Hmm, an SD card plugged into your camera, sticking out in plain view, with nothing on it. A second card, installed under the dash, that does the recording. "Why no, officer, I don't believe the camera was turned on".
So if I always listened to music in a concert hall with a 25000 watt speaker system then I might care. But instead I always listen to my music through earbuds or my car stereo or even my home stereo - where, as you say, "The difference in audio quality may not really be apparent".
So, to answer the question of the thread, NO, I can't really hear the difference between Lossless, Lossy Audio.
I don't know if it's a good study, but I did exactly this test. Ten or fifteen years ago.
I took four musical selections (from the latest Rolling Stones album at the time, a solo piano performance, a classical orchestra, a female vocal), and encoded them at 128, 192, and 256 Kbps with the Fraunhofer codec of the day (remember that?). I re-expanded them to 44.1 KHz CD tracks, and put them on a burned audio CD (remember those?). Each selection on the CD had five versions - the first was always the original bit-for-bit copy from the source CD, then followed (in random order) the 128, 192, 256, and the original again.
I made ten copies, and handed them out to the audiophiles in the office to play on their home stereos, and gave them a test sheet - I asked them to identify for each selection which version was 128, 192, 256, or the original. Nobody came close to having a "golden ear" that could reliably tell the 128Kbps versions from the others, much less the higher bitrates. Overall, there was a slight ability to detect the 128 kbps versions - it got selected as the lowest quality one more times than random chance would suggest, but even it was still well below 50% (I don't remember the exact numbers any more).
And this was with ancient MP3 encoders.
Frankly, if you think you've got the golden ear, first of all I pity you - I'm sorry that you have to put up with all the crap you're going to hear. Second of all, I really recommend running the same test - prepare the tracks, have a friend randomly order them (but keep track), and then see if you can identify them. Don't simply say "Of course I can" - Actually do it and prove it.
And, if I can be an old man with a bit of advice for a minute: if you can't tell the difference, don't go out of your way to train yourself to tell the difference. It'll just be an annoyance to you for the rest of your life. Kinda like the person who taught me about the reel-change indicators on film at the movie theatres - I see it, and my whole body tenses up waiting for the change. I wish I had never known about it. I really appreciate the change to digital projection so I don't have to deal with those anymore./frank
As a long-time paying user of UE (although I haven't upgraded in several years), I think their original model was great. You could install and run for 30 days, and had to register after that time. During the 30 days, everytime you ran the program there was a brief splash screen that said "27 days left in evaluation period". Once your 30 days were up, it informed you and gave you a clickable link to their site. No online activation, no always-on servers - when you registered, you got a signed certificate in email that, once installed, now proudly announced your name in the help->about screen and eliminated the evaluation period.
Sure it was piratable - but you didn't have to download the pirate version just to try it out and decide if you liked it. You didn't have to give up an email address, or a credit card, for the evaluation either. You got 30 days to become dependent on it if it was good, or to stop using it if it was bad. You could send a copy to your friend, your mother, your co-worker with a clear conscience - they had 30 days. The shovelware firms didn't need to find a cracked version to include in their "collections" - the factory-distributed version worked fine - for 30 days. After 30 days, you got to decide - is this worth buying, or not? Anyone who used it for 30 days and then pirated it wasn't going to pay for it anyway.
It seemed like the least intrusive, most customer friendly approach I could imagine for someone trying to make a living off their software development efforts.
But perhaps it will become cheap enough to take and desalinate water and fill up major rivers so that natural distribution can be restored. It would take a lot of energy to do it but with the two orders of magnitude cheaper maybe it would be cost effective?
So, as a practical matter, major rivers tend to run downhill - that is, the lowest end of the river tends to be at sea level, and the highest end at a significantly higher altitude (and often thousands of miles away). As they say, "Gravity sucks". So "fill up major rivers" involves, first, the energy necessary to desalinate the water, then you get to build a pipeline to the upper end of the river 1000 miles away, and then you can fill the river.
As an example, New Orleans might not be very happy with the water level necessary at the mouth of the Mississippi to get water back up to, say, the Great Lakes (at roughly 2000' of elevation).
Communities located near the ocean (Which is, frankly, most of the worlds largest cities) could benefit from this techology using Ocean water. Iowa, not so much, but they could use it to purify brackish aquifers, farm runoff, or treated sewage.
I don't know Alan, but looking at pictures of the device at http://www.hanscan.com/en/hsc-ac-it2 I'd guess that it's a Fingerprint cards RF-based placement scanner (http://www.fingerprints.com/Products/Sensors/FPC1011F.aspx) with an IR pulse detector (for example, http://pulsesensor.myshopify.com/pages/open-hardware), wrapped by a bunch of simple software apps for time-and-attendance, low-value shopping, etc.
Frankly, everyone in the business is trying to replace credit cards; how else can you envision getting 3% of every transaction made, anywhere, without having to do more than lift a finger now and then?
You could engineer a pump to drive pulsed blood through the capillaries. Heck, you could even heat the blood while you're pumping it. (This device does not detect temperature btw)
It is a solution, certainly, but wrought with a myriad of flaws. This ought to be a very long time to market I expect. Unless of course, they decide to give the job of redesigning the scanner to someone who's passed the fourth grade.
I didn't see it above, but this comment is the perfect place for the obligatory xkcd reference: http://xkcd.com/538/
Well, yes, they have. We build fingerprint swipe sensors where that attack is meaningless - the sensing surface is a single line that you "swipe" your finger across. Your suggested attack would, in the absolute worst case, cause the capture of a 50 micron tall line across the finger. Good luck getting that to match.
There are roughly a gajillion different designs of fingerprint sensors that have been built over the last 30 years. Many of them can be spoofed trivially (such as your attack), others are far more difficult. This particular one is probably spoofable, but the amount of work necessary to do so is probably significant enough that a $5 wrench would make for a more usable attack.
Possibly. My experience is with fingerprint swipe sensors, not fingerprint placement sensors, and with those the gummi bear mold has to be fairly thick to survive a swipe over the sensor. The thickness tends to block the light from such optical sensor, and so the attempt is detected and blocked. With a placement sensor, the gummi bear mold could probably be made thinner; I don't know if it can be made thin enough.
Well, I beg to differ on that particular point. The technology to reliably detect that published attack has been (and is being) shipped in a major OEM's Enterprise level laptops for several years. Call your salesman if you'd like to know if yours has it.
Unfortunately, not all OEMs that include fingerprint sensors choose to include antispoof features. Most consumer grade laptops, for example, don't. So when you go buy that $300 special down at Best Buy, don't go crowing that you can build a spoof for it - Matsumoto's paper will give you a direct recipe and procedure for doing that, and you may be successful. BTW, should you wish to attempt it yourself, there are easier materials to use than Gummi bears. A pulse sensor is a plausible way to prevent this attack (unless, of course, you're using live Gummi's, which would be inhumane).
Spoofing of biometrics is a well-known problem, but that doesn't mean there isn't advancement in the state of the art (on both sides). Heck, it's even the subject of a major motion picture (Tom Cruise in a bit of a stinker, "Minority Report"). There will always be attacks possible - the question is whether the attack on the biometric is really the easiest way into whatever's being protected. If you have my laptop and are trying to break into my system, wouldn't it be easier to simply image the hard drive rather than etching PCBs to make molds for the Gummi bear spoof? At some point in time, the $5 wrench is easier to employ than the necessary spoof building technology, and that's what we're aiming for.
A gun isn't necessarily the best approach for home protection for someone who isn't comfortable with the moral and legal ramifications of the decision to actually use it.
A can of Bear Spray (a spray-paint sized can of strong pepper spray) will disable just about anyone short of a meth-crazed psycho (and almost all burglars simply aren't meth-crazed psychos). For someone who might hesitate using a gun, or keeps the gun safely locked up (and hence unavailable) at home, this is probably the superior solution - there's generally no need to hesitate on it's use, you can leave it unlocked, and if you are faced with a meth-crazed psycho you're probably not going to get your gun unlocked, loaded, and fire an effective shot in time anyway. If your kids get their hands on it, the worst thing that'll happen is a very unpleasant experience; no ones gonna blow anyones head off.
In all my years of corporate computing, I've gone to IT 4 times to get a file off backup (4 different IT departments at 4 different companies). My success rate? 25%.
Each time, the answer came back "I'm sorry, but we weren't able to recover that file".
For some reason, I have a distrust for IT Backup, and make my own copies of important stuff./frank
Well, not having the details at hand (although I did RTFA), it seems that the OS allowed a user app to corrupt the system.
So, yes, I can blame it on the OS. Java may have been the initial vector that allowed the malware entry to the system, but the OS allowed the malware to do things it shouldn't have been able to.
It's a manual engagement of SOME braking system, generally a pale imitation of a real one.
On my Civic with rear drums, it activates the rear drums (and not the front disks). It will slow the car if running at speed (I'm not crazy enough to yank it hard enough to lock the wheels at 100 KPH), but if the engine were driving the car I'd expect the brakes to overheat and fade long before I got down to a reasonable speed.
On my Ford Explorer with rear disks, the parking brake engaged a very small drum brake located inside the disk. Yes, it would slow the vehicle, but stopping under engine power was probably impossible again.
there have been instances of Monsanto claiming that farmers who simply have their seeds in their field, even through natural spreading, owe them a fee.
They really don't, unless the Internet can use it to put together a list of companies that actually take engineering seriously, and have a bulletproof firmware update procedure.
I've shipped dozens of devices to production that might need reflashing in the field. It's easy to create a reflash procedure that works reliably (meaning half a dozen times on one configuration) on the engineer's desk, and reliably (meaning several dozen times on several devices) in QA. It's very difficult to create a reflash procedure that works reliably on a million units in the field, in a million different configurations, in a million different locations. Especially when the product was built with barely sufficient FLASH for the normal runtime image, much less a duplicate image to revert to.
It's similar to coding - for anyone who's done any significant amounts of production 'C' code, you quickly realize that error handling ends up being three or four times as much code as the mainline code that solves the problem you're trying to solve. Now, try to handle an error after you've erased your runtime image in Flash. It's not easy.
Companies that don't spend the engineering effort to get this right end up with many bricks in the field. Companies that do spend the engineering time to get it right still end up with a few - it's kind of unavoidable in the current state of the art.
In a world of mindless plants and animals, I agree with you. Malthus described some of those rules - and in a world of 6 Billion people (or is it 7 this week?), I think we ought to carefully consider whether we wish to be controlled by mindless rules, or attempt to set new ones.
And, frankly, homosexuality thrives in the face of whatever rules you think apply to the "survival and extinction of species". I would guess that intolerance is a far greater threat to "survival and extinction" than what two people do behind closed doors.
Logic is a crappy way to determine how things work. Geocentrism was extremely logical given the assumptions of the day, as was phlogiston and the aether.
Experimentation is required. Short of that (as it's difficult to do for evolution of both life and the universe), theory and evidence will have to suffice for both./frank
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Hmm, an SD card plugged into your camera, sticking out in plain view, with nothing on it. A second card, installed under the dash, that does the recording. "Why no, officer, I don't believe the camera was turned on".
You're reading them? Why?
Your argument is completely retarded. Helium is also an element and it BEAT helium.
See, that's the problem with mud-slinging - sometimes, a wee bit of that mud comes right back at you.
So if I always listened to music in a concert hall with a 25000 watt speaker system then I might care. But instead I always listen to my music through earbuds or my car stereo or even my home stereo - where, as you say, "The difference in audio quality may not really be apparent".
So, to answer the question of the thread, NO, I can't really hear the difference between Lossless, Lossy Audio.
Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?
The second would be a remarkably scary result.
I don't know if it's a good study, but I did exactly this test. Ten or fifteen years ago.
I took four musical selections (from the latest Rolling Stones album at the time, a solo piano performance, a classical orchestra, a female vocal), and encoded them at 128, 192, and 256 Kbps with the Fraunhofer codec of the day (remember that?). I re-expanded them to 44.1 KHz CD tracks, and put them on a burned audio CD (remember those?). Each selection on the CD had five versions - the first was always the original bit-for-bit copy from the source CD, then followed (in random order) the 128, 192, 256, and the original again.
I made ten copies, and handed them out to the audiophiles in the office to play on their home stereos, and gave them a test sheet - I asked them to identify for each selection which version was 128, 192, 256, or the original. Nobody came close to having a "golden ear" that could reliably tell the 128Kbps versions from the others, much less the higher bitrates. Overall, there was a slight ability to detect the 128 kbps versions - it got selected as the lowest quality one more times than random chance would suggest, but even it was still well below 50% (I don't remember the exact numbers any more).
And this was with ancient MP3 encoders.
Frankly, if you think you've got the golden ear, first of all I pity you - I'm sorry that you have to put up with all the crap you're going to hear. Second of all, I really recommend running the same test - prepare the tracks, have a friend randomly order them (but keep track), and then see if you can identify them. Don't simply say "Of course I can" - Actually do it and prove it.
And, if I can be an old man with a bit of advice for a minute: if you can't tell the difference, don't go out of your way to train yourself to tell the difference. It'll just be an annoyance to you for the rest of your life. Kinda like the person who taught me about the reel-change indicators on film at the movie theatres - I see it, and my whole body tenses up waiting for the change. I wish I had never known about it. I really appreciate the change to digital projection so I don't have to deal with those anymore. /frank
As a long-time paying user of UE (although I haven't upgraded in several years), I think their original model was great. You could install and run for 30 days, and had to register after that time. During the 30 days, everytime you ran the program there was a brief splash screen that said "27 days left in evaluation period". Once your 30 days were up, it informed you and gave you a clickable link to their site. No online activation, no always-on servers - when you registered, you got a signed certificate in email that, once installed, now proudly announced your name in the help->about screen and eliminated the evaluation period.
Sure it was piratable - but you didn't have to download the pirate version just to try it out and decide if you liked it. You didn't have to give up an email address, or a credit card, for the evaluation either. You got 30 days to become dependent on it if it was good, or to stop using it if it was bad. You could send a copy to your friend, your mother, your co-worker with a clear conscience - they had 30 days. The shovelware firms didn't need to find a cracked version to include in their "collections" - the factory-distributed version worked fine - for 30 days. After 30 days, you got to decide - is this worth buying, or not? Anyone who used it for 30 days and then pirated it wasn't going to pay for it anyway.
It seemed like the least intrusive, most customer friendly approach I could imagine for someone trying to make a living off their software development efforts.
And how, precisely, would "polarized glasses" stop laser light?
Insightful, indeed.
But perhaps it will become cheap enough to take and desalinate water and fill up major rivers so that natural distribution can be restored. It would take a lot of energy to do it but with the two orders of magnitude cheaper maybe it would be cost effective?
So, as a practical matter, major rivers tend to run downhill - that is, the lowest end of the river tends to be at sea level, and the highest end at a significantly higher altitude (and often thousands of miles away). As they say, "Gravity sucks". So "fill up major rivers" involves, first, the energy necessary to desalinate the water, then you get to build a pipeline to the upper end of the river 1000 miles away, and then you can fill the river.
As an example, New Orleans might not be very happy with the water level necessary at the mouth of the Mississippi to get water back up to, say, the Great Lakes (at roughly 2000' of elevation).
Communities located near the ocean (Which is, frankly, most of the worlds largest cities) could benefit from this techology using Ocean water. Iowa, not so much, but they could use it to purify brackish aquifers, farm runoff, or treated sewage.
I don't know Alan, but looking at pictures of the device at http://www.hanscan.com/en/hsc-ac-it2 I'd guess that it's a Fingerprint cards RF-based placement scanner (http://www.fingerprints.com/Products/Sensors/FPC1011F.aspx) with an IR pulse detector (for example, http://pulsesensor.myshopify.com/pages/open-hardware), wrapped by a bunch of simple software apps for time-and-attendance, low-value shopping, etc.
Frankly, everyone in the business is trying to replace credit cards; how else can you envision getting 3% of every transaction made, anywhere, without having to do more than lift a finger now and then?
And there are a lot of people trying to do it:
http://www.paywithisis.com/
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/lenovo-nok-nok-labs-paypal-validity-lead-open-industry-alliance-revolutionize-online-1755467.htm
http://www.inquisitr.com/490728/authentec-iphone-6-fingerprint-detection-and-apple-release-date-rumors/
I wish him luck.
You could engineer a pump to drive pulsed blood through the capillaries.
Heck, you could even heat the blood while you're pumping it. (This device does not detect temperature btw)
It is a solution, certainly, but wrought with a myriad of flaws. This ought to be a very long time to market I expect. Unless of course, they decide to give the job of redesigning the scanner to someone who's passed the fourth grade.
I didn't see it above, but this comment is the perfect place for the obligatory xkcd reference:
http://xkcd.com/538/
Be enlightened:
http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-93096.html
Well, yes, they have. We build fingerprint swipe sensors where that attack is meaningless - the sensing surface is a single line that you "swipe" your finger across. Your suggested attack would, in the absolute worst case, cause the capture of a 50 micron tall line across the finger. Good luck getting that to match.
There are roughly a gajillion different designs of fingerprint sensors that have been built over the last 30 years. Many of them can be spoofed trivially (such as your attack), others are far more difficult. This particular one is probably spoofable, but the amount of work necessary to do so is probably significant enough that a $5 wrench would make for a more usable attack.
Possibly. My experience is with fingerprint swipe sensors, not fingerprint placement sensors, and with those the gummi bear mold has to be fairly thick to survive a swipe over the sensor. The thickness tends to block the light from such optical sensor, and so the attempt is detected and blocked. With a placement sensor, the gummi bear mold could probably be made thinner; I don't know if it can be made thin enough.
A pulse is easier to detect by movement, but is still useless against the "gummy worm" fake fingerprint attack, documented over a decade ago at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/16/gummi_bears_defeat_fingerprint_sensors/. There is still no fingerprint technology that reliably detects this attack.
Well, I beg to differ on that particular point. The technology to reliably detect that published attack has been (and is being) shipped in a major OEM's Enterprise level laptops for several years. Call your salesman if you'd like to know if yours has it.
Unfortunately, not all OEMs that include fingerprint sensors choose to include antispoof features. Most consumer grade laptops, for example, don't. So when you go buy that $300 special down at Best Buy, don't go crowing that you can build a spoof for it - Matsumoto's paper will give you a direct recipe and procedure for doing that, and you may be successful. BTW, should you wish to attempt it yourself, there are easier materials to use than Gummi bears. A pulse sensor is a plausible way to prevent this attack (unless, of course, you're using live Gummi's, which would be inhumane).
Spoofing of biometrics is a well-known problem, but that doesn't mean there isn't advancement in the state of the art (on both sides). Heck, it's even the subject of a major motion picture (Tom Cruise in a bit of a stinker, "Minority Report"). There will always be attacks possible - the question is whether the attack on the biometric is really the easiest way into whatever's being protected. If you have my laptop and are trying to break into my system, wouldn't it be easier to simply image the hard drive rather than etching PCBs to make molds for the Gummi bear spoof? At some point in time, the $5 wrench is easier to employ than the necessary spoof building technology, and that's what we're aiming for.
A gun isn't necessarily the best approach for home protection for someone who isn't comfortable with the moral and legal ramifications of the decision to actually use it.
A can of Bear Spray (a spray-paint sized can of strong pepper spray) will disable just about anyone short of a meth-crazed psycho (and almost all burglars simply aren't meth-crazed psychos). For someone who might hesitate using a gun, or keeps the gun safely locked up (and hence unavailable) at home, this is probably the superior solution - there's generally no need to hesitate on it's use, you can leave it unlocked, and if you are faced with a meth-crazed psycho you're probably not going to get your gun unlocked, loaded, and fire an effective shot in time anyway. If your kids get their hands on it, the worst thing that'll happen is a very unpleasant experience; no ones gonna blow anyones head off.
In all my years of corporate computing, I've gone to IT 4 times to get a file off backup (4 different IT departments at 4 different companies). My success rate? 25%.
Each time, the answer came back "I'm sorry, but we weren't able to recover that file".
For some reason, I have a distrust for IT Backup, and make my own copies of important stuff. /frank
Ahh, those halcyon days of youth on VAX/VMS turning in Assignment4.c;97
Those were the good old days.
Well, not having the details at hand (although I did RTFA), it seems that the OS allowed a user app to corrupt the system.
So, yes, I can blame it on the OS. Java may have been the initial vector that allowed the malware entry to the system, but the OS allowed the malware to do things it shouldn't have been able to.
It's a manual engagement of SOME braking system, generally a pale imitation of a real one.
On my Civic with rear drums, it activates the rear drums (and not the front disks). It will slow the car if running at speed (I'm not crazy enough to yank it hard enough to lock the wheels at 100 KPH), but if the engine were driving the car I'd expect the brakes to overheat and fade long before I got down to a reasonable speed.
On my Ford Explorer with rear disks, the parking brake engaged a very small drum brake located inside the disk. Yes, it would slow the vehicle, but stopping under engine power was probably impossible again.
there have been instances of Monsanto claiming that farmers who simply have their seeds in their field, even through natural spreading, owe them a fee.
Citation
Sure. Let me google that for you:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/25/percy-schmeiser-farmer-who-beat-monsanto.aspx
They really don't, unless the Internet can use it to put together a list of companies that actually take engineering seriously, and have a bulletproof firmware update procedure.
I've shipped dozens of devices to production that might need reflashing in the field. It's easy to create a reflash procedure that works reliably (meaning half a dozen times on one configuration) on the engineer's desk, and reliably (meaning several dozen times on several devices) in QA. It's very difficult to create a reflash procedure that works reliably on a million units in the field, in a million different configurations, in a million different locations. Especially when the product was built with barely sufficient FLASH for the normal runtime image, much less a duplicate image to revert to.
It's similar to coding - for anyone who's done any significant amounts of production 'C' code, you quickly realize that error handling ends up being three or four times as much code as the mainline code that solves the problem you're trying to solve. Now, try to handle an error after you've erased your runtime image in Flash. It's not easy.
Companies that don't spend the engineering effort to get this right end up with many bricks in the field. Companies that do spend the engineering time to get it right still end up with a few - it's kind of unavoidable in the current state of the art.
In a world of mindless plants and animals, I agree with you. Malthus described some of those rules - and in a world of 6 Billion people (or is it 7 this week?), I think we ought to carefully consider whether we wish to be controlled by mindless rules, or attempt to set new ones.
And, frankly, homosexuality thrives in the face of whatever rules you think apply to the "survival and extinction of species". I would guess that intolerance is a far greater threat to "survival and extinction" than what two people do behind closed doors.
Logic is a crappy way to determine how things work. Geocentrism was extremely logical given the assumptions of the day, as was phlogiston and the aether.
Experimentation is required. Short of that (as it's difficult to do for evolution of both life and the universe), theory and evidence will have to suffice for both. /frank
0.42 cents - $0.0042.
Half a cent per play.