As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
Then perhaps you want to check out ownCloud. It's Open Source. You can host it yourself. They also have a provider you can rent from (which is how they make ends meet.) There are native clients for Android and iPhone. It supports SSL and can encrypt files stored on the server if you choose. It does a rudimentary form of versioning. It can even translate ODF files to HTML for easy online viewing of documents.
Your data, your control, your responsibility. Everything you just asked for.
The prices of solar cells have been dropping rapidly over the last few years. I think the "green" movement is finally driving up demand to the point where they're becoming commodity items instead of specialty items. They're now available in prices under a dollar per watt, which is about 4 times cheaper than they were just three years ago (the last time I was looking at a rooftop array.) That means today you can buy 400 square feet of solar panels for $5,220, capable of producing a peak power output of 5,500 watts. Not that you'll get that much power with every minute of sunshine, but it could keep a large set of batteries charged.
Of course there's extra money involved - the panels won't mount themselves on your roof, and you'll have to buy an inverter and wire it into your house. Batteries are surprisingly optional, by the way - unless you want to run off the grid, consider selling the electricity back to the electric company instead of storing it yourself. When the smart grid arrives it could make money, as the peak power prices generally coincide with the brightest and hottest days of the year.
I'm not sure how cheap you're expecting them to be get, but they're available today, and a lot cheaper than they were even just a few years ago. The only thing stopping you from buying them is inertia (and the money, of course).
Sure, they could have thrown in with Android. They still could, if they can kick Microsoft to the curb. They could probably even retask the people who were working on Symbian to improve on Android instead.
But just maybe they want to be the top-tier market differentiator like they were in the pre-smartphone era, and they may see the opportunity to be top dog in the Windows market as better than being an also-ran in the Android market. It's not like the Windows phone OS is completely horseshit like the old WinCE versions were. Plus Microsoft has been marketing the hell out of their stuff - you can see product placement in all kinds of popular TV shows, with many of the cool heroes now using Windows Nokia phones instead of the iPhones they used last season.
Microsoft is also actively shopping the Nokia phones around to industries that had been ready to head over the iPhone cliff. They're claiming that a fragile iPhone or iPod needs a heavy $300 protective anti-drop rubber case and add-on battery to serve reliably in a retail environment, whereas a Nokia is already battle hardened and survives the drop tests just fine with an all-day battery life. Nokia would never have gotten a promotional deal like that had they gone with Android.
And almost by coincidence, Apple's new not-universal connectors have suddenly made all the old third-party protective battery/scanner/cases obsolete. If buying additional or replacement iPhones requires a complete replacement of your old investment in batteries and cases, it's just as easy to buy not-Apple gear that doesn't use them at all. And the old stuff currently has good used value for companies not willing to switch away from their old iPhones just yet. So if you were looking for a time to swap hardware, recoup a little of the loss on your investment in hardware, and jump ship from Apple to Microsoft, this could be a good time.
It's a gamble for sure, but Nokia has a plan, and they're starting to see results. It's still way to early to tell if their new CEO is a genius or a loser.
I was actually mocking the slashdot story editor for claiming they were providing a copy of the web instead of providing a copy of web metadata obtained by crawling.
Here's your car analogy: Web crawling is like a guy driving down every street in town and taking a picture of every vehicle he sees, and analyzing them to figure out make, model, year, license plate number, etc. The guy can either choose to sell the information, or he can make it freely available under a creative commons license and publish it on the web.
So if you want to open a gas station and are wondering if you should install a diesel fuel pump, you can either drive all the streets yourself to count all the diesel cars, you can pay the one guy to find out how many diesel cars he counted, you can download a copy of the freely available car information, or you can make a guess. Only one of these choices costs nothing yet leads to making an informed decision.
Bull. The "burning memo" was an honest assessment of Nokia's relevance: they weren't, and they knew it. A loyal but small group of people liked Symbian OS, but no one else cared about it, and Nokia knew they had *nothing* of lasting value going in the smartphone market. They knew exactly what their cash cow was: it was the ordinary mobile phones that they sold by the millions. The trick is that when people are buying non-smartphones, they're making the decision based on price above all else. Those customers don't care much about durability or features or any other differentiators, because they don't have the money to make a different choice. There are a billion of those people on the planet. And once you settle for customers who are buying on price, you're in a commodity market, where the lowest price will dominate.
A Chinese foundry started making cheap chipsets available that enabled any factory in Shenzhen to crank out an adequate phone for about $20 per copy. Since Nokia's phones cost them about $50 to make, it was obvious to them that their cash cow was going to stop producing. Doesn't matter who the CEO is, Nokia was facing a long steep slope downward.
So they had two options: they could try to lower the costs on their cheaper phones, or they could try to find a way to produce a differentiating phone again. Competing with the Chinese on price is impossible, because the playing field isn't level - lacking adequate governmental oversight they have shown they will pollute, they won't provide safety equipment for their workers, they'll copy or steal R&D instead of paying for it, and they'll pay their labor a lot less than Europe. If they can't compete on price, that leaves creating a differentiating phone, one that makes people want it because of its cool features. The marketplace for phones has proven the only way to compete on features instead of price is to play in the smartphone market, and that market is very tough: Apple and Android have both shown to the world that you don't just sell a phone anymore, you sell a phone connected to an ecosystem, a marketplace with thousands of apps. So if you want to enter the smartphone world, you have to bring a smartphone OS and you have to entice hundreds of independent developers to port their popular apps to your platform. That means convincing hundreds of people like you and me that Symbian was going to be wildly profitable and all the porting expenses would be worth it because I would be selling my apps to a market of millions. I don't know about you, but they couldn't bribe me enough to believe a story like that. Lots of app developers can't afford to port to multiple platforms today, and produce only Android or iPhone apps. If they already can't afford to gamble on a proven platform (iOS if they're Android, Android if they're iOS), what would entice them to gamble on an unproven platform?
So instead of investing the billions of dollars it would take to build yet another smartphone ecosystem with no guarantee of success, a different tactic is to stop trying to build your own, and to buy into an existing OS and marketplace instead. Microsoft has the money and OS to realistically provide a potential third marketplace, but it's a gamble and they know it. Microsoft is certainly trying: they've spent the money on the software and are spending it on the marketing. They're out there convincing developers to port their apps. They're providing the tools to build them. They're convincing non phone Windows developers to create Windows phone apps. They're cutting deals with individual industries to provide custom phones for specialized purposes. And a few customers are even buying them. But will Nokia see enough customers before they go out of business? Who knows?
What I do know is that Elop is in a tough spot, and that changing CEOs isn't going to change their position. Maybe what they need is to start producing a different product, like car electronics or cheap and simple home automation systems.
I didn't realize the web wasn't available to everyone, including tinkerers, hackers, activists, and new companies. Thank $(DEITY) the Common Crawlers are here to make sure that my port 80 hasn't yet been pried from my cold, dead fingers.
3. The 'Pockyclipse is really on the way, but the NASA engineers are lying because they don't want to give up any precious engineer slots to save some useless politicians. Remember, NASA has all the keys to the escape rockets.
I second the motion. In addition to continuing to send dunning letters to their accounts payable department, talk to your business partners. Whatever team you're working with, they're going to have more pull from the inside than you can push from the outside. Maybe you tell them you can't afford to keep going at the same pace and have to shrink your team on date X, and that will leave unfinished work that you can no longer deliver on schedule. Maybe gentle hints that your corporate overlords are talking of pulling your contracts. Don't piss them off, don't be unprofessional, don't threaten to pull the plugs completely, but point out that you're in both a mutually tough spot and ask for their help.
Your argument is that because they created the content primarily to get links is that it somehow makes the content less "worthy", whereas I think the content should be judged on its own merits.
Even if the content creator is an advertiser specializing in online-for-profit schools, that doesn't invalidate the content. This is actually more like ordinary advertising, except it's paid for with (somewhat) valuable content instead of directly with cash. And of course there is a link as a result, but it's a legitimate link back to their service.
I still don't see this as anything particularly shady or system-gaming.
Yeah, I didn't exactly see their site or practices as shady. It's not like they're hiding what they're doing or who they're advertising for, so they're not spam. Getting people to link to you by offering content that apparently has enough value for you to link to them is not link farming, it's linking.
It's link farming if the links go back to a fake news aggregator site that nobody could really use. It's SEO comment spam if it includes gratuitous links in generic comments or pseudonymous profiles. (A small dose of nofollow will take care of those guys.)
This company is simply an advertiser that appears to be working hard on behalf of their clients, nothing more. They have provided something that you obviously once thought had value. Turn down the paranoia filter a notch or two, and maybe get away from the keyboard for a while. Perhaps rent a nice relaxing movie, like "Enemy of the State".
I figured that for measuring the frequency history, they could use modules like the kind the UTK students built. Theirs are cable-modem sized boxes that simply plug into a wall outlet and have an ethernet jack and GPS antenna, and look like they were made for easy construction, simple installation, and unattended operation. An intelligence agency with a lot of resources could have them hidden in out of the way places all around the world. Perhaps they hide them inside wall cavities, or on boxes on electrical poles, and give them wireless modems (GSM, wi-fi, Bluetooth, or something custom) to reach the internet. If a couple of engineering students can build one in a box the size of a cable modem, the CIA's S & T guys could probably build one that fits behind a wall outlet box, or even build one into the plug at the end of an electrical cord.
One thing to keep in mind is that an intelligence agency has a very different goal than the university researchers. They aren't trying to map or measure the nation's electrical grid. All they have to do is measure and monitor the frequency anywhere within the same grid or region as the target. This would provide enough information to say "the target was on the same grid as our Peshawar monitoring station on 13 Dec 2012 at 1530."
Regarding the ripples propagating only during disturbances, they might still be able to be used. If you look carefully at the charts they included next to the event maps, you can see tiny ripples continuously throughout the day. Those small ripples are obviously detectable, and are actually the basis for the article's original claims. They weren't displayed on the video because they weren't at the same scale as the large events the studies were highlighting. But I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps the effect of neighboring generators isn't large enough to map the differences.
Still, if you could at least know the target is getting electricity from wires on the Peshawar grid, you don't have to accuse the ambassador of Afghanistan of harboring him.
I think your 2c is not really an issue. Kickstarter's name and reputation is the only valuable asset they have, because just about anybody could stand up a clone. It's in their best interests to make sure that there is no appearance of impropriety in any of their dealings, or people will abandon their site faster than you can kick start a Harley-Davidson on a cold day.
If they're truly willing to spend their reputation for a few quick bucks made off of honest people getting screwed, they're a lot closer to the drain than they appear.
Using "1" as a trunk code in North America is almost meaningless these days. Digital switches route calls based on all the digits, they no longer have to be directed to find a trunk line before passing the rest of the digits through. I wouldn't be overly surprised if there are still a few local exchanges in the remote corners of America that still use electromechanical relays or really old ESS switches that need the "1" prefix for accessing a trunk line, but most networks can and will simply route any ten digit number to the correct destination without complaint.
"Dial '1' for long distance" these days is little more than a 'courtesy' reminder to people that "we will charge you extra money for this call because we've convinced Congress and the FCC that long distance calls still cost us extra money." In reality, those charges represent exactly the reasons that most people abandon their PSTN carriers and switch to digital phone carriers. I'd still be using the traditional wires (and paying the traditional phone company) if my local carrier hadn't stuck an unwanted "long distance access fee" on my bill after I discontinued long distance service.
Regarding "standards to reduce confusion", there are three standards for emergencies: 911, 112, and 000, and they all depend on where you came from and what you learned. If implementing them costs nothing, and there are no collisions in the network, supporting them all reduces confusion during emergencies - the one thing in an emergency situation that you don't want.
Yes, digital recordings are lossy, but they still would include phase and frequency information for the components that make it into the signal. They may not be shaped perfectly like a sine wave, but over time they will still reflect the true nature of the underlying waveform.
Regarding time of day, this technique may not be able to say "which" of the waveforms at 59.9876 Hz was used. But given enough recording duration, the mapping of transitions from 59.9876 to 59.9900 to 59.9950 to 60.0005 can be mapped to identify a particular time. Two independently spliced in sections could provide evidence that the first half was recorded at one time and the second half was recorded later. And yes, abrupt phase changes would clearly signal tampering.
Experts in forensics are always in a position to tamper with evidence. You always need an independent analyst, one without a stake in the outcome. An expert analyzing digital information is almost always working from a copy, and not in a position to tamper with the original data. A claim of falsified evidence could be cross checked by another expert.
Your camera could be battery operated, sure. The point is that your camera's microphone circuitry could pick up stray induced hum from the extension cord powering your lights.
Or if you dubbed in the audio later in your home, the microphone cord might pick up the hum from your computer's monitor.
The point is that hum from the grid, no matter where it entered your information, would identify it to a particular generating plant and time frame.
One real-world use would be tying the frequency fluctuations to anchor a recording in time. Remember when Osama bin Laden would send out his tapes via courier, and the CIA would analyze them and say things like "we can tell he's still alive as of last week because he mentioned the Yemen bombing." If his tapes matched a certain frequency pattern, they might have been able to say "we know he recorded this on December 12th, because the hum matches the power grid of Pakistan's Islamabad power generating plant." That also would have proven he was in Pakistan, and might even be why the CIA insisted he was.
With continual monitoring of the world's electrical grid (that doesn't seem like an impossible task for the CIA to do), they can discover in which section of the grid such a signal originated. I was watching some of the University of Tennessee Knoxville's video footage on YouTube generated by the FNET, which shows impacts to the grid rippling across the country over time. Disturbances are surprisingly visible, and the way they spread via propagation delays would act like an echolocator to pinpoint someone who sent the recording. Not only could they tie it to a specific plant, but they could tie it to a subsection of the grid with a known delay.
And they could potentially discover this location without having all the recording instruments in place in advance. If they knew the signatures of the Islamabad generator and the Lahore generator, and they knew the recordings contained signatures delayed by 2 msec from Islamabad and 5 msec from Lahore, they could start quietly plugging in line monitors around Gujrat to map out where such a grid section might be.
Of course, if bin Laden's lighting was from a private generator, which is not uncommon in that area of the world, then they wouldn't know such info. But if he was using commercial electrical power, that might have located him to within a region.
FOSS isn't a governance model. It's a licensing model.
The FSF, on the other hand, may want to be more like a governance model (as in cases like this), but they can only function as an adviser. That's the beauty of the OS licensing. Not even the owners of the license can exert that much control.
And that's powerful evidence of the true 'Free' at the root of FOSS.
What the FSF could do would be to hand out a "Certificate of FSF purity compliance", based on a product's compliance with the FSF's principles (the four freedoms). The compiler of a distro could submit it for evaluation, and the FSF could feature them in a list of fully compliant distros, or place them in a ranking of "most compliant" to "least compliant." A distro might have 99% compliant modules, but include a non-compliant audio driver, for example, so they might get a rating of FSF-99.
They could list each distro and include the violations of the FSF's principles contained within it. That way, people would have a menu they could go to and say "oh, I didn't know Ubuntu violated principle x this way," or "hey, Debian looks like a pretty FSF compliant GNU/Linux distro," or "OMG, I didn't realize RHEL was so not-free."
The difference is that you made all those sharing decisions for yourself. Canonical should not make that choice for you by default. They can certainly make it an easy-to-drool-on option, but it should not be the system default.
Slashdot Mirror
See, that's the one really nice thing about Ubuntu and Unity. You can walk away from them and not even feel like you've lost something of value.
As long as we can run our own cloud on our own server at home, I'm all for it. Otherwise, screw it. I don't want to give any company control over my own godamn data.
Then perhaps you want to check out ownCloud. It's Open Source. You can host it yourself. They also have a provider you can rent from (which is how they make ends meet.) There are native clients for Android and iPhone. It supports SSL and can encrypt files stored on the server if you choose. It does a rudimentary form of versioning. It can even translate ODF files to HTML for easy online viewing of documents.
Your data, your control, your responsibility. Everything you just asked for.
The prices of solar cells have been dropping rapidly over the last few years. I think the "green" movement is finally driving up demand to the point where they're becoming commodity items instead of specialty items. They're now available in prices under a dollar per watt, which is about 4 times cheaper than they were just three years ago (the last time I was looking at a rooftop array.) That means today you can buy 400 square feet of solar panels for $5,220, capable of producing a peak power output of 5,500 watts. Not that you'll get that much power with every minute of sunshine, but it could keep a large set of batteries charged.
Of course there's extra money involved - the panels won't mount themselves on your roof, and you'll have to buy an inverter and wire it into your house. Batteries are surprisingly optional, by the way - unless you want to run off the grid, consider selling the electricity back to the electric company instead of storing it yourself. When the smart grid arrives it could make money, as the peak power prices generally coincide with the brightest and hottest days of the year.
I'm not sure how cheap you're expecting them to be get, but they're available today, and a lot cheaper than they were even just a few years ago. The only thing stopping you from buying them is inertia (and the money, of course).
Sure, they could have thrown in with Android. They still could, if they can kick Microsoft to the curb. They could probably even retask the people who were working on Symbian to improve on Android instead.
But just maybe they want to be the top-tier market differentiator like they were in the pre-smartphone era, and they may see the opportunity to be top dog in the Windows market as better than being an also-ran in the Android market. It's not like the Windows phone OS is completely horseshit like the old WinCE versions were. Plus Microsoft has been marketing the hell out of their stuff - you can see product placement in all kinds of popular TV shows, with many of the cool heroes now using Windows Nokia phones instead of the iPhones they used last season.
Microsoft is also actively shopping the Nokia phones around to industries that had been ready to head over the iPhone cliff. They're claiming that a fragile iPhone or iPod needs a heavy $300 protective anti-drop rubber case and add-on battery to serve reliably in a retail environment, whereas a Nokia is already battle hardened and survives the drop tests just fine with an all-day battery life. Nokia would never have gotten a promotional deal like that had they gone with Android.
And almost by coincidence, Apple's new not-universal connectors have suddenly made all the old third-party protective battery/scanner/cases obsolete. If buying additional or replacement iPhones requires a complete replacement of your old investment in batteries and cases, it's just as easy to buy not-Apple gear that doesn't use them at all. And the old stuff currently has good used value for companies not willing to switch away from their old iPhones just yet. So if you were looking for a time to swap hardware, recoup a little of the loss on your investment in hardware, and jump ship from Apple to Microsoft, this could be a good time.
It's a gamble for sure, but Nokia has a plan, and they're starting to see results. It's still way to early to tell if their new CEO is a genius or a loser.
I was actually mocking the slashdot story editor for claiming they were providing a copy of the web instead of providing a copy of web metadata obtained by crawling.
Here's your car analogy: Web crawling is like a guy driving down every street in town and taking a picture of every vehicle he sees, and analyzing them to figure out make, model, year, license plate number, etc. The guy can either choose to sell the information, or he can make it freely available under a creative commons license and publish it on the web.
So if you want to open a gas station and are wondering if you should install a diesel fuel pump, you can either drive all the streets yourself to count all the diesel cars, you can pay the one guy to find out how many diesel cars he counted, you can download a copy of the freely available car information, or you can make a guess. Only one of these choices costs nothing yet leads to making an informed decision.
Bull. The "burning memo" was an honest assessment of Nokia's relevance: they weren't, and they knew it. A loyal but small group of people liked Symbian OS, but no one else cared about it, and Nokia knew they had *nothing* of lasting value going in the smartphone market. They knew exactly what their cash cow was: it was the ordinary mobile phones that they sold by the millions. The trick is that when people are buying non-smartphones, they're making the decision based on price above all else. Those customers don't care much about durability or features or any other differentiators, because they don't have the money to make a different choice. There are a billion of those people on the planet. And once you settle for customers who are buying on price, you're in a commodity market, where the lowest price will dominate.
A Chinese foundry started making cheap chipsets available that enabled any factory in Shenzhen to crank out an adequate phone for about $20 per copy. Since Nokia's phones cost them about $50 to make, it was obvious to them that their cash cow was going to stop producing. Doesn't matter who the CEO is, Nokia was facing a long steep slope downward.
So they had two options: they could try to lower the costs on their cheaper phones, or they could try to find a way to produce a differentiating phone again. Competing with the Chinese on price is impossible, because the playing field isn't level - lacking adequate governmental oversight they have shown they will pollute, they won't provide safety equipment for their workers, they'll copy or steal R&D instead of paying for it, and they'll pay their labor a lot less than Europe. If they can't compete on price, that leaves creating a differentiating phone, one that makes people want it because of its cool features. The marketplace for phones has proven the only way to compete on features instead of price is to play in the smartphone market, and that market is very tough: Apple and Android have both shown to the world that you don't just sell a phone anymore, you sell a phone connected to an ecosystem, a marketplace with thousands of apps. So if you want to enter the smartphone world, you have to bring a smartphone OS and you have to entice hundreds of independent developers to port their popular apps to your platform. That means convincing hundreds of people like you and me that Symbian was going to be wildly profitable and all the porting expenses would be worth it because I would be selling my apps to a market of millions. I don't know about you, but they couldn't bribe me enough to believe a story like that. Lots of app developers can't afford to port to multiple platforms today, and produce only Android or iPhone apps. If they already can't afford to gamble on a proven platform (iOS if they're Android, Android if they're iOS), what would entice them to gamble on an unproven platform?
So instead of investing the billions of dollars it would take to build yet another smartphone ecosystem with no guarantee of success, a different tactic is to stop trying to build your own, and to buy into an existing OS and marketplace instead. Microsoft has the money and OS to realistically provide a potential third marketplace, but it's a gamble and they know it. Microsoft is certainly trying: they've spent the money on the software and are spending it on the marketing. They're out there convincing developers to port their apps. They're providing the tools to build them. They're convincing non phone Windows developers to create Windows phone apps. They're cutting deals with individual industries to provide custom phones for specialized purposes. And a few customers are even buying them. But will Nokia see enough customers before they go out of business? Who knows?
What I do know is that Elop is in a tough spot, and that changing CEOs isn't going to change their position. Maybe what they need is to start producing a different product, like car electronics or cheap and simple home automation systems.
I didn't realize the web wasn't available to everyone, including tinkerers, hackers, activists, and new companies. Thank $(DEITY) the Common Crawlers are here to make sure that my port 80 hasn't yet been pried from my cold, dead fingers.
Your list is missing my favorite description: Instagram is Twitter for illiterates.
Is it still a joke if it's true?
3. The 'Pockyclipse is really on the way, but the NASA engineers are lying because they don't want to give up any precious engineer slots to save some useless politicians. Remember, NASA has all the keys to the escape rockets.
I second the motion. In addition to continuing to send dunning letters to their accounts payable department, talk to your business partners. Whatever team you're working with, they're going to have more pull from the inside than you can push from the outside. Maybe you tell them you can't afford to keep going at the same pace and have to shrink your team on date X, and that will leave unfinished work that you can no longer deliver on schedule. Maybe gentle hints that your corporate overlords are talking of pulling your contracts. Don't piss them off, don't be unprofessional, don't threaten to pull the plugs completely, but point out that you're in both a mutually tough spot and ask for their help.
And good luck.
The NANP is certainly big enough to qualify as a standard. It's even international.
That's the nice thing about standards. There are so many to choose from!
Your argument is that because they created the content primarily to get links is that it somehow makes the content less "worthy", whereas I think the content should be judged on its own merits.
Even if the content creator is an advertiser specializing in online-for-profit schools, that doesn't invalidate the content. This is actually more like ordinary advertising, except it's paid for with (somewhat) valuable content instead of directly with cash. And of course there is a link as a result, but it's a legitimate link back to their service.
I still don't see this as anything particularly shady or system-gaming.
Yeah, I didn't exactly see their site or practices as shady. It's not like they're hiding what they're doing or who they're advertising for, so they're not spam. Getting people to link to you by offering content that apparently has enough value for you to link to them is not link farming, it's linking.
It's link farming if the links go back to a fake news aggregator site that nobody could really use. It's SEO comment spam if it includes gratuitous links in generic comments or pseudonymous profiles. (A small dose of nofollow will take care of those guys.)
This company is simply an advertiser that appears to be working hard on behalf of their clients, nothing more. They have provided something that you obviously once thought had value. Turn down the paranoia filter a notch or two, and maybe get away from the keyboard for a while. Perhaps rent a nice relaxing movie, like "Enemy of the State".
I figured that for measuring the frequency history, they could use modules like the kind the UTK students built. Theirs are cable-modem sized boxes that simply plug into a wall outlet and have an ethernet jack and GPS antenna, and look like they were made for easy construction, simple installation, and unattended operation. An intelligence agency with a lot of resources could have them hidden in out of the way places all around the world. Perhaps they hide them inside wall cavities, or on boxes on electrical poles, and give them wireless modems (GSM, wi-fi, Bluetooth, or something custom) to reach the internet. If a couple of engineering students can build one in a box the size of a cable modem, the CIA's S & T guys could probably build one that fits behind a wall outlet box, or even build one into the plug at the end of an electrical cord.
One thing to keep in mind is that an intelligence agency has a very different goal than the university researchers. They aren't trying to map or measure the nation's electrical grid. All they have to do is measure and monitor the frequency anywhere within the same grid or region as the target. This would provide enough information to say "the target was on the same grid as our Peshawar monitoring station on 13 Dec 2012 at 1530."
Regarding the ripples propagating only during disturbances, they might still be able to be used. If you look carefully at the charts they included next to the event maps, you can see tiny ripples continuously throughout the day. Those small ripples are obviously detectable, and are actually the basis for the article's original claims. They weren't displayed on the video because they weren't at the same scale as the large events the studies were highlighting. But I could be wrong, of course. Perhaps the effect of neighboring generators isn't large enough to map the differences.
Still, if you could at least know the target is getting electricity from wires on the Peshawar grid, you don't have to accuse the ambassador of Afghanistan of harboring him.
I think your 2c is not really an issue. Kickstarter's name and reputation is the only valuable asset they have, because just about anybody could stand up a clone. It's in their best interests to make sure that there is no appearance of impropriety in any of their dealings, or people will abandon their site faster than you can kick start a Harley-Davidson on a cold day.
If they're truly willing to spend their reputation for a few quick bucks made off of honest people getting screwed, they're a lot closer to the drain than they appear.
Using "1" as a trunk code in North America is almost meaningless these days. Digital switches route calls based on all the digits, they no longer have to be directed to find a trunk line before passing the rest of the digits through. I wouldn't be overly surprised if there are still a few local exchanges in the remote corners of America that still use electromechanical relays or really old ESS switches that need the "1" prefix for accessing a trunk line, but most networks can and will simply route any ten digit number to the correct destination without complaint.
"Dial '1' for long distance" these days is little more than a 'courtesy' reminder to people that "we will charge you extra money for this call because we've convinced Congress and the FCC that long distance calls still cost us extra money." In reality, those charges represent exactly the reasons that most people abandon their PSTN carriers and switch to digital phone carriers. I'd still be using the traditional wires (and paying the traditional phone company) if my local carrier hadn't stuck an unwanted "long distance access fee" on my bill after I discontinued long distance service.
Regarding "standards to reduce confusion", there are three standards for emergencies: 911, 112, and 000, and they all depend on where you came from and what you learned. If implementing them costs nothing, and there are no collisions in the network, supporting them all reduces confusion during emergencies - the one thing in an emergency situation that you don't want.
Yes, digital recordings are lossy, but they still would include phase and frequency information for the components that make it into the signal. They may not be shaped perfectly like a sine wave, but over time they will still reflect the true nature of the underlying waveform.
Regarding time of day, this technique may not be able to say "which" of the waveforms at 59.9876 Hz was used. But given enough recording duration, the mapping of transitions from 59.9876 to 59.9900 to 59.9950 to 60.0005 can be mapped to identify a particular time. Two independently spliced in sections could provide evidence that the first half was recorded at one time and the second half was recorded later. And yes, abrupt phase changes would clearly signal tampering.
Experts in forensics are always in a position to tamper with evidence. You always need an independent analyst, one without a stake in the outcome. An expert analyzing digital information is almost always working from a copy, and not in a position to tamper with the original data. A claim of falsified evidence could be cross checked by another expert.
Your camera could be battery operated, sure. The point is that your camera's microphone circuitry could pick up stray induced hum from the extension cord powering your lights.
Or if you dubbed in the audio later in your home, the microphone cord might pick up the hum from your computer's monitor.
The point is that hum from the grid, no matter where it entered your information, would identify it to a particular generating plant and time frame.
One real-world use would be tying the frequency fluctuations to anchor a recording in time. Remember when Osama bin Laden would send out his tapes via courier, and the CIA would analyze them and say things like "we can tell he's still alive as of last week because he mentioned the Yemen bombing." If his tapes matched a certain frequency pattern, they might have been able to say "we know he recorded this on December 12th, because the hum matches the power grid of Pakistan's Islamabad power generating plant." That also would have proven he was in Pakistan, and might even be why the CIA insisted he was.
With continual monitoring of the world's electrical grid (that doesn't seem like an impossible task for the CIA to do), they can discover in which section of the grid such a signal originated. I was watching some of the University of Tennessee Knoxville's video footage on YouTube generated by the FNET, which shows impacts to the grid rippling across the country over time. Disturbances are surprisingly visible, and the way they spread via propagation delays would act like an echolocator to pinpoint someone who sent the recording. Not only could they tie it to a specific plant, but they could tie it to a subsection of the grid with a known delay.
And they could potentially discover this location without having all the recording instruments in place in advance. If they knew the signatures of the Islamabad generator and the Lahore generator, and they knew the recordings contained signatures delayed by 2 msec from Islamabad and 5 msec from Lahore, they could start quietly plugging in line monitors around Gujrat to map out where such a grid section might be.
Of course, if bin Laden's lighting was from a private generator, which is not uncommon in that area of the world, then they wouldn't know such info. But if he was using commercial electrical power, that might have located him to within a region.
"This sounds shopped. I can tell from some of the auxels and from hearing quite a few shops in my time."
I'd hazard a guess that it's far more common that average potential buyers scan the QR codes instead of loading up those apps.
Of course, now I have a good idea where to place my QR stickers...
JDBC... lol, don't java'ers use hibernate now? Shit even got ported to .NET for some reason I'll never fully understand.
Revenge. Java guys hate .Net guys.
I guess asking for $25,000 seemed ridiculous?
FOSS isn't a governance model. It's a licensing model.
The FSF, on the other hand, may want to be more like a governance model (as in cases like this), but they can only function as an adviser. That's the beauty of the OS licensing. Not even the owners of the license can exert that much control.
And that's powerful evidence of the true 'Free' at the root of FOSS.
What the FSF could do would be to hand out a "Certificate of FSF purity compliance", based on a product's compliance with the FSF's principles (the four freedoms). The compiler of a distro could submit it for evaluation, and the FSF could feature them in a list of fully compliant distros, or place them in a ranking of "most compliant" to "least compliant." A distro might have 99% compliant modules, but include a non-compliant audio driver, for example, so they might get a rating of FSF-99.
They could list each distro and include the violations of the FSF's principles contained within it. That way, people would have a menu they could go to and say "oh, I didn't know Ubuntu violated principle x this way," or "hey, Debian looks like a pretty FSF compliant GNU/Linux distro," or "OMG, I didn't realize RHEL was so not-free."
The difference is that you made all those sharing decisions for yourself. Canonical should not make that choice for you by default. They can certainly make it an easy-to-drool-on option, but it should not be the system default.