"Good intentions, questionable execution. European legislators have been giving DRM considerable attention for a while, but Norway has actually gone so far as to declare that Apple's iTunes store is illegal under Norwegian law. The crux of the issue is that the Fairplay DRM that is at the heart of the iTunes/iPod universe doesn't work with anything else, meaning that if you want access to the cast iTunes library, you have to buy an iPod."
It is NOT necessary to own an iPod to access the iTunes library! It is only necessary to have a copy of iTunes!
To carry those tunes on a portable device it is only necessary to have a CD burner, and follow these steps:
- Burn tracks onto CD from iTunes (iTunes lets you do this). - Either use recorded CD into your portable CD player, or - Rip tracks from CD using iTunes or similar package, and save as.mp3 files - Transfer ripped tracks to your favourite MP3 player.
Provided this is all done for *personal use only* it would seem to be covered by fair use. However IANAL, so you freedom may vary.
I know this is the UK, but don't you have a right to not incriminate yourself?
Unlike in the US, there is no written Consitution or Bill of Rights. The only rights you get are those granted by various laws enacted from time to time, and which are themselves regularly messed about with by other laws enacted from time to time.
The RIP Act completely tramples over any right not to incriminate yourself in respect of encrytion keys. If you want to claim that you do not know the key, you have to prove that you do not know it.
Just been confirmed at a press conference by the emergency services that 4 devices exploded this morning - 3 on tube trains and one on a bus. At least 33 people have died.
Technically, *OWNING* a TV in the UK without possessing a TV license is NOT ILLEGAL. It is only if you *USE* a TV in location without a valid TV license that you actually break the law.
This all comes back to the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 (and probably earlier legislation), in which it is an offence to use ANY wireless transmission or reception equipment without a suitable license issued by the Secretary of State, or where the specific use is covered by an exemption defined by the legislation/Secretary of State.
A suitable analogy would be that in the UK it is NOT ILLEGAL to own a vehicle for which the appropriate Vehicle Excise Duty (Road Tax in normal-speak!) has not been paid up to date, and the "tax disk" displayed on the vehicle as evidence of same.
It is ONLY ILLEGAL for an untaxed vehicle to "use" (ie park/drive on) the public highway.
In both cases it is the "user" who has the statutory responsibility that such use is covered by the appropriate license.
Therefore it is the responsibility of the TV Licensing Agency to "prove" that you were using a TV "receiver" (so that this covers VCR's and TV cards in PCs). Hence the "need" for the TV detector vans. The IT and databases just helps them target those resources properly.
One thing that many people are not aware of is that if you hire or sell TVs, or other associated equipment, you are required by law to inform the TVLA of the name and address of the hirer/purchaser. I'm not sure of the fine details of that particular bit of legislation, but it may well only apply to commercial entities.
Re:I wouldn't be surprised to see 'em buy a Level
on
Google's Dark Fibre Plans?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No no no.
Why the hell would Google want to buy up an existing ISP/telco with all the crap that that entails?
What they are doing is actually very sensible.
By looking to negotiate purchase/lease of dark fibre over the medium term they are avoiding the big cost which is actually putting fibre into the ground.
I imagine that they would ensure that the maintenance of that fibre is the responsibility of the provider, so they don't need to run their own maintenance crews either.
And the BIG plus with having access to fiber is that you can then ramp up your capacity by using WDM (Wave Division Multiplexing) to get more bandwidth out of your fibre.
They have probably realised that to ramp up their networks to cope with their future plans they need more bandwidth that they can afford to buy as "service" from a regular telco. Its just too damn expensive!
By leasing the fibre themselves, they light it how they want, rather that how the telco wants to sell it to them.
This *might* have biogger up front costs, but the recurrent costs are MUCH lower.
You can be sure it will actually be STM-256c as opposed to plain vanilla STM-256.
Almost NO datacomms equipment manufacturers support the non-concatenated versions of SDH above STM-1. I have bitten in the past by companies that said they support STM-4 when they actually meant STM-4c. And of course at the time the telcos only support STM-4 and NOT STM-4c.
I suspect that the STM-256 support will be the same.
(For the uninitiated STM-4 is a straight multiplexing of 4 STM-1s, each with their own header and payload sections. STM-4c is essentially one big STM channel with a single header section and a single concatenated payload section. STM-256c just extends this principle to more insane capacities).
Checking out SCOs Products section on their website, then selected the right hand link for their Intellectual Property Home Page, and guess what I got back?
Document Not Found
To find the document you're looking for, please see our company sitemap
Hmm...what the paper describes is exactly what BT in the UK are proposing as a "MidBand" service (as opposed to Broadband). Even the pricing seems similar!
Essentially it is just ISDN actualy using the bells and whistles it has always had, but has never used!
In the UK, the JANET national academic network went through a period of charging individual institutions for their use of JANET transatlantic internet links. This was instigated because at the time, the costs of maintaining acceptable access provision were outstripping the available funding.
Essentially, institutions would be charged 0.02UKP/Megabyte of traffic entering the UK across the Transatlantic links to the US (although this may have included traffic from almost anywhere on the globe). In some institutions,t his charges would be apportioned and re-charged to the relevant departments, or in some cases even to individuals. At one institution I previously worked at it was discovered that 80% of all chargeable traffic could be attributed to student residences! As a result students were given a download quota, and once that quota was consumed, access would be blocked until more credit was purchased.
Unfortunately, as more lines were added the central JANET traffic accounting systems could no longer keep up, and eventually, when new high speed links were brought into service, the idea was dropped as it was proving too difficult (and costly) to accurately account for all the traffic.
That said, the concept of charging for use, is still being discussed, although no-one seems to be able to agree on how best to do it!
In the meantime, we just happily chew up the 2 x 2.5Gbps pipes!;-)
As a side note, part of the old charging deal was that you could avoid charges by using the national web-caching service. This worked reasonably well when demand outstripped network capacity (we only had a handful of OC-3/STM-1 pipes then). We no longer have a bandwidth bottleneck, and the web-caching service was formally closed down at the end of 2002.
It seems that throwing bandwidth at the problem really is the simplest (and perhaps the cheapest) solution.
And what about those folks who are not connected to the electricity distribution grid? Sure these may be few and far between, but some people do live "off-net" as far as electricity goes, either doing without, or generating their own requirements using natural resources.
Should these people be discriminated for ID purposes simply because they cannot provide the requisite base info?
And besides, given that a MPAN only applies to a household, how do you separate members of the same household with the same name?
It is still not *that* uncommon for say a father and son to share the same firstname, perhaps as their only firstname.
... but I'd suggest you devote your hardware attentions to Intel's desktop strategum. (Although they own a controlling interest in ARM now...)
I think you may be confusing Intel's interests in the StrongARM and XScale processor ranges with a controlling interest in ARM itself.
Intel acquired the StongARM interests after it bought out Digital's processor business. StrongARM was a joint development by ARM and Digital. XScale is just the next generation of StrongARM architecture.
But StongARM is in itself just a licensee of technology from ARM. ARM define the processor platform (instruction set and other associated IP), then license it to semiconductor partners (there are many) who implement that technology and IP into silicon products.
Intel may have a shareholding in ARM, but I'm pretty certain it is in no way a controlling stake. Intel DO however control the StrongARM and XScale architectures (within the bounds of their license from ARM).
If you are destroyed and then replicated,
you are effectively dead. Consider if you could meet your replicate before being destroyed. He would say to you: "Ok, I don't need you anymore, so I destroy you now." Is that good for you? Maybe it is good for him, but certainly not good for the real you.
Hmmm, this is where the whole argument gets into the realms of philosophy. After all, just what is real? If the "replicant" is truly identical to the original, then logically it must be as real as the original. Therefore if one is destroyed as the other is "created" and the two are truly identical, then no-one will be able to tell the difference, even the person being "teleported" in the first place.
Reality is bunk. It is little more than the blinkered perception of the deluded human subconscious.
Who the hell wants a watch that crashes with the BSOD whenever I ask it to tell me the time!
Has anyone actually *READ* the article??...
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
...because it doesn't deserve the comments or indeed the initial description that referred to it.
Sure, its on MSNBC so we take everything it says with a truckload of salt, but the bottom line is it does NOT say that Linux or any other open source OS is dead.
It simply states that it has not made the inroads into the desktop market that were predicted years ago. But then again, it mentions TabletPCs later in the article and Microsoft has been banging on about that idea in one form or another for ages (was it Windows for Pens? I cant remember...)
The fact is that Linux hasn't made the inroads into the desktop market that a lot of people would have liked. But that is not to say that it will not do so in the future, and the article gives no prediction either way.
Whilst the article did not exactly heap praise on Linux, it did not brand it as dead either. It is not the most stimulating or informative read in the world, but that is not to say that you shouldn't read it BEFORE passing judgement. It just makes you look more ignorant and more arrogant than Microsoft and their media monkeys.
Disclaimer: Yes I use Windoze, but I'm no Microsofty. Windoze still sucks, and I'm no keener on Bill's "big plan" than anyone else. I use it, because it lets me do what I need to do (like read bloody Office docs), but I still use Unix, Linux and *BSD for different things.
1) Propose draconian unworkable legislation.
2) Await the huge opposion.
3) Retract the proposal and quickly pass original intended less-severe version while everyone is celebrating victory.
I'm serious, keep your eye on him. We must not let this sort of thing pass in ANY FORM. A single miniscule step in the wrong direction is too far. I will be continuing to push for the original unmodified act to be cut down to size also. I suggest you do the same if you live in the UK.
I could not agree more. The original proposals talk about using these powers for detection and prevention of crime (from what I recall).
However, by my reckoning, if a Govt organisation believes that there is criminal activity going on then thren they should be involving the relevant authorities who are there to deal with criminal investigations - THE POLICE! That is what they are there for!!!!
But then since when has any govt (British or otherwise) ever seen a reason to have one criminal investigation organisation when 200 will do?
"A Statuary Order, does not need to be debated to become law, it just "neads to be layn befor the House for seven days".
What this gobadygook actual means is, as long as its in the Commons Libary for a week and nobody chalanges it it will become law."
This is incorrect in the context of this Act since, as specified in S.25(5) of RIPA:
"(5) The Secretary of State shall not make an order under this section that adds any person to the list of persons who are for the time being relevant public authorities for the purposes of this Chapter unless a draft of the order has been laid before Parliament and approved by a resolution of each House."
In short this order MUST be debated and approved by both houses for it to take effect.
Of course, I'm quite sure that if necessary the Govt would invoke the Parliament Act to force the issue if it passed in Commons but not the Lords. But then who gives a shit for democracy anyway??
Antennae do have to have certain characteristics to resonate and therefore radio a signal effectively, but like many things in life, there is more than one way to do this. It all comes down to the length of the antenna relative to the wavelength of the signal.
There are various "good" ratios of antenna length to wavelength. And the larger the antenna the better provided that the fit the "good ratio" models.
yeah...but DWDM *ONLY* operates on optical carriers. Besides DWDM is jsut a glorified version of FDM - Fequency Division Multiplex -which is of course precisely what good old analogue cable uses anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
To carry those tunes on a portable device it is only necessary to have a CD burner, and follow these steps:
- Burn tracks onto CD from iTunes (iTunes lets you do this).
- Either use recorded CD into your portable CD player, or
- Rip tracks from CD using iTunes or similar package, and save as
- Transfer ripped tracks to your favourite MP3 player.
Provided this is all done for *personal use only* it would seem to be covered by fair use. However IANAL, so you freedom may vary.
Unlike in the US, there is no written Consitution or Bill of Rights. The only rights you get are those granted by various laws enacted from time to time, and which are themselves regularly messed about with by other laws enacted from time to time.
The RIP Act completely tramples over any right not to incriminate yourself in respect of encrytion keys. If you want to claim that you do not know the key, you have to prove that you do not know it.
Just been confirmed at a press conference by the emergency services that 4 devices exploded this morning - 3 on tube trains and one on a bus. At least 33 people have died.
Technically, *OWNING* a TV in the UK without possessing a TV license is NOT ILLEGAL. It is only if you *USE* a TV in location without a valid TV license that you actually break the law.
This all comes back to the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949 (and probably earlier legislation), in which it is an offence to use ANY wireless transmission or reception equipment without a suitable license issued by the Secretary of State, or where the specific use is covered by an exemption defined by the legislation/Secretary of State.
A suitable analogy would be that in the UK it is NOT ILLEGAL to own a vehicle for which the appropriate Vehicle Excise Duty (Road Tax in normal-speak!) has not been paid up to date, and the "tax disk" displayed on the vehicle as evidence of same.
It is ONLY ILLEGAL for an untaxed vehicle to "use" (ie park/drive on) the public highway.
In both cases it is the "user" who has the statutory responsibility that such use is covered by the appropriate license.
Therefore it is the responsibility of the TV Licensing Agency to "prove" that you were using a TV "receiver" (so that this covers VCR's and TV cards in PCs). Hence the "need" for the TV detector vans. The IT and databases just helps them target those resources properly.
One thing that many people are not aware of is that if you hire or sell TVs, or other associated equipment, you are required by law to inform the TVLA of the name and address of the hirer/purchaser. I'm not sure of the fine details of that particular bit of legislation, but it may well only apply to commercial entities.
No no no.
Why the hell would Google want to buy up an existing ISP/telco with all the crap that that entails?
What they are doing is actually very sensible.
By looking to negotiate purchase/lease of dark fibre over the medium term they are avoiding the big cost which is actually putting fibre into the ground.
I imagine that they would ensure that the maintenance of that fibre is the responsibility of the provider, so they don't need to run their own maintenance crews either.
And the BIG plus with having access to fiber is that you can then ramp up your capacity by using WDM (Wave Division Multiplexing) to get more bandwidth out of your fibre.
They have probably realised that to ramp up their networks to cope with their future plans they need more bandwidth that they can afford to buy as "service" from a regular telco. Its just too damn expensive!
By leasing the fibre themselves, they light it how they want, rather that how the telco wants to sell it to them.
This *might* have biogger up front costs, but the recurrent costs are MUCH lower.
Hell, in 1996 someone made a nice Acorn RiscPC with built in toaster/pizza oven. It even had a working sink so you could wash up afterwards!
You can be sure it will actually be STM-256c as opposed to plain vanilla STM-256.
Almost NO datacomms equipment manufacturers support the non-concatenated versions of SDH above STM-1. I have bitten in the past by companies that said they support STM-4 when they actually meant STM-4c. And of course at the time the telcos only support STM-4 and NOT STM-4c.
I suspect that the STM-256 support will be the same.
(For the uninitiated STM-4 is a straight multiplexing of 4 STM-1s, each with their own header and payload sections. STM-4c is essentially one big STM channel with a single header section and a single concatenated payload section. STM-256c just extends this principle to more insane capacities).
Anyone got a mirror up yet?
I certainly noticed! Those Beebs were great machinea for their time. You could do so much with them, and interface with practically anything!
I've still got my Beeb up in the loft. Last time I tried it (last year) it still worked too! Can't say that about many 20+ year old computers!
I must dig it out again, and fire up Elite!
Document Not Found
To find the document you're looking for, please see our company sitemap
Oooops!
Hmm...what the paper describes is exactly what BT in the UK are proposing as a "MidBand" service (as opposed to Broadband). Even the pricing seems similar!
Essentially it is just ISDN actualy using the bells and whistles it has always had, but has never used!
In the UK, the JANET national academic network went through a period of charging individual institutions for their use of JANET transatlantic internet links. This was instigated because at the time, the costs of maintaining acceptable access provision were outstripping the available funding.
;-)
Essentially, institutions would be charged 0.02UKP/Megabyte of traffic entering the UK across the Transatlantic links to the US (although this may have included traffic from almost anywhere on the globe). In some institutions,t his charges would be apportioned and re-charged to the relevant departments, or in some cases even to individuals. At one institution I previously worked at it was discovered that 80% of all chargeable traffic could be attributed to student residences! As a result students were given a download quota, and once that quota was consumed, access would be blocked until more credit was purchased.
Unfortunately, as more lines were added the central JANET traffic accounting systems could no longer keep up, and eventually, when new high speed links were brought into service, the idea was dropped as it was proving too difficult (and costly) to accurately account for all the traffic.
That said, the concept of charging for use, is still being discussed, although no-one seems to be able to agree on how best to do it!
In the meantime, we just happily chew up the 2 x 2.5Gbps pipes!
As a side note, part of the old charging deal was that you could avoid charges by using the national web-caching service. This worked reasonably well when demand outstripped network capacity (we only had a handful of OC-3/STM-1 pipes then). We no longer have a bandwidth bottleneck, and the web-caching service was formally closed down at the end of 2002.
It seems that throwing bandwidth at the problem really is the simplest (and perhaps the cheapest) solution.
And what about those folks who are not connected to the electricity distribution grid? Sure these may be few and far between, but some people do live "off-net" as far as electricity goes, either doing without, or generating their own requirements using natural resources.
Should these people be discriminated for ID purposes simply because they cannot provide the requisite base info?
And besides, given that a MPAN only applies to a household, how do you separate members of the same household with the same name?
It is still not *that* uncommon for say a father and son to share the same firstname, perhaps as their only firstname.
Suddenly no unique ID. Oooops!
I think you may be confusing Intel's interests in the StrongARM and XScale processor ranges with a controlling interest in ARM itself.
Intel acquired the StongARM interests after it bought out Digital's processor business. StrongARM was a joint development by ARM and Digital. XScale is just the next generation of StrongARM architecture.
But StongARM is in itself just a licensee of technology from ARM. ARM define the processor platform (instruction set and other associated IP), then license it to semiconductor partners (there are many) who implement that technology and IP into silicon products.
Intel may have a shareholding in ARM, but I'm pretty certain it is in no way a controlling stake. Intel DO however control the StrongARM and XScale architectures (within the bounds of their license from ARM).
Hmmm, this is where the whole argument gets into the realms of philosophy. After all, just what is real? If the "replicant" is truly identical to the original, then logically it must be as real as the original. Therefore if one is destroyed as the other is "created" and the two are truly identical, then no-one will be able to tell the difference, even the person being "teleported" in the first place.
Reality is bunk. It is little more than the blinkered perception of the deluded human subconscious.
Who the hell wants a watch that crashes with the BSOD whenever I ask it to tell me the time!
...because it doesn't deserve the comments or indeed the initial description that referred to it.
Sure, its on MSNBC so we take everything it says with a truckload of salt, but the bottom line is it does NOT say that Linux or any other open source OS is dead.
It simply states that it has not made the inroads into the desktop market that were predicted years ago. But then again, it mentions TabletPCs later in the article and Microsoft has been banging on about that idea in one form or another for ages (was it Windows for Pens? I cant remember...)
The fact is that Linux hasn't made the inroads into the desktop market that a lot of people would have liked. But that is not to say that it will not do so in the future, and the article gives no prediction either way.
Whilst the article did not exactly heap praise on Linux, it did not brand it as dead either. It is not the most stimulating or informative read in the world, but that is not to say that you shouldn't read it BEFORE passing judgement. It just makes you look more ignorant and more arrogant than Microsoft and their media monkeys.
Disclaimer: Yes I use Windoze, but I'm no Microsofty. Windoze still sucks, and I'm no keener on Bill's "big plan" than anyone else. I use it, because it lets me do what I need to do (like read bloody Office docs), but I still use Unix, Linux and *BSD for different things.
However, by my reckoning, if a Govt organisation believes that there is criminal activity going on then thren they should be involving the relevant authorities who are there to deal with criminal investigations - THE POLICE! That is what they are there for!!!!
But then since when has any govt (British or otherwise) ever seen a reason to have one criminal investigation organisation when 200 will do?
"A Statuary Order, does not need to be debated to become law, it just "neads to be layn befor the House for seven days".
What this gobadygook actual means is, as long as its in the Commons Libary for a week and nobody chalanges it it will become law."
This is incorrect in the context of this Act since, as specified in S.25(5) of RIPA: "(5) The Secretary of State shall not make an order under this section that adds any person to the list of persons who are for the time being relevant public authorities for the purposes of this Chapter unless a draft of the order has been laid before Parliament and approved by a resolution of each House." In short this order MUST be debated and approved by both houses for it to take effect. Of course, I'm quite sure that if necessary the Govt would invoke the Parliament Act to force the issue if it passed in Commons but not the Lords. But then who gives a shit for democracy anyway??See article in The Guardian Online section today.
Longer does not necessarily mean bad, or good.
Antennae do have to have certain characteristics to resonate and therefore radio a signal effectively, but like many things in life, there is more than one way to do this. It all comes down to the length of the antenna relative to the wavelength of the signal.
There are various "good" ratios of antenna length to wavelength. And the larger the antenna the better provided that the fit the "good ratio" models.
yeah...but DWDM *ONLY* operates on optical carriers. Besides DWDM is jsut a glorified version of FDM - Fequency Division Multiplex -which is of course precisely what good old analogue cable uses anyway!
Damn...I'm sure I saw this years ago in that Woody Allen film The Sleeper....
The link to the EULA no longer seems to work....suspicious? or am I just paranoid?