It would only remove some property crimes. Thieves instead of breaking into your house would be relaxing at best resorts of the world.
However the most serious, most violent crime is not directly related to the wealth. If you take 100 gangbangers and give them $1M each they will be still roaming streets. This is because that's what they like to do. Beating people gives them the thrill; they are drunk on strong emotions. Those guys will be simply spending their money on bling and lawyers, not on investing or on buying good houses.
A uniform penalty of death for all crimes would reduce recidivism to zero quite reliably too. Like racial profiling it is unacceptable to civilized people
If you don't kill a murderer, he will be one day free and with some probability will kill someone else. Unless that probability is 0, you will be killing an innocent person by not killing the murderer.
Also consider that the social value of a murderer is often lower than the social value of a victim. There are exceptions, of course, like Hans Reiser or many gangbangers who die from the hand of other gangbangers. What would happen to us if Albert Einstein was mugged and killed in his youth by some two-bit idiot?
The civilized society would do well only if it ensures that no recidivism is ever possible. Earlier societies used exile. Today long prison terms are arbitrarily reduced by orders of administrators and thousands of angry and hopeless criminals are released. This results in more murders. I will agree with your desire to never kill criminals only if you can absolutely, provably guarantee that I will never see any of them, lust like when it happens when they are 6' under.
I'd suggest they redo the insurance so that both Wal-mart *and* the decedent's survivors get money.
Sounds like a good idea, as long as the employee contributes money to pay for that policy. If not, the private contract between the employer and a 3rd party has nothing to do with the employee.
There is another issue. If the employee doesn't contribute but gets benefits then there are some tax issues - the employer can't just buy something for you, it has to be accounted as your income - as far as I understand. The IRS doesn't just want to tax the benefits when/if they are paid, it wants to tax the money with which they are purchased.
The problem with cheap drugs is that they take away free will (and sanity).
I'm not following you here. Cheap drugs promote free will because it's the only thing that stands between you taking drugs or staying away from them.
Sanity has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with the head on the shoulders. If you are sane enough to not use drugs - or seek treatment if you did - then you are OK. If, on the other hand, you are not in control of yourself - well, the Universe doesn't need weaklings. You will die; hopefully, alone.
Wait until you've seen "Controlling a crane with heroin"
We already have such a problem with alcohol. How would that be any different? Do you have any facts to show that today's drug users refrain from driving?
Just go to your library, it's bound to have a few books on the subject
If you go back into 1930's you will find that the police then didn't worry too much about drunk drivers either. They do now.
If the concern about drug users in control of heavy machinery is so high, just shoot the offenders. The society needs to defend itself, and it has to use the response that is adequate to the threat. You can't stop the armies of Genghis Khan with a court order.
That's the chicken's side of the problem, and IETF just suddenly realized that the egg is also somehow involved. ISPs can't deploy IPv6 because:
There are too few managed (or otherwise) routers that they can use to provide dual stack services.
There is no understanding who does what. For example, who provides DNS for my toaster? I'm not going to enter the IPv6 address each time I want to ping it.
Who is doing the IPv6 autoconfiguration?
Finally, how the customer is going to transition?
In my dreams I envisioned a box that could have been sold years ago; the box is IPv4 and IPv6 capable, can do IPv6 NAT, can do IPv6 firewall, can do tunnelling if there is no WAN IPv6. Such a transitional box could be deployed right now, and it would work in all networks, and if one day the ISP enables IPv6 the box would simply switch from a tunnel to a proper link.
I believe such box is required, and I posted here several times stating that. IETF just now started thinking about it; that is fairly late, don't you think? I can live with a VMware appliance, just give me that image and I will embrace IPv6. My LAN is already IPv6, since my last XP boxes are ready for the landfill. My server is already IPv6, and that's how I like it. But I have no Internet connection via IPv6. I was looking at pfSense and other things, they look good, but honestly I don't have time to mess with them - I have my own work to do.
unless I'm unlucky it would tend to be a "glancing" blow
If you are already at the roundabout and "the idiot", approaching the roundabout, fails to realize that (expecting a straight road ahead) you will be seriously hit.
It is a standard operating procedure in the US media to label undesirable leaders as "insane", "strongmen", "dictators" etc. This dehumanizes them. I don't see why normal people should lap it up. We don't know if Koresh was or wasn't sane, though many would say that his religious beliefs indicate insanity. But then most humans on this planet are insane to some extent.
Regardless, the government isn't supposed to kill insane people; it may kill people who are dangerous to others, but only when such a danger is obvious and imminent. The government can't send a tank squad to a local rifle range and exterminate target shooters there just because in theory they could be dangerous to someone, somewhere.
If you open fire on people serving a search warrant, what the fuck do you expect's going to happen?
Wikipedia has this to say about that search warrant: "On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) raided Mount Carmel. The raid resulted in the deaths of four agents and six Davidians [...] Koresh was seriously injured by a gunshot wound"
Even if we ignore that Wikipedia says "raid" and you say "search warrant", I still don't see that the government should kill, in retaliation, scores of people who had nothing to do with the original firefight. But BATF came ready for a war, and they made war, and they got plenty of dead bodies to show for it.
A reasonable person would say that yes, maybe David Koresh is not quite sane; his religious rambling (see Wikipedia) was quite unusual. But the decision to wage a full scale war on a surrounded and isolated group of people was somewhere between stupid and criminal - that is obvious from the aftermath. Want to hear a better plan? Add tranquilizers into the food that you send to the group; after a week they will be sleepy and docile. If you really don't want to take chances, infect them with a contagious, treatable but serious disease; they'd never know what hit them. If they live on stored food and water, wait until they run out of it - it's they who are surrounded; the FBI could wait for years. But the FBI waited only 51 day, and then got bored.
Also from Wikipedia: "Waco: The Rules of Engagement claims that FBI sharpshooters fired on, and killed, many Branch Davidians who attempted to flee the flames. While the few Branch Davidians who did successfully flee the fire supported this claim
If that is true, what justification could possibly be devised for shooting people who run away from fire? This would be a war crime even in a real war.
The government will just ignore it and let you carry on with your insane paranoid commune?
Maintaining a paranoid commune is not a crime. The sect was accused of a very specific list of real crimes, and most likely they did them (I haven't read the trial reports.) Those crimes had to be stopped. However "killing them to save them" didn't work for Lt. Calley and it shouldn't work for anyone else in a similar situation. A civilian police force should consider well-being of noncombatants far above the need to arrest the criminals. But in this case FBI et al. acted as Schutzstaffel, killing tens of innocent people for actions of a few.
Does the average American even care about space science?
The average American doesn't care about Slashdot, and he most certainly doesn't know or care about a certain AC. This doesn't mean that/. or that AC are worthless. It only means that the average American is not omniscient; he is not even smarter than the average:-)
I haven't built this scope because I don't need it (I have two usable scopes already.) However I already did some quick research for my previous comment, and if there is interest I can contribute to the design.
Open source hardware doesn't mean "you do it, we use it" - it means "let's build it together." I can do all aspects of this design, but what I'm lacking is time. There are just too many interesting projects that compete for my attention...
A good digital scope costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars
Sometimes you can get lucky and grab one for free or nearly free. I got a Tektronix 2440 this way. It wasn't completely working, mind you, but it's something one can fix... if not then probably you don't need the scope anyway:-) There is a lot of old, well used and maybe a bit broken equipment around that nobody in a business wants. You just need to make contacts, look around, visit your neighborhood Weird Stuff - and dive into a dumpster sometimes.
But there is something else you can do. Build your own high speed oscilloscope. Today it's not that difficult. Take AD9601, for example - it's a 300 MSPS A/D with dual (interleaved) parallel bus. You need also an FPGA to capture the data - some Spartan probably will do. Then you need a simple USB MCU to fetch the data from the FPGA and slowly ship it into the PC. Total three ICs, not counting the analog front end which is not a rocket science anymore. You can generate the sample clock with a DCM in the FPGA. Build such a thing and it will be a great exercise. Such a scope will be not a toy, it will be a very useful, small device. Logic Shrimp is a logic analyzer, but this is a real scope - in all its 10-bit glory. You actually can measure analog signals with it. You can use even a lower resolution A/D, like AD9484. (Bits are necessary when you are doing DSP, not when you are just looking at things.)
A good digital scope costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars
Sometimes you can get lucky and grab one for free or nearly free. I got a Tektronix 2440 this way. It wasn't completely working, mind you, but it's something one can fix... if not then probably you don't need the scope anyway:-) There is a lot of old, well used and maybe a bit broken equipment around that nobody in a business wants. You just need to make contacts, look around, visit your neighborhood Weird Stuff.
But there is something else you can do. Build your own high speed oscilloscope. Today it's not that difficult. Take AD9601, for example - it's a 300 MSPS A/D with dual (interleaved) parallel bus. You need also an FPGA to capture the data - some Spartan probably will do. Then you need a simple USB MCU to fetch the data from the FPGA and slowly ship it into the PC. Total three ICs, not counting the analog front end which is not a rocket science. You can generate the sample clock with a DCM in the FPGA. Build such a thing and it will be a great exercise. Such a scope will be not a toy, it will be a very useful, small device. Logic Shrimp is a logic analyzer, but this is a real scope - in all its 10-bit glory. You actually can measure analog signals with it. You can use even a lower resolution A/D, like AD9484. (Bits are necessary when you are doing DSP, not when you are just looking at things.)
What did we do after Kent State here in the US? [...] we changed
Wishful thinking at best. The students were protecting another war being started, this time in Cambodia. How many wars of choice the USA is currently in? Count Libya too.
What changed is simply the policy. Draft was politically unacceptable. However if you hire mercenaries and send them to fight your wars then the society will be enjoying explosions all over "enemy" cities. That's the only change that is obvious. Citizens of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya may not see it as a sufficient change, especially if they are dead, killed by US bombs. Or perhaps you expect the politicians to suddenly repent? Clinton killed 74 people at Waco in 1993; that's the strangest kind of mourning and changing that I have ever heard of.
And here we are on Slashdot on a Saturday holiday weekend night.
But look at the bright side. Other folks have to deal with their relatives, drunken friends, taking stupid, ugly girls to see movies that any normal man would hate, drinking reused "beer", and eating stuff that kills.
Faithful geeks, on the other hand, don't have to go anywhere; if their friends are drunk it's a problem only in `svn diff`; their girls are the most beautiful and the least demanding (being downloadable.) Food, however, is a problem - neither them nor us eat at most exquisite French restaurants.
But the question in the end of each day is simple: what have you done today to make this world better? If you say that you ate a bunch of hotdogs, no brownie points for that. But if you wrote 10 lines of code that someone, somewhere needs, it's a good thing. At least that's what workaholics say:-)
The sub-$500 PC-based logic analyzers like the Logic Sniffer and Saelae Logic still come in handy for low speed buses like I2C and SPI
In my experience it is essential to see the analog side of the signal, especially on the I2C (which is passively pulled up.) A lot of degradation can occur there, and a cheap logic analyzer will show garbage, if anything. You simply need to synchronize your scope well; sometimes you need to output something on a pin. A reasonably good digital scope will capture all you need to know, at any delay from the trigger and at any speed once the instrument triggers. Often you can see the trouble after one run.
With regard to profiling, I personally use one GPIO pin for that. On an AVR it takes one simple machine instruction to set it or clear it. Connect an oscilloscope to it and observe your timings. If you have two pins you have everything that is necessary to measure all the timings in the design (one by one.)
I don't know how you could use the abysmally slow I2C, or somewhat faster but still glacial SPI for profiling. That would require a fast-running timer (like on AVR32) and a cache of profiling data in RAM; but if you have that then SPI is just another debugging channel, not any better than a spare 3.3V UART that you connected to a 3-pin header.
One of good things about those busses (I2C and SPI) is that they are under your control. You know what is sent because you sent it. You know what was received because the hardware received it (and you will do well if you connect a debugging facility to that, if you need to.) A logic analyzer on such a bus is needed primarily when you are not sure what's happening. Again the roots of the thing go back into the world of one foot by one foot PCBs with SN74 DIP logic on them. Then you had to monitor tons of signals because you didn't know what is wrong. But if a 2-wire bus toggles, chances are your master is OK. If you see ACKs then you know that your slave is also OK. If you have issues with the nature of the data, it's datasheet time.
Still, as you say there are uses for everything. It's just I haven't seen much use of logic analyzers recently:-) You can't even connect them to modern busses like DDRx (and that's one tough bus to get timings right.) If you could they'd cost $50K, like PCIe bus analyzers, and you still need to instrument your board with MICTOR or like connectors that don't ruin your design right away.
Logic analyzers are collecting dust now, for many reasons. Originally they were envisioned to capture the complete state of a complex logical circuit, and perhaps they were useful at that time. But that time was about 20 years ago.
Today all the hardware that logic analyzers attempted to debug is located on the MCU die. You don't have access to it, and generally you don't have to - the manufacturer of the MCU did that already, and the peripheral is likely to work (modulo the errata.)
If you are building a full size clone of IBM/370 then you can benefit from the device. But if you are doing it in an FPGA then Xilinx already has a logic analyzer there, called ChipScope. It's an IP core, so you can remove it when you are done debugging.
What you really need today is a half-decent digital scope, with at least 1 GS/s (better 4.) You don't need lots of channels - one is enough, two is plenty. If you need four you probably don't know what you are doing. Note: the trigger channel is also a channel, it's there for a purpose.
You can debug nearly all the amateur level hardware with just a scope. More test equipment is needed if you are into RF. The problem, as you point out, is that cheap equipment is often a waste of time and money. If you have to, go out and rent a decent instrument, it's not that expensive on a daily basis. You don't want to fight the test equipment that is too slow for your signals - you won't see a thing anyway, and the joy of owning a piece of junk is not worth contemplating:-)
"to the extent which we think it necessary for the Service."
Note carefully, they don't say "necessary for providing the Service". Why is that? Is it because the money they attempt to get from selling your stuff is needed to motivate them to keep the servers running?
I never had an account with them, and obviously I'm not going to ever get one. As matter of fact, I have my own instance of Open-Xchange on the Net, and I can store my own InfoItems from wherever I want to.
Didn't TFA mention something about wings? Don't *they* have a cooling effect?
A thing that burns megajoules can't have a cooling effect overall. It will have heating effect, to the exact amount of energy expended.
All the fuel that an airplane uses up during the flight heats the atmosphere, unless there is a difference in elevation between the origin and the destination airports.
My voice to your ear is comparable to my wireless to your wifi receiver.
That would be true only if a standard notebook with a standard WiFi card comes with a packet sniffer that runs by default, dumps all the packets into a popup window, and is hard to stop. That's how our ears work.
If I want to listen to your in-house conversations I need an extension of my hearing abilities. If I want to listen to your in-house network I need an extension of my WiFi receiving abilities. In both cases the necessary extensions are commonly available and known to specialists. The analogy stands.
The walls and windows of the house are a protection scheme.
First of all, this is not a DMCA problem. But most importantly the radio waves are attenuated by walls and by the distance in a similar way to the audio signals. Spies can pick up the audio hundreds of meters away - farther than a Google's WiFi card can pick up transmissions from your router.
If walls are good enough as a symbolic privacy shield for your speech, they should be good enough for the radio as well.
There are plenty of comments in the thread that mention devices other than storage. The ATA command set is designed primarily for storage. It is probably "complete enough" to connect a custom video chipset through it, but you need to rewrite all the drivers. Thunderbolt will allow you to just plug the card, or two, or three as you need them. You can build a pretty impressive video machine with that if you want to. Apple always went for extra features - they need to justify the price, after all.
So don't focus on storage - there are indeed lots of solutions for storage already, the NAS being the cheapest and probably sufficient for majority of the users. Think of *what else* you can do with a notebook if suddenly you can insert additional PCIe cards into it, and the bus bandwidth is not a concern. You think connecting several powerful GPUs to your notebook is not important? That gives you plenty of performance. If you are a videographer you can run a lot of filters on full resolution, uncompressed video this way, or do whatever else you need. If you are a business you can now develop and sell external PCIe devices that connect to the host via the Thunderbolt interface.
Therefore, using non-broadcast networks compromises the privacy of the wireless network configuration of a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003-based wireless client because it is periodically disclosing its set of preferred non-broadcast wireless networks.
If one person is going to map receiving the signals as equivalent to entering
Don't know about that. However imagine that there is a car in front of your house, on a public road. The car's occupants point microphones at your house, where you and your wife have very private conversations. The car is parked there for hours, if not days. What would be your action? Will you do nothing, or perhaps you will call 911? Note that you "broadcast" audio waves as you speak, and those waves easily penetrate walls of typical US houses, them being cheap plywood and drywall.
The question is, is unencrypted data a "private conversation"? I think the answer is a clear "no"
It is a clear "no" as long as you don't object to me listening to your conversations within your own home using this here high gain microphones and laser pickups of vibration of glass in your windows.
However if you don't like my plan then the answer to the original question must be a clear "yes."
So by the judge's reasoning, ISPs can be sued if they use packet sniffing to detect usage for throttling or shaping?
It's more of a legal territory. However ISP should be allowed to look into packets as long as that is necessary for fulfilling their part of the contract. USPS is also allowed to look at the address of my mail to find out where to send it to. FedEx will ask me what is in the envelope that I address to a foreign destination because of customs. All these actions are needed.
However Google is a 3rd party; its existence and involvement doesn't benefit any of the parties in the wireless conversation. Google would love to set up camp at a USPS facility and scan all mail - and we'd rightfully give them a ride out of town, on a rail.
Phone lines aren't public. They're owned by the ISP. So using alligator clips on phone wires would constitute both b&e as well as destruction of property.
If you are a ham you should know that a simple magnetic loop will pick up enough signal to decode conversations without physically connecting to the bundle. The phone sends something like 0 dBm on the wire into 600 Ohm, that's plenty of current. Does it make it legal to wiretap?
Cell phones broadcast unidirectionally on account of their antennae design.
You are in danger of losing your geek card (if not the FCC license.) Cell phones' antennas are omnidirectional in the horizontal plane.
You can receive cell phone signals with a $100 scanner from radio shack.
The CDMA signal is DSSS, well below the noise floor of the receiver, You need to synchronize to the PRN code to pull it out. No $100 scanner from Radio Shack can do that.
There's nothing illegal about receiving public broadcasts, otherwise I would be be jail for all those years of participating in ham radio.
Try to manufacture and sell receivers for now extinct AMPS and you may yet find yourself locked up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be great if we all were rich
It would only remove some property crimes. Thieves instead of breaking into your house would be relaxing at best resorts of the world.
However the most serious, most violent crime is not directly related to the wealth. If you take 100 gangbangers and give them $1M each they will be still roaming streets. This is because that's what they like to do. Beating people gives them the thrill; they are drunk on strong emotions. Those guys will be simply spending their money on bling and lawyers, not on investing or on buying good houses.
A uniform penalty of death for all crimes would reduce recidivism to zero quite reliably too. Like racial profiling it is unacceptable to civilized people
If you don't kill a murderer, he will be one day free and with some probability will kill someone else. Unless that probability is 0, you will be killing an innocent person by not killing the murderer.
Also consider that the social value of a murderer is often lower than the social value of a victim. There are exceptions, of course, like Hans Reiser or many gangbangers who die from the hand of other gangbangers. What would happen to us if Albert Einstein was mugged and killed in his youth by some two-bit idiot?
The civilized society would do well only if it ensures that no recidivism is ever possible. Earlier societies used exile. Today long prison terms are arbitrarily reduced by orders of administrators and thousands of angry and hopeless criminals are released. This results in more murders. I will agree with your desire to never kill criminals only if you can absolutely, provably guarantee that I will never see any of them, lust like when it happens when they are 6' under.
I'd suggest they redo the insurance so that both Wal-mart *and* the decedent's survivors get money.
Sounds like a good idea, as long as the employee contributes money to pay for that policy. If not, the private contract between the employer and a 3rd party has nothing to do with the employee.
There is another issue. If the employee doesn't contribute but gets benefits then there are some tax issues - the employer can't just buy something for you, it has to be accounted as your income - as far as I understand. The IRS doesn't just want to tax the benefits when/if they are paid, it wants to tax the money with which they are purchased.
The problem with cheap drugs is that they take away free will (and sanity).
I'm not following you here. Cheap drugs promote free will because it's the only thing that stands between you taking drugs or staying away from them.
Sanity has nothing to do with drugs and everything to do with the head on the shoulders. If you are sane enough to not use drugs - or seek treatment if you did - then you are OK. If, on the other hand, you are not in control of yourself - well, the Universe doesn't need weaklings. You will die; hopefully, alone.
Wait until you've seen "Controlling a crane with heroin"
We already have such a problem with alcohol. How would that be any different? Do you have any facts to show that today's drug users refrain from driving?
Just go to your library, it's bound to have a few books on the subject
If you go back into 1930's you will find that the police then didn't worry too much about drunk drivers either. They do now.
If the concern about drug users in control of heavy machinery is so high, just shoot the offenders. The society needs to defend itself, and it has to use the response that is adequate to the threat. You can't stop the armies of Genghis Khan with a court order.
Get the ISPs to provide IPv6 to their customers.
That's the chicken's side of the problem, and IETF just suddenly realized that the egg is also somehow involved. ISPs can't deploy IPv6 because:
In my dreams I envisioned a box that could have been sold years ago; the box is IPv4 and IPv6 capable, can do IPv6 NAT, can do IPv6 firewall, can do tunnelling if there is no WAN IPv6. Such a transitional box could be deployed right now, and it would work in all networks, and if one day the ISP enables IPv6 the box would simply switch from a tunnel to a proper link.
I believe such box is required, and I posted here several times stating that. IETF just now started thinking about it; that is fairly late, don't you think? I can live with a VMware appliance, just give me that image and I will embrace IPv6. My LAN is already IPv6, since my last XP boxes are ready for the landfill. My server is already IPv6, and that's how I like it. But I have no Internet connection via IPv6. I was looking at pfSense and other things, they look good, but honestly I don't have time to mess with them - I have my own work to do.
unless I'm unlucky it would tend to be a "glancing" blow
If you are already at the roundabout and "the idiot", approaching the roundabout, fails to realize that (expecting a straight road ahead) you will be seriously hit.
Yup, nothing to do wih the nutjob David Koresh.
It is a standard operating procedure in the US media to label undesirable leaders as "insane", "strongmen", "dictators" etc. This dehumanizes them. I don't see why normal people should lap it up. We don't know if Koresh was or wasn't sane, though many would say that his religious beliefs indicate insanity. But then most humans on this planet are insane to some extent.
Regardless, the government isn't supposed to kill insane people; it may kill people who are dangerous to others, but only when such a danger is obvious and imminent. The government can't send a tank squad to a local rifle range and exterminate target shooters there just because in theory they could be dangerous to someone, somewhere.
If you open fire on people serving a search warrant, what the fuck do you expect's going to happen?
Wikipedia has this to say about that search warrant: "On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) raided Mount Carmel. The raid resulted in the deaths of four agents and six Davidians [...] Koresh was seriously injured by a gunshot wound"
Even if we ignore that Wikipedia says "raid" and you say "search warrant", I still don't see that the government should kill, in retaliation, scores of people who had nothing to do with the original firefight. But BATF came ready for a war, and they made war, and they got plenty of dead bodies to show for it.
A reasonable person would say that yes, maybe David Koresh is not quite sane; his religious rambling (see Wikipedia) was quite unusual. But the decision to wage a full scale war on a surrounded and isolated group of people was somewhere between stupid and criminal - that is obvious from the aftermath. Want to hear a better plan? Add tranquilizers into the food that you send to the group; after a week they will be sleepy and docile. If you really don't want to take chances, infect them with a contagious, treatable but serious disease; they'd never know what hit them. If they live on stored food and water, wait until they run out of it - it's they who are surrounded; the FBI could wait for years. But the FBI waited only 51 day, and then got bored.
Also from Wikipedia: "Waco: The Rules of Engagement claims that FBI sharpshooters fired on, and killed, many Branch Davidians who attempted to flee the flames. While the few Branch Davidians who did successfully flee the fire supported this claim
If that is true, what justification could possibly be devised for shooting people who run away from fire? This would be a war crime even in a real war.
The government will just ignore it and let you carry on with your insane paranoid commune?
Maintaining a paranoid commune is not a crime. The sect was accused of a very specific list of real crimes, and most likely they did them (I haven't read the trial reports.) Those crimes had to be stopped. However "killing them to save them" didn't work for Lt. Calley and it shouldn't work for anyone else in a similar situation. A civilian police force should consider well-being of noncombatants far above the need to arrest the criminals. But in this case FBI et al. acted as Schutzstaffel, killing tens of innocent people for actions of a few.
Does the average American even care about space science?
The average American doesn't care about Slashdot, and he most certainly doesn't know or care about a certain AC. This doesn't mean that /. or that AC are worthless. It only means that the average American is not omniscient; he is not even smarter than the average :-)
Show us the one you built
I haven't built this scope because I don't need it (I have two usable scopes already.) However I already did some quick research for my previous comment, and if there is interest I can contribute to the design.
Open source hardware doesn't mean "you do it, we use it" - it means "let's build it together." I can do all aspects of this design, but what I'm lacking is time. There are just too many interesting projects that compete for my attention...
A good digital scope costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars
Sometimes you can get lucky and grab one for free or nearly free. I got a Tektronix 2440 this way. It wasn't completely working, mind you, but it's something one can fix... if not then probably you don't need the scope anyway :-) There is a lot of old, well used and maybe a bit broken equipment around that nobody in a business wants. You just need to make contacts, look around, visit your neighborhood Weird Stuff - and dive into a dumpster sometimes.
But there is something else you can do. Build your own high speed oscilloscope. Today it's not that difficult. Take AD9601, for example - it's a 300 MSPS A/D with dual (interleaved) parallel bus. You need also an FPGA to capture the data - some Spartan probably will do. Then you need a simple USB MCU to fetch the data from the FPGA and slowly ship it into the PC. Total three ICs, not counting the analog front end which is not a rocket science anymore. You can generate the sample clock with a DCM in the FPGA. Build such a thing and it will be a great exercise. Such a scope will be not a toy, it will be a very useful, small device. Logic Shrimp is a logic analyzer, but this is a real scope - in all its 10-bit glory. You actually can measure analog signals with it. You can use even a lower resolution A/D, like AD9484. (Bits are necessary when you are doing DSP, not when you are just looking at things.)
A good digital scope costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars
Sometimes you can get lucky and grab one for free or nearly free. I got a Tektronix 2440 this way. It wasn't completely working, mind you, but it's something one can fix... if not then probably you don't need the scope anyway :-) There is a lot of old, well used and maybe a bit broken equipment around that nobody in a business wants. You just need to make contacts, look around, visit your neighborhood Weird Stuff.
But there is something else you can do. Build your own high speed oscilloscope. Today it's not that difficult. Take AD9601, for example - it's a 300 MSPS A/D with dual (interleaved) parallel bus. You need also an FPGA to capture the data - some Spartan probably will do. Then you need a simple USB MCU to fetch the data from the FPGA and slowly ship it into the PC. Total three ICs, not counting the analog front end which is not a rocket science. You can generate the sample clock with a DCM in the FPGA. Build such a thing and it will be a great exercise. Such a scope will be not a toy, it will be a very useful, small device. Logic Shrimp is a logic analyzer, but this is a real scope - in all its 10-bit glory. You actually can measure analog signals with it. You can use even a lower resolution A/D, like AD9484. (Bits are necessary when you are doing DSP, not when you are just looking at things.)
This gold master, does it by any chance have anything to do with Bullfish Interactive or their CEO Phraud Hogslop?
What did we do after Kent State here in the US? [...] we changed
Wishful thinking at best. The students were protecting another war being started, this time in Cambodia. How many wars of choice the USA is currently in? Count Libya too.
What changed is simply the policy. Draft was politically unacceptable. However if you hire mercenaries and send them to fight your wars then the society will be enjoying explosions all over "enemy" cities. That's the only change that is obvious. Citizens of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya may not see it as a sufficient change, especially if they are dead, killed by US bombs. Or perhaps you expect the politicians to suddenly repent? Clinton killed 74 people at Waco in 1993; that's the strangest kind of mourning and changing that I have ever heard of.
And here we are on Slashdot on a Saturday holiday weekend night.
But look at the bright side. Other folks have to deal with their relatives, drunken friends, taking stupid, ugly girls to see movies that any normal man would hate, drinking reused "beer", and eating stuff that kills.
Faithful geeks, on the other hand, don't have to go anywhere; if their friends are drunk it's a problem only in `svn diff`; their girls are the most beautiful and the least demanding (being downloadable.) Food, however, is a problem - neither them nor us eat at most exquisite French restaurants.
But the question in the end of each day is simple: what have you done today to make this world better? If you say that you ate a bunch of hotdogs, no brownie points for that. But if you wrote 10 lines of code that someone, somewhere needs, it's a good thing. At least that's what workaholics say :-)
The sub-$500 PC-based logic analyzers like the Logic Sniffer and Saelae Logic still come in handy for low speed buses like I2C and SPI
In my experience it is essential to see the analog side of the signal, especially on the I2C (which is passively pulled up.) A lot of degradation can occur there, and a cheap logic analyzer will show garbage, if anything. You simply need to synchronize your scope well; sometimes you need to output something on a pin. A reasonably good digital scope will capture all you need to know, at any delay from the trigger and at any speed once the instrument triggers. Often you can see the trouble after one run.
With regard to profiling, I personally use one GPIO pin for that. On an AVR it takes one simple machine instruction to set it or clear it. Connect an oscilloscope to it and observe your timings. If you have two pins you have everything that is necessary to measure all the timings in the design (one by one.)
I don't know how you could use the abysmally slow I2C, or somewhat faster but still glacial SPI for profiling. That would require a fast-running timer (like on AVR32) and a cache of profiling data in RAM; but if you have that then SPI is just another debugging channel, not any better than a spare 3.3V UART that you connected to a 3-pin header.
One of good things about those busses (I2C and SPI) is that they are under your control. You know what is sent because you sent it. You know what was received because the hardware received it (and you will do well if you connect a debugging facility to that, if you need to.) A logic analyzer on such a bus is needed primarily when you are not sure what's happening. Again the roots of the thing go back into the world of one foot by one foot PCBs with SN74 DIP logic on them. Then you had to monitor tons of signals because you didn't know what is wrong. But if a 2-wire bus toggles, chances are your master is OK. If you see ACKs then you know that your slave is also OK. If you have issues with the nature of the data, it's datasheet time.
Still, as you say there are uses for everything. It's just I haven't seen much use of logic analyzers recently :-) You can't even connect them to modern busses like DDRx (and that's one tough bus to get timings right.) If you could they'd cost $50K, like PCIe bus analyzers, and you still need to instrument your board with MICTOR or like connectors that don't ruin your design right away.
Logic analyzers are collecting dust now, for many reasons. Originally they were envisioned to capture the complete state of a complex logical circuit, and perhaps they were useful at that time. But that time was about 20 years ago.
Today all the hardware that logic analyzers attempted to debug is located on the MCU die. You don't have access to it, and generally you don't have to - the manufacturer of the MCU did that already, and the peripheral is likely to work (modulo the errata.)
If you are building a full size clone of IBM/370 then you can benefit from the device. But if you are doing it in an FPGA then Xilinx already has a logic analyzer there, called ChipScope. It's an IP core, so you can remove it when you are done debugging.
What you really need today is a half-decent digital scope, with at least 1 GS/s (better 4.) You don't need lots of channels - one is enough, two is plenty. If you need four you probably don't know what you are doing. Note: the trigger channel is also a channel, it's there for a purpose.
You can debug nearly all the amateur level hardware with just a scope. More test equipment is needed if you are into RF. The problem, as you point out, is that cheap equipment is often a waste of time and money. If you have to, go out and rent a decent instrument, it's not that expensive on a daily basis. You don't want to fight the test equipment that is too slow for your signals - you won't see a thing anyway, and the joy of owning a piece of junk is not worth contemplating :-)
"to the extent which we think it necessary for the Service."
Note carefully, they don't say "necessary for providing the Service". Why is that? Is it because the money they attempt to get from selling your stuff is needed to motivate them to keep the servers running?
I never had an account with them, and obviously I'm not going to ever get one. As matter of fact, I have my own instance of Open-Xchange on the Net, and I can store my own InfoItems from wherever I want to.
Didn't TFA mention something about wings? Don't *they* have a cooling effect?
A thing that burns megajoules can't have a cooling effect overall. It will have heating effect, to the exact amount of energy expended.
All the fuel that an airplane uses up during the flight heats the atmosphere, unless there is a difference in elevation between the origin and the destination airports.
My voice to your ear is comparable to my wireless to your wifi receiver.
That would be true only if a standard notebook with a standard WiFi card comes with a packet sniffer that runs by default, dumps all the packets into a popup window, and is hard to stop. That's how our ears work.
If I want to listen to your in-house conversations I need an extension of my hearing abilities. If I want to listen to your in-house network I need an extension of my WiFi receiving abilities. In both cases the necessary extensions are commonly available and known to specialists. The analogy stands.
The walls and windows of the house are a protection scheme.
First of all, this is not a DMCA problem. But most importantly the radio waves are attenuated by walls and by the distance in a similar way to the audio signals. Spies can pick up the audio hundreds of meters away - farther than a Google's WiFi card can pick up transmissions from your router.
If walls are good enough as a symbolic privacy shield for your speech, they should be good enough for the radio as well.
There are plenty of comments in the thread that mention devices other than storage. The ATA command set is designed primarily for storage. It is probably "complete enough" to connect a custom video chipset through it, but you need to rewrite all the drivers. Thunderbolt will allow you to just plug the card, or two, or three as you need them. You can build a pretty impressive video machine with that if you want to. Apple always went for extra features - they need to justify the price, after all.
So don't focus on storage - there are indeed lots of solutions for storage already, the NAS being the cheapest and probably sufficient for majority of the users. Think of *what else* you can do with a notebook if suddenly you can insert additional PCIe cards into it, and the bus bandwidth is not a concern. You think connecting several powerful GPUs to your notebook is not important? That gives you plenty of performance. If you are a videographer you can run a lot of filters on full resolution, uncompressed video this way, or do whatever else you need. If you are a business you can now develop and sell external PCIe devices that connect to the host via the Thunderbolt interface.
I am never going to trust your party invitations again.
This is Slashdot, what is that "party invitation" thing that you are talking about? :-)
it's no less crazy to map broadcast of the signals as equivalent to sending out invitations.
Hiding SSID is not a solution:
Therefore, using non-broadcast networks compromises the privacy of the wireless network configuration of a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003-based wireless client because it is periodically disclosing its set of preferred non-broadcast wireless networks.
If one person is going to map receiving the signals as equivalent to entering
Don't know about that. However imagine that there is a car in front of your house, on a public road. The car's occupants point microphones at your house, where you and your wife have very private conversations. The car is parked there for hours, if not days. What would be your action? Will you do nothing, or perhaps you will call 911? Note that you "broadcast" audio waves as you speak, and those waves easily penetrate walls of typical US houses, them being cheap plywood and drywall.
The question is, is unencrypted data a "private conversation"? I think the answer is a clear "no"
It is a clear "no" as long as you don't object to me listening to your conversations within your own home using this here high gain microphones and laser pickups of vibration of glass in your windows.
However if you don't like my plan then the answer to the original question must be a clear "yes."
So by the judge's reasoning, ISPs can be sued if they use packet sniffing to detect usage for throttling or shaping?
It's more of a legal territory. However ISP should be allowed to look into packets as long as that is necessary for fulfilling their part of the contract. USPS is also allowed to look at the address of my mail to find out where to send it to. FedEx will ask me what is in the envelope that I address to a foreign destination because of customs. All these actions are needed.
However Google is a 3rd party; its existence and involvement doesn't benefit any of the parties in the wireless conversation. Google would love to set up camp at a USPS facility and scan all mail - and we'd rightfully give them a ride out of town, on a rail.
Phone lines aren't public. They're owned by the ISP. So using alligator clips on phone wires would constitute both b&e as well as destruction of property.
If you are a ham you should know that a simple magnetic loop will pick up enough signal to decode conversations without physically connecting to the bundle. The phone sends something like 0 dBm on the wire into 600 Ohm, that's plenty of current. Does it make it legal to wiretap?
Cell phones broadcast unidirectionally on account of their antennae design.
You are in danger of losing your geek card (if not the FCC license.) Cell phones' antennas are omnidirectional in the horizontal plane.
You can receive cell phone signals with a $100 scanner from radio shack.
The CDMA signal is DSSS, well below the noise floor of the receiver, You need to synchronize to the PRN code to pull it out. No $100 scanner from Radio Shack can do that.
There's nothing illegal about receiving public broadcasts, otherwise I would be be jail for all those years of participating in ham radio.
Try to manufacture and sell receivers for now extinct AMPS and you may yet find yourself locked up.