. It's one thing to have a meaningful demonstration, it's another to attempt to censor someone by being loud during a speech.
Loud and obnoxious demonstrations often do no good or even harm the cause that you are campaigning for. The personage on stage will put you further on the "pay no mind" list, Joe and Jill average will treat your cause with disgust at being so rude, and you stand a good chance of getting kicked out/arrested and thus being put out of the picture.
If you really want to make a difference then organize some public debates and invite the press, write up some short (and cordial) position papers and distribute them, write an article or two and submit it to local and national news organizations, and so on. If you are reasonable, calm, and assertive then you will garner much more attention than some loud, obnoxious protest. You will also get much more sympathy and understanding from the people not directly involved in your cause.
It's so easy to raise an unruly mob, that takes almost no dedication to a cause. A true proponent of a cause uses methods that act at a steady, long-term pace even though it takes more effort to achieve them.
I mean what's your whole purpose with a demonstration? Do you hope that you'll be such a pain in the ass that the guy will suddenly realize the error of his ways, give up his cushy job and become a monk in Tibet? You know that no matter what you do you won't turn him over to your cause so easily so instead work on the neutral people in a more calm manner. If you win them over with reason then your cause will be much harder to ignore.
Yeah this is another common example, the reason I didn't use it is because it doesn't show the change over time as clearly and someone might point to the center of the balloon as the void which was mentioned in the article. I thought that by using the graph that I described I might convey the idea more clearly.
It can be a complicated concept to grasp if you aren't looking at it correctly. I would say that the raisin bread model might be the most clear example but I didn't think to bring it up.
Draw a line from the center through each dot and then place another dot along each at two inches from the center. Oops, I left one word out although what I meant should be apparent from the context:
"Draw a line from the center through each dot and then place another dot along each LINE at two inches from the center."
If there was a Big Bang, then all matter would have emanated from that single point in the universe and moved outward, leaving a huge hole of nothing. This site could simply be where the Big Bang occured. The problem is that the way the universe is expanding from the Big Bang (at least the way we theorize it) means there isn't a single spot that you can point to and say "there's the center".
I'll simplify it a bit so that it's easily illustrated. Suppose you have a sheet of paper and in the center of the sheet is the origin point of the universe, put a dot there. Now place a bunch of dots evenly spread on a one inch circle centered on that dot. Draw a line from the center through each dot and then place another dot along each at two inches from the center. Repeat this at three inches and so on. You should have several rings of dots centered around the central dot.
Each ring of points would represent a snapshot in time of the universe expanding. The one inch circle might represent 1 billion years, two inches 2 billion years, and so on. Lets say the outermost ring represents the present. You'll notice that with each ring there is no gap that wasn't part of your original placement of dots. Since the expansion is over time your center is at time zero and doesn't show up on any single ring.
This is a simple two dimensional graph of a four dimensional topic. You have a one dimensional universe (each ring) which expands outward (the second dimension, representing time). Our universe is at least four dimensions, 3 physical and one temporal. What we see in the actual universe is that every point is getting further from each point in physical space. This type of expansion doesn't allow for there to be a center in the physical dimensions, rather there is a center in the temporal dimension that we don't see with any snapshot of the expansion.
The hole described in this article is most likely due to an uneven distribution or influence upon the universe's expansion. It would be similar to if the initial dots on your graph had a large gap in them, or if the lines you drew outwards weren't completely straight.
You must be new here. "Fixed it for you" is a common/. joke similar to "you mispelled...." in which someone "hacks up" (to use your terminology) a statement - usually in a funny way, but often making a point. It's almost satire. Ok, maybe that's a stretch. Oh, I've been here quite a while and have seen the method before. Misquoting someone is never funny, you either correctly quote them and respond to the ACTUAL statement or you don't quote at all. Then again I've worked for several newspapers as a writer, copy editor, and layout editor and I've had proper quotation and attribution of sources beat into me.
I would say that misquoting someone in this fashion can be considered to be a form of Straw Man fallacy. No matter how innocent it may seem that's no way to have a proper discussion.
Yeah, yeah, stick up my butt and all. Being funny on Slashdot is like shooting fish in a barrel, it's not even a contest. Say something off-color and you'll be at +5 Funny in moments. I usually shoot for a real, compelling, and spirited discussion because that's a far more interesting way to spend your time here.
He "fixed it" from your way too optimistic scenario to a far more realistic one. They could just as easily take away your computer, especially if it was the computer you used to commit the offense. That's no fix, that's a hack job. I meant what I said and trying to be "cool" by putting words in my mouth is no way to make a point.
Yes, the condition might be that you either run Windows or you don't get internet access. In my case I wouldn't be able to run Windows, which is exactly what I said. No need to be cute and misquote me, any intelligent person would be able to draw that conclusion based on what I was talking about.
In my case if they demanded I run Windows I would try to make the argument that it is not possible for me to do so and that there was no reasonable way for me to fulfill their conditions. It may or may not make a difference but it is a tack to try, which is the exact point I was getting at.
Honestly, if people want to have an proper discussion then just respond directly to the posts and don't do some half-assed hack job. Come right out and we can talk like intelligent people.
Ahh, this makes me glad that I'm still using a PowerPC Macintosh since it can't run Windows directly. Yeah it can run it in emulation but only under the regular Mac OS operating system and there's no way the emulated Windows environment can determine what's going on in the main Mac OS. They can tell me to run Windows all they want, unless they buy me a brand new computer it ain't happening!
Of course eventually I'll upgrade to an Intel Macintosh and those can run Windows directly.
Hmm couldn't he just get a live Linux CD and boot his monitored computer using that? The government can install Windows and monitoring software all they want, there's no way a monitoring program can work if it's not being run. Of course if he is caught using the internet and the monitoring software isn't running then he would be in worse trouble...
I hear people misrepresent and misunderstand this (admittedly non-obvious) consequence of the Nyquist Theorum all the time, and it bugs the heck out of me. Strictly speaking, the NT applies to digital signals (i.e., perfect square waves); applying it to analog signals is useful, but introduces aliasing (phasing) effects. Actually the Nyquist Theorem holds for all signals but what you need to realize is that sampling is only half the job. If you simply plot the samples then you aren't going to get a good fit for the higher frequency components, that's why the rest of the job is how you reconstruct the sampled signal. Typically this means you use something similar to the Whittaker-Shannon interpolation formula.
If your signal is bandlimited and the sampling rate is at least double the highest frequency sampled (you have used a low-pass filter before the sampling was performed) then the Whittaker-Shannon interpolation will faithfully reproduce your original signal. This is all theoretical and of course there will be some degradation in the real world due to stuff like imperfect filters and (nearly) nonlinear components in the original signal.
Your case of a square wave is actually one of the tougher signals to sample because a square wave consists of an infinite amount of odd sinusoidal harmonics. These harmonics are filtered by the low-pass filter and when the signal is reconstructed the square wave will be approximated by a finite number of sinusoidal waves. The good news is that true square waves are very rare in music and most "real-world" signals so it's not a huge worry.
The aliasing you are talking about is not an artifact of the Nyquist Theorem but rather not applying it properly and failing to properly bandlimit the signal before sampling.
I'll totally agree with that, everyone always says that Steve Wozniak is a great, easygoing guy. Howard Roark certainly doesn't come across as being anywhere near as pleasant as Woz does.
Aside from that they really do seem similar, at least when you consider their outlook on the projects they undertake.
After reading this article it dawned on me - Steve Wozniak is a real-life Howard Roark. Woz matches pretty closely with the fictional character: they both have uncompromising principles, they are both creative geniuses, they both use the materials and techniques of their craft to achieve creations far beyond their peers.
Yet the statement "it's impossible to represent anything other than a square wave at the nyquist frequency which is exactly 1/2 the sampling rate" is correct. He is trying to speak about the phase distortion inherhent to the sampling process -- while you can accurately represent the frequency of a signal close to the sample rate, its amplitude is subject to severe filtering effects as a function of the phase of the signal and its frequency. Right but that's a matter of the anti-aliasing filter which is used before the actual sampling. You are perfectly correct that you will get phase distortion as a result of filtering but that's a complex subject in and of itself. When you start to discuss theory there will always be some break between the theory and its implementation in the real world. A perfect lowpass filter will have no phase distortion, rolloff, or ripple. This is great in theory but of course in reality you always fall short a little. That's why researchers have developed several methods of dealing with these filtering artifacts.
Lets face it, every way we record information is imperfect. Even if you are standing in front of a live band performing you are not getting EXACTLY the sounds that are being produced by the instruments. What we have to live with is the best approximations that time, money, and physics permit. I'm not saying that we shouldn't continue to stretch the envelope with higher sampling rates, new sampling algorithms, better filters, and so on. We absolutely should try to improve our listening experiences but we also have to be realistic and understand how to properly evaluate sound quality. The complexities of signal theory are difficult even for experts in the field and certainly an informal discussion on Slashdot is going to be fraught with mistakes, I know I've made a couple in the current discussion.
Ahh, I finally did see where the square wave was mentioned. Somehow I skipped over the mention of it in the statement I was correcting. In the exact case he was mentioning there would be some change in the actual sound since the square wave would get approximated into a sine wave. However, as I mentioned, you really don't come across square waves in most music. It's a bit of a stretch to worry greatly about square waves when we are talking about acoustic sampling but it is a case that would be difficult to reproduce perfectly accurately.
Fortunately if the square wave was combined with a decent number of other elements then the approximation into a sine wave or two really wouldn't be that noticeable.
Wow. Talk about missing the point. If the brain activity is different for the AAC file then obviously the listener is not hearing the music the way it was intended to be heard. There is no argument here to be made as to which one is preferred. The one which accurately represents the artists intent is clearly preferred. I did not miss the point at all, tests such as brain-wave activity are still not directly relevant.
First off why is the artists intent preferred? You are the one who bought the music, if the encoding makes the music more enjoyable then clearly you should prefer that. The artist might not like it but he's not the one currently listening to the music, you are.
Secondly it is possible to have differences in sound and still prefer the modified version. For example many people make use of equalizers which change how the audio sounds, some people might prefer more bass and so they boost the base, and so on. In another example a lot of people say they prefer the "warm" sound of records, that "warm" sound is a harmonic distortion of the originally recorded signal. Does this mean that the people who like records shouldn't be allowed to enjoy them because they don't EXACTLY reproduce the original recording?
The key to any presentation of music is whether or not people are enjoying it. Brain-wave activity just isn't a decent metric of this phenomenon. The results are too subject to false interpretation and no matter what they would need to be correlated with subjective measures for brain activity to become relevant. It is much easier to simply poll a decent-sized sample of people as to whether they enjoy the music or not. That is the final determination, you bought the music so what's the most enjoyable for you to listen to. If enough people enjoy a format just about the same as another format then any differences in the format are moot.
There may or may not be differences in the way people perceive an AAC file verses a PCM file verses a record. The question becomes are those differences in perception enough to be relevant? Does any tradeoffs in quality overcome advantages in portability and price? The whole situation is a lot more complex than what encoding produces the same brain activity as the original recording.
Where the grandparent was wrong, and you are perhaps not the clearest in explanation, is that the Nyquist theorem holds if you have perfect reconstruction; i.e. a perfect lowpass filter. I'm but a humble chemist and my instrumental analysis was decently enough long ago that I'm a bit creaky on some of the signal theory. You're totally right that I did sketch over the fact that you need to have a low-pass filter at half the sampling frequency in order to adhere to the Nyquist theorem.
I believe that we were talking in terms of sine waves so a signal that has a frequency less than 22.05 kHz (and it MUST be less than that) which is sampled at 44.1 kHz should have no aliasing. Because the signal is a perfect sine wave it should be able to be reproduced faithfully from that sample without a filter.
A square wave at that frequency and sample rate would have some problems being reproduced because as you said it is composed of an infinite amount of sine wave harmonics. Since these would be filtered out with a low-pass filter you would end up with some pretty crude approximations of the square wave if you attempted to reproduce it. I believe the worst case would be that the square wave would be reproduced as a sine wave if it was at half or higher than half of the frequency of the low-pass filter.
Fortunately with music and speech you very rarely have perfect square, triangle, or sawtooth waves - all of which are problematic. Because there are very few true "sharp" edges to the waveforms most music and speech is fairly nicely reproduced for the human ear by a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and a low -pass filter of 22.05 kHz.
Slashdot Mirror
But hey, at least I ATTEMPTED to RTFA!
Hmm, can anyone say anti-competitive abuse of a monopoly? Yes, I know there are some alternatives to Word but I've had nothing but odd problems when I use Open Office or Apple's Pages. In the business world you are pretty much required to send people Word documents, even if you are sending them a resume. If you don't use Word you are playing russian roulette with your file, maybe it will work, maybe there will be some odd issue like the page headers not printing properly.
I really wish we could all get on the same page and come up with a good, highly accepted, replacement format to Microsoft Word and Excel. I know that alternative formats are being worked on but they all look like they have a snowball's chance in hell at getting accepted over the Word document format.
I can promise one thing. If a music company stops selling music through the iTunes Store then I'm gonna stop buying their music altogether.
Before the iTunes Store opened up I had pretty much stopped buying music. I was just too busy to take the time to go seek out music at a store and most of the time I wouldn't remember what I wanted when I got there. Once the iTunes Store opened it was so easy, I'd hear something on TV or on the web, go over to the iTunes store and buy it immediately. I quickly doubled my music collection because it was so simple, inexpensive, and immediate.
Right now, if the music isn't on the iTunes store then I'll never bother to get it.
I know I'm not alone in this, a lot of people's shopping habits are similar to mine. Just look at the success of Amazon.com and other online retailers. People want stuff quickly and they want to buy it as soon as they think of it. The music store in the mall will still be around but it definitely has much less impact on consumers than it used to.
Any company which doesn't buy into the iTunes Store is just shutting itself off of a huge source of income. Apple's terms are not that harsh and you'll lose a lot more money by being greedy and leaving the iTunes than you'll ever gain by going off on your own.
The classic example is why you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theatre -- the real reason is that it intrudes on the private property owner's rights to operate his business in a peaceful manner. Ahh no, the real reason is because shouting "fire" in a crowded theater was judged to be an imminent lawless action. The act of shouting about a nonexistent fire in a crowded area is likely to cause a riot and damage to property and people. In that case it would not be considered free speech but would instead be treated as a crime.
You can shout whatever you want on private property, unless you are threatening violence or performing some other lawless action all the property owner can do is ask you to leave and then call the police to have you removed if you won't leave.
The end result is that information transmitted through entanglement travels at the fastest speed allowed by conventional means. Until we create a warp drive that limit is the speed of light.
The likelihood is that Draeger is just using the words "trade secret" to obfuscate the operation of their device to head off lawsuits.
(i) derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to, and not being readily ascertainable by proper means by, other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use, and
(ii) is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy. Now in this case the algorithms in the breathalyzer code are generally known to the rest of the industry so the likelihood that the code contains trade secrets is pretty low. If the breathalyzer used a revolutionary, and probably patentable, method to measure the blood alcohol level then the code would be covered under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act and other relevant civil law.
It's very likely that the breathalyzer manufacturer is just using the concept of a trade secret in order to obstruct any potential court cases from using the code to nullify the breath tests. In the case of this code it seems that it is deeply flawed and the results will very likely be thrown out of court.
Oh sure, that's why I didn't bother getting into how you could use the command-line to monitor the computer. You could also do it through VNC or something similar and it also wouldn't be hard to throw together a simple keylogger or whatever.
That's one of the nice things about Mac OS X, it leverages a lot of technologies that can be fit together in novel ways to solve problems. I can't tell you how many quick and dirty Automater/Applescript/command-line solutions I've thrown together to solve tasks.
There are also a lot of tools available in the command-line environment, as well as open source software that can be compiled for Mac OS X. I'll leave it to the user to hunt them down because I haven't used any of them for monitoring.
Loud and obnoxious demonstrations often do no good or even harm the cause that you are campaigning for. The personage on stage will put you further on the "pay no mind" list, Joe and Jill average will treat your cause with disgust at being so rude, and you stand a good chance of getting kicked out/arrested and thus being put out of the picture.
If you really want to make a difference then organize some public debates and invite the press, write up some short (and cordial) position papers and distribute them, write an article or two and submit it to local and national news organizations, and so on. If you are reasonable, calm, and assertive then you will garner much more attention than some loud, obnoxious protest. You will also get much more sympathy and understanding from the people not directly involved in your cause.
It's so easy to raise an unruly mob, that takes almost no dedication to a cause. A true proponent of a cause uses methods that act at a steady, long-term pace even though it takes more effort to achieve them.
I mean what's your whole purpose with a demonstration? Do you hope that you'll be such a pain in the ass that the guy will suddenly realize the error of his ways, give up his cushy job and become a monk in Tibet? You know that no matter what you do you won't turn him over to your cause so easily so instead work on the neutral people in a more calm manner. If you win them over with reason then your cause will be much harder to ignore.
Yeah this is another common example, the reason I didn't use it is because it doesn't show the change over time as clearly and someone might point to the center of the balloon as the void which was mentioned in the article. I thought that by using the graph that I described I might convey the idea more clearly.
It can be a complicated concept to grasp if you aren't looking at it correctly. I would say that the raisin bread model might be the most clear example but I didn't think to bring it up.
"Draw a line from the center through each dot and then place another dot along each LINE at two inches from the center."
I'll simplify it a bit so that it's easily illustrated. Suppose you have a sheet of paper and in the center of the sheet is the origin point of the universe, put a dot there. Now place a bunch of dots evenly spread on a one inch circle centered on that dot. Draw a line from the center through each dot and then place another dot along each at two inches from the center. Repeat this at three inches and so on. You should have several rings of dots centered around the central dot.
Each ring of points would represent a snapshot in time of the universe expanding. The one inch circle might represent 1 billion years, two inches 2 billion years, and so on. Lets say the outermost ring represents the present. You'll notice that with each ring there is no gap that wasn't part of your original placement of dots. Since the expansion is over time your center is at time zero and doesn't show up on any single ring.
This is a simple two dimensional graph of a four dimensional topic. You have a one dimensional universe (each ring) which expands outward (the second dimension, representing time). Our universe is at least four dimensions, 3 physical and one temporal. What we see in the actual universe is that every point is getting further from each point in physical space. This type of expansion doesn't allow for there to be a center in the physical dimensions, rather there is a center in the temporal dimension that we don't see with any snapshot of the expansion.
The hole described in this article is most likely due to an uneven distribution or influence upon the universe's expansion. It would be similar to if the initial dots on your graph had a large gap in them, or if the lines you drew outwards weren't completely straight.
I would say that misquoting someone in this fashion can be considered to be a form of Straw Man fallacy. No matter how innocent it may seem that's no way to have a proper discussion.
Yeah, yeah, stick up my butt and all. Being funny on Slashdot is like shooting fish in a barrel, it's not even a contest. Say something off-color and you'll be at +5 Funny in moments. I usually shoot for a real, compelling, and spirited discussion because that's a far more interesting way to spend your time here.
Yes, the condition might be that you either run Windows or you don't get internet access. In my case I wouldn't be able to run Windows, which is exactly what I said. No need to be cute and misquote me, any intelligent person would be able to draw that conclusion based on what I was talking about.
In my case if they demanded I run Windows I would try to make the argument that it is not possible for me to do so and that there was no reasonable way for me to fulfill their conditions. It may or may not make a difference but it is a tack to try, which is the exact point I was getting at.
Honestly, if people want to have an proper discussion then just respond directly to the posts and don't do some half-assed hack job. Come right out and we can talk like intelligent people.
Fixed what? I can't see where I said anything like that at all.
Maybe you should go back and re-read what I actually said?
Ahh, this makes me glad that I'm still using a PowerPC Macintosh since it can't run Windows directly. Yeah it can run it in emulation but only under the regular Mac OS operating system and there's no way the emulated Windows environment can determine what's going on in the main Mac OS. They can tell me to run Windows all they want, unless they buy me a brand new computer it ain't happening!
Of course eventually I'll upgrade to an Intel Macintosh and those can run Windows directly.
Hmm couldn't he just get a live Linux CD and boot his monitored computer using that? The government can install Windows and monitoring software all they want, there's no way a monitoring program can work if it's not being run. Of course if he is caught using the internet and the monitoring software isn't running then he would be in worse trouble...
If your signal is bandlimited and the sampling rate is at least double the highest frequency sampled (you have used a low-pass filter before the sampling was performed) then the Whittaker-Shannon interpolation will faithfully reproduce your original signal. This is all theoretical and of course there will be some degradation in the real world due to stuff like imperfect filters and (nearly) nonlinear components in the original signal.
Your case of a square wave is actually one of the tougher signals to sample because a square wave consists of an infinite amount of odd sinusoidal harmonics. These harmonics are filtered by the low-pass filter and when the signal is reconstructed the square wave will be approximated by a finite number of sinusoidal waves. The good news is that true square waves are very rare in music and most "real-world" signals so it's not a huge worry.
The aliasing you are talking about is not an artifact of the Nyquist Theorem but rather not applying it properly and failing to properly bandlimit the signal before sampling.
I'll totally agree with that, everyone always says that Steve Wozniak is a great, easygoing guy. Howard Roark certainly doesn't come across as being anywhere near as pleasant as Woz does.
Aside from that they really do seem similar, at least when you consider their outlook on the projects they undertake.
After reading this article it dawned on me - Steve Wozniak is a real-life Howard Roark. Woz matches pretty closely with the fictional character: they both have uncompromising principles, they are both creative geniuses, they both use the materials and techniques of their craft to achieve creations far beyond their peers.
I wonder how Woz would feel about the comparison.
Lets face it, every way we record information is imperfect. Even if you are standing in front of a live band performing you are not getting EXACTLY the sounds that are being produced by the instruments. What we have to live with is the best approximations that time, money, and physics permit. I'm not saying that we shouldn't continue to stretch the envelope with higher sampling rates, new sampling algorithms, better filters, and so on. We absolutely should try to improve our listening experiences but we also have to be realistic and understand how to properly evaluate sound quality. The complexities of signal theory are difficult even for experts in the field and certainly an informal discussion on Slashdot is going to be fraught with mistakes, I know I've made a couple in the current discussion.
Ahh, I finally did see where the square wave was mentioned. Somehow I skipped over the mention of it in the statement I was correcting. In the exact case he was mentioning there would be some change in the actual sound since the square wave would get approximated into a sine wave. However, as I mentioned, you really don't come across square waves in most music. It's a bit of a stretch to worry greatly about square waves when we are talking about acoustic sampling but it is a case that would be difficult to reproduce perfectly accurately.
Fortunately if the square wave was combined with a decent number of other elements then the approximation into a sine wave or two really wouldn't be that noticeable.
First off why is the artists intent preferred? You are the one who bought the music, if the encoding makes the music more enjoyable then clearly you should prefer that. The artist might not like it but he's not the one currently listening to the music, you are.
Secondly it is possible to have differences in sound and still prefer the modified version. For example many people make use of equalizers which change how the audio sounds, some people might prefer more bass and so they boost the base, and so on. In another example a lot of people say they prefer the "warm" sound of records, that "warm" sound is a harmonic distortion of the originally recorded signal. Does this mean that the people who like records shouldn't be allowed to enjoy them because they don't EXACTLY reproduce the original recording?
The key to any presentation of music is whether or not people are enjoying it. Brain-wave activity just isn't a decent metric of this phenomenon. The results are too subject to false interpretation and no matter what they would need to be correlated with subjective measures for brain activity to become relevant. It is much easier to simply poll a decent-sized sample of people as to whether they enjoy the music or not. That is the final determination, you bought the music so what's the most enjoyable for you to listen to. If enough people enjoy a format just about the same as another format then any differences in the format are moot.
There may or may not be differences in the way people perceive an AAC file verses a PCM file verses a record. The question becomes are those differences in perception enough to be relevant? Does any tradeoffs in quality overcome advantages in portability and price? The whole situation is a lot more complex than what encoding produces the same brain activity as the original recording.
I believe that we were talking in terms of sine waves so a signal that has a frequency less than 22.05 kHz (and it MUST be less than that) which is sampled at 44.1 kHz should have no aliasing. Because the signal is a perfect sine wave it should be able to be reproduced faithfully from that sample without a filter.
A square wave at that frequency and sample rate would have some problems being reproduced because as you said it is composed of an infinite amount of sine wave harmonics. Since these would be filtered out with a low-pass filter you would end up with some pretty crude approximations of the square wave if you attempted to reproduce it. I believe the worst case would be that the square wave would be reproduced as a sine wave if it was at half or higher than half of the frequency of the low-pass filter.
Fortunately with music and speech you very rarely have perfect square, triangle, or sawtooth waves - all of which are problematic. Because there are very few true "sharp" edges to the waveforms most music and speech is fairly nicely reproduced for the human ear by a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz and a low -pass filter of 22.05 kHz.