As I recall from the Frontline documentary, the NSA argues that sweeping up and recording emails and conversations does not require a warrant if they do not actually read or listen to the recorded information. They say they would need a warrant for wire tapping if they want to open up a record and examine it.
We and two partner firms saw a big increase in email latency for the afternoon, up to a few hours delay in some cases. General connectivity (vpn, vnc etc.) was not affected, though.
3) A driver is not strong enough to stop the car against the engine
Check your facts. In the late 1980s Car and Driver could not find any kind of vehicle that could not be slowed with the brakes even with the accelerator held all the way down to the floor. An update to this is at the following link: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-deal-with-unintended-acceleration
In any case, drivers that don't know how to put their car in neutral and cars that can't be put into neutral don't belong on public roads.
There's a big difference between "initial quality" reports and long term (5, 10, 15 year) reliability, though there is probably some correlation due to overall manufacturing control at the factory. Initial quality tells you if something was built correctly, for the most part. Long term reliability has more to do with the design and specifications of the car and its components. You can have a cheap car (or camera, or toy, etc.) that works fine out of the box and breaks in a short time due to cheap materials. Or you could have one built of high quality materials with fine tolerances that lasts effectively forever.
You should check eBay for used Mindstorms kits. Even the older first generation kits or NXT (not NXT 2.0) kits have a lot to offer, and are just at the top end of your price range. The graphical programming environment (NXT-G) is very easy to learn. I've been working with an informal group of parents and kids that want to get ready to start an FLL team next year, and the kids are able to make the NXT bot do things within minutes (okay, maybe 5 to 10 minutes) of getting started with the software (and a chassis ready to go).
The Lego engineers have done a darn good job making robotics accessible. I considered for myself building up breadboards with microcontrollers, etc. but that's more for me. For the kids, the used NXT set has been fast and easy way for them to get to level that would take *much* longer with other approaches. I think most 10-year-olds will get board very quickly unless they can hit the ground running, and the NXT system does just that.
By the way, the older NXT kits can be upgraded to some degree with additional parts and sensors, and the FLL allows use of even the older Mindstorms kits, so it's not a dead-end purchase.
That's shortsighted thinking. The ability to derive and analyze is where a great deal of realization and invention comes from. The ability to efficiently perform quantitative analyses is useful and interesting, but doesn't lead to great insights about the world.
I agree completely. Working as an engineer (and as a student) I find my self always returning to my venerable HP 15C. While it may be useful to have some programmable 'macro' level functions (parallel resistor formula, Volts to dBm conversion, etc.), entering and graphing equations or programming anything in general is generally a waste of time.
Anyone doing serious work will be using Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, etc., or even Excel.
Anyone "not there yet" should be graphing by hand and using a basic calculator (if any) for gnarly calculations.
In a related rant-
Calculators should basically be banned from lower level math classes, at least until students demonstrate proficiency with arithmetic and can check their own work.
The argument that introducing young students to calculators is of some benefit is entirely misguided, coming from educators that have not much experience in math in the first place. We find the results of this calculator reliance in a huge number of college students that have no clue how to check their own work, what results to expect, when they've made an error or not, to the point where they're basically mathematically illiterate.
Teachers and professors should be smart enough to craft problems with 'nice numbers' that are easily worked by hand, eliminating any need for calculators in class or on exams in the first place.
Many of the expanded government powers that have been sought (or implemented) in the last decade would be more acceptable with oversight directly by elected officials. As it stands now, most of the related decisions are made in secret... and that can't be good in the long run.
... probably aren't high on the recruiting list for IT and technology professionals. MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford,... several state universities, and on down are where the action is for engineering and computer science. So clearly there are more "tech" jobs in the specialties where these schools are hiring, likely those requiring less education. The problem with this data is that it has no basis for comparison to how the visa program is actually changing anything.
I had tried to recruit some talented MSEE grads for some time back in 2007 and found, frustratingly, that most were here in student visas and the pool of H1-B visas were much smaller. We couldn't count on obtaining an H1-B and had to turn down a few very talented people. And, no, at the time we did not find as many U.S. citizens available.
A better data point would be to show the percentage of student visa holders that have remained the in U.S. with this program.
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
Just because people today 'don't use' something in their daily lives, does not mean you can conclude it's not important. As many before have noted here, a solid understanding of algebra and calculus underpins understanding of statistics, finance, physics and on and on. While I agree the way math is taught to the 'general' track of students in school needs to change, it's just ridiculous to relegate the masses to ignorance by reducing math requirements any further than they are.
Everything referenced in the thread so far is from the description and abstract. What matters most is the actual claims. These can be quite narrow, especially given the cited prior art, however given the rapid time from filing to issue I would guess that the application went through without much push back from the examiners.
Claim 1 is pasted below. The other independent claim is Claim 13. All the other claims are dependent on these (narrower).
It will be interesting to see if this is challenged... but I suspect Amazon will first have to sue someone, since a patent is just that - a right to sue.
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving and storing personal data of a first user of a computer-based service, said computer-based service accessible to users over a network, said personal data specified by the first user; providing a user interface for users to establish contact relationships with other users of the service such that each user can have one or more contacts, said user interface enabling a user to identify other users of the service, and to selectively initiate the generation of requests to establish contact relationships with the identified users; receiving a request from a second user of the service to establish a contact relationship with the first user, said request submitted to the service over a network via said user interface; sending a notification of the request to the first user over a network; providing an option, in connection with said request, for the first user to grant permission for the second user to view at least some of the personal data of the first user; and in response to the first user granting said permission, providing the second user access to at least some of the personal data of the first user via a contact information user interface of the service, such that the second user is provided access to data that would not otherwise be accessible to the second user via the service; wherein the method, including receiving and storing the personal data, providing the user interface, receiving the request, sending the notification, providing said option, and providing the second user access, is performed by a server computer system.
Any quantized or discretized representation of a higher resolution signal (image) must have limited bandwidth (image resolution) to avoid aliasing artifacts. It doesn't matter whether you can distinguish (see) the pixels (samples) or not. The problem is that for a signal with high frequency content (image with fine resolution content) the lower frequency (lower resolution) samples (pixels) cannot distinguish between the original/intended signal (image) and a corresponding one with lower frequency (resolution) content. The lower frequency signal having the same samples is called the alias of the high frequency signal (at least in this case...). You effectively "see" (or in audio "hear") a lower frequency signal than was there originally.
The effect is the same for audio or video or images or any other system with sampled signals. By limiting the resolution before sampling, equivalent to lowpass filtering, you can limit the high frequency content that aliases to lower frequencies.
It seemed to be pretty well settled that the problem with the Audi 5000's in the 1980's was due to placement of the pedal cluster. In these cars, the gas and brake pedals were shifted left relative to their location in typical, large American autos. Investigators had found that in many cases the gas pedals were bent out of shape and the air-conditioning cut-off switch under the pedal broken - and the driver saying "I was pressing as hard as I could on the pedal and it kept going faster!" There was some finding that most of the drivers in the accidents had their first Audi, within six months of ownership, and had previously driven a large American car.
So the problem was ergonomic, and Audi did a terrible job handling the complaints and addressing the issue. Their sales tanked for a decade.
By the way, Car and Driver magazine did a test at the time and demonstrated that braking "horsepower" is always higher than engine output, assuming the brakes work. They did several tests where they took cars up to 60mph and then held the accelerator down while braking. In every case the car came to a stop - eventually.
viking80, you have a lot of errors or misunderstandings in your post.
As Icepick points out, GSM/EDGE standards allow up to 2W in low band and 1W in the higher bands.
Newer CDMA based standards have maximum output power even lower, more like +24 to +26dBm (about 0.4W). The actual transmit power level of your phone is determined by the path loss between you and the base station, and it's controlled by feedback from the base station. Typically it will be transmitting much less. For CDMA based standards the average power is between 0 and 5dBm, or 1 to 3mW.
Also your WiFi information is wrong. Look at 47 CFR Part 15.247. In the 915MHz and 2.45GHz ISM bands, if using spread spectrum (most every product does), WLAN routers are allowed to use up to 1W, just like cellphones, but the difference is you don't usually hold them up to your head... But then again, you don't hold your phone to your head for very long either.
MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3) encoding was designed as a 'perceptual encoding' algorithm where less "effort" (fewer bits) is given to signals that fall below below a threshold based on the other signals present. For example, a quiet tone close in frequency to a loud tone cannot be heard by the human ear, so no effort needs to be expended on reproducing it. All we're debating is whether the engineering behind this is sufficient. Certainly at lower encoding rates the distortion characteristics get very weird, though, and not at all like degraded quantization noise or analog distortion (Try it for yourself...)
A few years back I decided to perform a little test one time to see how 192kbps MP3s performed. A self-avowed audiophile friend of mine lent me a copy of one of his favorite "reference" recordings (a Diana Krall jazz CD), and decided to give him a little test. I ripped his 'reference' song to.wav, encoded to 192kbps MP3, decoded the MP3 back to a second.wav file and burned a new CD for him.
He couldn't tell the difference much at all, and actually thought the one that had been through the processing sounded a little better. I couldn't tell any real difference on my studio monitors either.
MP3 is certainly good enough, at least at 192kbps, for portable use and on any 'normal' home system. I'd be interested to hear of any other opinions from similar tests.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a Frontline a while back about this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/view/.
The EFF notes similar here: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
Neither stated that the government is recording _everything_, though.
As I recall from the Frontline documentary, the NSA argues that sweeping up and recording emails and conversations does not require a warrant if they do not actually read or listen to the recorded information. They say they would need a warrant for wire tapping if they want to open up a record and examine it.
We and two partner firms saw a big increase in email latency for the afternoon, up to a few hours delay in some cases. General connectivity (vpn, vnc etc.) was not affected, though.
3) A driver is not strong enough to stop the car against the engine
Check your facts. In the late 1980s Car and Driver could not find any kind of vehicle that could not be slowed with the brakes even with the accelerator held all the way down to the floor. An update to this is at the following link: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-deal-with-unintended-acceleration
In any case, drivers that don't know how to put their car in neutral and cars that can't be put into neutral don't belong on public roads.
References or sources?? Looking at the NOAA reports, there is certainly continuing increase past the year 2000. For example: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/glob/201201-201209.gif and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/lo-hem/201201-201209.gif from: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/9.
There's a big difference between "initial quality" reports and long term (5, 10, 15 year) reliability, though there is probably some correlation due to overall manufacturing control at the factory. Initial quality tells you if something was built correctly, for the most part. Long term reliability has more to do with the design and specifications of the car and its components. You can have a cheap car (or camera, or toy, etc.) that works fine out of the box and breaks in a short time due to cheap materials. Or you could have one built of high quality materials with fine tolerances that lasts effectively forever.
You should check eBay for used Mindstorms kits. Even the older first generation kits or NXT (not NXT 2.0) kits have a lot to offer, and are just at the top end of your price range. The graphical programming environment (NXT-G) is very easy to learn. I've been working with an informal group of parents and kids that want to get ready to start an FLL team next year, and the kids are able to make the NXT bot do things within minutes (okay, maybe 5 to 10 minutes) of getting started with the software (and a chassis ready to go).
The Lego engineers have done a darn good job making robotics accessible. I considered for myself building up breadboards with microcontrollers, etc. but that's more for me. For the kids, the used NXT set has been fast and easy way for them to get to level that would take *much* longer with other approaches. I think most 10-year-olds will get board very quickly unless they can hit the ground running, and the NXT system does just that.
By the way, the older NXT kits can be upgraded to some degree with additional parts and sensors, and the FLL allows use of even the older Mindstorms kits, so it's not a dead-end purchase.
That's shortsighted thinking. The ability to derive and analyze is where a great deal of realization and invention comes from. The ability to efficiently perform quantitative analyses is useful and interesting, but doesn't lead to great insights about the world.
I agree completely. Working as an engineer (and as a student) I find my self always returning to my venerable HP 15C. While it may be useful to have some programmable 'macro' level functions (parallel resistor formula, Volts to dBm conversion, etc.), entering and graphing equations or programming anything in general is generally a waste of time.
Anyone doing serious work will be using Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, etc., or even Excel.
Anyone "not there yet" should be graphing by hand and using a basic calculator (if any) for gnarly calculations.
In a related rant-
Calculators should basically be banned from lower level math classes, at least until students demonstrate proficiency with arithmetic and can check their own work.
The argument that introducing young students to calculators is of some benefit is entirely misguided, coming from educators that have not much experience in math in the first place. We find the results of this calculator reliance in a huge number of college students that have no clue how to check their own work, what results to expect, when they've made an error or not, to the point where they're basically mathematically illiterate.
Teachers and professors should be smart enough to craft problems with 'nice numbers' that are easily worked by hand, eliminating any need for calculators in class or on exams in the first place.
Many of the expanded government powers that have been sought (or implemented) in the last decade would be more acceptable with oversight directly by elected officials. As it stands now, most of the related decisions are made in secret... and that can't be good in the long run.
... probably aren't high on the recruiting list for IT and technology professionals. MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, ... several state universities, and on down are where the action is for engineering and computer science. So clearly there are more "tech" jobs in the specialties where these schools are hiring, likely those requiring less education. The problem with this data is that it has no basis for comparison to how the visa program is actually changing anything.
I had tried to recruit some talented MSEE grads for some time back in 2007 and found, frustratingly, that most were here in student visas and the pool of H1-B visas were much smaller. We couldn't count on obtaining an H1-B and had to turn down a few very talented people. And, no, at the time we did not find as many U.S. citizens available.
A better data point would be to show the percentage of student visa holders that have remained the in U.S. with this program.
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
Just because people today 'don't use' something in their daily lives, does not mean you can conclude it's not important. As many before have noted here, a solid understanding of algebra and calculus underpins understanding of statistics, finance, physics and on and on. While I agree the way math is taught to the 'general' track of students in school needs to change, it's just ridiculous to relegate the masses to ignorance by reducing math requirements any further than they are.
Everything referenced in the thread so far is from the description and abstract. What matters most is the actual claims. These can be quite narrow, especially given the cited prior art, however given the rapid time from filing to issue I would guess that the application went through without much push back from the examiners.
Claim 1 is pasted below. The other independent claim is Claim 13. All the other claims are dependent on these (narrower).
It will be interesting to see if this is challenged... but I suspect Amazon will first have to sue someone, since a patent is just that - a right to sue.
1. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving and storing personal data of a first user of a computer-based service, said computer-based service accessible to users over a network, said personal data specified by the first user; providing a user interface for users to establish contact relationships with other users of the service such that each user can have one or more contacts, said user interface enabling a user to identify other users of the service, and to selectively initiate the generation of requests to establish contact relationships with the identified users; receiving a request from a second user of the service to establish a contact relationship with the first user, said request submitted to the service over a network via said user interface; sending a notification of the request to the first user over a network; providing an option, in connection with said request, for the first user to grant permission for the second user to view at least some of the personal data of the first user; and in response to the first user granting said permission, providing the second user access to at least some of the personal data of the first user via a contact information user interface of the service, such that the second user is provided access to data that would not otherwise be accessible to the second user via the service; wherein the method, including receiving and storing the personal data, providing the user interface, receiving the request, sending the notification, providing said option, and providing the second user access, is performed by a server computer system.
Any quantized or discretized representation of a higher resolution signal (image) must have limited bandwidth (image resolution) to avoid aliasing artifacts. It doesn't matter whether you can distinguish (see) the pixels (samples) or not. The problem is that for a signal with high frequency content (image with fine resolution content) the lower frequency (lower resolution) samples (pixels) cannot distinguish between the original/intended signal (image) and a corresponding one with lower frequency (resolution) content. The lower frequency signal having the same samples is called the alias of the high frequency signal (at least in this case...). You effectively "see" (or in audio "hear") a lower frequency signal than was there originally.
The classic example of this the Moire' pattern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_pattern.
The effect is the same for audio or video or images or any other system with sampled signals. By limiting the resolution before sampling, equivalent to lowpass filtering, you can limit the high frequency content that aliases to lower frequencies.
See Nyquist Rate and Sampling Theory for more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_rate
It seemed to be pretty well settled that the problem with the Audi 5000's in the 1980's was due to placement of the pedal cluster. In these cars, the gas and brake pedals were shifted left relative to their location in typical, large American autos. Investigators had found that in many cases the gas pedals were bent out of shape and the air-conditioning cut-off switch under the pedal broken - and the driver saying "I was pressing as hard as I could on the pedal and it kept going faster!" There was some finding that most of the drivers in the accidents had their first Audi, within six months of ownership, and had previously driven a large American car.
So the problem was ergonomic, and Audi did a terrible job handling the complaints and addressing the issue. Their sales tanked for a decade.
By the way, Car and Driver magazine did a test at the time and demonstrated that braking "horsepower" is always higher than engine output, assuming the brakes work. They did several tests where they took cars up to 60mph and then held the accelerator down while braking. In every case the car came to a stop - eventually.
viking80, you have a lot of errors or misunderstandings in your post.
As Icepick points out, GSM/EDGE standards allow up to 2W in low band and 1W in the higher bands.
Newer CDMA based standards have maximum output power even lower, more like +24 to +26dBm (about 0.4W). The actual transmit power level of your phone is determined by the path loss between you and the base station, and it's controlled by feedback from the base station. Typically it will be transmitting much less. For CDMA based standards the average power is between 0 and 5dBm, or 1 to 3mW.
Also your WiFi information is wrong. Look at 47 CFR Part 15.247. In the 915MHz and 2.45GHz ISM bands, if using spread spectrum (most every product does), WLAN routers are allowed to use up to 1W, just like cellphones, but the difference is you don't usually hold them up to your head... But then again, you don't hold your phone to your head for very long either.
Here's link to the regulations: http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title47/47cfr15_main_02.tpl
MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3) encoding was designed as a 'perceptual encoding' algorithm where less "effort" (fewer bits) is given to signals that fall below below a threshold based on the other signals present. For example, a quiet tone close in frequency to a loud tone cannot be heard by the human ear, so no effort needs to be expended on reproducing it. All we're debating is whether the engineering behind this is sufficient. Certainly at lower encoding rates the distortion characteristics get very weird, though, and not at all like degraded quantization noise or analog distortion (Try it for yourself...) A few years back I decided to perform a little test one time to see how 192kbps MP3s performed. A self-avowed audiophile friend of mine lent me a copy of one of his favorite "reference" recordings (a Diana Krall jazz CD), and decided to give him a little test. I ripped his 'reference' song to .wav, encoded to 192kbps MP3, decoded the MP3 back to a second .wav file and burned a new CD for him.
He couldn't tell the difference much at all, and actually thought the one that had been through the processing sounded a little better. I couldn't tell any real difference on my studio monitors either.
MP3 is certainly good enough, at least at 192kbps, for portable use and on any 'normal' home system. I'd be interested to hear of any other opinions from similar tests.