Actually, the main function of the UK Data Protection Act is to keep the European Commission happy about UK civil liberties while in reality allowing large companies and the Government to keep whatever information they like about you. There are few restrictions on their collection of data. All they have to do is to sign up to say they are collecting data, and whether they are likely to give it to other people. The Commissioner is then made to operate in a resource-starved little enclave with no real power at all. Meanwhile, in the interests of the said "Data protection" companies are being persuaded to have ever more secretive internal processes - so your chance of knowing what is actually going on gets less.
I'm not just writing this to bash the UK. Recently I heard from someone who had asked for their records from Intrum Justicia (a fancy name for a debt collection and credit rating agency based in several EU states.) The information stored on their record and used as the basis for a credit rating was utterly misleading - it had collected information about everyone known to have lived at their last three addresses, one of which was a student lodging. When asked, the Data Protection Agency eventually replied that yes, they had constant complaints about this company but unless you had vast legal resources there was nothing that could be done. Unless legal systems are changed to provide pro bono representation to anyone who has a prima facie case that companies are collecting bad data about them, this will continue.
While on fanciful things that will not happen, it would be nice if companies whose function is to collect data about people had to refer to this on all their printed materials, advertising etc. so that people became aware of just how many of these organisations there are.
No. The Onion is not a parody any more, because it is now an original creation in its own right. Furthermore, it is the brilliant riposte to Europeans who claim that Americans do not understand irony.
Do you really want to hang out with people with exactly the same interests? To me, being a sheep has never looked hugely attractive, even leaving aside the words "lamb chops".
I'm fortunate to work and live with a group of people with whom I have just enough interests in common. And, despite the obsolete sexism and general lack of PC, I rather liked Ogden Nash's observation that it didn't hurt for husband and wife to be a little incompatible, provided he had income and she was pattable. How do we analyse for this?
Quite right. I am the only real person posting on Slashdot. Everything else is just made up by the AI programs running on the server.
All that first post stuff - obviously not produced by sentient beings Exception:
java.lang.AI.ForbiddenRevelationException
java.lang.AI.ForbiddenRevelationException:
at com.Minsky.AI.ApparentHumanBehavior (443)
at com.Minsky.AI.RandomPostingEngine (93189)
It reminds me of the urban myth of the expensive IBM upgrade that consisted solely of adding a jumper on the clock subsystem.
Seriously, though, what gives? Is the only real difference between dual and single processing jumper controlled or is the decision made on the basis of testing - in which case, what might go wrong if you mod these things to run as dual processors? Even given prevailing levels of cynicism about marketing departments, I would have thought that the potential for chip sales if dual processor boards became more common, would outweigh the loss of margins on the small existing DP business.
Given the main use for multiprocessor boards, I'd be nervous about a mod that might screw data integrity.
That's inductive logic, not deductive. The conclusions do not necessarily follow from the facts*, but if a number of pertinent facts are discovered they make the conclusion more likely. Scientsist and police detectives use inductive, not deductive, logic
*Many people have dogs who do not have families and there are many gay men who get married.
This information brought to you by a bored pedant
Does SCI AM review articles properly nowadays?
on
Self-Repairing Computers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The authors either don't seem to know much about the current state of the art or are just ignoring it. And as for unreliability - well, it's true that the first Unix box I ever had (8 user with VT100 terminals) could go almost as long without rebooting as my most recent small Linux box, but there's a bit of a difference in traffic between 8 19200 baud serial links and two 100baseT ports, not to mention the range of applications being supported. Or the factor of 1000 to 1 in hard disk sizes. Or the 20:1 price difference.
I think a suitable punishment would be to lock the authors in a museum somewhere that has a 70s mainframe, and let them out when they've learned how to swap disk packs, load the tapes, splice paper tape, connect the Teletype, sweep the chad off the floor, stack a card deck or two and actually run an application...those were the days, when computing kept you fit.
The Cage piece is pure plagiarism. The religious society of friends (Quakers) have been holding meetings with intervals of silence since the 17th. century, and the Trappists are perhaps even more famous for their silences. The actual duration of many of these silences must have been 4' 33'. Most of them are now in the public domain. I offer this helpful suggestion to anyone who wants to release any amount of silence as a recording.
Dear AC, I'm assuming you are about 13 years old, which is why you can't spell and don't know the meaning of 'feminist'. Well, I'll take you more seriously than you deserve. The answer is no. She runs an accounting company. Male accountants seem to have problems working for women. As for the meaning of feminist, I suggest you ask your English teacher.
Buy the poor woman a Mac. You know it makes sense. My wife runs an all-woman business, the office is full of Macs (Linux servers) and, you know what? Support is virtually nil. When she had PCs, we had constant training issues. I don't fully understand it myself, it just seems to happen.
Entirely right. Back in the 1970s the British Wireless World magazine published some stuff about Russian Hi-fi. Because components were so expensive, Russian scientists were building home amps using transistors with carefully selected linearity, and very little feedback (minimising phase distortion). Coupled with properly designed horns, they were giving very high quality output off a few hundred milliwatts. A Class D amp is just a solution to the problem of trying to build an aesthetic loudspeaker - part of our perpetual attempt to find a technical fix to the problem caused by the last technical fix.
Since you asked, since about 45% of international bonds started to be traded in Euros and the US started to get seriously worried about the prospects for oil to start being traded in Euros too. One of Saddam's bush-baiting tricks was to transfer assets into Euros.
Fortunately for the US, the Euro is now rising fast against the dollar which might do something to help US exports.
To a certain extent this is a dupe of any previous article about emulating hard disk drives in RAM. Perhaps it is worth making a few points.
First, as other have said, a properly designed RAM subsystem can be battery backed up. In terms of getting the data out, loss of power to the RAM is no more catastrophic than loss of power to the CPU, the router, the computer running the middleware, or whatever. Because RAM is a purely semiconductor approach, any battery backup system can be simple and reliable.
In fact, it should not be too difficult to design a system which, in the event of power fail, dumps data to backup disk drives. To get to that state, the main system has already failed to do a clean shutdown, so this is a last resort issue.
The next thing is error detection and correction. It's true that single bit ECC is limited, but it also takes only limited resources (7 additional bits for a 32-bit subsystem, 8 for 64). Memory subsystems could have extra columns so that if bit errors start to multiply in one column, it can be switched out for a new one. Just as with any error detection and correction strategy, single bit detection in columns can be combined with further error correction down rows, using dedicated hardware to encode and decode on the fly. Just good old basic electronics.
In the worst case, it should be possible to build an extremely reliable memory system for a bit penalty of 50% - no worse than mirroring two hard drives. It won't be quite as fast as writing direct to motherboard RAM, but we don't want to do that anyway (we want to be able to break the link on power fail, save to disk, then later on restore from disk. And we want the subsystem in its own cabinet along with the batteries. No one in their right minds is suggesting having a couple of C cells taped to this thing and held on with croc clips.)
I'd even venture to suggest that most MySQL databases are not in the terabyte range, and that most databases aren't in the gigabyte range even if they are mission critical in SMEs.
Conclusion? As usual we have the people trying to boast "My database is far too big and complicated for MySQL! So MySQL sucks! My database is too (etc.) to run in RAM! So running DBs from RAM sucks!" and ignoring the fact that there are many web databases where transactional integrity is not an issue, and the market for a RAM store for databases in the low Gbyte range might actually be rather substantial.
Last I heard, US law didn't apply outside US borders. Officially. After all, that's what makes it necessary to hold small boys - sorry, al Queda terrorists - at Guantanamo Bay, safely outside US jurisdiction.
On a more serious note, this seems part of a trend that will eventually block off access for ordinary people to the unregulated internet. Nice to know that the States are learning from Beijing.
Yes, I used to do all that EMC stuff and, to my embarrassment, I've written pieces with lots of long words intended to frighten potential clients into spending money.
Actually, the EMI level of things like cell phones and Bluetooth is very well known. If the defined interference levels for emc in aircraft are so low that these things are a risk, someone hasn't been doing their homework. Portable phones have now been around for years, plenty of time to do a study.
In any case, aircraft must, as I pointed out, survive high levels of external radiation. They are hardly Faraday cages or cell phones would not work inside them. Equally, when an aircraft flies into or through a radar or near a high power transmitter, the field levels inside will not be zero.
With traffic down over SARS, terrorism, and general economic jitters, now is not the time for airlines to piss off the business traveller without a pretty good reason.
To what extent has this been fuelled by the airline's attempt to sell their own very expensive at-seat phone service?
AFAIUI, radio spectrum is supposed to be allocated in such a way that interference does not affect critical bands. There's a regulatory body to do it. In the past, before this became an issue, there were a lot of electronic gadgets that produced quite large broadband interference. Look at early home computers with plastic cases - you could get several volts of signal from some of them just by holding an oscilloscope probe over the case. Then people starting using serious shielding so that only the wanted frequencies got out.
The actual signal levels from Bluetooth, 802.11 etc. are all pretty low and they are in standards-designated bands.
So exactly what is the issue? Does it have, as I suspect, a lot more to do with the convenience of the cabin crew and the airline than the passengers?
Aircraft survive lightning strike. They are locked onto by powerful radar stations. They have transmitters many times more powerful than cell phones. But, seemingly, all terrorists need to do is to keep their cellphones turned on. doh.
If the Register account is correct, this really was deliberate theft of intellectual property. He knew what he was doing. He betrayed the trust of his uncle. He was either stupid, or a complete anal aperture. He actually stole material that some of the sites he sent it to seemed to have found too hot to handle.
Perhaps he should get some kind of special award from the industry. Like the RIAA Platinum IP Theft Award. "See- we're not paranoid! There really are criminals out there! We need all the protection we can get!"
The point is, what is the worst case disaster that can happen on site? If the site itself is sufficiently secure, there may be little point in having off-site storage for relatively shortlived data. It's pretty difficult to steal one of these systems, and if it is in a tornado-proof basement suitably protected from flooding, anything that takes out both it and all the surrounding systems with the live data is also likely to take out the need for the data. It's clear that this is transient stuff - not like financial information that has to be kept for years and years.
In Germany, people never used to jaywalk. They waited religiously for the Grüne Mann. Then one day in Munich I was crossing the road with a guy who had recently left East Germany, literally the day the Wall came down. He marched out into the traffic. People blew horns. I shouted at him to come back. He replied "Hitler and Stalin were possible because people behaved like sheep. Germans must learn not to be sheep!"
And that's the answer to the likes of the RIAA. Laws are supposed to reflect the beliefs of society in general, not special interest groups. If society believes that the present copyright laws are a mistake, people must not behave like sheep.
I live in an area with no DSL but with cable. Guess what? I can't get a cable business account without buying a leased line equivalent, "because the capacity is used up" (tr: "We have a monopoly, sucker, and we intend to milk it."). So my cable connection is faster than DSL, because 500kbit/s is faster than 0, but I can't do anything really useful with it for under $13000/year.
At the next election I intend to vote for any party that has a serious clue about the importance of internet bandwidth. Oh well, another pissed-off non-voter.
Recently? Some Swiss railways have had regenerative braking for many years. Even had 3-phase overhead and track supply so that the energy could be fed straight back. Unfortunately you can't regenerative brake a pure combustion engine, unless you have a clever way of converting CO2 + water -> gas plus oxygen.
To-day, 28 April 2003, Steve Jobs made the following announcement:
Recently, Apple Computer was approached by beings from the Planet Zog. Zog is the richest planet in known space and all its inhabitants are so intelligent that it has no concept of intellectual property, since anybody is capable of inventing anything he, she or it needs as and when necessary. All Zog software is Open Source, mostly written in VLIW assembler by users as and when required. Unfortunately the Zog economy is somewhat overheated, despite a rise in income tax to 99%, and Zog is looking for a way to lose some cash. They have offered to merge Apple with a Zog publicly owned corporation called "We really are Universal Music" (ZSE: WRUM), the present stockholders of Apple to retain 51% of the equity. The idea is to introduce a music-on-demand service by which music will be directly downloaded from Zog. Zog has no equivalent of the DMCA since even the cheapest Zog pseudopodheld can crack any form of encryption on the fly, and has been recording the entire data output of the Earth for the last hundred years on the Ogg recorder in some Zog kid's bedroom. To encourage takeup of the service. the new corporation will give away all its hardware and software free for the next 20 years, and offer to replace all Macs in the field free of charge with new terahertz systems running OS MDCLX.
Jobs then demonstrated the new direct thought to text input PowerBook G93000 which projects a virtual reality 3-D image into the entire visual field, runs for a year on an AAA battery and weighs half an ounce.
Following the announcement, Microsoft shares rose $3 and Apple shares were $12 down at close of trading. The usual suspects predicted the demise of Apple within 3 weeks, citing the failure to keep up technically with the PC market, and Steve Jobs was slightly injured by a troll from slashdot complaining about file copy speed on a 9600/300....try to keep posts on topic
No, parity is almost useless: it tells you you have lost data, but not what.
ECC is what you want. Someone will probably correct me on this, but the number of extra bits for ECC is not 50%. It is 6 at 16 bit word width (ie 22 bits), 7 and 32 and 8 at 64. However, it only deals with single bit errors and the probability of multi bit errors increases as word width increases.Even so, the overhead is around 40% max for a 16 bit memory path, rather than 50%.
When using external loudspeakers, it's obvious why you can't get true stereo with only 2 (crosstalk plus the speakers are point sources instad of the whole field) but this is not true of headphones.
But then I don't understand surround sound either. If anything, the problem should get worse because now you have crosstalk from a number of speakers. I haven't read an explanation of the different surround sounds that I understand, and I did sensory psychology as part of my first degree so I'm presumably not a complete idiot (?)
The issue of motion of the sound source as you turn your head is different. I can see how multiple speakers could give the illusion of that, whereas with headphones as you turn your head the orchestra moves with you. But I don't see any evidence of one of those neat little vibrating arm rate gyros on headphones which would in theory make it possible to rotate the sound field.
Of course, there's also the question of how important it really is to achieve this absolute spatial fidelity. The sets of "Audiophiles" and "musicians" may not be completely disjoint, but I've never yet met anyone in the insersection. And we're talking MP3 players, which are lossy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not just writing this to bash the UK. Recently I heard from someone who had asked for their records from Intrum Justicia (a fancy name for a debt collection and credit rating agency based in several EU states.) The information stored on their record and used as the basis for a credit rating was utterly misleading - it had collected information about everyone known to have lived at their last three addresses, one of which was a student lodging. When asked, the Data Protection Agency eventually replied that yes, they had constant complaints about this company but unless you had vast legal resources there was nothing that could be done. Unless legal systems are changed to provide pro bono representation to anyone who has a prima facie case that companies are collecting bad data about them, this will continue.
While on fanciful things that will not happen, it would be nice if companies whose function is to collect data about people had to refer to this on all their printed materials, advertising etc. so that people became aware of just how many of these organisations there are.
No. The Onion is not a parody any more, because it is now an original creation in its own right. Furthermore, it is the brilliant riposte to Europeans who claim that Americans do not understand irony.
I'm fortunate to work and live with a group of people with whom I have just enough interests in common. And, despite the obsolete sexism and general lack of PC, I rather liked Ogden Nash's observation that it didn't hurt for husband and wife to be a little incompatible, provided he had income and she was pattable. How do we analyse for this?
All that first post stuff - obviously not produced by sentient beings
Exception: java.lang.AI.ForbiddenRevelationException
java.lang.AI.ForbiddenRevelationException:
at com.Minsky.AI.ApparentHumanBehavior (443)
at com.Minsky.AI.RandomPostingEngine (93189)
Seriously, though, what gives? Is the only real difference between dual and single processing jumper controlled or is the decision made on the basis of testing - in which case, what might go wrong if you mod these things to run as dual processors?
Even given prevailing levels of cynicism about marketing departments, I would have thought that the potential for chip sales if dual processor boards became more common, would outweigh the loss of margins on the small existing DP business.
Given the main use for multiprocessor boards, I'd be nervous about a mod that might screw data integrity.
*Many people have dogs who do not have families and there are many gay men who get married.
This information brought to you by a bored pedant
Or the factor of 1000 to 1 in hard disk sizes.
Or the 20:1 price difference.
I think a suitable punishment would be to lock the authors in a museum somewhere that has a 70s mainframe, and let them out when they've learned how to swap disk packs, load the tapes, splice paper tape, connect the Teletype, sweep the chad off the floor, stack a card deck or two and actually run an application...those were the days, when computing kept you fit.
The Cage piece is pure plagiarism. The religious society of friends (Quakers) have been holding meetings with intervals of silence since the 17th. century, and the Trappists are perhaps even more famous for their silences. The actual duration of many of these silences must have been 4' 33'. Most of them are now in the public domain. I offer this helpful suggestion to anyone who wants to release any amount of silence as a recording.
Dear AC,
I'm assuming you are about 13 years old, which is why you can't spell and don't know the meaning of 'feminist'.
Well, I'll take you more seriously than you deserve. The answer is no. She runs an accounting company. Male accountants seem to have problems working for women. As for the meaning of feminist, I suggest you ask your English teacher.
Buy the poor woman a Mac. You know it makes sense. My wife runs an all-woman business, the office is full of Macs (Linux servers) and, you know what? Support is virtually nil. When she had PCs, we had constant training issues. I don't fully understand it myself, it just seems to happen.
I don't understand this at all. Speakers are analog devices. What are you talking about? Not surprising this is an AC post.
Entirely right. Back in the 1970s the British Wireless World magazine published some stuff about Russian Hi-fi. Because components were so expensive, Russian scientists were building home amps using transistors with carefully selected linearity, and very little feedback (minimising phase distortion). Coupled with properly designed horns, they were giving very high quality output off a few hundred milliwatts. A Class D amp is just a solution to the problem of trying to build an aesthetic loudspeaker - part of our perpetual attempt to find a technical fix to the problem caused by the last technical fix.
Fortunately for the US, the Euro is now rising fast against the dollar which might do something to help US exports.
First, as other have said, a properly designed RAM subsystem can be battery backed up. In terms of getting the data out, loss of power to the RAM is no more catastrophic than loss of power to the CPU, the router, the computer running the middleware, or whatever. Because RAM is a purely semiconductor approach, any battery backup system can be simple and reliable.
In fact, it should not be too difficult to design a system which, in the event of power fail, dumps data to backup disk drives. To get to that state, the main system has already failed to do a clean shutdown, so this is a last resort issue.
The next thing is error detection and correction. It's true that single bit ECC is limited, but it also takes only limited resources (7 additional bits for a 32-bit subsystem, 8 for 64). Memory subsystems could have extra columns so that if bit errors start to multiply in one column, it can be switched out for a new one. Just as with any error detection and correction strategy, single bit detection in columns can be combined with further error correction down rows, using dedicated hardware to encode and decode on the fly. Just good old basic electronics.
In the worst case, it should be possible to build an extremely reliable memory system for a bit penalty of 50% - no worse than mirroring two hard drives. It won't be quite as fast as writing direct to motherboard RAM, but we don't want to do that anyway (we want to be able to break the link on power fail, save to disk, then later on restore from disk. And we want the subsystem in its own cabinet along with the batteries. No one in their right minds is suggesting having a couple of C cells taped to this thing and held on with croc clips.)
I'd even venture to suggest that most MySQL databases are not in the terabyte range, and that most databases aren't in the gigabyte range even if they are mission critical in SMEs.
Conclusion? As usual we have the people trying to boast "My database is far too big and complicated for MySQL! So MySQL sucks! My database is too (etc.) to run in RAM! So running DBs from RAM sucks!" and ignoring the fact that there are many web databases where transactional integrity is not an issue, and the market for a RAM store for databases in the low Gbyte range might actually be rather substantial.
Last I heard, US law didn't apply outside US borders. Officially. After all, that's what makes it necessary to hold small boys - sorry, al Queda terrorists - at Guantanamo Bay, safely outside US jurisdiction.
On a more serious note, this seems part of a trend that will eventually block off access for ordinary people to the unregulated internet. Nice to know that the States are learning from Beijing.
Actually, the EMI level of things like cell phones and Bluetooth is very well known. If the defined interference levels for emc in aircraft are so low that these things are a risk, someone hasn't been doing their homework. Portable phones have now been around for years, plenty of time to do a study.
In any case, aircraft must, as I pointed out, survive high levels of external radiation. They are hardly Faraday cages or cell phones would not work inside them. Equally, when an aircraft flies into or through a radar or near a high power transmitter, the field levels inside will not be zero.
With traffic down over SARS, terrorism, and general economic jitters, now is not the time for airlines to piss off the business traveller without a pretty good reason.
AFAIUI, radio spectrum is supposed to be allocated in such a way that interference does not affect critical bands. There's a regulatory body to do it. In the past, before this became an issue, there were a lot of electronic gadgets that produced quite large broadband interference. Look at early home computers with plastic cases - you could get several volts of signal from some of them just by holding an oscilloscope probe over the case. Then people starting using serious shielding so that only the wanted frequencies got out.
The actual signal levels from Bluetooth, 802.11 etc. are all pretty low and they are in standards-designated bands.
So exactly what is the issue? Does it have, as I suspect, a lot more to do with the convenience of the cabin crew and the airline than the passengers?
Aircraft survive lightning strike. They are locked onto by powerful radar stations. They have transmitters many times more powerful than cell phones. But, seemingly, all terrorists need to do is to keep their cellphones turned on. doh.
Perhaps he should get some kind of special award from the industry. Like the RIAA Platinum IP Theft Award. "See- we're not paranoid! There really are criminals out there! We need all the protection we can get!"
The point is, what is the worst case disaster that can happen on site? If the site itself is sufficiently secure, there may be little point in having off-site storage for relatively shortlived data. It's pretty difficult to steal one of these systems, and if it is in a tornado-proof basement suitably protected from flooding, anything that takes out both it and all the surrounding systems with the live data is also likely to take out the need for the data. It's clear that this is transient stuff - not like financial information that has to be kept for years and years.
And that's the answer to the likes of the RIAA. Laws are supposed to reflect the beliefs of society in general, not special interest groups. If society believes that the present copyright laws are a mistake, people must not behave like sheep.
At the next election I intend to vote for any party that has a serious clue about the importance of internet bandwidth. Oh well, another pissed-off non-voter.
Recently? Some Swiss railways have had regenerative braking for many years. Even had 3-phase overhead and track supply so that the energy could be fed straight back. Unfortunately you can't regenerative brake a pure combustion engine, unless you have a clever way of converting CO2 + water -> gas plus oxygen.
Recently, Apple Computer was approached by beings from the Planet Zog. Zog is the richest planet in known space and all its inhabitants are so intelligent that it has no concept of intellectual property, since anybody is capable of inventing anything he, she or it needs as and when necessary. All Zog software is Open Source, mostly written in VLIW assembler by users as and when required.
Unfortunately the Zog economy is somewhat overheated, despite a rise in income tax to 99%, and Zog is looking for a way to lose some cash. They have offered to merge Apple with a Zog publicly owned corporation called "We really are Universal Music" (ZSE: WRUM), the present stockholders of Apple to retain 51% of the equity.
The idea is to introduce a music-on-demand service by which music will be directly downloaded from Zog. Zog has no equivalent of the DMCA since even the cheapest Zog pseudopodheld can crack any form of encryption on the fly, and has been recording the entire data output of the Earth for the last hundred years on the Ogg recorder in some Zog kid's bedroom. To encourage takeup of the service. the new corporation will give away all its hardware and software free for the next 20 years, and offer to replace all Macs in the field free of charge with new terahertz systems running OS MDCLX.
Jobs then demonstrated the new direct thought to text input PowerBook G93000 which projects a virtual reality 3-D image into the entire visual field, runs for a year on an AAA battery and weighs half an ounce.
Following the announcement, Microsoft shares rose $3 and Apple shares were $12 down at close of trading. The usual suspects predicted the demise of Apple within 3 weeks, citing the failure to keep up technically with the PC market, and Steve Jobs was slightly injured by a troll from slashdot complaining about file copy speed on a 9600/300. ...try to keep posts on topic
ECC is what you want. Someone will probably correct me on this, but the number of extra bits for ECC is not 50%. It is 6 at 16 bit word width (ie 22 bits), 7 and 32 and 8 at 64. However, it only deals with single bit errors and the probability of multi bit errors increases as word width increases.Even so, the overhead is around 40% max for a 16 bit memory path, rather than 50%.
When using external loudspeakers, it's obvious why you can't get true stereo with only 2 (crosstalk plus the speakers are point sources instad of the whole field) but this is not true of headphones.
But then I don't understand surround sound either. If anything, the problem should get worse because now you have crosstalk from a number of speakers. I haven't read an explanation of the different surround sounds that I understand, and I did sensory psychology as part of my first degree so I'm presumably not a complete idiot (?)
The issue of motion of the sound source as you turn your head is different. I can see how multiple speakers could give the illusion of that, whereas with headphones as you turn your head the orchestra moves with you. But I don't see any evidence of one of those neat little vibrating arm rate gyros on headphones which would in theory make it possible to rotate the sound field.
Of course, there's also the question of how important it really is to achieve this absolute spatial fidelity. The sets of "Audiophiles" and "musicians" may not be completely disjoint, but I've never yet met anyone in the insersection. And we're talking MP3 players, which are lossy.