Not necessarily. As supplies eventually wane, the price of crude may actually skyrocket, and savvy investors could make a killing. Demand is still going to be there. Are we going to have realistic alternatives for technologies that require hydrocarbon-based fuel, like airliners? The ones we're building *right now* will undoubtedly still be in service in 20-30 years.
Besides, people have been predicting the death of the oil industry since the 50's, and it's always been "20 years out". I guarantee you that twenty years from now, someone else will also be predicting the end of oil "20 years from now". No one is foolish enough to believe oil supplies will last forever, but we've certainly managed to skirt past peak-oil predictions by almost half a century so far. If that track record holds true, I'd say the oil industry is going to be around for another half century at least, until it's eventually no longer economical to drill for natural oil, at which point everyone will turn to biofuel or synthetics, I suppose.
Like I said, it's inevitable that the oil market shrinks, but that video didn't address the areas where electricity isn't practical. Neither did the paper. The speaker asserts that "all new vehicles will be electric by 2025. What about vehicles that regularly need to travel more than 300 miles? There are still a lot of those, and he never addresses those points. I agree with a lot of his analyses, but not his conclusions, and I think his timelines are a bit optimistic as well. The notion of your house and car being able to transfer energy on demand (both ways) was sort of an interesting idea, though, and one I hadn't heard before. But again, I think his timeline of 2030 is a decade too early at a minimum. Infrastructure changes *very* slowly, so I think you'll see a slow transition over decades rather than a quick switch, as he seems to be promising.
About three-quarters of what gets refined from every barrel goes to transportation needs. Some of that is cars, but planes, trains, and trucks fall into those categories, and electricity won't work for all of those. Gasoline apparently accounts for 43% of the market, so let's assume those can ALL be replaced by EVs (which I think is optimistic as well) for argument's sake.
That's a good start, but what replaces the other half of the current oil market? We're still going to need some sort of hydrocarbon-based fuel to fuel planes, power ships, and drive long haul vehicles until some miracle energy source replaces it, or until we're generating so much excess electricity that we can afford to use that excess to create synthetic or alternative fuels with it. And that doesn't even address the other uses for oil which are non-transportation. In the near future, it seems more likely that we're going to struggle building capacity for the massively increased demand for electricity as we transition from gas-powered cars to EVs.
At the moment, I think it's wildly optimistic for anyone to assume the oil industry isn't going to still have a very long lifespan ahead of it, even if in a reduced capacity.
The current Silicon Valley fetish of thinking that access to the internet is somehow going to lift the world out of poverty strikes me as the height of hubris.
What would help more than anything is to eliminate the oppressive governments that are starving their own people or ensuring access to clean water or modern health centers. They see high technology as the answer to every problem. It's the exact same nonsense as the "put computers in every school / give every child a laptop or iPad / kids need to learn to code" nonsense. Sure, it's important for kids to have access to and be exposed to technology, but it's silly to make that the focus when the real effort simply needs to be on getting the basics taught well. It's the same with fighting poverty - we need to start with the basics. First, we need to ensure people are safe, free, and have access to clean food, water, and health care.
I'll credit Bill Gate's foundation for eventually figuring this out, after wasting million here and there on pointless high-tech approaches. Sounds like Wales and others haven't gotten there yet.
We're going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster than anyone thinks? I'm not sure how that's going to happen.
It's clearly going to take a generation or two to transition to electric vehicles, and even then, anyone who needs a long-hauler or high-endurance vehicle isn't going to switch to EVs, as they're not very practical for that. How about air travel? No good alternatives there for liquid hydrocarbon fuels - at least not that I can think of. Ships and ocean-going vessels? I don't think there are any realistic alternatives there. Manufacturing? Nope, lots of oil-based products still needed. And while bio-fuels or alternatives can take up some of this, we're a long, long way from having a realistic capacity to make up the difference. What am I missing here?
It's obvious that fossil fuel use certainly will wane, and electricity will take up the slack where possible, because that makes sense, but in reading the paper, they seem to skip over a number of thorny issues where there simply weren't yet practical alternatives to fossil fuels.
"At a minimum, this plausible future would suggest that governments ensure that the risks of further investments in oil and gas infrastructure be borne by private interests rather than taxpayers," the report reads.
Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy too. I think what the summary writers was (somewhat clumsily) trying to get at is that the gameplay elements are mechanical rather than electronic displays.
I also find it slightly ironic that Slashdot first links to said bullshit study the other day (in which many people rightly call out that it's complete crap), and then posts this a few days later, as if they didn't contribute to the original study's publicity.
I mean, I get it, Slashdot is just a news aggregator, but I really wish they could find more reliable news sources to draw from in the first place, rather than having to post the same story twice: first sensationalizing, then debunking.
Why do you feel that you need a "state" to approve your knowledge to call yourself whatever you want?
Welcome to the civilized world. It's entirely appropriate for the state to make sure the people who design our buildings and bridges, or who cut us open with surgical instruments, or who fly us from city to city in jumbo jets are actually qualified to do so.
Call yourself whatever you want and just get things done, don't worry about bullshit "approved" titles.
And yet, you were the one complaining that Tim Cook had the audacity to call what we do "coding".
I call what I do "coding", "programming", or "development" somewhat interchangeably. I also call myself a "programmer" rather than a "software engineer", as I don't recall passing any state-approved certification exams before I could write code as a professional.
True, but I'd have much rather seen something in the form of an Ask Slashdot asking "How can we solve this issue?", or "Why is this such a hard problem to solve?", rather than throwing out some half-assed answer that took all of 30 seconds to think of. Even the cost figure is ridiculous. At least do the math on the back of a fucking envelope before getting it wrong by orders of magnitude like that. As an example, Operation Tomodachi cost $90 million, and was far more extensive than this search. It shows a profound ignorance and a lack of respect for people who spend their entire professional lives working on such issues, not to mention demonstrating an annoying arrogance all too often found by armchair engineers and geeks.
Generally speaking, when you think you have an answer to a problem that's so obvious you can't believe no one thought of it before, remember that it's far more likely you haven't thought of some significant problem with your idea than the odds that none of the other billions of people on earth haven't had your particular stroke of genius.
COPPA applies to online services that are either designed for children younger than 13 or that know those children are using them. Khaliah Barnes, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), believes that by showing pre-teenage children using voice-activated AI devices, Amazon, Google and Apple are admitting their services are aimed at youngsters.
“When your advertising markets this product to children, and parents with children, that would absolutely trigger COPPA,” she says. “Recording children in the privacy of the home is genuinely creepy, and this warrants additional investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and [US] states.”
Siri is being advertised using Sesame Street's cookie monster (check out TFA). That's absolutely targeted at children. And of course, we've heard about the toy products like Barbie that sends recorded data out across the net to a server where it's processed and responded to. I think the big problem is that the parents aren't necessarily aware of the implications of these devices. No one is explicitly told that everything they say is recorded and transmitted to corporate headquarters. Would people be slightly more averse to putting these devices in the home if they knew they were essentially constantly-on, remotely controlled microphones? Maybe... maybe not.
I'm definitely not a "regulate first and ask questions later" sort of guy, so I'd say it's probably best to simply watch this space really carefully. We can always introduce new, specific legislation as the need arises to deal with potential threats. I think it's generally a bad idea for legislation to try to preempt problems that don't actually exist yet - you know... "for the children", etc. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep a close eye on what's happening here.
That's what we thought we were getting with cable TV subscriptions, and then we started getting ads there too. Even companies from whom I purchase products (like Amazon) still can't seem to stop themselves from *also* putting ads on their sites, which irritates me to no end. The temptation for just a bit of extra revenue from ads is apparently irresistible.
It would be nice to have that choice, but the cynic in me says that what you'll probably see is *fewer* ads, or perhaps *less intrusive* ads, rather than no ads.
Oh, don't get me wrong... I agree with you. I probably should have said *was* rather than *is*. It's certainly not anything you'd want to use for a new project, of course, but there are very likely a lot of legacy projects that are still being maintained that rely on it.
VB6 is simply a tool to get shit done, quickly and easily. If you couldn't do it quickly and easily, then it was the wrong tool for the job. People in the real world use software to get their real work done. You're thinking of VB6 as an end-product rather than as a tool, which is where your analogy goes off the rails.
I can sort of understand why some companies aren't so eager to open source dead code. Open sourcing it means that anyone can look at the code and check to see if it used someone else's patented algorithm, or happened to use source from a non-permissive license which wasn't disclosed, or any number of other issues...
Legal issues tend to kill a lot of good ideas and intentions. MS is fine with open-sourcing their active concerns when it will help promote their own products, but I wouldn't hold my breath for something like this to ever happen. It would involve sticking their neck out (legally speaking) for no perceivable gains.
Some people predict that Windows will eventually go open source. My bet is that it will never happen simply for legal reasons.
IBM has a hell of a lot worse problems than their employees going home at a reasonable hour. And there are a gazillions startups where plenty of enthusiastic young programmers ruined their relationships and health, only to have the company eventually fold under them anyhow.
I can't see how working insane hours is any measure of success for a company. In fact, one of the most successful companies I've ever worked for (and this is in the videogame industry, which is notorious for its insane crunches) has deliberately insisted that their employees should NOT work long hours, because it's actually detrimental to both employees AND the product in the long haul.
Even the mantra I hear of of "programmers work long hours because they *want* to" is idiotic and self-destructive. Most people will eventually burn out, even if it's doing something they love, if they're doing it too long and too intensely.
Oh, I can think of a lot of abuses the NSA hasn't committed. Minor corruption or scandals (relatively speaking) like what have been committed are not the depth of this issue. It's the potential for much, much worse abuse that scares the hell out of me now that this precedent has been established.
Do you think US citizens are fundamentally immune to the sort of oppression visited on other people around the world? Americans would like to think so, but we're as human and flawed as any other group of people, unfortunately. We've just been blessed with the inheritance of visionary (albeit just as human and flawed) forefathers who put in place a pretty good system to avoid the most flagrant abuses of the state, but many of us are scared to death over the ever-growing power of the government for exactly these sorts of reasons.
So many people love to see the federal government "righting wrongs" with a big stick of justice, or enacting all these wonderful social programs, but the flip side is that we're increasingly unable to control those agencies which are eroding our civil liberties a little more every day. I wish people would wake up and realize that you really aren't going to have one without the other, as much as people claim or wish otherwise.
Like I said, during the McCarthy-era witch hunts. Did you not even read to the end of the post? I was assuming the poster was talking present-tense. Because we also literally hunted and tried witches in the past, which we don't tend to do now in the present either.
try starting a Communist party in the USA (illegal)
I'd like to believe you're simply ignorant rather than intentially telling a falsehood. We don't ban political parties in the US. Granted, we haven't always lived up to that ideal, like the McCarthy-era witch hunts - perhaps that's what you're thinking of?
Yep, I agree. Your best bet is to simply use whatever the professionals are using, since you generally know that will be supported for a reasonable length of time. For game developers, that means plain old C++ and DirectX targeted at the desktop (or native console APIs, if you're a console developer). It's easy enough to port to other platforms like Universal Windows Apps as required, but you definitely don't want all your eggs in just one new MS basket. And these days, it makes sense to make sure you're porting to at least Mac, if not Linux as well.
You've got it mostly right, but not completely right. Any sort of digital manipulation introduces noise into the audio stream due to the nature of floating-point math. The more accuracy (or "headroom") you have in both domains (frequency and amplitude), the closer the final mix will be to the original waveform. That's why many studio engineers use 24bit / 192khz source material... not because you can actually hear any difference in the original source, but because it preserves the pristine quality of the source longer as it moves through arbitrary numbers of digital filters and mixing stages.
It's moderately useful for masters as you stated, because those masters can still be digitally manipulated without introducing any additional audible artifact. As indicated by vel-ex-tech, you actually do need additional samples for clean pitch or tempo shifting, but I wouldn't call that a typical "consumer" application.
Of course, for consumer tracks (simple listening), it's utterly pointless, much like the ridiculous Pono player. No one can actually hear the difference, and nearly all reputable double-blind studies confirm this. It's just a "bigger numbers are better" fetish among audiophiles or people who don't understand the science of audio. And frankly, the "loudness wars" have actually decreased the require dynamic range for most consumer music by pumping up the volume and compressing the shit out of it.
If they're targeting you, sure. And they'd need to be specifically targeting you to associate a NAME with those fingerprints. Not so much if it's all nicely contained in a ready-to-download electronic database.
Which one do you honestly think is more likely to happen? In fact, the electronic thefts have ALREADY happened via government computers, in case you missed that little bit of news a couple of years ago. I'm just extrapolating based on recent history.
Besides which, there's a very high probability that this biometric data will eventually be stolen by some hacker, or leaked via an insider. Then criminals will have your biometric data, and won't that be fun?
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. As supplies eventually wane, the price of crude may actually skyrocket, and savvy investors could make a killing. Demand is still going to be there. Are we going to have realistic alternatives for technologies that require hydrocarbon-based fuel, like airliners? The ones we're building *right now* will undoubtedly still be in service in 20-30 years.
Besides, people have been predicting the death of the oil industry since the 50's, and it's always been "20 years out". I guarantee you that twenty years from now, someone else will also be predicting the end of oil "20 years from now". No one is foolish enough to believe oil supplies will last forever, but we've certainly managed to skirt past peak-oil predictions by almost half a century so far. If that track record holds true, I'd say the oil industry is going to be around for another half century at least, until it's eventually no longer economical to drill for natural oil, at which point everyone will turn to biofuel or synthetics, I suppose.
Like I said, it's inevitable that the oil market shrinks, but that video didn't address the areas where electricity isn't practical. Neither did the paper. The speaker asserts that "all new vehicles will be electric by 2025. What about vehicles that regularly need to travel more than 300 miles? There are still a lot of those, and he never addresses those points. I agree with a lot of his analyses, but not his conclusions, and I think his timelines are a bit optimistic as well. The notion of your house and car being able to transfer energy on demand (both ways) was sort of an interesting idea, though, and one I hadn't heard before. But again, I think his timeline of 2030 is a decade too early at a minimum. Infrastructure changes *very* slowly, so I think you'll see a slow transition over decades rather than a quick switch, as he seems to be promising.
About three-quarters of what gets refined from every barrel goes to transportation needs. Some of that is cars, but planes, trains, and trucks fall into those categories, and electricity won't work for all of those. Gasoline apparently accounts for 43% of the market, so let's assume those can ALL be replaced by EVs (which I think is optimistic as well) for argument's sake.
That's a good start, but what replaces the other half of the current oil market? We're still going to need some sort of hydrocarbon-based fuel to fuel planes, power ships, and drive long haul vehicles until some miracle energy source replaces it, or until we're generating so much excess electricity that we can afford to use that excess to create synthetic or alternative fuels with it. And that doesn't even address the other uses for oil which are non-transportation. In the near future, it seems more likely that we're going to struggle building capacity for the massively increased demand for electricity as we transition from gas-powered cars to EVs.
At the moment, I think it's wildly optimistic for anyone to assume the oil industry isn't going to still have a very long lifespan ahead of it, even if in a reduced capacity.
The current Silicon Valley fetish of thinking that access to the internet is somehow going to lift the world out of poverty strikes me as the height of hubris.
What would help more than anything is to eliminate the oppressive governments that are starving their own people or ensuring access to clean water or modern health centers. They see high technology as the answer to every problem. It's the exact same nonsense as the "put computers in every school / give every child a laptop or iPad / kids need to learn to code" nonsense. Sure, it's important for kids to have access to and be exposed to technology, but it's silly to make that the focus when the real effort simply needs to be on getting the basics taught well. It's the same with fighting poverty - we need to start with the basics. First, we need to ensure people are safe, free, and have access to clean food, water, and health care.
I'll credit Bill Gate's foundation for eventually figuring this out, after wasting million here and there on pointless high-tech approaches. Sounds like Wales and others haven't gotten there yet.
We're going to wean ourselves off fossil fuels faster than anyone thinks? I'm not sure how that's going to happen.
It's clearly going to take a generation or two to transition to electric vehicles, and even then, anyone who needs a long-hauler or high-endurance vehicle isn't going to switch to EVs, as they're not very practical for that. How about air travel? No good alternatives there for liquid hydrocarbon fuels - at least not that I can think of. Ships and ocean-going vessels? I don't think there are any realistic alternatives there. Manufacturing? Nope, lots of oil-based products still needed. And while bio-fuels or alternatives can take up some of this, we're a long, long way from having a realistic capacity to make up the difference. What am I missing here?
It's obvious that fossil fuel use certainly will wane, and electricity will take up the slack where possible, because that makes sense, but in reading the paper, they seem to skip over a number of thorny issues where there simply weren't yet practical alternatives to fossil fuels.
"At a minimum, this plausible future would suggest that governments ensure that the risks of further investments in oil and gas infrastructure be borne by private interests rather than taxpayers," the report reads.
Ah... okay, I get it.
Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy too. I think what the summary writers was (somewhat clumsily) trying to get at is that the gameplay elements are mechanical rather than electronic displays.
I also find it slightly ironic that Slashdot first links to said bullshit study the other day (in which many people rightly call out that it's complete crap), and then posts this a few days later, as if they didn't contribute to the original study's publicity.
I mean, I get it, Slashdot is just a news aggregator, but I really wish they could find more reliable news sources to draw from in the first place, rather than having to post the same story twice: first sensationalizing, then debunking.
Why do you feel that you need a "state" to approve your knowledge to call yourself whatever you want?
Welcome to the civilized world. It's entirely appropriate for the state to make sure the people who design our buildings and bridges, or who cut us open with surgical instruments, or who fly us from city to city in jumbo jets are actually qualified to do so.
Call yourself whatever you want and just get things done, don't worry about bullshit "approved" titles.
And yet, you were the one complaining that Tim Cook had the audacity to call what we do "coding".
I call what I do "coding", "programming", or "development" somewhat interchangeably. I also call myself a "programmer" rather than a "software engineer", as I don't recall passing any state-approved certification exams before I could write code as a professional.
True, but I'd have much rather seen something in the form of an Ask Slashdot asking "How can we solve this issue?", or "Why is this such a hard problem to solve?", rather than throwing out some half-assed answer that took all of 30 seconds to think of. Even the cost figure is ridiculous. At least do the math on the back of a fucking envelope before getting it wrong by orders of magnitude like that. As an example, Operation Tomodachi cost $90 million, and was far more extensive than this search. It shows a profound ignorance and a lack of respect for people who spend their entire professional lives working on such issues, not to mention demonstrating an annoying arrogance all too often found by armchair engineers and geeks.
Generally speaking, when you think you have an answer to a problem that's so obvious you can't believe no one thought of it before, remember that it's far more likely you haven't thought of some significant problem with your idea than the odds that none of the other billions of people on earth haven't had your particular stroke of genius.
A little humility would go a long way.
I think the article answers this reasonably well:
COPPA applies to online services that are either designed for children younger than 13 or that know those children are using them. Khaliah Barnes, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), believes that by showing pre-teenage children using voice-activated AI devices, Amazon, Google and Apple are admitting their services are aimed at youngsters.
“When your advertising markets this product to children, and parents with children, that would absolutely trigger COPPA,” she says. “Recording children in the privacy of the home is genuinely creepy, and this warrants additional investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and [US] states.”
Siri is being advertised using Sesame Street's cookie monster (check out TFA). That's absolutely targeted at children. And of course, we've heard about the toy products like Barbie that sends recorded data out across the net to a server where it's processed and responded to. I think the big problem is that the parents aren't necessarily aware of the implications of these devices. No one is explicitly told that everything they say is recorded and transmitted to corporate headquarters. Would people be slightly more averse to putting these devices in the home if they knew they were essentially constantly-on, remotely controlled microphones? Maybe... maybe not.
I'm definitely not a "regulate first and ask questions later" sort of guy, so I'd say it's probably best to simply watch this space really carefully. We can always introduce new, specific legislation as the need arises to deal with potential threats. I think it's generally a bad idea for legislation to try to preempt problems that don't actually exist yet - you know... "for the children", etc. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep a close eye on what's happening here.
That's what we thought we were getting with cable TV subscriptions, and then we started getting ads there too. Even companies from whom I purchase products (like Amazon) still can't seem to stop themselves from *also* putting ads on their sites, which irritates me to no end. The temptation for just a bit of extra revenue from ads is apparently irresistible.
It would be nice to have that choice, but the cynic in me says that what you'll probably see is *fewer* ads, or perhaps *less intrusive* ads, rather than no ads.
Oh, don't get me wrong... I agree with you. I probably should have said *was* rather than *is*. It's certainly not anything you'd want to use for a new project, of course, but there are very likely a lot of legacy projects that are still being maintained that rely on it.
VB6 is simply a tool to get shit done, quickly and easily. If you couldn't do it quickly and easily, then it was the wrong tool for the job. People in the real world use software to get their real work done. You're thinking of VB6 as an end-product rather than as a tool, which is where your analogy goes off the rails.
I can sort of understand why some companies aren't so eager to open source dead code. Open sourcing it means that anyone can look at the code and check to see if it used someone else's patented algorithm, or happened to use source from a non-permissive license which wasn't disclosed, or any number of other issues...
Legal issues tend to kill a lot of good ideas and intentions. MS is fine with open-sourcing their active concerns when it will help promote their own products, but I wouldn't hold my breath for something like this to ever happen. It would involve sticking their neck out (legally speaking) for no perceivable gains.
Some people predict that Windows will eventually go open source. My bet is that it will never happen simply for legal reasons.
IBM has a hell of a lot worse problems than their employees going home at a reasonable hour. And there are a gazillions startups where plenty of enthusiastic young programmers ruined their relationships and health, only to have the company eventually fold under them anyhow.
I can't see how working insane hours is any measure of success for a company. In fact, one of the most successful companies I've ever worked for (and this is in the videogame industry, which is notorious for its insane crunches) has deliberately insisted that their employees should NOT work long hours, because it's actually detrimental to both employees AND the product in the long haul.
Even the mantra I hear of of "programmers work long hours because they *want* to" is idiotic and self-destructive. Most people will eventually burn out, even if it's doing something they love, if they're doing it too long and too intensely.
Oh, I can think of a lot of abuses the NSA hasn't committed. Minor corruption or scandals (relatively speaking) like what have been committed are not the depth of this issue. It's the potential for much, much worse abuse that scares the hell out of me now that this precedent has been established.
Do you think US citizens are fundamentally immune to the sort of oppression visited on other people around the world? Americans would like to think so, but we're as human and flawed as any other group of people, unfortunately. We've just been blessed with the inheritance of visionary (albeit just as human and flawed) forefathers who put in place a pretty good system to avoid the most flagrant abuses of the state, but many of us are scared to death over the ever-growing power of the government for exactly these sorts of reasons.
So many people love to see the federal government "righting wrongs" with a big stick of justice, or enacting all these wonderful social programs, but the flip side is that we're increasingly unable to control those agencies which are eroding our civil liberties a little more every day. I wish people would wake up and realize that you really aren't going to have one without the other, as much as people claim or wish otherwise.
Like I said, during the McCarthy-era witch hunts. Did you not even read to the end of the post? I was assuming the poster was talking present-tense. Because we also literally hunted and tried witches in the past, which we don't tend to do now in the present either.
When it comes to generics, reviews are pretty useless as the underlying supplier often changes.
Yes, but they pretty much have the exact same formulations as the brands whose packaging they imitate.
Also: relevant to this discussion...
try starting a Communist party in the USA (illegal)
I'd like to believe you're simply ignorant rather than intentially telling a falsehood. We don't ban political parties in the US. Granted, we haven't always lived up to that ideal, like the McCarthy-era witch hunts - perhaps that's what you're thinking of?
Yep, I agree. Your best bet is to simply use whatever the professionals are using, since you generally know that will be supported for a reasonable length of time. For game developers, that means plain old C++ and DirectX targeted at the desktop (or native console APIs, if you're a console developer). It's easy enough to port to other platforms like Universal Windows Apps as required, but you definitely don't want all your eggs in just one new MS basket. And these days, it makes sense to make sure you're porting to at least Mac, if not Linux as well.
You've got it mostly right, but not completely right. Any sort of digital manipulation introduces noise into the audio stream due to the nature of floating-point math. The more accuracy (or "headroom") you have in both domains (frequency and amplitude), the closer the final mix will be to the original waveform. That's why many studio engineers use 24bit / 192khz source material... not because you can actually hear any difference in the original source, but because it preserves the pristine quality of the source longer as it moves through arbitrary numbers of digital filters and mixing stages.
It's moderately useful for masters as you stated, because those masters can still be digitally manipulated without introducing any additional audible artifact. As indicated by vel-ex-tech, you actually do need additional samples for clean pitch or tempo shifting, but I wouldn't call that a typical "consumer" application.
Of course, for consumer tracks (simple listening), it's utterly pointless, much like the ridiculous Pono player. No one can actually hear the difference, and nearly all reputable double-blind studies confirm this. It's just a "bigger numbers are better" fetish among audiophiles or people who don't understand the science of audio. And frankly, the "loudness wars" have actually decreased the require dynamic range for most consumer music by pumping up the volume and compressing the shit out of it.
Damn... which comic to choose?
You can always get a new car or a new credit card.
If they're targeting you, sure. And they'd need to be specifically targeting you to associate a NAME with those fingerprints. Not so much if it's all nicely contained in a ready-to-download electronic database.
Which one do you honestly think is more likely to happen? In fact, the electronic thefts have ALREADY happened via government computers, in case you missed that little bit of news a couple of years ago. I'm just extrapolating based on recent history.
Besides which, there's a very high probability that this biometric data will eventually be stolen by some hacker, or leaked via an insider. Then criminals will have your biometric data, and won't that be fun?