I honestly think there's a significant aspect to the move to "ban" Feds that people are overlooking: safety and liability. DEFCON gets a bit rowdy at the best of time, in the current climate re: PRISM, Snowden, etc. I seriously think the move will save a few bloody noses, possibly broken bones, and likely lawsuits and criminal charges stemming from the same. The conference also shields itself from the associated liability. A lot of people, especially in the hacker/DEFCON community, are *seriously* pissed at the US gov't right now, and that's gonna cause a lot more friction than normal.

Ohm's law is completely irrelevant to this situation *in the form you describe*. "Burning a hole through the board" would be possible and a simple function of Ohm's law only if they were using a linear regulator to generate the Vcore. But VRM's have been switching DC/DC converters since the 486 days. They achieve a voltage conversion by switching the incoming voltage on and off *very fast*, which results in an output voltage that's a function of the input voltage and the duty cycle of the on/off switching. An inductor (current-smoothing) and capacitor (voltage smoothing) give a nice clean DC voltage.

The differences between on-motherboard VRMs and this new in-package (it's technically a separate chip...) are significant. First off, physically moving it closer means that you're not sending 100+ Amps of current over the 3-4 centimeters of generally very thin copper traces on the PCB, they're sent millimeters through die-bond wires, or even through a solid substrate (no idea what Intel does at that level). There's your Ohm's law coming into play at that level, but the power losses there are relatively minimal since you're talking maybe a few tenths of an ohm. Die-bond wires are going to drop that to 10's of milli-ohms probably, so nothing major but still a positive effect.

The main reason this will generate a lot less heat is because of the *frequency* of the switching. Because this on-board VRM is so much smaller, it can switch the input faster (shorter wires, less parasitic capacitance, less ringing, etc.). This in turn means smaller value components required, e.g. the switch from the monster inductors seen on the motherboard (at maybe 1-2MHz switching) in the slide to the tiny chip-scale inductors on the FIVR (at 10's or 100's of MHz). The end result of all of this is that switching losses get significantly smaller. It's those losses that create heat local to the regulator. If they can for example go from an 80% efficient VRM to an 90% efficient FIVR for a 100W CPU load, they reduce the switching losses from 25W to 11.1W.

Given how much "revenue" city police get from traffic violations, I'd think they'd be all for this. Get the population that's fed up with jackass drivers to buy and install cameras that do the cops' job for them in court, bringing in additional fines without adding more traffic cops.

I'd call that a win for everybody except the jackass drivers.

The scenario I'm more interested in is having a camera running at all times that catch the various idiot drivers all over the place. Hit a button and the last 5 minutes and anything until the next press are permanently stored. Then send the file to the traffic cops.

The challenge is making the video admissible in court with sufficient weight to be enough to actually convict somebody of the traffic violation they're on tape performing. Currently "we" consider a cops' word as overwhelming evidence in such a case, with police dashboard cameras being a "bonus".

If there's some way to ensure that *I* don't tamper with the recording at a level that the courts would trust, I'd install one in a heartbeat.

I'd tend to say that when the "confiscation" has no legal basis whatsoever, we can very accurately call it "stolen".

*ALL* projects have a high rate of blowing deadlines, that's what happens with complex stuff. Show me numbers that Kickstarter projects have a worse rate of being late than any other comparable projects out there, and then we can talk.

It's faaaaar worse than that. One of our borehole geophones came back from a job at Hanford with the 1/2" thick aluminium tube so eaten away that it had to be replaced. That would be 100's of meters down a hole (I think they had a 500m cable...).

Read through the entire thing, but am very unimpressed with the quality of the writing. If re-written at a higher skill level and otherwise massaged, I think it would make an ideal document (stamped by the GOP of all groups) to send around to our local congresscritters as a talking point. Wonder if the sponsor could be convinced to let it be "fixed" without changing the content or message, and updated?

I think you've got that wrong. If they're measuring DSL overhead, error correction, etc then the proper analogy would be:

Somebody sells you a crate of apples they claim is 1000 pounds. What they neglected to tell you was that the crate itself weight 200 pounds, and they included that in their calculation. You only got 800lbs of actual apples.

See subject.

Any even marginally architected system can deal with disk failures, and indeed *must*. The difference between using masses of consumer disks and a few enterprise disks is that while a failed consumer disk in a massive pool might cause a slight slowdown spread across all of your users, a failed enterprise disk in a business-critical system can ruin your whole day even if you *don't* lose any data. Remember how Google just lets hardware die and replaces it on repeated passes through the datacenter? Same thing.

Um, I'm not going by "my experience" at all, this is fundamental and *very* well-understood physiology, not to mention basic physics. *All* human ears exhibit the masking effect, because (as expanded on by someone else below) there is a fixed dynamic range possible in the construction of the ear. Actual muscles and bones *move* to "change the input gain" in the ear, just like your pupils change size when it's bright or dark out. Some people have a wider intrinsic dynamic range than others, but only by a narrow margin. If you can show me somebody who's pupils never change size yet they can see perfectly well in both extreme dark and full sunlight, then we can talk.

As for detecting speaker polarity, I can absolutely guarantee you that they are detecting *mixed* polarity: wire the left speaker one way and the right speaker "backwards" and they can sense it (I bet I could too). Wire *both* speakers "backwards" and there is no possibility anybody is going to be able to detect it. Anybody who insists otherwise is also going to refuse a double-blind confirmation.

I was generalizing for the consumption of people who no relevant background, and should have been more specific. Harmonics are absolutely important, but not all of them. The challenge in perceptual coding is figuring out which harmonics are functionally relevant.

Also you are correct that Nyquist sampling is *not* sufficient for human perception of higher frequencies, as it introduces quantization and phasing errors if there aren't enough (or an integer number of) "samples per wave". It bugs me when people who ought to know better (Opus!!!) keep claiming this.

...I think I figured it out: he's a long-haul rocker, thus his hearing is pretty much shot anyway. His ears' gain only goes to 7.

(oh, and I mistyped above, should read "adjust the gain back down")

He clearly doesn't understand the first thing about the human ear or brain. The *bitrate* is 5% of the original CD, but the human-effective *datarate* is ~95%. That last ~5% of the signal is various harmonics, twitchy bits, and other stuff that the human ear is simply incapable of hearing, but in terms of actual spectral data it's pretty incompressible. Lossy audio compression makes the perfectly legitimate trade-off that you can completely skip that incompressible chunk of the audio signal that the human ear can't actually hear, and save bandwidth.

Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.

What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....