Yup, at first I thought satellite imagery would be useless too. Now I use it to imagine what it will look like when I get there so I'll know that I've arrived. Photos from the ground would be all the better.
That is, I can convert CDDA->FLAC->Apple Lossless->CDDA over and over ad infinitum and still get exactly the same CDDA file.
Have you tried it? There could be gotchas. For instance, if you convert a.WAV file with u-law encoding to a.WAV file with PCM encoding, you would lose information - even assuming both use the same sample rate and bits per sample. Though since FLAC and Apple Lossless are probably both designed around CDDA, I suppose you are right.
I found the high strings and high horns to be funny sounding (I think the phenomenon was called aliasing and arose from the choice to use 41.1K as the sample rate).
In order to avoid aliasing, they're supposed to start out sampling at a much higher frequency and use a low-pass filter to retain only what the encoding scheme can represent. It's not hard to imagine an early CD having that problem, but it should have been reduced or eliminated in CDs mastered later on. (Just as digital camera makers continue to experiment with ways to eliminate unwanted sampling artifacts like moire patterns).
Like you, my hearing isn't good enough for it to matter. I can't even hear things like keys jangling in pockets that my wife and kids can, so the time for me to obsess about extreme fidelity is over. I really don't think it has degraded my enjoyment of music.
Let's not perpetrate the myth that music can be recorded losslessly in the first place. All sampling is lossy. CDDA specifies a certain sample rate, beyond which you lose higher frequencies, and a fixed number of bits per sample, so you lose precision. For the same bitrate, you would get better results by starting with a high-resolution master and using lossy compression down to CDDA bitrate.
I'm not arguing that a lossy encoding of CDDA is as good as CDDA; it isn't. Just that there's no law of nature establishing CDDA as the gold standard in the first place.
Doesn't a vaginal, drug-free childbirth in a hospital count as "natural"? I'm not strongly in favor of home-births, but I suppose they have actually got a lot safer with better diagnostics that should usually allow discovery of problems ahead of time, so risky births can be done in a hospital.
$1000 a month really isn't that disgusting, your health bills without it would be much more.
I work at one of those "cushy government jobs" you always hear about, with full benefits. My health care premiums are right about $500/mo. Our premiums rise regularly, with no end in sight. So now you know what it means to have employer-paid health care; it means they pay about half of it, and falling.
Besides, there was never any question that terrorists would like to wreck the stock market, if they had some means to do so. Of course they would, just like countless other criminals would love to break into it for personal gain. So what? Issuing a new statement to that effect changes precisely nothing.
This is just like when people fly into a tizzy because some nobody halfway around the world says he'd like to establish a global caliphate and subject Europe and America to shariah (Muslim law). Whoopdie-doo. Unless they have some viable means to make it happen, they have their opinion and I have mine.
And what do you suppose the adoption rate of Vista within the next few months will be? I'm betting 0%, give or take. Hackers would be better off going after OS/2.
The study I'd like to see, that of course probably will never be done, is on a group using a highly controlled game environment. For example pick an engine and have one group play a violent mod like a Deathmatch, and have another play a mode like Freeze Tag. In both cases you have a team based, competitive, fast paced game that works the same, however one is violent, the other is non-violent. See if there's any difference between those groups (probably not).
So do it! It's a good proposal. And it could be done objectively, because they are using physiological sensing. In my mind, that does separate it from much of the behavioral sciences research you decry.
But I think the study they already did is significant. Brain activity monitoring isn't all that sensitive yet, and it makes sense to work up from distinguishing very dissimilar cases to more similar ones. Will people go off the deep end and draw conclusions that aren't supported by the research? Probably. But if (IF) they are doing good science, it shouldn't be shot down just because "people might get the wrong idea."
You're criticising the slashdot mis-quote instead of what the guy actually said. Here it is from the article:
Around 10 years down the line that could be expanded, creating iPods that can hold all the music ever sold commercially.
He said: "In 12 years, why not an iPod that can carry any video ever produced?"
So, it seems pretty clear to me that he's discussing all (music) video, and not "all the video in the world" such as simpsons and soap operas.
He still may be wrong, but but ~30,000 music videos would at least cover everything that hit the top 100 in the charts for many, many years.
Not only is Gingrich not in power, but we don't even know what he said. I'm not going to get all worked up about a few quotes or misquotes in a speech by a nobody.
That said, the larger issue is important. Just last night NBC ran a story about nuclear plant and security information being available in public libraries. My first reaction was that I generally favor public access to information, and that private watchdogs and the free press are probably why the US has not had a Chernobyl. The idea of purging public libraries is distasteful. But then they talked about what information was available, and I had to agree some of it should not be public, such as specifically the most damaging place to hit a nuclear power plant with an airplane. It is old information, and that sort of information would probably never be released now. Is that a good or bad thing?
'There's no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that's in HD.'...
My biggest problem with HDTV is that it just means my cable bill is bigger at the end of every month.
I say we will have HDTV, and we will not pay extra for it, any more than we pay a premium for color or stereo. The HD premium will become small enough that competion alone will push it forward. I already have my Cable company calling trying to switch me over to digital but I won't, not if it costs extra. Eventually they'll get sick of paying to maintain the analog system and move me over with little or no premium. That's if I even want cable TV by then. Years ago I never thought I'd escape the phone company, but I switched to VOIP about two years ago and have no intentions of going back.
Until they start making it easy for Joe Average to pipe Internet based content to the big LCD or Plasma they're been fighting for on black friday for Xmas...I don't see internet streamed content displacing regular, cable or satellite tv.
I think the point was about nationally shared experience, not family relations. It used to be that everybody (mild overstatement) watched the networks' evening news. That determined whatever the big story was at any given point in time. Of course, that could just as easily be put in a negative light, since hardly anybody else but the big boys had a voice at all. Either way, it will be interesting to see whether fragmentation of the media has a noticeable effect.
That's a legitimate question, and the answer is pretty simple: because the US standard of living and low inflation rate depend on cheap Chinese imports, as well as a commitment to free trade.
I only hope this trade defict policy actually manages to sustain our standard of living and low inflation in the medium and long term. I rather suspect that we're simply selling down the gradient between our standard of living and China's. By the time China reaches parity (or even equilibrium), this world may be very different place for Americans than it is now. Yes, I know many aspects of economics are not zero sum. But natural resources (oil) and military dominance are.
"Pirated" might include the grey market, which is products ligitimately produced for another market but imported where it doesn't "belong" (arbitrage). Or, I also heard of a Chinese shoe factory that lost its contract to produce a well-known brand of shoes. So what did they do? They kept making the shoes, ignoring the middleman (the US branding company). The shoes hadn't changed, they simply hadn't been "blessed." A "bootleg" could just be the factory going beyond their order and producing extras. I wonder how far up the chain of command one would have to go in a car company to sneak out a few extra copies?
I would much prefer something like little WiiRemotes strapped to the ankes to replace dancemats. I was going to buy DDR but I read about a lot of problems with the mats. And if you think about it, jumping on your controller has to be hard on it (unless you pay a couple hundred for a metal pad). Remote sensing (like the WiiRemote) might avoid all the mechanical Dance Pad problems.
You do have to wonder, will Nintendo come out with sensors you can wear on (i.e.) your ankles that use the same technology? I was going to buy a Dance Dance Revolution game but never did because there are all kinds of problems with the dance pads (except for the metal ones that cost a couple hundred). Think about it, if you jump on your controller it's bound to wear out. But doing it optically or with gyros or however this thing works should last a lot longer.
If they did, assuming that Amazon's tech team is any good, this idea would get shot down pretty quickly as one which would creating a DOS attack.
Do you have some reason to think this was not a successful promotion? The fact that the website got slow is probably as discouraging to Amazon as the fact that people waited in line for a week to get a PS3 was to Sony.
The Sharper Image, which until recently advertised as anti-microbial several products containing nanosilver, has dropped all such references from its marketing materials.
So the companies that want to get around this only have to change how they market their products? Sounds like an effective use of government time/money to me.
Huh? If they can't prove the stuff is antimicrobial, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise it as such. Sounds good to me.
I doubt that a computer can incorporate thigns like global news, company announcements, and other such real world variables into how it makes judgments.
Here's a guy who incorporated yahoo message boards in his stock market prediction software a few years ago.
Actually I was surprised how few references I could find to this sort of thing. Still I don't believe this is an indication that it's not happening; rather, I think market prediction is a black art because investors don't want anybody else to know what they're doing or how they're doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, at first I thought satellite imagery would be useless too. Now I use it to imagine what it will look like when I get there so I'll know that I've arrived. Photos from the ground would be all the better.
Like you, my hearing isn't good enough for it to matter. I can't even hear things like keys jangling in pockets that my wife and kids can, so the time for me to obsess about extreme fidelity is over. I really don't think it has degraded my enjoyment of music.
I'm not arguing that a lossy encoding of CDDA is as good as CDDA; it isn't. Just that there's no law of nature establishing CDDA as the gold standard in the first place.
Maybe it was just a bug that happened to be planted in the handset?
Doesn't a vaginal, drug-free childbirth in a hospital count as "natural"? I'm not strongly in favor of home-births, but I suppose they have actually got a lot safer with better diagnostics that should usually allow discovery of problems ahead of time, so risky births can be done in a hospital.
This is just like when people fly into a tizzy because some nobody halfway around the world says he'd like to establish a global caliphate and subject Europe and America to shariah (Muslim law). Whoopdie-doo. Unless they have some viable means to make it happen, they have their opinion and I have mine.
And what do you suppose the adoption rate of Vista within the next few months will be? I'm betting 0%, give or take. Hackers would be better off going after OS/2.
But I think the study they already did is significant. Brain activity monitoring isn't all that sensitive yet, and it makes sense to work up from distinguishing very dissimilar cases to more similar ones. Will people go off the deep end and draw conclusions that aren't supported by the research? Probably. But if (IF) they are doing good science, it shouldn't be shot down just because "people might get the wrong idea."
That said, the larger issue is important. Just last night NBC ran a story about nuclear plant and security information being available in public libraries. My first reaction was that I generally favor public access to information, and that private watchdogs and the free press are probably why the US has not had a Chernobyl. The idea of purging public libraries is distasteful. But then they talked about what information was available, and I had to agree some of it should not be public, such as specifically the most damaging place to hit a nuclear power plant with an airplane. It is old information, and that sort of information would probably never be released now. Is that a good or bad thing?
I think the point was about nationally shared experience, not family relations. It used to be that everybody (mild overstatement) watched the networks' evening news. That determined whatever the big story was at any given point in time. Of course, that could just as easily be put in a negative light, since hardly anybody else but the big boys had a voice at all. Either way, it will be interesting to see whether fragmentation of the media has a noticeable effect.
"Pirated" might include the grey market, which is products ligitimately produced for another market but imported where it doesn't "belong" (arbitrage). Or, I also heard of a Chinese shoe factory that lost its contract to produce a well-known brand of shoes. So what did they do? They kept making the shoes, ignoring the middleman (the US branding company). The shoes hadn't changed, they simply hadn't been "blessed." A "bootleg" could just be the factory going beyond their order and producing extras. I wonder how far up the chain of command one would have to go in a car company to sneak out a few extra copies?
I would much prefer something like little WiiRemotes strapped to the ankes to replace dancemats. I was going to buy DDR but I read about a lot of problems with the mats. And if you think about it, jumping on your controller has to be hard on it (unless you pay a couple hundred for a metal pad). Remote sensing (like the WiiRemote) might avoid all the mechanical Dance Pad problems.
You do have to wonder, will Nintendo come out with sensors you can wear on (i.e.) your ankles that use the same technology? I was going to buy a Dance Dance Revolution game but never did because there are all kinds of problems with the dance pads (except for the metal ones that cost a couple hundred). Think about it, if you jump on your controller it's bound to wear out. But doing it optically or with gyros or however this thing works should last a lot longer.
Actually I was surprised how few references I could find to this sort of thing. Still I don't believe this is an indication that it's not happening; rather, I think market prediction is a black art because investors don't want anybody else to know what they're doing or how they're doing it.