Actually, I do understand the POTS architecture and the PSTN pretty well - though of course there's always more to learn. Maybe you just don't understand my posts.
What I'd like to know, since you seem to know more about LNP, is whether Vonage can sell its blocks of termination numbers to another telco, like maybe Verizon. That seems more likely than Vonage just letting such a valuable asset go without cashing in.
Do you know if I can do some kind of tradein deal with them? Like give them 5 working phones, but with no Bluetooth, and get back one with Blueteooth, maybe for an extra $20 cash?
No, there are many tiny CLECs around the world which can do the routing. I'm talking about porting the number to my own termination, just like I did the others, and just like I would port, say, my Sprint mobile# to my Verizon phone, which would get routed by Verizon rather than by Sprint.
I have SIP over my broadband. Which is exactly the same scenario.
These objections are all BS. I want to port my Vonage number out of Vonage, I have the technical equipment available to do it, but Vonage refuses, because "I dont' own the phone#, I just rent it from Vonage". I understand Vonage being grabby with a valuable (in bulk) asset like my phone#, but Slashdotters insisting the same is just lying.
The nuke construction industry, and the funding for it, does not have the capacity to build 100 plants at a time, and probably not 10, either. You do realize there are only a few companies that can do it, like Bechtel, right? And the kinds of waste and accidents from a crash course in growing that industry, especially given the excuses for ignoring them "because of the energy crisis", would make the current nuke industry look safe.
"Close" means "still problems". But it's close. And like I said, pouring the money that's already poured into subsidizing the extremely profitable petrofuel industries, and subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable nuke industry, all into solar R&D, would solve those problems. And then an army of civil engineers could indeed deploy solar safely and quickly.
Well, Verizon doesn't exist on a moral plane. It's a corporation, not a person. It's been illegally spying on the entire country, along with its competition (probably including Vonage), and has over a century of other "moral" crimes.
The ATAs, though, don't belong to the customers. They're free from Vonage. If Vonage dies, those locked ATAs will be a waste, but not a cost to the customer (except maybe recycling, unless Vonage pays for that - as they should, because it's Vonage's property they're discarding).
The phone#, though, is a major cost if lost. Which is exactly why we have the elaborate Local Number Portability system. I bet Vonage is exempt, or will act like it, on their typical scam basis that "we're an info service, not a phone company", which is the basis they used to keep their phone#s, which helped them keep customers. Probably Vonage will sell the phone#s, as several million of them is a substantial asset, especially in popular places like UK, NYC and other large cities with "brand name" area/country codes. But probably in bulk, to some other telco - like Verizon. Which could indeed be a way for Vonage to "help" their customers keep service, if Vonage dies.
Which would be a huge win for Verizon. Though stranding them all would be a bigger strategic win for Verizon: scaring the whole market into avoiding "VoIP", even when it's a big, well funded startup that works technically for years. That sounds like Verizon's plan all along.
Like I said, not moral. Any corporation sufficiently amoral is indistinguishable from evil.
Perhaps, but video like that would look like an Atari 2600 game, with real object lighting converted to always color every pixel into which it was sampled exactly the same. A rectangular dot moving around the screen, except for the tiniest variations in natural lighting at very small/brief scales of timespace.
No, actually it's a SIP provider I'm paying to host some other DIDs that I did either port or just buy (as portable) to put on it. They're running some Avaya equipment, and some Asterisk servers. But it could be my own Asterisk server, if I wanted. That's how LNP is supposed to work: all you're supposed to need is a phone number on a phone, and put in a request to port it to another carrier.
So what? Who cares? What the hell is the difference? Verizon had no problem porting some numbers to my preferred provider, nor did some other telcos, like Sprint, from whom I first got the number. Vonage had a problem.
So what does your buzzword complaint have to do with anything? This is a question merely of whether Vonage will let me port a number, the way other telcos do, the way LNP is supposed to work. If anything, you should throw your buzzwords at Vonage, instead of acting like you're some kind of bigshot. All it does is make you look like you don't understand LNP.
There's probably a subset of video that's popular enough to be worth upconverting.
But Google already harnesses lots of distributed computing power: nearly all of the CPU cycles consumed in playing their videos is consumed on the viewing user's PC. Which uses a Google Flash applet to play it back. Google could include in that applet extra code which chews away at some of their archived video. Which could in turn become a way for Google to expand its crunching power to other tasks, like indexing. I'd toggle ads off in exchange for Google using my PC's extra capacity to improve their data that I access.
Video can be upscaled to higher resolution much better than can photos, because video has more info in it. When a feature smaller than a sampled pixel moves across several pixels, it doesn't affect the all pixels the same way. The sampling grid can be "deconvolved" (or otherwise factored out) to a great extent, relying on the relative consistency of objects' appearance across brief intervals and short distances.
Google's got the money and PhDs to make that work. I'd love to see them drag the archive of lorez movies into a hirez platform.
So will I be able to buy my Vonage phone#, that they've refused to let me port to my own SIP server, when they have the firesale? Or will they sell me to Verizon to pay for their patent infringement?
I like to put prepaid SIMs into old GSM phones I don't use, and leave them in the car and at home as backups or for visitors. But most SIMs still expire after a while, which seems like a scam to me (since the telcos don't refund their cost). CDMA phones do no good.
But I wish they could all be unlocked to use a low-power accesspoint in my home. The Bluetooth ones would be good as remote controls, if a Java or native applet could harness them.
Public domain still covers everything. And with a simple statement of perpetuity for derivatives, it really covers everything, every way, forever. We're talking under an hour for a competent IP lawyer, not months for teams of them.
Unless they're protecting more than the freedom of what they release, like some of their own private interests in its not-so-free perpetuation.
I think it's worth asking the question, after indicating that everyone else in the country could be selling for the same amount, which would reflect to each student asked approximately what the results reflect to us. Though we always get the exact percentage, and a paradox prevents saying it in the question.
I also think that it's worth polling on selling for $10, for $100, and maybe also in exchange for a firm handshake.
But just the principle of selling your vote has been tested. $1 million for 300 million people is indeed $300 trillion. If I could indeed control 300 million votes, I could make it repay 300 trillion over time (so long as the country didn't make reversing my power its top priority for the next 10-20 elections). But, in this theoretical vacuum, I could make 60 million votes, the maximum amount it's taken for over a decade to ensure control of the entire government, well worth $60 trillion (5 years of US GDP). If I had that kind of money to hand out, I'd probably afford making a plan to spend something like a couple $trillion on only 2 million votes which could swing that kind of money back to me.
And if I bought polling showing the price was closer to a firm handshake, closer to a few $billion to control the pulling tips of the political levers, I'd easily raise the money and do it. Which sounds exactly like what political parties actually do.
Thanks for mentioning that. When I read this story, my first thought was of the Clipper chip, and "key escrow". Security model: "trust us, we're from the government". It wasn't worth believing then, and now, after a decade of Republican honesty in government, it's like diet of tainted government cheese.
"It doesn't matter how many eyes you have on it"? If the NSA made its algorithms secret, and required we all just use black boxes, that would be a lot less secure.
And before you call that fiction, remember that today's NSA is the product of 7 years of the most secretive, abusive, and untrustworthy presidency in history. Which has perverted the NSA beyond recognition as an American agency. They were never any saints, but if you don't think more eyes on their work is better, then that just means they don't have to waste any more time fooling you.
It's not "stealing" if you still have it when I "take" it. Any more than reading your newspaper over your shoulder is "stealing".
Because practically all these WiFi piggybacks are accessing over 11Mbps segments leading to something like 1.5-8Mbps Internet connections, the users probably never see any reduction in WiFi bandwidth. And since most people are just hitting web pages, which has mostly time the WAN pipe isn't being used (while people read the page), there's probably little competition for WAN bandwidth, too.
This whole thing is stupid. If someone wants to keep their WiFi to themselves, it's easy to close it, especially if they notice any problems. Just like it's easy to close your shades if when you don't want people peeking in your windows. If you leave the shades up, you're inviting company.
t's not a "panacea". It's just a way of working. That's better than the alternative. As well as to say that "binary" is a panacea. There's always a lot of work to do. Open source is just the only way for that work to have any chance to reliably succeed.
"A" nuke plant? You're the one whose dreams glow in the dark.
And if you don't think that the money spent subsidizing oil, coal and nukes spent over 10 years on solar research can't get it to be a better fuel source, then you don't know how to spell "$200 a barrel".
Solar is already close enough to be an alternative, before that other poison kills us any more. You don't even understand what it was like for this country to go from watching Sputnik to putting a man on the Moon in 12 years, with a much tinier GDP, much more rudimentary engineering tools, and a much less urgent motivation. You should dare to dream a little higher than state of the art 1955.
Solar panel efficiency, to name just one, just achieved 42%. With concentrators (mirrors), so it doesn't need expensive panels for the entire area. Putting $10 billion into that research for five years would pay off a lot better than the current plan: spend $12 billion on each month in Iraq.
Tell me about that nuke plant you're going to build in under 3 years - that won't crack in half and take out all the neighbors, that is.
"Until a better solution can be found" has been the nukes motto for over a half century. Now we've got to find a solution to the mountain of extremely toxic waste, and our dependency on it.
Nah, the CC licenses are complex. There's no reason the license can't read "this software/dataset/whatever is hereby released from any rights or obligations by either the recipient or anyone from whom they receive it, except the obligation to include this notice is required".
Even if that needs tweaking by a lawyer, any lawyer who can't make that sound, given all the knowledge of existing contracts, isn't worth their own license.
Besides, that contract isn't even necessary. They can just release it with "this thing is hereby placed in the public domain". If they want to ensure that any changes or derivations are forced to be published, which I don't see as necessary, they can publish it under the GPL, which is easier to defend precisely because it's not new. If it's content, not code, they can publish it under an existing CC.
A delay of several months to release a new license is only a way to reserve some other rights to themselves. Which is crap.
Open source software can also benefit from open process, not just world-readable source code. But that open code is the only reliable open product of any process, however open the process might be. Because there's no way to know just how open the process really is, just because there's a report on that process. The difference is that the product, either the code or the mathematics, is available for certifiably total inspection before it's used, whether math to make source code, or source code to make executables.
So I'm underscoring how important it is for the NSA products, like this random number generator, to be open source. They'd be better with more open processes, but the source's openness is what's strictly necessary. Even if, say, rijndael were only open source (not open process), it would still be subject to the same testing as it is now.
And just because a process is open doesn't mean that the source is safe or good. It all still needs to be tested by distrustful parties. It will all also still take time to learn the full implications of any complex work. So while open processes are a bonus, it's the open source that we really need.
Given the secrecy, even "reclassifying", that the current NSA has indulged in (beyond all sanity, but for political effects), insisting on the source remaining open is necessary. Further demands for more open processes are warranted as pushback, but beneficial mainly as measured by whether the threshold of open source is met.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I do understand the POTS architecture and the PSTN pretty well - though of course there's always more to learn. Maybe you just don't understand my posts.
What I'd like to know, since you seem to know more about LNP, is whether Vonage can sell its blocks of termination numbers to another telco, like maybe Verizon. That seems more likely than Vonage just letting such a valuable asset go without cashing in.
Do you know if I can do some kind of tradein deal with them? Like give them 5 working phones, but with no Bluetooth, and get back one with Blueteooth, maybe for an extra $20 cash?
No, there are many tiny CLECs around the world which can do the routing. I'm talking about porting the number to my own termination, just like I did the others, and just like I would port, say, my Sprint mobile# to my Verizon phone, which would get routed by Verizon rather than by Sprint.
I have SIP over my broadband. Which is exactly the same scenario.
These objections are all BS. I want to port my Vonage number out of Vonage, I have the technical equipment available to do it, but Vonage refuses, because "I dont' own the phone#, I just rent it from Vonage". I understand Vonage being grabby with a valuable (in bulk) asset like my phone#, but Slashdotters insisting the same is just lying.
The nuke construction industry, and the funding for it, does not have the capacity to build 100 plants at a time, and probably not 10, either. You do realize there are only a few companies that can do it, like Bechtel, right? And the kinds of waste and accidents from a crash course in growing that industry, especially given the excuses for ignoring them "because of the energy crisis", would make the current nuke industry look safe.
"Close" means "still problems". But it's close. And like I said, pouring the money that's already poured into subsidizing the extremely profitable petrofuel industries, and subsidizing the otherwise unprofitable nuke industry, all into solar R&D, would solve those problems. And then an army of civil engineers could indeed deploy solar safely and quickly.
Well, Verizon doesn't exist on a moral plane. It's a corporation, not a person. It's been illegally spying on the entire country, along with its competition (probably including Vonage), and has over a century of other "moral" crimes.
The ATAs, though, don't belong to the customers. They're free from Vonage. If Vonage dies, those locked ATAs will be a waste, but not a cost to the customer (except maybe recycling, unless Vonage pays for that - as they should, because it's Vonage's property they're discarding).
The phone#, though, is a major cost if lost. Which is exactly why we have the elaborate Local Number Portability system. I bet Vonage is exempt, or will act like it, on their typical scam basis that "we're an info service, not a phone company", which is the basis they used to keep their phone#s, which helped them keep customers. Probably Vonage will sell the phone#s, as several million of them is a substantial asset, especially in popular places like UK, NYC and other large cities with "brand name" area/country codes. But probably in bulk, to some other telco - like Verizon. Which could indeed be a way for Vonage to "help" their customers keep service, if Vonage dies.
Which would be a huge win for Verizon. Though stranding them all would be a bigger strategic win for Verizon: scaring the whole market into avoiding "VoIP", even when it's a big, well funded startup that works technically for years. That sounds like Verizon's plan all along.
Like I said, not moral. Any corporation sufficiently amoral is indistinguishable from evil.
Perhaps, but video like that would look like an Atari 2600 game, with real object lighting converted to always color every pixel into which it was sampled exactly the same. A rectangular dot moving around the screen, except for the tiniest variations in natural lighting at very small/brief scales of timespace.
No, actually it's a SIP provider I'm paying to host some other DIDs that I did either port or just buy (as portable) to put on it. They're running some Avaya equipment, and some Asterisk servers. But it could be my own Asterisk server, if I wanted. That's how LNP is supposed to work: all you're supposed to need is a phone number on a phone, and put in a request to port it to another carrier.
So what? Who cares? What the hell is the difference? Verizon had no problem porting some numbers to my preferred provider, nor did some other telcos, like Sprint, from whom I first got the number. Vonage had a problem.
So what does your buzzword complaint have to do with anything? This is a question merely of whether Vonage will let me port a number, the way other telcos do, the way LNP is supposed to work. If anything, you should throw your buzzwords at Vonage, instead of acting like you're some kind of bigshot. All it does is make you look like you don't understand LNP.
There's probably a subset of video that's popular enough to be worth upconverting.
But Google already harnesses lots of distributed computing power: nearly all of the CPU cycles consumed in playing their videos is consumed on the viewing user's PC. Which uses a Google Flash applet to play it back. Google could include in that applet extra code which chews away at some of their archived video. Which could in turn become a way for Google to expand its crunching power to other tasks, like indexing. I'd toggle ads off in exchange for Google using my PC's extra capacity to improve their data that I access.
Video can be upscaled to higher resolution much better than can photos, because video has more info in it. When a feature smaller than a sampled pixel moves across several pixels, it doesn't affect the all pixels the same way. The sampling grid can be "deconvolved" (or otherwise factored out) to a great extent, relying on the relative consistency of objects' appearance across brief intervals and short distances.
Google's got the money and PhDs to make that work. I'd love to see them drag the archive of lorez movies into a hirez platform.
So will I be able to buy my Vonage phone#, that they've refused to let me port to my own SIP server, when they have the firesale? Or will they sell me to Verizon to pay for their patent infringement?
I like to put prepaid SIMs into old GSM phones I don't use, and leave them in the car and at home as backups or for visitors. But most SIMs still expire after a while, which seems like a scam to me (since the telcos don't refund their cost). CDMA phones do no good.
But I wish they could all be unlocked to use a low-power accesspoint in my home. The Bluetooth ones would be good as remote controls, if a Java or native applet could harness them.
Public domain still covers everything. And with a simple statement of perpetuity for derivatives, it really covers everything, every way, forever. We're talking under an hour for a competent IP lawyer, not months for teams of them.
Unless they're protecting more than the freedom of what they release, like some of their own private interests in its not-so-free perpetuation.
Sprint and T-Mobile seem to have no problem competing with each other while also joining the OHA.
And Google has been planning to spend $billions on the 700MHz band to compete with them all for years.
This story isn't stupid, but the question it asks to frame it is so stupid I'm surprised I didn't see it on TV news.
I think it's worth asking the question, after indicating that everyone else in the country could be selling for the same amount, which would reflect to each student asked approximately what the results reflect to us. Though we always get the exact percentage, and a paradox prevents saying it in the question.
I also think that it's worth polling on selling for $10, for $100, and maybe also in exchange for a firm handshake.
But just the principle of selling your vote has been tested. $1 million for 300 million people is indeed $300 trillion. If I could indeed control 300 million votes, I could make it repay 300 trillion over time (so long as the country didn't make reversing my power its top priority for the next 10-20 elections). But, in this theoretical vacuum, I could make 60 million votes, the maximum amount it's taken for over a decade to ensure control of the entire government, well worth $60 trillion (5 years of US GDP). If I had that kind of money to hand out, I'd probably afford making a plan to spend something like a couple $trillion on only 2 million votes which could swing that kind of money back to me.
And if I bought polling showing the price was closer to a firm handshake, closer to a few $billion to control the pulling tips of the political levers, I'd easily raise the money and do it. Which sounds exactly like what political parties actually do.
Thanks for mentioning that. When I read this story, my first thought was of the Clipper chip, and "key escrow". Security model: "trust us, we're from the government". It wasn't worth believing then, and now, after a decade of Republican honesty in government, it's like diet of tainted government cheese.
"It doesn't matter how many eyes you have on it"? If the NSA made its algorithms secret, and required we all just use black boxes, that would be a lot less secure.
And before you call that fiction, remember that today's NSA is the product of 7 years of the most secretive, abusive, and untrustworthy presidency in history. Which has perverted the NSA beyond recognition as an American agency. They were never any saints, but if you don't think more eyes on their work is better, then that just means they don't have to waste any more time fooling you.
It's not "stealing" if you still have it when I "take" it. Any more than reading your newspaper over your shoulder is "stealing".
Because practically all these WiFi piggybacks are accessing over 11Mbps segments leading to something like 1.5-8Mbps Internet connections, the users probably never see any reduction in WiFi bandwidth. And since most people are just hitting web pages, which has mostly time the WAN pipe isn't being used (while people read the page), there's probably little competition for WAN bandwidth, too.
This whole thing is stupid. If someone wants to keep their WiFi to themselves, it's easy to close it, especially if they notice any problems. Just like it's easy to close your shades if when you don't want people peeking in your windows. If you leave the shades up, you're inviting company.
t's not a "panacea". It's just a way of working. That's better than the alternative. As well as to say that "binary" is a panacea. There's always a lot of work to do. Open source is just the only way for that work to have any chance to reliably succeed.
"A" nuke plant? You're the one whose dreams glow in the dark.
And if you don't think that the money spent subsidizing oil, coal and nukes spent over 10 years on solar research can't get it to be a better fuel source, then you don't know how to spell "$200 a barrel".
Solar is already close enough to be an alternative, before that other poison kills us any more. You don't even understand what it was like for this country to go from watching Sputnik to putting a man on the Moon in 12 years, with a much tinier GDP, much more rudimentary engineering tools, and a much less urgent motivation. You should dare to dream a little higher than state of the art 1955.
'leet speak first turned the world upside down as a joke about "BOOBLESS". I wonder if the 4004 could run a softporn text adventure game like that.
The execs who run the NSA are responsible for letting bad math out the door, as well as for breaking the law.
Solar panel efficiency, to name just one, just achieved 42%. With concentrators (mirrors), so it doesn't need expensive panels for the entire area. Putting $10 billion into that research for five years would pay off a lot better than the current plan: spend $12 billion on each month in Iraq.
Tell me about that nuke plant you're going to build in under 3 years - that won't crack in half and take out all the neighbors, that is.
"Until a better solution can be found" has been the nukes motto for over a half century. Now we've got to find a solution to the mountain of extremely toxic waste, and our dependency on it.
Nah, the CC licenses are complex. There's no reason the license can't read "this software/dataset/whatever is hereby released from any rights or obligations by either the recipient or anyone from whom they receive it, except the obligation to include this notice is required".
Even if that needs tweaking by a lawyer, any lawyer who can't make that sound, given all the knowledge of existing contracts, isn't worth their own license.
Besides, that contract isn't even necessary. They can just release it with "this thing is hereby placed in the public domain". If they want to ensure that any changes or derivations are forced to be published, which I don't see as necessary, they can publish it under the GPL, which is easier to defend precisely because it's not new. If it's content, not code, they can publish it under an existing CC.
A delay of several months to release a new license is only a way to reserve some other rights to themselves. Which is crap.
Hmm, how is this secure when you passed the password in plaintext? Do you think the NSA is that naive?
Open source software can also benefit from open process, not just world-readable source code. But that open code is the only reliable open product of any process, however open the process might be. Because there's no way to know just how open the process really is, just because there's a report on that process. The difference is that the product, either the code or the mathematics, is available for certifiably total inspection before it's used, whether math to make source code, or source code to make executables.
So I'm underscoring how important it is for the NSA products, like this random number generator, to be open source. They'd be better with more open processes, but the source's openness is what's strictly necessary. Even if, say, rijndael were only open source (not open process), it would still be subject to the same testing as it is now.
And just because a process is open doesn't mean that the source is safe or good. It all still needs to be tested by distrustful parties. It will all also still take time to learn the full implications of any complex work. So while open processes are a bonus, it's the open source that we really need.
Given the secrecy, even "reclassifying", that the current NSA has indulged in (beyond all sanity, but for political effects), insisting on the source remaining open is necessary. Further demands for more open processes are warranted as pushback, but beneficial mainly as measured by whether the threshold of open source is met.