I don't think the article mentions "Liquid Carbon Dioxide". That would take great pressure and extremely low temperature to pull off. I think it says "stored in a liquefied state" or something of the sort. I propose they would do this in such a fashion:
NaOH + CO2 --> NaHCO3
The reaction would have to take place in aqueous solution, or the ions would crash out. The product is Sodium Bicarbonate, the main ingredient in carbonated beverages. Umm...so I think that the inventors may be leaning more toward soda water, and less toward liquid dry ice. I am not saying this is a sane answer to the problem of automobiles, fuel, sprawl, whatever. I figure no one is insane enough to propose that we sit on a "dry ice bomb" as someone else so eloquently put it.
Still, they are going to have to use a pretty strong base to solubilize carbon dioxide. What else could they use? Anhydrous Ammonia? Yeah, sounds real pretty.
I started reading the original article, and stopped at this line:
"Every time you download a song to your phone, the same song is downloaded to your computer for playback through your PC speakers."
Just how the heck do they know when my PC is on, much less download songs to it? I don't want them downloading songs onto my PC without my knowledge. This service seems insidious. So you're saying every time I want to download a song, your proprietary player needs to be on a computer that's on and hooked up to the internet? Gee, there's no potential for abuse there.
What if someone sends me a rogue music file? If the same file is downloaded to my computer, isn't that going to mess up my machine? Virus writers are going to have a field day with this. Shame on Omniphone for promoting this garbage, and what is LG thinking, buying into this deal?
This will not replace p2p. It will barely make a dent. How can you justify charging for premium unlimited data when the same thing can be done with any smart phone on a wifi network for free? Really, these companies need to go back to their boardrooms and either disband or think of a better business model.
I'm not worried about the DRM. Whatever DRM these files come with will be broken the day that the first music file is downloaded from this service. I just don't understand why they even bother, anymore.
I was a little confused about the entire WSD vs 700MHz debate, so I looked this up. There's actually a chart available, I'm not sure exactly where I got it, but it is from a document called: "Unlicensed Broadband Device Technologies: "White Space Device" Operations on the TV Band and the Myth of Harmful Interference"
The last block, channels 52-69, are the 700MHz block that is being auctioned off for tons of moolah. The Channels 2-51, and other unoccupied spectrum, are the zones of contention for the so called White-Space Devices (WSD).
So, to answer your question, we will shortly have devices that function in these channels. 700MHz and WSD are meant to address different issues. The 700Mhz spectrum auction is being held to find out who wants to build a national network in this space. Analog TV is going off the air (I still don't know what frequency range they'll use for OTA digital). 700MHz winners will fill the gap, apparently. Keep in mind that there are a whole host of regional players competing for little chunks of the spectrum in rural and under-served areas. The regional players may address the needs of folks without broadband now. Then again, they may just go ahead and ignore the rural market and concentrate on building their networks in the most profitable places possible. There may be something like Universal service for Broadband, in the future, but don't count on it from the current Congress and FCC.
Where does that leave WSD? WSD is like Wifi. Smaller companies (Cisco, Belkin, Netgear, etc.) are building WSD that should work either on the one-router-per-home model or the wifi mesh "cloud" model. Quite possibly, the WSD could be used in a configuration which is a hybrid of those two. Some people will have customer premise equipment (CPE) some folks will pull their data from the "cloud". Here's another thing that gets me: no one complains that their cell phones or wifi cards are too weak to interface with their "uplink" whatever that uplink is. Yet, we still have this controversy over using WSD. It's a strawman. Think of WSD as a more powerful wifi, or cell phones (phones and towers) and you'll get an idea of how it will be used.
Why are we having these auctions/spectrum give-aways? The analog crowd can no longer justify exclusive control of the spectrum. In the WSD space, hardly anyone broadcasts OTA anymore, and those that do will be forced to switch to "digital" whatever that means. So, there is room here for license-free devices. We just need the go ahead from the FCC to build them. Notice here that the companies in the 700MHz race (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Google) are not the ones in the WSD space (Phillips, Cisco, Microsoft). Basically, anyone can build WSD, as long as it conforms to the "listen-before-talk" principle, is fairly low-power, and is able to avoid interference.
What advantage do these things bring? Finally, we are able to do Wifi right. The problem with wireless communication at 2.4Ghz, is that ranges are horrible. Also, there is so much interference from competing technologies that signal is usually drowned out in noise. With WSD, the ranges can become a lot longer. This introduces the problem of multiple devices communicating all at once to a central hub or router, but given enough "eyeballs on the problem" I believe that this problem, when it comes up, will be surmountable.
I am very optimistic about the viability of this technology. Then again, I think that people are basically good, and look where that belief has gotten me. Well, here's hoping that the 700Mhz auction isn't hijacked by a bunch of scoundrels and that WSD isn't sabotaged by the broadcasters who are so greedy that they won't give up their largely unused spectrum.
I know many of you have pointed this out already, but here's my 2p:
The author confuses physical goods with digital goods. No problem, happens all the time. He introduces this concept though:
"So people who made wooden chairs could trade them for, say, rice, fresh fruits, or meat. In time, a monetary system was introduced to generate a larger economy." That's not how it went down. Actually, according to my conspiracy-minded imagination, money was introduced by a bunch of lazy slobs who wanted to own the whole world, by doing the minimum amount of work. They devised a system by which people would trade little beads, bits of paper, shells, whatever, as long as they controlled the supply of said fiat currency. Like the man said "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
Thanks, Lance, for perpetuating the corruption that is money. That's swell. Before, people made whatever and traded whatever. Sure, there were inefficiencies, but people did what they fail to do now: they told people what they had and what they needed. Nowadays, it's all about "How much can I get for it" or "What are you willing to pay me for". So much better, I admit. (BTW, I am a wannabe '60's hippie that Lance is talking about in the article, like you couldn't have guessed) Moving on.
"We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it--on a limited basis--to you."
Whoa! When did we agree to this? OK, just for the record, let it be known that unlike everything else ever created in the world that is portable, fungible, and transferable, media is different. You don't own it. You have the right to use it. OK, let me get this straight, Lance, so I don't misrepresent you or your media conglomerate sugar daddy.
If I were to purchase a physical paper copy of your magazine, just for fun, let's say...then I gave that copy of your magazine to someone else after I was done reading it, that would be copyright infringement, right? Bear with me Lance...I purchased the "right" to read your sacred text, the words that you received on high by the mighty fortress that is...Microsoft, Ziff-Davis? I forgot who your corporate masters were. Anyway, so I purchased this "right", naively thinking I had purchased a "product" instead. If I then give that holy writ away to someone else, thinking "Hey, geek-boy over there is going to get a kick out of this," have I not infringed upon your sacred copyright? Have I not transferred my right to view your copyrighted work, without your express written consent (and the written consent of ABC, and the National Football League)? Am I in trouble, Lance? Are the cops going to take me away? I want my mommy. Woe is me.
See, this is exactly why a common peasant, unwise in the ways of copyright law, would be tempted to "steal" music. The commoner understands the concept of "buying and selling stuff". We do not understand this concept of "limited transfer of rights". In fact, it appears that yon mega-media company is attempting to rip us off. Is that what's going on? Has this been going on for years? Are the money changers in the temple? Have they been kicked out by the messiah of P2P? Lance, are you actually defending the money-changers? Do you even know what you're up against?
Sharing resources like this always makes me think of the parable of the loaves and the fishes (no I am not a Christian, but I will not hesitate to use Christian literature against them). You see, The Original Hippie split loaves of bread and entire fish. Why he did not bring at least some of the fish back to life, to replenish the stocks in the lake/river/stream/whatever is beyond me. Perhaps his powers were weak, at the time. Anyway, everyone got enough to eat because Beardy basically did this matter transmutation thing with food.
This is essentially what we are doing now, with media. We copy one set of organiz
Done. Or have you not been to Euro Disneyland lately?
Oh, you and all the other French people.
It's becoming impossible to make a buck in France, anymore, if you are an American. Like the local waiters here totally spit in your food. How often do I have to tell them "Je ne parle pas français" to get that right?
Just because the Americans have the audacity to call them cowards, change the name to French Fries to Freedom Fries (I'm not sure what French people have to do with deep-fried potatoes, sounds English to me), and give the name French Toast to egg-battered bread -- these aren't valid reasons to hate us.
Corrupting their language, making fun of Quebec, and calling them all a bunch of effete limp-wristed bastards...those are valid reasons.
Sprint builds the network, does all the gorilla-arms stuff (you know, builds towers, connects cable a with plug b).
Virgin sells and actually administers the network. Hey, if Virgin actually has a marketing and customer service system that works, why not give the entire retail business to them?
Sprint would be better off focusing on its core competencies, such as making, then breaking deals with ClearWire.
Now, you're just making excuses. The up-and-coming generation is not going to just stop using the internet and start using old media technologies to get their information. Whether it's at work or home, new generation folks are going to be using the internet a lot more than old generation. It's just a fact of life. Think about it. Who would you rather trust, the onion or Fox News? Seriously, people who grew up on the internet aren't going to be able to quit cold turkey.
They'll use whatever they can get, preferably for free. Free Wifi in cafes comes to mind. Also, getting promoted at work and attracting hot chicks can be done over the internet, so that can get accomplished. Ever heard of telecommuting? How about Remote Desktop Administration? I'd hate to call you out as behind the times, but face it: you and I do not know how the internet may be used in the future.
This bandwidth cap is a bad idea. It's bad for everybody. It'd definitely bad for America. It might be a good thing for Seoul and Tokyo. They can attract a lot more folks to work in their code factories, knowing that they can offer 50-100mbps uncapped. None of these crazy monopolistic practices (NTT has a telephone monopoly, but they act like saints compared to AT&T).
If you want to cripple your kids or influence the people that you can and tell them to get off the internet and back into 'real life' be my guest. Please don't presume, though, that you know how everybody else is going to use the internet for the next 30 years. None of us know. That's why we need to preserve the elements that we have. Unlimited (truly unlimited, not marketing hype) all-you-can eat internet. Say, why is it that these ISP's can be so incredibly profitable, but are incapable of investing their earnings into something basic...such as infrastructure improvement? Why has America been stuck in the low teens of mbps when Asia and Europe have raced ahead? Don't pull out that "But America is so big!" excuse. Why, then, hasn't it happened in New York or L.A.?
There hasn't been any re-investment, that's why. The CEO's of these corporations have taken these profits and invested them into lear jets, high-priced hookers, and coke. I don't blame the new generation of kids who watch YouTube instead of MTV (and what about uploading videos to YouTube? Should that count against one's bandwidth cap?). I blame the old generation of CEO's who think that building a business is boring, and we should just rape the company and discard the husk. Corporate responsibility, we've heard of it.
"employers could decide not to hire you if they felt you drank too much"
and get sued for employment discrimination. Then again, how would you ever know? I think that the potential for abuse for such a system goes way beyond employment and insurance issues, but I could be wrong.
There must be a way to game the system...
I give up, just give me whatever Ted Kennedy takes to hide his drinking problem from his mistress...oops!
Are they going after that hugely lucrative market called desktop search? I just don't understand the target audience, here.
Microsoft, and everybody else, was beat when the FTC allowed Google to purchase Double-click. What the "competitors" to Google fail to see is that search is a small fraction of what Google does. What brings home the bacon is targeted advertising. If Microsoft could replicate Ad-Sense, or make something bigger and better, they might be able to get back on the playground.
As is, their goose is cooked. Go ahead take over search. Will it stop people from using gmail, google apps (I know this is a non-starter), google earth, youtube? Google is fast becoming a global version of what AOL wanted to be: a walled garden where nobody leaves the google homeworld for other mysterious parts of the internet. Google just owns a very large garden, and the walls are hidden behind the pretty scenery. Also, Google is not as obtuse as AOL, and doesn't treat its users like children until they misbehave and talk smack about Google. Even then, it chooses to behave more rationally than a censorbot.
I'm not exactly a Google fanboi, but I at least have the sense to know that attacking your enemy in a peripheral "market" is not going to drive customers to your site. You need to hit them in the wallet. Google is attempting to take over the desktop. What's Microsoft's response? Try to take over search. Search? No, your enemy is Ad-Sense/Double-Click.
We seem to be running into this issue with professional photographers, recently, and I'm just wondering if it's a clash of cultures. He mentions that David Pogue polled 500 people, and only 2 of them thought downloading movies and music off the internet was wrong. This represents a profound cultural shift in the way we use words and images, folks (see Steal This Film, Part II).
The problem seems to be that Dan Heller keeps throwing words around like "contributory infringement" and "intellectual property" which have no effect on what is actually going on. People are downloading copyrighted music and movies, Dan. Do you think that your content is safe?
At worst, Creative Commons is destroying trust in its own model. It's getting all of these photographers to contribute to the "Flickr Community" which is just as ephemeral and not nearly as snippy as the "Slashdot Community". Then, it tempts you into licensing your photos with the Creative Commons license. Oooh...sneaky. All of a sudden, it's kitty-bar-the-door when your precious photos end up on some scavenger site for extra-terrestrials. Oh noes! I thought that the internets was going to protect me from the bad pirates. Boy, I hope the cave you've been living in has central heating. Maybe the "commercial artists" out there will wake up and stop using Flickr/Creative Commons. It doesn't seem to be touched by the big media companies so they're safe (yeah, right!). Oh, where will I go for all of my copyrighted still images? Um, let's try Google Copyright Infringement, or Images, for short. Boy, that was difficult.
You can always go RIAA on us, but then we can throw Fair Use in your face. The only time that the law comes into it is when you are dealing with a legal entity which is using your photos for commercial gain. If someone downloads your photos and uses them as CD-cover art on a CD containing 100% downloaded music, gee, guess what? No one's making money in this context. Flickr, from what I understand, is a free photo-sharing community. If you want commercial-grade, stick to Getty. They're more your style.
For all of us who think, "Wow! that was a fantastic image, created by an amateur artist. I'm going to promote that in my next non-commercial release of my grind-core trip-hop spoken word album-making tour video," Flickr might be the right place. Just a word about appropriation: If Flickr were serious about preventing copyright infringement, they'd disable Right-Click "Save Image As..." No really, they could totally rail you for it. "You have been caught attempting to save a copyrighted image onto your computer. Stay where you are as the copyright police come to your residence and take away your kids, pets, and houseplants. You are a bad person/lifeform/entity." Go ahead, just try to block that pop-up.
For those of us who are thinking about starting up companies (Lotto, don't fail me now) and hiring yon graphic artist to sketch out a little logo for us, we'll probably sample your work, make sure that it fits with our corporate image (slave-drivers), and commission you to do an original. Why? Because commercial interests aren't ghetto enough to pull images off of Flickr. Dude, that's so ghetto! Who's going to buy into that company? Turns out there's this "venture capital" firm sitting around in East Oakland swimming in piles of $1's and $5's, looking to "cash in" on the dot-com boom. Oops, too late. Seriously, though, any commercial interest worth a bag of salt will want to commission your work, assuming that you are a serious artist and not a crybaby attention whore.
Whoever sold you on the idea that Flickr was some paradise where commercial artists are compensated perfectly for the images they upload and it's all "happies and smileys" is the same guy that sold you the Potemkin Village image of the suburbs. The internet was started by people who wanted free porn and free warez. It really hasn't gotten a whole lot better, except that some folks also learned how to respond to stupid blog posts by employing a slightly greater than 3 word vocabulary (haxxor, w00t, pwnd!).
For all of you elitist fools: if you don't want your s*** jacked, get out of the ghetto.
First, one can never prove a scientific theory. Scientific theories are adopted because some group of scientists decides that some new theory gives us a better picture of the universe than the old theory. Basically, if the new theory has better predictive capabilities than the old theory, then the new theory tends to dominate. In reality, the old theory never goes away until proponents of the old theory all die. Theories can only be disproved.
A theory is disproved when physical phenomena are encountered which contradict the predictions made by the theory. This is how quantum mechanics and relativity were formulated. Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics was seen as "The Truth" for hundreds of years until scientists encountered strange phenomena which could not be explained by a new theory. They gradually evolved these new theories to explain these effects. In order for the Virtual Reality theory of the universe to be adopted, the model has to answer more questions than the previous model did. In order for it to be disproved, something has to break the model.
You see? The cycle repeats itself, with each answer coming closer to some ultimate "truth" which we'll probably never find in the lifetime of our species. If reality as VR solves more problems than it creates, it may get adopted. If another theory comes along which is intrinsically "better" then it may get adopted. One thing scientists can never do is "fix the intelligence around the policy" meaning fit the data to the theory. Reproducible data is sacrosanct. If your theory doesn't explain how your experiment begot your data, it's time to look around for another theory.
In any case, irrelevant arguments like "He's not even a scientist" or "It's all been done before" do nothing to contribute to the advancement of science. The approach should be "OK, let's assume that he's correct. Now let's go about proving him wrong". This should be the work of serious scientists, not people looking to get into a turf war or a religious battle.
I think what a lot of the "public data is public" folks are missing is that even when someone elects to "share" their information with someone else, that doesn't meant that they want that sharing of information to become public knowledge to everyone, for all time.
Up until 12/14/07, the Google Reader had been a bit broken. It was difficult to share information with everyone in an individual's contact list. There were 3 user responses to this: 1. Stop using Reader until this was fixed. 2. Work around the problem, possibly coding something of your own. 3. Take advantage of this issue by selectively sharing with people you want, while not sharing with people you do not.
Google's "fix" brought groups #1 and #2 into the fold, with the effect of alienating group #3. It turns out a lot of people were using this "bug" to keep some people not completely aware of what the account holder was doing. Now, it is all out in the open. The problem, for Google, is two-fold.
First, they did not give adequate notice that this change was going to happen. They announced the change on a Friday night, then immediately implemented it. I am sure that some folks came to work Monday morning and were caught flat-footed by the change. Most of these folks (in camp 3, above) are steaming mad, and are burning up the forums.
Second, they did not give users an option to "revert it back to the way it was". In fact, this has all the hallmarks of a permanent shift, although Google claims publicly that this "is still a very experimental feature". Somehow, I don't believe them. If it were very experimental, they would have switched it back to the original configuration after the 10th complaint hit the forum. It looks like what they really mean is "This is the way it's going to be from now on, so deal with it."
Q: What part of shared don't you understand?
A: If I were to "share" my hard drive across my LAN, wouldn't I feel a little uncomfortable if I saw the contents of my hard drive appear on a public forum, or in a public place? This is the same feeling Google Reader users are getting, I bet. Suddenly a word that they thought meant one thing (shared to a limited group of people in the contacts list) became a completely different concept (shared with everyone in contact list). Such a radical shift should not be implemented overnight, with virtually no user feedback. In fact, even after the feedback, it appears that Google is unwilling to revisit this issue.
Q: Why should I be ashamed or embarrassed to share my information with all the folks in my contact list? I mean, what do I have to hide?
A: Slashdot readers, in particular, should be knowledge regarding the privacy implications of this move. One concept that people have a hard time grasping is contextual privacy. I want to share a certain amount of information with some people (my love of WWII FPS games with my friends) while sharing other things with others (my knowledge of hedge fund movements with Wall Street people). With the new Google model, everyone is on equal footing. My carefully segregated contacts have been ruined, thanks to Google. Oh well, start again with another RSS reader, but the damage has already been done. Now, my Wall Street buddies know I like to play FPS games (I can of much more incriminating examples) and my reputation has been ruined.
If someone doesn't sue Google, I would be surprised. They are a company based in Mountain View, CA. I am sure that there is at least one person in CA who feels "cheated" by Google. We Californians (yikes, gotta stop giving away personal information like that) are a litigious lot, and I'm sure someone is going to claim damages out of this whole thing. The title of my post explains why.
In the Silicon Valley, there people who live by multiple allegiances, and there are people paid to figure out the allegiances of those subjects. If the Godfather taught me anything, it's "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies clos
I don't understand how this happens. The demographic that is going to be affected by the switchover has these characteristics:
1. Analog TV -- OK, so far, pretty basic. We probably all have one of these, or at least a television capable of playing analog video.
2. Over-the-Air transmission -- in other words, Rabbit Ears.
That's it folks. There isn't a large pocket of aliens sitting in a canyon getting their TV reception from disruptions in the ionosphere, or at least, I don't think so. The digital conversion will leave these folks behind.
Anyway, why the hell aren't there more PSA's on network television advertising this stuff? There are all these anti-drug ads, anti-piracy ads (in theatres mostly), and tons of idiotic political ads (hmm...can't understand that one). Why doesn't the network come up with a snazzy "Hey, if you're still using rabbit ears, you won't be able to see us anymore, without getting a set-top box" type commercial. Do they really want all the complaints?
I think the reason that the networks are not prepared for the digital crossover is that they are hoping to delay it, and in doing so, deny the FCC from giving back the white-spaces to the people. Oh well, we'll just have to "Take the Power Back." Yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, it's a pretty messed up situation. I was reminded of this article a while back when wondering why the FCC insists on auctioning off spectrum, rather than keeping it, forcing some rules onto spectrum users, and licensing retailers/end-users.
I agree with the Feld/MAP analysis: Google will build the architecture, then get a bunch of also-rans to actually sell the service on to end-users. This situation is analogous to the previous ISP golden age, back when the power of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe was waning. Suddenly, all of these little ISP's appeared, each offering dial-up at $15-20 a month. Hopefully, Google will usher in a new golden age, but with a little bit faster speeds (we're already 16th in the OECD. How much slower can we get?)
How hard will it be to build the infrastructure? First, Google could pull a Cisco, and outsource the construction, just slapping their name on the finished product. Second, we're talking about 700MHz, as in UHF. This will be a boon to all (7) of the RF-geeks out there just itching to build UHF transceivers. There are many possibilities, and depending on what level of control Google chooses to exercise, we could see a lot of antennas popping up in odd places. Don't forget the UHF...public access channels!
Why would Google build it? Why not? They build everything else themselves. Servers, switches, talk of renewable energy (yes, they blow a lot of hot air, but what corporation doesn't). They've figured out that the best way to stay in the game is to not rely on their "friends" but to bring competence in-house. This has probably had a negative effect on the rest of the industry (someone should do a study on this). If all the best minds are going to Google, then the rest are...dumb? I don't know. It's better than the best and the brightest going into the Pentagon, at least.
Since the FCC isn't going to collapse overnight, we're probably stuck with this model for a while. Auctions will be with us until the general public figures out that auctions are a pretty pathetic way of distributing our precious natural resources.
Disclaimer: I actually hate Google. I just hate AT&T and Verizon more.
I know this is a contract dispute with Novell, but just how did SCO use this to attack Linux?
Didn't Linus Torvalds build Linux from scratch, based upon Minix? Didn't he specifically avoid using Bell System code, just so he wouldn't have to deal with this kind of chinachery?
Honestly, I don't know why companies like SCO bother, sometimes. They should just take whatever money they had at the peak of their stock valuations, and run off to Switzerland. Better that, then sink it into a 5 year legal battle which gets you nothing but bankruptcy.
Oh well, I guess the RIAA/MPAA are next on the block. Someone ought to tell these folks that the train has left the station, and it's no use standing around foaming. Either get with the times or get out of the game. I notice wax-cylinder sales have been pretty flat, this year.
Yeah, the title should have been "EFF releases new software (actually a Python script, but whatever) in bid to show that ISP's spoof packets" That would have been much more of an attention grabber.
Ya gotta admit, using "Net Neutrality" however wrongfully, is an attention grabber. It got you talking, didn't it?
I don't think the person from the Socialist country is being insulting. He/She is just pointing out that for a supposedly "free" country the U.S. has a lot of restrictions. I don't really want to start a flame war, but looking at the religious backgrounds of the presidential candidates, and the fact that religion plays such a crucial role in our politics is just one example.
What seems to be happening is that at the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. had a fairly robust broadband infrastructure. Companies were rolling out DSL and Cable Internet, there were multiple ISP's, and some companies were even investing in fiber. We have fallen far behind the rest of the world, in the meantime.
The poster from a Socialist country pointed out that in his/her country, the retail and wholesale broadband markets were separate. In other words, one company built out the physical infrastructure, be it copper wires, co-ax, fiber, satellite, or my personal favorite: Morse-code firing flashlight/lasers. Then another company would lease that "line" to the retail customer: the actual end-user. Unfortunately, we don't have that model. Instead, we have the model of the railroad company: they own the network, and charge everybody who wants to use it a "tax" to get on. Now, if there were multiple competing companies attempting to vie for the same pool of customers, and they needed to compete on service and features, fine, that would work out. Unfortunately, we have "natural monopolies" which aren't natural at all, but stem from the backwards regulatory framework that we have here.
As for the claim that America is so huge, someone from Europe couldn't possibly understand what this place is all about: there was a time when universal telephone service was considered a right. Ma Bell was forced to connect unprofitable communities. Bell did this by collecting more money from the cities than the company could spend there, and spent the income on rural build-out. Bell also got direct infusions of cash from the government. Now, the same companies that profited off the backs of all of us are crying poverty again. I don't believe them. If they really wanted to compete for the rural market, they'd build out, and tell everyone what a good job they're doing, and get brownie-points. Instead, they pretty much ignore the rural market. They play games like "If one person in your zip code is served by broadband, that means everybody in your community is served." Kinda reminds me of the days where everyone was huddled around the radio, listening to FDR (no, actually, I don't have that memory, but I've seen pictures, and I don't want to go back to those days).
Also, this "we're too poor to do proper broadband in the country" excuse does not explain the lack of muli-megabit broadband offerings in the city. In Seoul and Tokyo, the average broadband speed is 43Mbps and 93Mbps. That's ridiculously high compared to what you can get in New York, L.A., or San Francisco. But San Francisco is supposed to be the most wired city in America! What gives? For the answer, you need look no further than AT&T and Comcast.
We need a policy change at the highest level. (Well, OK, first we need to get rid of the FCC, but that's another story). First, we need to separate the wholesale and retail markets. The people building the roads should not be the ones renting the cars. Next, there should be incentives for serving under-served communities. Maybe the government should pay a premium for rural customers. I know, this could only lead to waste and fraud as multiple lines are run out to BFE (look it up) and "ghost subscribers" are created for the purposes of that subsidy. Universal phone service was supposed to work. Let's give this a shot, and see if we can get real universal broadband to real customers.
Unfortunately, the Socialist model may be best, in this case. There are too many incentives to "cheat" and currently, there is too much profit in providing that last mile. Broadband has to be de-mys
Finally, someone who gets it! I'm sick of all of these whiners who say "I can see 10 or 20 wireless AP's within range of my system, and it's killing me!" Gee, imagine all of those AP's converted into one mesh network. You'd only see 1.
That's right, 1 network to rule them all. If that's too paranoid for you, break it up into 3 overlapping networks. Call them NBC, ABC, and CBS for historical reasons. I don't care. Don't assume that if this model gets implemented any time soon, though, that you are going to see a proliferation of AP's. No, that's not why we want this (and believe me a lot of us want this).
The reason we want a municipal wifi MESH network is for redundancy, emergency services, and to wean our cities off of the cable/dsl duopoly. Also, a lot of you here are whinging about your ISP's and their terms of service. Get this, every one of you. If this model is put in place there will be NO ISP, unless you count the City of (Where-you-happen-to-live) here. Alright? A mesh is just that. No one controls it. It's the ultimate p2p network, and it scares the crap out of the telcos and cablecos because they lose control, pure and simple.
Please, if you are going to post something in response to an article about "Mesh" networks, read something about them. My favorite sites are www.saschameinrath.com, which talks about a working mesh network in the Champaign-Urbana area, as well as www.wetmachine.com, which is a political rant site about how the FCC is screwing us all (OK, the second one is just for fun).
For those of you whining that "evil people will use my bandwidth to download pr0n or talk to terr'ists, and I might be held liable..." you are uninformed about the law. Even if someone uses the part of your network that is nominally "yours" to send messages to your favorite band of evil-doers, you have no liability. You are covered under section 230, Title 47. The communications medium is not responsible for the actions of the people at either end of the line.
Let's take this "the medium is evil, because it is used by evil people" to its logical extreme. Are privately owned automobiles illegal? Why not? I can run moonshine in them, or use them to rob banks. How horrible. Cars must be banned. Also, there was an event which took place, oh, I don't know some time in September, in which bad things happened to people inside of buildings and airplanes. I don't see the world attempting to ban either of those things. Of course, the obvious solution to all of our technological problems is to ban technology, and go back to the lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gatherers, but good luck getting the Supreme Court to support you in that argument. We may as well ban oxygen because it is used by evil people to breathe.
My final point is this: mesh is the future, and it is inevitable. Who is going to construct the next generation internet? The incumbents? Give me a break. They're too busy rent-seeking on the crap they have sell us now.
Change happens during a crisis, and if you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that crises happen more and more frequently around here. Also, you may know, unless you have contradictory information, that the fastest way to set up an emergency communication network is by putting up a mesh network. You get your emergency services up and running faster with hippies and WRT54g's, as opposed to corporate suits in their slick vans and PR people.
And once people have gotten used to living in their post-warzone, post-hurricane, post-earthquake disaster area with a fast p2p network --(remember, the telcos and cablecos are going to limit you to the speed they think you can handle. You are going to be going as fast as the spec says you can go, which is currently 54mbps, with plain old 802.11g) do you really think all of these folks are going to want to go back to corporate mediated comms?
The only real problems left to solve, for the people who are interested, are security (VPN tunnelling) and ha
Who cares what model they are throwing out there. The only thing Slashdotters should be focusing on is the same old question : can it run Linux? Secondary only to the most important question is the next reflexive question : Will it Doom? Why do you care about ad-supported vs. not? Don't you think that within days or hours of the phone becoming publicly available, someone will write a hack to make the ads disappear, or fall into a dev/null hole? Is anyone really worried about Google having all of our secrets? If that's your greatest concern, pack up and live in a cave, if you aren't already doing so.
The killer app for any OS, desktop environment, etc. is porn. Without the easy ability to just click on a link and download/play porn, linux (and by extension every other up-and-coming OS) is dead in the water. Ya gotta give the users what they want. And what they want, overwhelmingly, is porn.
Wasn't ftp started by people trading warez and porn? How are you going to cut your teeth on a new OS. Well, first ya gotta use it for doing the things you most enjoy. Games and porn. End of story.
I am confused by the mindless shuffling of politicians,these days. Anyone with any sense should see that this will only increase downloads of video games, driving out businesses attempting to make it in the New York area.
Expect to see many more video games shops in New Jersey, unless the market merely collapses. Also, this doesn't affect online retailers, so folks like Amazon and Gamespy can expect more revenue thanks to Daddy's stolen credit card (this will have the knock-on effect of turning kids into wire fraud artists).
It won't do a thing about kids' access to violent video games. Kids will get into all sorts of mischief despite their parents' interests. Oh well, politics as usual.
This is not about competition. It's about destroying a market. When Wintel gets set to release a product, it asks itself, "What can I get away with?" Yes, I know, Intel and Microsoft are different companies, but to use the car analogy :
GM makes (or made) cars and Delphi makes transmissions (I don't really care what they make, the point is, the two companies have a symbiotic relationship). Along comes Ford, and says "Hey, that's messed up, I can do it better." Ford makes millions of cheap CVT-installed cars and sells them to poor people.
Now, GM and Delphi have a problem : They are used to selling their Lincoln Town Cars and Cadillacs to all of the rich people of the world, and their processes are too inefficient to make cheap cars. (Actually, to be a little more historically accurate, Ford should be replaced by VW, Toyota, Yugo, etc.) What's a giant corporation to do? It's called "Create a loss-leader."
To get to the motivations of Intel/M$ : What happens when OLPC's become successful, and people realize that "Hey, I really can do it all for $100, at least in the 3rd world." Well, folks, the wonderful children of the third world are going to sell their laptops on Ebay (they'll all be connected to the internet, you see) for $200 to gullible U.S.ians like ourselves, turn around, buy themselves another $100 laptop, rinse and repeat. Pretty soon the world will be flooded by cheap laptops all running....AMD/Ubuntu. Think that's funny?
Michael Dell doesn't think so....but anyway. This is why Wintel has to get into this game. It is to prevent the "Complete Destruction of the IT Industry" (from their point of view, really).
Now, interestingly enough, there is a historical analogy which fits here. Back in the day, radios were these huge horrible clunky things which drew on mains power (that's 120 volts AC for us folks stateside) with huge tubes instead of tiny little transistors. Technology advanced, scientists were still employed, Bell even did a little useful research, but the big radio manufacturing companies did not change their production process. It was still "One Radio per Family."
Something changed (in Japan, as the rumors go), and someone had a brilliant idea. "Instead of one radio per house, why not one radio per person?" Sound crazy? That's right, and now we are stuck with even bigger radios the size of football stadiums, computers the size of shopping malls...oh wait, that didn't happen.
So, expect changes. Even if AMD/Linux does not win this round, there will be other flavors of "free or cheap laptop". Maybe it will all go cellular, and we can finally abandon the PC and concentrate on moving apps to the mobile phone. OK, enough rant. Back to your regularly scheduled slashdotting.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the article mentions "Liquid Carbon Dioxide". That would take great pressure and extremely low temperature to pull off. I think it says "stored in a liquefied state" or something of the sort. I propose they would do this in such a fashion:
NaOH + CO2 --> NaHCO3
The reaction would have to take place in aqueous solution, or the ions would crash out. The product is Sodium Bicarbonate, the main ingredient in carbonated beverages. Umm...so I think that the inventors may be leaning more toward soda water, and less toward liquid dry ice. I am not saying this is a sane answer to the problem of automobiles, fuel, sprawl, whatever. I figure no one is insane enough to propose that we sit on a "dry ice bomb" as someone else so eloquently put it.
Still, they are going to have to use a pretty strong base to solubilize carbon dioxide. What else could they use? Anhydrous Ammonia? Yeah, sounds real pretty.
I started reading the original article, and stopped at this line:
"Every time you download a song to your phone, the same song is downloaded to your computer for playback through your PC speakers."
Just how the heck do they know when my PC is on, much less download songs to it? I don't want them downloading songs onto my PC without my knowledge. This service seems insidious. So you're saying every time I want to download a song, your proprietary player needs to be on a computer that's on and hooked up to the internet? Gee, there's no potential for abuse there.
What if someone sends me a rogue music file? If the same file is downloaded to my computer, isn't that going to mess up my machine? Virus writers are going to have a field day with this. Shame on Omniphone for promoting this garbage, and what is LG thinking, buying into this deal?
This will not replace p2p. It will barely make a dent. How can you justify charging for premium unlimited data when the same thing can be done with any smart phone on a wifi network for free? Really, these companies need to go back to their boardrooms and either disband or think of a better business model.
I'm not worried about the DRM. Whatever DRM these files come with will be broken the day that the first music file is downloaded from this service. I just don't understand why they even bother, anymore.
Can't teach a dinosaur new tricks, I suppose.
I was a little confused about the entire WSD vs 700MHz debate, so I looked this up. There's actually a chart available, I'm not sure exactly where I got it, but it is from a document called: "Unlicensed Broadband Device Technologies: "White Space Device" Operations on the TV Band and the Myth of Harmful Interference"
Anyway, here is the frequency breakdown:
Channels 2-6: 54-88Mhz
Channels 7-13: 174-216MHz
Channels 14-51: 470-698MHz
Channels 52-69: 698-806MHz
The last block, channels 52-69, are the 700MHz block that is being auctioned off for tons of moolah. The Channels 2-51, and other unoccupied spectrum, are the zones of contention for the so called White-Space Devices (WSD).
So, to answer your question, we will shortly have devices that function in these channels. 700MHz and WSD are meant to address different issues. The 700Mhz spectrum auction is being held to find out who wants to build a national network in this space. Analog TV is going off the air (I still don't know what frequency range they'll use for OTA digital). 700MHz winners will fill the gap, apparently. Keep in mind that there are a whole host of regional players competing for little chunks of the spectrum in rural and under-served areas. The regional players may address the needs of folks without broadband now. Then again, they may just go ahead and ignore the rural market and concentrate on building their networks in the most profitable places possible. There may be something like Universal service for Broadband, in the future, but don't count on it from the current Congress and FCC.
Where does that leave WSD? WSD is like Wifi. Smaller companies (Cisco, Belkin, Netgear, etc.) are building WSD that should work either on the one-router-per-home model or the wifi mesh "cloud" model. Quite possibly, the WSD could be used in a configuration which is a hybrid of those two. Some people will have customer premise equipment (CPE) some folks will pull their data from the "cloud". Here's another thing that gets me: no one complains that their cell phones or wifi cards are too weak to interface with their "uplink" whatever that uplink is. Yet, we still have this controversy over using WSD. It's a strawman. Think of WSD as a more powerful wifi, or cell phones (phones and towers) and you'll get an idea of how it will be used.
Why are we having these auctions/spectrum give-aways? The analog crowd can no longer justify exclusive control of the spectrum. In the WSD space, hardly anyone broadcasts OTA anymore, and those that do will be forced to switch to "digital" whatever that means. So, there is room here for license-free devices. We just need the go ahead from the FCC to build them. Notice here that the companies in the 700MHz race (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Google) are not the ones in the WSD space (Phillips, Cisco, Microsoft). Basically, anyone can build WSD, as long as it conforms to the "listen-before-talk" principle, is fairly low-power, and is able to avoid interference.
What advantage do these things bring? Finally, we are able to do Wifi right. The problem with wireless communication at 2.4Ghz, is that ranges are horrible. Also, there is so much interference from competing technologies that signal is usually drowned out in noise. With WSD, the ranges can become a lot longer. This introduces the problem of multiple devices communicating all at once to a central hub or router, but given enough "eyeballs on the problem" I believe that this problem, when it comes up, will be surmountable.
I am very optimistic about the viability of this technology. Then again, I think that people are basically good, and look where that belief has gotten me. Well, here's hoping that the 700Mhz auction isn't hijacked by a bunch of scoundrels and that WSD isn't sabotaged by the broadcasters who are so greedy that they won't give up their largely unused spectrum.
I know many of you have pointed this out already, but here's my 2p:
The author confuses physical goods with digital goods. No problem, happens all the time. He introduces this concept though:
"So people who made wooden chairs could trade them for, say, rice, fresh fruits, or meat. In time, a monetary system was introduced to generate a larger economy." That's not how it went down. Actually, according to my conspiracy-minded imagination, money was introduced by a bunch of lazy slobs who wanted to own the whole world, by doing the minimum amount of work. They devised a system by which people would trade little beads, bits of paper, shells, whatever, as long as they controlled the supply of said fiat currency. Like the man said "He who controls the spice controls the universe".
Thanks, Lance, for perpetuating the corruption that is money. That's swell. Before, people made whatever and traded whatever. Sure, there were inefficiencies, but people did what they fail to do now: they told people what they had and what they needed. Nowadays, it's all about "How much can I get for it" or "What are you willing to pay me for". So much better, I admit. (BTW, I am a wannabe '60's hippie that Lance is talking about in the article, like you couldn't have guessed) Moving on.
"We access or play an instance of it, but ownership lies really with the creators or, if they signed the rights away, to the media conglomerate that sold the right to consume it--on a limited basis--to you."
Whoa! When did we agree to this? OK, just for the record, let it be known that unlike everything else ever created in the world that is portable, fungible, and transferable, media is different. You don't own it. You have the right to use it. OK, let me get this straight, Lance, so I don't misrepresent you or your media conglomerate sugar daddy.
If I were to purchase a physical paper copy of your magazine, just for fun, let's say...then I gave that copy of your magazine to someone else after I was done reading it, that would be copyright infringement, right? Bear with me Lance...I purchased the "right" to read your sacred text, the words that you received on high by the mighty fortress that is...Microsoft, Ziff-Davis? I forgot who your corporate masters were. Anyway, so I purchased this "right", naively thinking I had purchased a "product" instead. If I then give that holy writ away to someone else, thinking "Hey, geek-boy over there is going to get a kick out of this," have I not infringed upon your sacred copyright? Have I not transferred my right to view your copyrighted work, without your express written consent (and the written consent of ABC, and the National Football League)? Am I in trouble, Lance? Are the cops going to take me away? I want my mommy. Woe is me.
See, this is exactly why a common peasant, unwise in the ways of copyright law, would be tempted to "steal" music. The commoner understands the concept of "buying and selling stuff". We do not understand this concept of "limited transfer of rights". In fact, it appears that yon mega-media company is attempting to rip us off. Is that what's going on? Has this been going on for years? Are the money changers in the temple? Have they been kicked out by the messiah of P2P? Lance, are you actually defending the money-changers? Do you even know what you're up against?
Sharing resources like this always makes me think of the parable of the loaves and the fishes (no I am not a Christian, but I will not hesitate to use Christian literature against them). You see, The Original Hippie split loaves of bread and entire fish. Why he did not bring at least some of the fish back to life, to replenish the stocks in the lake/river/stream/whatever is beyond me. Perhaps his powers were weak, at the time. Anyway, everyone got enough to eat because Beardy basically did this matter transmutation thing with food.
This is essentially what we are doing now, with media. We copy one set of organiz
Done. Or have you not been to Euro Disneyland lately?
Oh, you and all the other French people.
It's becoming impossible to make a buck in France, anymore, if you are an American. Like the local waiters here totally spit in your food. How often do I have to tell them "Je ne parle pas français" to get that right?
Just because the Americans have the audacity to call them cowards, change the name to French Fries to Freedom Fries (I'm not sure what French people have to do with deep-fried potatoes, sounds English to me), and give the name French Toast to egg-battered bread -- these aren't valid reasons to hate us.
Corrupting their language, making fun of Quebec, and calling them all a bunch of effete limp-wristed bastards...those are valid reasons.
Sounds like the solution is:
Sprint builds the network, does all the gorilla-arms stuff (you know, builds towers, connects cable a with plug b).
Virgin sells and actually administers the network. Hey, if Virgin actually has a marketing and customer service system that works, why not give the entire retail business to them?
Sprint would be better off focusing on its core competencies, such as making, then breaking deals with ClearWire.
Now, you're just making excuses. The up-and-coming generation is not going to just stop using the internet and start using old media technologies to get their information. Whether it's at work or home, new generation folks are going to be using the internet a lot more than old generation. It's just a fact of life. Think about it. Who would you rather trust, the onion or Fox News? Seriously, people who grew up on the internet aren't going to be able to quit cold turkey.
They'll use whatever they can get, preferably for free. Free Wifi in cafes comes to mind. Also, getting promoted at work and attracting hot chicks can be done over the internet, so that can get accomplished. Ever heard of telecommuting? How about Remote Desktop Administration? I'd hate to call you out as behind the times, but face it: you and I do not know how the internet may be used in the future.
This bandwidth cap is a bad idea. It's bad for everybody. It'd definitely bad for America. It might be a good thing for Seoul and Tokyo. They can attract a lot more folks to work in their code factories, knowing that they can offer 50-100mbps uncapped. None of these crazy monopolistic practices (NTT has a telephone monopoly, but they act like saints compared to AT&T).
If you want to cripple your kids or influence the people that you can and tell them to get off the internet and back into 'real life' be my guest. Please don't presume, though, that you know how everybody else is going to use the internet for the next 30 years. None of us know. That's why we need to preserve the elements that we have. Unlimited (truly unlimited, not marketing hype) all-you-can eat internet. Say, why is it that these ISP's can be so incredibly profitable, but are incapable of investing their earnings into something basic...such as infrastructure improvement? Why has America been stuck in the low teens of mbps when Asia and Europe have raced ahead? Don't pull out that "But America is so big!" excuse. Why, then, hasn't it happened in New York or L.A.?
There hasn't been any re-investment, that's why. The CEO's of these corporations have taken these profits and invested them into lear jets, high-priced hookers, and coke. I don't blame the new generation of kids who watch YouTube instead of MTV (and what about uploading videos to YouTube? Should that count against one's bandwidth cap?). I blame the old generation of CEO's who think that building a business is boring, and we should just rape the company and discard the husk. Corporate responsibility, we've heard of it.
"employers could decide not to hire you if they felt you drank too much"
and get sued for employment discrimination. Then again, how would you ever know? I think that the potential for abuse for such a system goes way beyond employment and insurance issues, but I could be wrong.
There must be a way to game the system...
I give up, just give me whatever Ted Kennedy takes to hide his drinking problem from his mistress...oops!
Are they going after that hugely lucrative market called desktop search? I just don't understand the target audience, here.
Microsoft, and everybody else, was beat when the FTC allowed Google to purchase Double-click. What the "competitors" to Google fail to see is that search is a small fraction of what Google does. What brings home the bacon is targeted advertising. If Microsoft could replicate Ad-Sense, or make something bigger and better, they might be able to get back on the playground.
As is, their goose is cooked. Go ahead take over search. Will it stop people from using gmail, google apps (I know this is a non-starter), google earth, youtube? Google is fast becoming a global version of what AOL wanted to be: a walled garden where nobody leaves the google homeworld for other mysterious parts of the internet. Google just owns a very large garden, and the walls are hidden behind the pretty scenery. Also, Google is not as obtuse as AOL, and doesn't treat its users like children until they misbehave and talk smack about Google. Even then, it chooses to behave more rationally than a censorbot.
I'm not exactly a Google fanboi, but I at least have the sense to know that attacking your enemy in a peripheral "market" is not going to drive customers to your site. You need to hit them in the wallet. Google is attempting to take over the desktop. What's Microsoft's response? Try to take over search. Search? No, your enemy is Ad-Sense/Double-Click.
OK, get hacking.
We seem to be running into this issue with professional photographers, recently, and I'm just wondering if it's a clash of cultures. He mentions that David Pogue polled 500 people, and only 2 of them thought downloading movies and music off the internet was wrong. This represents a profound cultural shift in the way we use words and images, folks (see Steal This Film, Part II).
The problem seems to be that Dan Heller keeps throwing words around like "contributory infringement" and "intellectual property" which have no effect on what is actually going on. People are downloading copyrighted music and movies, Dan. Do you think that your content is safe?
At worst, Creative Commons is destroying trust in its own model. It's getting all of these photographers to contribute to the "Flickr Community" which is just as ephemeral and not nearly as snippy as the "Slashdot Community". Then, it tempts you into licensing your photos with the Creative Commons license. Oooh...sneaky. All of a sudden, it's kitty-bar-the-door when your precious photos end up on some scavenger site for extra-terrestrials. Oh noes! I thought that the internets was going to protect me from the bad pirates. Boy, I hope the cave you've been living in has central heating. Maybe the "commercial artists" out there will wake up and stop using Flickr/Creative Commons. It doesn't seem to be touched by the big media companies so they're safe (yeah, right!). Oh, where will I go for all of my copyrighted still images? Um, let's try Google Copyright Infringement, or Images, for short. Boy, that was difficult.
You can always go RIAA on us, but then we can throw Fair Use in your face. The only time that the law comes into it is when you are dealing with a legal entity which is using your photos for commercial gain. If someone downloads your photos and uses them as CD-cover art on a CD containing 100% downloaded music, gee, guess what? No one's making money in this context. Flickr, from what I understand, is a free photo-sharing community. If you want commercial-grade, stick to Getty. They're more your style.
For all of us who think, "Wow! that was a fantastic image, created by an amateur artist. I'm going to promote that in my next non-commercial release of my grind-core trip-hop spoken word album-making tour video," Flickr might be the right place. Just a word about appropriation: If Flickr were serious about preventing copyright infringement, they'd disable Right-Click "Save Image As..." No really, they could totally rail you for it. "You have been caught attempting to save a copyrighted image onto your computer. Stay where you are as the copyright police come to your residence and take away your kids, pets, and houseplants. You are a bad person/lifeform/entity." Go ahead, just try to block that pop-up.
For those of us who are thinking about starting up companies (Lotto, don't fail me now) and hiring yon graphic artist to sketch out a little logo for us, we'll probably sample your work, make sure that it fits with our corporate image (slave-drivers), and commission you to do an original. Why? Because commercial interests aren't ghetto enough to pull images off of Flickr. Dude, that's so ghetto! Who's going to buy into that company? Turns out there's this "venture capital" firm sitting around in East Oakland swimming in piles of $1's and $5's, looking to "cash in" on the dot-com boom. Oops, too late. Seriously, though, any commercial interest worth a bag of salt will want to commission your work, assuming that you are a serious artist and not a crybaby attention whore.
Whoever sold you on the idea that Flickr was some paradise where commercial artists are compensated perfectly for the images they upload and it's all "happies and smileys" is the same guy that sold you the Potemkin Village image of the suburbs. The internet was started by people who wanted free porn and free warez. It really hasn't gotten a whole lot better, except that some folks also learned how to respond to stupid blog posts by employing a slightly greater than 3 word vocabulary (haxxor, w00t, pwnd!).
For all of you elitist fools: if you don't want your s*** jacked, get out of the ghetto.
First, one can never prove a scientific theory. Scientific theories are adopted because some group of scientists decides that some new theory gives us a better picture of the universe than the old theory. Basically, if the new theory has better predictive capabilities than the old theory, then the new theory tends to dominate. In reality, the old theory never goes away until proponents of the old theory all die. Theories can only be disproved.
A theory is disproved when physical phenomena are encountered which contradict the predictions made by the theory. This is how quantum mechanics and relativity were formulated. Classical (Newtonian) Mechanics was seen as "The Truth" for hundreds of years until scientists encountered strange phenomena which could not be explained by a new theory. They gradually evolved these new theories to explain these effects. In order for the Virtual Reality theory of the universe to be adopted, the model has to answer more questions than the previous model did. In order for it to be disproved, something has to break the model.
You see? The cycle repeats itself, with each answer coming closer to some ultimate "truth" which we'll probably never find in the lifetime of our species. If reality as VR solves more problems than it creates, it may get adopted. If another theory comes along which is intrinsically "better" then it may get adopted. One thing scientists can never do is "fix the intelligence around the policy" meaning fit the data to the theory. Reproducible data is sacrosanct. If your theory doesn't explain how your experiment begot your data, it's time to look around for another theory.
In any case, irrelevant arguments like "He's not even a scientist" or "It's all been done before" do nothing to contribute to the advancement of science. The approach should be "OK, let's assume that he's correct. Now let's go about proving him wrong". This should be the work of serious scientists, not people looking to get into a turf war or a religious battle.
I think what a lot of the "public data is public" folks are missing is that even when someone elects to "share" their information with someone else, that doesn't meant that they want that sharing of information to become public knowledge to everyone, for all time.
Up until 12/14/07, the Google Reader had been a bit broken. It was difficult to share information with everyone in an individual's contact list. There were 3 user responses to this: 1. Stop using Reader until this was fixed. 2. Work around the problem, possibly coding something of your own. 3. Take advantage of this issue by selectively sharing with people you want, while not sharing with people you do not.
Google's "fix" brought groups #1 and #2 into the fold, with the effect of alienating group #3. It turns out a lot of people were using this "bug" to keep some people not completely aware of what the account holder was doing. Now, it is all out in the open. The problem, for Google, is two-fold.
First, they did not give adequate notice that this change was going to happen. They announced the change on a Friday night, then immediately implemented it. I am sure that some folks came to work Monday morning and were caught flat-footed by the change. Most of these folks (in camp 3, above) are steaming mad, and are burning up the forums.
Second, they did not give users an option to "revert it back to the way it was". In fact, this has all the hallmarks of a permanent shift, although Google claims publicly that this "is still a very experimental feature". Somehow, I don't believe them. If it were very experimental, they would have switched it back to the original configuration after the 10th complaint hit the forum. It looks like what they really mean is "This is the way it's going to be from now on, so deal with it."
Q: What part of shared don't you understand?
A: If I were to "share" my hard drive across my LAN, wouldn't I feel a little uncomfortable if I saw the contents of my hard drive appear on a public forum, or in a public place? This is the same feeling Google Reader users are getting, I bet. Suddenly a word that they thought meant one thing (shared to a limited group of people in the contacts list) became a completely different concept (shared with everyone in contact list). Such a radical shift should not be implemented overnight, with virtually no user feedback. In fact, even after the feedback, it appears that Google is unwilling to revisit this issue.
Q: Why should I be ashamed or embarrassed to share my information with all the folks in my contact list? I mean, what do I have to hide?
A: Slashdot readers, in particular, should be knowledge regarding the privacy implications of this move. One concept that people have a hard time grasping is contextual privacy. I want to share a certain amount of information with some people (my love of WWII FPS games with my friends) while sharing other things with others (my knowledge of hedge fund movements with Wall Street people). With the new Google model, everyone is on equal footing. My carefully segregated contacts have been ruined, thanks to Google. Oh well, start again with another RSS reader, but the damage has already been done. Now, my Wall Street buddies know I like to play FPS games (I can of much more incriminating examples) and my reputation has been ruined.
If someone doesn't sue Google, I would be surprised. They are a company based in Mountain View, CA. I am sure that there is at least one person in CA who feels "cheated" by Google. We Californians (yikes, gotta stop giving away personal information like that) are a litigious lot, and I'm sure someone is going to claim damages out of this whole thing. The title of my post explains why.
In the Silicon Valley, there people who live by multiple allegiances, and there are people paid to figure out the allegiances of those subjects. If the Godfather taught me anything, it's "Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies clos
I don't understand how this happens. The demographic that is going to be affected by the switchover has these characteristics:
1. Analog TV -- OK, so far, pretty basic. We probably all have one of these, or at least a television capable of playing analog video.
2. Over-the-Air transmission -- in other words, Rabbit Ears.
That's it folks. There isn't a large pocket of aliens sitting in a canyon getting their TV reception from disruptions in the ionosphere, or at least, I don't think so. The digital conversion will leave these folks behind.
Anyway, why the hell aren't there more PSA's on network television advertising this stuff? There are all these anti-drug ads, anti-piracy ads (in theatres mostly), and tons of idiotic political ads (hmm...can't understand that one). Why doesn't the network come up with a snazzy "Hey, if you're still using rabbit ears, you won't be able to see us anymore, without getting a set-top box" type commercial. Do they really want all the complaints?
I think the reason that the networks are not prepared for the digital crossover is that they are hoping to delay it, and in doing so, deny the FCC from giving back the white-spaces to the people. Oh well, we'll just have to "Take the Power Back." Yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, it's a pretty messed up situation. I was reminded of this article a while back when wondering why the FCC insists on auctioning off spectrum, rather than keeping it, forcing some rules onto spectrum users, and licensing retailers/end-users.
I agree with the Feld/MAP analysis: Google will build the architecture, then get a bunch of also-rans to actually sell the service on to end-users. This situation is analogous to the previous ISP golden age, back when the power of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe was waning. Suddenly, all of these little ISP's appeared, each offering dial-up at $15-20 a month. Hopefully, Google will usher in a new golden age, but with a little bit faster speeds (we're already 16th in the OECD. How much slower can we get?)
How hard will it be to build the infrastructure? First, Google could pull a Cisco, and outsource the construction, just slapping their name on the finished product. Second, we're talking about 700MHz, as in UHF. This will be a boon to all (7) of the RF-geeks out there just itching to build UHF transceivers. There are many possibilities, and depending on what level of control Google chooses to exercise, we could see a lot of antennas popping up in odd places. Don't forget the UHF...public access channels!
Why would Google build it? Why not? They build everything else themselves. Servers, switches, talk of renewable energy (yes, they blow a lot of hot air, but what corporation doesn't). They've figured out that the best way to stay in the game is to not rely on their "friends" but to bring competence in-house. This has probably had a negative effect on the rest of the industry (someone should do a study on this). If all the best minds are going to Google, then the rest are...dumb? I don't know. It's better than the best and the brightest going into the Pentagon, at least.
Since the FCC isn't going to collapse overnight, we're probably stuck with this model for a while. Auctions will be with us until the general public figures out that auctions are a pretty pathetic way of distributing our precious natural resources.
Disclaimer: I actually hate Google. I just hate AT&T and Verizon more.
This is great news, and all. But I was wondering, how will they overcome the 640k limit?
I'll need to load all of my programs high, again, I suspect.
I know this is a contract dispute with Novell, but just how did SCO use this to attack Linux?
Didn't Linus Torvalds build Linux from scratch, based upon Minix? Didn't he specifically avoid using Bell System code, just so he wouldn't have to deal with this kind of chinachery?
Honestly, I don't know why companies like SCO bother, sometimes. They should just take whatever money they had at the peak of their stock valuations, and run off to Switzerland. Better that, then sink it into a 5 year legal battle which gets you nothing but bankruptcy.
Oh well, I guess the RIAA/MPAA are next on the block. Someone ought to tell these folks that the train has left the station, and it's no use standing around foaming. Either get with the times or get out of the game. I notice wax-cylinder sales have been pretty flat, this year.
Yeah, the title should have been "EFF releases new software (actually a Python script, but whatever) in bid to show that ISP's spoof packets" That would have been much more of an attention grabber.
Ya gotta admit, using "Net Neutrality" however wrongfully, is an attention grabber. It got you talking, didn't it?
I don't think the person from the Socialist country is being insulting. He/She is just pointing out that for a supposedly "free" country the U.S. has a lot of restrictions. I don't really want to start a flame war, but looking at the religious backgrounds of the presidential candidates, and the fact that religion plays such a crucial role in our politics is just one example.
What seems to be happening is that at the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. had a fairly robust broadband infrastructure. Companies were rolling out DSL and Cable Internet, there were multiple ISP's, and some companies were even investing in fiber. We have fallen far behind the rest of the world, in the meantime.
The poster from a Socialist country pointed out that in his/her country, the retail and wholesale broadband markets were separate. In other words, one company built out the physical infrastructure, be it copper wires, co-ax, fiber, satellite, or my personal favorite: Morse-code firing flashlight/lasers. Then another company would lease that "line" to the retail customer: the actual end-user. Unfortunately, we don't have that model. Instead, we have the model of the railroad company: they own the network, and charge everybody who wants to use it a "tax" to get on. Now, if there were multiple competing companies attempting to vie for the same pool of customers, and they needed to compete on service and features, fine, that would work out. Unfortunately, we have "natural monopolies" which aren't natural at all, but stem from the backwards regulatory framework that we have here.
As for the claim that America is so huge, someone from Europe couldn't possibly understand what this place is all about: there was a time when universal telephone service was considered a right. Ma Bell was forced to connect unprofitable communities. Bell did this by collecting more money from the cities than the company could spend there, and spent the income on rural build-out. Bell also got direct infusions of cash from the government. Now, the same companies that profited off the backs of all of us are crying poverty again. I don't believe them. If they really wanted to compete for the rural market, they'd build out, and tell everyone what a good job they're doing, and get brownie-points. Instead, they pretty much ignore the rural market. They play games like "If one person in your zip code is served by broadband, that means everybody in your community is served." Kinda reminds me of the days where everyone was huddled around the radio, listening to FDR (no, actually, I don't have that memory, but I've seen pictures, and I don't want to go back to those days).
Also, this "we're too poor to do proper broadband in the country" excuse does not explain the lack of muli-megabit broadband offerings in the city. In Seoul and Tokyo, the average broadband speed is 43Mbps and 93Mbps. That's ridiculously high compared to what you can get in New York, L.A., or San Francisco. But San Francisco is supposed to be the most wired city in America! What gives? For the answer, you need look no further than AT&T and Comcast. We need a policy change at the highest level. (Well, OK, first we need to get rid of the FCC, but that's another story). First, we need to separate the wholesale and retail markets. The people building the roads should not be the ones renting the cars. Next, there should be incentives for serving under-served communities. Maybe the government should pay a premium for rural customers. I know, this could only lead to waste and fraud as multiple lines are run out to BFE (look it up) and "ghost subscribers" are created for the purposes of that subsidy. Universal phone service was supposed to work. Let's give this a shot, and see if we can get real universal broadband to real customers.
Unfortunately, the Socialist model may be best, in this case. There are too many incentives to "cheat" and currently, there is too much profit in providing that last mile. Broadband has to be de-mys
Finally, someone who gets it! I'm sick of all of these whiners who say "I can see 10 or 20 wireless AP's within range of my system, and it's killing me!" Gee, imagine all of those AP's converted into one mesh network. You'd only see 1.
That's right, 1 network to rule them all. If that's too paranoid for you, break it up into 3 overlapping networks. Call them NBC, ABC, and CBS for historical reasons. I don't care. Don't assume that if this model gets implemented any time soon, though, that you are going to see a proliferation of AP's. No, that's not why we want this (and believe me a lot of us want this).
The reason we want a municipal wifi MESH network is for redundancy, emergency services, and to wean our cities off of the cable/dsl duopoly. Also, a lot of you here are whinging about your ISP's and their terms of service. Get this, every one of you. If this model is put in place there will be NO ISP, unless you count the City of (Where-you-happen-to-live) here. Alright? A mesh is just that. No one controls it. It's the ultimate p2p network, and it scares the crap out of the telcos and cablecos because they lose control, pure and simple.
Please, if you are going to post something in response to an article about "Mesh" networks, read something about them. My favorite sites are www.saschameinrath.com, which talks about a working mesh network in the Champaign-Urbana area, as well as www.wetmachine.com, which is a political rant site about how the FCC is screwing us all (OK, the second one is just for fun).
For those of you whining that "evil people will use my bandwidth to download pr0n or talk to terr'ists, and I might be held liable..." you are uninformed about the law. Even if someone uses the part of your network that is nominally "yours" to send messages to your favorite band of evil-doers, you have no liability. You are covered under section 230, Title 47. The communications medium is not responsible for the actions of the people at either end of the line.
Let's take this "the medium is evil, because it is used by evil people" to its logical extreme. Are privately owned automobiles illegal? Why not? I can run moonshine in them, or use them to rob banks. How horrible. Cars must be banned. Also, there was an event which took place, oh, I don't know some time in September, in which bad things happened to people inside of buildings and airplanes. I don't see the world attempting to ban either of those things. Of course, the obvious solution to all of our technological problems is to ban technology, and go back to the lifestyle of nomadic hunter-gatherers, but good luck getting the Supreme Court to support you in that argument. We may as well ban oxygen because it is used by evil people to breathe.
My final point is this: mesh is the future, and it is inevitable. Who is going to construct the next generation internet? The incumbents? Give me a break. They're too busy rent-seeking on the crap they have sell us now.
Change happens during a crisis, and if you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that crises happen more and more frequently around here. Also, you may know, unless you have contradictory information, that the fastest way to set up an emergency communication network is by putting up a mesh network. You get your emergency services up and running faster with hippies and WRT54g's, as opposed to corporate suits in their slick vans and PR people.
And once people have gotten used to living in their post-warzone, post-hurricane, post-earthquake disaster area with a fast p2p network --(remember, the telcos and cablecos are going to limit you to the speed they think you can handle. You are going to be going as fast as the spec says you can go, which is currently 54mbps, with plain old 802.11g) do you really think all of these folks are going to want to go back to corporate mediated comms?
The only real problems left to solve, for the people who are interested, are security (VPN tunnelling) and ha
Who cares what model they are throwing out there. The only thing Slashdotters should be focusing on is the same old question : can it run Linux? Secondary only to the most important question is the next reflexive question : Will it Doom? Why do you care about ad-supported vs. not? Don't you think that within days or hours of the phone becoming publicly available, someone will write a hack to make the ads disappear, or fall into a dev/null hole? Is anyone really worried about Google having all of our secrets? If that's your greatest concern, pack up and live in a cave, if you aren't already doing so.
The killer app for any OS, desktop environment, etc. is porn. Without the easy ability to just click on a link and download/play porn, linux (and by extension every other up-and-coming OS) is dead in the water. Ya gotta give the users what they want. And what they want, overwhelmingly, is porn. Wasn't ftp started by people trading warez and porn? How are you going to cut your teeth on a new OS. Well, first ya gotta use it for doing the things you most enjoy. Games and porn. End of story.
I am confused by the mindless shuffling of politicians,these days. Anyone with any sense should see that this will only increase downloads of video games, driving out businesses attempting to make it in the New York area.
Expect to see many more video games shops in New Jersey, unless the market merely collapses. Also, this doesn't affect online retailers, so folks like Amazon and Gamespy can expect more revenue thanks to Daddy's stolen credit card (this will have the knock-on effect of turning kids into wire fraud artists).
It won't do a thing about kids' access to violent video games. Kids will get into all sorts of mischief despite their parents' interests. Oh well, politics as usual.
This is not about competition. It's about destroying a market. When Wintel gets set to release a product, it asks itself, "What can I get away with?" Yes, I know, Intel and Microsoft are different companies, but to use the car analogy : GM makes (or made) cars and Delphi makes transmissions (I don't really care what they make, the point is, the two companies have a symbiotic relationship). Along comes Ford, and says "Hey, that's messed up, I can do it better." Ford makes millions of cheap CVT-installed cars and sells them to poor people. Now, GM and Delphi have a problem : They are used to selling their Lincoln Town Cars and Cadillacs to all of the rich people of the world, and their processes are too inefficient to make cheap cars. (Actually, to be a little more historically accurate, Ford should be replaced by VW, Toyota, Yugo, etc.) What's a giant corporation to do? It's called "Create a loss-leader." To get to the motivations of Intel/M$ : What happens when OLPC's become successful, and people realize that "Hey, I really can do it all for $100, at least in the 3rd world." Well, folks, the wonderful children of the third world are going to sell their laptops on Ebay (they'll all be connected to the internet, you see) for $200 to gullible U.S.ians like ourselves, turn around, buy themselves another $100 laptop, rinse and repeat. Pretty soon the world will be flooded by cheap laptops all running....AMD/Ubuntu. Think that's funny? Michael Dell doesn't think so....but anyway. This is why Wintel has to get into this game. It is to prevent the "Complete Destruction of the IT Industry" (from their point of view, really). Now, interestingly enough, there is a historical analogy which fits here. Back in the day, radios were these huge horrible clunky things which drew on mains power (that's 120 volts AC for us folks stateside) with huge tubes instead of tiny little transistors. Technology advanced, scientists were still employed, Bell even did a little useful research, but the big radio manufacturing companies did not change their production process. It was still "One Radio per Family." Something changed (in Japan, as the rumors go), and someone had a brilliant idea. "Instead of one radio per house, why not one radio per person?" Sound crazy? That's right, and now we are stuck with even bigger radios the size of football stadiums, computers the size of shopping malls...oh wait, that didn't happen. So, expect changes. Even if AMD/Linux does not win this round, there will be other flavors of "free or cheap laptop". Maybe it will all go cellular, and we can finally abandon the PC and concentrate on moving apps to the mobile phone. OK, enough rant. Back to your regularly scheduled slashdotting.