There's a perfectly reasonable convention of prefixing adverts with [ADV] in the subject line so people who dont want to read them dont have to.
If they aren't going to play fair then i dont see why we should. We need to make sure that the financial penalties outweigh the potential profits to be made. If it's a small penalty per email sent, then it'd take a while to whittle away ralskys fortunes.
We need to make an example of people breaking these laws to act as a deterrent. Perhaps a 3 emails and your up for life in prison....
I use VoIP all the time. I live in the UK and vonage give me a regular Denver phone number which here connects to a regular phone.. so i can make international calls to my collegues and fiancee for free.
But then again not many people are in my position.
Why do we always have to put up with these putdowns at the end of slashdot stories.
VoIP is cool and it's cool that toshiba have started putting it in PCs. I'm sure if it takes off it'll find its way into more products but if it's not available on your handheld of choice then start coding it....
I'm not suggesting that everything should be at a fixed price, but establish some sort of system wherby i sell my photograph to NG (hypothetically) for some price plus a per publication royalty fee. I dont see any difference between publication on paper or a cdrom but some thought might have to go into more ephemoral things like web publishing.
If everything were standardized then NG could at least look at a photograph and work out their costs of republishing it.
Let photographers decide on the pricing but some standard contract to prevent squabbling about new media.
You are right about copyright terms - they are getting far too long. Where would we be now if shakespeare etc.. were still copyrighted? What if the 'basics' of mechanical engineering were still patented?
Whilst i have no counter evidence, it seems unlikely that they'd be creating a copy of CIL.
Optimising high performance code distributed code has a different set of challenges to optimizing desktop or web applications. OGSA already provides a framework for grid applications to exist and communicatate in, and I suspect this already has some overlap with CIL.
Photography is inherently a copy medium. It is never any more difficult to make a copy of a photograph than it was to make the original in the first place. Usually less so. It goes with the territory. Such issues are inherent in choosing the field as a way to generate personal profit.
Have you ever tried taking a good photograph. I've tried hauling my 4x5" wooden view camera up into rocky mountain national park and nothing that comes back looks remotely like the equivilent shot by Ansel Adams. Sure it might have the same mountain on it, and my films four times smaller but a lot finer grained... but it's not the same.
The photographs which national geographic publishes are usually of outstanding quality and some of their photographers go to the ends of the world (literally and metaphorically) to get the results they want.
I'd be in favor of adopting a mandatory licensing scheme, allowing future work to be reproduced at a fixed royalty level. So if someone wants to reproduce a printed article online, on a dvd, tatooed on thier ass... then there'd be a straightforward charging scheme.
The problem i see is that RFID's aren't active and smart chips dont work without an external power source. Seems like we're a long way off from coupling these together to make a wireless selfpowered smartcard.
Smartchips make a lot more sense for credit cards whereas rfid is better for security passes, subway cards etc...
That's akin to saying that all users should start linux with the command line and build their way up to a graphical environment.
I challenge you to find a midrange digital camera that can match the sharpness that i get with a slow film and an f/1.8 prime lens. I'm sure you could get the camera and a 50mm f/1.8 for under $200 on ebay.
I think it's better to start automatic and if it doesn't meet your needs then you can easily learn how to tweak your shutter speed and f/stop to get the desired results.
No midrange digital offers the flexibility of any film-based SLR. Though i'm desperate for a digital rebel and would kill for a 1ds:)
It's digital, and i like digital things and find them inherantly more easy to trust than an analog system.
Secondly it's a spot meter. It can measure the intensity of 1 degree, 2 degree and 4 degree spot which is great for very dramatic lighting, whereas cheaper meters will average a larger area.
Thirdly it can sync to a random flash - so i can test fire a flash on my camera, the meter will spot the increased brightness and let me measure how much light is bouncing off a surface.
Fourthly. I'm using it with a cheap ($675) large format view camera with a cheap ($450) lens with a cheap ($140) tripod... so it's not really that much.
Also i'm amused by the fact that every time i see 'glamour' photographers working on TV, they always seem to have a Sekonic L-508 in front of the boobies:)
I agree completely with you. I moved from a K-1000 to the EOS series about 10 years ago and now do most of my photography with an Eos 300 (the UK version of the Rebel 2000).
It's a great little camera, very light for travelling and whilst it's probably not the best made - it's cheap and i haven't broken it yet:)
The metering is great and does really well with complex lighting, it's also very accurate and rarely disagrees with my sekonic meter (which cost more than this whole camera).
It's AF is a bit on the slow side - i mostly shoot landscapes so that's no big deal. The lens selection is great, Canon and Tokina do some great lenses and Phoenix/Vivitar/Tamron are around for when you want cheap ones.
I wouldn't fixate on the 'do everything manually attitude' since most auto cameras let you do everything manually when you want. It's much better to focus on composing good photographs and bracket difficult exposures (since film is cheap).
That said i recently started with large format photography and it's been quite a wake-up call to have to do EVERYTHING by hand.
Scottish hydro electric do a 2Mb up & down service. We're still stuck on ISDN here but I've heard that the HE service is very very fast, and cheaper than 2Mbit cable or DSL services.
Yeah but my phone works in just about every country on the planet save north korea.
And i pay about $25/month for the few calls that i actually do make.
Electricity seems to cost about the same in the UK and US, though we get substantail off peak discounts if we use it for heating and such.
There certainly aren't quite as good all you can use cell tarrifs in the uk, but bear in mind that we dont ever pay a thing for incoming calls (unless we're abroad), oh and there are very few places in the UK that dont have coverage with all 4 2nd generation networks.
3G coverage is still a bit spotty but, remind me again, what 3G options do you have in the states:)
I just have my bank create a bill payment option for each of my credit cards, my electricity bill and also for settling debts with my roommates - then on *their* banking application i just click bill payment and choose the amount.
Of course you can get one better with direct debit whereby i authorize my cellphone and satelite providers just to take their funds straight from my account.
Unlike my (limited) experience in the USA, this actually works out cheaper. I get a GBP2 discount on each cellphone bill because the provider knows that they'll get their money every month on the day taht they want.. and they dont have to pay people to open mail and deposit checks.
I believe (and cant be bothered checking in true/. style) that Volvo developed the three point seat belt.
Realising it's safety potential, they then chose to patent it but make it freely available to other manufacturers.
Although it's a slightly different situation since Volvo were almost certainly going to use their invention regardless of what others in the field did.
There is a reasonably clear correlation between radio bandwidth and usable data bandwidth. So in your example, the phones will have only 1kHz of bandwidth each. In order to squeeze a phonecall in that space you'd need to use some very clever compression and encoding scheme which would likely be very intolerant of noise.
IIRC cellphone networks are divided into 64kHz channels, each of which are shared by 8 phones. So each GSM phone has around 8kHz of bandwidth to play with.
FM Radio on the other hand i think has 150kHz per station, so that limits how closely stations can be spaced.
TV is HUGE, several MHz wide.
As you move to higher frequencies of course you can have more bandwidth per channel since there's just more of it. There the same between 2.4 and 2.5GHz as there is between 0 and 100Mhz.
Unfortunately higher frequency signals dont tend to travel as far in crowded environments - a single LW transmitter can cover most of a continent whereas at 5GHz you need a lot more wifi cells to do it.
Cellphones permeate walls and 'wrap' their signal through windows more than 802.11b does partly because they operate on a lower frequency.
Some cellphones are still running on 900Mhz which definitely propogates better than higher frequencies will.
Consider LW radio - a single transmitter can cover a continent!
When the cell networks move to 3G they'll also move to a higher frequency. Unless they increase the number of base stations (and survive the soccer mom rampage) then they'll surely have poorer coverage.
I could have ran rings around my parents when i was a teenager. As it happened i didn't have much to hide from them, but considering the lengths we went to in school it should be no surprise.
We repartitioned and reformatted one systems hard drive so that it could have a 'games' drive. Then we copied across the original system from a clone using a parallel cable - the powers that be called in all sorts of computer 'experts' but not one ever found what we'd done.... although by the time one of them had found fdisk i'd been in with partition magic and cleared the evidence.
Another system we'd discovered that you could pry the floppy disk lock off (or rather the drive facia) using a flatbladed screwdriver. Then we took advantage of the fact that it had a modem and we had a QNX boot disk (no knoppix in those days).
Uni was a little bit harder until we discovered that they used uniform bios passwords. Cracking the password on a 486 gave us access to reconfigure all the nice sparkly new PII's with a complete separate windows install just so we could get a parallel port zip drive, in turn just so we could download the matrix before the MPAA got round to releasing it here.
Confidential data needs to have strictly managed flows and storage. It'd worrying enough that this information could be accessed anywhere on campus even without the wireless threat.
When it comes to something like a psych evaluation I cant see why that information isn't kept 'offline' or on a small secured network. There is *no* justification even for allowing all staff members direct access to this sort of thing - it's ripe for abuse. I also cant see any reason why you'd need access to such a report instantly.
Now i'm going to get family members saying "i dont want another windows machine cos they blow up when i download files"
I'm quite certain that if i made a real effort to properly lock down a linux box, register alerts to people snooping and ther likes that even the top govt experts would struggle.
Then i'll just stick a Linux, BSD and Solaris box in a chain so they'd have three to get thru.... that'd cost more than buying the damn cds in the first place, but that's almost not the point anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a perfectly reasonable convention of prefixing adverts with [ADV] in the subject line so people who dont want to read them dont have to.
If they aren't going to play fair then i dont see why we should. We need to make sure that the financial penalties outweigh the potential profits to be made. If it's a small penalty per email sent, then it'd take a while to whittle away ralskys fortunes.
We need to make an example of people breaking these laws to act as a deterrent. Perhaps a 3 emails and your up for life in prison....
I use VoIP all the time. I live in the UK and vonage give me a regular Denver phone number which here connects to a regular phone.. so i can make international calls to my collegues and fiancee for free.
But then again not many people are in my position.
Why do we always have to put up with these putdowns at the end of slashdot stories.
VoIP is cool and it's cool that toshiba have started putting it in PCs. I'm sure if it takes off it'll find its way into more products but if it's not available on your handheld of choice then start coding it....
I'm not suggesting that everything should be at a fixed price, but establish some sort of system wherby i sell my photograph to NG (hypothetically) for some price plus a per publication royalty fee. I dont see any difference between publication on paper or a cdrom but some thought might have to go into more ephemoral things like web publishing.
If everything were standardized then NG could at least look at a photograph and work out their costs of republishing it.
Let photographers decide on the pricing but some standard contract to prevent squabbling about new media.
You are right about copyright terms - they are getting far too long. Where would we be now if shakespeare etc.. were still copyrighted? What if the 'basics' of mechanical engineering were still patented?
Whilst i have no counter evidence, it seems unlikely that they'd be creating a copy of CIL.
Optimising high performance code distributed code has a different set of challenges to optimizing desktop or web applications. OGSA already provides a framework for grid applications to exist and communicatate in, and I suspect this already has some overlap with CIL.
Photography is inherently a copy medium. It is never any more difficult to make a copy of a photograph than it was to make the original in the first place. Usually less so. It goes with the territory. Such issues are inherent in choosing the field as a way to generate personal profit.
Have you ever tried taking a good photograph. I've tried hauling my 4x5" wooden view camera up into rocky mountain national park and nothing that comes back looks remotely like the equivilent shot by Ansel Adams. Sure it might have the same mountain on it, and my films four times smaller but a lot finer grained... but it's not the same.
The photographs which national geographic publishes are usually of outstanding quality and some of their photographers go to the ends of the world (literally and metaphorically) to get the results they want.
I'd be in favor of adopting a mandatory licensing scheme, allowing future work to be reproduced at a fixed royalty level. So if someone wants to reproduce a printed article online, on a dvd, tatooed on thier ass... then there'd be a straightforward charging scheme.
The problem i see is that RFID's aren't active and smart chips dont work without an external power source. Seems like we're a long way off from coupling these together to make a wireless selfpowered smartcard.
Smartchips make a lot more sense for credit cards whereas rfid is better for security passes, subway cards etc...
i'd love one - but they are a bit pricey for me just now
There's no need.
:)
That's akin to saying that all users should start linux with the command line and build their way up to a graphical environment.
I challenge you to find a midrange digital camera that can match the sharpness that i get with a slow film and an f/1.8 prime lens. I'm sure you could get the camera and a 50mm f/1.8 for under $200 on ebay.
I think it's better to start automatic and if it doesn't meet your needs then you can easily learn how to tweak your shutter speed and f/stop to get the desired results.
No midrange digital offers the flexibility of any film-based SLR. Though i'm desperate for a digital rebel and would kill for a 1ds
They make more expensive ones.
:)
It's digital, and i like digital things and find them inherantly more easy to trust than an analog system.
Secondly it's a spot meter. It can measure the intensity of 1 degree, 2 degree and 4 degree spot which is great for very dramatic lighting, whereas cheaper meters will average a larger area.
Thirdly it can sync to a random flash - so i can test fire a flash on my camera, the meter will spot the increased brightness and let me measure how much light is bouncing off a surface.
Fourthly. I'm using it with a cheap ($675) large format view camera with a cheap ($450) lens with a cheap ($140) tripod... so it's not really that much.
Also i'm amused by the fact that every time i see 'glamour' photographers working on TV, they always seem to have a Sekonic L-508 in front of the boobies
I agree completely with you. I moved from a K-1000 to the EOS series about 10 years ago and now do most of my photography with an Eos 300 (the UK version of the Rebel 2000).
:)
It's a great little camera, very light for travelling and whilst it's probably not the best made - it's cheap and i haven't broken it yet
The metering is great and does really well with complex lighting, it's also very accurate and rarely disagrees with my sekonic meter (which cost more than this whole camera).
It's AF is a bit on the slow side - i mostly shoot landscapes so that's no big deal. The lens selection is great, Canon and Tokina do some great lenses and Phoenix/Vivitar/Tamron are around for when you want cheap ones.
I wouldn't fixate on the 'do everything manually attitude' since most auto cameras let you do everything manually when you want. It's much better to focus on composing good photographs and bracket difficult exposures (since film is cheap).
That said i recently started with large format photography and it's been quite a wake-up call to have to do EVERYTHING by hand.
Scottish hydro electric do a 2Mb up & down service. We're still stuck on ISDN here but I've heard that the HE service is very very fast, and cheaper than 2Mbit cable or DSL services.
http://www.hydro.co.uk/broadband/index.asp
Yeah but my phone works in just about every country on the planet save north korea.
:)
And i pay about $25/month for the few calls that i actually do make.
Electricity seems to cost about the same in the UK and US, though we get substantail off peak discounts if we use it for heating and such.
There certainly aren't quite as good all you can use cell tarrifs in the uk, but bear in mind that we dont ever pay a thing for incoming calls (unless we're abroad), oh and there are very few places in the UK that dont have coverage with all 4 2nd generation networks.
3G coverage is still a bit spotty but, remind me again, what 3G options do you have in the states
In the UK this works great:
I just have my bank create a bill payment option for each of my credit cards, my electricity bill and also for settling debts with my roommates - then on *their* banking application i just click bill payment and choose the amount.
Of course you can get one better with direct debit whereby i authorize my cellphone and satelite providers just to take their funds straight from my account.
Unlike my (limited) experience in the USA, this actually works out cheaper. I get a GBP2 discount on each cellphone bill because the provider knows that they'll get their money every month on the day taht they want.. and they dont have to pay people to open mail and deposit checks.
I believe (and cant be bothered checking in true /. style) that Volvo developed the three point seat belt.
Realising it's safety potential, they then chose to patent it but make it freely available to other manufacturers.
Although it's a slightly different situation since Volvo were almost certainly going to use their invention regardless of what others in the field did.
There is a reasonably clear correlation between radio bandwidth and usable data bandwidth. So in your example, the phones will have only 1kHz of bandwidth each. In order to squeeze a phonecall in that space you'd need to use some very clever compression and encoding scheme which would likely be very intolerant of noise.
IIRC cellphone networks are divided into 64kHz channels, each of which are shared by 8 phones. So each GSM phone has around 8kHz of bandwidth to play with.
FM Radio on the other hand i think has 150kHz per station, so that limits how closely stations can be spaced.
TV is HUGE, several MHz wide.
As you move to higher frequencies of course you can have more bandwidth per channel since there's just more of it. There the same between 2.4 and 2.5GHz as there is between 0 and 100Mhz.
Unfortunately higher frequency signals dont tend to travel as far in crowded environments - a single LW transmitter can cover most of a continent whereas at 5GHz you need a lot more wifi cells to do it.
Aren't microsoft on the verge of releasing their googleslaying search engine (or perhaps just search marketing) on the world.
How nice on an impartial journalistic source to pick holes in google which are almost certainly specific areas which microsoft has chosen to optimise.
I had a BTExact tunnel on my home lan at one point and BT gave me 15 trillion addresses.... I'm already way over my 4 billion.
If i wanted to use all them then i'd even have to dig out that 486 laptop from under my bed.
It's not enough i tell ya.
Cellphones permeate walls and 'wrap' their signal through windows more than 802.11b does partly because they operate on a lower frequency.
Some cellphones are still running on 900Mhz which definitely propogates better than higher frequencies will.
Consider LW radio - a single transmitter can cover a continent!
When the cell networks move to 3G they'll also move to a higher frequency. Unless they increase the number of base stations (and survive the soccer mom rampage) then they'll surely have poorer coverage.
I could have ran rings around my parents when i was a teenager. As it happened i didn't have much to hide from them, but considering the lengths we went to in school it should be no surprise.
We repartitioned and reformatted one systems hard drive so that it could have a 'games' drive. Then we copied across the original system from a clone using a parallel cable - the powers that be called in all sorts of computer
'experts' but not one ever found what we'd done.... although by the time one of them had found fdisk i'd been in with partition magic and cleared the evidence.
Another system we'd discovered that you could pry the floppy disk lock off (or rather the drive facia) using a flatbladed screwdriver. Then we took advantage of the fact that it had a modem and we had a QNX boot disk (no knoppix in those days).
Uni was a little bit harder until we discovered that they used uniform bios passwords. Cracking the password on a 486 gave us access to reconfigure all the nice sparkly new PII's with a complete separate windows install just so we could get a parallel port zip drive, in turn just so we could download the matrix before the MPAA got round to releasing it here.
This is a general network security issue.
Confidential data needs to have strictly managed flows and storage. It'd worrying enough that this information could be accessed anywhere on campus even without the wireless threat.
When it comes to something like a psych evaluation I cant see why that information isn't kept 'offline' or on a small secured network. There is *no* justification even for allowing all staff members direct access to this sort of thing - it's ripe for abuse. I also cant see any reason why you'd need access to such a report instantly.
i thought the articles emphasis to be on avoiding having to gpl government projects. In which case the tools would be irrelevant
I've never looked but i'm sure there are non-gpl compilers for bsd and linux systems. There certainly are for proprietry unix and windows boxes.
I've been using konqueror pretty much exclusively for the last few months... it's great.
A few more complex sites dont work and the odd site doesn't let you in until you fake the user agent, but it's come on leaps and bounds since 2.0.
Well i can write a program, compile it with GCC and sell it with any license i like..
GCC's license means that any product which is a derivative of gcc must be gpl'd
Now i'm going to get family members saying "i dont want another windows machine cos they blow up when i download files"
I'm quite certain that if i made a real effort to properly lock down a linux box, register alerts to people snooping and ther likes that even the top govt experts would struggle.
Then i'll just stick a Linux, BSD and Solaris box in a chain so they'd have three to get thru.... that'd cost more than buying the damn cds in the first place, but that's almost not the point anymore.