The service should shine for big downloads, but be rather poor for highly "chatty" stuff, with many request-response pairs. Loading web pages with many small objects would be rather disappointing, I should think. Checking POP3 email, if there are many small messages, would be pretty poor.
Depends on what you mean by poor.. if you're in the middle of a National Park and the link means the difference between getting email and not getting email, I'd say I could put up with the latency. Even at this rate, it's way faster than Winmail on HF at 300 bps..
It wouldn't be _true_ mobile Internet, of course, but if I mounted the dish on a positioner on the roof of my SUV, and ruggedized the installation of the transceiver and Ethernet hub, I could at least use the bandwidth while I'm parked in a field..
And, of course, connect an 802.11 base station so I could sit outside with the laptop and surf from there.. this has possibilities, even if I am sharing the pipe with about a million other users. Have to think *seriously* about that.;-)
Copyright is a TEMPORARY priviledge granted to encourage people to publish/produce works that will eventually become fully free to the public at large.
It got a whole lot less "temporary" sometime in the early 1970's, when copyright protection was extended to the remainder of the life of the author plus 50 years. After that, the work drops into the public domain but is still legally identified as the work of the original author. Ever wonder why you hear so many covers/samples/etc of songs that are all from before 1972? (yes, the Beatles are a special case unto themselves..)
You could say DMCA is an extension of that trend, and puts a few more teeth into copyright enforcement, for the poor little multinational corporations that have to miss lunch because you watched your DVD on a Linuz box with DeCSS instead of going out and buying a DVD player. You'd be disagreeing with me, but you could say it..
I was just mentioning to someone today that I remember when 64K was a lot of memory, and here someone dumps a real blast from the past in my lap that had only *1K*. Now, you can do a lot in 1K with Z-80 machine code, but then again, you have to program in Z-80 machine code.
And as if that ain't scary enough, I still remember a few Z80 opcodes.. C3 xx xx and CD xx xx->C9 being my favorites..
It's not a licensed band, and is mostly kept open for noise generated by these devices.
It is licensed if you want to go narrowband -- amateur radio has a secondary allocation on the 2.4 GHz band. Not like NFM and DSSS are going to interefere with each other very much, but the potential is there.
One thing that could be tricky, though, is if FM-video amateur TV gets as popular on 2.4 as it is on 1.2.. those signals spread out a bit..;-)
I guess we can add "Spamming" as another "Business" where Microsoft can use its monopoly status to its advantage.
I have to say previous postings are right.. this isn't really Microsoft spamming, it's Microsoft setting their apps up so the unwary and clueless can very easily spam all their friends by accident with a Microsoft ad. Although you could make the very strong case that this is simply using the lusers as an innovative and clever new form of spam vector..
We can only hope.. sure would cut down on unsolicited email if every spammer had to pay patent royalties to Microsoft..
And the best part is, it would be powered by Microsoft's legal department. If the PTO is going to grant stupid patents, the least they can do is make the spammers live under the constant threat of cease-and-desist orders from the Evil Empire.
Get a good digital camera, and send out a lot of pictures to your friends. Some may have messages. Most don't.
A truly elegant little pearl in the rough, that.. this is an example of what hams like to refer to as a "fuzzy" mode, one that conveys the message but does it in a way that's not strictly digital encoding (especially if the original message is handwritten on a Big Chief tablet..) and not strictly analog either. These are *damn* hard to convert back into analyzable text -- really a non-trivial task, and one virtually guaranteed to either eat up a huge amout of CPU or require the intervention of some human eyes.
Combine the major inconvenience with the dilution effect of sending *all* (or most) of your messages this way, and you're looking at a method that's crackable, but not in a practical way. It has the added advantage of being fun.;-) Be forewarned, though, FBI agents are notoriously immune to humor..
1) If you don't know a license agreement exists, you can't agree to it. If someone gives me a piece of hardware free, and I don't see any reference to a license on the package, I'm going to assume it's a gift and the device belongs to me. IANAL, but any lawyer could make a really solid case out of this.
2) If someone loans you something, it's their responsibility to know they loaned it to you and keep track of what you do with it. How does DC know I have one of their units, especially if I never opened the software package and never even *saw* the license agreement? Can you prove I have one? If I lost it, or it "accidentally" got run over by the car, or what have you, do I now owe them some exorbitant abuse and damage fee?
My opinion on this whole thing is that DC should just admit the obvious and declare Chapter 11 now, while they still have enough money to pay off the board's golden parachutes. They've made it clear that they don't have a clue how the real market works and deserve to be driven out of business..
How can you "loan" me something if you a) don't know who I am, b) don't bother to record who I am, c) don't ask for any collateral or specify any terms/conditions/length for the loan, and d) retroactively declare it was a loan?
I was just gonna say..;-)
It does sort of sound like they're looking for a way to yank back any:C's that have been played with -- mainly a way to hassle and harass people who post details of how to take them apart, etc. on the Web.
I agree though -- since I make a habit of not revealing who I am to Radio Shack unless there's a warranty involved (c'mon, guys, do you really need my phone number and address when I buy a fscking pack of resistors?) and DC would have absolutely no clue that I had one of their kitties. Not that it's a particularly good implementation of a barcode scanner, you understand, but as long as it's free.. oh, and there's *no* chance of my running or even opening the software, since my home machine is a Macintosh..;-)
If business critical data leaks out, and you know only a very short list of your top employees had access to it at the time of the leak, you narrow down your list of suspects a lot.
You can tag text files by making small benign paraphrase changes to the text and giving each recipient a slightly different version, MD5'ed and tagged with the recipient's MAC address in the log when they download it.
You can do this to images as well.. make small random changes to image files that don't change the appearance appreciably, MD5'ed and tagged with the recipient's MAC address as well.
If a sensitive file shows up on a public site, MD5 the content and see if its digest matches that of one of the server accesses. If it does, the MAC address will tell you which machine downloaded it, which will tell you who leaked it in most cases, and there is your proof.
This isn't hard to circumvent, but you can combine it with other approaches and keep quiet about some of them. Someone else said that there has to be some level of trust, and they're right, but deterrents like this have their place. If someone wants to leak information, they can do it, but at least you'll know when they do. That will stop most of them.
Well, the previous poster that described what's actually being planned pretty much turned me off it. Sounds more like eye candy to keep passengers happy, with enough live content to give the corporate types something to play with.
What's wrong with having one big broadband wireless connection to the ground, with a router and DHCP server on the plane feeding a gigabit LAN? Maybe the connection speed to the ground would suffer, but enough people use cable and DSL now that they're used to sharing the pipe, and there are ways to make sure the bandwidth is shared fairly.
If the DHCP server does DNS as well, you could map an onboard web server that has live updated flight info, position maps, interesting things to see out the window (does anyone look out the window anymore?) and even online flight safety pages. *That* would work. The proposal I saw just now is more a way to get advertisements onto our screens than anything else..
.. when spilling beer into a keyboard actually made it work *better*.. yeah, this was a *very* old keyboard (Kaypro 10 I believe, running a heavily customized CP/M 2.2F) and the beer in question was Shiner Bock, which is bound to have different results than, say, Miller Light, but still.. they don't make'em like they used to..
I don't think opening the search criteria will help much, nor will keeping them closed. Either some people cheat, or everybody cheats, or the Web grinds to a halt under all the wasted bandwidth from people trying.
<META NAME="keyword"> tags were a good deal for a while, but that got corrupted pretty quickly. Notice how long some of the high ranked pages take to load? View source on one of those pages and see how many screenfuls of keywords appear in META tags. There are numerous other ways to crowbar the index, this is only one of the easiest -- if the search engine indexes comments for keywords as well, you can cram the same enormous list of keywords into comment lines. Neither is visible to the end user, so all they see is a long delay.
Sorry, this has been a sore spot of mine for a LONG time, and relates as much to obnoxious unsolicited email as it does to pages and pages of results totally irrelevant to my search. (Google seems to filter out a lot of this c**p out pretty well.. so far..) Why do we have to put up with it? Is it just that people who don't care about anything but ramming their advertisements down as many throats as possible just happen to be good at figuring out how to force us to see them everywhere we go, or is it that the whole process of evolution happens fast enough that any decent search engine has a useful half life of about a year before the indexing algorithm is totally compromised?
OK, OK, done ranting, and I know I could probably force feed my own page to as many eyes as the big admongers do, but the point is I *don't*. Maybe it's because I have ethics, I don't know, but it just p***es me off when so many people don't seem to know any better. Maybe they think they're actually boosting their sales. I don't know. All I can say is they're not getting *my* business..
1) They say the "base tower" would be 50 km high, which they say is "much taller than the Eiffel Tower." Rather like saying the Eiffel Tower is much taller than an ant.
2) They conveniently avoid mentioning that the entire system would tend to *lift* the base tower, even if the counterpoise mass balances the cable. If the tower isn't very well anchored, it could detach from the ground and eventually be whipped off into space. Since most of our engineering experience deals with holding buildings up off the ground, I'm betting they haven't put much thought into how to anchor it. Personally, I want to be there with a camcorder when it pulls loose.;-)
Oh, and yes, there's seriously nonlinear mechanics involved, and we're not even close to materials that are strong enough to tether an asteroid against centrifugal force (it's going to be at 2x GEO altitude and going much faster than orbital velocity -- think about it), and we're not even sure an asteroid would be solid enough to withstand that kind of strain. I suspect it's going to be a lot more than 50 years before we solve those problems. Never mind that it will have to stand up to being hit by old booster upper stages and other junk that's still in orbit with too much kinetic energy to think about -- remember it's moving at one revolution per day, and objects in LEO are moving several thousand mph faster than that. Just imagine something like a Delta or Proton, or maybe a Shuttle ET, impacting at LEO velocity. shudder..
The single most important thing that each of us can do is vote. Calling and writing your congressman may help, but ultimately it is what we do on election day that matters most.
It doesn't matter much. We get to make one halfway meaningful choice every few years and that's about it. How many other jobs can you think of where you can't be fired except on a specific day every four years (six years in the case of our Senators) no matter how badly you screw up, and your boss doesn't even live in the same state, so he or she can't even supervise you?
I think it's time people realized that the Internet is what makes direct democracy possible. Rest assured the politicians know it -- it's one reason they're trying everything they can to get us on leashes.
Get enough people involved who know what's going on, and Congress finds they are out of a job before they realize what hit them -- they supposedly work for us, although I'm sure they don't mind a lot of people thinking it's the other way around..
Consider, in light of the:Cue:Cat mess, whether the FBI really *wants* to give you a free box and tell you what to do with it.
Also worth noting: Most ISP admins are pretty protective of their hardware. Here's a black box that does.. well, something.. and may well be fscking up your router. You did notice some screwy ICMP messages and looping packets happening about the time they installed it, didn't you? Thought so..
.. looks like the one plugged into the Carnivore box. Wonder how long the FBI will try to ping it before they realize it's offline? Oh well..
Seriously, if it's hardware and it's in the rack, what's to stop you from 'accidentally' disconnecting its connection to your router? Does it actually sit inline upstream of your POP? It might need to, in order to guarantee that it sees all the traffic. Could it be moved, say, to a bottom level switch so they can still ping it and get a response, but it doesn't see any IP traffic that isn't sent directly to it? (Anyone who's seen one care to comment?)
Once again, it's something made by humans, which other humans, given enough time, can figure out.. this ought to be fun to watch, actually..
.. is on their servers. If you don't link to their server, you're not using their IP. Period. As I have previously mentioned, you have the option of going out and buying a completely different make and model of barcode scanner and doing exactly what the so-called "hackers" are doing here.
D:C is just flustered that people are using their free hardware to do things they didn't intend it to do, and haven't realized that that horse was out of the barn the moment the scanner ended up in an end-user's hands. They just don't have the moral right to authorize only certain uses for something that ceased to be theirs the moment it left the store. They might have the legal right to do that, but that's more a case of stupid law than anything else -- perhaps we should be hacking the legal system instead.
Hmm.. programmers as legislators.. *that's* an interesting thought..
One of the major themes in The Sovereign Individual is the notion that the revolution unleashed by digital technologies is liberating individuals at the expense of the nation-states that have governed much of humanity for thousands of years.
And the nation-states have been aware of this for years now, and are even now taking steps to preserve their power. DMCA and other means of securing the position of the major multinationals are only a tiny piece of the strategy. We've seen China's approach to the situation -- firewall the whole country and only allow traffic that suits their purposes. Other countries may start trying that soon, and I'm not ruling it out here in the USA as well. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, folks..
My main gripe with M$ isn't overall stability of their OS, or their tendency to gouge (both of which are gripes, just not the main one..), but rather their apps' tendency to dictate style and content of what I try to do with them.
I am forced to use an NT workstation at my day job, and every once in a while I have to try and type something up in Word. What I end up with is a constant battle with Word over how I should spell words (excuse me, Microsoft, but my *brain* has a larger dictionary than your spell checker does, and it's context sensitive and more fun to use..) or whether or not I want list items auto-numbered, or whether I can change margins, or a number of other little stylistic things. I know M$ likes to make their apps 'smart', but sometimes I think 'smart-assed' is more appropriate.
I think this is the real reason for a lot of the animosity towards Microsoft. There may be people out there clueless enough to need that much help, but I haven't met any yet. I'm sure I'm not the only person who really doesn't appreciate M$ apps nagging us about not conforming to their idea of the look and feel of a business letter, especially when we're typing up something other than a business letter. In some ways it even makes me miss vi..;-)
Seriously, though, stop telling the people who *know* how to use a computer how to use their computer, and don't force us to conform to your assumptions about what we're doing. Look around and you'll find Linux (and Mac OS, for that matter) are way ahead of you there..
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It wouldn't be _true_ mobile Internet, of course, but if I mounted the dish on a positioner on the roof of my SUV, and ruggedized the installation of the transceiver and Ethernet hub, I could at least use the bandwidth while I'm parked in a field ..
.. this has possibilities, even if I am sharing the pipe with about a million other users. Have to think *seriously* about that. ;-)
And, of course, connect an 802.11 base station so I could sit outside with the laptop and surf from there
You could say DMCA is an extension of that trend, and puts a few more teeth into copyright enforcement, for the poor little multinational corporations that have to miss lunch because you watched your DVD on a Linuz box with DeCSS instead of going out and buying a DVD player. You'd be disagreeing with me, but you could say it
I was just mentioning to someone today that I remember when 64K was a lot of memory, and here someone dumps a real blast from the past in my lap that had only *1K*. Now, you can do a lot in 1K with Z-80 machine code, but then again, you have to program in Z-80 machine code.
.. C3 xx xx and CD xx xx->C9 being my favorites ..
And as if that ain't scary enough, I still remember a few Z80 opcodes
One thing that could be tricky, though, is if FM-video amateur TV gets as popular on 2.4 as it is on 1.2
We can only hope .. sure would cut down on unsolicited email if every spammer had to pay patent royalties to Microsoft ..
And the best part is, it would be powered by Microsoft's legal department. If the PTO is going to grant stupid patents, the least they can do is make the spammers live under the constant threat of cease-and-desist orders from the Evil Empire.
And jerk (a parameter I've only seen referred to once) is the derivative over time of acceleration
Combine the major inconvenience with the dilution effect of sending *all* (or most) of your messages this way, and you're looking at a method that's crackable, but not in a practical way. It has the added advantage of being fun.
1) If you don't know a license agreement exists, you can't agree to it. If someone gives me a piece of hardware free, and I don't see any reference to a license on the package, I'm going to assume it's a gift and the device belongs to me. IANAL, but any lawyer could make a really solid case out of this.
..
2) If someone loans you something, it's their responsibility to know they loaned it to you and keep track of what you do with it. How does DC know I have one of their units, especially if I never opened the software package and never even *saw* the license agreement? Can you prove I have one? If I lost it, or it "accidentally" got run over by the car, or what have you, do I now owe them some exorbitant abuse and damage fee?
My opinion on this whole thing is that DC should just admit the obvious and declare Chapter 11 now, while they still have enough money to pay off the board's golden parachutes. They've made it clear that they don't have a clue how the real market works and deserve to be driven out of business
It does sort of sound like they're looking for a way to yank back any
I agree though -- since I make a habit of not revealing who I am to Radio Shack unless there's a warranty involved (c'mon, guys, do you really need my phone number and address when I buy a fscking pack of resistors?) and DC would have absolutely no clue that I had one of their kitties. Not that it's a particularly good implementation of a barcode scanner, you understand, but as long as it's free
.. keep track of who knows what.
.. make small random changes to image files that don't change the appearance appreciably, MD5'ed and tagged with the recipient's MAC address as well.
If business critical data leaks out, and you know only a very short list of your top employees had access to it at the time of the leak, you narrow down your list of suspects a lot.
You can tag text files by making small benign paraphrase changes to the text and giving each recipient a slightly different version, MD5'ed and tagged with the recipient's MAC address in the log when they download it.
You can do this to images as well
If a sensitive file shows up on a public site, MD5 the content and see if its digest matches that of one of the server accesses. If it does, the MAC address will tell you which machine downloaded it, which will tell you who leaked it in most cases, and there is your proof.
This isn't hard to circumvent, but you can combine it with other approaches and keep quiet about some of them. Someone else said that there has to be some level of trust, and they're right, but deterrents like this have their place. If someone wants to leak information, they can do it, but at least you'll know when they do. That will stop most of them.
Well, the previous poster that described what's actually being planned pretty much turned me off it. Sounds more like eye candy to keep passengers happy, with enough live content to give the corporate types something to play with.
..
What's wrong with having one big broadband wireless connection to the ground, with a router and DHCP server on the plane feeding a gigabit LAN? Maybe the connection speed to the ground would suffer, but enough people use cable and DSL now that they're used to sharing the pipe, and there are ways to make sure the bandwidth is shared fairly.
If the DHCP server does DNS as well, you could map an onboard web server that has live updated flight info, position maps, interesting things to see out the window (does anyone look out the window anymore?) and even online flight safety pages. *That* would work. The proposal I saw just now is more a way to get advertisements onto our screens than anything else
.. they make *Mexico* look organized. ;-)
.. when spilling beer into a keyboard actually made it work *better* .. yeah, this was a *very* old keyboard (Kaypro 10 I believe, running a heavily customized CP/M 2.2F) and the beer in question was Shiner Bock, which is bound to have different results than, say, Miller Light, but still .. they don't make'em like they used to ..
I don't think opening the search criteria will help much, nor will keeping them closed. Either some people cheat, or everybody cheats, or the Web grinds to a halt under all the wasted bandwidth from people trying.
.. so far ..) Why do we have to put up with it? Is it just that people who don't care about anything but ramming their advertisements down as many throats as possible just happen to be good at figuring out how to force us to see them everywhere we go, or is it that the whole process of evolution happens fast enough that any decent search engine has a useful half life of about a year before the indexing algorithm is totally compromised?
..
<META NAME="keyword"> tags were a good deal for a while, but that got corrupted pretty quickly. Notice how long some of the high ranked pages take to load? View source on one of those pages and see how many screenfuls of keywords appear in META tags. There are numerous other ways to crowbar the index, this is only one of the easiest -- if the search engine indexes comments for keywords as well, you can cram the same enormous list of keywords into comment lines. Neither is visible to the end user, so all they see is a long delay.
Sorry, this has been a sore spot of mine for a LONG time, and relates as much to obnoxious unsolicited email as it does to pages and pages of results totally irrelevant to my search. (Google seems to filter out a lot of this c**p out pretty well
OK, OK, done ranting, and I know I could probably force feed my own page to as many eyes as the big admongers do, but the point is I *don't*. Maybe it's because I have ethics, I don't know, but it just p***es me off when so many people don't seem to know any better. Maybe they think they're actually boosting their sales. I don't know. All I can say is they're not getting *my* business
1) Has anyone fixed the leaks in the Spektr module yet?
..
2) Does the cosmonaut training include lessons in how to realign the platform to the sun before it loses power?
3) Do we *have* to go up on a Soyuz/Proton?
I'm not even going to discuss EVA's, or whether or not the "winner" is going to be drafted to do any in order to keep the crew alive
1) They say the "base tower" would be 50 km high, which they say is "much taller than the Eiffel Tower." Rather like saying the Eiffel Tower is much taller than an ant.
;-)
..
2) They conveniently avoid mentioning that the entire system would tend to *lift* the base tower, even if the counterpoise mass balances the cable. If the tower isn't very well anchored, it could detach from the ground and eventually be whipped off into space. Since most of our engineering experience deals with holding buildings up off the ground, I'm betting they haven't put much thought into how to anchor it. Personally, I want to be there with a camcorder when it pulls loose.
Oh, and yes, there's seriously nonlinear mechanics involved, and we're not even close to materials that are strong enough to tether an asteroid against centrifugal force (it's going to be at 2x GEO altitude and going much faster than orbital velocity -- think about it), and we're not even sure an asteroid would be solid enough to withstand that kind of strain. I suspect it's going to be a lot more than 50 years before we solve those problems. Never mind that it will have to stand up to being hit by old booster upper stages and other junk that's still in orbit with too much kinetic energy to think about -- remember it's moving at one revolution per day, and objects in LEO are moving several thousand mph faster than that. Just imagine something like a Delta or Proton, or maybe a Shuttle ET, impacting at LEO velocity. shudder
I think it's time people realized that the Internet is what makes direct democracy possible. Rest assured the politicians know it -- it's one reason they're trying everything they can to get us on leashes.
Get enough people involved who know what's going on, and Congress finds they are out of a job before they realize what hit them -- they supposedly work for us, although I'm sure they don't mind a lot of people thinking it's the other way around
Consider, in light of the :Cue:Cat mess, whether the FBI really *wants* to give you a free box and tell you what to do with it.
.. well, something .. and may well be fscking up your router. You did notice some screwy ICMP messages and looping packets happening about the time they installed it, didn't you? Thought so ..
Also worth noting: Most ISP admins are pretty protective of their hardware. Here's a black box that does
.. looks like the one plugged into the Carnivore box. Wonder how long the FBI will try to ping it before they realize it's offline? Oh well ..
.. this ought to be fun to watch, actually ..
Seriously, if it's hardware and it's in the rack, what's to stop you from 'accidentally' disconnecting its connection to your router? Does it actually sit inline upstream of your POP? It might need to, in order to guarantee that it sees all the traffic. Could it be moved, say, to a bottom level switch so they can still ping it and get a response, but it doesn't see any IP traffic that isn't sent directly to it? (Anyone who's seen one care to comment?)
Once again, it's something made by humans, which other humans, given enough time, can figure out
.. is on their servers. If you don't link to their server, you're not using their IP. Period. As I have previously mentioned, you have the option of going out and buying a completely different make and model of barcode scanner and doing exactly what the so-called "hackers" are doing here.
.. programmers as legislators .. *that's* an interesting thought ..
D:C is just flustered that people are using their free hardware to do things they didn't intend it to do, and haven't realized that that horse was out of the barn the moment the scanner ended up in an end-user's hands. They just don't have the moral right to authorize only certain uses for something that ceased to be theirs the moment it left the store. They might have the legal right to do that, but that's more a case of stupid law than anything else -- perhaps we should be hacking the legal system instead.
Hmm
My main gripe with M$ isn't overall stability of their OS, or their tendency to gouge (both of which are gripes, just not the main one..), but rather their apps' tendency to dictate style and content of what I try to do with them.
.. ;-)
..
I am forced to use an NT workstation at my day job, and every once in a while I have to try and type something up in Word. What I end up with is a constant battle with Word over how I should spell words (excuse me, Microsoft, but my *brain* has a larger dictionary than your spell checker does, and it's context sensitive and more fun to use..) or whether or not I want list items auto-numbered, or whether I can change margins, or a number of other little stylistic things. I know M$ likes to make their apps 'smart', but sometimes I think 'smart-assed' is more appropriate.
I think this is the real reason for a lot of the animosity towards Microsoft. There may be people out there clueless enough to need that much help, but I haven't met any yet. I'm sure I'm not the only person who really doesn't appreciate M$ apps nagging us about not conforming to their idea of the look and feel of a business letter, especially when we're typing up something other than a business letter. In some ways it even makes me miss vi
Seriously, though, stop telling the people who *know* how to use a computer how to use their computer, and don't force us to conform to your assumptions about what we're doing. Look around and you'll find Linux (and Mac OS, for that matter) are way ahead of you there