If anyone who has a deeper understanding of the subject can come up with a sufficiently detailed and plausible explanation of how exactly a rocket may have caused this, I'm all ears.
Bad Astronomer has a good write-up, and he certainly knows his stuff. It's corroborated by a comment on the blog there as well:
That reminds me of something we saw waaay back in the late 1980’s during a public night at our observatory. All of a sudden there was a gasp from the crowd, and we looked out the dome to see this bright glowing ball traveling south to north (mostly). When we moved the telescope over to it, we could see in the eyepiece a small object from which the stuff was jetting out from. Later we found out it was a booster stage venting unused propellant.
Using CD-quality numbers, that comes to 600MB/hour. So about 6 hours of radio per day at that rate.
Assuming average overall, as well as including ambient radio stations (most restaurants and shopping malls) I can envision 6/hr a day of hearing the radio, even if it's not active listening.
It seems they converted any information you consume to digital. For example, the headline "The New York Times" would be 18 bytes encoded as characters (assuming no byte packing). Television and audio (including radio and phone) were also measured, I assume by the size of the digital signals on the provider's backend.
TV was 45% of the overall data consumed per day, clocking in at 4.5 hours of watching. That's 34GB * 45% = 15.3GB of television. 15.3GB/4.5 hours = 3.4GB/hour => ~1MB/s => ~8Mbit/s. That's a fairly reasonable (and conservative) estimate, since compressed 720p is 20Mbit/s. I'd say 34GB/day overall is a reasonable number.
That's why it would fail, of course. But, putting out a $30 game and $30 of 'essential' DLC is what would happen in my candy-coated world. It still relies on a working DRM model for the DLC, though.
As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer.
So what you're saying is that we should only sell half the game in the shops and make the customer download the rest of it as DLC?
As long as the game in stores costs half as much, or gives credit to download the other half of the game, that seems acceptable to me.
Some genres of game might even be better because of it. For example racing, sports, and music games.
Racing: a core group of cars from all the classes, then download packs for american muscle, touring cars, exotics, supercars, japanese late-models, etc. You only pay for the cars you want.
Sports: soccer (football) game where you only buy the leagues you want to play. MLS, premier, and national teams, for example.
Music: same idea, buy the disc and get $X to spend on downloadable songs. Never have to play that song you hate, just don't buy them.
Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the initial game would be cheaper (har har), and the DLC of course necessitates DRM (otherwise it all gets pirated, and it's a bunch of extra work for no pay). This would work great in theory, but in practice I imagine nothing good.
It's not as simple as just collecting relevant data. Even if it were, that in and of itself is a major hurdle.
Agreed. Even at a worst case scenario a human can identify information that is more likely to be important, but only if you have it. As you said, sometimes we don't know data is relevent until after we have collected it, especially in the case of corroborating evidence.
GP's suggestion to delete the data ignores the ability to search for useful signals (even if it is time consuming or a crap-shoot) and assumes that we will not obtain an automated system by the time this data is useless.
Like brewing coffee, boring testing work and stuff like that.
Hahaha, I do testing work & I get paid *way* more than $80/hr. Testing work is hard to do right & good people who are willing to do it are as rare as hens teeth.
But boring testing work is hard to mess up, and the pay reflects that. Sure, if you're developing test equipment or software, designing requirements, or doing cool stuff, testing is awesome. If they hand you a unit and ask you to run the automated testing on it... hope the computer has minesweeper.
A good boss will be happy if you (or any employee) work diligently for the COMPANY, not just the boss personally. This means sometimes professionally disagreeing with the boss, and letting him know that (politely!). This has worked very well for me before, but of course YMMV.
Agreed. A good boss won't care, as long as you make something better.
During my (engineering) internship, I was building and troubleshooting a new-technology demonstration board. My boss had created the schematic and board artwork already, I was in charge of turning that into a working circuit (manufactured, assembled, and working).
Because he expected me to do the work, he had missed several things that I needed to fix. About two months in, I was having significant issues with the power supply (the important part of the circuit) while my boss was on vacation. It turned out my boss hadn't followed the manufacturer's directions for our power regulator and the board layout was preventing the circuit from working correctly. While he was still away I was able to get demonstration boards from the chip producer, wire them onto my board, and get the overall circuit working.
My boss laughed and congratulated me when I told him "all you needed to do was leave the country, and I fixed it!" He didn't want to be right, he wanted a proof of concept, and I was able to deliver. He was a great manager, and I probably would have taken a full time job there if I hadn't gotten a better offer elsewhere (though my current job has fantastic management as well). That's exactly the kind of job that you want. I made less money than most of my friends, but had great opportunities and an excellent work environment. You won't make your fortune during your internship, but you can lay the foundation for scoring a job worth bragging to your friends about.
I think it was Rock Band at Best Buy..no bass drum pedal setup.
The demo stations were intentionally dumbed-down. Best Buy initially requested there be no pedal, since they didn't want to set up chairs, or scare customers away if it was too hard.
I suggest at least trying the actual game. It's quite close to actually drumming, at least as much as one would reasonably expect.
Again, what is the proposed alternative? Are you suggesting that we throw out IQ and simply stop studying statistical relationships involving intelligence? Or are you proposing some alternative measure of intelligence? The fact that IQ is not an ideal measure of intelligence does not mean it is not a useful measure of intelligence.
IQ is really more of a measure of education, just like nearly every other test type. Without a working vocabulary (and a relatively large one at that), your IQ test score will be lower. Of course, one can always study their IQ higher by several points. That's education (knowledge), not intelligence, and IQ includes too much of the former to be a reasonable measure of purely the latter.
For example, there's a 0.82 correlation between IQ and SAT scores. A simple look at the number of IQ test questions which require learned knowledge (particularly vocabulary) shows that even if IQ mostly measures raw intelligence, it's also significantly affected by education. Add that socio-economic groups which receive generally less or lower quality education seem to score lower on both tests, and perhaps IQ is a better measure of knowledge than education.
Since IQ is about education as well as intelligence, why label it purely a measure of intelligence? This seems to be circular reasoning to make some studies seem more useful. IQ correlates with income, but doesn't it make more sense that this is a function of education (which IQ measures, in part), rather than of raw intelligence? Or perhaps the 'heritibility' of IQ is due to higher income families providing their children higher quality education. Averaged over an entire nation and mistakenly attributing IQ to intelligence alone would give the false impression that these people are smart because their parents are smart. However, do the same study with SAT scores (which correlate highly with IQ scores) and the conclusion would likely be that the schools are failing to enable success in their students. This seems inaccurate at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
IQ does have a useful measure, for identifying underperforming (IQ 80) school children who need remedial help. That was one of its initial uses. Trying to make fine predictions (10 points) with it, especially much above 100 is of little use. For example, a score of 100 could be good at math with a weak vocabulary or vice-vers-a. However, a score much lower clearly indicates a deficit of education.
it's more than just interest, though, there is a common skillset. Practice in the game can improve your real life performance and vice-vers-a. While they will need to exercise it differently, a racing gamer will know how to feather the throttle, to overtake in a corner, or avoid a wreck. Likewise a music gamer will know common drum beats, fills, and how to move their hands and feet seperately and in time.
Sure there are bad habits to overcome (I still bury the bass pedal), but the gamer has a head start over someone with just a strong interest.
And what drum game had you playing bass drum with a stick? Were you playing on a lower difficulty?
Thirdly, (and yes, I play drums too), the drum skills in those Band/Hero games are terrible. They don't even develop the basic motor skills of the bass drum, snare drum, high hat (95% of all popular western music). Instead you just hit something related to when a light lights up on the screen. No transfer at all... At least the guitar part of those games puts the notes in relative order (higher notes are higher on the fret board, and lower notes are lower). The drums are just layed out as, red, blue, orange, green...a drummer didn't design these games, clearly.
Sorry, but they certainly were developed by drummers (at least as far as Rock Band, Harmonix is >70% musicians). Also, the drums are (for the most part) layed out consistently, at least enough to put two and two together as to which drum you're 'playing' if you just listen.
And if they didn't build up the motor skills to hit high hat, snare, and bass, how did I go from playing bass guitar to playing drums as well? I didn't emerge from the game as a fantastic drummer, but I played well enough to fool people into thinking that I had played the drums before. Two years later and I play drums more than bass. I had to refine my stick rebound, dynamics, and tempo, but otherwise I knew how to play drums. I still tend to consider what I do 'faking it', but I still do it well enough to fool those who don't know, and even best several people I know who come from percussion backgrounds.
And that's the point, these games lay the groundwork for future success, assuming you have the opportunity to hone your skills with the real thing. Nobody expects (I hope) to turn their game lap time their first time on the track, but you'll get there a hell of a lot quicker than someone with no sim experience.
Viola! Data byte 2 has been 100% fully corrected using parity, so your nitpicking quote "Parity bits don't allow you to correct an error" is 100% wrong.
Shit, I misread (and misspoke). I was speaking about parity bits (one bit per byte of data), which are not able to correct an error. You (and GP) were talking about parity bytes (which I somehow completely forgot about) which can rebuild data (hence, RAID 3, 4, 5, and 6). How I misread that, I don't know.
This is correct. There's no reasonable way for them to 'guarantee' a minimum speed, since an outage (either theirs or the backbone) or other interruption is a huge issue.
There are really two problems:
1) The networks aren't always transparent about their management practices. If you throtle a user for using >50% of their max for more than 15 minutes, tell me that. At least I know up front.
2) The inability to change providers. If I don't like Comcast's management policies, I can't get another cable internet service. I'm stuck with DSL or fiber (if I'm lucky). Europe has significantly more choice of available ISPs in any given area. This allows competition where a customer can actually decide to use a different company based on network management.
This is the reason why we're stuck, we have little choice to avoid network management policies, aside from forgoing internet or possibly reducing your max speed (both options worse than sticking it out). Until we can effectively 'vote with our dollar', we have little recourse.
Look at how well (comparatively) this has worked for the cell phone industry. It's a race to provide free perks, and if you don't like your carrier you have the ability to switch to at least 2 other, roughly equivalent, carriers. There's no enforced monopoly for them to hide behind, they have to compete or they lose money.
Also if we can present the same logical file when read to the application even if every 9th byte is parity on the disk that is a plus because it means legacy apps can get the enhanced protection as well.
Not to nitpick, but I'm going to nitpick...
Parity bits don't allow you to correct an error, only check that an error is present. This is useful for transfer protocols, where the system knows to ask for the file again, but the final result on an archived file is the same: file corrupt. With parity, though, you have an extra bit that can be corrupted.
In other words, parity is an error check system, what we need is ECC (Error Check and Correct). Single parity bit is a 1-bit check, 0-bit correct. we need a system that provides a correction limit at least as much as the average corruption rate for our required time. Others in the comments have suggested common algorithms to do this, but simple parity just won't cut it.
Point taken. You can do some homebrew on an XBox, not all.
Regardless, that's the trade-off. If you want to run on the XBox, you need to follow their rules. If you don't like their rules, go somewhere else (PC, for example), but be aware you might not get exactly the combination that you prefer, just because all the companies operating in the space don't offer it (or did and went out of business).
Of course, the big thing here is it was the XBL terms of service that were violated, not the hardware terms. So, if you REALLY want a modded XBox, just don't use it on Live or use any Live-enabled features. Problem solved?
Or, to not purchase an Xbox 360, for the same reasons.
Then what set-top video game machine do you recommend for people who prefer to play indie games? Even with XNA's limitations, Nintendo and Sony don't offer anything remotely close to XNA.
You could, you know, not modify the console, since you can play homebrew without a mod.
I would argue that just because you don't like the gaming offerings out there, it doesn't give the 'right' to get what you want. There are three competitors in the space, you can pick one, more, or none of them depending on your preference. I think this was a clear cut case, I might be singing a different song if they were banning for fleeting explitives or because you didn't buy enough MS points.
If you don't want to play by the common sense rules, you can deal with it. Though I do have sympathy for those who were not aware their console was modified (refurbs or pre-owned).
No, they'll drive by neighborhoods looking through your house trying to find illegal activity.
Then they tell a judge they got an anonymous tip, and get a warrant.
Easy solution, log when the device is turned on and report immediately using GPS and the cell network. Now there is a record of any illegal usage of the device. The technology can still be used for warranted searches and if you get caught without being warranted it should be easy for your lawyer to get the case thrown out of court.
And just like bittorrent, it will be mostly used for the illegitimate purposes.
So we should ban bittorrent? No.
Even tasers are good when used on a 300 pound guy charging you with a knife where the alternative is shooting the guy. So get angry at the cops who tase people for civil disobedience or use FLIR and RADAR for warrantless searches, not at the (otherwise legitimate) tools they used. Instead of railing against the technology, why not push for requiring all uses to be logged to prevent abuses. There are tasers with a camera that record before and after the trigger is pulled, connect this device to GPS and the cell network and log the time and location while it is used. If there's not a search warrant for them at that time and place, throw out the evidence and discipline the cops.
I'm just pointing out that it's inconsistent to say one technology that has illegal uses is 'good' while the other is 'bad', because all the technologies are agnostic to how they are used. So, don't dismiss a technology on the premis that it will be abused. Find a way to prevent just the abuses, then you don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
What will stop the cops from cruising down the street looking into peoples' houses, spotting illegal activity, telling a judge that they received an anonymous tip, obtaining a warrant, and then legally raiding your home.
While that may be an issue for some technologies (FLIR), it really isn't one here. It seems this technology can only detect movement, even as minute as breathing. So, unless you can think of an illegal activity that can be detected purely by number of bodies in a house, you're late to the party and going after the wrong technology.
Again, the issue is with illegal searches, which this technology doesn't even do much to facilitate, especially compared with stuff in use already.
Let's not mention FLIR (forward looking infra-red) allows law enforcement to see through walls anyway with remarkable resolution.
They still need a warrant to use it
Here's the trick, isn't it? As far as I can tell, our justice system for criminal offenses is still relatively transparent. People still get cases dismissed because the cops did something wrong, such as not obtaining a warrant. If they're busting into your house with a warrant already, I see no sense in complaining about what technology they may or may not use to prepare. Especially with the potential benefits against being surprised by the visitor to your house, or the ability to detect weapons before they're encountered (preventing unintended injuries). Or even just the ability to make sure you're home before busting in your door thinking you're avoiding them.
Basically, complain about the search and seizure, complain about not obtaining warrants, but don't complain about the specific technology used unless there are concerns about safety (taser) or efficacy (too many false-positives).
Of course, the big reason why fire departments want this is because FLIR doesn't work on a burning building, this will let them identify breathing victims to minimize their risk and let them rescue as many as possible. The benefit for police is more marginal, though still significant. But if you're worried about cops having the capability to lok into your house, they already do (and SCOTUS have said it requires a warrant).
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone who has a deeper understanding of the subject can come up with a sufficiently detailed and plausible explanation of how exactly a rocket may have caused this, I'm all ears.
Bad Astronomer has a good write-up, and he certainly knows his stuff. It's corroborated by a comment on the blog there as well:
That reminds me of something we saw waaay back in the late 1980’s during a public night at our observatory. All of a sudden there was a gasp from the crowd, and we looked out the dome to see this bright glowing ball traveling south to north (mostly). When we moved the telescope over to it, we could see in the eyepiece a small object from which the stuff was jetting out from. Later we found out it was a booster stage venting unused propellant.
Using CD-quality numbers, that comes to 600MB/hour. So about 6 hours of radio per day at that rate.
Assuming average overall, as well as including ambient radio stations (most restaurants and shopping malls) I can envision 6/hr a day of hearing the radio, even if it's not active listening.
Otherwise it is really hard to get to ~20GB/day of internet use.
I knew nobody RTFA, but I thought people at least read a short comment before replying.
Not internet use, all information/data. That's including possibly non-digital formats such as television, phone conversations, or print.
It seems they converted any information you consume to digital. For example, the headline "The New York Times" would be 18 bytes encoded as characters (assuming no byte packing). Television and audio (including radio and phone) were also measured, I assume by the size of the digital signals on the provider's backend.
TV was 45% of the overall data consumed per day, clocking in at 4.5 hours of watching. That's 34GB * 45% = 15.3GB of television. 15.3GB/4.5 hours = 3.4GB/hour => ~1MB/s => ~8Mbit/s. That's a fairly reasonable (and conservative) estimate, since compressed 720p is 20Mbit/s. I'd say 34GB/day overall is a reasonable number.
That's why it would fail, of course. But, putting out a $30 game and $30 of 'essential' DLC is what would happen in my candy-coated world. It still relies on a working DRM model for the DLC, though.
As a result, he suggested, EA sells DLC to both communities of gamers. And that's how a pirate can turn into a paying customer.
So what you're saying is that we should only sell half the game in the shops and make the customer download the rest of it as DLC?
As long as the game in stores costs half as much, or gives credit to download the other half of the game, that seems acceptable to me.
Some genres of game might even be better because of it. For example racing, sports, and music games.
Racing: a core group of cars from all the classes, then download packs for american muscle, touring cars, exotics, supercars, japanese late-models, etc. You only pay for the cars you want.
Sports: soccer (football) game where you only buy the leagues you want to play. MLS, premier, and national teams, for example.
Music: same idea, buy the disc and get $X to spend on downloadable songs. Never have to play that song you hate, just don't buy them.
Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the initial game would be cheaper (har har), and the DLC of course necessitates DRM (otherwise it all gets pirated, and it's a bunch of extra work for no pay). This would work great in theory, but in practice I imagine nothing good.
It's not as simple as just collecting relevant data. Even if it were, that in and of itself is a major hurdle.
Agreed. Even at a worst case scenario a human can identify information that is more likely to be important, but only if you have it. As you said, sometimes we don't know data is relevent until after we have collected it, especially in the case of corroborating evidence.
GP's suggestion to delete the data ignores the ability to search for useful signals (even if it is time consuming or a crap-shoot) and assumes that we will not obtain an automated system by the time this data is useless.
Like brewing coffee, boring testing work and stuff like that.
Hahaha, I do testing work & I get paid *way* more than $80/hr. Testing work is hard to do right & good people who are willing to do it are as rare as hens teeth.
But boring testing work is hard to mess up, and the pay reflects that. Sure, if you're developing test equipment or software, designing requirements, or doing cool stuff, testing is awesome. If they hand you a unit and ask you to run the automated testing on it... hope the computer has minesweeper.
A good boss will be happy if you (or any employee) work diligently for the COMPANY, not just the boss personally. This means sometimes professionally disagreeing with the boss, and letting him know that (politely!). This has worked very well for me before, but of course YMMV.
Agreed. A good boss won't care, as long as you make something better.
During my (engineering) internship, I was building and troubleshooting a new-technology demonstration board. My boss had created the schematic and board artwork already, I was in charge of turning that into a working circuit (manufactured, assembled, and working).
Because he expected me to do the work, he had missed several things that I needed to fix. About two months in, I was having significant issues with the power supply (the important part of the circuit) while my boss was on vacation. It turned out my boss hadn't followed the manufacturer's directions for our power regulator and the board layout was preventing the circuit from working correctly. While he was still away I was able to get demonstration boards from the chip producer, wire them onto my board, and get the overall circuit working.
My boss laughed and congratulated me when I told him "all you needed to do was leave the country, and I fixed it!" He didn't want to be right, he wanted a proof of concept, and I was able to deliver. He was a great manager, and I probably would have taken a full time job there if I hadn't gotten a better offer elsewhere (though my current job has fantastic management as well). That's exactly the kind of job that you want. I made less money than most of my friends, but had great opportunities and an excellent work environment. You won't make your fortune during your internship, but you can lay the foundation for scoring a job worth bragging to your friends about.
I think it was Rock Band at Best Buy..no bass drum pedal setup.
The demo stations were intentionally dumbed-down. Best Buy initially requested there be no pedal, since they didn't want to set up chairs, or scare customers away if it was too hard.
I suggest at least trying the actual game. It's quite close to actually drumming, at least as much as one would reasonably expect.
Again, what is the proposed alternative? Are you suggesting that we throw out IQ and simply stop studying statistical relationships involving intelligence? Or are you proposing some alternative measure of intelligence? The fact that IQ is not an ideal measure of intelligence does not mean it is not a useful measure of intelligence.
IQ is really more of a measure of education, just like nearly every other test type. Without a working vocabulary (and a relatively large one at that), your IQ test score will be lower. Of course, one can always study their IQ higher by several points. That's education (knowledge), not intelligence, and IQ includes too much of the former to be a reasonable measure of purely the latter.
For example, there's a 0.82 correlation between IQ and SAT scores. A simple look at the number of IQ test questions which require learned knowledge (particularly vocabulary) shows that even if IQ mostly measures raw intelligence, it's also significantly affected by education. Add that socio-economic groups which receive generally less or lower quality education seem to score lower on both tests, and perhaps IQ is a better measure of knowledge than education.
Since IQ is about education as well as intelligence, why label it purely a measure of intelligence? This seems to be circular reasoning to make some studies seem more useful. IQ correlates with income, but doesn't it make more sense that this is a function of education (which IQ measures, in part), rather than of raw intelligence? Or perhaps the 'heritibility' of IQ is due to higher income families providing their children higher quality education. Averaged over an entire nation and mistakenly attributing IQ to intelligence alone would give the false impression that these people are smart because their parents are smart. However, do the same study with SAT scores (which correlate highly with IQ scores) and the conclusion would likely be that the schools are failing to enable success in their students. This seems inaccurate at best, and intentionally misleading at worst.
IQ does have a useful measure, for identifying underperforming (IQ 80) school children who need remedial help. That was one of its initial uses. Trying to make fine predictions (10 points) with it, especially much above 100 is of little use. For example, a score of 100 could be good at math with a weak vocabulary or vice-vers-a. However, a score much lower clearly indicates a deficit of education.
it's more than just interest, though, there is a common skillset. Practice in the game can improve your real life performance and vice-vers-a. While they will need to exercise it differently, a racing gamer will know how to feather the throttle, to overtake in a corner, or avoid a wreck. Likewise a music gamer will know common drum beats, fills, and how to move their hands and feet seperately and in time.
Sure there are bad habits to overcome (I still bury the bass pedal), but the gamer has a head start over someone with just a strong interest.
And what drum game had you playing bass drum with a stick? Were you playing on a lower difficulty?
The Papyrus games were very squirrely and hard to drive... just like they should be.
The console sims still give a little bit of leeway on acceleration, which makes a big difference when you run a RWD car with 800+ HP.
I've never opened a GH/RB box and found a "Learn How to Play Guitar" book.
But there were 'here are proper drum/vocal techniques' tutorials.
Thirdly, (and yes, I play drums too), the drum skills in those Band/Hero games are terrible. They don't even develop the basic motor skills of the bass drum, snare drum, high hat (95% of all popular western music). Instead you just hit something related to when a light lights up on the screen. No transfer at all... At least the guitar part of those games puts the notes in relative order (higher notes are higher on the fret board, and lower notes are lower). The drums are just layed out as, red, blue, orange, green...a drummer didn't design these games, clearly.
Sorry, but they certainly were developed by drummers (at least as far as Rock Band, Harmonix is >70% musicians). Also, the drums are (for the most part) layed out consistently, at least enough to put two and two together as to which drum you're 'playing' if you just listen.
And if they didn't build up the motor skills to hit high hat, snare, and bass, how did I go from playing bass guitar to playing drums as well? I didn't emerge from the game as a fantastic drummer, but I played well enough to fool people into thinking that I had played the drums before. Two years later and I play drums more than bass. I had to refine my stick rebound, dynamics, and tempo, but otherwise I knew how to play drums. I still tend to consider what I do 'faking it', but I still do it well enough to fool those who don't know, and even best several people I know who come from percussion backgrounds.
And that's the point, these games lay the groundwork for future success, assuming you have the opportunity to hone your skills with the real thing. Nobody expects (I hope) to turn their game lap time their first time on the track, but you'll get there a hell of a lot quicker than someone with no sim experience.
Viola! Data byte 2 has been 100% fully corrected using parity, so your nitpicking quote "Parity bits don't allow you to correct an error" is 100% wrong.
Shit, I misread (and misspoke). I was speaking about parity bits (one bit per byte of data), which are not able to correct an error. You (and GP) were talking about parity bytes (which I somehow completely forgot about) which can rebuild data (hence, RAID 3, 4, 5, and 6). How I misread that, I don't know.
I need more coffee...
This is correct. There's no reasonable way for them to 'guarantee' a minimum speed, since an outage (either theirs or the backbone) or other interruption is a huge issue.
There are really two problems:
1) The networks aren't always transparent about their management practices. If you throtle a user for using >50% of their max for more than 15 minutes, tell me that. At least I know up front.
2) The inability to change providers. If I don't like Comcast's management policies, I can't get another cable internet service. I'm stuck with DSL or fiber (if I'm lucky). Europe has significantly more choice of available ISPs in any given area. This allows competition where a customer can actually decide to use a different company based on network management.
This is the reason why we're stuck, we have little choice to avoid network management policies, aside from forgoing internet or possibly reducing your max speed (both options worse than sticking it out). Until we can effectively 'vote with our dollar', we have little recourse.
Look at how well (comparatively) this has worked for the cell phone industry. It's a race to provide free perks, and if you don't like your carrier you have the ability to switch to at least 2 other, roughly equivalent, carriers. There's no enforced monopoly for them to hide behind, they have to compete or they lose money.
Sorry, messed up my abbreviations.
We want Error Detect and Correct.
ECC is an Error Correcting Code.
Also if we can present the same logical file when read to the application even if every 9th byte is parity on the disk that is a plus because it means legacy apps can get the enhanced protection as well.
Not to nitpick, but I'm going to nitpick...
Parity bits don't allow you to correct an error, only check that an error is present. This is useful for transfer protocols, where the system knows to ask for the file again, but the final result on an archived file is the same: file corrupt. With parity, though, you have an extra bit that can be corrupted.
In other words, parity is an error check system, what we need is ECC (Error Check and Correct). Single parity bit is a 1-bit check, 0-bit correct. we need a system that provides a correction limit at least as much as the average corruption rate for our required time. Others in the comments have suggested common algorithms to do this, but simple parity just won't cut it.
Point taken. You can do some homebrew on an XBox, not all.
Regardless, that's the trade-off. If you want to run on the XBox, you need to follow their rules. If you don't like their rules, go somewhere else (PC, for example), but be aware you might not get exactly the combination that you prefer, just because all the companies operating in the space don't offer it (or did and went out of business).
Of course, the big thing here is it was the XBL terms of service that were violated, not the hardware terms. So, if you REALLY want a modded XBox, just don't use it on Live or use any Live-enabled features. Problem solved?
Or, to not purchase an Xbox 360, for the same reasons.
Then what set-top video game machine do you recommend for people who prefer to play indie games? Even with XNA's limitations, Nintendo and Sony don't offer anything remotely close to XNA.
You could, you know, not modify the console, since you can play homebrew without a mod.
I would argue that just because you don't like the gaming offerings out there, it doesn't give the 'right' to get what you want. There are three competitors in the space, you can pick one, more, or none of them depending on your preference. I think this was a clear cut case, I might be singing a different song if they were banning for fleeting explitives or because you didn't buy enough MS points.
If you don't want to play by the common sense rules, you can deal with it. Though I do have sympathy for those who were not aware their console was modified (refurbs or pre-owned).
No, they'll drive by neighborhoods looking through your house trying to find illegal activity. Then they tell a judge they got an anonymous tip, and get a warrant.
Easy solution, log when the device is turned on and report immediately using GPS and the cell network. Now there is a record of any illegal usage of the device. The technology can still be used for warranted searches and if you get caught without being warranted it should be easy for your lawyer to get the case thrown out of court.
And just like bittorrent, it will be mostly used for the illegitimate purposes.
So we should ban bittorrent? No.
Even tasers are good when used on a 300 pound guy charging you with a knife where the alternative is shooting the guy. So get angry at the cops who tase people for civil disobedience or use FLIR and RADAR for warrantless searches, not at the (otherwise legitimate) tools they used. Instead of railing against the technology, why not push for requiring all uses to be logged to prevent abuses. There are tasers with a camera that record before and after the trigger is pulled, connect this device to GPS and the cell network and log the time and location while it is used. If there's not a search warrant for them at that time and place, throw out the evidence and discipline the cops.
I'm just pointing out that it's inconsistent to say one technology that has illegal uses is 'good' while the other is 'bad', because all the technologies are agnostic to how they are used. So, don't dismiss a technology on the premis that it will be abused. Find a way to prevent just the abuses, then you don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
What will stop the cops from cruising down the street looking into peoples' houses, spotting illegal activity, telling a judge that they received an anonymous tip, obtaining a warrant, and then legally raiding your home.
While that may be an issue for some technologies (FLIR), it really isn't one here. It seems this technology can only detect movement, even as minute as breathing. So, unless you can think of an illegal activity that can be detected purely by number of bodies in a house, you're late to the party and going after the wrong technology.
Again, the issue is with illegal searches, which this technology doesn't even do much to facilitate, especially compared with stuff in use already.
Let's not mention FLIR (forward looking infra-red) allows law enforcement to see through walls anyway with remarkable resolution.
They still need a warrant to use it
Here's the trick, isn't it? As far as I can tell, our justice system for criminal offenses is still relatively transparent. People still get cases dismissed because the cops did something wrong, such as not obtaining a warrant. If they're busting into your house with a warrant already, I see no sense in complaining about what technology they may or may not use to prepare. Especially with the potential benefits against being surprised by the visitor to your house, or the ability to detect weapons before they're encountered (preventing unintended injuries). Or even just the ability to make sure you're home before busting in your door thinking you're avoiding them.
Basically, complain about the search and seizure, complain about not obtaining warrants, but don't complain about the specific technology used unless there are concerns about safety (taser) or efficacy (too many false-positives).
Of course, the big reason why fire departments want this is because FLIR doesn't work on a burning building, this will let them identify breathing victims to minimize their risk and let them rescue as many as possible. The benefit for police is more marginal, though still significant. But if you're worried about cops having the capability to lok into your house, they already do (and SCOTUS have said it requires a warrant).