Comment Who responsible for editing summaries? (Score 0) 254
Come on, Dice. It's the first sentence of the summary.
Come on, Dice. It's the first sentence of the summary.
I was sort of expecting a post addressing today's, erm, "issue".
Competent natural-language voice recognition is still too hard for a handheld or embedded device. So, these devices digitize your voice (OMG recording!), ship it off to a server farm for interpretation, and receive the results. Because voice recognition is still a challenge, it's usually farmed out to one of a few firms (Nuance comes to mind) that do this as a third-party service. These firms can "retain" that information in the sense that it trains their voice-recognition algorithms, but they probably aren't building a huge dossier of your private conversations.
I'd certainly like to know if Samsung retains the voice information it collects. I'd even more urgently like to know if they sell it to other "third parties" besides whoever's doing the voice recognition. The initial panic I'm seeing around this looks ill-informed, but Samsung definitely has to get out in front of it. If they can't -- if they can't provide a simple, clear explanation of what they are and aren't doing -- it's going to cost them.
What, you don't like exclamation points?!!!!!! What did you expect from Medium.com?!!!!!!!!
Okay, actually, 100 microns (0.1mm) is a reasonable diameter for a human hair. So, kudos for the phrasing!
It was bad enough when the VoIP startup I worked for tried to make us use our own softswitch for phone calls in the office...
...or under the keister of anyone who doesn't double-check the correct spelling of a word, even though the existing spell-checker flags the correct spelling as wrong as well.
Guess it wasn't German-derived.
If only one of these languages would let me write a spell-checker that puts a red underline beneath words that are misspelled, and a 5KV pulse under the kiester of any "editor" who passes the wrong homophone...
It's property and lives, and, yes, facing risks on our behalf is pretty much what we ask firefighters to do every single day.
That's not to say, of course, that we should make them guinea pigs for inadequately tested compounds, or stooges for suppliers trying to cut corners on cost and safety.
If that were driving a large part of the change, it should only take a moment's work with the raw statistics to tease it out. I'd say "since they don't say that, it's probably not what's happening" -- but that would be making some possibly-unjustified assumptions about the motives of those publishing these results.
Since so many people have already stepped up to shame the submitter and editor about botching the ONE statement not drawn directly from the article...
I'll just say that I would love to see a night sky featuring this ring system at, oh, say, Jupiter's distance from Earth. It would appear several times larger than the full Moon, and many, many times brighter. Anybody want to cook up a rendering?
Scientists and those who understand science: "Yep, that's how science works. No matter how exciting a new finding may be, if later analysis finds that its conclusions are flawed, it's out the door."
Popular media and pundits: "See? Science is a sham! They just make stuff up to get the big research bucks! Why are we wasting money on this, instead of spending it on something that matters, like welfare or fighter jets?"
No, that's a zeroth approximation. To a first approximation, 65Mhz of spectrum gets you capacity linearly proportional to the frequency.
I don't think so.
I am out of my depth here somewhat, so I may be completely wrong. But I think that any frequency band of a given width has the same information capacity as any other, given identical signal/noise. That's what the first equation on the Wikipedia page you linked seems to state -- there's no separate term for "base frequency" of your channel. There are fairly simple techniques for transforming a "passband" (a band starting or centered at a higher frequency) to a "baseband" signal (starting at DC, or 0 Hz) -- and, of course, vice-versa.
You seem to be saying that the band from 1 GHz to 1.1 GHz would give you half the capacity of the band from 2 GHz to 2.1 GHz. I'm pretty sure that's wrong, and that the two bands, each 100 MHz wide, have the same Shannon capacity (again, given identical signal/noise).
Of course, in reality there's a few more nasty surprises -- higher frequencies can carry more capacity but have much worse penetration through obstacles. Lower frequencies give better coverage at the cost of capacity. That's why shoving T-Mobile and Sprint up in the 1800+ nosebleeds means they will never get the coverage range of VZ and ATT down in the 700-800 range.
Yep, that's one of the higher-order issues, along with interference from adjacent bands, broadband noise from power electronics, atmospheric propagation differences, cost of components capable of operating in the target band, and lots of other stuff.
The space between 100 MHz and 165 MHz would constitute 65 MHz of spectrum. So would the space between 1 GHz and 1.065 GHz, or 1 KHz and 65.001 MHz.
According to this US government source, this auction was for 1695-1710 MHz, 1755-1780 MHz and 2155-2180 MHz -- a 15 MHz band and two 25-MHz bands, totaling 65 MHz.
To a first approximation, 65MHz of spectrum gives you a fixed amount of capacity, regardless of its start and end points.
As others have already noted, this is an old, old tactic. I'm a bit surprised that you can correlate enough of the broadband scream produced by a modern laptop to tease out keystrokes reliably, but not that suprised.
It's only "crazy" if you're spending disproportionate time, effort and money to conceal your boring, inconsequential data. And in these days of big-data sieves and ubiquitous surveillance, "boring" and "inconsequential" aren't what they used to be.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
