The "zOMG co2!" thing should get people riled up(at least here across the atlantic); but I suspect that this is(in the guise of being 'green'); basically just the same arrangement.
There are more and less efficient engine designs and(over short distances, if you don't count upstream emissions) even a main battle tank could emit zero co2 if it packed enough batteries; but, on average, this is basically going to target old cars(more likely to be noisy, lax on assorted noxious emissions) and large cars(more metal rolling, more energy needed. Period.)
It is an interesting quirk of French politics that you would bring up the co2 thing to make such a ban more palatable; but the effects of this proposal seem pretty much identical to most other schemes aimed at making dense cities more pleasant and less congested: all of them target big, loud, and noxious vehicles, through a mixture of either Orwellian cameras(Hi London!), landscaping changes aimed at 'pedestrianizing' the city, or just plain legal fiat backed by traffic cops.
In general, I get the impression that(at least among city dwellers, suburbanites commuting in are rather the target) such schemes are reasonably popular. Above a certain density, you just get smog-huffing gridlock that tends to grind out the vibrant street-level life of a city. Culling the more obnoxious vehicles, and replacing them with some mixture of better walkability, public transit, and smaller vehicles(sometimes as part of zipcar-like arrangements), tends to bring some of the charm back, and isn't too inconvenient in very high density areas. Trying to be the suburbs, when you are 10x or more as dense, just doesn't scale very well. Cities reacting against this trend are fairly common, though generally not by hitting co2 related metrics...
Thin clients have their uses(though the hardware costs are bloody usurious for what they are. For some ARM widget or a geode board I should not be paying as much as a low-end dual core desktop with HDD, CD/DVD drive, Windows licence, etc.); but there are annoying pitfalls:
With your classic Citrix or MS Windows Terminal Server, you end up paying once for the backend servers(fileservers, DB, internal web stuff, etc.), once for the terminal servers(to keep the thin clients going), once for the thin clients, and then it is happy-fun CAL time. You can re-ghost a lot of flakey client machines for that money. Worse, the number of applications that just. don't. quite. work. right.(or at all) on Windows server vs. Windows Client or RDP/ICA vs. local terminal is surprisingly large. And this isn't just fancy 3D or HD video stuff, where not working right over a fairly high latency link is expected, this is large amounts of benign-looking 2D software that just breaks when it sees a server OS or trips on some subtle single-user system assumption(one of my personal favorites was an issue with Flash that showed up in some citrix environments: if you logged in to the server locally, or went in via RDP, Flash worked normally, was installed, etc. If you logged in via ICA, even as an admin, Flash would simply not appear to be installed. No Flash-using sites would work. Period. The fix was munging some obscure registry key, for reasons unknown to any mere mortal(including Citrix support...))
Dealing with shit like that can eat up a lot of admin time on your ostensibly "efficient" centralized system. Worse, since fucking up a citrix box can ruin it for a whole bunch of users, you have to tread softly and otherwise treat the servers like servers. Citrix being a brittle bastard doesn't help(Why sure, why shouldn't updating the JRE by a point release or two break the system horribly?). Users, for good or ill, want their updates, and their flash plugins, and so forth. Unless you are dealing with crazy-secure requirements, just letting relatively inexpensive desktop admins cowboy around, swapping out and re-imaging the occasional broken config, actually seems to result in more happy user hours than does your carefully curated citrix setup.
I can only hope that the VDI-style "one desktop VM per user, spawned dynamically" at least solves some of those problems; but it is still worse than it looks...
In the US(at least for people who aren't suspected of terrorism, or in one of the other undesirable categories) we have a constitutional guarantee of due process of law, presumption of innocence in trial, and such. My understanding is that the EU is, if anything, even more expansive in declaring assorted things to be human rights(if occasionally at the expense of some of the ones that we get touchy about, like free speech...)
How does a "copying" levy, applied more or less indiscriminately to virtually all media and devices, and then paid as atonement for all the sinful copyright infringement presumed to be done with those media and devices, possibly pass "due process"(or any analogous formulation) muster? Is there some way in which making buying a stack of CD-Rs presumptive evidence of partial guilt for hypothetical future copyright infringement, and punishing it on the spot, different than treating buying a knife as presumptive evidence of partial guilt for hypothetical future murder, and making each purchase require a few days in prison?
Is there any reason to suspect that inferring somebody's culture, or hardcoding a system to use an extended concept of "locale" that includes modifications to dictionary meanings as well as dictionary spellings and accepted grammatical forms, would be any harder than other challenges in computational linguistics?
If anything, I suspect that that step would be among the easier ones, especially since simple cheats like asking the user, IP geolocation, or any of the techniques used to steer demographic targeted advertising could be used, even before you get to more difficult automated attempts to detect cultural locale information from text alone...
Perfection would be a tall order; but I suspect that 'good enough' cultural placement would probably be much easier than handling ambiguity, double meanings, wordplay, assorted flavors of humor, and other messy stuff.
I don't mean to suggest that the computational linguists have caught up to human level capabilities(because they are a damn ways off); but how could something that a few pounds of gooey neural network processes just fine not be boiled down to a collection of algorithms?
The process of boiling may be ugly, slow, and way harder than it looks; but unless humans secretly have a metaphysical language lobe, irreducible to physical laws, doing their processing, the fact that humans can do it demonstrates that it can be done(we just have to hope that there is a method more elegant than a complete simulation of the relevant brain areas; because that would be a huge pain in the ass...)
My post was half joking allusion to the fact that the company who was going to save us from IBM's truly sinister plan to overcharge for cube-drone PCs is now the largest and most popular distributor of cryptographically crippled general purpose computers in the entire consumer space and half "ha ha, only serious" allusion to the number of App store restrictions and application removals that have had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting users...
The fact that the Windows user experience is pretty dismal does not change the fact that where there are walled gardens, there will be rent-seeking landords with their own interests...
Man, there is irony so thick you can take a knife to it: Somebody, with an apparently straight face, has actually just said that Apple's Information Purification Directives will create for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths...
While I have no doubt Apple loves having the thinnest CEO in the industry, unless this facility is a grandiose brain-in-a-vat life support system or a breakthrough AI research institute, 'ol Steve probably won't have an ego to worry about in 10 years...
Now that they've taken the Xserve out back and given it the 'ol' yeller treatment', what exactly is humming away in that fancy new datacenter of theirs?
Are they actually taking their own risible advice, and packing the place floor-to-ceiling with the "3 mac-pros-per-12U-shelf-what-is-this-'LOM Card'-you-speak-of?" server configuration?
Will this facility be the world's largest collection of hackentoshes? Is this going to be the most humiliating "Get The Facts" microsoft ever gets to do? Will somebody actualy be running Darwin for reasons other than perverse experimentation?
My contention is with the only part of that statement. "Governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression" is a simple statement of fact, with which I have not the slightest disagreement.
"Only governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression", by contrast, is dangerously delusional twaddle that utterly ignores both what the private sector is capable of(everything from petty fraud and contracts of adhesion, the kangaroo courts of "mandatory binding arbitration", up to and including private sector paramilitary death squads, depending on historical circumstance). It also tends to ignore(or whitewash as purely a problem of government), the use by the private sector of the apparatus of state coercion over which they have obtained regulatory capture(privatized prison corporations writing punitive criminal codes in order to ensure a supply of new 'customers', certain uses of eminent domain, the CIA doing regime changes for United Fruit, etc.)
States are, obviously, capable of deeply dangerous and unsavory behavior, and constant vigilance is necessary. That much is true. What is dangerous is forgetting that the private sector is not without tools in this area and, in essentially every repressive state, there are willing private sector actors right behind them(those phones aren't going to tap themselves, now are they?).
While the idea that net neutrality is about turning the internet into a liberal nanny state is, naturally, unmitigated hogwash, there is a certain twisted "logic" to its appeal...
First, of course, is the "zOMG, only governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression, free markets are free as in freedom, all historical evidence to the contrary!" brigade. There are people who think that "free market" is some sort of god-given default state, not something created by the interesection of specific culture and rule of law. This tends to lead to a view where "free market" is what happens with no regulations, and every subsequent regulation is a brick in the road toward socialist fascism.
Second, where do conservative commentators have their greatest strength, in terms of market penetration, viewership numbers, etc? Radio and Cable. On the radio, there is pretty much Right win talk, apolitical top-40 pop drivel, and NPR coming in a distant third. On cable, you have the rabid ideologues on Fox, and the slightly more respectable-looking "centrist" corporatistists elsewhere. The left pretty much has comedy central.
Now, given that, there is an obvious ideological and economic alliance of interests between team Cable, RF broadcasters, and the major entertainment and "news" figures whose fortunes are alligned with theirs.
The ideological alignment helps; but even if Limbaugh were host of the "Glorious People's Revolutionary Communism Hour", he would probably be dismissing net neutrality as a plot of the capitalist running-dogs and their international banking masters of deceit. Cable and Radio are two media where right wing figures have played particularly well. The fact that they are standing in defense of their bread-and-butter medium against the unfettered internet access that would(through a mixture of streaming video and pressure to re-allocate spectrum toward wireless IP networks rather than AM/FM/UHF/VHF broadcasts) cut into that medium's viability seems entirely logical, even without the ideological component.
The trouble with the 10 year delay suggestion is that, unless you followed the marital mores of medieval Europe or something, you'll be on sprog #1 in the late 20s, at the earliest.
Still well within the window of technical feasibility; but you are starting to court increased probability of various unfortunate defects and/or expensive fertility issues....
Clearly a terrifyingly effective social engineer. Probably the next Kevin Mitnick. The hacker so deadly that the victim simply gives them access to the system. We definitely have to protect the public from that kind of menace...
Isn't this the third or fourth vaporware company to claim that it somewhere scooped up the rights to flay Commodore's carcass and smear the mutilated skin of the brand onto some boring x86 whitebox?
In these days of emulators and cheap FPGAs, it just seems tasteless to throw a plastic skin around the winning architecture and call it a C64(even more tasteless to claim to do that, then not follow through, of course...) If you want to bring the past into the present, take advantage of the fact that modern tech should be able to reproduce old gear for considerably less, even in small quantities. If you want to hearken back to the days of the architecture wars, when numerous competing systems existed, featuring a variety of exotic design choices, perhaps one of the hobby projects in creating something exotic, for its own sake, is a more appropriate homage...
I apologize if I came off sounding snippy. Putin is just the dangerous sort of bad dude that makes me really nervous.
He's smart, he has presided over a period of economic growth(exactly how much was his doing is debatable; but executive heads usually get the credit for general economic conditions); but he is openly oligarchic, his circle of old spook buddies is downright sinister, and journalists who look too closely have a nasty habit of suffering unsolved getting-shot-repeatedly-in-broad-daylight incidents...
The fact that the monazite refining process involves either "heating it with concentrated sulfuric acid to temperatures between 120 and 150 C for several hours" or application of "sodium hydroxide solution (73 %) at about 140 C" suggests that the thorium and rare earths in the naturally occuring stuff are likely to be considerably less chemically mobile than the thorium and friends in the wastewater from the refining process...
Oh, I would say that the US is enthusiastically charging in the wrong direction on a number of salient fronts. It's an ugly business. Russia had a head start, and Putin is very much the nasty(but clever) product of his KGB background; but the US is certainly doing its best to head in that direction.
Unfortunately for us, Putin at least had the good taste to practice his political vices on top of a period of economic good fortune that extended even beyond his cronies, something that American administrations have been steadily unable to do since approximately the 1970s; but "he made the trains run on time" is not exactly a compliment...
Yeah, my old-school iPAQ's 900MaH battery would probably not be happy about running a Luxeon for long...
On the other hand, with the absolutely spooky optical MEMS stuff and CMOS/CCD imagers you can get for absolute peanuts today, you might be able to whip up a little solid-state device that tracked 2 or 4 "target" LEDs located around the room's receiver and then steered a low power IR laser right into its lens...
That would still only work with a clear LOS, and with the emitter window less than 90 degrees away from being dead on target; but it would cut the power requirements pretty drastically...
Wholly impractical for handhelds, minimally practical for laptops; but having a dongle velcroed to the top of every cubicle partition would do just fine.
Either they licensed them, or they lapsed; but optical wireless remained relatively uncommon, outside of IRDA(and, of course, almost every remote control ever made, except for the earliest acoustic models and a few fancy BT or wifi networked ones).
For whatever reason, there was one area where absolutely enormous numbers of IR wireless keyboards showed up: Hotel TV entertainment systems(I think "lodgenet" may have been one, my memory is a little fuzzy). For various usurious fees, you could use the keyboard to browse through pay-per-view movies(Adult titles euphemized on your bill for your convenience when expensing the room...), play a few little games, change channels, maybe call up weather reports.
For them, since hotel guests will steal everything and the towels if it isn't nailed down, the fact that IR keyboards showed up basically nowhere else on the market was a virtue; because it reduced the keyboards' tendency to walk(I'm sure a decent hardware hacker would laugh at whatever obfuscation they did; but Joe Consumer would find that nothing he could buy would talk to the things...)
I don't know whether there was a patent licensing deal going on, or whether LOS problems and the ubiquity of cheap-and-ghastly proprietary RF dongles killed them for the home market; but I've never seen an IR keyboard outside of a hotel room.
The trouble with 3Mbit/s is that, while it is luxury by the standards of "ambient" devices(ie. anything that you would consider using X10, GSM/SMS, zigbee, assorted proprietary facilities automation stuff, etc. for) it is painfully low unless the ratio of computers to light fixtures approaches 1(and, not just light fixtures; but optically separated light fixtures that don't interfere with one another; if this is anything like RF wireless, that physical layer rate has to be shared between all devices in the same area).
The kicker is line of sight: Users don't want cellphones that stop receiving calls when they pocket them and, while desktops and laptops aren't likely to be a problem, IT pushing 100megs of patches to each workstation on Monday morning while everyone tries to access their network shares will be.
Potentially promising, if cheap enough, for thermostats and light switches and wall clocks, and every other little device that would be a lot easier if you could just talk to it at even a few hundred bits/second every few minutes; but a lousy fit for anything pocketable or data-heavy, unless they seriously bump the speed.
From unpleasant experience, I can say that 802.11G is noticably worse than basic 100mb ethernet for even a single device(not to mention, common system-imaging products tend to only support wired networks and you lose PXE and WOL). Get a roomful of systems, even with multiple high-end APs, and you are looking at sub-10Mb rates. N is better; but not as better as one might like, though a real improvement for residential scenarios that were marginal under G.
I would recommend either reading up on Putin's quietly enthusiastic suppression of opposition, close ties with a circle of crony-capitalist plutocrats who did very well in the post-soviet privatization, and vaguely sinister cult of personality.
If you have already done that and still like him; I urgently suggest checking yourself for signs of closet authoritarian nationalism...
The process will certainly be a very, very gradual one(heck, even moving a single enterprise between Windows versions can take quite a bit of doing, a Windows -> Linux transition of a government is going to take some time); but I suspect that there are three things going on: One, you'll never finish a gradual process if you don't start. Two: The more serious you sound about Linux, the cheaper your Windows licenses get. Three: It is dawning on people that being able to inspect your software is a security issue. Putin is probably willing to pay for Windows(and MS is quite likely to be willing to offer discounts that make switching economically dubious in the short to medium term); but he probably puts on his old KGB hat and mutters darkly when he thinks about American spooks crawling merrily around Redmond...
With enough power, you could certainly saturate whatever receiver tech they are using(presumably some sort of reasonably high speed photosensitive semiconductor, TFA isn't clear on what kind); but in the visible spectrum that sort of thing would be pretty noticeable. If they are actually just including some IR LEDs in their lamp array(which isn't entirely unlikely, "white" LEDs, since they are phosphor-coated blues or UVs, actually have lousy switching speeds because the phosphor keeps glowing momentarily after the diode is turned off. Though they could, I suppose, be using RGB arrays, which would have full switching speed...) "flood" interference would be less obvious; but still pretty unsubtle.
Because of little things like "eye safety" and "that guy in the truck with the generator and 5kw of stage lighting is pretty obvious at 300 meters" the classic "directional antenna and illegal power levels" that works so well on Wi-Fi probably won't work on this thing. On the other hand, TFA makes the company sound like they decided to go it alone, develop all their own patented tech and protocols and stuff. If the history of RF is anything to go on(Why hello WEP and the assorted nameless 900mhz and 2.4ghz cordless phone systems, we were just talking about you...) people who do that tend to make protocol and/or cryptographic mistakes. Assuming this stuff ever gets out of complete obscurity, I assume that snarky grey-hats will be flooding the system with garbage frames at defcon and you'll be able to buy little LED flashlights from ebay that exploit buffer overflows and execute arbitrary code on the microcontrollers in the ceiling fixtures...
It would be interesting to know exactly how much of a device's purchase price is caused by FCC anti-interference interference(sorry, couldn't resist); though there probably isn't a single number, depending on how many devices were manufactured with one model certification, and how much shielding/redesign/clocking cleverness was required to comply; but I'd be surprised if it were high enough to drive adoption of this optical stuff, unless they have the LOS issue truly figured out and are willing to accept very thin royalties on their patents...
Since complex digital devices tend to need to be tested and certified for noninterference with licenced frequencies anyway, skipping wifi doesn't save you from the FCC(also, an increasing number of devices cater to markets that want some sort of cellular connectivity, so you can't skip that RF step) and, for relatively small-run stuff, you can always just purchase OEM wifi modules, pre-certified, and jam them into your product(this tends not to apply to hugely space-sensitive things like cellphones, or mass-market items with design-unique antenna systems, like laptops; but a surprising number of devices for commercial sale just have a little USB wifi dongle, caseless but with onboard antenna, stuck in an internal USB port or header. Dirt cheap, in quantity, works just fine through a plastic case, and is certified in itself.)
If the transmitter/receiver units are cheap enough, they might have some success against the more poorly standardized low speed/low power RF stuff(zigbee, nordic, et al.) for home automation and the like; but unless their hardware is cheap and they are willing to be very generous on licensing they'll just get lost in the soup of semi or fully proprietary low speed wireless systems. Those things are already ubiquitous; but poorly interoperable.
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The "zOMG co2!" thing should get people riled up(at least here across the atlantic); but I suspect that this is(in the guise of being 'green'); basically just the same arrangement.
There are more and less efficient engine designs and(over short distances, if you don't count upstream emissions) even a main battle tank could emit zero co2 if it packed enough batteries; but, on average, this is basically going to target old cars(more likely to be noisy, lax on assorted noxious emissions) and large cars(more metal rolling, more energy needed. Period.)
It is an interesting quirk of French politics that you would bring up the co2 thing to make such a ban more palatable; but the effects of this proposal seem pretty much identical to most other schemes aimed at making dense cities more pleasant and less congested: all of them target big, loud, and noxious vehicles, through a mixture of either Orwellian cameras(Hi London!), landscaping changes aimed at 'pedestrianizing' the city, or just plain legal fiat backed by traffic cops.
In general, I get the impression that(at least among city dwellers, suburbanites commuting in are rather the target) such schemes are reasonably popular. Above a certain density, you just get smog-huffing gridlock that tends to grind out the vibrant street-level life of a city. Culling the more obnoxious vehicles, and replacing them with some mixture of better walkability, public transit, and smaller vehicles(sometimes as part of zipcar-like arrangements), tends to bring some of the charm back, and isn't too inconvenient in very high density areas. Trying to be the suburbs, when you are 10x or more as dense, just doesn't scale very well. Cities reacting against this trend are fairly common, though generally not by hitting co2 related metrics...
Thin clients have their uses(though the hardware costs are bloody usurious for what they are. For some ARM widget or a geode board I should not be paying as much as a low-end dual core desktop with HDD, CD/DVD drive, Windows licence, etc.); but there are annoying pitfalls:
With your classic Citrix or MS Windows Terminal Server, you end up paying once for the backend servers(fileservers, DB, internal web stuff, etc.), once for the terminal servers(to keep the thin clients going), once for the thin clients, and then it is happy-fun CAL time. You can re-ghost a lot of flakey client machines for that money. Worse, the number of applications that just. don't. quite. work. right.(or at all) on Windows server vs. Windows Client or RDP/ICA vs. local terminal is surprisingly large. And this isn't just fancy 3D or HD video stuff, where not working right over a fairly high latency link is expected, this is large amounts of benign-looking 2D software that just breaks when it sees a server OS or trips on some subtle single-user system assumption(one of my personal favorites was an issue with Flash that showed up in some citrix environments: if you logged in to the server locally, or went in via RDP, Flash worked normally, was installed, etc. If you logged in via ICA, even as an admin, Flash would simply not appear to be installed. No Flash-using sites would work. Period. The fix was munging some obscure registry key, for reasons unknown to any mere mortal(including Citrix support...))
Dealing with shit like that can eat up a lot of admin time on your ostensibly "efficient" centralized system. Worse, since fucking up a citrix box can ruin it for a whole bunch of users, you have to tread softly and otherwise treat the servers like servers. Citrix being a brittle bastard doesn't help(Why sure, why shouldn't updating the JRE by a point release or two break the system horribly?). Users, for good or ill, want their updates, and their flash plugins, and so forth. Unless you are dealing with crazy-secure requirements, just letting relatively inexpensive desktop admins cowboy around, swapping out and re-imaging the occasional broken config, actually seems to result in more happy user hours than does your carefully curated citrix setup.
I can only hope that the VDI-style "one desktop VM per user, spawned dynamically" at least solves some of those problems; but it is still worse than it looks...
In the US(at least for people who aren't suspected of terrorism, or in one of the other undesirable categories) we have a constitutional guarantee of due process of law, presumption of innocence in trial, and such. My understanding is that the EU is, if anything, even more expansive in declaring assorted things to be human rights(if occasionally at the expense of some of the ones that we get touchy about, like free speech...)
How does a "copying" levy, applied more or less indiscriminately to virtually all media and devices, and then paid as atonement for all the sinful copyright infringement presumed to be done with those media and devices, possibly pass "due process"(or any analogous formulation) muster? Is there some way in which making buying a stack of CD-Rs presumptive evidence of partial guilt for hypothetical future copyright infringement, and punishing it on the spot, different than treating buying a knife as presumptive evidence of partial guilt for hypothetical future murder, and making each purchase require a few days in prison?
Is there any reason to suspect that inferring somebody's culture, or hardcoding a system to use an extended concept of "locale" that includes modifications to dictionary meanings as well as dictionary spellings and accepted grammatical forms, would be any harder than other challenges in computational linguistics?
If anything, I suspect that that step would be among the easier ones, especially since simple cheats like asking the user, IP geolocation, or any of the techniques used to steer demographic targeted advertising could be used, even before you get to more difficult automated attempts to detect cultural locale information from text alone...
Perfection would be a tall order; but I suspect that 'good enough' cultural placement would probably be much easier than handling ambiguity, double meanings, wordplay, assorted flavors of humor, and other messy stuff.
I don't mean to suggest that the computational linguists have caught up to human level capabilities(because they are a damn ways off); but how could something that a few pounds of gooey neural network processes just fine not be boiled down to a collection of algorithms?
The process of boiling may be ugly, slow, and way harder than it looks; but unless humans secretly have a metaphysical language lobe, irreducible to physical laws, doing their processing, the fact that humans can do it demonstrates that it can be done(we just have to hope that there is a method more elegant than a complete simulation of the relevant brain areas; because that would be a huge pain in the ass...)
My post was half joking allusion to the fact that the company who was going to save us from IBM's truly sinister plan to overcharge for cube-drone PCs is now the largest and most popular distributor of cryptographically crippled general purpose computers in the entire consumer space and half "ha ha, only serious" allusion to the number of App store restrictions and application removals that have had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting users...
The fact that the Windows user experience is pretty dismal does not change the fact that where there are walled gardens, there will be rent-seeking landords with their own interests...
Man, there is irony so thick you can take a knife to it: Somebody, with an apparently straight face, has actually just said that Apple's Information Purification Directives will create for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths...
While I have no doubt Apple loves having the thinnest CEO in the industry, unless this facility is a grandiose brain-in-a-vat life support system or a breakthrough AI research institute, 'ol Steve probably won't have an ego to worry about in 10 years...
Now that they've taken the Xserve out back and given it the 'ol' yeller treatment', what exactly is humming away in that fancy new datacenter of theirs?
Are they actually taking their own risible advice, and packing the place floor-to-ceiling with the "3 mac-pros-per-12U-shelf-what-is-this-'LOM Card'-you-speak-of?" server configuration?
Will this facility be the world's largest collection of hackentoshes? Is this going to be the most humiliating "Get The Facts" microsoft ever gets to do? Will somebody actualy be running Darwin for reasons other than perverse experimentation?
My contention is with the only part of that statement. "Governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression" is a simple statement of fact, with which I have not the slightest disagreement.
"Only governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression", by contrast, is dangerously delusional twaddle that utterly ignores both what the private sector is capable of(everything from petty fraud and contracts of adhesion, the kangaroo courts of "mandatory binding arbitration", up to and including private sector paramilitary death squads, depending on historical circumstance). It also tends to ignore(or whitewash as purely a problem of government), the use by the private sector of the apparatus of state coercion over which they have obtained regulatory capture(privatized prison corporations writing punitive criminal codes in order to ensure a supply of new 'customers', certain uses of eminent domain, the CIA doing regime changes for United Fruit, etc.)
States are, obviously, capable of deeply dangerous and unsavory behavior, and constant vigilance is necessary. That much is true. What is dangerous is forgetting that the private sector is not without tools in this area and, in essentially every repressive state, there are willing private sector actors right behind them(those phones aren't going to tap themselves, now are they?).
While the idea that net neutrality is about turning the internet into a liberal nanny state is, naturally, unmitigated hogwash, there is a certain twisted "logic" to its appeal...
First, of course, is the "zOMG, only governments are capable of regulation and/or oppression, free markets are free as in freedom, all historical evidence to the contrary!" brigade. There are people who think that "free market" is some sort of god-given default state, not something created by the interesection of specific culture and rule of law. This tends to lead to a view where "free market" is what happens with no regulations, and every subsequent regulation is a brick in the road toward socialist fascism.
Second, where do conservative commentators have their greatest strength, in terms of market penetration, viewership numbers, etc? Radio and Cable. On the radio, there is pretty much Right win talk, apolitical top-40 pop drivel, and NPR coming in a distant third. On cable, you have the rabid ideologues on Fox, and the slightly more respectable-looking "centrist" corporatistists elsewhere. The left pretty much has comedy central.
Now, given that, there is an obvious ideological and economic alliance of interests between team Cable, RF broadcasters, and the major entertainment and "news" figures whose fortunes are alligned with theirs.
The ideological alignment helps; but even if Limbaugh were host of the "Glorious People's Revolutionary Communism Hour", he would probably be dismissing net neutrality as a plot of the capitalist running-dogs and their international banking masters of deceit. Cable and Radio are two media where right wing figures have played particularly well. The fact that they are standing in defense of their bread-and-butter medium against the unfettered internet access that would(through a mixture of streaming video and pressure to re-allocate spectrum toward wireless IP networks rather than AM/FM/UHF/VHF broadcasts) cut into that medium's viability seems entirely logical, even without the ideological component.
The trouble with the 10 year delay suggestion is that, unless you followed the marital mores of medieval Europe or something, you'll be on sprog #1 in the late 20s, at the earliest.
Still well within the window of technical feasibility; but you are starting to court increased probability of various unfortunate defects and/or expensive fertility issues....
Clearly a terrifyingly effective social engineer. Probably the next Kevin Mitnick. The hacker so deadly that the victim simply gives them access to the system. We definitely have to protect the public from that kind of menace...
Isn't this the third or fourth vaporware company to claim that it somewhere scooped up the rights to flay Commodore's carcass and smear the mutilated skin of the brand onto some boring x86 whitebox?
In these days of emulators and cheap FPGAs, it just seems tasteless to throw a plastic skin around the winning architecture and call it a C64(even more tasteless to claim to do that, then not follow through, of course...) If you want to bring the past into the present, take advantage of the fact that modern tech should be able to reproduce old gear for considerably less, even in small quantities. If you want to hearken back to the days of the architecture wars, when numerous competing systems existed, featuring a variety of exotic design choices, perhaps one of the hobby projects in creating something exotic, for its own sake, is a more appropriate homage...
I apologize if I came off sounding snippy. Putin is just the dangerous sort of bad dude that makes me really nervous.
He's smart, he has presided over a period of economic growth(exactly how much was his doing is debatable; but executive heads usually get the credit for general economic conditions); but he is openly oligarchic, his circle of old spook buddies is downright sinister, and journalists who look too closely have a nasty habit of suffering unsolved getting-shot-repeatedly-in-broad-daylight incidents...
The fact that the monazite refining process involves either "heating it with concentrated sulfuric acid to temperatures between 120 and 150 C for several hours" or application of "sodium hydroxide solution (73 %) at about 140 C" suggests that the thorium and rare earths in the naturally occuring stuff are likely to be considerably less chemically mobile than the thorium and friends in the wastewater from the refining process...
I wonder if the "local start-up" has any useful buddies in local government? It sometimes pays to be civic minded...
Oh, I would say that the US is enthusiastically charging in the wrong direction on a number of salient fronts. It's an ugly business. Russia had a head start, and Putin is very much the nasty(but clever) product of his KGB background; but the US is certainly doing its best to head in that direction.
Unfortunately for us, Putin at least had the good taste to practice his political vices on top of a period of economic good fortune that extended even beyond his cronies, something that American administrations have been steadily unable to do since approximately the 1970s; but "he made the trains run on time" is not exactly a compliment...
Yeah, my old-school iPAQ's 900MaH battery would probably not be happy about running a Luxeon for long...
On the other hand, with the absolutely spooky optical MEMS stuff and CMOS/CCD imagers you can get for absolute peanuts today, you might be able to whip up a little solid-state device that tracked 2 or 4 "target" LEDs located around the room's receiver and then steered a low power IR laser right into its lens...
That would still only work with a clear LOS, and with the emitter window less than 90 degrees away from being dead on target; but it would cut the power requirements pretty drastically...
Wholly impractical for handhelds, minimally practical for laptops; but having a dongle velcroed to the top of every cubicle partition would do just fine.
Either they licensed them, or they lapsed; but optical wireless remained relatively uncommon, outside of IRDA(and, of course, almost every remote control ever made, except for the earliest acoustic models and a few fancy BT or wifi networked ones).
For whatever reason, there was one area where absolutely enormous numbers of IR wireless keyboards showed up: Hotel TV entertainment systems(I think "lodgenet" may have been one, my memory is a little fuzzy). For various usurious fees, you could use the keyboard to browse through pay-per-view movies(Adult titles euphemized on your bill for your convenience when expensing the room...), play a few little games, change channels, maybe call up weather reports.
For them, since hotel guests will steal everything and the towels if it isn't nailed down, the fact that IR keyboards showed up basically nowhere else on the market was a virtue; because it reduced the keyboards' tendency to walk(I'm sure a decent hardware hacker would laugh at whatever obfuscation they did; but Joe Consumer would find that nothing he could buy would talk to the things...)
I don't know whether there was a patent licensing deal going on, or whether LOS problems and the ubiquity of cheap-and-ghastly proprietary RF dongles killed them for the home market; but I've never seen an IR keyboard outside of a hotel room.
The trouble with 3Mbit/s is that, while it is luxury by the standards of "ambient" devices(ie. anything that you would consider using X10, GSM/SMS, zigbee, assorted proprietary facilities automation stuff, etc. for) it is painfully low unless the ratio of computers to light fixtures approaches 1(and, not just light fixtures; but optically separated light fixtures that don't interfere with one another; if this is anything like RF wireless, that physical layer rate has to be shared between all devices in the same area).
The kicker is line of sight: Users don't want cellphones that stop receiving calls when they pocket them and, while desktops and laptops aren't likely to be a problem, IT pushing 100megs of patches to each workstation on Monday morning while everyone tries to access their network shares will be.
Potentially promising, if cheap enough, for thermostats and light switches and wall clocks, and every other little device that would be a lot easier if you could just talk to it at even a few hundred bits/second every few minutes; but a lousy fit for anything pocketable or data-heavy, unless they seriously bump the speed.
From unpleasant experience, I can say that 802.11G is noticably worse than basic 100mb ethernet for even a single device(not to mention, common system-imaging products tend to only support wired networks and you lose PXE and WOL). Get a roomful of systems, even with multiple high-end APs, and you are looking at sub-10Mb rates. N is better; but not as better as one might like, though a real improvement for residential scenarios that were marginal under G.
I would recommend either reading up on Putin's quietly enthusiastic suppression of opposition, close ties with a circle of crony-capitalist plutocrats who did very well in the post-soviet privatization, and vaguely sinister cult of personality.
If you have already done that and still like him; I urgently suggest checking yourself for signs of closet authoritarian nationalism...
The process will certainly be a very, very gradual one(heck, even moving a single enterprise between Windows versions can take quite a bit of doing, a Windows -> Linux transition of a government is going to take some time); but I suspect that there are three things going on: One, you'll never finish a gradual process if you don't start. Two: The more serious you sound about Linux, the cheaper your Windows licenses get. Three: It is dawning on people that being able to inspect your software is a security issue. Putin is probably willing to pay for Windows(and MS is quite likely to be willing to offer discounts that make switching economically dubious in the short to medium term); but he probably puts on his old KGB hat and mutters darkly when he thinks about American spooks crawling merrily around Redmond...
With enough power, you could certainly saturate whatever receiver tech they are using(presumably some sort of reasonably high speed photosensitive semiconductor, TFA isn't clear on what kind); but in the visible spectrum that sort of thing would be pretty noticeable. If they are actually just including some IR LEDs in their lamp array(which isn't entirely unlikely, "white" LEDs, since they are phosphor-coated blues or UVs, actually have lousy switching speeds because the phosphor keeps glowing momentarily after the diode is turned off. Though they could, I suppose, be using RGB arrays, which would have full switching speed...) "flood" interference would be less obvious; but still pretty unsubtle.
Because of little things like "eye safety" and "that guy in the truck with the generator and 5kw of stage lighting is pretty obvious at 300 meters" the classic "directional antenna and illegal power levels" that works so well on Wi-Fi probably won't work on this thing. On the other hand, TFA makes the company sound like they decided to go it alone, develop all their own patented tech and protocols and stuff. If the history of RF is anything to go on(Why hello WEP and the assorted nameless 900mhz and 2.4ghz cordless phone systems, we were just talking about you...) people who do that tend to make protocol and/or cryptographic mistakes. Assuming this stuff ever gets out of complete obscurity, I assume that snarky grey-hats will be flooding the system with garbage frames at defcon and you'll be able to buy little LED flashlights from ebay that exploit buffer overflows and execute arbitrary code on the microcontrollers in the ceiling fixtures...
It would be interesting to know exactly how much of a device's purchase price is caused by FCC anti-interference interference(sorry, couldn't resist); though there probably isn't a single number, depending on how many devices were manufactured with one model certification, and how much shielding/redesign/clocking cleverness was required to comply; but I'd be surprised if it were high enough to drive adoption of this optical stuff, unless they have the LOS issue truly figured out and are willing to accept very thin royalties on their patents...
Since complex digital devices tend to need to be tested and certified for noninterference with licenced frequencies anyway, skipping wifi doesn't save you from the FCC(also, an increasing number of devices cater to markets that want some sort of cellular connectivity, so you can't skip that RF step) and, for relatively small-run stuff, you can always just purchase OEM wifi modules, pre-certified, and jam them into your product(this tends not to apply to hugely space-sensitive things like cellphones, or mass-market items with design-unique antenna systems, like laptops; but a surprising number of devices for commercial sale just have a little USB wifi dongle, caseless but with onboard antenna, stuck in an internal USB port or header. Dirt cheap, in quantity, works just fine through a plastic case, and is certified in itself.)
If the transmitter/receiver units are cheap enough, they might have some success against the more poorly standardized low speed/low power RF stuff(zigbee, nordic, et al.) for home automation and the like; but unless their hardware is cheap and they are willing to be very generous on licensing they'll just get lost in the soup of semi or fully proprietary low speed wireless systems. Those things are already ubiquitous; but poorly interoperable.