Just make a -real- email address with the word spam in it. I have the address spamme@ever.mine.nu as my email address for slashdot, and it is a -real- email address. However, the harversters have [for the past several months, anyhow] ignored it completelt
You can now get a 5 port 10/100 ethernet switch for only slightly more then the cost of a hub. If you're going to be doing any serious MPI [or other parallel] programming, why limit total bandwidth by using a hub? Seems silly.
I have a 24/7 broadband connection with better then 99.9% uptime at home, and I quite enjoy the minor hobby of being able to run my own tinsy little server on it. I have apache and sendmail, ssh login, etc. The notion of a default policy of filtering ports to the end consumer of bandwidth troubles me enormously.
Indeed, this seems to contradict the notion of free and unrestricted end-to-end service,
as discussed recently on slashdot. Not to sound horrible here, but we all manage to live with spam pretty well, it's not like it's all that much of a hassle. I just keep a variety of email addresses to give out for different purposes. A few get a good deal of spam, and it's easy to run a script to delete first time messages from users I have never corresponded with from those accounts.
I just worry that, if we were try to really achieve a spam-free utopia, that it might well be at far too great a cost in freedom. I would rather deal with the occasional spam, then have the commercial bandwitdth providers filter my connection. And there is always the worry of false/vindictive reports leading to unfair account termination.
As I see it, the real problem with the ISS is the huge amount of money that it is sucking up, to essentially just provide an international good-will playground for military trained rocketboys. If the resources devoted to the ISS were instead diverted to substantial research on practical, conceivably -profitable- projects, such as
space mining and manufacturing
, there might concievably be some real non-beuracratized development of space where private citizens could have the oppurtunity to finally have a new frontier to expand into.
After all, the sun is more then halfway through it's usefull life. If intelligent civilization dosen't manage to establish a self-sustaining foothold in space while it has the chance [say, before it destroys itself, or is wrecked by natural disaster/cataclysm (perhaps, ironically enough by said very same insteller rocks)], then all of the glorious complexity and marvelous achievements of evolution [up to and including mankind] will have been for nothing.
What a waste that would be... "I am ozymandius, king of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, and dispair"...
Speak Freely is a marvelous program, I have used it to save literally hundreds of dollars on long distance! It has been around for a long time, but hardly anyone new to unix these days seems to have heard of or use it.
It is a marvelously solid and robust package, supports 4 types of compression [even one which allows robust [4 duplicates of every packet] communication over a standard POTS 33.6 modem (albeit at less then ideal fidelity)], as well as GSM compression [at a mere 1.5KB/sec], which I find delivers notably better fidelity then your normal telephone link! [Maybe this is just a matter of the higher quality analog-to-digitial converters in modern sound cards plus better mics then normal phones]
It is available, under a BSD style license,
for download at this site [full source]
Best of all [or pehaps not, depending on your degree of elitism]
it is also available for windoze... which, although I hate to think of another example of the win32 world enjoying the fruits of hardcore unix ingenuity and altruism [they even slapped a bloody GUI on the thing for the win32 version...sigh...], nonetheless is cool because they interoperate.
This means that other less CSCI friends/aquantainences of mine can download it and talk to me for free. I doubt I could convince them that "well, you just need to install a copy of linux on your system to use this amazing product, come on, it's easy enough, I'll talk you through it!" heh [PS. not saying linux is hard to install at all, but it is for those people whose VCR's are still blinking 12:00]
An amazing program. Enjoy saving lots of money!
P.S. Did I mention that it also natively supports high-grade encryption for all conversations? ... comes with full integration of IDEA, DES, Blowfish cyphers, and can call pgp to exchange a key with someone else if they have pgp installed too.
P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the fine group that has developed speakfreely. I just think that the program rocks.
If the theatre distribution system were to change to digital streaming of some sort, this might pose a significant advantage for small time low-budget films to be available to audiences. Think about it; as it is today, a theatre company will only show a film on it's screens repeatably, and hope that enough people will show up. I've been in cinema rooms with as few as seven people in them during off peak hours or when the movie wasn't a fresh release.
After all, the theatre knows that seven tickets are better then one, and since it has the film at hand, it shows it again for the additional marginal revenue.
But what if an underutilized cinema screen could be showing any current movie in existance [at least, more recent ones that have the benefit of being digital]? This could add significantly to the competiveness of the theatres by alowing them to diversify their offerins significantly. A group of 7 to 25 people who want to see some particular low-budget or subversive art film could get together and bid as a group for a desire to reserve a screen at a certain time. Both the theatre wins by offering exactly what it's customers democratically bid on, and the customers win, by having an enormous expansion of the available material in the theatre.
My panties were just fine, thank you! I am an ardent beliver in property rights, and of course am aware that I have no property claim or right to cable service [or too any service] from anybody!
My only point was that the contract's limitations were more draconian then they need to be. Note my point about taking my buisness to someone else if they tried to enforce them; does that seem to imply I am on some populist campaign about the big bad cable company and me the poor little guy? Read before you post.
Such a nightmare might be avoidable if the design was robust enough to begin with. Something with spheres of authority and the oppurtunity to ban cycles of self-promoting false links, [as well as some sort of probalistic detection of self referencial simmilar script generated rings]
heh.
Still, no one else had yet posted about ipmasqadmin when I made that comment. It was meant to provider a hint to newbies; the article was afterall about the prevalence of firewalls in home networks.
Of course a masq_napster module would be nice, but there is no one to speak of that I know of right now.
NAT isn't that bad. When I first set up a home NAT firewall, I suddenly noticed that many of my napster recieves weren't working anymore. Woe is me. However, it's a trivial matter to run napster on each individual computer set to listen/accept on a certain port, and configure forwarding of that port through the firewall.
For example, if I am running napster on default listen/accept of 6699..
ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L $EXT_IP_ADDR 6699 -R $INT_IP_ADDR 6699
And that's that. If another computer on the internal NAT segment wants to use napster, just set it up to use a nondefault [say, 9966] port.
Most all NAT/masquerading issues can be resolved with a little elbow grease.
If it gets too bad, google will fall the way of altavista and others, and some fresh new company will come along, untainted by commercial biases, to be adopted by the (informed) masses... only to be bought out, sell their soul... rince, wash, repeat.
Still, perhaps google is just doing this to better determine the overall validity/appeal/appropriateness of the links it returns, to use this to add an additional weight into their relative ranking. [example: If no one ever finds what they are looking for in items 3 and 7, perhaps they should be lower down, eh?]
I'm tempted to add the obligatory "why dosen't someone start a true copyleft-esque open-for-ever-by-viral-contract search portal for the better the world", etc. If only bandwidth and processing power weren't so expensive. Google can't survive the demands placed on it by it's popularity without some form of recompense for it's inevitable costs....
I had hoped that their contracting out as the engine of yahoo might allow for them to remain pure and uncontaminated. Only time will tell.
What a shame. I wonder if any covert governmental types may have used some sort of classified anti-satellite weapon to prevent this level of detail being available to the public market.
I remember that the other private imaging satelite [with, if I recall, 10 or 15 meter resolution] was only allowed to be lauched due to the companies consent to pre-censoring of certain areas by the Feds.
Were they perhaps trying to get around such restraints by lauching in europe and avoiding US oversight? Beats me; sorry to add anything more to the conspiracy fodder supply.
but they are usually not enforced. For example, I use roadrunner, whose terms of use contract includes:
(d) Subscriber will not resell the Road Runner Service, or any portion
thereof, or otherwise charge others to use RoadRunner, or any portion
thereof. Further, Subscriber will not redistribute the RoadRunner
Service, or any portion thereof, whether or not Subscriber receives
compensation for such redistribution. The Road Runner Service as
offered under this Agreement is a residential service offered for
personal, non-commercial use only. Subscriber agrees not to use the
RoadRunner Service for operation as an internet service provider, for
the hosting of websites or for any business enterprise. Subscriber
further agrees not to connect the cable modem to any computer other
than the Computer(s) or to any server (or any computer running server
applications that provide similar protocol services over the Road
Runner Service), including without limitation any servers for mail,
HTTP, FTP, RTP, IRC, DHCP, or multi-user interactive forums (e.g.
gaming).
I run httpd and ftp on my home computer, and sshd and mindterm [free GPL'd java ssh client applet] so that I can log into it securely from any browser on the planet. Technically, this violates my agreement, but this has been going on for over a year. If they cared, they could have stopped me [and lost a lot of money: $50 a month!].
They haven't, so I have stuck with them. If they ever dared to enforce the rediculous provisions of our 'contract', I would quickly take my buisness elsewhere to one of the several DSL providers in town.
-- man sig
If a spam has a 1-800 number, call it a lot.
on
Spambot Poisoner
·
· Score: 2
Don't forget, your average spammer is desperate for the low margin of sales he can hope to achive. Thus, many of the spams I have recieved often contain 1-800-xxx-xxxx numbers for contacting them. Remember, with an 800 number, the reciever of the call is charged money for each incoming call to it.
A friend of mine runs a script which intermittently dials the numbers in the evening when he's asleep and not otherwise using his line. Vindictive, evil, yet somehow it seems just.
There is an excellent book of short stories concerning such questions of advanced computational ability and it's effect on human society. Diaspora, by Greg Egan. It's about a future where humanity exists primariliy [except for a few luddite fleshy holdouts] as sentient software modeled in nanocomputers from the principals of neurogenesis defined by reverse engineering the genome.
Fascinating book. I would highly recommend it [and no, I am in no way associated with the author or publisher]
We're talking about computation here, not energy. Comparing the power of the brain [i.e. in informational processing ability] to the completely different notion of chemical energy or work is just plain silly. By that arguement, although a brain will always be more powerfull then silicone becuase, if you try to burn each one, you will get more energy out of the brain... but also old newspaper is would always be more 'powerfull' then the human brain.
Think before you post.
The individual neuron is not much more then a glorified adding machine.
Actually, the new IE with Win2K requires http://
on
W3 Releases Amaya 4.0
·
· Score: 1
At least at the computer labs in the engineering building at my college. If you try to type in, say, "someurl.com", it will automatically go to a microsoft search page to return results on "someurl.com". You have to type "http://someurl.com" for it to go to the site.
Amusingly enough, some college kids figured out how to, via supersampling [taking lots of readings instead of only onw], average out the imposed errors and get extremely accurate results.
[They published an article about it, too]... thus, enemy states could easily make accurate GPS recievers to, say, guide cruise missles. [As if 30 yards isn't accurate enough, anyway!]
Likely because of this, the governemnt turned of the induced error in the civilian signal last Feburary.
Hey, this is not a flame; I deeply respect and admire the effort of the mozilla developers. [And thank my lucky stars that I [hopefully] won't have to boot windows to browse the web one day]
But, I have on several occasions downloaded the mozilla builds, and have found mozilla to be ungodly slow. I mean, sure, I don't have the fasted computer in the world [AMD K6-3 400Mhz], but yikes! Scrolling is fast, I admit, but gif images stutter horribly while my CPU maxes out. Just selecting drop down menu items is sluggish. Oh well. I'm sure it will improve.
The only way I can think of doing this is in undefeatably secure way would be to put up another GPS satellite system [or perhaps merely reprogram the current ones, if they can handle sensitive reception as well], in which the protocal would be:
A: Your device sends a authentication session request to the satellite network.
B: Several satellites in range [after coordinating with each other to ensure precise timing] send out a "packet" addressed specifically to your device.
C: Your device, upon recieving each packet, immediately sends out a response.
D: The satellites compare the time they recieved the response, and know where you are.
Basically, it's like being pinged from several locations at once. It's a reversal of the semantics of GPS itself. Current GPS works because each satellite is sending out time stamps continously, and your reciever compares the difference in local arrival time from the stamps sent at the same time. [This is because the speed of light is finite, and the satellites are at different distances from you].
You just need to reverse the process, sending back a ping, and have the satellites coordinate the difference in arrival time of the signal.
Come to think of it, a special device wouldn't really be necessary. Any transmission that can be intercepted by the sattelites could be sampled, and arrival time differences used to locate the source precisely. Hmmm.
I'd be willing to bet good money the government already has just such a capability.
It hardly seems worth using that much storage to my somewhat low fi tastes. Current NTSC resolution is wholly adequate for me. It is the message of the story that really counts, after all. Don't get me wrong, if it was affordable and terabyte scale storage was affordable to the average person, I would be much happier then without it...
But I would be much happier today if I could find a means to permanently archive my wealth of recorded [fair use, wink wink, although it was, afterall broadcast on cable services I subscribed to] media. I have several hundred VHS cassetes of programming [including every simpsons episode, every Pinky and the Brain episode, the State [long since cancelled sketch commedy show], etc. Perhaps not so much with the simpsons. I preserve things that you cannot buy in stores, anywhere, for I do not want them to slip away.
Probably for the same reason I tend to mirror sites I like. The recent flap with the death of Mathworld is a perfect example of the value of archiving. Web sites fit just fine on $0.44 CDR's, and so does music. But video is another beast, and I would be extremely happy if I could ever find an affordable option to digitally archive [even at less then broadcast quality] my videos, which are otherwise quietly degrading into noise.
My point is, that it's not so much ultra quality that matters, but longevity. If only MPG4 would come out, and someone would sell a hardware encoder. Sigh. [You still can't even buy MPG2 encoders for less then several thousand dollars, and MPG2 actually takes up -more- space the MPG1, [although the quality is actually at broadcast level, unlike MPG which isn't even at VHS-EP level.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what the junk DNA is... it's filled with first posts, links to goatse, and other viral troll phage sequences.
---
man sig
Just make a -real- email address with the word spam in it. I have the address spamme@ever.mine.nu as my email address for slashdot, and it is a -real- email address. However, the harversters have [for the past several months, anyhow] ignored it completelt
---
man sig
You can now get a 5 port 10/100 ethernet switch for only slightly more then the cost of a hub. If you're going to be doing any serious MPI [or other parallel] programming, why limit total bandwidth by using a hub? Seems silly.
---
man sig
I have a 24/7 broadband connection with better then 99.9% uptime at home, and I quite enjoy the minor hobby of being able to run my own tinsy little server on it. I have apache and sendmail, ssh login, etc. The notion of a default policy of filtering ports to the end consumer of bandwidth troubles me enormously.
Indeed, this seems to contradict the notion of free and unrestricted end-to-end service, as discussed recently on slashdot. Not to sound horrible here, but we all manage to live with spam pretty well, it's not like it's all that much of a hassle. I just keep a variety of email addresses to give out for different purposes. A few get a good deal of spam, and it's easy to run a script to delete first time messages from users I have never corresponded with from those accounts.
I just worry that, if we were try to really achieve a spam-free utopia, that it might well be at far too great a cost in freedom. I would rather deal with the occasional spam, then have the commercial bandwitdth providers filter my connection. And there is always the worry of false/vindictive reports leading to unfair account termination.
---
man sig
As I see it, the real problem with the ISS is the huge amount of money that it is sucking up, to essentially just provide an international good-will playground for military trained rocketboys. If the resources devoted to the ISS were instead diverted to substantial research on practical, conceivably -profitable- projects, such as space mining and manufacturing , there might concievably be some real non-beuracratized development of space where private citizens could have the oppurtunity to finally have a new frontier to expand into.
After all, the sun is more then halfway through it's usefull life. If intelligent civilization dosen't manage to establish a self-sustaining foothold in space while it has the chance [say, before it destroys itself, or is wrecked by natural disaster/cataclysm (perhaps, ironically enough by said very same insteller rocks)], then all of the glorious complexity and marvelous achievements of evolution [up to and including mankind] will have been for nothing.
What a waste that would be... "I am ozymandius, king of kings, look upon my works, ye mighty, and dispair"...
---
man sig
Speak Freely is a marvelous program, I have used it to save literally hundreds of dollars on long distance! It has been around for a long time, but hardly anyone new to unix these days seems to have heard of or use it.
... comes with full integration of IDEA, DES, Blowfish cyphers, and can call pgp to exchange a key with someone else if they have pgp installed too.
It is a marvelously solid and robust package, supports 4 types of compression [even one which allows robust [4 duplicates of every packet] communication over a standard POTS 33.6 modem (albeit at less then ideal fidelity)], as well as GSM compression [at a mere 1.5KB/sec], which I find delivers notably better fidelity then your normal telephone link! [Maybe this is just a matter of the higher quality analog-to-digitial converters in modern sound cards plus better mics then normal phones]
It is available, under a BSD style license, for download at this site [full source]
Best of all [or pehaps not, depending on your degree of elitism] it is also available for windoze... which, although I hate to think of another example of the win32 world enjoying the fruits of hardcore unix ingenuity and altruism [they even slapped a bloody GUI on the thing for the win32 version...sigh...], nonetheless is cool because they interoperate.
This means that other less CSCI friends/aquantainences of mine can download it and talk to me for free. I doubt I could convince them that "well, you just need to install a copy of linux on your system to use this amazing product, come on, it's easy enough, I'll talk you through it!" heh [PS. not saying linux is hard to install at all, but it is for those people whose VCR's are still blinking 12:00]
An amazing program. Enjoy saving lots of money!
P.S. Did I mention that it also natively supports high-grade encryption for all conversations?
P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the fine group that has developed speakfreely. I just think that the program rocks.
---
man sig
If the theatre distribution system were to change to digital streaming of some sort, this might pose a significant advantage for small time low-budget films to be available to audiences. Think about it; as it is today, a theatre company will only show a film on it's screens repeatably, and hope that enough people will show up. I've been in cinema rooms with as few as seven people in them during off peak hours or when the movie wasn't a fresh release.
After all, the theatre knows that seven tickets are better then one, and since it has the film at hand, it shows it again for the additional marginal revenue.
But what if an underutilized cinema screen could be showing any current movie in existance [at least, more recent ones that have the benefit of being digital]? This could add significantly to the competiveness of the theatres by alowing them to diversify their offerins significantly. A group of 7 to 25 people who want to see some particular low-budget or subversive art film could get together and bid as a group for a desire to reserve a screen at a certain time. Both the theatre wins by offering exactly what it's customers democratically bid on, and the customers win, by having an enormous expansion of the available material in the theatre.
---
man sig
My panties were just fine, thank you! I am an ardent beliver in property rights, and of course am aware that I have no property claim or right to cable service [or too any service] from anybody!
My only point was that the contract's limitations were more draconian then they need to be. Note my point about taking my buisness to someone else if they tried to enforce them; does that seem to imply I am on some populist campaign about the big bad cable company and me the poor little guy? Read before you post.
---
man sig
Such a nightmare might be avoidable if the design was robust enough to begin with. Something with spheres of authority and the oppurtunity to ban cycles of self-promoting false links, [as well as some sort of probalistic detection of self referencial simmilar script generated rings]
---
man sig
heh. Still, no one else had yet posted about ipmasqadmin when I made that comment. It was meant to provider a hint to newbies; the article was afterall about the prevalence of firewalls in home networks.
Of course a masq_napster module would be nice, but there is no one to speak of that I know of right now.
NAT isn't that bad. When I first set up a home NAT firewall, I suddenly noticed that many of my napster recieves weren't working anymore. Woe is me. However, it's a trivial matter to run napster on each individual computer set to listen/accept on a certain port, and configure forwarding of that port through the firewall.
For example, if I am running napster on default listen/accept of 6699..
ipmasqadm portfw -a -P tcp -L $EXT_IP_ADDR 6699 -R $INT_IP_ADDR 6699
And that's that. If another computer on the internal NAT segment wants to use napster, just set it up to use a nondefault [say, 9966] port. Most all NAT/masquerading issues can be resolved with a little elbow grease.
---
man sig
If it gets too bad, google will fall the way of altavista and others, and some fresh new company will come along, untainted by commercial biases, to be adopted by the (informed) masses... only to be bought out, sell their soul... rince, wash, repeat.
Still, perhaps google is just doing this to better determine the overall validity/appeal/appropriateness of the links it returns, to use this to add an additional weight into their relative ranking. [example: If no one ever finds what they are looking for in items 3 and 7, perhaps they should be lower down, eh?]
I'm tempted to add the obligatory "why dosen't someone start a true copyleft-esque open-for-ever-by-viral-contract search portal for the better the world", etc. If only bandwidth and processing power weren't so expensive. Google can't survive the demands placed on it by it's popularity without some form of recompense for it's inevitable costs....
I had hoped that their contracting out as the engine of yahoo might allow for them to remain pure and uncontaminated. Only time will tell.
---
man sig
What a shame. I wonder if any covert governmental types may have used some sort of classified anti-satellite weapon to prevent this level of detail being available to the public market.
I remember that the other private imaging satelite [with, if I recall, 10 or 15 meter resolution] was only allowed to be lauched due to the companies consent to pre-censoring of certain areas by the Feds.
Were they perhaps trying to get around such restraints by lauching in europe and avoiding US oversight? Beats me; sorry to add anything more to the conspiracy fodder supply.
---
man sig
but they are usually not enforced. For example, I use roadrunner, whose terms of use contract includes:
(d) Subscriber will not resell the Road Runner Service, or any portion thereof, or otherwise charge others to use RoadRunner, or any portion thereof. Further, Subscriber will not redistribute the RoadRunner Service, or any portion thereof, whether or not Subscriber receives compensation for such redistribution. The Road Runner Service as offered under this Agreement is a residential service offered for personal, non-commercial use only. Subscriber agrees not to use the RoadRunner Service for operation as an internet service provider, for the hosting of websites or for any business enterprise. Subscriber further agrees not to connect the cable modem to any computer other than the Computer(s) or to any server (or any computer running server applications that provide similar protocol services over the Road Runner Service), including without limitation any servers for mail, HTTP, FTP, RTP, IRC, DHCP, or multi-user interactive forums (e.g. gaming).
I run httpd and ftp on my home computer, and sshd and mindterm [free GPL'd java ssh client applet] so that I can log into it securely from any browser on the planet. Technically, this violates my agreement, but this has been going on for over a year. If they cared, they could have stopped me [and lost a lot of money: $50 a month!].
They haven't, so I have stuck with them. If they ever dared to enforce the rediculous provisions of our 'contract', I would quickly take my buisness elsewhere to one of the several DSL providers in town.
--
man sig
Don't forget, your average spammer is desperate for the low margin of sales he can hope to achive. Thus, many of the spams I have recieved often contain 1-800-xxx-xxxx numbers for contacting them. Remember, with an 800 number, the reciever of the call is charged money for each incoming call to it.
A friend of mine runs a script which intermittently dials the numbers in the evening when he's asleep and not otherwise using his line. Vindictive, evil, yet somehow it seems just.
---
man sig
Is right here Enjoy.
--
man sig
There is an excellent book of short stories concerning such questions of advanced computational ability and it's effect on human society. Diaspora, by Greg Egan. It's about a future where humanity exists primariliy [except for a few luddite fleshy holdouts] as sentient software modeled in nanocomputers from the principals of neurogenesis defined by reverse engineering the genome.
Fascinating book. I would highly recommend it [and no, I am in no way associated with the author or publisher]
--
man sig
We're talking about computation here, not energy. Comparing the power of the brain [i.e. in informational processing ability] to the completely different notion of chemical energy or work is just plain silly. By that arguement, although a brain will always be more powerfull then silicone becuase, if you try to burn each one, you will get more energy out of the brain... but also old newspaper is would always be more 'powerfull' then the human brain. Think before you post.
The individual neuron is not much more then a glorified adding machine.
At least at the computer labs in the engineering building at my college. If you try to type in, say, "someurl.com", it will automatically go to a microsoft search page to return results on "someurl.com". You have to type "http://someurl.com" for it to go to the site.
---
man sig
Amusingly enough, some college kids figured out how to, via supersampling [taking lots of readings instead of only onw], average out the imposed errors and get extremely accurate results.
[They published an article about it, too]... thus, enemy states could easily make accurate GPS recievers to, say, guide cruise missles. [As if 30 yards isn't accurate enough, anyway!]
Likely because of this, the governemnt turned of the induced error in the civilian signal last Feburary.
---
man sig
Hey, this is not a flame; I deeply respect and admire the effort of the mozilla developers. [And thank my lucky stars that I [hopefully] won't have to boot windows to browse the web one day]
But, I have on several occasions downloaded the mozilla builds, and have found mozilla to be ungodly slow. I mean, sure, I don't have the fasted computer in the world [AMD K6-3 400Mhz], but yikes! Scrolling is fast, I admit, but gif images stutter horribly while my CPU maxes out. Just selecting drop down menu items is sluggish. Oh well. I'm sure it will improve.
---
man sig
The only way I can think of doing this is in undefeatably secure way would be to put up another GPS satellite system [or perhaps merely reprogram the current ones, if they can handle sensitive reception as well], in which the protocal would be:
A: Your device sends a authentication session request to the satellite network.
B: Several satellites in range [after coordinating with each other to ensure precise timing] send out a "packet" addressed specifically to your device.
C: Your device, upon recieving each packet, immediately sends out a response.
D: The satellites compare the time they recieved the response, and know where you are.
Basically, it's like being pinged from several locations at once. It's a reversal of the semantics of GPS itself. Current GPS works because each satellite is sending out time stamps continously, and your reciever compares the difference in local arrival time from the stamps sent at the same time. [This is because the speed of light is finite, and the satellites are at different distances from you].
You just need to reverse the process, sending back a ping, and have the satellites coordinate the difference in arrival time of the signal.
Come to think of it, a special device wouldn't really be necessary. Any transmission that can be intercepted by the sattelites could be sampled, and arrival time differences used to locate the source precisely. Hmmm.
I'd be willing to bet good money the government already has just such a capability.
---
man sig
I checked out the website. It only decodes MPEG2
It hardly seems worth using that much storage to my somewhat low fi tastes. Current NTSC resolution is wholly adequate for me. It is the message of the story that really counts, after all. Don't get me wrong, if it was affordable and terabyte scale storage was affordable to the average person, I would be much happier then without it...
But I would be much happier today if I could find a means to permanently archive my wealth of recorded [fair use, wink wink, although it was, afterall broadcast on cable services I subscribed to] media. I have several hundred VHS cassetes of programming [including every simpsons episode, every Pinky and the Brain episode, the State [long since cancelled sketch commedy show], etc. Perhaps not so much with the simpsons. I preserve things that you cannot buy in stores, anywhere, for I do not want them to slip away.
Probably for the same reason I tend to mirror sites I like. The recent flap with the death of Mathworld is a perfect example of the value of archiving. Web sites fit just fine on $0.44 CDR's, and so does music. But video is another beast, and I would be extremely happy if I could ever find an affordable option to digitally archive [even at less then broadcast quality] my videos, which are otherwise quietly degrading into noise.
My point is, that it's not so much ultra quality that matters, but longevity. If only MPG4 would come out, and someone would sell a hardware encoder. Sigh. [You still can't even buy MPG2 encoders for less then several thousand dollars, and MPG2 actually takes up -more- space the MPG1, [although the quality is actually at broadcast level, unlike MPG which isn't even at VHS-EP level.
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man sig