Violent revolution is easier than a complete rework of a political regime through Statute.
October Revolution French Revolution Spanish Civil War American War of Independence The Glorious Revolution The Fall of the Roman Empire The Sacking of Troy...but a few notable historical examples.
Before I start on this rant, let me just say: if you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
While this Earth-shatteringly important Candidate Pissing Match/Circlejerk is all over the media, what coverage on that same media is offered the current situation at the BBC and the higher echelons of British society? I speak of the massive, massive conspiracy of silence that appears to be centered around the British Broadcasting Corporation, more specifically the dressing room of the late Sir James Saville.
The BBC knew about the paedophile activities of Sir Saville that occurred within their own hallowed halls. They did nothing. They did not report anything. As a collective they just carried on as normal, even publicly japing at the "rumours" of Sir Saville's strange sexual habits. The Metropolitan Police knew through complaints made by victims, about the paedophile activities of Sir Saville. They said there was not enough evidence and carried it no further. The Director of Public Prosecutions knew through criminal complaints filed by victims who had bypassed the Police because the Police had basically called them liars, yet they closed the files before they even made it to a courtroom.
It wasn't until the true scale of the abuses literally smashed its way through millions of television screens last week and throttled the British public into the realisation that something was very, very wrong at the BBC, that anybody is finally doing anything about it. What do we have? The BBC promising internal enquiries into the matter.
Great. Where does that leave survivors when they come back and say "NFA"?
The Courts still aren't going to take any notice unless by Royal mandate.
The Royals aren't going to issue that mandate because...
great idea, which falls on its arse when you're talking about one person in a multi household taking up a full week, the immediate consequence of which is that nobody in the house gets welfare... that one person has to earn enough to give EVERYBODY in the house the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. VERY difficult when skilled jobs are offshored and you got 2.4 children and a stay-at-home parent who needs to be home to look after them.
Also consider that with minimum wage being a statutory minimum (and not taking into account minor expenses like rent/mortgage, car/other transport, local taxes, state taxes, medical expenses - pretty much anything non-cash welfare takes care of), most companies will offer employment at that statutory minimum for as many hours as they can squeeze out of you. End result? You are screwed: it's slave labour, basically. You're guaranteed, unless you work 16 hour days at minimum wage, to come off worse than if you stay on basic welfare.
1. Inverse square law: the flux density (signal strength) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. (Sir Isaac Newton)
2. Commercial broadcast satellite receivers rely on omnidirectional antennas with directive gain for a typical consumer type 60 cm satellite dish at 11.75 GHz of 37.50dB. These devices can detect signals above the noise floor with a sensitivity measuring in the picowatts. That's all that's needed, even though the satellites only transmit relatively little power (Astra 1KR outputs a total of 140W) themselves through a narrow cone, and the receivers employ noise filters up the wazoo. This is why a broadcast satellite signal from say, Astra Sky, can be received in Edinburgh or London but not in Santander even though the satellite is almost overhead. (source). For comparison, consider the amount of energy that the Voyager probes transmitted back to Earth as they encountered Jupiter: between them, the total power incident at Jodrell Bank wouldn't have powered a digital watch.
3. Broadcast satellite dishes also rely on line-of-sight to the satellites. If there's a wall in the way, you ain't getting a signal. Windows can be a problem unless you have an extremely high gain antenna (Sky offer apartment packages where it's not possible for whatever reason to install a communal dish; this involves a small dish that sits on the window sash). Personal mobile radios operating in civilian bands do not rely on line-of-sight, though this obviously helps a lot with the range they operate at a low enough frequency that they are functional through most walls.
wait, what? As frequency increases, the power needed to achieve the same range increases. Radio 101.
At 100mW EIRP and 0db antenna gain (what you'd expect to find on a legally compliant consumer 2.4GHz AP), you're looking at a line of sight range of about 670 feet. Theoretically. At 1W EIRP and 0db antenna gain (what you'd expect to find on a legally compliant consumer 5.4GHz AP) you're looking at LOSR of about 800 feet. Ten times the power at twice the frequency for not much in the way of range gain.
An unlicensed consumer radio transmitter in the UK cannot under any circumstances exceed an EIRP of 4W. So for a 60GHz transmitter, with a 0db antenna, at 4W, you're looking at an effective LOSR of...
less than thirty inches. Theoretically.
There is another problem...
Bear in mind that the 60GHz band (it's actually the midpoint of the FCC allocation between 57-64GHz) is very susceptible to oxygen absorption - to the tune of requiring a 22dB gain on the antenna just to overcome the problem, otherwise you're stuck with something that will not even cover the backplane on a rack. The FCC in the US is allowing 40dBm EIRP transmit power to account for this, though this extra power (we're into the several tens to several hundred Watts here: not a consumer-grade solution) will not improve the range over 2.4GHz at consumer-grade output, in fact it will not even come close. Current 60GHz designs are aimed at datacentre interconnects over distances probably not exceeding 40 to 60 feet.
it's true about the printers. Epson have a function in their printer service software that resets the firmware page count in their inkjets; handy because after so many pages*, the printer will flash an error whether or not the heads still work and indicate the need for replacement. HP I suspect do the same thing, as I have a fax machine that uses full-head cartridges - the system complains that heads need replacing ON NEW CARTRIDGES. I have yet to locate HP 7110 service software.
*confirmed in two models of Epson direct-on-disc label printers, the TPC is 5,000 pages or labels. Great news if you're one of the lucky ones who bought an R200 when they were over GB£140 a pop!
This is also the case for laser printers (and why diagnostic/test pages for them display a total page count!) although I think the total duty cycle might be a tad higher (I just kicked out a test page on my laser and it reports over 39,000 pages. Not bad to say I've only replaced the toner twice and the corona drum once).
sources: several years servicing Epson (mainly, but others as well) printers and owning an HP PSC7110 printer/copier/fax as well as a Brother laser printer
Not quite. The antenna conductor at midband on 2.4GHz is 1.21" long. Every router I've seen uses a straight antenna, not wrapped around anything (since this would be a rather silly thing to do when you're dealing with CMOS - induction current would be enough to kill the tuner). Package encapsulated wifi equipment such as laptop antennas and USB dongles generally use reticulated PCB track.
1. slow burnout of emitter gear due to thermal degradation (yes, clock chips and transistors get hot, as do solder tracks and joints). Thermal runaway can occur if a solder joint fails and arcs, or overvoltage causes signal tracks to vapourise. 2. ionising radiation, particularly on unshielded components such as antenna conductors (I've seen something like this occur on an externally mounted amateur radio antenna: the sunward side of the antenna completely degraded, the result being that the only signals received (or sent) were on the shadow side). 3. component quality on consumer gear is not as stringent as it could be. Components can and do fail, and considering the number of components in a lot of consumer gear, it's a wonder any of it actually leaves the factory. 4. the noise floor of several years ago was far, far lower than it is now. The ERP of newer gear is (by design or by necessity) higher than older gear as more and more transmitters have to share the band. As a result, the signal quality taking a dive may be at least partly illusory. The equipment may actually be perfectly fine. 5. parasitic structures in semiconductor packages may be the catalyst for failure, either immediate or delayed. Such structures may be as small as a single atom of chlorine embedded in a crystal of germanium - innocuous at first (undetectable, even), but over time and use, that contamination will alter the chemistry of the semiconductor, possibly causing it to bond with the package material and rendering it useless. This might not even be an issue in high powered gear like regulators but in something like a microprocessor, it's a showstopper.
no company can ask you to surrender your legal/lawful rights under any circumstances. Least of all as part of a contract. Where this argument falls down is if you ACCEPT the contract, you also accepted the clause that you give up your legal rights. The company hasn't won; you've lost by your own action. Next time, try negotiating that bit out.
Cat 5, Cat5e, Cat6 and Cat7 all specify a maximum unswitched segment length of 100m for x-BaseT ethernet over copper. Any longer and you're either needing some switchgear or relay hardware, or you're going fibre over 1000BASE-LX, and 1000BASE-SX, 1000BASE-LX10, 1000BASE-BX10 or the non-standard -ZX, of which 1000Base-ZX (single mode fibre at 1550nm) offers the greatest segment length of around 70km.
I beg to differ on your claim that judges are experts on the Law. I can tell you from first hand experience on many, many occasions that they are not. In fact, they tend to agree, without question, with the opinions given to them by the Clerks (who are qualified in Law).
Mod parent up. Although, there is a caveat (isn't there always?):
What you seem to be describing is the Shareware Concept. This isn't so much fair use as a licence to copy and distribute. For those of you born after the days of bulletin boards and floppy disks on the front of magazines, here's how it works:
You get a copy of a piece of software from wherever (I'll use a copy of FractINT 18.0 I got on the front of a magazine a few years before my oldest child was born). The licence that comes with it (in electronic form, a file named license.doc and another called vendor.doc) says I can distribute as many copies of the software as I like, to whomever I like, BUT:
1. I cannot charge for the software. I am, however, allowed to charge for the media and bare distribution costs such as postage and packaging. 2. If I distribute the software as part of a compilation I MUST get permission in writing from the copyright holder (they're usually very good about this). 3. The software must not be modified in any way. Ancillary files not essential to the software's functionality but included with it (such as the licenses) must be bundled with it. Usually the license documents include a list of the files that must be included (an exception to this is the example given, where the authors actually encourage community input into the program, great mods/additions make it to the next version). 4. If I find the software useful, I should consider paying the author. Sometimes, what you have is a locked-down version (a "demo") of the full program. Pay a small fee and you get the unlock key. Sometimes it's a 30-day period with full functionality then it locks down. Same thing. OR for some games, you get to distribute the first level or three, pay the fee to get the rest of the game sent to you in the post (what a weird concept these days!)
Now, I've been using FractINT for nigh on two decades, it's the most fantastic bit of geek porn. I've also made regular donations to the authors in time and development (as they say, "Don't want money, got money. Want recognition". Great philosophy!) and I've managed to sort of keep up with the latest developments myself (though I still prefer the DOS version).
What the Shareware Concept and associated licence does in these days of wireless broadband and "What's a CD-ROM?" is reduce the cost of distributing software attached to it, to almost zero. You're not buying media or envelopes, or paying postage anymore. You're opening a Bittorrent client and hooking up to a tracker. There's no effort involved anymore, and that is what is scaring the SHIT out of the big vendors and the associatives - their business model is COMPLETELY OBSOLETE.
...stick your fixed line contract up your arse. I'll find an ISP that DOESN'T do SPI, DOESN'T do traffic shaping, DOESN'T cap, and DOESN'T pander to Mafia interests! Oh, and offers BETTER SERVICE with no wires at ONE THIRD THE PRICE!
Kaspersky's not looking to build a general purpose OS. He's looking at something with a very narrow functionality, even tighter than an embedded OS like WinCE. We're talking punchcard-programming-level here with maybe a little seed input, like a computer controlled cutting machine. OK, there are those (like in Home Depot or Homebase) that use x86 and DOS to control the machines, but they started with pattern cards that were fed into a box. x86 was adopted because more functionality, such has ad-hoc or one-off cutting patterns using a standardised input model, were required.
The more you overtake the plumbing by overcomplicating the solution, the more problems you create and the easier it is to gum up the works.
- with apologies to Montgomery Scott.
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, did I say 70 words? I meant 70 characters!
DTS (Digital Text Service) != Ceefax.
Never was, never intended to be. DTS is about so much more than a 70-word soundbite. It's also a gateway to parallel channels.
The Ceefax service to mainland UK shut off in February this year, leaving Northern Ireland as the only area left with coverage.
Oh, and the original ad for Ceefax claimed "it is made up of two words: Cee and Fax." But of a silly one, that.
yeah - I tried the music and flowers bit, all it got me was a broken nose and the taste of Ronseal.
I figure the other option isn't too far around the corner.
Violent revolution is easier than a complete rework of a political regime through Statute.
October Revolution ...but a few notable historical examples.
French Revolution
Spanish Civil War
American War of Independence
The Glorious Revolution
The Fall of the Roman Empire
The Sacking of Troy
Before I start on this rant, let me just say: if you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
While this Earth-shatteringly important Candidate Pissing Match/Circlejerk is all over the media, what coverage on that same media is offered the current situation at the BBC and the higher echelons of British society? I speak of the massive, massive conspiracy of silence that appears to be centered around the British Broadcasting Corporation, more specifically the dressing room of the late Sir James Saville.
The BBC knew about the paedophile activities of Sir Saville that occurred within their own hallowed halls. They did nothing. They did not report anything. As a collective they just carried on as normal, even publicly japing at the "rumours" of Sir Saville's strange sexual habits.
The Metropolitan Police knew through complaints made by victims, about the paedophile activities of Sir Saville. They said there was not enough evidence and carried it no further.
The Director of Public Prosecutions knew through criminal complaints filed by victims who had bypassed the Police because the Police had basically called them liars, yet they closed the files before they even made it to a courtroom.
It wasn't until the true scale of the abuses literally smashed its way through millions of television screens last week and throttled the British public into the realisation that something was very, very wrong at the BBC, that anybody is finally doing anything about it. What do we have? The BBC promising internal enquiries into the matter.
Great. Where does that leave survivors when they come back and say "NFA"?
The Courts still aren't going to take any notice unless by Royal mandate.
The Royals aren't going to issue that mandate because...
THEY ARE ALSO INVOLVED.
great idea, which falls on its arse when you're talking about one person in a multi household taking up a full week, the immediate consequence of which is that nobody in the house gets welfare... that one person has to earn enough to give EVERYBODY in the house the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. VERY difficult when skilled jobs are offshored and you got 2.4 children and a stay-at-home parent who needs to be home to look after them.
Also consider that with minimum wage being a statutory minimum (and not taking into account minor expenses like rent/mortgage, car/other transport, local taxes, state taxes, medical expenses - pretty much anything non-cash welfare takes care of), most companies will offer employment at that statutory minimum for as many hours as they can squeeze out of you. End result? You are screwed: it's slave labour, basically. You're guaranteed, unless you work 16 hour days at minimum wage, to come off worse than if you stay on basic welfare.
same way England did: civil war.
only Pam and her five lovely daughters...
ok.
1. Inverse square law: the flux density (signal strength) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. (Sir Isaac Newton)
2. Commercial broadcast satellite receivers rely on omnidirectional antennas with directive gain for a typical consumer type 60 cm satellite dish at 11.75 GHz of 37.50dB. These devices can detect signals above the noise floor with a sensitivity measuring in the picowatts. That's all that's needed, even though the satellites only transmit relatively little power (Astra 1KR outputs a total of 140W) themselves through a narrow cone, and the receivers employ noise filters up the wazoo. This is why a broadcast satellite signal from say, Astra Sky, can be received in Edinburgh or London but not in Santander even though the satellite is almost overhead. (source). For comparison, consider the amount of energy that the Voyager probes transmitted back to Earth as they encountered Jupiter: between them, the total power incident at Jodrell Bank wouldn't have powered a digital watch.
3. Broadcast satellite dishes also rely on line-of-sight to the satellites. If there's a wall in the way, you ain't getting a signal. Windows can be a problem unless you have an extremely high gain antenna (Sky offer apartment packages where it's not possible for whatever reason to install a communal dish; this involves a small dish that sits on the window sash). Personal mobile radios operating in civilian bands do not rely on line-of-sight, though this obviously helps a lot with the range they operate at a low enough frequency that they are functional through most walls.
wait, what? As frequency increases, the power needed to achieve the same range increases. Radio 101.
At 100mW EIRP and 0db antenna gain (what you'd expect to find on a legally compliant consumer 2.4GHz AP), you're looking at a line of sight range of about 670 feet. Theoretically.
At 1W EIRP and 0db antenna gain (what you'd expect to find on a legally compliant consumer 5.4GHz AP) you're looking at LOSR of about 800 feet. Ten times the power at twice the frequency for not much in the way of range gain.
An unlicensed consumer radio transmitter in the UK cannot under any circumstances exceed an EIRP of 4W. So for a 60GHz transmitter, with a 0db antenna, at 4W, you're looking at an effective LOSR of...
less than thirty inches. Theoretically.
There is another problem...
Bear in mind that the 60GHz band (it's actually the midpoint of the FCC allocation between 57-64GHz) is very susceptible to oxygen absorption - to the tune of requiring a 22dB gain on the antenna just to overcome the problem, otherwise you're stuck with something that will not even cover the backplane on a rack. The FCC in the US is allowing 40dBm EIRP transmit power to account for this, though this extra power (we're into the several tens to several hundred Watts here: not a consumer-grade solution) will not improve the range over 2.4GHz at consumer-grade output, in fact it will not even come close. Current 60GHz designs are aimed at datacentre interconnects over distances probably not exceeding 40 to 60 feet.
it's true about the printers. Epson have a function in their printer service software that resets the firmware page count in their inkjets; handy because after so many pages*, the printer will flash an error whether or not the heads still work and indicate the need for replacement. HP I suspect do the same thing, as I have a fax machine that uses full-head cartridges - the system complains that heads need replacing ON NEW CARTRIDGES. I have yet to locate HP 7110 service software.
*confirmed in two models of Epson direct-on-disc label printers, the TPC is 5,000 pages or labels. Great news if you're one of the lucky ones who bought an R200 when they were over GB£140 a pop!
This is also the case for laser printers (and why diagnostic/test pages for them display a total page count!) although I think the total duty cycle might be a tad higher (I just kicked out a test page on my laser and it reports over 39,000 pages. Not bad to say I've only replaced the toner twice and the corona drum once).
sources: several years servicing Epson (mainly, but others as well) printers and owning an HP PSC7110 printer/copier/fax as well as a Brother laser printer
Not quite. The antenna conductor at midband on 2.4GHz is 1.21" long. Every router I've seen uses a straight antenna, not wrapped around anything (since this would be a rather silly thing to do when you're dealing with CMOS - induction current would be enough to kill the tuner). Package encapsulated wifi equipment such as laptop antennas and USB dongles generally use reticulated PCB track.
problem with 60GHz: it has an effective range of about seven inches.
1. slow burnout of emitter gear due to thermal degradation (yes, clock chips and transistors get hot, as do solder tracks and joints). Thermal runaway can occur if a solder joint fails and arcs, or overvoltage causes signal tracks to vapourise.
2. ionising radiation, particularly on unshielded components such as antenna conductors (I've seen something like this occur on an externally mounted amateur radio antenna: the sunward side of the antenna completely degraded, the result being that the only signals received (or sent) were on the shadow side).
3. component quality on consumer gear is not as stringent as it could be. Components can and do fail, and considering the number of components in a lot of consumer gear, it's a wonder any of it actually leaves the factory.
4. the noise floor of several years ago was far, far lower than it is now. The ERP of newer gear is (by design or by necessity) higher than older gear as more and more transmitters have to share the band. As a result, the signal quality taking a dive may be at least partly illusory. The equipment may actually be perfectly fine.
5. parasitic structures in semiconductor packages may be the catalyst for failure, either immediate or delayed. Such structures may be as small as a single atom of chlorine embedded in a crystal of germanium - innocuous at first (undetectable, even), but over time and use, that contamination will alter the chemistry of the semiconductor, possibly causing it to bond with the package material and rendering it useless. This might not even be an issue in high powered gear like regulators but in something like a microprocessor, it's a showstopper.
...the subtitles also explicitly prohibit the use of same for commercial purposes! Double whammy!
I already did it. Virgin Media to Hutchison 3G. Best decision I ever made.
wouldn't entrapment come in there somewhere??
no company can ask you to surrender your legal/lawful rights under any circumstances. Least of all as part of a contract. Where this argument falls down is if you ACCEPT the contract, you also accepted the clause that you give up your legal rights. The company hasn't won; you've lost by your own action. Next time, try negotiating that bit out.
Cat 5, Cat5e, Cat6 and Cat7 all specify a maximum unswitched segment length of 100m for x-BaseT ethernet over copper. Any longer and you're either needing some switchgear or relay hardware, or you're going fibre over 1000BASE-LX, and 1000BASE-SX, 1000BASE-LX10, 1000BASE-BX10 or the non-standard -ZX, of which 1000Base-ZX (single mode fibre at 1550nm) offers the greatest segment length of around 70km.
I beg to differ on your claim that judges are experts on the Law. I can tell you from first hand experience on many, many occasions that they are not. In fact, they tend to agree, without question, with the opinions given to them by the Clerks (who are qualified in Law).
Mod parent up. Although, there is a caveat (isn't there always?):
What you seem to be describing is the Shareware Concept. This isn't so much fair use as a licence to copy and distribute. For those of you born after the days of bulletin boards and floppy disks on the front of magazines, here's how it works:
You get a copy of a piece of software from wherever (I'll use a copy of FractINT 18.0 I got on the front of a magazine a few years before my oldest child was born). The licence that comes with it (in electronic form, a file named license.doc and another called vendor.doc) says I can distribute as many copies of the software as I like, to whomever I like, BUT:
1. I cannot charge for the software. I am, however, allowed to charge for the media and bare distribution costs such as postage and packaging.
2. If I distribute the software as part of a compilation I MUST get permission in writing from the copyright holder (they're usually very good about this).
3. The software must not be modified in any way. Ancillary files not essential to the software's functionality but included with it (such as the licenses) must be bundled with it. Usually the license documents include a list of the files that must be included (an exception to this is the example given, where the authors actually encourage community input into the program, great mods/additions make it to the next version).
4. If I find the software useful, I should consider paying the author. Sometimes, what you have is a locked-down version (a "demo") of the full program. Pay a small fee and you get the unlock key. Sometimes it's a 30-day period with full functionality then it locks down. Same thing. OR for some games, you get to distribute the first level or three, pay the fee to get the rest of the game sent to you in the post (what a weird concept these days!)
Now, I've been using FractINT for nigh on two decades, it's the most fantastic bit of geek porn. I've also made regular donations to the authors in time and development (as they say, "Don't want money, got money. Want recognition". Great philosophy!) and I've managed to sort of keep up with the latest developments myself (though I still prefer the DOS version).
What the Shareware Concept and associated licence does in these days of wireless broadband and "What's a CD-ROM?" is reduce the cost of distributing software attached to it, to almost zero. You're not buying media or envelopes, or paying postage anymore. You're opening a Bittorrent client and hooking up to a tracker. There's no effort involved anymore, and that is what is scaring the SHIT out of the big vendors and the associatives - their business model is COMPLETELY OBSOLETE.
no problem, they'll just do a Jon doe and leaflet everyone who parks outside your house.
...stick your fixed line contract up your arse. I'll find an ISP that DOESN'T do SPI, DOESN'T do traffic shaping, DOESN'T cap, and DOESN'T pander to Mafia interests! Oh, and offers BETTER SERVICE with no wires at ONE THIRD THE PRICE!
Kaspersky's not looking to build a general purpose OS. He's looking at something with a very narrow functionality, even tighter than an embedded OS like WinCE. We're talking punchcard-programming-level here with maybe a little seed input, like a computer controlled cutting machine. OK, there are those (like in Home Depot or Homebase) that use x86 and DOS to control the machines, but they started with pattern cards that were fed into a box. x86 was adopted because more functionality, such has ad-hoc or one-off cutting patterns using a standardised input model, were required.
The more you overtake the plumbing by overcomplicating the solution, the more problems you create and the easier it is to gum up the works.
- with apologies to Montgomery Scott.