While it is true that the connection is "one way", many large carriers do it with a conventional high-cap circuit, like a T-1 or DS-3, because it is easy.
It may appear to be unfiltered to the person making the connection. However, if it is anything like the T1 I hooked up where I worked, only the calls with active warrants are passed down the T1. That being said, the T1 hooks directly into the switch just like any other T1, and is configured to be a CALEA port in the switch itself. A wire-frame guy who isn't doing the programming/translations wouldn't know any better, so I think that's where this "idea" comes from.
NEWS FLASH: EVERY wireline and wireless carrier has facility like this between their central offices and Quantico, Virginia. I can tell you for an absolute fact that a medium-sized cable company operating in the Rocky Mountain region has similar facilities between their main office and the FBI Academy, because I helped install it.
So is jaywalking, however in the grand scheme of things is a minor offense that people engage in every day that rarely results in any legal repercussions.
WiFi is relative proof that you can go relatively unregulated in spectrum bandwidth and have things work just fine. Yes, yes, some people in the middle of Manhattan complain about WiFi performance, but my experience at my old office in downtown Chicago showed that things worked just fine -- all the time.
Actually, WiFi is a case-in-point of why the existing regulatory scheme is broken, and how completely "unregulated bandwidth" would be a disaster for our communications infrastructure.
Case study: Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, a public square commonly referred to as "Portland's living room," smack dab in the middle of Portland's busy, and dense, downtown. There are no fewer than six "free" hotspots all trying to provide service, and countless WEP/WPA-encrypted ones from neighboring offices, plus the "city WiFi" from MetroFi. Add to this mess a large quantity of Bluetooth noise from a Verizon Wireless store that has all the Bluetooth crap turned on every freaking phone, a 2.4GHz wireless microphone system used by the City for performances in the square, and you've got a nice average noise floor somewhere around -55dBm.
None of the WiFi works more than 25 feet from the access points. The wireless microphone system often breaks. If you're trying to use your Bluetooth headset on your phone, you have to be within a foot for it to work.
So, what happens? One of the offices goes and buys an amplifier and a 15 dB antenna from Fry's to see if they can get their WiFi to work in their office. This increases the noise floor and now makes it so that anybody on Channel 1 who's near that office gets elbowed out of the way by the sloppy amplifier.
"Unregulated airwaves" are theoretically a great idea, but fail in actual practice because the people making the decisions are not technologically literate.
If, on the other hand, all the devices in the 2.4GHz band were using a cooperative radio system, where everybody talked to everybody else and determined frequencies and power levels based upon some kind of algorithm, there's no reason why it couldn't work. Add to that some liberal frequency expansion, and you could be on to something.
However, just "deregulating" the whole thing without putting technological limitations on the system is a disaster waiting to happen. Deregulated radio works great in theory, until T-Mobile decides to deliberately interfere with the free hotspot because it's "competition" for their paid service.. or Starbucks decides to deliberately interfere with Seattle's Best Coffee's hotspot for the same reason.
.. except there is mountains of case law that says otherwise: that EULAs are, in essence, only marginally enforceable.
This being in some hidden Facebook EULA, or on some 'policy page' for Blockbuster does not mean "the user notifies us in writing". That has specific legal meaning: if they don't have a SIGNED PIECE OF PAPER with the words "I allow you do release my video rental records", they don't have notification in writing of permission.
All this is irrelevant, anyway: the worst that's likely to happen here is some states' attorney general will file a lawsuit, get it certified as "class action", and Blockbuster will settle out-of-court and pay some piddly fine + attorney's fees and send everybody who asks a $5 for free rentals. Big deal.
Isn't Voyager I sending us signals from inside the termination shock?
The signals received by amateur radio operators in 2006 indicate that radio, at least at the frequencies Voyager is using, is capable of crossing the heliosphere.
The "sex offender" registry hasn't prevented one crime against children, and has in fact caused more problems than it has solved.
From the US Department of Justice: 96% of female rape victims younger than 12 years old, knew their attackers. 20% were victimized by their fathers or step-fathers. 60% were victimized by another family member.
Sex crimes are the only crimes we continue to punish people after they've "paid their debt to society". We restrict their movement, restrict where they can live, and in many cases ensure through force of law that they never lead a normal life again.
If we, as a society, are convinced that child molesters are incurable, let's just keep them locked up. This idiotic list serves no purpose: if they are, indeed, almost certain to commit the crime again, why are we releasing them from institutionalization? If these people are "sick", let's transfer them from the penal system to the mental health system where they probably belong.
I don't know about where you live, but in most of the United States the vast majority of the broadcasting outfits are owned either directly or indirectly by companies with affiliates who are members of the RIAA.
My numbers were coming from the IAEA. Perhaps IAEA's numbers were for "North America" including Canada.
It still brings up the major point, which you (in nitpicking) seem to have missed.
Even if we quadrupled wind capacity in 10 years, which would be quite a feat and impressive in and of itself, we would not change by even a fraction of a percent the percentage of power generated by wind energy. We'd need a 100-fold increase to even make a dent.
The **AA considers ANY copying, even copying that has time and again been considered FAIR USE, to be "theft." Much like the BSA and SPA don't consider possession of simply a "certificate of authenticity" to be proof of a valid license (you have to have reciepts for all those!), even if you obtained the music legally (via eMusic or a service like Rhapsody, or ripped from a CD) how much do you want to bet that the RIAA would go after you if you had a CD AND a MP3 of a song?
Worldwide production of wind power accounts for somewhere around 1% of demand. The country with the largest dependency on wind power only uses it for 20% of their total load.
The United States currently has about about 22,000 megawatts of wind power capacity. As a point of comparison, just the INCREASE in peak demand in the next ten years is around 140,000 megawatts.
We could quadruple the number of wind generators we have in ten years (quite a feat, really) and still not be producing a larger percentage of power from wind power than we are today.
By comparison, nuclear power plants in the US produce 200,000 megawatts of power.. and are behind hydroelectric and coal in quantity of power produced.
There's more than one city named San Francisco, yet nobody ever needs "disambiguation" there. Nobody ever hears the words "San Francisco" and immediately thinks of "San Francisco, New Mexico."
Killingsworth is, if memory served, named after an influential family who lived in the Overlook neighborhood.
Portland Blvd. and Interstate Avenue were considered for "renaming" because they aren't named for a "person".
Portland Blvd. was confusing, in the sense that it is a secondary street that isn't very commercially significant (and before you say anything, I LIVE one block from Portland Blvd/Rosa Parks). It was named before Arbor Lodge and Piedmont were part of Portland. Most of the reason why you didn't hear a big stink about Portland Blvd. is because many in North felt it was a weirdly named street to begin with.
Now, we have Rosa Parks way.
What I want to know is this: is the city aware of the pun they created by renaming Portland Blvd. to "Rosa Parks Way?" Portland trivia question: where is Portland's oldest rose garden? Yep, in the park that is, conveniently, now on Rosa Parks Way.
I'm one of the people who was vocally against the original renaming of Interstate Avenue to Chavez, and a resident of the Arbor Lodge neighborhood that was the most opposed to the renaming. It is worth pointing out that this renaming was a hot-button in local politics. People were called "racist" for opposing the renaming.
Fourth was brought up as a last-minute compromise that nobody was happy with.
Those interested might want to read the St. Johns Sentinel, the community newspaper up here in North Portland. Here's a good starting point.
Portland, Maine: population 63,882. While the biggest city in Maine, and probably a regional economic center, not a major city.
Portland, Oregon: population 537,081, with a metro population exceeding 2 million. Third largest city in the Pacific Northwest. Significant shipping port for grain and lumber. Home of the NBA's "Trailblazers" professional basketball club. Considered a pioneer in aggressive urban planning and transit-friendly development.
We might have been named for Portland, Maine.. but we've grown a little since the 1850's.
Something I didn't totally see in that is the following scenario.
I've had an E-Mail address for.. well, we'll just say "forever" that's so old it was used to post on USENET before using a "real" E-Mail address was a problem. Additionally, it's also been used on some domain registrations, and in general seems to wind up on quite a few spam lists.
Using current filtering, somewhere around 80% of all E-mails this account gets is spam.
On the other hand, I'm also on a number of popular mailing lists with that E-mail address. One of these lists gets a good number of messages a day.
How does the system detect which mail is "good" and which is "bad" solely looking at my reputation? I'd gather based on the nature of the mailing list.. let's just say it's NANOG or a similar list.. there might be a large number of subscribers to the list who also have "bad karma" according to the system.
That theory has never been argued in a court of law, AFAIK.
You could argue that, provided you do nothing to hinder the user from accessing it, that providing a URL to somebody who hosts the code IS distribution.
That might not be the FSF's reasoning, mind you.
But, I'm quite sure that the court would at least hear the argument: "While we personally didn't distribute the source code, we made arrangements for the source code to be obtained free of charge on the Internet through a third-party."
In brief, you're making a "Item 1" claim of violation. I'm stating that the "Item 2" violation would hold more weight with the court, and is considerably more insidious.
They actually are "distributing the source", granted via the Ubuntu package system. You could argue in court (and probably get traction with the argument) that you were obeying the "spirit" of the license agreement.
Where that breaks is when you change the code (like they did with ncat), and then not distribute the changes in the form of a diff. That's not a minor "technicality:" that's the whole purpose of the GPL, is to require that if you make those kinds of changes you distribute your code changes.
Additionally, it is my understanding they actually made some changes to ntop, and did not provide any instructions on how to obtain the changes.
So, it's not even a technical violation in the letter of the license, it's a legitimate violation of the spirit of the license. They are distributing a change to the code without source.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is true that the connection is "one way", many large carriers do it with a conventional high-cap circuit, like a T-1 or DS-3, because it is easy.
It may appear to be unfiltered to the person making the connection. However, if it is anything like the T1 I hooked up where I worked, only the calls with active warrants are passed down the T1. That being said, the T1 hooks directly into the switch just like any other T1, and is configured to be a CALEA port in the switch itself. A wire-frame guy who isn't doing the programming/translations wouldn't know any better, so I think that's where this "idea" comes from.
This is precisely what this is.
NEWS FLASH: EVERY wireline and wireless carrier has facility like this between their central offices and Quantico, Virginia. I can tell you for an absolute fact that a medium-sized cable company operating in the Rocky Mountain region has similar facilities between their main office and the FBI Academy, because I helped install it.
Welcome to the world post-CALEA.
Not only did the C64 have great games written for it, but in its own way created the culture that allowed those who followed to flourish.
Many kids who diddled with the C64 later became the game developers who programmed on the PlayStation, the Xbox, and other consoles.
So is jaywalking, however in the grand scheme of things is a minor offense that people engage in every day that rarely results in any legal repercussions.
So, your point is.. what, exactly?
WiFi is relative proof that you can go relatively unregulated in spectrum bandwidth and have things work just fine. Yes, yes, some people in the middle of Manhattan complain about WiFi performance, but my experience at my old office in downtown Chicago showed that things worked just fine -- all the time.
Actually, WiFi is a case-in-point of why the existing regulatory scheme is broken, and how completely "unregulated bandwidth" would be a disaster for our communications infrastructure.
Case study: Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, a public square commonly referred to as "Portland's living room," smack dab in the middle of Portland's busy, and dense, downtown. There are no fewer than six "free" hotspots all trying to provide service, and countless WEP/WPA-encrypted ones from neighboring offices, plus the "city WiFi" from MetroFi. Add to this mess a large quantity of Bluetooth noise from a Verizon Wireless store that has all the Bluetooth crap turned on every freaking phone, a 2.4GHz wireless microphone system used by the City for performances in the square, and you've got a nice average noise floor somewhere around -55dBm.
None of the WiFi works more than 25 feet from the access points. The wireless microphone system often breaks. If you're trying to use your Bluetooth headset on your phone, you have to be within a foot for it to work.
So, what happens? One of the offices goes and buys an amplifier and a 15 dB antenna from Fry's to see if they can get their WiFi to work in their office. This increases the noise floor and now makes it so that anybody on Channel 1 who's near that office gets elbowed out of the way by the sloppy amplifier.
"Unregulated airwaves" are theoretically a great idea, but fail in actual practice because the people making the decisions are not technologically literate.
If, on the other hand, all the devices in the 2.4GHz band were using a cooperative radio system, where everybody talked to everybody else and determined frequencies and power levels based upon some kind of algorithm, there's no reason why it couldn't work. Add to that some liberal frequency expansion, and you could be on to something.
However, just "deregulating" the whole thing without putting technological limitations on the system is a disaster waiting to happen. Deregulated radio works great in theory, until T-Mobile decides to deliberately interfere with the free hotspot because it's "competition" for their paid service.. or Starbucks decides to deliberately interfere with Seattle's Best Coffee's hotspot for the same reason.
.. except there is mountains of case law that says otherwise: that EULAs are, in essence, only marginally enforceable.
This being in some hidden Facebook EULA, or on some 'policy page' for Blockbuster does not mean "the user notifies us in writing". That has specific legal meaning: if they don't have a SIGNED PIECE OF PAPER with the words "I allow you do release my video rental records", they don't have notification in writing of permission.
All this is irrelevant, anyway: the worst that's likely to happen here is some states' attorney general will file a lawsuit, get it certified as "class action", and Blockbuster will settle out-of-court and pay some piddly fine + attorney's fees and send everybody who asks a $5 for free rentals. Big deal.
Isn't Voyager I sending us signals from inside the termination shock?
The signals received by amateur radio operators in 2006 indicate that radio, at least at the frequencies Voyager is using, is capable of crossing the heliosphere.
The "sex offender" registry hasn't prevented one crime against children, and has in fact caused more problems than it has solved.
From the US Department of Justice: 96% of female rape victims younger than 12 years old, knew their attackers. 20% were victimized by their fathers or step-fathers. 60% were victimized by another family member.
Sex crimes are the only crimes we continue to punish people after they've "paid their debt to society". We restrict their movement, restrict where they can live, and in many cases ensure through force of law that they never lead a normal life again.
If we, as a society, are convinced that child molesters are incurable, let's just keep them locked up. This idiotic list serves no purpose: if they are, indeed, almost certain to commit the crime again, why are we releasing them from institutionalization? If these people are "sick", let's transfer them from the penal system to the mental health system where they probably belong.
Who owns those local news stations?
I don't know about where you live, but in most of the United States the vast majority of the broadcasting outfits are owned either directly or indirectly by companies with affiliates who are members of the RIAA.
See today's story on Slashdot?
My comment seems.. prescient.
My numbers were coming from the IAEA. Perhaps IAEA's numbers were for "North America" including Canada.
It still brings up the major point, which you (in nitpicking) seem to have missed.
Even if we quadrupled wind capacity in 10 years, which would be quite a feat and impressive in and of itself, we would not change by even a fraction of a percent the percentage of power generated by wind energy. We'd need a 100-fold increase to even make a dent.
Or, did you miss that point?
You don't understand.
The **AA considers ANY copying, even copying that has time and again been considered FAIR USE, to be "theft." Much like the BSA and SPA don't consider possession of simply a "certificate of authenticity" to be proof of a valid license (you have to have reciepts for all those!), even if you obtained the music legally (via eMusic or a service like Rhapsody, or ripped from a CD) how much do you want to bet that the RIAA would go after you if you had a CD AND a MP3 of a song?
Yep.
Just like drug-law forfeitures were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Hrm? What? Wait.
Yes, it is proven.
Worldwide production of wind power accounts for somewhere around 1% of demand. The country with the largest dependency on wind power only uses it for 20% of their total load.
The United States currently has about about 22,000 megawatts of wind power capacity. As a point of comparison, just the INCREASE in peak demand in the next ten years is around 140,000 megawatts.
We could quadruple the number of wind generators we have in ten years (quite a feat, really) and still not be producing a larger percentage of power from wind power than we are today.
By comparison, nuclear power plants in the US produce 200,000 megawatts of power.. and are behind hydroelectric and coal in quantity of power produced.
Funny. The Pacific Northwest uses hydroelectric for their baseload.
There's more than one city named San Francisco, yet nobody ever needs "disambiguation" there. Nobody ever hears the words "San Francisco" and immediately thinks of "San Francisco, New Mexico."
The biggest one.
There is more than one San Francisco, and nobody ever seems to get that wrong.
Killingsworth is, if memory served, named after an influential family who lived in the Overlook neighborhood.
Portland Blvd. and Interstate Avenue were considered for "renaming" because they aren't named for a "person".
Portland Blvd. was confusing, in the sense that it is a secondary street that isn't very commercially significant (and before you say anything, I LIVE one block from Portland Blvd/Rosa Parks). It was named before Arbor Lodge and Piedmont were part of Portland. Most of the reason why you didn't hear a big stink about Portland Blvd. is because many in North felt it was a weirdly named street to begin with.
Now, we have Rosa Parks way.
What I want to know is this: is the city aware of the pun they created by renaming Portland Blvd. to "Rosa Parks Way?" Portland trivia question: where is Portland's oldest rose garden? Yep, in the park that is, conveniently, now on Rosa Parks Way.
I'm one of the people who was vocally against the original renaming of Interstate Avenue to Chavez, and a resident of the Arbor Lodge neighborhood that was the most opposed to the renaming. It is worth pointing out that this renaming was a hot-button in local politics. People were called "racist" for opposing the renaming.
Fourth was brought up as a last-minute compromise that nobody was happy with.
Those interested might want to read the St. Johns Sentinel, the community newspaper up here in North Portland. Here's a good starting point.
Portland, Maine: population 63,882. While the biggest city in Maine, and probably a regional economic center, not a major city.
Portland, Oregon: population 537,081, with a metro population exceeding 2 million. Third largest city in the Pacific Northwest. Significant shipping port for grain and lumber. Home of the NBA's "Trailblazers" professional basketball club. Considered a pioneer in aggressive urban planning and transit-friendly development.
We might have been named for Portland, Maine.. but we've grown a little since the 1850's.
The last two issues, actually, has had a "back cover" photo that isn't necessarily a pay phone..
Something I didn't totally see in that is the following scenario.
.. let's just say it's NANOG or a similar list .. there might be a large number of subscribers to the list who also have "bad karma" according to the system.
I've had an E-Mail address for.. well, we'll just say "forever" that's so old it was used to post on USENET before using a "real" E-Mail address was a problem. Additionally, it's also been used on some domain registrations, and in general seems to wind up on quite a few spam lists.
Using current filtering, somewhere around 80% of all E-mails this account gets is spam.
On the other hand, I'm also on a number of popular mailing lists with that E-mail address. One of these lists gets a good number of messages a day.
How does the system detect which mail is "good" and which is "bad" solely looking at my reputation? I'd gather based on the nature of the mailing list
How does it prevent a false positive?
That theory has never been argued in a court of law, AFAIK.
You could argue that, provided you do nothing to hinder the user from accessing it, that providing a URL to somebody who hosts the code IS distribution.
That might not be the FSF's reasoning, mind you.
But, I'm quite sure that the court would at least hear the argument: "While we personally didn't distribute the source code, we made arrangements for the source code to be obtained free of charge on the Internet through a third-party."
In brief, you're making a "Item 1" claim of violation. I'm stating that the "Item 2" violation would hold more weight with the court, and is considerably more insidious.
They actually are "distributing the source", granted via the Ubuntu package system. You could argue in court (and probably get traction with the argument) that you were obeying the "spirit" of the license agreement.
Where that breaks is when you change the code (like they did with ncat), and then not distribute the changes in the form of a diff. That's not a minor "technicality:" that's the whole purpose of the GPL, is to require that if you make those kinds of changes you distribute your code changes.
Additionally, it is my understanding they actually made some changes to ntop, and did not provide any instructions on how to obtain the changes.
So, it's not even a technical violation in the letter of the license, it's a legitimate violation of the spirit of the license. They are distributing a change to the code without source.