Kind of... You know how, even though you only have two ears, you can still determine whether a sound is coming from in front of you, behind you, above you, below you, etc.? You don't need 5 ears or 7 ears or whatever surround-sound standard you think of, and yet you still get a great 3D image. It has to do with some complicated math our brains are instinctively doing, measuring the interaural phase differences of low frequency signals received at each ear, and interaural timing and amplitude differences of high frequency signals. A signal from your right that gets to your right ear has to travel an additional foot and a half or so to get to your left ear, and that results in a phase difference for a signal with a long wavelength (say, below around 800 Hz) or a time and amplitude difference for signals with shorter wavelengths.
Additionally, your ears are not symmetrical, but have a small reflector at the front, a curved reflector along the top and back, etc., and these reflectors have specific reflective and absorptive bandwidths, so signals coming from different directions (above you, below you, etc.) are filtered in slightly different ways.

All of these features make up the head-related transfer function (HRTF) that acts as a filter on a signal based on its frequency and 3-dimensional position around your head.

As an aside, binaural recordings are typically done with things that look like headphones, but are actually microphones placed very close to the engineer's ears, so that the audio they pick up is affected by the HRTF. When you play the recording back over headphones, you get incredible 3D audio. And Neumann makes the KU 100 head-on-a-stick binaural microphone that actually has rubbery ears and microphones placed where eardrums would be.

This standard defines ways to store and process the HRTF so that recordings can be decoded by binaural processors for playback in earbuds or headphones. Importantly, it allows a recording to be stored in a format capable of multiple ways of decoding, so that you can have one track that you can play in surround sound from your speakers, or load up on your phone and play through ear buds, and still get a great 3D environment (binaural recordings don't work effectively through speakers, and surround sound collapses down to stereo through ear buds; this allows one file to play on both).

That makes no sense, both from a physics standpoint and a common sense standpoint. For the former, sound is varying air pressure over time. Distance doesn't come into it, and you don't need to run around in a space to hear low frequencies.

For the latter, the distance between ear buds and your eardrum are approximately what, half an inch? Sound travels at about 1000 ft/sec, or conversely, has a wavelength of 1 ft at 1kHz, 1 inch at 12 kHz, and a half-inch at 24kHz. If your ability to hear low frequency depended on the distance between your ear and the source, then no one wearing earbuds could hear anything below 24 kHz, right? And since most people can't hear above 20kHz, then ear buds would just be silence generators, right?

Or, if you wanted to hear the rumble of an approaching train in the distance, you wouldn't put your ear on the track because "the distance between it and your ear wouldn't be enough to hear low frequencies" and instead, you'd want to stand several feet away?

In fact, as noted above, the wavelength of 1 kHz sound wave in air is 1 ft. At 100 Hz, it's 10ft, and at 20 Hz, it's 50 ft. How many people have 50 feet between their ears and their speakers? Or even 10 feet in most living rooms?

Your post makes no sense, no matter how you think about it.

Not really - Amex puts its CCV on the front of the card. The real purpose is that the CCV isn't encoded in the magnetic strip, and isn't embossed, so theoretically, someone using a magnetic swiper to steal data or someone dumpster diving for those old carbon paper-imprint style records would get the numbers but not the CVV.

But of course, the person who is stealing your credit card info is most likely your waiter, and they have a minute or two with your card over at the POS to copy down the CVV manually.

If so, why aren't iOS devices a target for this?
And Macs are known for being high-priced toys for rich yuppies with more disposable income than sense, hence the $10k gold iWatch, right? Aren't those exactly the sort of people you want to scam, rather than Joe Schmoe with his 10 year old Stinkpad and $20 in his checking account?

As per the XKCD comic, the solution is a social one, not a technical one. Spam callers spoof their numbers, which is why they're so difficult to block, but caller ID spoofing is explicitly allowed by the phone companies, who let the spammers specify a "calling from" number to be included in the caller ID data. However, the phone company knows exactly where the real call is coming from and who is making it - that's how they bill the company for the 20,000 phone calls they make every month.

And why does the phone company do this? Because the spammers pay them decent money, and most people don't realize that the phone company's involved, so they get mad at the spammers and not AT&T or Verizon.

So, the solution is to send a burly man with a wrench to the CEO's office and ask him politely to stop letting companies specify different caller ID numbers, if he would like his kneecaps to remain intact.

If you can show that they did, they won't.

As to why it makes sense - the rest of the world uses a first to file system, only the US was different. This harmonizes patent law and makes it more predictable for businesses, which is a good thing. And finally, despite hundreds of posters on Slashdot telling you how big a change this was and how it guts patent law, the switch from first to invent to first to file affects about 20 patent applications per year, out of half a million filed - there were, on average, only 20 interference proceedings each year, which is where there's a dispute on who invented something first. They were horribly expensive (upwards of $30-50k) and time consuming, and they occurred only after you filed your application and went through full examination... so someone could be already out $25k getting an allowable patent and then be hit with another $50k trying to show they invented it before someone else. Instead, now you can just point to the filing date and save money.

Not at all - there's a process called accelerated examination, which, for a substantial fee, pushes your application to the top of the queue. People in fast moving technologies like software tend to go for that, while people in slow moving technologies like pharmaceuticals tend to prefer waiting YEARS, since they're in FDA trials and can't actually sell any product. By allowing a fast track and slow track, everyone benefits.

Because that would make MIT, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, etc. very, very sad and gut their research departments.

Do you have a citation for any of your claims? Because I've got a half dozen patent applications on my desk under obviousness rejections, and I'd love to be able to push them aside because the PTO didn't actually issue them.

I'm not. Patent term has only ever been extended once, to comply with an international treaty (the Paris Convention on Intellectual Property), and even then, it was a negligible change (20 years from filing, given an average 3 year delay from filing to issuance vs. 17 years from issuance). Compare that to copyright getting extended every time someone blinks.

There's a simple reason for this. The people pushing for longer copyright terms are the publishers who want to commercially exploit their property for as long as possible, and they've got tons of money; the people pushing for shorter copyright terms are... the public. And we have no lobbying money. So, it's an easy guess as to which one wins.

But patent is different - Apple wants their patents to last a long time, but they want Microsoft's to last a short term, and vice versa. Unlike copyright, where you don't really get Sony Pictures wanting to make a Paramount screenplay without paying royalties, you actually do have tons of large companies wanting to use each other's patents. No one wants longer terms, because all of their competitors have patents they want to use. So, there's no pile of lobbying money pushing on just one side of that equation, and patent terms don't get extended.

Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney. But the above should make sense regardless of your opinion of my work.

And while those pictures are taken with consent, there was never any consent to distribution by the third party or anyone else.

Frankly, what I'd love to see is some of these people start registering their copyright and going after the third parties and the revenge porn operators for statutory damages. Let's see some of those multimillion dollar judgements that the RIAA/MPAA gets, based on the unlawful distribution. I think juries will have a much easier time smacking some porn king with damages than someone who shares a few albums or movies.

Inside of kids, it's too dark to use one.

In related news, iPod Touch sales are apparently nonexistent.

It's already covered. When you file a continuation-in-part, the only claims that get the benefit of the earlier priority date are ones that were fully described in the initial application. Anything that wasn't described there doesn't get that priority date, and you only get the later date. So, for example, if I file a patent application that describes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on 1/1/2000, I can later file a continuation in part application on 1/1/2010 (provided the original is still pending) that adds using cinnamon raisin toast as the bread. If that later application has a patent claim of:

That would get a priority date of 1/1/2000 for searching for prior art. If I have a second claim of:

That would only get a priority date of 1/1/2010.

So, it's even better than your suggestion - you don't even get a single day to hone your patent application. Anything new you add gets a later date.

In what way? That claim can't be interpreted to cover, for example, mouse traps. So it's not quite as generalized as you say.

It's both. 17 USC 506 defines criminal copyright infringement:

The usual differentiation between criminal and civil infringement is 1A, for the purpose of commercial advantage of private financial gain. I think in this case, it had to do with the fact that MegaUpload made significant amounts of money through advertising associated with the pages on which they were sharing works under copyright.

Dick: 4+4 = 7. Good attempt, and you set up the problem correctly. B-.
Jane: 4+4 = 7. See, this is why girls aren't good at math. You should probably focus on something girls are good at, like making sandwiches. F.