However some would argue that software is becoming the foundation of many aspects of daily life, and that giving control or ownership of those tools to organizations with little or no responsiblity to the general public is giving up a slice of your freedom. If there is only one candidate what does voting mean? If you life in a company town, buy a the company store, and rent a company house, are you free?
But then other "essentials" have been "closed source" - water, electricity, the postal service, broadcast media. In many cases those were provided by government agencies or by private companies that were under government regulation; and supposedly the government was responsive to the will of the people and looking out for their welfare.
So maybe freedom comes down to choices, and to access to information so that choices may be made in an intellegent manner. How meaningful those choices are is important, a single and closed source video game is much less restricting than a one party State. But turning the tools and information channels used by society over to a small group is asking to loose all meaningful freedoms.
I will agree that helping NGOs such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International is at least as important as helping the FSF, but I don't think that the FSF and DFN are minor and can be ignored.
MS starts off saying how creative they are, saying that the big processor houses wouldn't have thought of such a chip five years ago.
Well, maybe not quite as integrated as such devices are being done today, but not all that far away "back then".
Motorola came out with the MPC821 a few years ago, with LCD driver build in, then the MPC823 with LCD/VGA support on the chip. Plus 10Base and USB ports, a couple of simple serial and I2C And SPI for controlling any peripherals you needed to. Oh, and it could talk to a framer to get T1/E1/ADSL. Not the fastest, at 40-80 MIPS, but maybe enough for settops, toasters, and microwave ovens.
It certainly seems as if this is a attempt to handle both the DoJ and inroads for compeating operating systems. The MS marketing machine certainly will make this impressive to some consumers.
Too bad open source RTOSes such as RTEMS haven't gotten much attention. They beat WinCE hands down, be it memory footprint, performance, or ease of use. And they are true hard real time OSes, not the MS "well, just use a faster processor and maybe it'll be quick enough" sort-of-real-time-OS.
Glycerol's refractive index is 1.47 or so, plain water or even salt water is 1.3X - however all the organics making up celluar material are higher. Glycerol has been used for a long time for tissue preparation for microscope viewing, making the tissue more transparent.
Note that glycerol (glycerin) is relatively non-toxic (it's been used in food for decades) and fairly quickly metabolised by the body (the effect is short-lived, provided you're alive).
Wrong - many libraries have been using computers for years (decades). It was that hardware was expensive, so you didn't see terminals everywhere for access to the card catalog. Computers were limited, so many libraries didn't have the machine resources to support the style of database needed for a card catalog.
And Make it web based, use SQL and XML. is, I believe, what is beening asked for. It's easy to say "use XML", it's another thing to write the XML and supporting software.
What is Applied Microwave and Wireless? Is it peer-reviewed?
I've seen it, and remember it as more of an advertiser supported `zine rather than a journal with reviewed articles. The sort of publication to announce your new product in.
Indeed, I suspect that Ms Love and online music sharing and publishing and distribution have a lot to do with it. The RIAA is making an move at self preservation.
Studios and recording-production are getting quite cheap now, and easier to do. This undercuts the need for the recording side infrastructure.
Publicity and distribution are the remaining stronghold of the big players in the recording industry. Fast `net access is beginning to make distribution easier; on-line ordering makes it possible to get the higher quality music on CDs to buyers without the music stores and distribution channels.
Publicity - well, TV and radio ads aren't that easy, nor splashs in the local papers. But on-line presence is a start. News groups can help to, although the need for moderated groups arise to keep the S/N ratio reasonable.
And the bad press the artists could generate while the RIAA is going after Napster and kin is important. Expect a push for more and tougher laws on the sharing of music (and other published, copywrited goods) and a narrowing of legitimate use.
A problem with systems like this is that they are intended to be able to capture all of an Email if that's what is needed. So we know that such capabilites must exist within Carnivore.
Now, this should only be done when a full wiretap authorization has been given by a court order. The part that needs Real Close Examination is the logging of enabling and disabling such captures. If that's sloppy or has holes then anyone could be monitored without proper authorization.
Beyond that one should be asking what will be done to review that logging - will this be done by the FBI, making sure that the FBI is only watching who the courst have said they could? Self monitoring has certain weaknesses...
This also applies to the "trace and trap" or "pen register" modes, where only the From: and To: information is being captured. The code review can confirm that the mode works as it should, but it also should confirm that moving from trap and trace to full capture mode gets logged as well
US citizens might consider the establishment of a standard for wiretap authorization; perhaps as a rider to CALEA. This would involve digital signatures for enabling levels of authorization, with an indirect process to generate the electronic command - the FBI asks, the court grants and sends the enabling command. And the code is well reviewed for any holes in the enabling and logging logic.
When UNIX was created there were no desktop computers more powerfull than something like a PDP8. 4K words doesn't cut it for most apps.
UNIX was created to deliever useful computer access to the desktop. That meant teletypes and their kin, and early CRT terminals. Slow, text mode - you didn't want to type much nor get much text back. How many/.ers remember when a good percentage of UNIX commands just returned '? ' for an error message? Great if you were familiar with the command and simply had mistyped something.
The OS is not the user interface. A good OS works with a number of models of user interface. A good OS does have functions and libraries to help with common operations; a good OS might set standards on how a program should handle reconfiguring (ie - not support but guidlines or rules). Just becasue MS has smooshed the layers together to make Windows, then split them apart in a different fashion but not drawn a lot of attention to this, does mean that other OSes have to abandon good partitioning.
Hmmm... I've got an old 11/04 that one could cannibalize. Nice husky power supply, 19 inch rack about 4 feet high. Couple of 5 meg RL01 drives, plus the 8 inch floppies. But I'd have to find the 200 pounds of lead weights that sit in the bottom of the rack to keep it from tipping over.
Actually while boiling liquid nitrogen removes heat from the LN2 well, it's not so good at cooling what's making the heat. The N2 gas forms an insulating layer around the heat source, greatly reducing the heat transfer. There's several LN2 tricks based on this, such as pouring the LN2 onto your slightly inclined hand where it runs off in a spray of small drops trailing clouds. Our, for the brave, "drinking" some LN2 - the gas generated keeps the liquid away from your mouth if you do it just right.
The folks doing freezing prep of bio samples run into this. They sometimes use a slush of propane and a little LN2 (-190C); the propane boils high enough (-42C) that it stays liquid when the sample is dumped into it, giving much faster cooling rates. Propane is a poor solvent, nonconductive, and otherwise resonalbel inert, so it would work well unless you got a flame or spark too near. Then the cooling system would sort'a reverse. But that's give you an excuse to do a hardware upgrade.
While I agree with the closing paragraph, there are some points that I feel jsut aren't correct.
The examples given apply better to the USA than elsewhere, although Europe after the Black Death is a far good fit as well.
Guilds were earlier forms of "centralized" sourcing. You could only buy certain things from the guild's members, not just anyone.
The early copywrite laws grew out of laws intended to allow printers to stomp out competition, supposedly just those reprinting the printers' books. While unauthorised printing was common, it wasn't blessed, just hard to stop given slow communications and lack of international agreements (remember that many of the pirates were privateers, authorised by one government to attack ships sailing under another's flag.)
IP wasn't an issue in the modern sense. Patent often meant that the state was giving you an exclusive right to make or sell something, sometimes with no time limit on the restriction of others.
The "open" model seems to exist when there is fresh, uncliamed, and mostly unexplored, territory to move into. In the past this meant land, in the last 150 years it has come to include market and information, the Internet being an extreme example of this. These new territories allow for small providers, alternative methods, and isolation from the mainstream that helps differences come into being and grow.
Once enough individuals and institutions have carved outa fair size slice of the new land, those alternatives become a threat. There's little more open space, to grow you need to take away from others. Tribes form, social standards evolve, strangers are unsafe because they might be there to take from you.
The new territory of information is different in that we're a long way from running out of room. It's cheap to clone information, so cheap that broadcast media just throws information into the air without any idea of who is receiving it. Yes, a TV station cost money to run, but compare that to the cost of making 10s or 100s of thousands of films or videos. Some of the rules have changed, yet we - individuals, businesses, governments, haven't really adapted to those changes. No, this doesn't mean "copyright is wrong" or whatever, just that costs have taken a great drop and there's lots of room for alternative ideas. Consider the joke about cable or satellite TV - now you can watch I Love Lucy reruns on 500 channels! That's the old style - multiply the existing product, not create new alternative products.
Change scares most people, differences worry most people. It's tough to get them to see otherwise.
The same thing is true for people who claim they are 'racially profiled.' Stop dressing like a street thug and claiming it's racism when
you're hassled regularly!
For sure - that city councilman in Seattle was dressed like a street thug, no doubt. That'll teach him to wear a business suit.
But this all to often means blocking everything except traffic and weather reports.
In a community that has a mix of social/political groups, I have seen and heard requests and demands to supress just about every viewpoint. Fashion magazines because they exploit women and have ads for appearl made with fur and/or leather. Liberal magazines that are to the left of the old American Opinion. New Farm becasue it is against mega-agribiz, and thus is a Communist tool. Chemistry & Industry because it has ads from agrichem businesses that are exploiting the famer and ruining the ecosystem. Christian nudists that want the library to carry naturalist magazines, other Christians and "Womans' Lib" groups that want the library to stop getting fashion magazines because of all the skin being shown. People who like wine/beer and were allowed small tastes when childern (as in Europe) face off against teatotallers who want to get rid of the magazines about wine and beer. People who think that Buddists, Jains, and Mormons are bad, false religions and allowing mention of them would lead children and simple folk astray; don't even think about Shinto and Wiccan. (and if you think that's weird, a several-years-ago edition of MS Encarta omitted almost every one of those religions because "they're controversial and not part of the US culture.")
The lowest common denominator is almost a non-pass filter. You can set guidelines and access control for children; for the Web this may mean a subnet with a "whire list" filter. Blacklists don't work, they miss sites and are slow to keep up with changes. Naughty word blocking isn't smart enough, if nothing else creative spelling and foreign words.
As I said - almost everyone is a lawbreaker, and thus by your definition a criminal. Have you ever driven over the speed limit? Had a parking meter expire, returned to you car before you got ticketed, and not dropped in some money to cover the expired time? Burned a piece of trash in your fireplace? Jaywalked? Forgotten to list some income on your tax form? Watered your lawn or garden on a conservation day?
If every lawbreaker was put into jail, we'd end up like the planet in Venus on the Half Shell, with the entire population behind bars. Or Niven's not-too-distant-Earth in the Known Space series, where littering and jaywalking are punishable by death (to get spare parts)
As for anarchy and right minded people, some might say that's exactly what a right-minded person would want. Too many laws, too many laybreakers, doesn't bring piece and security but rather destroys them.
Yup - gotta watch out for thos Muslims like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols - obvious ragheads.
As for being a criminal and having nothing to worry about - I've seen a number of estimates of the percentage of citizens that are technically lawbreakers. Most countries have an enormous number of rules, regulations, and laws. The estimates are that the majority of people have broken some of those laws, perhaps intentionally, perhaps unwittingly. In some cases the authorities knew of the transgression but did not act; later when the individual became annoying for some other reason, out pops the records of those criminal acts and into the slammeer with the criminal.
Now, whe nyou start protesting the building of a hazardous waste processing plant next to your house, do you want everything you'ce said/written/emailed/done on record, waiting for "friend of economic development" to dig them out and start legal processes against you?
I think James Schmitz and Thomas Jeffereson had it right.
It's a packet snooper plus a filter to recognize Email, then check the sender and destination against a list of monitored Email addresses.
Almost off the shelf, and it needs to be tied into the packet stream at the Email host so as to see all packets.
Releasing the sources it like describing how a old fashion wiretap works - you can get the parts, you know how to hook it up, but if you can't get at someone else's phone line then it does you no good. And the telephone company isn't likely to let you into their C.O., nor is an ISP likely to let you hook you packet sniffer up to the ISP's hardware.
So did RSX, RSTS, and TOPS-10 - all before the VAX and VMS. You just set the number of backups you wanted to keep, and the OS deleted the oldest backup when you created backup N+1.
Then there was better wildcards del Z*A to delete anything starting with an Z and ending with a A. Typing "copy" would get a prompt "from?" and then if you didn't give both source and destination you'd get the "to?" prompt.
And all the command switches were the same on each command, such as/REPLACE and/NOREPLACE for eacn and every command that it made sense for.
It's real - Lon is another home controller network that was supposed to end up in every light switch and light socket, and everything else in your home. Big address space so you could do that, hasn't really caught on. Several of the early supporting companies have pulled out or deemphasized their efforts.
Hoaxing isn't a recent phenomenon. Clemans/Twain did it, EA Poe did it, there was the "New York is sinking" hoax early in the 19th century. There's examples all through history.
What damages are there ? Bent your dignity by waxing ecstatic over it? Bought plane tickets to Russia so you could pick some up ? Did they intent to commit fraud by taking money and not delivering?
True, it's Just A Pipe. But saying it will fail becauser there's no standard for content is like saying Ethernet will fail because it has not content standards.
Bluetooth is IrLA on steriods - it isn't line of site, being RF, it can go 10 to 100 meters, and it supports 7 nodes per master radio. They call that a piconet, beyound that you can connect a number of piconets. Not too bad for wiring a wireless home, one piconet per room.
There is a set of "profiles" that are specs on how to communicate between boxes. The profiles I know of are
Generic Access Profile
Service Discovery Profile Application Profile
Cordless Telephony Profile
Intercom Profile
Serial Port profile
Headset Profile
Dial-up Networking Profile
Fax Profile
Lan Access Profile
Generic Object Exchange Profile
Object Push Profile
File Transfer Profile
Synchronization Profile
Looks like a good start to me... the protocol is royality free, the specs (~1500 pages) on CD do cost $100 - something of a bummer, but you can get them on-line at www.bluetooth.com
Might never "kick in" for you, as you're grown. A lot of things like the shape of your eyes get determined early in your life as your body grows. To change would take reshaping - tearing down and building up at the same time - which the body does to a limited extent. Your eyes would have to be reshapped and the surrounding bone structure redone as well.
YOu get $10 enjoyment from one chapter ofa book? Is't this like seeing the trailers for a movie and saying that you've gotten the full enjoyment of the movie (well, for some films that would be true). Some might say that reading the start of a suspense/mystery novel and not being able to finish it gives you negative enjoyment. I know someone who went out at 1AM and drive miles to get another copy of a book because the last 50 pages was missing, and they couldn't sleep until they'd read the entire thing.
I will agree that 3/4 of the readers paying is far to high of a percentage. Better to base it on how much he takes in. What's better pay - 75% of 5000 downloads or 1% of a million downloads.
The tethers work on collection electrons or ions from plasma. You don't get ionized plasmas in dense gases (normal pressure air) without pumping in a lot of power. The stuff the tether taps is way above what we think of as air - say 100 to 200 km up - no birds, airplanes, and so on.
For a look at some of the natural stuff that goes on in the lower reaches of the area of interest try : http://www.sciam.com/explorations/012097sprites/01 2097explorations.html
Ah - but total knowledge of what others are doing has effects beyond simple body modesty
Are you cheating on your SOs? Embezzling? Consuming illegal substances (booze in the Middle East, Khat in the US) ? Praying to the wrong Ghods? Writing agaisnt the government?
Somewhere in the world one or more of those activies would get you into deep trouble. A fully transparent society would seem to lead either to a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail or worse, or a small-l libratarian condition where most activities are OK.
In either case expect struggles, if not out and out warfare. Most people have certain activities that they can not tolerate other people doing.
Slashdot Mirror
But then other "essentials" have been "closed source" - water, electricity, the postal service, broadcast media. In many cases those were provided by government agencies or by private companies that were under government regulation; and supposedly the government was responsive to the will of the people and looking out for their welfare.
So maybe freedom comes down to choices, and to access to information so that choices may be made in an intellegent manner. How meaningful those choices are is important, a single and closed source video game is much less restricting than a one party State. But turning the tools and information channels used by society over to a small group is asking to loose all meaningful freedoms.
I will agree that helping NGOs such as the Red Cross and Amnesty International is at least as important as helping the FSF, but I don't think that the FSF and DFN are minor and can be ignored.
Motorola came out with the MPC821 a few years ago, with LCD driver build in, then the MPC823 with LCD/VGA support on the chip. Plus 10Base and USB ports, a couple of simple serial and I2C And SPI for controlling any peripherals you needed to. Oh, and it could talk to a framer to get T1/E1/ADSL. Not the fastest, at 40-80 MIPS, but maybe enough for settops, toasters, and microwave ovens.
It certainly seems as if this is a attempt to handle both the DoJ and inroads for compeating operating systems. The MS marketing machine certainly will make this impressive to some consumers.
Too bad open source RTOSes such as RTEMS haven't gotten much attention. They beat WinCE hands down, be it memory footprint, performance, or ease of use. And they are true hard real time OSes, not the MS "well, just use a faster processor and maybe it'll be quick enough" sort-of-real-time-OS.
They're using Toshiba for the actual silicon, although Tos may be going to some fab house. One way or another, Microsoft isn't buying a fab house.
Note that glycerol (glycerin) is relatively non-toxic (it's been used in food for decades) and fairly quickly metabolised by the body (the effect is short-lived, provided you're alive).
And Make it web based, use SQL and XML. is, I believe, what is beening asked for. It's easy to say "use XML", it's another thing to write the XML and supporting software.
Studios and recording-production are getting quite cheap now, and easier to do. This undercuts the need for the recording side infrastructure.
Publicity and distribution are the remaining stronghold of the big players in the recording industry. Fast `net access is beginning to make distribution easier; on-line ordering makes it possible to get the higher quality music on CDs to buyers without the music stores and distribution channels.
Publicity - well, TV and radio ads aren't that easy, nor splashs in the local papers. But on-line presence is a start. News groups can help to, although the need for moderated groups arise to keep the S/N ratio reasonable.
And the bad press the artists could generate while the RIAA is going after Napster and kin is important. Expect a push for more and tougher laws on the sharing of music (and other published, copywrited goods) and a narrowing of legitimate use.
Now, this should only be done when a full wiretap authorization has been given by a court order. The part that needs Real Close Examination is the logging of enabling and disabling such captures. If that's sloppy or has holes then anyone could be monitored without proper authorization.
Beyond that one should be asking what will be done to review that logging - will this be done by the FBI, making sure that the FBI is only watching who the courst have said they could? Self monitoring has certain weaknesses ...
This also applies to the "trace and trap" or "pen register" modes, where only the From: and To: information is being captured. The code review can confirm that the mode works as it should, but it also should confirm that moving from trap and trace to full capture mode gets logged as well
US citizens might consider the establishment of a standard for wiretap authorization; perhaps as a rider to CALEA. This would involve digital signatures for enabling levels of authorization, with an indirect process to generate the electronic command - the FBI asks, the court grants and sends the enabling command. And the code is well reviewed for any holes in the enabling and logging logic.
UNIX was created to deliever useful computer access to the desktop. That meant teletypes and their kin, and early CRT terminals. Slow, text mode - you didn't want to type much nor get much text back. How many /.ers remember when a good percentage of UNIX commands just returned ' ? ' for an error message? Great if you were familiar with the command and simply had mistyped something.
The OS is not the user interface. A good OS works with a number of models of user interface. A good OS does have functions and libraries to help with common operations; a good OS might set standards on how a program should handle reconfiguring (ie - not support but guidlines or rules). Just becasue MS has smooshed the layers together to make Windows, then split them apart in a different fashion but not drawn a lot of attention to this, does mean that other OSes have to abandon good partitioning.
Hmmm ... I've got an old 11/04 that one could cannibalize. Nice husky power supply, 19 inch rack about 4 feet high. Couple of 5 meg RL01 drives, plus the 8 inch floppies. But I'd have to find the 200 pounds of lead weights that sit in the bottom of the rack to keep it from tipping over.
The folks doing freezing prep of bio samples run into this. They sometimes use a slush of propane and a little LN2 (-190C); the propane boils high enough (-42C) that it stays liquid when the sample is dumped into it, giving much faster cooling rates. Propane is a poor solvent, nonconductive, and otherwise resonalbel inert, so it would work well unless you got a flame or spark too near. Then the cooling system would sort'a reverse. But that's give you an excuse to do a hardware upgrade.
The examples given apply better to the USA than elsewhere, although Europe after the Black Death is a far good fit as well.
Guilds were earlier forms of "centralized" sourcing. You could only buy certain things from the guild's members, not just anyone.
The early copywrite laws grew out of laws intended to allow printers to stomp out competition, supposedly just those reprinting the printers' books. While unauthorised printing was common, it wasn't blessed, just hard to stop given slow communications and lack of international agreements (remember that many of the pirates were privateers, authorised by one government to attack ships sailing under another's flag.)
IP wasn't an issue in the modern sense. Patent often meant that the state was giving you an exclusive right to make or sell something, sometimes with no time limit on the restriction of others.
The "open" model seems to exist when there is fresh, uncliamed, and mostly unexplored, territory to move into. In the past this meant land, in the last 150 years it has come to include market and information, the Internet being an extreme example of this. These new territories allow for small providers, alternative methods, and isolation from the mainstream that helps differences come into being and grow.
Once enough individuals and institutions have carved outa fair size slice of the new land, those alternatives become a threat. There's little more open space, to grow you need to take away from others. Tribes form, social standards evolve, strangers are unsafe because they might be there to take from you.
The new territory of information is different in that we're a long way from running out of room. It's cheap to clone information, so cheap that broadcast media just throws information into the air without any idea of who is receiving it. Yes, a TV station cost money to run, but compare that to the cost of making 10s or 100s of thousands of films or videos. Some of the rules have changed, yet we - individuals, businesses, governments, haven't really adapted to those changes. No, this doesn't mean "copyright is wrong" or whatever, just that costs have taken a great drop and there's lots of room for alternative ideas. Consider the joke about cable or satellite TV - now you can watch I Love Lucy reruns on 500 channels! That's the old style - multiply the existing product, not create new alternative products.
Change scares most people, differences worry most people. It's tough to get them to see otherwise.
In a community that has a mix of social/political groups, I have seen and heard requests and demands to supress just about every viewpoint. Fashion magazines because they exploit women and have ads for appearl made with fur and/or leather. Liberal magazines that are to the left of the old American Opinion. New Farm becasue it is against mega-agribiz, and thus is a Communist tool. Chemistry & Industry because it has ads from agrichem businesses that are exploiting the famer and ruining the ecosystem. Christian nudists that want the library to carry naturalist magazines, other Christians and "Womans' Lib" groups that want the library to stop getting fashion magazines because of all the skin being shown. People who like wine/beer and were allowed small tastes when childern (as in Europe) face off against teatotallers who want to get rid of the magazines about wine and beer. People who think that Buddists, Jains, and Mormons are bad, false religions and allowing mention of them would lead children and simple folk astray; don't even think about Shinto and Wiccan. (and if you think that's weird, a several-years-ago edition of MS Encarta omitted almost every one of those religions because "they're controversial and not part of the US culture.")
The lowest common denominator is almost a non-pass filter. You can set guidelines and access control for children; for the Web this may mean a subnet with a "whire list" filter. Blacklists don't work, they miss sites and are slow to keep up with changes. Naughty word blocking isn't smart enough, if nothing else creative spelling and foreign words.
If every lawbreaker was put into jail, we'd end up like the planet in Venus on the Half Shell, with the entire population behind bars. Or Niven's not-too-distant-Earth in the Known Space series, where littering and jaywalking are punishable by death (to get spare parts)
As for anarchy and right minded people, some might say that's exactly what a right-minded person would want. Too many laws, too many laybreakers, doesn't bring piece and security but rather destroys them.
As for being a criminal and having nothing to worry about - I've seen a number of estimates of the percentage of citizens that are technically lawbreakers. Most countries have an enormous number of rules, regulations, and laws. The estimates are that the majority of people have broken some of those laws, perhaps intentionally, perhaps unwittingly. In some cases the authorities knew of the transgression but did not act; later when the individual became annoying for some other reason, out pops the records of those criminal acts and into the slammeer with the criminal.
Now, whe nyou start protesting the building of a hazardous waste processing plant next to your house, do you want everything you'ce said/written/emailed/done on record, waiting for "friend of economic development" to dig them out and start legal processes against you?
I think James Schmitz and Thomas Jeffereson had it right.
Almost off the shelf, and it needs to be tied into the packet stream at the Email host so as to see all packets.
Releasing the sources it like describing how a old fashion wiretap works - you can get the parts, you know how to hook it up, but if you can't get at someone else's phone line then it does you no good. And the telephone company isn't likely to let you into their C.O., nor is an ISP likely to let you hook you packet sniffer up to the ISP's hardware.
Then there was better wildcards del Z*A to delete anything starting with an Z and ending with a A. Typing "copy" would get a prompt "from?" and then if you didn't give both source and destination you'd get the "to?" prompt.
And all the command switches were the same on each command, such as /REPLACE and /NOREPLACE for eacn and every command that it made sense for.
(the Good Old Days ... sigh)
It's real - Lon is another home controller network that was supposed to end up in every light switch and light socket, and everything else in your home. Big address space so you could do that, hasn't really caught on. Several of the early supporting companies have pulled out or deemphasized their efforts.
What damages are there ? Bent your dignity by waxing ecstatic over it? Bought plane tickets to Russia so you could pick some up ? Did they intent to commit fraud by taking money and not delivering?
The more you know, the more jokes you get.
Bluetooth is IrLA on steriods - it isn't line of site, being RF, it can go 10 to 100 meters, and it supports 7 nodes per master radio. They call that a piconet, beyound that you can connect a number of piconets. Not too bad for wiring a wireless home, one piconet per room.
There is a set of "profiles" that are specs on how to communicate between boxes. The profiles I know of are
Generic Access Profile
Service Discovery Profile Application Profile
Cordless Telephony Profile
Intercom Profile
Serial Port profile
Headset Profile
Dial-up Networking Profile
Fax Profile
Lan Access Profile
Generic Object Exchange Profile
Object Push Profile
File Transfer Profile
Synchronization Profile
Looks like a good start to me ... the protocol is royality free, the specs (~1500 pages) on CD do cost $100 - something of a bummer, but you can get them on-line at www.bluetooth.com
Might never "kick in" for you, as you're grown. A lot of things like the shape of your eyes get determined early in your life as your body grows. To change would take reshaping - tearing down and building up at the same time - which the body does to a limited extent. Your eyes would have to be reshapped and the surrounding bone structure redone as well.
I will agree that 3/4 of the readers paying is far to high of a percentage. Better to base it on how much he takes in. What's better pay - 75% of 5000 downloads or 1% of a million downloads.
But it is an iteresting experiment.
For a look at some of the natural stuff that goes on in the lower reaches of the area of interest try :1 2097explorations.html
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/012097sprites/0
Are you cheating on your SOs? Embezzling? Consuming illegal substances (booze in the Middle East, Khat in the US) ? Praying to the wrong Ghods? Writing agaisnt the government?
Somewhere in the world one or more of those activies would get you into deep trouble. A fully transparent society would seem to lead either to a rather oppressive State with a large percentage of the population in jail or worse, or a small-l libratarian condition where most activities are OK.
In either case expect struggles, if not out and out warfare. Most people have certain activities that they can not tolerate other people doing.