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  1. Re:Spacetime on Kilogram Gets Controversial; Why Not Split the Difference? · · Score: 2

    The whole point of changing a definition is to base it on something that's easier to measure to very high accuracy. We can't even measure the curvature caused by the Earth that accurately and even if we could, we don't know the mass of the Earth that accurately either.

  2. Re:FORTRAN on Should Younger Developers Be Paid More? · · Score: 2

    Actually, one major reason why FORTRAN has been around for so long is not because people liked it that much but because for a long time (don't know how true it is now), FORTRAN code ran faster than C. The reason is simply that some details of the language (e.g. aliasing rules, no pointer arithmetic) made it easier for compilers to produce fast code. If it weren't for the more efficient compilers, FORTRAN would have been dead a long time ago.

  3. Re:Astrology and Religion ... damn on Stars Remain In Their Usual Places; People Panic · · Score: 1

    I tend to prefer Astrology. At least people of different signs don't kill each other.

  4. Re:Flanagan has recanted on Moscow Has Eyes On WikiLeaks, Too · · Score: 1

    Recanted or not, given the current Canadian laws, that's pretty close to being a criminal offence. Canada has laws against inciting to violence/murder. Not as tough as in many EU countries, but more than in the US.

  5. Re:This is actually a good solution on UN May Ban Blotting Out the Sun · · Score: 1

    And orbital sun blocking system is totally reversible

    The blocking is reversible, but the extra CO2 you'll get (from reduced photosynthesis) by blocking the sun is not going away instantly when you let the sun in again.

  6. Re:global warming as a tool on UN May Ban Blotting Out the Sun · · Score: 1

    If you block out the sun, you reduce temperature in the short term, i.e. while you're blocking the sun. On the other hand, you're increasing the amount of CO2 in the long term because while the sun is blocked, you have less photosynthesis to get rid of the CO2.

    This means you'll have to block even more sun to keep the same temperature as the CO2 increases. Doesn't sound like a great solution to me.

  7. Re:Um, not quite.... on Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself · · Score: 1

    Actually, getting Uranium is easy, but getting enriched Uranium is very hard. Once you have that, a Uranium bomb is nearly trivial. OTOH getting military grade Plutonium is relatively easy, but making a Plutonium bomb is pretty damn tough.

  8. Did the same on High-Tech Microphone Picks Voices From a Crowd · · Score: 1

    Except with 8 mics mounted on a mobile robot. The bottom line is that the more microphones you have, the easier it is. Another approach is to use a big parabolic "antenna" put a mic at the focal point, and steer it in the direction you want to listen. Of course, the advantage of the mic array is that you don't need any motor and you can actually listen to more than one source at a time.

  9. Re:P2P networking on FCC Set To Finalize Rules For Next-Gen Wireless · · Score: 1

    There's a few important technical differences between this and CB. First, the current protocols are *designed* to make multiple people "talking" over each other. It reduces the bandwidth, but it doesn't break things like for analog voice. It's now possible to computationally "steer" the transmission and reception so that you can have multiple users in different locations that aren't actually talking interfering with each other.

  10. Re:Who the hell... on Scientists Using Lasers To Cool Molecules · · Score: 1

    You mean I should stop telling people that the Plank constant is 6.28*10^-37 Btu*second?

  11. Re:Err Speex on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 1

    Sure, Speex does 2 kbps, but if you compare that to codec2, there's a hell of a difference. The 2 kbps Speex mode is something I put together quickly -- mainly to encode comfort noise at low rate. On the other hand, David put a lot of effort into codec2 and it actually sounds decent for voice at that rate (IMO better than Speex sounds at 4 kb/s).

  12. Re:How does it handle background noise? on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 1

    I don't know how codec2 actually does, but noise is a fundamental problem for all low-bitrate codecs. One thing that can sometimes help is applying some (conservative) noise reduction on the input to reduce the effect of noise on the codec.

  13. Re:Great news on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 1

    Hi Bruce,

    Just a minor correction, the frame size is 20 millisecond, not 20 microsecond :-). As for VQ, the concept is not that hard really. Of course, as for many things, the devil's in the details, many of which I got wrong in the Speex LSP VQ anyway.

  14. Re:what about LATENCY? on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 1

    Don't worry. The frame size is 20 ms and there's probably (haven't looked at that detail) around 10 ms of look-ahead, so latency shouldn't be an issue. I'd actually argue that it could be increased *if* there's a way to reduce the bit-rate by doing that.

  15. Re:English only ? on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 1

    Actually, this is not low enough for language to really have an effect other than tonal vs non-tonal languages. As long as you "train" quantizers with multiple languages you're fine. I would not expect language-dependencies to actually kick in until you hit something like 100 bps or below (i.e. when you need to do speech-to-text in the "encoder" and text-to-speech in the decoder).

  16. Re:Original Rationale on Codec2 — an Open Source, Low-Bandwidth Voice Codec · · Score: 5, Informative

    The fundamental difference is not that much the lossless vs lossy transmission, but the actual bit-rate. I designed Speex with a "sweet spot" around 16 kb/s, whereas David designed codec for a sweet spot around 2.4 kb/s. Speex does have a 2.4 kb/s mode, but the quality isn't even close to what David was able to achieve with codec2.

  17. Re:Bandwidth not Frequency on Lo-Fi Phones and the Future · · Score: 1

    Have you ever looked at the spectrum of an "s" compared to an "f". It just happens that they are nearly identical below 4 kHz? The main difference between the two is that above 4 kHz, the spectrum of the "f" rolls off much faster than that of the "s".

  18. Re:I'm all for it on Intel Wants To Charge $50 To Unlock Your CPU's Full Capabilities · · Score: 1

    Of course. In this case, all you need to do to save $50 is to take the package off the CPU (without damaging the die), analyse the die with an electron microscope to find the key, and put back the package. Sounds like a simple way to save $50.

  19. Re:Bandwidth not Frequency on Lo-Fi Phones and the Future · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Actually the bandwidth is 3.1kHz, running from 300Hz to 3.4kHz. This is the range of frequencies that conveys the most information relevant to intelligibility. Anything else makes it easier to recognise the speaker but doesn't make it easier to understand them and can make it harder to understand in noisy environments.

    That's a myth, 3.4 kHz is not high enough to tell the "f" sound from the "s" sound over the phone. Similarly for "v" vs "z" and a bunch of others. If phones were that intelligible, people wouldn't have to say "a as in alpha, b as in bravo, ...".

  20. Re:Read ALL The Articles on Music Festival Producer Pre-Sues Bootleggers · · Score: 1

    Report to police, sure. Start a trial, not so sure.

  21. Re:Collision course on Giant Balloons Could Solve Space Junk Problem · · Score: 1

    That was my first thought: "to fight space junk, we'll just send more space junk".

  22. Re:WebM is not the solution on Breaking Open the Video Frontier, Despite MPEG-LA · · Score: 1

    Every software field is full of patents. Either you do you what you can and hope for the best, or else you quit writing software. Most people choose the former. This is not specific to video. There may be a few more patents there, but nothing that makes the field fundamentall different from others. Sure trying to get rid of patents entirely is nice, but if that the only strategy, we'd all be using 100% proprietary software today.

  23. Binary star? on Scientists Discover Biggest Star · · Score: 1

    I'm curious, does anyone know how/if they can tell it's not a binary star system, i.e. two stars that are each below the Eddington limit?

  24. Re:solution: on The Hell Known As Internet Screening Services · · Score: 1

    You mean a bit like this?

  25. Re:1934 on AU Band Men At Work Owes Royalties On 'Kookaburra' · · Score: 1

    Oh right, copyright law is written for zombies.

    Of course they are. If we didn't have them, tell me what incentive would zombies have to innovate!