Nothing stops these UAVs from flying in the same airspace as planes carrying people - all it takes is a little software malfunction. They are small and hard to see, aren't in radio contact with air traffic controllers, and don't show up on radar. There's a reason the government is concerned about them, and I suspect it's not about supressing truth.
Of course, the same is true of geese and other birds and there are a *lot* more 10 pound geese in the air than 3 pound UAV's.
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
Considering testing was slated to BEGIN the day before launch, I doubt it.
The contractors were too busy designing all of the "Due to the government shutdown, this website is closed" websites for all of the other government sites, so they didn't have enough time to work on the launch of the new site.
Furthermore... Accidents, by definition, happen accidentally. If you could prevent them, they wouldn't have happened.
Just because something is an accident doesn't mean it couldn't have been prevented. For example, there's a lot that has been done (and could be done) to prevent car accidents... Putting soft surfaces on playgrounds helps prevent accidental deaths and injuries from falls... Fire safety codes help prevent accidental fire deaths... And so on.... a huge amount of money is spent each year in direct and indirect costs of preventing accidents.
They didn't "ask" for permission. They inferred it from people providing their twitter account info. There wasn't even an "opt-out" option because people didn't know this was going to happen.
When you grant a third party access to sent Tweets on your behalf, don't you click through a warning telling you that? Why would you give a convention permission to send Tweets as you, and if you do, why would you be surprised when they do?
no one can audit every line of code in every piece of software they run - the linux kernel itself has over 5 million lines of code, and that doesn't even include applications.
You can always run Oberon. No need to go to 1960s.
On what hardware? How far back in time do you need to go to be sure that the BIOS in your network card isn't installing a keylogging hook?
I picked 1960's because that was when you could trace the wirewrapped wires and discrete logic that build your computer. And you could toggle in the bootloader yourself on the front panel before loading your carefully vetted operating system image from paper tape. You could even read the binary from the paper tape yourself if you wanted to.
Though I imagine that you'd need to put your computer in a big faraday cage since it would probably be trivial for someone from afar to monitor your CPU in real-time using a radio receiver and modern DSP's to clean up the signal.
Aren't these companies encrypting their extremely valuable data? All of my computers use full-disk encryption and I don't have anything more valuable than old tax returns and my carefully curated p0rn collection. I've got a lot of my company's source code, but most of it will end up open sourced anyway, so it's not that valuable to a thief.
Because rebooting any time I want to do any of the following sounds a lot less convenient than hitting a button to switch from the host environment to the VM and back again:
That way if someone emails you a document or presentation you can save it to your device in Android, reboot into Linux and run LibreOffice or another office app to edit it. Or if you’re using Ubuntu and want to watch Netflix or use Skype, you can reboot into Android to do that.
The project doesn't make any mention of the NSA. That's timmy inserting irrelevant editorial.
And isn't even a valid point -- no one can audit every line of code in every piece of software they run - the linux kernel itself has over 5 million lines of code, and that doesn't even include applications.
Even if you were certain that the code itself was clean, how do you know you can trust the firnware in the device, the compiler you're using to compile the code, and even your own computer?
If you went back to a 1960's era wirewrapped computer, you might have some hope at validating the operating system and hardware, but there's no way for an individual to be 100% certain that a modern computer is free of software and hardware back doors when the bad guys could have compromised the hardware locked inside of the core chips that run the device.
If you're going to install a Linux distribution on the thing anyway, why not just run Android in a VM which eliminates the need to reboot to switch operating systems?
Providers don't necessarily have to be interchangeable - I think that's a misconception with this idea. Consumers will just use resources from whatever providers they buy the commodity from. They could choose to only buy AWS clouds, for exmaple, from this marketplace Federation would be ideal, but it's not a requirement for this to work.
Here are some pros and cons of the broader plan though:
Pros: Gives consumers a market on which to shop for cloud products in an apples-to-apples comparison
But only if the cloud providers *want* an apples-to-apples comparison. I suspect, that just like cellular provides, they will obfuscate their pricing so much so as to make it impossible for a simple comparison. Additionally, they'll add features that other competitors don't have - look at Amazon AWS, they have dozens of cloud products and services with rich API's. If you use those tools, you're probably not going to find them at Google Compute Engine or the Rackspace Cloud.
That is one of the most asinine statements in that article. It appears from a picture in the article that he landed at night. So, not having "lights on" means he's... flying without lights on. That's about it.
While he's in the air, he's still able to see other planes (they have their lights on) and there really isn't a lot of anything else he might need to see in the air. Blind? Hardly.
And the airport, well, they have these modern spiffy things called... lights. They mark the runway. That's how you can see the runway at night.
One of the things that private pilots get trained in when they want to go night flying is how to land at night without "lights". That would be the landing light, of course. Having one isn't mandatory. I've done it, both with an instructor as part of training and when I wound up getting home later than I planned in a plane where the light had burned out. Yes, I know, this guy isn't a pilot (although the article says he is believed to have flight experience), I'm just pointing out that landing at night without a landing light is far far from being "blind".
The other fascinating statement is that the propeller "hit the floor". And then it "uprighted again". It takes a lot for a small airplane to get in a position where it needs to be uprighted, and most airports don't have floors outside.
I thought the whole point of those big bright landing landing lights was to illuminate the ground when you're near touch down (and for taxi/takeoff). Runway markers may may it easy to see the runway from afar, but aren't going to be as useful for an untrained pilot to see how fast the plane is approaching the ground since a few fast moving dots of light streaming by aren't the same as a broadly lit surface).
> but the average user isn't going to pay for one environment to use for special tasks, and then set up a completely different FOSS environment where he'll do most of his work.
That's a false strawman. The beauty of Free Software is that it is generally platform agnostic. You don't have to do anything remotely like what you've just described. All your "special environment" requires is downloading some software.
It's no more burdensome than getting your flash and silverlight plugins sorted.
No strawman, it's a practical use case. You're assuming that all one needs to do to become proficient in some software is to install it, that's the easy part, the hard part is learning how to use it effectively.
When a student is told that he is required to submit work created by the school's chosen software, how many students are going to take the time to find a FOSS equivalent, do all of their work in that FOSS equivalent, and then, just before submitting the assignment, test it using the paid software to make sure it works, and if it doesn't work, spend time debugging it to get it to run/format correctly before submitting it?
"The South African Education Department has effectively banned the use of FOSS software in state-run schools by forcing all candidates writing the Computer Applications Technology examination to use Microsoft's Office 2010 or 2013 as the only supported options."
Fascinating, apparently MS-South Africa has sophisticated technology that seeks out and destroys all open source software simply because Microsoft Office is used for some tasks. This new learning is amazing! Tell me again how sheep-bladders can be used to prevent earthquakes!
That technology is called "convenience" and "money", and is what was meant by "effectively banned" rather than saying "completely banned".
Once you've spent the money to purchase the non-FOSS tools that the school requires you to use, you're not going to seek out free/open source replacements for those tools.
A few FOSS zealots may be willing to use LibreOffice, FreePascal, Linux, etc for most things, and only use the paid tools when he absolutely has to, but the average user isn't going to pay for one environment to use for special tasks, and then set up a completely different FOSS environment where he'll do most of his work.
(I'm one of those few, I use Linux for 99% of my work, but rdp into a Windows server to run Outlook, Visio, MS-Office, etc when I need to)
luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'
The company is paying for that.
Exactly - if you're staying at a luxury hotel chain and it's worth your time to complain about a $9.99 or $15 Wifi fee or "resort charge", you probably shouldn't be staying at a luxury hotel chain. But chances are that if you complain about it when you check out, they'll waive the charges
The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."
But what's the failure rate for iPads loaned to (but not owned by) K-12 students?
I'd imagine that kids are harder on tablets than (most) adults, especially if they are not owned by the kids who know they'll get a new one if theirs breaks -- even more so if they are putting it in and out of a backpack all day long to carry it to classes and back and forth to home.
What is their patent on a "headphone jack sensor"? Is this anything like the sensor that portable radios have had for decades that let them switch off the speaker when the headphones are plugged in?
Nope. This is actually a sensor to determine, when headphones are plugged in, whether they're just stereo headphones, headphones+mic, or headphones+mic+control interface.
Whether there's anticipatory prior art for that is a different question, but the dumb normally-closed TRS jacks that have been used in patch bays for decades are not the same thing and all, and can make no determinations about the device plugged in, just whether a device is plugged in.
Thanks, when I tried to look it up, all I could find was references to this current decision with nothing about the actual patents that Apple claims were violated.
didn't i already respond to you the last time this came up?
Well gee, I don't know. I can't keep track of every Anonymous Coward post on this site. But if you did reply to me before, then just post the link to that reply and not only can you save yourself from mustering up some fake indignation, but you can actually answer my question.
What is their patent on a "headphone jack sensor"? Is this anything like the sensor that portable radios have had for decades that let them switch off the speaker when the headphones are plugged in?
Why should they care about science? They are free to care about whatever they find important. That's human nature, and you're not going to change it.
Furthermore, if everyone cared about science, then you wouldn't be quite so special.
The same reason they should care about the arts, humanities, math, history, etc -- without a well rounded education, citizens can't make informed choices for themselves, or about their leaders. Not everyone needs to be a scientist, but everyone should have some basic knowledge of science.
For example, when less than 60% of the US population knows that CO2 is the believed to be the gas responsible for causing atmospheric temperatures to rise, how can that other 40% make any reasonable decision on global warming if they don't even know what is believed to be responsible?
why is the bbc first to report on this? It happens in CA, and we get scooped? wtf??
Because Americans don't care about science and if you told the typical American that we achieved nuclear Fusion, they'd say "That's the same thing that killed all those people in Fukishima, we don't need that sh*t here!"
However, the Fifth Amendment lets you refuse to answer the question of whether you even committed the crime at all, and I didn't see what was so great about that, because it is everybody's legitimate business whether or not you committed the crime.)
But *which* crime? There are so many laws that even the federal government can't tell you how many they are. How can anyone possibly know that they haven't committed a crime and that their statments might come back to bite them later?
Just like the huge tax code, the criminal code needs a major overhaul and simplification.
As Duane says:
[James Duane] Now. Here's part of the problem. The heart of the problem, as Justice Briar, on the U.S. Supreme Court explained in 1998 is, quote: "The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code, and virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear to a prosecutor to be relevant to some investigation."
One expert on criminal law recently noted "estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary, although it has been reported that the Congressional Research Service can no longer even count the current number of federal crimes." That's right, even the federal government has lost count. "These laws are scattered over all fifty pages of the U.S. Code, encompassing roughly twenty thousand pages. Worse yet, these statutes often incorporate by reference to the provisions of administrative regulations. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, although the ABA thinks there may be nearly ten thousand."
I'm using an atom cpu with several onboard intel gig-e ports.
fanless and has been pretty reliable so far. my 50mbps cable connection stays up and the 'router' has not needed rebooting in the month or two that I've been using it so far.
I've been very happy with pfSense running on a PC Engines Alix2d13 board. The board has 3 100mbit ethernet ports and 1 miniPCI slot for Wifi expansion, but I think there's limited driver support for 802.11n capable cards. I already had an Asus 802.11abgn wifi router, so I'm using that router for Wifi, and the pfSense box just as a firewall, VPN server, and a home webserver. I have dual WAN connections and use pfSense to failover from the primary connection (Comcast 50mbit) to the backup 3mbit DSL connection. Works great, and I can set up policy routes to route certain traffic across either WAN connection.
The Alix is not super powerful and is somewhat memory constrained (256MB), but I can get a Speedtest peak of 60mbit down from my Comcast connection. They are supposed to be working on a more powerful Alix successor that will have 1 or 2GB of RAM and a faster, dual core CPU. The cost is supposed to be in line with the current boards ~ $200.
I've only had this setup for a few months, but seems pretty stable, I last rebooted over 70 days ago and haven't had any problems with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing stops these UAVs from flying in the same airspace as planes carrying people - all it takes is a little software malfunction. They are small and hard to see, aren't in radio contact with air traffic controllers, and don't show up on radar. There's a reason the government is concerned about them, and I suspect it's not about supressing truth.
Of course, the same is true of geese and other birds and there are a *lot* more 10 pound geese in the air than 3 pound UAV's.
s/waived/waved/ – it makes a difference.
Thank you, I couldn't figure out how a private citizen "waived" a government cease and desist order, but it makes much more sense that he "waved" it.
What exactly in my post is "trolling"?
Moderators often confuse "I don't agree with you" with "Trolling".
They either haven't read or don't agree with the Slashdot moderation guide:
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
Considering testing was slated to BEGIN the day before launch, I doubt it.
The contractors were too busy designing all of the "Due to the government shutdown, this website is closed" websites for all of the other government sites, so they didn't have enough time to work on the launch of the new site.
Furthermore... Accidents, by definition, happen accidentally. If you could prevent them, they wouldn't have happened.
Just because something is an accident doesn't mean it couldn't have been prevented. For example, there's a lot that has been done (and could be done) to prevent car accidents... Putting soft surfaces on playgrounds helps prevent accidental deaths and injuries from falls... Fire safety codes help prevent accidental fire deaths... And so on.... a huge amount of money is spent each year in direct and indirect costs of preventing accidents.
They didn't "ask" for permission. They inferred it from people providing their twitter account info. There wasn't even an "opt-out" option because people didn't know this was going to happen.
When you grant a third party access to sent Tweets on your behalf, don't you click through a warning telling you that? Why would you give a convention permission to send Tweets as you, and if you do, why would you be surprised when they do?
no one can audit every line of code in every piece of software they run - the linux kernel itself has over 5 million lines of code, and that doesn't even include applications.
You can always run Oberon. No need to go to 1960s.
On what hardware? How far back in time do you need to go to be sure that the BIOS in your network card isn't installing a keylogging hook?
I picked 1960's because that was when you could trace the wirewrapped wires and discrete logic that build your computer. And you could toggle in the bootloader yourself on the front panel before loading your carefully vetted operating system image from paper tape. You could even read the binary from the paper tape yourself if you wanted to.
Though I imagine that you'd need to put your computer in a big faraday cage since it would probably be trivial for someone from afar to monitor your CPU in real-time using a radio receiver and modern DSP's to clean up the signal.
Aren't these companies encrypting their extremely valuable data? All of my computers use full-disk encryption and I don't have anything more valuable than old tax returns and my carefully curated p0rn collection. I've got a lot of my company's source code, but most of it will end up open sourced anyway, so it's not that valuable to a thief.
Why run a VM when you can just switch OSs?
Because rebooting any time I want to do any of the following sounds a lot less convenient than hitting a button to switch from the host environment to the VM and back again:
That way if someone emails you a document or presentation you can save it to your device in Android, reboot into Linux and run LibreOffice or another office app to edit it. Or if you’re using Ubuntu and want to watch Netflix or use Skype, you can reboot into Android to do that.
The project doesn't make any mention of the NSA. That's timmy inserting irrelevant editorial.
And isn't even a valid point -- no one can audit every line of code in every piece of software they run - the linux kernel itself has over 5 million lines of code, and that doesn't even include applications.
Even if you were certain that the code itself was clean, how do you know you can trust the firnware in the device, the compiler you're using to compile the code, and even your own computer?
If you went back to a 1960's era wirewrapped computer, you might have some hope at validating the operating system and hardware, but there's no way for an individual to be 100% certain that a modern computer is free of software and hardware back doors when the bad guys could have compromised the hardware locked inside of the core chips that run the device.
If you're going to install a Linux distribution on the thing anyway, why not just run Android in a VM which eliminates the need to reboot to switch operating systems?
Couple of points:
Providers don't necessarily have to be interchangeable - I think that's a misconception with this idea. Consumers will just use resources from whatever providers they buy the commodity from. They could choose to only buy AWS clouds, for exmaple, from this marketplace Federation would be ideal, but it's not a requirement for this to work.
Here are some pros and cons of the broader plan though:
Pros:
Gives consumers a market on which to shop for cloud products in an apples-to-apples comparison
But only if the cloud providers *want* an apples-to-apples comparison. I suspect, that just like cellular provides, they will obfuscate their pricing so much so as to make it impossible for a simple comparison. Additionally, they'll add features that other competitors don't have - look at Amazon AWS, they have dozens of cloud products and services with rich API's. If you use those tools, you're probably not going to find them at Google Compute Engine or the Rackspace Cloud.
That is one of the most asinine statements in that article. It appears from a picture in the article that he landed at night. So, not having "lights on" means he's ... flying without lights on. That's about it.
While he's in the air, he's still able to see other planes (they have their lights on) and there really isn't a lot of anything else he might need to see in the air. Blind? Hardly.
And the airport, well, they have these modern spiffy things called ... lights. They mark the runway. That's how you can see the runway at night.
One of the things that private pilots get trained in when they want to go night flying is how to land at night without "lights". That would be the landing light, of course. Having one isn't mandatory. I've done it, both with an instructor as part of training and when I wound up getting home later than I planned in a plane where the light had burned out. Yes, I know, this guy isn't a pilot (although the article says he is believed to have flight experience), I'm just pointing out that landing at night without a landing light is far far from being "blind".
The other fascinating statement is that the propeller "hit the floor". And then it "uprighted again". It takes a lot for a small airplane to get in a position where it needs to be uprighted, and most airports don't have floors outside.
I thought the whole point of those big bright landing landing lights was to illuminate the ground when you're near touch down (and for taxi/takeoff). Runway markers may may it easy to see the runway from afar, but aren't going to be as useful for an untrained pilot to see how fast the plane is approaching the ground since a few fast moving dots of light streaming by aren't the same as a broadly lit surface).
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
I was thinking something more like this.
> but the average user isn't going to pay for one environment to use for special tasks, and then set up a completely different FOSS environment where he'll do most of his work.
That's a false strawman. The beauty of Free Software is that it is generally platform agnostic. You don't have to do anything remotely like what you've just described. All your "special environment" requires is downloading some software.
It's no more burdensome than getting your flash and silverlight plugins sorted.
No strawman, it's a practical use case. You're assuming that all one needs to do to become proficient in some software is to install it, that's the easy part, the hard part is learning how to use it effectively.
When a student is told that he is required to submit work created by the school's chosen software, how many students are going to take the time to find a FOSS equivalent, do all of their work in that FOSS equivalent, and then, just before submitting the assignment, test it using the paid software to make sure it works, and if it doesn't work, spend time debugging it to get it to run/format correctly before submitting it?
"The South African Education Department has effectively banned the use of FOSS software in state-run schools by forcing all candidates writing the Computer Applications Technology examination to use Microsoft's Office 2010 or 2013 as the only supported options."
Fascinating, apparently MS-South Africa has sophisticated technology that seeks out and destroys all open source software simply because Microsoft Office is used for some tasks. This new learning is amazing! Tell me again how sheep-bladders can be used to prevent earthquakes!
That technology is called "convenience" and "money", and is what was meant by "effectively banned" rather than saying "completely banned".
Once you've spent the money to purchase the non-FOSS tools that the school requires you to use, you're not going to seek out free/open source replacements for those tools.
A few FOSS zealots may be willing to use LibreOffice, FreePascal, Linux, etc for most things, and only use the paid tools when he absolutely has to, but the average user isn't going to pay for one environment to use for special tasks, and then set up a completely different FOSS environment where he'll do most of his work.
(I'm one of those few, I use Linux for 99% of my work, but rdp into a Windows server to run Outlook, Visio, MS-Office, etc when I need to)
luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'
The company is paying for that.
Exactly - if you're staying at a luxury hotel chain and it's worth your time to complain about a $9.99 or $15 Wifi fee or "resort charge", you probably shouldn't be staying at a luxury hotel chain. But chances are that if you complain about it when you check out, they'll waive the charges
The Amplify tablet now has a record for poor construction quality and a breakage rate that is 12 times higher than what Squaretrade reported in early 2012 for the iPad 2."
But what's the failure rate for iPads loaned to (but not owned by) K-12 students?
I'd imagine that kids are harder on tablets than (most) adults, especially if they are not owned by the kids who know they'll get a new one if theirs breaks -- even more so if they are putting it in and out of a backpack all day long to carry it to classes and back and forth to home.
What is their patent on a "headphone jack sensor"? Is this anything like the sensor that portable radios have had for decades that let them switch off the speaker when the headphones are plugged in?
Nope. This is actually a sensor to determine, when headphones are plugged in, whether they're just stereo headphones, headphones+mic, or headphones+mic+control interface.
Whether there's anticipatory prior art for that is a different question, but the dumb normally-closed TRS jacks that have been used in patch bays for decades are not the same thing and all, and can make no determinations about the device plugged in, just whether a device is plugged in.
Thanks, when I tried to look it up, all I could find was references to this current decision with nothing about the actual patents that Apple claims were violated.
no it's not
didn't i already respond to you the last time this came up?
Well gee, I don't know. I can't keep track of every Anonymous Coward post on this site. But if you did reply to me before, then just post the link to that reply and not only can you save yourself from mustering up some fake indignation, but you can actually answer my question.
What is their patent on a "headphone jack sensor"? Is this anything like the sensor that portable radios have had for decades that let them switch off the speaker when the headphones are plugged in?
Why should they care about science? They are free to care about whatever they find important. That's human nature, and you're not going to change it.
Furthermore, if everyone cared about science, then you wouldn't be quite so special.
The same reason they should care about the arts, humanities, math, history, etc -- without a well rounded education, citizens can't make informed choices for themselves, or about their leaders. Not everyone needs to be a scientist, but everyone should have some basic knowledge of science.
For example, when less than 60% of the US population knows that CO2 is the believed to be the gas responsible for causing atmospheric temperatures to rise, how can that other 40% make any reasonable decision on global warming if they don't even know what is believed to be responsible?
http://www.pewresearch.org/quiz/science-knowledge/results/
why is the bbc first to report on this? It happens in CA, and we get scooped? wtf??
Because Americans don't care about science and if you told the typical American that we achieved nuclear Fusion, they'd say "That's the same thing that killed all those people in Fukishima, we don't need that sh*t here!"
However, the Fifth Amendment lets you refuse to answer the question of whether you even committed the crime at all, and I didn't see what was so great about that, because it is everybody's legitimate business whether or not you committed the crime.)
But *which* crime? There are so many laws that even the federal government can't tell you how many they are. How can anyone possibly know that they haven't committed a crime and that their statments might come back to bite them later?
Just like the huge tax code, the criminal code needs a major overhaul and simplification.
As Duane says:
[James Duane] Now. Here's part of the problem. The heart of the problem, as Justice Briar, on the U.S. Supreme Court explained in 1998 is, quote: "The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code, and virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear to a prosecutor to be relevant to some investigation."
One expert on criminal law recently noted "estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary, although it has been reported that the Congressional Research Service can no longer even count the current number of federal crimes." That's right, even the federal government has lost count. "These laws are scattered over all fifty pages of the U.S. Code, encompassing roughly twenty thousand pages. Worse yet, these statutes often incorporate by reference to the provisions of administrative regulations. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, although the ABA thinks there may be nearly ten thousand."
I'm using an atom cpu with several onboard intel gig-e ports.
fanless and has been pretty reliable so far. my 50mbps cable connection stays up and the 'router' has not needed rebooting in the month or two that I've been using it so far.
I've been very happy with pfSense running on a PC Engines Alix2d13 board. The board has 3 100mbit ethernet ports and 1 miniPCI slot for Wifi expansion, but I think there's limited driver support for 802.11n capable cards. I already had an Asus 802.11abgn wifi router, so I'm using that router for Wifi, and the pfSense box just as a firewall, VPN server, and a home webserver. I have dual WAN connections and use pfSense to failover from the primary connection (Comcast 50mbit) to the backup 3mbit DSL connection. Works great, and I can set up policy routes to route certain traffic across either WAN connection.
The Alix is not super powerful and is somewhat memory constrained (256MB), but I can get a Speedtest peak of 60mbit down from my Comcast connection. They are supposed to be working on a more powerful Alix successor that will have 1 or 2GB of RAM and a faster, dual core CPU. The cost is supposed to be in line with the current boards ~ $200.
I've only had this setup for a few months, but seems pretty stable, I last rebooted over 70 days ago and haven't had any problems with it.