Counterfeit CDs sold across the United States cost music companies $300 million a year, the RIAA said. The numbers are increasing as the equipment to make counterfeit copies becomes cheaper and smaller, according to industry statistics.
"This new initiative should serve as a clarion call for retail outlets of all shapes and sizes that we take music piracy seriously, and they need to get their house in order," said Hilary Rosen, the association's chief executive officer. "No one should think they operate below the radar anymore."
Where the hell did they get that 300,000,000 from? Did they send a knowlegable person into a reasonable statistical sampling of the world's gasoline stations, compile lists of pirated songs, and present the evidence? Or did Hilary stop into a gas station on the way back from Vegas and notice a bunch of CDs she could not recognize? Sorry, I don't buy the number or RIAA's ability to distinguish between a legitimate CD, from India for example, and a "pirate."
This does bode poorly for anyone trying to make their way without RIAA help. They are a racket that follows anticompetive practices such as RIAA only shops, payola and all that.
You say this about HD: Much of the real work was still done on MVS (that the IBM mainframe) in JCL, assembly, and whatnot.
The other day, I had a look at a new looking terminal in the Lowes. It was some kind of IBM box, running X. The main aplication seemed to be.... a 3270 emulator. Ta-da! the sturdy old background process continues to run but they now have a reasonable desktop to add other applications if they feel like it. No hideous CompUSA adverts blaring, just a nice clean window manager. The terminal, by the way, looked to have all the expected IBM toughness. It was pleasing to see.
show up as an unknown emitter which in a time of war will generally cause the ship/plane/helicopter to go "defensive" and defend against the potential threat!
So, one $10 wifi card can be traded for one $10,000,000 radar seaking misile? Oh dear, that's worse than hitting a camel in the butt next to an empty tent. What's that myserious uptick in demand for 802.11? Why is it that portions of "no fly zones" are starting to look like New York? Ahhhh!
Me thinks the DoD had better get smarter than that. Shutting down wifi in the US will not keep others from exploiting this problem.
Yep, that's the obvious point.
on
DOD vs. 802.11b
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Killing the utility of 802.11 in the US won't keep others from expoiting our problems. It will simply keep us from having better, lower cost communications. I posted this making fun of DoD in another thread.
You might try a valid link to something that's not a huge pdf file. Your link did not work, and I don't like multi megabyte pfs where text can explain the concept.
I don't know why I even bother responding to your drivel, but still...
I know why, let's look and see.
802.11 was designed to provide confidentialty, access control and data integrity. And the paper cited demonstrates that neither of the three are achieved (in very practical attacks... not something involving million-dollar machines)
Aha, you respond because you are a troll. That's not the stated goal of 802.11, now is it? Would you mind responding to the fact that all communications are insecure? It's all very nice of you to call me an idiot, but it would be better if you informed me. As I see things now, you don't need million dollar equipment to tap a phone line, a cable, listen to microwave tower transmisions or most other forms of current communications. None of these forms of snooping takes much more effort than setting up a 802.11 bug. Others with larger budgets can spy on stand alone machines, but even there, I doubt that off the shelf light analysis equipment costs millions. You could hire a competent engineer to build one for you for $50,000 in a year plus a few equipment costs. Encrypted communicatins over 802.11 works as well as encrypted communications anywhere else.
I just happened to have a brochure of Sprint's Vision plan in front of me. There is no $50/month data plan, however $40/month will get you a big fat 20 mega bytes, with each additional kilobyet costing you $00.002. or two freaking dollars per megabyte. For $100/month the service is "unlimited." I imagine much of that money will go directly to the FCC as a result of Bill Clinton's big greedy specturm auction. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of money to further fund the Feds.
It's shocking that the new administration is following the greedy, ignorant policy of it's predecesor. If such services flop, those who opposed the specturm auctions can say, "I told you so," and that will be that. It's not like the telecomunications has been a stable source of employment for most of the people working there. If the government forgives the auction debts, it will ammount to a huge bail out of big corporate interests. That's bad because it give an advantage to those who bid irresponsibly and continues the ineficient specturm use but at least it will provide service to people at something closer to its cost. If the government legislates 802.11 out of practicality, it will be a huge scandal as the only reason will be to prevent new entrants from ruining these silly third generation services. Yet this third option is the one that keeps comming up. Keeping the public from building their own communications networks, which are technically possible, ammounts to a denial of first amendment free speech rights.
Bandwith scarcity is a lie and services that operate on that principle, metering out kilobytes of data, are a rape.
Security issues will never, ever be addressed but fear of wireless communications is baseless and stupid. Wireless is no less secure than any other part of the internet. When you hook up to it, people can see your machine and may try to hack it. The concerns you have about inteception exist for all forms of communications. An interloper can even listen to a stand alone machine unless that machine is operated in a windowless perfect Faraday cage on battery power.
The only answer is to use an easy to customize, stable and relativly secure operating system and lock it down. This will lower the chances of your machine being owned by someone else who will then use it to search for content of interest, store mp3s, movies and kiddie porn, or to harrass others, yet not throw out the whole purpose and promisse of the internet: the sharing of information and computing resources.
I'm very very tired of people transfering their eXPerience with worm, virus, hole plauged operating systems to "security" of the internet. Not every machine in the world is brain dead enough to run an email client as root and automatically execute attatchments. Some people use freely available secure communications packages like OpenSSH. Get a clue people, especially you, Uncle Sam.
Thanks for the NYT article, which everyone in the world can read. I can just imagine this:
Dear Tiger Direct,
Do you offer volume discounts for 802.11 equipment? We are interested in many hundreds of thousands of these and will gladly pay in counterfit US dolars, oil or gold.
Sincerely, your friend.
General A. Henchman
Iraqui National Air Defense
Bagdad, Iraq.
Most large US companies are already involved in porn. No, I'm not just talking about Disney purchasing small art house film makers. I'm talking about big finincail institutions such as GE Finance, GM and others having interests in porn. It does not bother them now.
I truly enjoyed the year I had with SDSL, even though I had to survive three different ISPs. By far, the worst one was DIRECTV Broadband. If they can't manage to serve someone who was pounding on their door desperately trying to remain a customer, then they deserve to fail.
Have you considered the possibility that the poor service was the fault of those who will now take you r money and give you even worse service? The local bells conspired to kill all DSL providers, any and all service problems in my case were attributable to BellSouth.
You say that you were charged for service that you did not recieve. That's nothing like what happened to me. Telocity/DirectTV killed my charges immediatly when I told them I was going to discontinue my service, and tollerated me hanging onto my modem for months. They were always polite and considerate. You then say,
F*ck You, DIRECTV... Thank God that AT&T/Comcast will finally be completing their broadband upgrade in my city next month.
You will be sorry. We all know what kind of service you get from the local bell. If it were not for them selling my number to telemarketers, I'd never consider paying them for an unlisted number or any of the other expensive anti-anoyance so many fools feel compeled to purchase. Read their ToS, weep, and know it will get worse as their competitors die off. Ever heard the phrase, "You can't fight the phone company"? You will come to learn what it means. Just try telling the local Bell to fuck off, it might be a federal crime.
A larger issue was the database of "availability", which was maintained and abused by the local bells. This list kept me from using their service and must be one small part of the "regulatory environment", refered to in the give up letter, that prevents profitable operation in the forseable future.
I got one of their modems when they were Telocity and thought the service was better than cable due to their enlightened and friendly user contracts. They gave you a static IP with no restrictions other than don't do anything malicious. No port blocks or any of that, just a simple line deal.
Then I moved a few blocks. BellSouth told me that service was not available in my new house and could not tell me how long it would be before it was available. I asked to be notified of availability and killed my DSL contract. Two week later, before I'd even sent the modem back, BellSouth calls to tell me that service is available. Great, I tell them, I'll get back to you. Phoning DirectTV, I'm informed that I can't just keep my modem and transfer my account to my new address. The service must be formally killed and fomally started. All of that fomality takes more than a month and service is, suprise, not available when it's over. Nor has it been available for more than a year. I checked regularly and have both BellSouth and DirectTV primed to notify me.
BellSouth's contract, if you can find it, sucked. It had server prohibitions, unilateral change clauses and all the other stupid stuff to make it useless for all but browsing. Why would a telco do that? Gee, I wonder why.
The internet is dying as it becomes more difficult for indivituals to run their own sites. It's not that they don't get it, it's that they don't want you to have it.
-ISS shutdown in progress. -Shuttle ages, replacement is where? -budget goes to zero as perpetual war "against terrorism" kicks off and nation becomes more "secure" -Centinial of flight!
Welcome back National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics! The future is much where you left it.
He did not re-evaluate the purpose of copyright law and the deal made to acheive that purpose. People keep mentioning the fact that you can make coppies of information cheaply and easily as if that were bad. Far from it. Copyright and patent laws exist to further the useful arts and the public domain. They do so by prohibiting others from exploiting work for a period of years, then 14 for copyright. At that time publishing was much more expensive, yet 14 years of exclusivity was seen as adequate incentive for publishers. So now that anyone can share information and publish, why do we need exclusivity? So that Disney can keep Mickey Mouse movies to themselves? Much more important works will rot in obscurity while Mickey generates cash for amusement park owners. Copyright needs to be evaluated from the perspective of it's purpose. New technology, which should and is obsoleting many large publishers, is also being perverted to artificailly make infomation imobile, as if it were confined to dead trees or vinyl that had to be trucked from central warehouses. To parphrase Bill Clinton, who signed the DMCA into law, Just because it's easy and profitable to hoard information, does not make it right.
1. They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
2. They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc.
I agree, but think you miss the point here:
the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user.
That user has every right to be angry, as do you. The DVD consortium has, with help from a few friends, make it a crime for you to figure out how to use your own equipment or even tell others how to do the same. It's a concept that matters and should not be belittled with absurd examples like trying to make a computer that does not have an IDE interface run a DVD player. Trade secrets should have no force outside of a signed contract, and should never trump free speech. My purchasing a DVD player is not equivalent to me signing a contract. "Open" OS only empower users to the extent that they have source code. If you don't have the power to help your friends do things there will be no free code and no Open OS and you will be at the mercy of those who exploit you to maintain tools you can't use.
I still don't see it. Where is this free wireless networking? SOMEONE is paying the fees needed to tap into the internet backbone.
This does not have to be the case. Large networks do not charge each other for access to and fro, that's what makes the internet work. A large enough network of 802.11b would not need to pay fees to connect to the "real" internet of adverts and old media suck. The old word would break down the doors demanding access. A large city, with millions of people living close to each other, is an ideal place for such a thing. You only need a few people sharing the bandwith they pay for on a short term basis. Then, good bye charge by the byte telcos. Indeed, a large enough city net would be just as interesting a place as the "real" internet is anyway.
Great idea, a laptop I have to plug in with a big "external battery" (otherwise known as a power converter).
That's not true, you can lug around a nice big 12 cell pack! I got my sites set on a lead acid battery instead. But at least they "boost into Windows to make sure each components are compatible".
Nice components too! Like a winmodem. Oh dear, the "choice of opperating systems" has nothing but Windoze. I've been trolled.
I asked the guy, "is my warranty effectively invalid if I run Linux?". He said that, unfortunately, that was, in essence, the case.
As any reader of Tiger Direct knows, that's a violation of anti-trust laws. Get it in writing, they are breaking the law as much as a printer vendor invalidating a waranty for using a different ink or a vehicle maker for using a different brand of lubricant. M$ and their slaves would not break the law in writing would they?
I'm never going to buy a laptop from any company that forces me to use M$ or pay for it or in anyway have anything to do with M$. This in itself seems like a violation of anti-trust laws, and it is.
If you agree to the M$ XP EULA, you have agreed to let M$ search you computer and install software at will. If that sounds like Paladium, that's because it is. Any OEM that would force you to agree to XP's EULA in order to buy a computer has already been sucked under.
With Paladium, it does not matter if you refuse to be bound by the bogus EULA - the spy is in the hardware and it won't work without it. This will be very tricky to get rid of and we are more than halfway there.
you don't see much, and that is your choice. You say. I see two ways this could work, depending on how most people configure themselves.
1) The plurality opinion, among those who care enough to broadcast, dominates what is "credible." Aliens kidnap people. School prayer should be mandatory. The list goes on. The internet is already like this.
So you want to kill the internet too?
2) The service fragments into cliques. You only hear from people who agree with you. Within any given clique, whatever you already believe to be true - this is credible. Nothing else is. The internet is already like this.
What's new? People pass what they hear through a bullshit filter called education and experience. Your post put mine offscale, and the flaws were easily demonstrated. The internet brought me this silly post of yours extolling lawyers with brain hemmorages. The same page your message came in had useful content. I suppose I could tell my agent to block your account, but that might keep me from reading something you say one day that makes sense.
Choice and freedom to chose are good. Contemptuous ignorance is anoying.
Wi-Fi's limited range, combined with its susceptibility to interference from garage-door openers and baby monitors, means it would take thousands upon thousands of "hot spots" to blanket a city, to say nothing of a more rural or suburban area. Even if a company managed to set up a citywide Wi-Fi network, low-cost transmitters are readily available to the public at Best Buy or Circuit City, which has enabled volunteers to build small, gratis public-access networks in New York, Seattle, and Portland. It's hard to compete with free. Ricochet isn't as vulnerable to competition from such civic-minded projects since its technology is proprietary and thus unlikely to wind up on retail shelves anytime soon. And people will fork over for Ricochet instead of settling for free Wi-Fi primarily because of its greater range.
He would not imagine people sharing and setting things up for each other, now would he? While he's bussy planning for you to "fork over money" others are building the next internet with 802.11b repeaters. Who wants or needs central control? Sorry, money dude, you can't really compete with free after all.
Until that happens, his $45/month service does not look so bad. It can't hurt to stay connected while we cook up the future that excludes him.
Granted, I live in Chicago, and so I get a lot of choices. In your situation, does it really make sense for the local bell to not offer you DSL services in the long run? If they have even a chance to charge you another $40/month, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to...
I'm sorry to hear that Chicago is down to three or four providers. The plan was for six to chose from.
BellSouth wants more than $40/month and they don't want to let any other company to get in and get by charging just that. It's simple, they've used spurious "competition" to losen their regulatory burden but kept just enough to screw their competitors. When it's over they will be able to screw everyone, or so they think. It's funny what happens when your lines run over public property.
I got on @home. Static IP, do what you want, 30 to 100KBytes/second up and down. $45/month with cable TV. It's been downhill since then, every six months prices increased and service declined. First TV was taken away. Then some turkey from ATT took over excite@home. Then servers were forbiden. Then they started putting in DHCP and @home died. ATT was seen dancing at the funeral. Then Cox took over. They put in DHCP and port blocks to enforce the no server ban. They sent out a big mailer to announce the service transition with mailboxes containing a CD that broke everyone's service. I did not use my lunch box and service worked just fine. What was in the mail box? A new MS IE! Useful on all zero of my computers. Yippie, they had MSIE only "services" like webmail, woo-hoo. They started crimping the modems and bandwith degraded. By the time I got out, I was paying close to $60/month for a single static IP address, no service inetnet service. They wanted $75/month for that static IP, with some rediculously low cap comprable to DSL down and less up. Lesser service was still "cheap" at $55/month.
I now use a linux friendly ISP, CanadaISP that earns their measly $10/month. Yeah, dial up sucks.
What are you able to do with your $80/month service? They let you run mail server? Web? The local telco? Right, even if they did, it's just not worth it to me.
I've got $40/month for the first person that lets me use the wires hooked up to my house.
Slashdot Mirror
Counterfeit CDs sold across the United States cost music companies $300 million a year, the RIAA said. The numbers are increasing as the equipment to make counterfeit copies becomes cheaper and smaller, according to industry statistics.
"This new initiative should serve as a clarion call for retail outlets of all shapes and sizes that we take music piracy seriously, and they need to get their house in order," said Hilary Rosen, the association's chief executive officer. "No one should think they operate below the radar anymore."
Where the hell did they get that 300,000,000 from? Did they send a knowlegable person into a reasonable statistical sampling of the world's gasoline stations, compile lists of pirated songs, and present the evidence? Or did Hilary stop into a gas station on the way back from Vegas and notice a bunch of CDs she could not recognize? Sorry, I don't buy the number or RIAA's ability to distinguish between a legitimate CD, from India for example, and a "pirate."
This does bode poorly for anyone trying to make their way without RIAA help. They are a racket that follows anticompetive practices such as RIAA only shops, payola and all that.
Much of the real work was still done on MVS (that the IBM mainframe) in JCL, assembly, and whatnot.
The other day, I had a look at a new looking terminal in the Lowes. It was some kind of IBM box, running X. The main aplication seemed to be .... a 3270 emulator. Ta-da! the sturdy old background process continues to run but they now have a reasonable desktop to add other applications if they feel like it. No hideous CompUSA adverts blaring, just a nice clean window manager. The terminal, by the way, looked to have all the expected IBM toughness. It was pleasing to see.
better fix the guns
So, one $10 wifi card can be traded for one $10,000,000 radar seaking misile? Oh dear, that's worse than hitting a camel in the butt next to an empty tent. What's that myserious uptick in demand for 802.11? Why is it that portions of "no fly zones" are starting to look like New York? Ahhhh!
Me thinks the DoD had better get smarter than that. Shutting down wifi in the US will not keep others from exploiting this problem.
Killing the utility of 802.11 in the US won't keep others from expoiting our problems. It will simply keep us from having better, lower cost communications. I posted this making fun of DoD in another thread.
Name calling is nice, thanks asshole.
I'll bet you never even read the paper I cited.
You might try a valid link to something that's not a huge pdf file. Your link did not work, and I don't like multi megabyte pfs where text can explain the concept.
I don't know why I even bother responding to your drivel, but still...
I know why, let's look and see.
802.11 was designed to provide confidentialty, access control and data integrity. And the paper cited demonstrates that neither of the three are achieved (in very practical attacks... not something involving million-dollar machines)
Aha, you respond because you are a troll. That's not the stated goal of 802.11, now is it? Would you mind responding to the fact that all communications are insecure? It's all very nice of you to call me an idiot, but it would be better if you informed me. As I see things now, you don't need million dollar equipment to tap a phone line, a cable, listen to microwave tower transmisions or most other forms of current communications. None of these forms of snooping takes much more effort than setting up a 802.11 bug. Others with larger budgets can spy on stand alone machines, but even there, I doubt that off the shelf light analysis equipment costs millions. You could hire a competent engineer to build one for you for $50,000 in a year plus a few equipment costs. Encrypted communicatins over 802.11 works as well as encrypted communications anywhere else.
Try setting the antea up on top of the tree. It's a free no paint needed tower.
It's shocking that the new administration is following the greedy, ignorant policy of it's predecesor. If such services flop, those who opposed the specturm auctions can say, "I told you so," and that will be that. It's not like the telecomunications has been a stable source of employment for most of the people working there. If the government forgives the auction debts, it will ammount to a huge bail out of big corporate interests. That's bad because it give an advantage to those who bid irresponsibly and continues the ineficient specturm use but at least it will provide service to people at something closer to its cost. If the government legislates 802.11 out of practicality, it will be a huge scandal as the only reason will be to prevent new entrants from ruining these silly third generation services. Yet this third option is the one that keeps comming up. Keeping the public from building their own communications networks, which are technically possible, ammounts to a denial of first amendment free speech rights.
Bandwith scarcity is a lie and services that operate on that principle, metering out kilobytes of data, are a rape.
The only answer is to use an easy to customize, stable and relativly secure operating system and lock it down. This will lower the chances of your machine being owned by someone else who will then use it to search for content of interest, store mp3s, movies and kiddie porn, or to harrass others, yet not throw out the whole purpose and promisse of the internet: the sharing of information and computing resources.
I'm very very tired of people transfering their eXPerience with worm, virus, hole plauged operating systems to "security" of the internet. Not every machine in the world is brain dead enough to run an email client as root and automatically execute attatchments. Some people use freely available secure communications packages like OpenSSH. Get a clue people, especially you, Uncle Sam.
Dear Tiger Direct,
Do you offer volume discounts for 802.11 equipment? We are interested in many hundreds of thousands of these and will gladly pay in counterfit US dolars, oil or gold.
Sincerely, your friend.
General A. Henchman
Iraqui National Air Defense
Bagdad, Iraq.
Most large US companies are already involved in porn. No, I'm not just talking about Disney purchasing small art house film makers. I'm talking about big finincail institutions such as GE Finance, GM and others having interests in porn. It does not bother them now.
I truly enjoyed the year I had with SDSL, even though I had to survive three different ISPs. By far, the worst one was DIRECTV Broadband. If they can't manage to serve someone who was pounding on their door desperately trying to remain a customer, then they deserve to fail.
Have you considered the possibility that the poor service was the fault of those who will now take you r money and give you even worse service? The local bells conspired to kill all DSL providers, any and all service problems in my case were attributable to BellSouth.
F*ck You, DIRECTV... Thank God that AT&T/Comcast will finally be completing their broadband upgrade in my city next month.
You will be sorry. We all know what kind of service you get from the local bell. If it were not for them selling my number to telemarketers, I'd never consider paying them for an unlisted number or any of the other expensive anti-anoyance so many fools feel compeled to purchase. Read their ToS, weep, and know it will get worse as their competitors die off. Ever heard the phrase, "You can't fight the phone company"? You will come to learn what it means. Just try telling the local Bell to fuck off, it might be a federal crime.
A larger issue was the database of "availability", which was maintained and abused by the local bells. This list kept me from using their service and must be one small part of the "regulatory environment", refered to in the give up letter, that prevents profitable operation in the forseable future.
I got one of their modems when they were Telocity and thought the service was better than cable due to their enlightened and friendly user contracts. They gave you a static IP with no restrictions other than don't do anything malicious. No port blocks or any of that, just a simple line deal.
Then I moved a few blocks. BellSouth told me that service was not available in my new house and could not tell me how long it would be before it was available. I asked to be notified of availability and killed my DSL contract. Two week later, before I'd even sent the modem back, BellSouth calls to tell me that service is available. Great, I tell them, I'll get back to you. Phoning DirectTV, I'm informed that I can't just keep my modem and transfer my account to my new address. The service must be formally killed and fomally started. All of that fomality takes more than a month and service is, suprise, not available when it's over. Nor has it been available for more than a year. I checked regularly and have both BellSouth and DirectTV primed to notify me.
BellSouth's contract, if you can find it, sucked. It had server prohibitions, unilateral change clauses and all the other stupid stuff to make it useless for all but browsing. Why would a telco do that? Gee, I wonder why.
The internet is dying as it becomes more difficult for indivituals to run their own sites. It's not that they don't get it, it's that they don't want you to have it.
-ISS shutdown in progress.
-Shuttle ages, replacement is where?
-budget goes to zero as perpetual war "against terrorism" kicks off and nation becomes more "secure"
-Centinial of flight!
Welcome back National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics! The future is much where you left it.
He did not re-evaluate the purpose of copyright law and the deal made to acheive that purpose. People keep mentioning the fact that you can make coppies of information cheaply and easily as if that were bad. Far from it. Copyright and patent laws exist to further the useful arts and the public domain. They do so by prohibiting others from exploiting work for a period of years, then 14 for copyright. At that time publishing was much more expensive, yet 14 years of exclusivity was seen as adequate incentive for publishers. So now that anyone can share information and publish, why do we need exclusivity? So that Disney can keep Mickey Mouse movies to themselves? Much more important works will rot in obscurity while Mickey generates cash for amusement park owners. Copyright needs to be evaluated from the perspective of it's purpose. New technology, which should and is obsoleting many large publishers, is also being perverted to artificailly make infomation imobile, as if it were confined to dead trees or vinyl that had to be trucked from central warehouses. To parphrase Bill Clinton, who signed the DMCA into law, Just because it's easy and profitable to hoard information, does not make it right.
1. They want to recieve license fees for every dvd-capable video player in existence.
2. They want every dvd-capable video player in existence to work by their rules-- i.e., the ones that allow content producers to completely set what it is possible to do with each disc.
I agree, but think you miss the point here:
the linux community" will not truly be happy using a closed source video player-- there will always be the person upset he couldn't play dvds on his 10-year-old sparc because the "approved" propeitary player is x86 and PPC only. But much more importantly, this is a problem because open source platforms inherently empower the user.
That user has every right to be angry, as do you. The DVD consortium has, with help from a few friends, make it a crime for you to figure out how to use your own equipment or even tell others how to do the same. It's a concept that matters and should not be belittled with absurd examples like trying to make a computer that does not have an IDE interface run a DVD player. Trade secrets should have no force outside of a signed contract, and should never trump free speech. My purchasing a DVD player is not equivalent to me signing a contract. "Open" OS only empower users to the extent that they have source code. If you don't have the power to help your friends do things there will be no free code and no Open OS and you will be at the mercy of those who exploit you to maintain tools you can't use.
This does not have to be the case. Large networks do not charge each other for access to and fro, that's what makes the internet work. A large enough network of 802.11b would not need to pay fees to connect to the "real" internet of adverts and old media suck. The old word would break down the doors demanding access. A large city, with millions of people living close to each other, is an ideal place for such a thing. You only need a few people sharing the bandwith they pay for on a short term basis. Then, good bye charge by the byte telcos. Indeed, a large enough city net would be just as interesting a place as the "real" internet is anyway.
That's not true, you can lug around a nice big 12 cell pack! I got my sites set on a lead acid battery instead.
But at least they "boost into Windows to make sure each components are compatible".
Nice components too! Like a winmodem. Oh dear, the "choice of opperating systems" has nothing but Windoze. I've been trolled.
As any reader of Tiger Direct knows, that's a violation of anti-trust laws. Get it in writing, they are breaking the law as much as a printer vendor invalidating a waranty for using a different ink or a vehicle maker for using a different brand of lubricant. M$ and their slaves would not break the law in writing would they?
I'm never going to buy a laptop from any company that forces me to use M$ or pay for it or in anyway have anything to do with M$. This in itself seems like a violation of anti-trust laws, and it is.
With Paladium, it does not matter if you refuse to be bound by the bogus EULA - the spy is in the hardware and it won't work without it. This will be very tricky to get rid of and we are more than halfway there.
Shudder.
1) The plurality opinion, among those who care enough to broadcast, dominates what is "credible." Aliens kidnap people. School prayer should be mandatory. The list goes on. The internet is already like this.
So you want to kill the internet too?
2) The service fragments into cliques. You only hear from people who agree with you. Within any given clique, whatever you already believe to be true - this is credible. Nothing else is. The internet is already like this.
What's new? People pass what they hear through a bullshit filter called education and experience. Your post put mine offscale, and the flaws were easily demonstrated. The internet brought me this silly post of yours extolling lawyers with brain hemmorages. The same page your message came in had useful content. I suppose I could tell my agent to block your account, but that might keep me from reading something you say one day that makes sense.
Choice and freedom to chose are good. Contemptuous ignorance is anoying.
Wi-Fi's limited range, combined with its susceptibility to interference from garage-door openers and baby monitors, means it would take thousands upon thousands of "hot spots" to blanket a city, to say nothing of a more rural or suburban area. Even if a company managed to set up a citywide Wi-Fi network, low-cost transmitters are readily available to the public at Best Buy or Circuit City, which has enabled volunteers to build small, gratis public-access networks in New York, Seattle, and Portland. It's hard to compete with free.
Ricochet isn't as vulnerable to competition from such civic-minded projects since its technology is proprietary and thus unlikely to wind up on retail shelves anytime soon. And people will fork over for Ricochet instead of settling for free Wi-Fi primarily because of its greater range.
He would not imagine people sharing and setting things up for each other, now would he? While he's bussy planning for you to "fork over money" others are building the next internet with 802.11b repeaters. Who wants or needs central control? Sorry, money dude, you can't really compete with free after all.
Until that happens, his $45/month service does not look so bad. It can't hurt to stay connected while we cook up the future that excludes him.
I'm sorry to hear that Chicago is down to three or four providers. The plan was for six to chose from.
BellSouth wants more than $40/month and they don't want to let any other company to get in and get by charging just that. It's simple, they've used spurious "competition" to losen their regulatory burden but kept just enough to screw their competitors. When it's over they will be able to screw everyone, or so they think. It's funny what happens when your lines run over public property.
I now use a linux friendly ISP, CanadaISP that earns their measly $10/month. Yeah, dial up sucks.
What are you able to do with your $80/month service? They let you run mail server? Web? The local telco? Right, even if they did, it's just not worth it to me.
I've got $40/month for the first person that lets me use the wires hooked up to my house.