Ok, so I didn't comment when slashdot linked to the troll at the Register who likes to berate the EFF with false claims that we lose all the time, but since they are simply not true, it would be nice if people would check into that before repeating them, ok? This poster seems to claim there was some sort of big recent loss by the EFF, which is similar in pattern to the troll articles that cited lost cases that were not by the EFF to support the strange idea the EFF loses all the time. (There was a recent loss in case case personally brought and funded by John Gilmore, an EFF board member, in which the EFF itself had no involvement, and I presume that's what's being alluded to here.)
Bad enough I'm feeding the troll here, but please, don't repeat the trolls, that gets them really excited.
I thought Serenenity was a very good movie, which leaves me more annoyed that like effectively all hollywood SF movies, it had no real concept of astronomy, how really far it is between planets in a solar system. (Or how vastly far it is in a galaxy, which Firefly sometimes declared to be its setting.)
A solar system is not like a western frontier where you meet other ships along the trail. And a solar system with hundreds of moons around many planets will have, depending on the place in the orbit, immense vast distances between planets on opposite sides of the star, and relatively short ones between moons, but still a vast void on all trips. You are not going to happen to run into Reaver ships.
Now as I said, most shows get this really wrong. To some extent the shows with FTL get it "better" even though FTL is itself fantasy, at least you get a reason to not treat the differences as so vast. Hyperspace jumps, another fantasy, are even better.
2001 got space right. Apollo 13 did (duh.) Few other films and very few TV shows ever did.
Because everybody has their different tastes. However, there are some things that are perhaps a bit more possible to make objective, and that's worth getting even voted opinions on.
In particular, it's often clear with SF/Fantasy shows that sometimes we have a show that "gets" the genre, and sometimes we have a show that is hollywood people doing SF. In both cases you can have better and worse. After all there are good non-SF hollywood people and they can make good SF from time to time, but sometimes they will just throw in something that is plain stupid, and shows that they don't understand SF.
Shows that get the genre can also vary in quality, but in this case it will be more a question of the usual variations of quality. And when they are excellent, they will be the best.
To make a top 50 list, a show should have few episodes that make you turn away in disgust, and also have many excellent shows. There are shows on this list (and shows I have seen people claim as favourites) that don't make this cut, and thus we will argue.
Everybody who goes to BM tries to capture it, which is not really possible, but the best I've been able to do has resulted in my project of giant panoramas, some of the larger ones in the world that get displayed there.
I do notice the negative comments here are from people who have not gone, and the positive ones from people who have. Jamie's negative comments are about the BMOrg, not the event, which like the rest of us, he loves. That should tell you something about what it is.
Cracking DES
on
Brute Force
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You will also want to check out Cracking DES the story of our building the real DES cracker, the machine on its own that was able to crack DES in just a couple of days, demonstrating finally that DES was not secure.
You're not thinking through the math. When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders.
Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him.
If there were a billion people on E-mail and ten million of them sat all day thinking of personal annoying messages to send out, and they could write 100 of these in a day, on average you would get one a day. But in fact these numbers are ridiculous, you would not get this many people just randomly deciding to write personal messages to strangers.
Consider this message:
"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"
Do you want to ban this message? This one, where the guy researched the company and had a reason to be mailing that specific company about that specfic product, not a message like this written as part of a "mail everybody I can think of" campaign.
No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?
Including of course, those who were around for the original definition of the term, based on the endless repetition of "spam, spam, spam, spam..." in the MP sketch. From the start it was always the volume of messages that was the issue.
This is in fact however an issue of much debate, with many people on both sides, sometimes called the UBE side and the UCE side. I'm on the UBE side (in fact I think the best and simplest definition for spam is 'bulk mail from a stranger') and there are many on that side.
The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.
Since I speak of CD Rom distros, of course I have heard of them. Aside from the time they take to boot and the other items pointed out, they are not what a novice user, who has NEVER RUN LINUX, wants to tell them if the machine is a good candidate for seamless linuxation. All they will do is issue bizarre diagnostics that stream off the screen if they have issues with the hardware. Or something won't be working right if you know to check for it.
Step 1 is something you want to give to Joe computer owner who has an old 700mhz Pentium ready to throw away. Stick this disk into it and see if it's good for donating to a school/etc.
A more advanced version (even on a floppy) would ask you to plug the computer into your LAN if you have a house LAN. There it could download the latest testing programs and scripts and lists of known problems when 2 pieces of hardware that are themselves fine don't play well together. Possibly it could even tell you who would like your donated computer while it does this.
Once you pass the test, we then want it to be easy to install the distro. The user might do that from CD, or at the school they might have a network install. The key is that these are not advanced users. Sysadmin is not an option for them. They need to know the install will be painless, and the student can take the machine and start surfing and writing assignments and doing email on it.
There are tons of discarded machines out there that can still run a good linux.
What would be nice is a distro meant to make it as easy as possible for relatively unskilled people to turn them into a desktop linux. Linspire may have a lot of that, but here's the elements I see.
A simple program, on a floppy and/or CD, which analyses the hardware in the machine, and gives an estimate of how suitable the machine is to the task. Ie. how well supported the components (chipsets, cards etc.) are, and how much performance one can expect from it.
It could also estimate what you would have to buy to bring the performance to your specs. "This machine is great but by just adding 128MB of ram -- just $20 -- it would be super." and "The machine is good but the ethernet card is one known to have problems. Cheap solid ethernet cards include these..."
And so on. School boards, not wanting to do a lot of fussing, might insist on a certain "easy to convert" rating from this program before taking donations.
Stage 2 is a distro which does a super-simple install on machines that make the cut. It knows the hardware is approved, so it's a hassle-free install, with ideally no questions asked, or barely any.
Then you would get a lot of computers converted and ready to be linux boxes.
With some mumbo jumbo about future fuels to sell it to people. In reality it's an electric heater. Almost all uses of electricity are electric heaters, and unless they affect things outside the room, they're mostly 100% efficient electric heaters. It's easy to be 100% efficient at turning useful energy into heat, after all. (furnaces are not 100% efficient because they must vent waste gas outside, along with some heat.)
This just happens to turn electricity into heat in an amusing way, at a high price. There are, of course lots of other interesting ways to turn electricity into heat. My computers are doing plenty of that right now.
If they really were pitching this as a way to heat the house, it would be as bad an idea as any other electric heater. They are way poorer in total "well to home" efficiency than gas furnaces, but often used because they are cheap to install (expensive to run), very easy to meter (for landlords), and on the positive side, can be easily individually controlled on a room by room basis, which sometimes can make them more efficient than heaters that either heat the whole building or nothing at all.
But I doubt this is meant as such a heater. It's meant as an art piece, to wow your fellow millionaire friends.
While the basic point is true, you would not have to slow down the shielding mass, particularly if it's something like water, since you plan to refuelign with more water when you get to mars. Let the shielding mass fly into space rather than slowing it down.
Though if you are aerobraking, you might keep some of it with you for that. And you probably are aerobraking to some degree.
Odd coincidence, just today I put up a set of pages derived from a database of the coordinates of all 788 of the Unesco World Heirtage sites, which includes many interesting landmarks.
I find it amazing how the spam issue will turn people who everywhere else defend the end to end principle of internet design, along with other fundamental internet concepts such as flat-rate billing, opposition to port blocking and the rest -- to suddenly reverse themselves.
We all want to stop spam very much. Yet with spam, we're ready to shoot the packet forwarder (and even the other customers of that packet forwarder) at the drop of a packet.
Because be warned, the principles you abandon "just to get spam" are at a danger of being lost everywhere else.
Paying for access doesn't solve this cafe's problem, which is not so much the moochers as it is the environment where everybody just stares at a screen all day instead of socializing.
I have come up with a solution that fixes both problems. An AP that does intermittent access, so that you can connect, but after enough time to do a basic session of E-mail or web research, it refuses you for 5 minutes.
While it's not a great idea, it's a fairly obvious one. Papers on this go back decades. I was one of the earliest to propose it in the Unix community almost a decade ago, but later denounced my own ideas.
But what amazes me is that like clockwork, somebody will publish an article on this "great new idea" for dealing with spam, several times a year it seems. They have clearly read none of the spam literature, nor done a search. And on top of that, journals and magazines also think it's new and publish the items, even slashdot publishes them.
How does this work? It says it puts out 720p in NTSC format. Equipment to deal with 720p in NTSC (presumably composite video) is not common, is it? I wasn't aware that you could even deal with that much bandwidth in a typical composite cable, which is why everybody else uses a form of 3 channel component video for this amount of resolution.
Of course, then you have to capture it, which requires a faster A to D than would be found in most video capture cards, though this should not be too hard to get today.
And then you have to compress it, which is not going to happen on an ordinary PC right now, though with hardware assist we're getting close. It's the grail for home HD recorders to be able to record analog HD so they don't have to worry about all the DRM.
Even without environmental questions. CPUs have been getting faster and faster per dollar you spend on them, but they haven not been getting faster the same way per _watt_ you put into them. And each watt put into them also costs power to cool them.
This applies even in the home. Here in California, land of the 14 cent kwh, a 100 watt PC running 24/7 costs $120 per year in power. In a 3 year life the power is more expensive than the CPU or any other major component except perhaps the monitor, sometimes more expensive than the whole PC.
This also plays big on ideas like getting an old computer and putting linux on it to act as a router or music player or other special functions. You are much better off buying a dedicated box like a WRT54G than making use of the "free" old hardware.
And yes, this does have environmental issues, but you can see the problem right away just by looking at costs.
I've been collecting all the different answers to how to have an economy of creative works after the old business models fail. It's apropos to this discussion. I include both things that I think are good and those that I think are bad, and I welcome other people who have heard of or thought of different alternatives to mail me to add to the list.
Commercial online communities have a long history of this. People didn't really resent on Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, GEnie and AOL that they paid to participate in the communities they were building. They just asked if they got value to match their money. Of course there were also lots of free BBSs at the time and paying BBSs, and there were arpanet mailing lists even earlier, and USENET groups which were "free" but you had to be part of a select club to get at them at the start.
Of course, if offered something good for free, people like it and will switch to it. But paying communities thrive today in both MMORPGS and things like Second Life (which does let you own the stuff you build in order to attract people who do have this concern.)
But this is nothing new, it's a competitive battle that will continue for a long time to come, with free and paid and people choosing.
As others have pointed out 62% is a pretty poor score at that site. They also subset the reviews for the more serious professional reviewers, and that's at 57% positive, which they rate as below the "rotten" threshold.
I like Rotten Tomatoes. Critics vary a lot in their personal tastes, unless you know their tastes match yours, any single critic is not that useful a tool. But if something is impressing everybody, you can be confident it has something, and likewise if it's depressing everybody.
As I understand it, they want to put both E911 and universal access surcharges on VoIP phones. The big telcos want this because they have to pay them and they are a barrier to entry for small companies.
But what do you regulate? SIP phones? There is a SIP phone in every copy of Windows XP, and freely available ones for all OSs. They can all register with proxies and make VoIP calls. They have to pay to go out to the PSTN right now, though.
Instead, they are putting the regs if the service gives you a phone number for incoming calls. Ie. it's backwards. If you can _receive_ calls (without necessarily the ability to make them) from the PSTN, then you have to be able to make an outgoing call to 911.
But anything can be a phone now. It can look like an old phone or it can be a piece of software. Anything can be set up to receive calls, or make them, or both. Or not talk to the PSTN at all. Or talk to it in limited ways (for example there are dial-in numbers that let you call from the PSTN and then enter a Free World Dialup number, making every FWD phone able to receive a call from the PSTN.)
This is a dangerous rathole. Accept that voice != emergency service path and find a better way.
The resolution isn't quite enough to tell you if we're looking at the burn platform being built or cleaned up, though the uniformity of colour of what you see does indeed suggest it's being built. The temple, as you say, might not have the same crew on it. The clues will be obvious to those who have been there at tear-down or before, since things like the cafe are not built up the same way they are torn down. I was just surprised to see not just the roads, but many other ad-hoc paths so well defined just from the watering and dragging.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so I didn't comment when slashdot linked to the troll at the Register who likes to berate the EFF with false claims that we lose all the time, but since they are simply not true, it would be nice if people would check into that before repeating them, ok? This poster seems to claim there was some sort of big recent loss by the EFF, which is similar in pattern to the troll articles that cited lost cases that were not by the EFF to support the strange idea the EFF loses all the time. (There was a recent loss in case case personally brought and funded by John Gilmore, an EFF board member, in which the EFF itself had no involvement, and I presume that's what's being alluded to here.)
Bad enough I'm feeding the troll here, but please, don't repeat the trolls, that gets them really excited.
Right. Next you'll be telling me that all the people on "The Office" reality show are actors too.
I thought Serenenity was a very good movie, which leaves me more annoyed that like effectively all hollywood SF movies, it had no real concept of astronomy, how really far it is between planets in a solar system. (Or how vastly far it is in a galaxy, which Firefly sometimes declared to be its setting.)
A solar system is not like a western frontier where you meet other ships along the trail. And a solar system with hundreds of moons around many planets will have, depending on the place in the orbit, immense vast distances between planets on opposite sides of the star, and relatively short ones between moons, but still a vast void on all trips. You are not going to happen to run into Reaver ships.
Now as I said, most shows get this really wrong. To some extent the shows with FTL get it "better" even though FTL is itself fantasy, at least you get a reason to not treat the differences as so vast. Hyperspace jumps, another fantasy, are even better.
2001 got space right. Apollo 13 did (duh.) Few other films and very few TV shows ever did.
Because everybody has their different tastes. However, there are some things that are perhaps a bit more possible to make objective, and that's worth getting even voted opinions on.
In particular, it's often clear with SF/Fantasy shows that sometimes we have a show that "gets" the genre, and sometimes we have a show that is hollywood people doing SF. In both cases you can have better and worse. After all there are good non-SF hollywood people and they can make good SF from time to time, but sometimes they will just throw in something that is plain stupid, and shows that they don't understand SF.
Shows that get the genre can also vary in quality, but in this case it will be more a question of the usual variations of quality. And when they are excellent, they will be the best.
To make a top 50 list, a show should have few episodes that make you turn away in disgust, and also have many excellent shows. There are shows on this list (and shows I have seen people claim as favourites) that don't make this cut, and thus we will argue.
Everybody who goes to BM tries to capture it, which is not really possible, but the best I've been able to do has resulted in my project of giant panoramas, some of the larger ones in the world that get displayed there.
You can see some of them at Brad's Burning Man Site at lower resolution of course.
I do notice the negative comments here are from people who have not gone, and the positive ones from people who have. Jamie's negative comments are about the BMOrg, not the event, which like the rest of us, he loves. That should tell you something about what it is.
You will also want to check out Cracking DES the story of our building the real DES cracker, the machine on its own that was able to crack DES in just a couple of days, demonstrating finally that DES was not secure.
We also have a page about Cracking DES
You're not thinking through the math. When there are millions and billions of people online, there are too many target addresses as well as lots of senders.
Non-bulk mail is mail written personally for you. Not form letters. Not even one person telling a room of 100 slaves "everybody write personal messages all day." These are all bulk mail. Somebody (not the slaves, the guy giving the orders) tried to send mail to a lot of people who didn't know him.
If there were a billion people on E-mail and ten million of them sat all day thinking of personal annoying messages to send out, and they could write 100 of these in a day, on average you would get one a day. But in fact these numbers are ridiculous, you would not get this many people just randomly deciding to write personal messages to strangers.
Consider this message:
"Hi, I have been following your company for a while, and you are doing cool stuff. I'm skilled at what you do and could really help on product X for the following reasons. Do you have an opening for somebody like me?"
Do you want to ban this message? This one, where the guy researched the company and had a reason to be mailing that specific company about that specfic product, not a message like this written as part of a "mail everybody I can think of" campaign.
No, you don't, so don't write your rules to ban this. Fortunately, there is no need to write them that way, so why create a fight with your otherwise allies just for the sake of banning something you don't need to ban?
Including of course, those who were around for the original definition of the term, based on the endless repetition of "spam, spam, spam, spam..." in the MP sketch. From the start it was always the volume of messages that was the issue.
This is in fact however an issue of much debate, with many people on both sides, sometimes called the UBE side and the UCE side. I'm on the UBE side (in fact I think the best and simplest definition for spam is 'bulk mail from a stranger') and there are many on that side.
The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.
Some essays relating to that question:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/2camps.html
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/define.html
Since I speak of CD Rom distros, of course I have heard of them. Aside from the time they take to boot and the other items pointed out, they are not what a novice user, who has NEVER RUN LINUX, wants to tell them if the machine is a good candidate for seamless linuxation. All they will do is issue bizarre diagnostics that stream off the screen if they have issues with the hardware. Or something won't be working right if you know to check for it.
Step 1 is something you want to give to Joe computer owner who has an old 700mhz Pentium ready to throw away. Stick this disk into it and see if it's good for donating to a school/etc.
A more advanced version (even on a floppy) would ask you to plug the computer into your LAN if you have a house LAN. There it could download the latest testing programs and scripts and lists of known problems when 2 pieces of hardware that are themselves fine don't play well together. Possibly it could even tell you who would like your donated computer while it does this.
Once you pass the test, we then want it to be easy to install the distro. The user might do that from CD, or at the school they might have a network install. The key is that these are not advanced users. Sysadmin is not an option for them. They need to know the install will be painless, and the student can take the machine and start surfing and writing assignments and doing email on it.
There are tons of discarded machines out there that can still run a good linux.
What would be nice is a distro meant to make it as easy as possible for relatively unskilled people to turn them into a desktop linux. Linspire may have a lot of that, but here's the elements I see.
A simple program, on a floppy and/or CD, which analyses the hardware in the machine, and gives an estimate of how suitable the machine is to the task. Ie. how well supported the components (chipsets, cards etc.) are, and how much performance one can expect from it.
It could also estimate what you would have to buy to bring the performance to your specs. "This machine is great but by just adding 128MB of ram -- just $20 -- it would be super." and "The machine is good but the ethernet card is one known to have problems. Cheap solid ethernet cards include these..."
And so on. School boards, not wanting to do a lot of fussing, might insist on a certain "easy to convert" rating from this program before taking donations.
Stage 2 is a distro which does a super-simple install on machines that make the cut. It knows the hardware is approved, so it's a hassle-free install, with ideally no questions asked, or barely any.
Then you would get a lot of computers converted and ready to be linux boxes.
With some mumbo jumbo about future fuels to sell it to people. In reality it's an electric heater. Almost all uses of electricity are electric heaters, and unless they affect things outside the room, they're mostly 100% efficient electric heaters. It's easy to be 100% efficient at turning useful energy into heat, after all. (furnaces are not 100% efficient because they must vent waste gas outside, along with some heat.)
This just happens to turn electricity into heat in an amusing way, at a high price. There are, of course lots of other interesting ways to turn electricity into heat. My computers are doing plenty of that right now.
If they really were pitching this as a way to heat the house, it would be as bad an idea as any other electric heater. They are way poorer in total "well to home" efficiency than gas furnaces, but often used because they are cheap to install (expensive to run), very easy to meter (for landlords), and on the positive side, can be easily individually controlled on a room by room basis, which sometimes can make them more efficient than heaters that either heat the whole building or nothing at all.
But I doubt this is meant as such a heater. It's meant as an art piece, to wow your fellow millionaire friends.
While the basic point is true, you would not have to slow down the shielding mass, particularly if it's something like water, since you plan to refuelign with more water when you get to mars. Let the shielding mass fly into space rather than slowing it down.
Though if you are aerobraking, you might keep some of it with you for that. And you probably are aerobraking to some degree.
A long article, full of photos and pointless details, and yet after a dozen pages tell me nothing?
Amazing.
Odd coincidence, just today I put up a set of pages derived from a database of the coordinates of all 788 of the Unesco World Heirtage sites, which includes many interesting landmarks.
Here is the page of Google Maps for World Heritage Sites, and there is also a blog entry for comments and corrections. Many can be zoomed in on. Enjoy.
ISPs route packets for users, which is their job.
I find it amazing how the spam issue will turn people who everywhere else defend the end to end principle of internet design, along with other fundamental internet concepts such as flat-rate billing, opposition to port blocking and the rest -- to suddenly reverse themselves.
We all want to stop spam very much. Yet with spam, we're ready to shoot the packet forwarder (and even the other customers of that packet forwarder) at the drop of a packet.
Because be warned, the principles you abandon "just to get spam" are at a danger of being lost everywhere else.
Paying for access doesn't solve this cafe's problem, which is not so much the moochers as it is the environment where everybody just stares at a screen all day instead of socializing.
I have come up with a solution that fixes both problems. An AP that does intermittent access, so that you can connect, but after enough time to do a basic session of E-mail or web research, it refuses you for 5 minutes.
I outline more about the solution of intermittent wifi in this blog entry
While it's not a great idea, it's a fairly obvious one. Papers on this go back decades. I was one of the earliest to propose it in the Unix community almost a decade ago, but later denounced my own ideas.
But what amazes me is that like clockwork, somebody will publish an article on this "great new idea" for dealing with spam, several times a year it seems. They have clearly read none of the spam literature, nor done a search. And on top of that, journals and magazines also think it's new and publish the items, even slashdot publishes them.
What gives?
How does this work? It says it puts out 720p in NTSC format. Equipment to deal with 720p in NTSC (presumably composite video) is not common, is it? I wasn't aware that you could even deal with that much bandwidth in a typical composite cable, which is why everybody else uses a form of 3 channel component video for this amount of resolution.
Of course, then you have to capture it, which requires a faster A to D than would be found in most video capture cards, though this should not be too hard to get today.
And then you have to compress it, which is not going to happen on an ordinary PC right now, though with hardware assist we're getting close. It's the grail for home HD recorders to be able to record analog HD so they don't have to worry about all the DRM.
Even without environmental questions. CPUs have been getting faster and faster per dollar you spend on them, but they haven not been getting faster the same way per _watt_ you put into them. And each watt put into them also costs power to cool them.
This applies even in the home. Here in California, land of the 14 cent kwh, a 100 watt PC running 24/7 costs $120 per year in power. In a 3 year life the power is more expensive than the CPU or any other major component except perhaps the monitor, sometimes more expensive than the whole PC.
This also plays big on ideas like getting an old computer and putting linux on it to act as a router or music player or other special functions. You are much better off buying a dedicated box like a WRT54G than making use of the "free" old hardware.
And yes, this does have environmental issues, but you can see the problem right away just by looking at costs.
I've been collecting all the different answers to how to have an economy of creative works after the old business models fail. It's apropos to this discussion. I include both things that I think are good and those that I think are bad, and I welcome other people who have heard of or thought of different alternatives to mail me to add to the list.
It can be found at Solutions to the Copyright Crisis.
But beware, clicking on this link may make you scream.
Quake in fear at Darth-Darth Binks
Commercial online communities have a long history of this. People didn't really resent on Compuserve, The Source, Prodigy, GEnie and AOL that they paid to participate in the communities they were building. They just asked if they got value to match their money. Of course there were also lots of free BBSs at the time and paying BBSs, and there were arpanet mailing lists even earlier, and USENET groups which were "free" but you had to be part of a select club to get at them at the start.
Of course, if offered something good for free, people like it and will switch to it. But paying communities thrive today in both MMORPGS and things like Second Life (which does let you own the stuff you build in order to attract people who do have this concern.)
But this is nothing new, it's a competitive battle that will continue for a long time to come, with free and paid and people choosing.
As others have pointed out 62% is a pretty poor score at that site. They also subset the reviews for the more serious professional reviewers, and that's at 57% positive, which they rate as below the "rotten" threshold.
I like Rotten Tomatoes. Critics vary a lot in their personal tastes, unless you know their tastes match yours, any single critic is not that useful a tool. But if something is impressing everybody, you can be confident it has something, and likewise if it's depressing everybody.
As I understand it, they want to put both E911 and universal access surcharges on VoIP phones. The big telcos want this because they have to pay them and they are a barrier to entry for small companies.
But what do you regulate? SIP phones? There is a SIP phone in every copy of Windows XP, and freely available ones for all OSs. They can all register with proxies and make VoIP calls. They have to pay to go out to the PSTN right now, though.
Instead, they are putting the regs if the service gives you a phone number for incoming calls. Ie. it's backwards. If you can _receive_ calls (without necessarily the ability to make them) from the PSTN, then you have to be able to make an outgoing call to 911.
But anything can be a phone now. It can look like an old phone or it can be a piece of software. Anything can be set up to receive calls, or make them, or both. Or not talk to the PSTN at all. Or talk to it in limited ways (for example there are dial-in numbers that let you call from the PSTN and then enter a Free World Dialup number, making every FWD phone able to receive a call from the PSTN.)
This is a dangerous rathole. Accept that voice != emergency service path and find a better way.
The resolution isn't quite enough to tell you if we're looking at the burn platform being built or cleaned up, though the uniformity of colour of what you see does indeed suggest it's being built. The temple, as you say, might not have the same crew on it. The clues will be obvious to those who have been there at tear-down or before, since things like the cafe are not built up the same way they are torn down. I was just surprised to see not just the roads, but many other ad-hoc paths so well defined just from the watering and dragging.
If you look at my own aerial photographs of burning man you can see the roads are in many cases not much more defined during the event.