When you're working on the go with a laptop rather than casually on a desktop the story changes. Frequently doing the former, I personally would love faster boot times.
If you want to get as specific as neural stimulation, then cochlear implants, depending on how common you mean. But I'm glad to be in a world that has that technology. It's also very highly analogous and can benefit from the same research, as it involves direct electrical stimulation to a population of neurons. One of the limiting factors in cochlear implants' success is that it is currently (no pun intended) impossible to stimulate anything close to a narrow, precise range of auditory neurons; thus frequency resolution in CI users suffers dramatically. We have something like 30,000 auditory neurons along on almost continuum of frequencies; studies tend to show that with a CI you can have up to a maximum of 8 separate frequency channels before performance saturates.
An iPhone or PDA easily has enough computing power to do a real-time spectrogram, but to be nitpicky, it's a time-frequency plot, not just a frequency plot. In my experience it's pretty hard to pick up the ability to read spectrograms of speech accurately and quickly, then again it's not my only access to speech. At the very least it would increase a deaf user's awareness of sound in his or her environment, and there would be at least a minimum level of discrimination between various types of sounds.
I always appreciate a good devil's advocate argument. But you don't have to work through any math to realize that $1.92 million is a ludicrous figure for this small number of non-commercial, personal acts of infringement. At her salary, it's more money than she'll make in a lifetime (ok, fine, I worked through some math there, so sue me). Blindly using these same formulas one would conclude that amount approaching and exceeding several billion in damages would be justified for common cases of infringement when an individual has been sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. If you're looking at this mathematically, this is the point where you step back and look for a sign error somewhere, because you know the result can't be correct.
And regarding your match analogy, IANAL either, but I think that yes, damages should be reduced if 100 others were involved. Why are you being held fully responsible for damages for which the responsibility demonstrably falls in the hands of others? Can your neighbor, after successfully suing you, go on to sue someone else for the same damages, thereby being allowed to receive 100 times the amount than if you alone had caused the damages? Yes, shared responsibility makes the logistics difficult, but avoiding difficulty is not an excuse for unjustly assigning the responsibility.
Furthermore, with multiplicative formulas such as yours, it can be very unreasonable to ballpark figures as you have. Small errors in these numbers result in large errors in the result. And when the difference is between a reasonable fine and ruining someone's life, surely you can agree that it is unacceptable to simply ballpark the figures.
Yet I've heard folks whose positions are that it's unrealistic to stop buying music from the major labels. It's disheartening that the consumer has lost so much power that we, in general, apparently feel we need to continue buying these products.
You don't need to own any music, much less RIAA-affiliated music. Don't buy it. Hell, encourage the music industry to develop a more small-artist based marketplace, driven by affordability-motivated competition between not only artists; but studios, audio hardware & software producers, etc. This could easily be a reality if we (the general public) could just get over our silly manufactured desires for these mass-produced, mass-marketed, practically shoved-down-our-throat stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's all bad, I in fact love some of the music by certain artists who have unfortunately signed with an RIAA-affiliated label. But I don't need it.
Cued speech, however, is quite simple to learn. Everything you need to know can fit on one sheet of paper [pdf] . Wouldn't say it beats "write what you want to say" for this purpose though.
Re:mix of white noise and randomized office hubbub
on
Cone of Silence 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Because it wouldn't work. First off, any error in the produced waveform, including latency which is unavoidable, and you're no longer fully canceling the sound--in fact you may be amplifying it at some frequencies. Also, unless the generated sound is coming from the same location as the to-be-canceled sound, then the phase difference (cancellation) depends on the listeners location, and again you will be selectively amplifying certain frequencies at certain locations.
"Since it's trivial to speed up a person's voice without altering the pitch using DSP"
True
"you'd still be able to understand the message at 10x speed (or more)"
Not necessarily true, even using techniques like transient preservation, especially depending on the talker (and the listener--I think my mom would be lost at 2x no matter the talker). From sounds I've heard and worked with, 10x I think is definitely pushing it.
The cocktail party problem - our ability to hear out a target conversation amongst a barrage of others. There's still a lot of room for improvement here as a computational problem; meanwhile, it's relatively easy to get a correct human response to multiple-talker environments if you cue listeners for what to listen for.
http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/
on
Backing Up Your Brain
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hmm, all the references I read actually find no documentation of such a quote, in or out of your given context; though the existing documentation seems to indicate that he was more of a mindset to have given your quote & context than the apparently widely mis-circulated quote. I'm intrigued though--do you have any references you could point to regarding the real quote?
Of course I find it necesary to point out to other readers who may assume your link as a source of backup without actually reading it, that the linked-to page, under the cam.ac.uk domain, actually shows the quote you provided, circulating in so many emails, to be false. There was no such study at Cambridge University; however there was a similar study with somewhat more complex results done at Nottingham University.
From the page:
2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs
3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur
Perhaps you can read those without a problem--I certainly couldn't, and I'll wager that most cannot. The page's author goes on to explain how there are clearly some words that cannot be read in this manner (such as "salt" and "slat," a poor choice of example by my opinion due to the infrequent common usage of the word "slat"), methods by which text may be insignificantly jumbled that would ease the reading (used in the quote to artificially show the point), and then goes on for longer than I care to read since I'm getting later and later for work.
What if I want to remote login to my home computer which may host my legally purchased media and view/listen them from my laptop when I'm away from home? Granted with today's technology I won't be getting a good speed on that, but it should be easily possible in the near future. Or is even that against some retarded part of the mess that is copyright law these days? But how does AT&T know that that data transfer is any different from making an illegal copy?
In its current incarnation it won't be seen on the battlefield at all. Invisible to targeting lasers? Use a different laser wavelength. Invisible to night vision? (Does night vision really only work on a single frequency anyway?) Change the frequency you're looking at. It's not a reliable solution for anything battlefield-worthy until it can encompass a range of frequencies--but it's a good academic first step!
Even if night vision did work on detecting a single frequency, it wouldn't be a robust viable solution. Simply change the wavelength your night vision operates on, and the cloaking devices become useless. For this reason this technology as it stands currently is really not a viable solution for any military application as long as your opponents know anything about it (better hope they don't read Slashdot!)
Don't get me wrong, I think it's still cool and a good first step, just not with any militarily robust applications.
I don't recall seeing similar reports on previous models...are the Intel-based laptops made out of a different material that would allow that explanation or that of user uncleanliness to be plausible?
I'm starting to get really pissed off at the "oh, wait, so it's bad if [m$ | AOL | Sony | other evil company] does it but it's OK if [Google | Apple | Symantec] does it? Shut the fuck up, give arugemtns a little more credibility than that. In this case, no, it's not bad if MS does it in my opinion. Here we have the choice between: give people some information and possibly let them know that they're legally not allowed to give them more; or don't give them any information at all. Can you please justify why the latter is better?
Please think about that. If they showed an average, and that average was better than the peak, then....wait, does that make an sense?
I'm sure the average was better than some specific benchmark runs. But that necessarily implies that it was worse than some other runs. Which means there would have been a way to skew the results more in their favor by picking and choosing which data to consider relevant. Which is what Apple did, and should not be accepted as "ok" just because many companies do it too.
Definition shmefinition--when I hear someone calling something pricey in certain contexts (context, ya know, the thing that you won't find much of in a dictionary?) it absolutely implies that it costs more than it's worth. For example: "that particular store is a bit pricey..." to me means that there are cheaper alternatives of comparable quality.
It's probably a little better; I'm guessing the code isn't quite as poorly written as First4Internet's rootkit for Sony. That still doesn't make it ok though.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're working on the go with a laptop rather than casually on a desktop the story changes. Frequently doing the former, I personally would love faster boot times.
If you want to get as specific as neural stimulation, then cochlear implants, depending on how common you mean. But I'm glad to be in a world that has that technology. It's also very highly analogous and can benefit from the same research, as it involves direct electrical stimulation to a population of neurons. One of the limiting factors in cochlear implants' success is that it is currently (no pun intended) impossible to stimulate anything close to a narrow, precise range of auditory neurons; thus frequency resolution in CI users suffers dramatically. We have something like 30,000 auditory neurons along on almost continuum of frequencies; studies tend to show that with a CI you can have up to a maximum of 8 separate frequency channels before performance saturates.
An iPhone or PDA easily has enough computing power to do a real-time spectrogram, but to be nitpicky, it's a time-frequency plot, not just a frequency plot. In my experience it's pretty hard to pick up the ability to read spectrograms of speech accurately and quickly, then again it's not my only access to speech. At the very least it would increase a deaf user's awareness of sound in his or her environment, and there would be at least a minimum level of discrimination between various types of sounds.
As for alternate modes of sensation (assuming something like a cochlear implant is a no-go), look into some of the work being done in vibro-tactile devices - http://techtv.mit.edu/genres/18-education/videos/3557-speakers-and-signers-ted-moallem-sensible-technologies----sensory-communication-aids-for-the-developing-world
I always appreciate a good devil's advocate argument. But you don't have to work through any math to realize that $1.92 million is a ludicrous figure for this small number of non-commercial, personal acts of infringement. At her salary, it's more money than she'll make in a lifetime (ok, fine, I worked through some math there, so sue me). Blindly using these same formulas one would conclude that amount approaching and exceeding several billion in damages would be justified for common cases of infringement when an individual has been sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. If you're looking at this mathematically, this is the point where you step back and look for a sign error somewhere, because you know the result can't be correct.
And regarding your match analogy, IANAL either, but I think that yes, damages should be reduced if 100 others were involved. Why are you being held fully responsible for damages for which the responsibility demonstrably falls in the hands of others? Can your neighbor, after successfully suing you, go on to sue someone else for the same damages, thereby being allowed to receive 100 times the amount than if you alone had caused the damages? Yes, shared responsibility makes the logistics difficult, but avoiding difficulty is not an excuse for unjustly assigning the responsibility.
Furthermore, with multiplicative formulas such as yours, it can be very unreasonable to ballpark figures as you have. Small errors in these numbers result in large errors in the result. And when the difference is between a reasonable fine and ruining someone's life, surely you can agree that it is unacceptable to simply ballpark the figures.
Yet I've heard folks whose positions are that it's unrealistic to stop buying music from the major labels. It's disheartening that the consumer has lost so much power that we, in general, apparently feel we need to continue buying these products.
You don't need to own any music, much less RIAA-affiliated music. Don't buy it.
Hell, encourage the music industry to develop a more small-artist based marketplace, driven by affordability-motivated competition between not only artists; but studios, audio hardware & software producers, etc. This could easily be a reality if we (the general public) could just get over our silly manufactured desires for these mass-produced, mass-marketed, practically shoved-down-our-throat stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's all bad, I in fact love some of the music by certain artists who have unfortunately signed with an RIAA-affiliated label. But I don't need it.
http://www.boycott-riaa.com/
http://www.riaaradar.com/
[files]:
[pdf]: http://downhillbattle.org/riaa/sticker.pdf
[MS Publisher]: http://downhillbattle.org/riaa/sticker.pub
^^ the above are formatted for Avery 5160 labels, but I in no way suggest you to do anything specific with those stickers. For educational purposes only, view what others have done here http://downhillbattle.org/riaa/
Cued speech, however, is quite simple to learn. Everything you need to know can fit on one sheet of paper [pdf] . Wouldn't say it beats "write what you want to say" for this purpose though.
Because it wouldn't work. First off, any error in the produced waveform, including latency which is unavoidable, and you're no longer fully canceling the sound--in fact you may be amplifying it at some frequencies. Also, unless the generated sound is coming from the same location as the to-be-canceled sound, then the phase difference (cancellation) depends on the listeners location, and again you will be selectively amplifying certain frequencies at certain locations.
"Since it's trivial to speed up a person's voice without altering the pitch using DSP"
True
"you'd still be able to understand the message at 10x speed (or more)"
Not necessarily true, even using techniques like transient preservation, especially depending on the talker (and the listener--I think my mom would be lost at 2x no matter the talker). From sounds I've heard and worked with, 10x I think is definitely pushing it.
The cocktail party problem - our ability to hear out a target conversation amongst a barrage of others. There's still a lot of room for improvement here as a computational problem; meanwhile, it's relatively easy to get a correct human response to multiple-talker environments if you cue listeners for what to listen for.
http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/
Hmm, all the references I read actually find no documentation of such a quote, in or out of your given context; though the existing documentation seems to indicate that he was more of a mindset to have given your quote & context than the apparently widely mis-circulated quote. I'm intrigued though--do you have any references you could point to regarding the real quote?
Of course I find it necesary to point out to other readers who may assume your link as a source of backup without actually reading it, that the linked-to page, under the cam.ac.uk domain, actually shows the quote you provided, circulating in so many emails, to be false. There was no such study at Cambridge University; however there was a similar study with somewhat more complex results done at Nottingham University. From the page: 2) Big ccunoil tax ineesacrs tihs yaer hvae seezueqd the inmcoes of mnay pneosenirs 3) A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur Perhaps you can read those without a problem--I certainly couldn't, and I'll wager that most cannot. The page's author goes on to explain how there are clearly some words that cannot be read in this manner (such as "salt" and "slat," a poor choice of example by my opinion due to the infrequent common usage of the word "slat"), methods by which text may be insignificantly jumbled that would ease the reading (used in the quote to artificially show the point), and then goes on for longer than I care to read since I'm getting later and later for work.
What if I want to remote login to my home computer which may host my legally purchased media and view/listen them from my laptop when I'm away from home? Granted with today's technology I won't be getting a good speed on that, but it should be easily possible in the near future. Or is even that against some retarded part of the mess that is copyright law these days? But how does AT&T know that that data transfer is any different from making an illegal copy?
But Google Maps? I'd call that content.
In its current incarnation it won't be seen on the battlefield at all. Invisible to targeting lasers? Use a different laser wavelength. Invisible to night vision? (Does night vision really only work on a single frequency anyway?) Change the frequency you're looking at. It's not a reliable solution for anything battlefield-worthy until it can encompass a range of frequencies--but it's a good academic first step!
Even if night vision did work on detecting a single frequency, it wouldn't be a robust viable solution. Simply change the wavelength your night vision operates on, and the cloaking devices become useless. For this reason this technology as it stands currently is really not a viable solution for any military application as long as your opponents know anything about it (better hope they don't read Slashdot!)
Don't get me wrong, I think it's still cool and a good first step, just not with any militarily robust applications.
"because there's a good chance they've got something quite specific in mind"
I believe that's precisely what he meant by "certain things are expected of you," you just worded it more clearly.
I don't recall seeing similar reports on previous models...are the Intel-based laptops made out of a different material that would allow that explanation or that of user uncleanliness to be plausible?
I've been advocating that solution for years...
That's my cue to stop reading.
I'm starting to get really pissed off at the "oh, wait, so it's bad if [m$ | AOL | Sony | other evil company] does it but it's OK if [Google | Apple | Symantec] does it? Shut the fuck up, give arugemtns a little more credibility than that. In this case, no, it's not bad if MS does it in my opinion. Here we have the choice between: give people some information and possibly let them know that they're legally not allowed to give them more; or don't give them any information at all. Can you please justify why the latter is better?
Please think about that. If they showed an average, and that average was better than the peak, then....wait, does that make an sense?
I'm sure the average was better than some specific benchmark runs. But that necessarily implies that it was worse than some other runs. Which means there would have been a way to skew the results more in their favor by picking and choosing which data to consider relevant. Which is what Apple did, and should not be accepted as "ok" just because many companies do it too.
Definition shmefinition--when I hear someone calling something pricey in certain contexts (context, ya know, the thing that you won't find much of in a dictionary?) it absolutely implies that it costs more than it's worth. For example: "that particular store is a bit pricey..." to me means that there are cheaper alternatives of comparable quality.
It's probably a little better; I'm guessing the code isn't quite as poorly written as First4Internet's rootkit for Sony. That still doesn't make it ok though.