And how many first gen iPads would still be in use if they hadn't been updated to the point of obsolescence? Because my first gen iPad gradually became slower and less useful, right up until Apple said "no longer supported".
I'm no longer willing to buy a device from either Apple or Google which is anywhere near bleeding edge or current release, there's nothing in it for me.
If they want to treat their tech as disposable, I'll oblige them -- I'll buy the oldest version of their product, and never apply an update to the fucking thing.
Well, there is something in it for you if you buy current hardware -- if you wait until the product is already 2 years old, then you get 2 years less of use of the product before it's obsolete.
I bought a nexus 4 when it was released, and it's fully supported on Android 5.0.1 and works fine -- if I had bought a Galaxy Nexus at the time, it would now be stuck on 4.3.
Or,"go" the language. Utterly ungooglable, and conflicts with at least three other programming languages.
(It's a name that's good for humans but useless for other reasons.)
If you think that's bad, trying searching for "IOS" for tips on managing your cisco router. You can add the "cisco" keyword, but then you lose some useful results. This is entirely Cisco's fault for licensing the name 'IOS' to Apple.
Stability control is traction control you stupid moron.
Now that really hurts coming from an Anonymous Coward! I feel that I have to defend my honor.
Stability Control is a superset of Traction Control. You can have Traction Control without Stability Control (and Traction Control has been widely available in cars well before Stability Control), but as far as I know, no Stability Control has been implemented without Traction Control.
You posted an article about stability control to prove that traction control prevents sideways skids? Why didn't you just post a video about how Jelly Beans are made? it would be about as relevant. Traction Control is not the same as Stability Control (but Traction Control can be a part of Stability Control)
In any case, not even advanced stability control can prevent skids in all conditions.
almost all the telcos have stopped leasing the software on their digital voice switches that reads the click=k=k=k=k=k=k=k of the dial. for that matter, you never hear the zzzziiipppppp-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk of rotary contactors that were the CO side of that dial phone (or the clank-k-k-k-THUNK of the crossbar switch.)
There is still a lot of old hardware out there that uses rotary dialing (or at least emulates it). There are still plenty of elevator emergency phones, alarm panels, apartment building call boxes, etc that are still using old style rotary dialing. Maybe some VoIP companies don't support rotary dialing on their ATA's, but I'd be surprised if the FCC would let the Bell companies to ignore pulse dialing on POTS service.
I used to take Amtrak to Sacramento to visit my parents after they retired from Silicon Valley in the 1990's. The first and last time I ever heard a steam hose hissing was when some kids put debris on the track in Oakland that the train ran over and a broken steam hose banged against the carriage underneath my seat. The train slowly came to a halt from traveling at 65 MPH. An engineer spent ten minutes replacing the hose. We were on our way as if nothing happened.
Unless you mistyped and meant to say that your parents lived there in the 1890's, that wasn't a steam hose, that was an air hose.
(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack. (2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell. (3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
My 4 oz bike can records about 3 hours on a charge... If 3 ounces of that is battery, that's a 12 ounce battery pack for 12 hours... Like I said , less than a police taser.
Since victims of police abuse know what time that abuse occurred, that takes care of the signal to noise ratio. Of course the data will be valuable to both sides.
Privacy concerns are taken care of just like all public records requests... Private images are filtered out when handing over the data.
They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
Why erase it at all? Storage is so cheap, there's no need to overwrite it in the camera.
A GoPro can record 8 hours on a 32GB memory card, so stick 64GB of memory in the body camera and it can record for over 16 hours with a large enough battery pack (which needn't weigh more than the taser that he's already carrying). Power the cop's radio off of the same battery so if the battery is dead he loses radio contact to make it more obvious that the battery is dead.
When his shift is done, he plugs the camera into a charger/camera reader, and video is uploaded to the departmental servers. In a 100 officer department, if each generates 40GB of data/day, that's only 4 TB/day, or 120TB if they retain if for a month. That's less than a $15,000 array - $150/officer.
Well that wouldn't be running the vulnerable service, now would it?
That was his question.
It's not obvious to everyone what runs in untouchable firmware (i..e a phone's baseband processor), what runs in the operating system, and what runs in application software. Just because someone knows enough to re-flash dd-wrt into a router, that doesn't mean that they know whether it's a full operating system or an application that runs on top of the router's firmware.
That's pretty much the system we have now -- the best and brightest are recruited from other countries who enjoy government paid (or at least highly subsidized) education. So in one sense, we *are* letting someone else pay for our worker's education, the drawback is that it means fewer USA workers in highly skilled positions.
About 30% of my company's engineering team came from overseas - within a year it will probably be closer to 50% because we can't find enough qualified local applicants.
You are not violating the law as far as ripping goes as long as you actually bought the disk. If you borrowed or rented the dvd/blu-ray, you would be illegally distributing.
Unless the DMCA has changed recently, I believe I'm still in violation:
The moment you crack DRM (Digital Rights Managemnt) to rip the DVD, you've violated Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. 1201 prohibits circumvention of DRM . . . Some courts have tried to leaven this rather harsh rule, but most have not. While it's typically hard to detect small-scale circumvention, the question is whether bypassing DRM is legal. The statute sets up some minor exceptions, but our ripper doesn't fall into any of them. So, the moment a studio protects the DVD with DRM, it gains both a technical and a legal advantage—ripping is almost certainly unlawful
While ripping the movie from a non-encrypted DVD may be legal, I don't believe that i'm legally allowed to bypass the CSS encryption.
And as far as torrenting, then that's illegal because you would be doing two things that are bad. 1. You are receiving illegally obtained goods; 2. You are distributing without authorization.
If I leech the torrents, am I really guilty of illegal distribution? Though it's likely that I'm guilty of receiving stolen goods, though I wonder if there's any wiggle room on that if I already own the movie?
Make sure you actually own the physical disk.
That part is easy, I have a big DVD binder full of every movie I own, plus amazon purchase receipts for probably 90% of it.
The ironic thing is that even though I purchase a lot of movies (around 350 at last count), the movie industry received very little of that money since I buy almost exclusively used movies. If I had a legal way to purchase non-DRM'ed content, they'd get a lot more money from me.
In a nutshell, Rightscorp and BMG are using the notice-and-notice system to require ISPs to send threats and misstatements of Canadian law in an effort to extract payments based on unproven infringement allegations.
It is not illegal to lie — except under oath.
It is, however, illegal to infringe on copyrights. If the legal lying helps reduce the illegal infringement, I'm fine with it.
But it won't, of course, because the illegal infringers will see the lies and use that to justify their infringement.
What would make a difference is to make legal content available more widely and without restriction. Why should I "buy" a DRM movie download that I can only watch on a designated "approved" device and only as long as the company I "bought" it from is still in business when it's even easier to download it from a torrent, and then I have full use of it on any device forever.
Generally when I want to buy a movie, I'll just buy a used DVD and rip it myself though sometimes if it's something I want to watch right away I'll torrent it and buy it at the same time so I can watch the movie immediately. I believe I'm violating the law in both cases despite the fact that I have physical DVD's for all of my movies.
If I could buy a non-DRM'ed "official" movie in digital form for a reasonable price, I'd rather do that since I'd be guaranteed a high quality copy in my language (that sure beats waiting 3 hours for a torrent to download only to find out that the audio is in Mandarin with no subtitles), but there's no way to do so.
When our developers do builds (which, including tests, would take many hours on a laptop), their build script spins up a big Amazon Instance (currently c3.4xlarge) and does the build there. That gives them 16 cores of CPU + 30 GB of RAM and 2 160GB SSD's (in RAID-0).
Average use per developer is around 4 hours/day which costs around $75 per developer per month and it gets the build & test time to under 2 hours. We tried a larger instance (32 cores + 60GB of RAM) for twice the price, but it made little difference in the build time.
The untethered desktop needs portable power. Get a marine battery and a 1000W pure sine wave inverter and hook them together with a couple 2-guage battery cables. You should be able to run a 400W desktop for ~4 hours without a power cord. Need more time off the grid or have a more powerful rig? Add more batteries in parallel. Don't forget the USB or PCIe wireless adapter. Using any cables is cheating!
200lbs of batteries and equipment is not what most people would call "portable".
(400W * 4 hours = 1600W-hour, or 133 Amp-hours @ 12V, double it since you don't want to discharge your batteries below 50% so 266Ah, add a little spare capacity to cover inverter losses, and you've got 3 60lb 100Ah deep cycle batteries)
The good news is that you can save a little money on the wires, to draw 33 amps across a 10 foot run you could use 6, or possibly 8 gauge, no need to go with 2 gauge.
You can't go from to 5.0.1? (Not that 5.0.1 is worth it, but...)
My phone never gave me the option to go to 5.0.1 -- my wife upgraded her Nexus4 OTA to 5.0 when it came out, then she also got the 5.0.1 upgrade when it came out, but since I delayed 5.0 for so long, I guess I get nothing.
I held off on upgrading to Lollipop on my Nexus5 after reading about some of the problems people were having. Shortly before the 5.0.1 update came out, they took down the 5.0 OTA update, so now I'd have to download the files and update manually. I probably won't bother since Kitkat is good enough.
Even if we ignore the sunk cost of the already laid fiber, it still has to managed, and that ain't free.
Every building on their campus also has a huge sunk cost and operational costs, but we don't expect them to rent office space rather than manage their own buildings on their own campus. Why should critical infrastructure like their network be any different?
I'd be surprised if the fiber network maintenance is a huge portion of their campus network budget. I managed a small corporate campus network (5 interconnected buildings, the longest run was around a kilometer), and the fiber network cost nothing to maintain over the 5 years I was there. They cheaped out when they did the build out by only pulling 2 pair between some of the buildings, when we needed more bandwidth between a couple buildings, rather than pull more fiber, we used a passive optical multiplexer that gave us 8 (?) channels over a single pair.
We did have a fiber cut to an outlying building once due to a landscaping crew's backhoe, they paid the cost to have a contractor come in and resplice the fiber, as well as the cost to rent point-to-point wireless gear to get the network up long enough for the fix - we had the point to point network up within 4 hours of the fiber cut. Most of the buildings were on a ring, so a single fiber cut wouldn't result in an outage.
Maintaining the copper infrastructure took much more money than the fiber. Of course, it had many more ports, and a lot more switches, we had a relative few core switches that touched the fiber network and these were all heavily built enterprise switches with full redundancy and hot swappable components so we could fix a hardware problem without downtime, but we over 500 switches that touched the copper network.
I hope they share this cloud technology with the rest of the world, so we can all have access to a cloud we can count on. This sounds almost too good to be true, but if the CIO said it, it must be true!
I'd like to see some interviews from the departmental IT staff that use this always available, unlimited use bandwidth and cloud.
I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.
100m is hardly a ridiculous limitation, it's a tradeoff among speed, cost of media and transceivers and distance. Granted, it can be a problem in some circumstances, but the limit had to be set to *something*.
If you want to pay more for media and transceivers to get more distance you can use fiber. Or if you willing to trade speed for distance, you can get VDSL repeaters and extend the range to over a kilometer and you can use existing CAT-5 (or even CAT-3) wiring.
All of my network equipment supports 9000+ byte frames, how big would a frame need to be to stop being ridiculous? With TCP offloading, Jumbo frames don't make a huge difference in throughput.
How do they limit the interceptions to a public space? What they are suggesting sounds a bit like saying that tapping into private phone lines is just fine as long as the telco box where they do the tapping is in a public space -- sure those lines may lead to a private residence, but if the signal can be tapped from a public space, then it's fair game.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many first gen iPads would still be in use if they hadn't been updated to the point of obsolescence? Because my first gen iPad gradually became slower and less useful, right up until Apple said "no longer supported".
I'm no longer willing to buy a device from either Apple or Google which is anywhere near bleeding edge or current release, there's nothing in it for me.
If they want to treat their tech as disposable, I'll oblige them -- I'll buy the oldest version of their product, and never apply an update to the fucking thing.
Well, there is something in it for you if you buy current hardware -- if you wait until the product is already 2 years old, then you get 2 years less of use of the product before it's obsolete.
I bought a nexus 4 when it was released, and it's fully supported on Android 5.0.1 and works fine -- if I had bought a Galaxy Nexus at the time, it would now be stuck on 4.3.
It's about time we finally have a language that meets all of our needs, now we don't need so many different languages.
Or ,"go" the language. Utterly ungooglable, and conflicts with at least three other programming languages.
(It's a name that's good for humans but useless for other reasons.)
If you think that's bad, trying searching for "IOS" for tips on managing your cisco router. You can add the "cisco" keyword, but then you lose some useful results. This is entirely Cisco's fault for licensing the name 'IOS' to Apple.
Stability control is traction control you stupid moron.
Now that really hurts coming from an Anonymous Coward! I feel that I have to defend my honor.
Stability Control is a superset of Traction Control. You can have Traction Control without Stability Control (and Traction Control has been widely available in cars well before Stability Control), but as far as I know, no Stability Control has been implemented without Traction Control.
Yes it does
You posted an article about stability control to prove that traction control prevents sideways skids? Why didn't you just post a video about how Jelly Beans are made? it would be about as relevant. Traction Control is not the same as Stability Control (but Traction Control can be a part of Stability Control)
In any case, not even advanced stability control can prevent skids in all conditions.
That's why he also said traction control.
Traction control doesn't prevent a car from skidding sideways.
almost all the telcos have stopped leasing the software on their digital voice switches that reads the click=k=k=k=k=k=k=k of the dial. for that matter, you never hear the zzzziiipppppp-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk of rotary contactors that were the CO side of that dial phone (or the clank-k-k-k-THUNK of the crossbar switch.)
There is still a lot of old hardware out there that uses rotary dialing (or at least emulates it). There are still plenty of elevator emergency phones, alarm panels, apartment building call boxes, etc that are still using old style rotary dialing. Maybe some VoIP companies don't support rotary dialing on their ATA's, but I'd be surprised if the FCC would let the Bell companies to ignore pulse dialing on POTS service.
I used to take Amtrak to Sacramento to visit my parents after they retired from Silicon Valley in the 1990's. The first and last time I ever heard a steam hose hissing was when some kids put debris on the track in Oakland that the train ran over and a broken steam hose banged against the carriage underneath my seat. The train slowly came to a halt from traveling at 65 MPH. An engineer spent ten minutes replacing the hose. We were on our way as if nothing happened.
Unless you mistyped and meant to say that your parents lived there in the 1890's, that wasn't a steam hose, that was an air hose.
Your bike weight 4oz? What's it made of? Probably not carbon steel or aluminium, I'm thinking.
Autocorrect typo, I figured most people could figure it out by context: can==cam.
(1) That's about a dozen to 20 batteries or, more realistically, a similarly sized battery pack.
(2) Too much info. Your signal to noise ratio goes all to hell.
(3) Too many images of things to don't want public. Lunch, the informer, the patient in the ER, etc. We've covered this at length.
My 4 oz bike can records about 3 hours on a charge... If 3 ounces of that is battery, that's a 12 ounce battery pack for 12 hours... Like I said , less than a police taser.
Since victims of police abuse know what time that abuse occurred, that takes care of the signal to noise ratio. Of course the data will be valuable to both sides.
Privacy concerns are taken care of just like all public records requests... Private images are filtered out when handing over the data.
They should do what traffic cams do and keep a constant feed that overwrites itself, then if it triggers that it needs to keep the recording it has the last 30 seconds already. Seems stupid to start recording after they're already suing a taser...
Why erase it at all? Storage is so cheap, there's no need to overwrite it in the camera.
A GoPro can record 8 hours on a 32GB memory card, so stick 64GB of memory in the body camera and it can record for over 16 hours with a large enough battery pack (which needn't weigh more than the taser that he's already carrying). Power the cop's radio off of the same battery so if the battery is dead he loses radio contact to make it more obvious that the battery is dead.
When his shift is done, he plugs the camera into a charger/camera reader, and video is uploaded to the departmental servers. In a 100 officer department, if each generates 40GB of data/day, that's only 4 TB/day, or 120TB if they retain if for a month. That's less than a $15,000 array - $150/officer.
Just connect an access point to an OpenBSD box, and this crap won't happen.
Why will that prevent it from happening? Anyone that owns the access point can inspect and modify all of the traffic that passes through it.
Have it repaired or get your money back. This shit has got to cost them.
Or, don't let untrusted users on your private network.
Well that wouldn't be running the vulnerable service, now would it?
That was his question.
It's not obvious to everyone what runs in untouchable firmware (i..e a phone's baseband processor), what runs in the operating system, and what runs in application software. Just because someone knows enough to re-flash dd-wrt into a router, that doesn't mean that they know whether it's a full operating system or an application that runs on top of the router's firmware.
As in somebody else pays for it...
That's pretty much the system we have now -- the best and brightest are recruited from other countries who enjoy government paid (or at least highly subsidized) education. So in one sense, we *are* letting someone else pay for our worker's education, the drawback is that it means fewer USA workers in highly skilled positions.
About 30% of my company's engineering team came from overseas - within a year it will probably be closer to 50% because we can't find enough qualified local applicants.
You are not violating the law as far as ripping goes as long as you actually bought the disk. If you borrowed or rented the dvd/blu-ray, you would be illegally distributing.
Unless the DMCA has changed recently, I believe I'm still in violation:
http://lifehacker.com/5978326/...
The moment you crack DRM (Digital Rights Managemnt) to rip the DVD, you've violated Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. 1201 prohibits circumvention of DRM . . . Some courts have tried to leaven this rather harsh rule, but most have not. While it's typically hard to detect small-scale circumvention, the question is whether bypassing DRM is legal. The statute sets up some minor exceptions, but our ripper doesn't fall into any of them. So, the moment a studio protects the DVD with DRM, it gains both a technical and a legal advantage—ripping is almost certainly unlawful
While ripping the movie from a non-encrypted DVD may be legal, I don't believe that i'm legally allowed to bypass the CSS encryption.
And as far as torrenting, then that's illegal because you would be doing two things that are bad. 1. You are receiving illegally obtained goods; 2. You are distributing without authorization.
If I leech the torrents, am I really guilty of illegal distribution? Though it's likely that I'm guilty of receiving stolen goods, though I wonder if there's any wiggle room on that if I already own the movie?
Make sure you actually own the physical disk.
That part is easy, I have a big DVD binder full of every movie I own, plus amazon purchase receipts for probably 90% of it.
The ironic thing is that even though I purchase a lot of movies (around 350 at last count), the movie industry received very little of that money since I buy almost exclusively used movies. If I had a legal way to purchase non-DRM'ed content, they'd get a lot more money from me.
It is not illegal to lie — except under oath.
It is, however, illegal to infringe on copyrights. If the legal lying helps reduce the illegal infringement, I'm fine with it.
But it won't, of course, because the illegal infringers will see the lies and use that to justify their infringement.
What would make a difference is to make legal content available more widely and without restriction. Why should I "buy" a DRM movie download that I can only watch on a designated "approved" device and only as long as the company I "bought" it from is still in business when it's even easier to download it from a torrent, and then I have full use of it on any device forever.
Generally when I want to buy a movie, I'll just buy a used DVD and rip it myself though sometimes if it's something I want to watch right away I'll torrent it and buy it at the same time so I can watch the movie immediately. I believe I'm violating the law in both cases despite the fact that I have physical DVD's for all of my movies.
If I could buy a non-DRM'ed "official" movie in digital form for a reasonable price, I'd rather do that since I'd be guaranteed a high quality copy in my language (that sure beats waiting 3 hours for a torrent to download only to find out that the audio is in Mandarin with no subtitles), but there's no way to do so.
When our developers do builds (which, including tests, would take many hours on a laptop), their build script spins up a big Amazon Instance (currently c3.4xlarge) and does the build there. That gives them 16 cores of CPU + 30 GB of RAM and 2 160GB SSD's (in RAID-0).
Average use per developer is around 4 hours/day which costs around $75 per developer per month and it gets the build & test time to under 2 hours. We tried a larger instance (32 cores + 60GB of RAM) for twice the price, but it made little difference in the build time.
Maybe you want desktops? Just a thought.
The untethered desktop needs portable power.
Get a marine battery and a 1000W pure sine wave inverter and hook them together with a couple 2-guage battery cables.
You should be able to run a 400W desktop for ~4 hours without a power cord.
Need more time off the grid or have a more powerful rig? Add more batteries in parallel.
Don't forget the USB or PCIe wireless adapter. Using any cables is cheating!
200lbs of batteries and equipment is not what most people would call "portable".
(400W * 4 hours = 1600W-hour, or 133 Amp-hours @ 12V, double it since you don't want to discharge your batteries below 50% so 266Ah, add a little spare capacity to cover inverter losses, and you've got 3 60lb 100Ah deep cycle batteries)
The good news is that you can save a little money on the wires, to draw 33 amps across a 10 foot run you could use 6, or possibly 8 gauge, no need to go with 2 gauge.
You can't go from to 5.0.1? (Not that 5.0.1 is worth it, but...)
My phone never gave me the option to go to 5.0.1 -- my wife upgraded her Nexus4 OTA to 5.0 when it came out, then she also got the 5.0.1 upgrade when it came out, but since I delayed 5.0 for so long, I guess I get nothing.
I held off on upgrading to Lollipop on my Nexus5 after reading about some of the problems people were having. Shortly before the 5.0.1 update came out, they took down the 5.0 OTA update, so now I'd have to download the files and update manually. I probably won't bother since Kitkat is good enough.
Even if we ignore the sunk cost of the already laid fiber, it still has to managed, and that ain't free.
Every building on their campus also has a huge sunk cost and operational costs, but we don't expect them to rent office space rather than manage their own buildings on their own campus. Why should critical infrastructure like their network be any different?
I'd be surprised if the fiber network maintenance is a huge portion of their campus network budget. I managed a small corporate campus network (5 interconnected buildings, the longest run was around a kilometer), and the fiber network cost nothing to maintain over the 5 years I was there. They cheaped out when they did the build out by only pulling 2 pair between some of the buildings, when we needed more bandwidth between a couple buildings, rather than pull more fiber, we used a passive optical multiplexer that gave us 8 (?) channels over a single pair.
We did have a fiber cut to an outlying building once due to a landscaping crew's backhoe, they paid the cost to have a contractor come in and resplice the fiber, as well as the cost to rent point-to-point wireless gear to get the network up long enough for the fix - we had the point to point network up within 4 hours of the fiber cut. Most of the buildings were on a ring, so a single fiber cut wouldn't result in an outage.
Maintaining the copper infrastructure took much more money than the fiber. Of course, it had many more ports, and a lot more switches, we had a relative few core switches that touched the fiber network and these were all heavily built enterprise switches with full redundancy and hot swappable components so we could fix a hardware problem without downtime, but we over 500 switches that touched the copper network.
a private cloud that they an always count on
I hope they share this cloud technology with the rest of the world, so we can all have access to a cloud we can count on. This sounds almost too good to be true, but if the CIO said it, it must be true!
I'd like to see some interviews from the departmental IT staff that use this always available, unlimited use bandwidth and cloud.
I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.
100m is hardly a ridiculous limitation, it's a tradeoff among speed, cost of media and transceivers and distance. Granted, it can be a problem in some circumstances, but the limit had to be set to *something*.
If you want to pay more for media and transceivers to get more distance you can use fiber. Or if you willing to trade speed for distance, you can get VDSL repeaters and extend the range to over a kilometer and you can use existing CAT-5 (or even CAT-3) wiring.
All of my network equipment supports 9000+ byte frames, how big would a frame need to be to stop being ridiculous? With TCP offloading, Jumbo frames don't make a huge difference in throughput.
How do they limit the interceptions to a public space? What they are suggesting sounds a bit like saying that tapping into private phone lines is just fine as long as the telco box where they do the tapping is in a public space -- sure those lines may lead to a private residence, but if the signal can be tapped from a public space, then it's fair game.