There are a bunch of banks at which security is poor and at which attitudes surrounding privacy are lax. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether they outsource or not or where: the problem is the bank and its management.
Stifling an industry efectively kills research in it
No, that's just not true. Most research is publicly funded; companies do product development. In the few cases where private companies made fundamental advances, it's generally been near-monopolies (AT&T, IBM), or corporate-private partnerships (common in biotech).
We could prohibit all product development related to, say, "nanotechnology" (if such a field actually even existed), and research would progress pretty much unhindered with public funding, the way most basic and applied research is already carried out in practice.
How about we stifle fusion research until we know how dangerous an exploding reactor is?
I didn't say anything about "stifling research".
But your example is a good illustration: private fusion reactors are currently effectively subject to very "stifling regulations". Has that stopped research? No. Research in fusion reactors is, for various reasons, regulated and publicly funded.
There is no such thing as "nanotech". Nanotech was an unfulfilled pipe dream about "molecular assemblers" and the like. Of course, Wolfe is just trying to make money off the name as well; he is trying to present this as a brand new industry that is at risk of being stifled.
Because nanotech was such an abysmal failure, in order for people to save face and sell old research as new, the term has now been applied to traditional areas of material science and molecular biology. Whether those areas need to be regulated and how needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
For example, releasing new materials into the environment, in particular dusts and coatings that can turn into dust, should be subject to stricter regulations--whether "nanoengineered" or just chemical, that sort of thing is a health risk.
Molecular biology generally has regulations in place already; applying the moniker "nanotech" to molecular biology should not let companies or researchers evade those regulations.
More generally, however, I don't subscribe to the notion that a new industry (even if "nanotech" were a new industry rather than just good old chemistry and material science) should not be stifled; if it's potentially dangerous, of course, its growth should be stifled until we know how to mitigate the dangers.
Sony hasn't yet built a device that works based on the ideas presented in the patent, so this is all theoretical. In fact, according to the New Scientist, Sony hasn't even conducted any experiments to see if this works.
This is why people used to be required to submit a working model with their patent application at some point. Think about it: some guy at Sony has a weird idea while sitting on the toilet and patents it. This removes the incentive of anybody other than Sony to invest the billions of dollars necessary to figure out how to actually make this work. That's not the way the patent system is supposed to work.
From a purely practical point of view, this is not a good idea: you do not want to stimulate brain cells using ultrasound. It's OK to jiggle the whole brain around and even squeeze it a little, but generating shear forces on a tiny length scale is a prescription for disaster.
(Finally, this has nothing to do with the Matrix--the Matrix clearly used invasive technology--unless you consider sticking a 6 inch spike into the brain "non-invasive".)
Do you even know how MP3's work? They look at a wave, and try and identify series of waves that "mask" other series of waves when processed by the human ear, and throw out the masked waves. This only works so well...
It can work arbitrarily well, depending on the bitrate. A good codec doesn't throw out coefficients if it doesn't need to. So, if you set the bitrate high enough, then it will code all the coefficients and you shouldn't hear any difference (even though the output may still not be bit-identical for other reasons). If you set the bitrate a little lower, it will only throw out coefficients that contribute the least to the output signal. Psychoacoustic properties are used to prioritize coefficients, not to throw them out willy-nilly.
And yes, I do distinctly hear a loss of harmonic complexity; it makes most (acoustic) string instruments sound like crap.
Not that it has anything to do with the main point we are discussing (namely, that if you set the compression quality high enough, there simply won't be any significant differences)...
If you aren't as susceptible to the masking effects that MP3 takes advantage of as other people, then I pity you--there is something wrong with your auditory system. Masking effects are an important part of human auditory processing. Hearing excessive detail is just as much of an auditory problem as hearing too little.
On my sub-$1000 rig (Yamaha HTR-5150 reciever, a pair Boston Acoustic CR-9's), lossy sounds noticeably worse than non-lossy.
That statement makes no sense whatsoever. Just digitally adjusting the volume down a little on your recording is "lossy" coding, since you can't recover the original signal from the reduced volume signal. Does that sound worse? I don't think so.
The point is: if you set the bitrate for a lossy codec high enough, you won't hear a difference. If you set it even higher, you won't hear a difference even if you re-encode in another lossy codec once. Etc. As a rule of thumb, the point at which that happens still is before you hit the bitrate of lossless audio codecs.
If you hear a difference, either you are using a bad codec, or you are setting the bitrate too low, or there is something else wrong with your setup.
Different lossy codecs throw away different parts of the audio stream. Trasncoding from one lossy format to another is essentially throwing away the superset of those parts.
If you encode at a high enough bitrate, a "lossy" codec throws away almost nothing.
If you think that there is no discernable difference, then how do you explain the fact that neither of the lossy formats throw away the entire superset to begin with for superior compression?
Codecs have something called a "bitrate". The higher the bitrate, the less they throw away. If you set the bitrate high enough, they become extremely conservative at what they throw away.
If you use any reasonable lossy codec at a high enough quality setting, it's essentially the same as a lossless codec, and you still save space compared to the lossless (bit accurate) codecs.
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Open source: users do all the testing, bug reporting, and create the content.
Proprietary: same as open source, except you pay some company for the privilege, again and again
There are a bunch of banks at which security is poor and at which attitudes surrounding privacy are lax. Ultimately, it doesn't matter whether they outsource or not or where: the problem is the bank and its management.
Stifling an industry efectively kills research in it
No, that's just not true. Most research is publicly funded; companies do product development. In the few cases where private companies made fundamental advances, it's generally been near-monopolies (AT&T, IBM), or corporate-private partnerships (common in biotech).
We could prohibit all product development related to, say, "nanotechnology" (if such a field actually even existed), and research would progress pretty much unhindered with public funding, the way most basic and applied research is already carried out in practice.
How about we stifle fusion research until we know how dangerous an exploding reactor is?
I didn't say anything about "stifling research".
But your example is a good illustration: private fusion reactors are currently effectively subject to very "stifling regulations". Has that stopped research? No. Research in fusion reactors is, for various reasons, regulated and publicly funded.
There is no such thing as "nanotech". Nanotech was an unfulfilled pipe dream about "molecular assemblers" and the like. Of course, Wolfe is just trying to make money off the name as well; he is trying to present this as a brand new industry that is at risk of being stifled.
Because nanotech was such an abysmal failure, in order for people to save face and sell old research as new, the term has now been applied to traditional areas of material science and molecular biology. Whether those areas need to be regulated and how needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
For example, releasing new materials into the environment, in particular dusts and coatings that can turn into dust, should be subject to stricter regulations--whether "nanoengineered" or just chemical, that sort of thing is a health risk.
Molecular biology generally has regulations in place already; applying the moniker "nanotech" to molecular biology should not let companies or researchers evade those regulations.
More generally, however, I don't subscribe to the notion that a new industry (even if "nanotech" were a new industry rather than just good old chemistry and material science) should not be stifled; if it's potentially dangerous, of course, its growth should be stifled until we know how to mitigate the dangers.
Will Pussy Galore's character be reverted in age?
(For nit-pickers, she was actually in Goldfinger, but maybe she'll make a cameo.)
Sony hasn't yet built a device that works based on the ideas presented in the patent, so this is all theoretical. In fact, according to the New Scientist, Sony hasn't even conducted any experiments to see if this works.
This is why people used to be required to submit a working model with their patent application at some point. Think about it: some guy at Sony has a weird idea while sitting on the toilet and patents it. This removes the incentive of anybody other than Sony to invest the billions of dollars necessary to figure out how to actually make this work. That's not the way the patent system is supposed to work.
From a purely practical point of view, this is not a good idea: you do not want to stimulate brain cells using ultrasound. It's OK to jiggle the whole brain around and even squeeze it a little, but generating shear forces on a tiny length scale is a prescription for disaster.
(Finally, this has nothing to do with the Matrix--the Matrix clearly used invasive technology--unless you consider sticking a 6 inch spike into the brain "non-invasive".)
Do you even know how MP3's work? They look at a wave, and try and identify series of waves that "mask" other series of waves when processed by the human ear, and throw out the masked waves. This only works so well...
It can work arbitrarily well, depending on the bitrate. A good codec doesn't throw out coefficients if it doesn't need to. So, if you set the bitrate high enough, then it will code all the coefficients and you shouldn't hear any difference (even though the output may still not be bit-identical for other reasons). If you set the bitrate a little lower, it will only throw out coefficients that contribute the least to the output signal. Psychoacoustic properties are used to prioritize coefficients, not to throw them out willy-nilly.
And yes, I do distinctly hear a loss of harmonic complexity; it makes most (acoustic) string instruments sound like crap.
Not that it has anything to do with the main point we are discussing (namely, that if you set the compression quality high enough, there simply won't be any significant differences)...
If you aren't as susceptible to the masking effects that MP3 takes advantage of as other people, then I pity you--there is something wrong with your auditory system. Masking effects are an important part of human auditory processing. Hearing excessive detail is just as much of an auditory problem as hearing too little.
On my sub-$1000 rig (Yamaha HTR-5150 reciever, a pair Boston Acoustic CR-9's), lossy sounds noticeably worse than non-lossy.
That statement makes no sense whatsoever. Just digitally adjusting the volume down a little on your recording is "lossy" coding, since you can't recover the original signal from the reduced volume signal. Does that sound worse? I don't think so.
The point is: if you set the bitrate for a lossy codec high enough, you won't hear a difference. If you set it even higher, you won't hear a difference even if you re-encode in another lossy codec once. Etc. As a rule of thumb, the point at which that happens still is before you hit the bitrate of lossless audio codecs.
If you hear a difference, either you are using a bad codec, or you are setting the bitrate too low, or there is something else wrong with your setup.
Different lossy codecs throw away different parts of the audio stream. Trasncoding from one lossy format to another is essentially throwing away the superset of those parts. If you encode at a high enough bitrate, a "lossy" codec throws away almost nothing. If you think that there is no discernable difference, then how do you explain the fact that neither of the lossy formats throw away the entire superset to begin with for superior compression? Codecs have something called a "bitrate". The higher the bitrate, the less they throw away. If you set the bitrate high enough, they become extremely conservative at what they throw away.
If you use any reasonable lossy codec at a high enough quality setting, it's essentially the same as a lossless codec, and you still save space compared to the lossless (bit accurate) codecs.