Yup - it was a Bob Shaw short story, and the full slow glass set did develop the theme of snooping on people. The last story in the timeline end with a "no privacy" scenario with dust size bits of slow glass scattered about, servering in effect as microscopic video recoders.
I wonder if that had any impact on the title choice of this book.
Algol68 would have been a better, more recent, example; certainly less successful and IMO less usable. But ADA was another even more recent, and one that actually functions.
Several posting have sid that in effect computer/network/IP telephony is a mess of proprietary hardware, softwware, and protocols. This isn't quite true - MVIP, SCSA, and H.100 are hardware standards for telephony servers (mostly specing big PCD-TDM highways to carry all that voice). Most platforms are one of these plus PCI. There some standards on the API side, CSTA, TAPI, TSAPI, although they've been rather weak 'standards'. H.323 is the recent multimedia over an IP network standard.
A lot of a CT application or product is in the rest of the software - switch functions, human interface, feature set. I suspect that this GPL'd package will need a fair amount of bashing at the interface level to get it into shape for platform portability, but it should have some real value.
You might say the same about Microsoft and their top management. The drive and ego is good in the early days, it kick starts the company. But after awhile...
The link is/.'d, so I can't read it. But many if not most of the posts are along the lines of "but microsoft is worse". I don't think that's the point.
Rather than getting into pissing wars of which current OS is "the best", look at it from the standpoint of "what would make a really good OS?"
Unix has survived in part because it does a pretty good job for people who have time to learn the parts they need to know, or have someone else learn that and support the end user. It was also a cheap multiuser OS for the academic world, which gave it some incredible inertia in regards to replacement, after desktop machines became well established.
And then herewas the fact that you had the sources - you could get under the hood and diddle with it. Great for compsci folks, not so useful for most anyone else. And the `386 based *nix varient have given that access to almost anyone who wants it.
But you really can't forget the the general user - the people who want to use the computer the way they use a copy machine or used to use a typewriter. It's those people who create the volume of sales that helps makes the hardware affordable. Ignore them, stick with a nerds' OS, and don't be surprised if later generations of hardware run a certain OS family much better than the non-competitors. Instructions to support driver operations for hardware that has no released documentation, hardware that is tailored to fit that one OS.
Unix has shortcomings. It was the third OS I learned, when I hit the 4th I couldn't help comparing the two and wishing they could be merged. Years later when I first ran into MS-DOS I was amazed at what was missing - no loadable device drivers ? No easy way to extend the CLI ? But the common hardware platfor got rid of things like using control-shift-buckybit for cursor control, and it was somewhat easier to use.
Unix has somewhat remained in the world of the geeks, even though it is slowly spreading. But it still could use some fixing. And the issue of compatibility gets in the way - if you can't run an old app on the new version, is it really *nix?
And the embedded processor world needs something other than Unix (and most certainly something other than WinCE). I don't want to have a 32 bit processor with 8 megs of RAM to control my microwave, when an 8 bit'r with a low footprint embedded OS will do the job. I mean, how often do you really need to use Emacs to prepare dinner?
So don't be mini-BillG types, with one true OS. experiment, come up with alternatives. You'll learn things, and might even create something the non0tech types end up using.
Righto - microtubals are on the right scale of size for quantum effects. Almost every cell type has microtubes - they seem to be the basic scafolding of cells if nothing else - so any cell could "be involve with quantum computing".
What's not been shown is does "quantum computing" take place in the microtubes, and if so how does it couple to the macroscale world.
As for the glail cell paper - as they state it's not (yet) known if this effect is something that takes place under normal conditions or under abnormal stress.
Note that "out of body" experiances generally take place under stress - near death, drugs suck as ketamine, breathing high levels of CO2 (don't try this at home - at take 30%CO2 70% O2 and it can damage you), and so on. If the effects seen are triggered by abnormal conditions around the cells, this might be an underlying cause behind the effects, explaining how the differing triggers can give the same result.
I'd bet on the neuron modulation function as the most likely, given that the ion glutamte diffusion s are slower than neuron to neuron triggering. I'd agree that this may be one source of the bundling observed, groups of neurons being affected by the slower, wider area effect of the glia.
Like or hate Katz, asking for a shorter article on this subject shows how much you care about it. But then, being an AC seems to show you don't care about who/what you are.
The cameras have decent dynamic range, and can handle low light levels. I think that they'd take headlights OK, perhaps better than simple mirrors because they could "compress" the intensity range and keep those headlights from blinding you.
You can even get some night vision amplification, and a interior light sensor should allow the LCD displays to have their illumination adjusted to the current lighting in the car - as bright as needed, but not too bright, and auto-adjust as you go through a tunnel.
As stated above, there's a hugh established base for the production, distribution, and use of petroleum based fuels. The problem with having a wide range of choices with physical things is that the space taken by all of them gets in the way. Adding several new fuel types means additional storage for those, and more "pumps". Plus the higher price of the cars, in the early low production volume stages, means that people are less likely to by them. Getting tax monies to offset the higher costs is a political problem.
Ethanol freezes/melts at -117 C, a bit colder than most of Canada even in the winter. Dry ice (frozen CO2) and ethanol make a nice cooling bath for the -70 C range. Methanol freezes at -93.9 C. The problem is more with their boiling points, 65 C for methanol and 78.5 for ethanol. Warm weather causes more vapourization than the blends used in gasoline, diesel has even less of a problem. Those same blends give you some vapour in cold weather, gasoline blends having some C4 and C5 hydrocarbons in them, so your car is a bit easier to start than with ethanol.
Both methanol and ethanol absorb water rather well, which causes both performance and corrosion problems. Ethanol likes to stay at 95% ethanol and 5% water. Not unsolvable problems, just more beyond gasoline.
The energy density of short chain alcohols is less than that of hydrocarbons, simple because of the oxygen in them - they are somewhat "precombusted". In kg-cal methanol 173 ethanol 327 methane 213 ethane 373 propane 530 C7-C8 hydrocarbons are around 1000-1100, cyclohexane is about 937.
Methane and ethane have a storage density problem, too. They're gases at normal temperatures and reasonable pressures. Storing them means high pressure gasses, tough to get the density up to that of liguids. Propane is better that way.
Note that it takes energy to get ethanol out of fermentation mixes, which are +80% water and have a lot of other stuff floating in them. Getting the ethanol out takes energy, careful production plant design helps but its still higher that petroleum derived fuels. Hyrogen hasa similar problem, although biotech may help here - if you make H2 from fermentation at least it's a gas and easier to remove from the production vat.
Fuel cells aren't quite here yet, but starting to reach something practical for us folks. One concern is the electrode materials, until fairly recently it looked like fuel cells were stuck with platinum group metals for if fuel cells replaced IC engines electrodes, the demand for Pt would push the price way up.
I have to agree with Steve B and FreeUser above. The FBI is authorised to do certain things. All too often it has done far more than it was authorised to do, particularly in the days of J Edger.
There was a court case in the earlier days of the USA, Argghhh I can't remember the name, where a person's diary was taken and used as evidence. At that time this was gernerally frowned upon, as it was considered an unreasonable invasion of property and privacy.
Things have changed a great deal since thing. The first real move was the advent of the telephone and wiretapping; this was argued as not being an invasion of privacy as the person's home was not being entered but rather the wire outside of their home was being monitored. The telegraph was not an issue, as generally private residences did not have telegraphs - you went to a central location.
At that time the telephone was not quite the common appliance that it is now, nor was it the defacto means of communications. (Note that email is doing the same sort of transformation, again replacing postal mail). Now electronic communications are used by nearly everyone nearly constantly. In effect the "wire" hasbecome part of the home.
Govenrments are defending their eavesdropping by holding up the banner of national security. But the amount of abuse of such activities in the past shows that their activities all too often far exceed the stated goals.
IMO overhead isn't a large issue, bandwidth continues to get cheaper. Low power wireless communications will be an excepion to this; but that is generally shortrange stuff while unstoppable distribution is more of a wide area issue.
Secure protocols will have more overhead because they need certain things beyond simply getting the data to the target. To avoid traffic pattern analysis you try to pad packets to fixed lengths, split streams up and send some junk so that bursts don't stand out, send dummy packets when traffic is low, and so on.
You need secure low level protocols to give yourself a fighting chance at anonymous exchanges. Running such protocols at a higher level over something that is essentially an end-to-end protocol just points out the path used to route the `crypted data. At that point the unfriendly government steps in and has you blocked or arrested.
The same technologies taht allow you to publish your anti-government newspapaer in a totalitarian state allow the distribution of porn and information on controlled substances. Sorry, information is information; differing states have declared diffeerent bits of information "bad" at times, the tools to supress one type can supress all types of information
As for Fling specifically, I noticed that it uses IP4 addresses putting it behind current tech. I'd like it better if it's internal addresses were larger than IP6.
1) Consider businesses based in one country where the products are legal, selling into another where they are forbidden. Publish your advertisment in some public forum, such as a newsgroup; this doesn't tell where you are physically located. Alright, maybe it's a government run sting, can't help you there.
2) So ? If the company is based somewhere friendly to it, it may be paying taxes there, but not being taxed out of existance.
3) I get the impression that Fling is more interested in keeping 3rd parties from knowing what is going on between A and B, than keeping A and B from knowing about each other.
Furthermore, it's not "crappy assembly" to have a single TAB instruction instead of a flexible MOVE A B... That TAB instruction just saved me two bytes in the program over your "better" MOVE instruction. If it's really so difficult to grasp, then find a good assembler that recognizes what you want to do when it sees "MOVE A B".
A number of assemblers do just that. Any decent macro processing language can be made into an assembler by mapping opcodes onto macros that expand into the proper bytes. The old PDP-11 DECUS C compiler did this for the metalanguage it compiled to, MUL tested for mutiplying by some of the small multiples of 2 and used shifts (not every model had hardware multiply, the software subroutine was "expensive").
For processors targeted at smallish apps, general purpose instruction sets/addressing modes don't always make sense. The `HC11 has two 8 bit / one 16 bit GP registers, two 16 bit index registers, and the stack. It understands the low 256 bytes or memory as special, using short addresses to access them. It makes for compact machine code, and makes it hard to target with stack based HLL like C and PASCAL.
The MPC8xx have 5-8K as well, and have the MMU. However *NIX style OSes take a lot more R/W memory than that. Most OSes taregeted at the embedded market can get by on 8-32K for some apps, RTEMS is one open source & free example.
While it may be well designed, the current implementation seems to have flaws. `tis rumored that the number of active taps far exceeds the authorised number. Then there's the free-lance investigators. And there have been numerous occasions when it appears that telco company employees did some monitoring all on their own.
Weeks later millions of people and numbers of businesses bitch to the government about how they can't get any support for their personal computers anymore.
Well, from what I've see with friends and family with newer computers, you doen't get any support from Microsoft currently.
"SPOOL32 performed an illegal operation ? That's a hardware problem, contact your hardware vendor."
But, to answer your question, I'd say it's fine if MS dropped sales in a country, or even decided to shut down. Now, they will have some amount of legal obligations - contracts - that will need to be addressed. But they should be able to handle those without too much difficulty. And Bill's MS stock will take a major dive in worth, but that's his business.
I imagine that a number of companies offering support and training for MS products would spring up very quickly. Later you'd see the outfits offering bundled platforms with WINE, for those needed to continue to run MS products. And the number of clones of MS applications would take off. All in all a boost to the software industry.
If you're trying to address the question of the.. ethical asspects of hammering MS, I'd say you need to take a close llok at its early history. If I steal your automobile, is it wrong to prevent me from making money by using it as a taxi?
I think that some are missing an important point - there are several major schools of thought on how something should work : A) The nerds, who want control of every aspect of whatever-it-is. B) The worker-grunt, who just wants the !@#$%^&*() tool to do what they need it to do, without a 6 month training class.
Now most folks fall inbetween the extremes, but those are boundary points. Sure, you like to dig into the source code and twiddle this or that obscure parameter, but when you flip on your TV do you want to tune the RF and IF filters and adjust the LO level and... or do you want the TV to light up and work.
There's 3 or 4 parameters that could be diddled on a refrigerator, outside of the "cold" control do you want to be messing with them? An artist usually wants to control saturation and hue and form, not understand how the software accomplishes that control.
I once worked at a medical electronics company where I was shown the next generation mock-up. It was designed by engineers for engineers; the front panel was filled with button, knobs, and lights. The final product, after the end users gave their feedback, had one dial and 8 soft keys, of which 4 were usually in their default meaning and 2 of which were really used. The users didn't have to look at the panel most of the time while using the machine, the simple controls, well spaced, let them watch the patient and video screen while tweaking what needed tweaking.
All the controls the engineers had put on the front panel were still around, just buried down in menus or from a service port. They were used during the earlier stages of development, and then slowing became unused. The end users had little to no need to access those control functions, although the original design engineers that they were absolute requirements.
IF CD sales are not being hurt by Napster and other sharing/pirating of music, is it not impossible that the small timers might be helped to? That is, Fred gives me a pie-rat copy of some new release of a new musician/group; I like it and go and pay for a proper copy of it from their site.
Face it, most musicians start off making money with the tip jar, private (for hire) performances, and hawking tapes and CDs on street corners. Seeing as that tape isn't in most if not any stores, if I want someone else to hear it I might copy it for them - cutting the originator out of a sale.
So why not encourage a good micorcash ewallet open protocol that can be dropped into any damn browser. Then I can buy one song or a set, and maybe even toss a bit of cash into the online tip jar (hey - Ebuskering - patent it quick!).
And continue to remind people that if the creators of music and art can't earn a living at it, they'll have to take Real World Jobs such as CPAs, used car salespeople, or handing out samples of DeathWheeze cigarettes. So it's more CPAs and elevator mussic, or pay the folks who make it, which do you want?
Re:Could someone explain the benefits of WAP?!?
on
WAP Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
I mean geez, in todays wired world, you are literally no more than 5 minutes from a computer anyway.
Well, some people might not like it when I burst into their house at 3 AM to check my email;-)
Actual uses for somehing like WAP might include, besides the "check my email" stuff, such functions as on-line "Yellow Pages" (click the phonenumber to dial), road condition reports, the normal ticker-tape stock market and sports scores, other real-time statusing of things such as movie listings and waiting times for popular attractions, road maps.
And of course p0rn, the driving force behind the adoptation of many new technologies.
Ah, but that doesn''t mean that the FBI and others aren't worried about the possiblity of delays in setting up such monitoring. Regardless of the practicality of running the servers outside of the US today, it still could be done and the legal tangle resulting would not be fun. A few weeks delay in setting up the tap might be important.
And why would NTT replace native English speakers with their own people? It'd be cheaper to host the servers in Japan, burning bandwidth rather than the hassles of importing workers into the US.
Note that current US laws are such that while a communications service provider may be required to provide certain information to a LEA, they are also prohibited from viewing that information themselves. Matters not if the workers are citizens of the USA or some other country.
If the worker is in the US, they are subject to the local laws; and they aren't supposed to listen in or peek. If the subsidiary is in the US, it is subject to the local laws. So why is the FBI expressing concern and wanting those assurances?
Indeed, it appears to be an advisory role at this point. But "national security" all too often is used as a magic phrase to shoot down criticism. Right now in the US it is used to promote many actions and activities to "protect US citizens against terrorists", some of which appear to be more to control those who disagree with the government or some other power block.
Do remember all the information the FBI collected on civil rights and anti-war activists in the past, much of which was labeled as important to national security.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if that had any impact on the title choice of this book.
Algol68 would have been a better, more recent, example; certainly less successful and IMO less usable. But ADA was another even more recent, and one that actually functions.
A lot of a CT application or product is in the rest of the software - switch functions, human interface, feature set. I suspect that this GPL'd package will need a fair amount of bashing at the interface level to get it into shape for platform portability, but it should have some real value.
You might say the same about Microsoft and their top management. The drive and ego is good in the early days, it kick starts the company. But after awhile ...
Rather than getting into pissing wars of which current OS is "the best", look at it from the standpoint of "what would make a really good OS?"
Unix has survived in part because it does a pretty good job for people who have time to learn the parts they need to know, or have someone else learn that and support the end user. It was also a cheap multiuser OS for the academic world, which gave it some incredible inertia in regards to replacement, after desktop machines became well established.
And then herewas the fact that you had the sources - you could get under the hood and diddle with it. Great for compsci folks, not so useful for most anyone else. And the `386 based *nix varient have given that access to almost anyone who wants it.
But you really can't forget the the general user - the people who want to use the computer the way they use a copy machine or used to use a typewriter. It's those people who create the volume of sales that helps makes the hardware affordable. Ignore them, stick with a nerds' OS, and don't be surprised if later generations of hardware run a certain OS family much better than the non-competitors. Instructions to support driver operations for hardware that has no released documentation, hardware that is tailored to fit that one OS.
Unix has shortcomings. It was the third OS I learned, when I hit the 4th I couldn't help comparing the two and wishing they could be merged. Years later when I first ran into MS-DOS I was amazed at what was missing - no loadable device drivers ? No easy way to extend the CLI ? But the common hardware platfor got rid of things like using control-shift-buckybit for cursor control, and it was somewhat easier to use.
Unix has somewhat remained in the world of the geeks, even though it is slowly spreading. But it still could use some fixing. And the issue of compatibility gets in the way - if you can't run an old app on the new version, is it really *nix?
And the embedded processor world needs something other than Unix (and most certainly something other than WinCE). I don't want to have a 32 bit processor with 8 megs of RAM to control my microwave, when an 8 bit'r with a low footprint embedded OS will do the job. I mean, how often do you really need to use Emacs to prepare dinner?
So don't be mini-BillG types, with one true OS. experiment, come up with alternatives. You'll learn things, and might even create something the non0tech types end up using.
What's not been shown is does "quantum computing" take place in the microtubes, and if so how does it couple to the macroscale world.
As for the glail cell paper - as they state it's not (yet) known if this effect is something that takes place under normal conditions or under abnormal stress.
Note that "out of body" experiances generally take place under stress - near death, drugs suck as ketamine, breathing high levels of CO2 (don't try this at home - at take 30%CO2 70% O2 and it can damage you), and so on. If the effects seen are triggered by abnormal conditions around the cells, this might be an underlying cause behind the effects, explaining how the differing triggers can give the same result.
I'd bet on the neuron modulation function as the most likely, given that the ion glutamte diffusion s are slower than neuron to neuron triggering. I'd agree that this may be one source of the bundling observed, groups of neurons being affected by the slower, wider area effect of the glia.
Like or hate Katz, asking for a shorter article on this subject shows how much you care about it. But then, being an AC seems to show you don't care about who/what you are.
You can even get some night vision amplification, and a interior light sensor should allow the LCD displays to have their illumination adjusted to the current lighting in the car - as bright as needed, but not too bright, and auto-adjust as you go through a tunnel.
Uh - won't that new computer just about be obsolete in 5 days ?
A cone 10 or 11 kiln should do the job - melts the platter, which really randomizes the data.
Ethanol freezes/melts at -117 C, a bit colder than most of Canada even in the winter. Dry ice (frozen CO2) and ethanol make a nice cooling bath for the -70 C range. Methanol freezes at -93.9 C. The problem is more with their boiling points, 65 C for methanol and 78.5 for ethanol. Warm weather causes more vapourization than the blends used in gasoline, diesel has even less of a problem. Those same blends give you some vapour in cold weather, gasoline blends having some C4 and C5 hydrocarbons in them, so your car is a bit easier to start than with ethanol.
Both methanol and ethanol absorb water rather well, which causes both performance and corrosion problems. Ethanol likes to stay at 95% ethanol and 5% water. Not unsolvable problems, just more beyond gasoline.
The energy density of short chain alcohols is less than that of hydrocarbons, simple because of the oxygen in them - they are somewhat "precombusted". In kg-cal
methanol 173
ethanol 327
methane 213
ethane 373
propane 530
C7-C8 hydrocarbons are around 1000-1100, cyclohexane is about 937.
Methane and ethane have a storage density problem, too. They're gases at normal temperatures and reasonable pressures. Storing them means high pressure gasses, tough to get the density up to that of liguids. Propane is better that way.
Note that it takes energy to get ethanol out of fermentation mixes, which are +80% water and have a lot of other stuff floating in them. Getting the ethanol out takes energy, careful production plant design helps but its still higher that petroleum derived fuels. Hyrogen hasa similar problem, although biotech may help here - if you make H2 from fermentation at least it's a gas and easier to remove from the production vat.
Fuel cells aren't quite here yet, but starting to reach something practical for us folks. One concern is the electrode materials, until fairly recently it looked like fuel cells were stuck with platinum group metals for if fuel cells replaced IC engines electrodes, the demand for Pt would push the price way up.
There was a court case in the earlier days of the USA, Argghhh I can't remember the name, where a person's diary was taken and used as evidence. At that time this was gernerally frowned upon, as it was considered an unreasonable invasion of property and privacy.
Things have changed a great deal since thing. The first real move was the advent of the telephone and wiretapping; this was argued as not being an invasion of privacy as the person's home was not being entered but rather the wire outside of their home was being monitored. The telegraph was not an issue, as generally private residences did not have telegraphs - you went to a central location.
At that time the telephone was not quite the common appliance that it is now, nor was it the defacto means of communications. (Note that email is doing the same sort of transformation, again replacing postal mail). Now electronic communications are used by nearly everyone nearly constantly. In effect the "wire" hasbecome part of the home.
Govenrments are defending their eavesdropping by holding up the banner of national security. But the amount of abuse of such activities in the past shows that their activities all too often far exceed the stated goals.
Secure protocols will have more overhead because they need certain things beyond simply getting the data to the target. To avoid traffic pattern analysis you try to pad packets to fixed lengths, split streams up and send some junk so that bursts don't stand out, send dummy packets when traffic is low, and so on.
You need secure low level protocols to give yourself a fighting chance at anonymous exchanges. Running such protocols at a higher level over something that is essentially an end-to-end protocol just points out the path used to route the `crypted data. At that point the unfriendly government steps in and has you blocked or arrested.
The same technologies taht allow you to publish your anti-government newspapaer in a totalitarian state allow the distribution of porn and information on controlled substances. Sorry, information is information; differing states have declared diffeerent bits of information "bad" at times, the tools to supress one type can supress all types of information
As for Fling specifically, I noticed that it uses IP4 addresses putting it behind current tech. I'd like it better if it's internal addresses were larger than IP6.
2) So ? If the company is based somewhere friendly to it, it may be paying taxes there, but not being taxed out of existance.
3) I get the impression that Fling is more interested in keeping 3rd parties from knowing what is going on between A and B, than keeping A and B from knowing about each other.
A number of assemblers do just that. Any decent macro processing language can be made into an assembler by mapping opcodes onto macros that expand into the proper bytes. The old PDP-11 DECUS C compiler did this for the metalanguage it compiled to, MUL tested for mutiplying by some of the small multiples of 2 and used shifts (not every model had hardware multiply, the software subroutine was "expensive").
For processors targeted at smallish apps, general purpose instruction sets/addressing modes don't always make sense. The `HC11 has two 8 bit / one 16 bit GP registers, two 16 bit index registers, and the stack. It understands the low 256 bytes or memory as special, using short addresses to access them. It makes for compact machine code, and makes it hard to target with stack based HLL like C and PASCAL.
The MPC8xx have 5-8K as well, and have the MMU. However *NIX style OSes take a lot more R/W memory than that. Most OSes taregeted at the embedded market can get by on 8-32K for some apps, RTEMS is one open source & free example.
While it may be well designed, the current implementation seems to have flaws. `tis rumored that the number of active taps far exceeds the authorised number. Then there's the free-lance investigators. And there have been numerous occasions when it appears that telco company employees did some monitoring all on their own.
I imagine that a number of companies offering support and training for MS products would spring up very quickly. Later you'd see the outfits offering bundled platforms with WINE, for those needed to continue to run MS products. And the number of clones of MS applications would take off. All in all a boost to the software industry.
If you're trying to address the question of the .. ethical asspects of hammering MS, I'd say you need to take a close llok at its early history. If I steal your automobile, is it wrong to prevent me from making money by using it as a taxi?
A) The nerds, who want control of every aspect of whatever-it-is.
B) The worker-grunt, who just wants the !@#$%^&*() tool to do what they need it to do, without a 6 month training class.
Now most folks fall inbetween the extremes, but those are boundary points. Sure, you like to dig into the source code and twiddle this or that obscure parameter, but when you flip on your TV do you want to tune the RF and IF filters and adjust the LO level and ... or do you want the TV to light up and work.
There's 3 or 4 parameters that could be diddled on a refrigerator, outside of the "cold" control do you want to be messing with them? An artist usually wants to control saturation and hue and form, not understand how the software accomplishes that control.
I once worked at a medical electronics company where I was shown the next generation mock-up. It was designed by engineers for engineers; the front panel was filled with button, knobs, and lights. The final product, after the end users gave their feedback, had one dial and 8 soft keys, of which 4 were usually in their default meaning and 2 of which were really used. The users didn't have to look at the panel most of the time while using the machine, the simple controls, well spaced, let them watch the patient and video screen while tweaking what needed tweaking.
All the controls the engineers had put on the front panel were still around, just buried down in menus or from a service port. They were used during the earlier stages of development, and then slowing became unused. The end users had little to no need to access those control functions, although the original design engineers that they were absolute requirements.
Face it, most musicians start off making money with the tip jar, private (for hire) performances, and hawking tapes and CDs on street corners. Seeing as that tape isn't in most if not any stores, if I want someone else to hear it I might copy it for them - cutting the originator out of a sale.
So why not encourage a good micorcash ewallet open protocol that can be dropped into any damn browser. Then I can buy one song or a set, and maybe even toss a bit of cash into the online tip jar (hey - Ebuskering - patent it quick!).
And continue to remind people that if the creators of music and art can't earn a living at it, they'll have to take Real World Jobs such as CPAs, used car salespeople, or handing out samples of DeathWheeze cigarettes. So it's more CPAs and elevator mussic, or pay the folks who make it, which do you want?
Actual uses for somehing like WAP might include, besides the "check my email" stuff, such functions as on-line "Yellow Pages" (click the phonenumber to dial), road condition reports, the normal ticker-tape stock market and sports scores, other real-time statusing of things such as movie listings and waiting times for popular attractions, road maps.
And of course p0rn, the driving force behind the adoptation of many new technologies.
And why would NTT replace native English speakers with their own people? It'd be cheaper to host the servers in Japan, burning bandwidth rather than the hassles of importing workers into the US.
Note that current US laws are such that while a communications service provider may be required to provide certain information to a LEA, they are also prohibited from viewing that information themselves. Matters not if the workers are citizens of the USA or some other country.
If the worker is in the US, they are subject to the local laws; and they aren't supposed to listen in or peek. If the subsidiary is in the US, it is subject to the local laws. So why is the FBI expressing concern and wanting those assurances?
That still doesn't explain the 1 in 10 ratio, the expense of supporting that is one reason service providers are making unhappy noises about CALEA.
And, actually, the FBI doesn't have to sift through all that data. It's up to the ISP to log everything that a LEA monitored customer of the ISP does.
Do remember all the information the FBI collected on civil rights and anti-war activists in the past, much of which was labeled as important to national security.