Back in college, a professor told me that there are up to two orders of magnitude of difference between the the productivity (as measured by debugged lines of code) of the basic "competent" programmer and the guru. Two orders of magnitude. For the math impaired, that means that the genuine guru delivers in a week what it takes the entry-level programmer a year to produce.
I've seen nothing since to suggest that this isn't true. If anything, I've seen proof after proof... Programmers who struck me as bright and experienced, yet time after time they just don't get it. And programmers who do get it. Instantly. In the first two weeks on the job.
You're not going to like the answer, but its this: Hire programmers until you find ones that deliver, and do what it takes to keep them. Fire the rest (which is to say, don't fire them but suggest to them that they should seek alternate employment quickly.)
What do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'?
Its perfectly acceptable to ask the contributor to make changes to his patch before you integrate it into the codebase. Some will. Some won't. Don't sweat it. A change could be as simple as #IFDEF'ing the new code so that its only enabled if whoever compiles it specifically wants it os as complex as adjusting it so that it meets the "mission" you've defined.
If its a question of something that won't work after you make certain planned changes to the product, say so. The contributor might think your plans are a great idea and go work on them, saving you the effort.
If its a question of violating some policy you've set for the project, ask yourself a question: Does it hurt anything by being there disabled? If you're looking for strict control of "your" product, it will have to be "your" product, not "our" product.
And, if you *really* don't like it, the catch-all answer is: "I don't want to put that in the main code base right now, but I'd be happy to place the patch on the FTP site where everyone can get it."
What if I get a patch that I don't understand?
Doesn't Linus normally ask folks to submit changes as a series of smaller patches if something submitted is too complex? That seems like a good solution to me.
What if someone gets angry and decides to fork the project?
Aside from the blow to your pride, what exactly would the problem be? RMS notwithstanding, open source is a poor place for large egos. Just don't sweat it. Besides, if they did it in anger (rather than simply wanting to go another direction) then their project is likely to last only as long as their anger.
TCP has a "window size". This window is how many bytes of data it can send ahead of an acknowledgement that the data has been received. The maximum the protocol allows is 64kbytes. If the full upstream queue delays those ACK packets by, say, one second then the maximum possible downstream speed for that TCP stream will be 64kbytes/sec or 512kbps.
This has major implications in high-speed cross-country networks where speed of light delays calculated against the window size cap the transmission speed well under the media's maximum capacity. Its also a significant problem running TCP over geosyncronous satellite links where the round trip speed-of-light delay is half a second.
As I recall, MS Windows further caps the TCP window size to 8kbytes. Increasing it won't help since this'll just clog the upstream faster.
If you're too badly clogged, packet loss becomes an issue. The TCP protocol implements congestion control by halving the window size every time a packet is lost. Guess what impact this has on your speed.
Time doesn't have arbitrarly chosen units of measurement the way length and volume does. Its defined by day borders and year borders.
Given the need for leap days caused by the mismatch between the boundaries of the day and the year, it would be difficult to define a metric time standard that aligned for day-borders and year-borders.
The whole point of a metric system is that everything ooperates in 10s. What's the value if you align on days but the years and months aren't powers of 10? What's the value if you align on years but the days don't align on powers of 10?
Either way it loses most of its value as a simplifying system. Computers already count based on seconds or days anyway. Why mess with it?
Bobby said he'd give me a one hundred dollar bill if I gave him five dollars, but he gave me monopoly money!
You get what you pay for. Sure it would be nice if the "broadband" providers would level with you and tell you up front that the standard of service is several steps below a T1, but that would be like a Toyota salesman telling you that their standard of quality was several steps below that of a Porsche.
Yeah, and what's worse: I got the wrong three letters. I was trying to criticize the, ah, zealousness of a certain individual at the Free Software Foundation.
List price on a Maxtor 160gb drive $300. With the Linux-compatible UltraDMA card.
List price on a DVD burner plus 32 disks is, well, more than that. Figure an extra $50+ for each additional 5gb DVD you want online at once.
The base PC cost for either approach is about the same (less than $200 if you're using linux; don't exactly need a lot of CPU power for this app), so how many DVDs do you have to burn to break even versus storing them on a linux server with hard disk drives?
Answer: So many that the only reason to buy a DVD burner is that a DVD burner is a more interesting toy than a terabyte file server.
It's in a company's best interest to pay workers as little as they can get away with. That does not by implication indicate they don't value the employee, nor are unwilling to pay more for the same employee.
That's not entirely true. Companies pay what they think it will cost to keep you or someone equivalent to you. They aren't going to suddenly realize that someone like you costs much more just because you got another offer. At best they'll give you a raise to keep you while they examine their options. They'll keep you only if that review leads them to believe that you contribute enough value to the company to merit the new salary.
If you accept the counter offer, plan on being early to work religiously for the next few months, and plan on working late during that period frequently enough that your boss notices. Re-demonstrate your loyalty, in other words.
And one more thing: Don't plan on doing this twice at the same company.
Someone has yet to offer me a satisfactory explanation of how these new lights are going to SAFELY emit enough energy at microwave-oven frequencies to disable dsss wireless lans (using low power at the same frequencies) 100 feet away.
The again, someone has yet to explain to me how its a good idea to hold a low-power microwave oven next to your head for an hour while chatting with your friends (2.4 ghz cordless phone).
Not a fiber optic expert, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Fiber Optic cables work based on a refraction principle called "total internal reflection." Like when you look up at the surface from under water: You see the entire 180 degrees of surface inside one small circle of light, and everything else is a reflection of the bottom.
The light travels through the fiber optic cable by reflecting back and forth at the boundary between the fiber and the cladding as it travels along the cable.
The upshot of this is that if you bend the cable too much, light starts to escape into the cladding. Bend it just right and make sure that the cladding is transparent to the wavelengths being used and enough light leaves the cable right there to read the signal... All the while appearing to be nothing more than an additional db loss to the endpoints.
So, you do have to cut into the cable assembly but you don't actually have to break the fibers.
Unless you particularly need to store the data in an online system, don't.
Most of your recurring billing doesn't happen using an internet based service, yes? The software dials a credit card service at intervals to process the cards. So, make the connection between your online system that first sees the credit card to your database that stores it a "write only" link. Not hard to do. Think: serial port and perl script. Then, drop any information from the "online" portion of the database that isn't strictly needed in the online portion.
It can't be hacked over the net if it isn't on the net.
I think you meant to say exclusive copyrights can not be assigned to another individual. If you can't assign any copyrights, then you can't distribute it without the recipient infringing.
Also, requiring the access control to be disabled upon expiration of the IP is impractical -- the author and publisher are generally long gone.
Also, with regards to patents, most software processes should be protected by patent, not copyright. Copyright protects the what, not the how. Patents protect the how. This means that no copyright protects a clever algorithm (even if it does protect the specific software you used it in), so if you want to protect it you need a patent.
1) No IP outlives its author, or one half of a "lifetime" if the owner is a company or organization other than the author.
2) Anyone who implements technical impediments to fair use (or use after the expiration of the IP) loses the right to punative damages (that is, can only collect real damages) due to infringement.
3) Consumer right to transfer an owned copy of an IP from one physical media to another (CD to a tape or mp3, painting to a computer image, etc).
4) Unvoidable consumer right to own any IP in his legitimate posession with all rights of an owner of one copy. (Come on, copies aren't a limited resource. There is simply no justification for the rental of IPs.)
5) Require DMCA infringement claims to prove that the primary purpose or use of a technology is infringement (and not some legitimate use).
6) Right to modify an owned copy of an IP in any way (but not to redistribute the modified copy).
The article is rather light on details about how exactly the lights are going to interfere.
2.4ghz is special in that its the resonance frequency of the water molecule. That's why microwave ovens operate at that frequency: vibration = heat.
So how exactly are these folks going to sell a product which emits high wattages at that frequency? Sitting under one would be like sticking your head in a microwave.
Answer: They're not stupid enough to sell a product that is like sticking your head in a microwave. Some critical facts are missing here.
The wireless stuff isn't particularly dangerous since its emitting at such a low power: well under 1 watt where the typical microwave emits at up to 1000 watts. And the spread spectrum technology does a good enough job of ignoring noise that the technology works despite the leakage from those ovens. If the wireless stuff does OK in the presence of leakage from 1000 watt Microwave Ovens, it'll do fine in the presence of other safe 2.4ghz devices.
That's why you use a whitelist instead of a blacklist.
With a blacklist you decide what isn't allowed, which demands an answer to: who gave you the right to censor?
With a whitelist, you're taking the same role as the school library does with books: We have only so much space and only so much funding. Therefore we choose to carry only the following materials.
As for angry parents, everything you do makes them angry... Including letting the school's internet connection be slow and inadequate. So if you're interested in making a difference, don't sweat the parents. That's what your boss, the principal, is for.
In a K12 institution, a "whitelist" approach to Internet access is perfectly appropriate. The opposite of a blacklist, what you do with this approach is say, "We don't have Internet access. We have access to these specific Internet features."
Then implement a simple and cheap packet-filtering firewall to enforce it.
That'll be the end of your PtP problem. Then, all you'll need is to create a policy for how additional Intnernet features are added.
Then the crook took her drivers license, somehow mangled it, and got the her picture on the front and my wife's name. [...] The moral of the story is that it is easy to impersonate someone, causing harm to that person because there is no biometric element at any point in the US ID system.
If a crook can successfully mangle one part of an ID then he can mangle another... Especially with biometric recording tools mass-produced and training available to minimum-wage employees at the DMV.
Bah. Why don't just put Verisign in charge and get it over with.
Not sure I understand what you're getting at, so if I don't answer your point please clarify it and I'll try again.
Under my proposal, rental doesn't exist. The closest thing to rental of an IP would be a store which makes a standing offer to repurchase the IP for a lower price at some later date, or some similar accomodation. This accomplishes more or less the same goal (legal possession of one copy for a limited period of time) but it puts the consumer in the driver's seat: the consumer decides directly whether and when the period of time comes to a close, and for the duration the consumer owns that copy with all rights that implies.
From a moral/societal standpoint, this is reasonable: With a normal property, rental is about sharing a finite resource. But an IP is not in any way finite. Stripped of the sharing aspect, rental is nothing more than an exercise in control.
Rental as an exercise in control is not a new idea. Look to land ownership in 19th century Europe for plenty of excellent examples of why its societally unhealthy... Just as US history has lots of prime examples of how a society can fuel its growth by enabling ownership in a world that rents.
Nor is the idea of banning the rental of an IP new. In fact, one form has been federal law since the 1980s. Thats why all those software rental stores closed. At the time, the software publishers complained that allowing the rentals to remain legal was the chief cause of software piracy. They were more right than they knew, though perhaps they didn't realize it was a two-way street.
Anyway, food for thought. As with any legal matter, the devil's in the details and I frankly don't know whether the details would work out here. I think it might be interesting to work through the implications.
The only legislation that will help at this point would be legislation that defines IP piracy narrowly enough that there are a manageable number of pirates.
According to the conglomorates, piracy is doing anything with an IP that they havn't explicitly conceived of and allowed. This definition is so broad and so overbearing that its useless.
Consider a speeding ticket. They came up with a new class of law for a speeding ticket. Its an "infraction," not a crime or a civil offense. The standard of proof is whether the defendant showed some reasonable evidence that it didn't happen. And the penalties are tiny: fines less than a couple hundred dollars leading up to the eventual loss of your drivers' license.
Why did they need to come up with a trivialized form of law for speeding? Because virtually everybody speeds at least some of the time.
The lesson: you can't criminalize something that everybody does at least some of the time. You can either have an "IP court" next door to the traffic court (an abomination if I do say so myself) or you can take a smarter approach:
Define some core consumer rights:
1) The right to _own_ a purchased copy of an IP, even if the license purports to make it a rental.
The constitution talks about offerning authors an inventors the opportunity to profit from their works... Not the opportunity to control them. And with good reason - control is the opposite of freedom.
Ownership might complicate things a little at Blockbuster: A return would have to be architected as a repurchase of the IP instead of merely returning a rental. But so what? College book stores do it all the time: you buy the book with some confidence of being able to sell it back at the end of the semester.
2) The right convert an IP from one physical media to another (copy a CD to a cassette tape for the car), or to undertake or enable reasonable steps which accomplish the same result (download an mp3 of the exact song you own on CD, rather than having to rip and convert it yourself).
Is it reasonable that someone who wants to listen to a song at work, in his car, and at home should have to buy it three times? Or that someone who bought the IP 10 years ago should have to buy it again just because LP records have gone out of style? Of course not! Make that sort of activity not just reasonable, but in fact the law.
3) The right to modify any copies of an IP that you own in any way desired, and the right to create and distribute tools which perform such modifications.
Perhaps even go so far as to state that the owner of an IP forfeits the right to punative damages if he publishes the IP using a manner in which he intends to deprive the purchaser of these rights. No punative damages allowed if the DVD was published with CSS!
I'm allowed to write notes in the margin of a book, rip out pages, doodle on it, etc. I can sell the book to someone else later. I can even rip it in half and sell one half to one person and one half to someone else! Why should my rights with other types of IP be any less? They shouldn't!
4) Apply the legal standard of intent - that someone pirating an IP or enabling the piracy of an IP either intended to acquire an IP to which they did not own any rights or that they had demonstrated negligence in taking no reasonable steps to avoid enabling such piracy. (after all, a file on an open server is a little like a swimming pool: an attractive nuisance. No fence = no defense in court.)
With those rights firmly established, how many pirates will be left? Only the modern Robin Hoods who who set up download servers with no attempt to validate a recipient's ownership of the IP. You can deal with them either in the form of criminal theft or as civil cases. Either way, there are few enough that they can be dealt with effectively.
I'm glad to see they've added it to 1.0rc1. It wasn't in 0.9.5 from a few months ago.
What would be even more useful, though, is an option along the lines of "run no javascript unless required to follow a link" which only runs javascript on a page if the link you clicked on uses javascript. That way I could surf with a largely javascript-free experience.
IE has an option to open new invocations as a seperate process. It uses more memory for state data, but the program itself is mostly shared-memory components. With the option set, new windows due to a following a link or File->Open remain in the same process while the desktop icon opens a new process. This is nice when I want to wander around google without losing my webmail.
1.0rc1 also seems to have sped up my reload in webmail... It no longer insists on loading the five icons over and over for each time they appear on the page. Very good.
1) It renders my table based webmail with its small icons much faster than Mozilla. When I tap reload, the redraw (with the new messages that just arrived) is almost instantaneous. With Mozilla 0.9.5, it sits there reloading the same damn icon each of the 1000 times it appears on the page.
2) I can disable the pop-under ads on sites I frequent by putting those sites into the "restricted" zone. Mozilla offers me no way to disable the popunders without completely disabling Javascript. (I'd rather have a option for "disable all javascript based popups", but at least IE gives me SOMETHING.)
3) Each time I load it, it runs a new instance. When it crashes, normally only that instance crashes. Mozilla insists on keeping all active windows in one instance, so when it crashes all my open web pages disappear.
Nothing stops these guys from banding together within the continent, buying point to point T3s into MAE-East and MAE-West, and then reciprocal-peering with the majority of the backbones there. Just like any other ISP of a sufficient size threshold.
If it costs more to send that T3 under the Atlantic from Virginia to Africa than it does to send it the few miles to my office, well, this is neither surprising nor unfair.
Now, if collectively they can't get organized enough and put together enough traffic to sustain the cost of a point to point T3, whose fault is that? And if the local African telcos rape them so badly that they can't effectively band together, whose fault is that?
The thrust of the article seems to be, "We deserve and demand that you extend the 50% handout you've been giving us." Baloney. If you want to play with the big boys, you should expect to do so on a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
Correct. Lets compare apples to apples for a moment:
6 mhz * 60 channels = 360mhz.
That 64kbps phone line is actually a 4 khz signal digitized at 8khz with 8 bits per sample to guarantee accurate frequency reproduction. That's 0.004 mhz. In fairness, its quasi-full duplex so it really takes twice as much: 0.008 mhz.
So, the coaxial cable can carry 360 mhz / 0.008 mhz = 45,000 simutaneous telephone conversations assuming they use the 20-years obsolete FDM scheme. Modern transmission techniques like CDMA bump data capacity in the same bandwidth up by at least an order of magnitude.
So, we're talking about the equivalent of half a million telephone conversations for each coax loop, and each coax loop serves only a few hundred households.
Fuzzy math, and the devil's in the details but the basic point is valid: Coax in the last mile has more than enough bandwidth for the foreseeable future.
The Bells only get 24 * 28 = 672 telephone conversations on each _pair_ of coaxial cables. No wonder they're so expensive!
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Back in college, a professor told me that there are up to two orders of magnitude of difference between the the productivity (as measured by debugged lines of code) of the basic "competent" programmer and the guru. Two orders of magnitude. For the math impaired, that means that the genuine guru delivers in a week what it takes the entry-level programmer a year to produce.
I've seen nothing since to suggest that this isn't true. If anything, I've seen proof after proof... Programmers who struck me as bright and experienced, yet time after time they just don't get it. And programmers who do get it. Instantly. In the first two weeks on the job.
You're not going to like the answer, but its this: Hire programmers until you find ones that deliver, and do what it takes to keep them. Fire the rest (which is to say, don't fire them but suggest to them that they should seek alternate employment quickly.)
What do I do when someone submits a patch that violates my 'mission'?
Its perfectly acceptable to ask the contributor to make changes to his patch before you integrate it into the codebase. Some will. Some won't. Don't sweat it. A change could be as simple as #IFDEF'ing the new code so that its only enabled if whoever compiles it specifically wants it os as complex as adjusting it so that it meets the "mission" you've defined.
If its a question of something that won't work after you make certain planned changes to the product, say so. The contributor might think your plans are a great idea and go work on them, saving you the effort.
If its a question of violating some policy you've set for the project, ask yourself a question: Does it hurt anything by being there disabled? If you're looking for strict control of "your" product, it will have to be "your" product, not "our" product.
And, if you *really* don't like it, the catch-all answer is: "I don't want to put that in the main code base right now, but I'd be happy to place the patch on the FTP site where everyone can get it."
What if I get a patch that I don't understand?
Doesn't Linus normally ask folks to submit changes as a series of smaller patches if something submitted is too complex? That seems like a good solution to me.
What if someone gets angry and decides to fork the project?
Aside from the blow to your pride, what exactly would the problem be? RMS notwithstanding, open source is a poor place for large egos. Just don't sweat it. Besides, if they did it in anger (rather than simply wanting to go another direction) then their project is likely to last only as long as their anger.
TCP has a "window size". This window is how many bytes of data it can send ahead of an acknowledgement that the data has been received. The maximum the protocol allows is 64kbytes. If the full upstream queue delays those ACK packets by, say, one second then the maximum possible downstream speed for that TCP stream will be 64kbytes/sec or 512kbps.
This has major implications in high-speed cross-country networks where speed of light delays calculated against the window size cap the transmission speed well under the media's maximum capacity. Its also a significant problem running TCP over geosyncronous satellite links where the round trip speed-of-light delay is half a second.
As I recall, MS Windows further caps the TCP window size to 8kbytes. Increasing it won't help since this'll just clog the upstream faster.
If you're too badly clogged, packet loss becomes an issue. The TCP protocol implements congestion control by halving the window size every time a packet is lost. Guess what impact this has on your speed.
Time doesn't have arbitrarly chosen units of measurement the way length and volume does. Its defined by day borders and year borders.
Given the need for leap days caused by the mismatch between the boundaries of the day and the year, it would be difficult to define a metric time standard that aligned for day-borders and year-borders.
The whole point of a metric system is that everything ooperates in 10s. What's the value if you align on days but the years and months aren't powers of 10? What's the value if you align on years but the days don't align on powers of 10?
Either way it loses most of its value as a simplifying system. Computers already count based on seconds or days anyway. Why mess with it?
Mommy mommy!
Bobby said he'd give me a one hundred dollar bill if I gave him five dollars, but he gave me monopoly money!
You get what you pay for. Sure it would be nice if the "broadband" providers would level with you and tell you up front that the standard of service is several steps below a T1, but that would be like a Toyota salesman telling you that their standard of quality was several steps below that of a Porsche.
Of course it is! DUH!
Yeah, and what's worse: I got the wrong three letters. I was trying to criticize the, ah, zealousness of a certain individual at the Free Software Foundation.
ESR- if you read this, my apologies.
List price on a Maxtor 160gb drive $300. With the Linux-compatible UltraDMA card.
List price on a DVD burner plus 32 disks is, well, more than that. Figure an extra $50+ for each additional 5gb DVD you want online at once.
The base PC cost for either approach is about the same (less than $200 if you're using linux; don't exactly need a lot of CPU power for this app), so how many DVDs do you have to burn to break even versus storing them on a linux server with hard disk drives?
Answer: So many that the only reason to buy a DVD burner is that a DVD burner is a more interesting toy than a terabyte file server.
This one should be a no-brainer. Just sic ESR on 'em.
It's in a company's best interest to pay workers as little as they can get away with. That does not by implication indicate they don't value the employee, nor are unwilling to pay more for the same employee.
That's not entirely true. Companies pay what they think it will cost to keep you or someone equivalent to you. They aren't going to suddenly realize that someone like you costs much more just because you got another offer. At best they'll give you a raise to keep you while they examine their options. They'll keep you only if that review leads them to believe that you contribute enough value to the company to merit the new salary.
If you accept the counter offer, plan on being early to work religiously for the next few months, and plan on working late during that period frequently enough that your boss notices. Re-demonstrate your loyalty, in other words.
And one more thing: Don't plan on doing this twice at the same company.
Someone has yet to offer me a satisfactory explanation of how these new lights are going to SAFELY emit enough energy at microwave-oven frequencies to disable dsss wireless lans (using low power at the same frequencies) 100 feet away.
The again, someone has yet to explain to me how its a good idea to hold a low-power microwave oven next to your head for an hour while chatting with your friends (2.4 ghz cordless phone).
Not a fiber optic expert, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Fiber Optic cables work based on a refraction principle called "total internal reflection." Like when you look up at the surface from under water: You see the entire 180 degrees of surface inside one small circle of light, and everything else is a reflection of the bottom.
The light travels through the fiber optic cable by reflecting back and forth at the boundary between the fiber and the cladding as it travels along the cable.
The upshot of this is that if you bend the cable too much, light starts to escape into the cladding. Bend it just right and make sure that the cladding is transparent to the wavelengths being used and enough light leaves the cable right there to read the signal... All the while appearing to be nothing more than an additional db loss to the endpoints.
So, you do have to cut into the cable assembly but you don't actually have to break the fibers.
Or am I missing something?
Unless you particularly need to store the data in an online system, don't.
Most of your recurring billing doesn't happen using an internet based service, yes? The software dials a credit card service at intervals to process the cards. So, make the connection between your online system that first sees the credit card to your database that stores it a "write only" link. Not hard to do. Think: serial port and perl script. Then, drop any information from the "online" portion of the database that isn't strictly needed in the online portion.
It can't be hacked over the net if it isn't on the net.
Brain fart: replace "redistribute" with "reproduce" in #6. Of course you can redistribute your copy... You just can't make new ones.
I think you meant to say exclusive copyrights can not be assigned to another individual. If you can't assign any copyrights, then you can't distribute it without the recipient infringing.
Also, requiring the access control to be disabled upon expiration of the IP is impractical -- the author and publisher are generally long gone.
Also, with regards to patents, most software processes should be protected by patent, not copyright. Copyright protects the what, not the how. Patents protect the how. This means that no copyright protects a clever algorithm (even if it does protect the specific software you used it in), so if you want to protect it you need a patent.
1) No IP outlives its author, or one half of a "lifetime" if the owner is a company or organization other than the author.
2) Anyone who implements technical impediments to fair use (or use after the expiration of the IP) loses the right to punative damages (that is, can only collect real damages) due to infringement.
3) Consumer right to transfer an owned copy of an IP from one physical media to another (CD to a tape or mp3, painting to a computer image, etc).
4) Unvoidable consumer right to own any IP in his legitimate posession with all rights of an owner of one copy. (Come on, copies aren't a limited resource. There is simply no justification for the rental of IPs.)
5) Require DMCA infringement claims to prove that the primary purpose or use of a technology is infringement (and not some legitimate use).
6) Right to modify an owned copy of an IP in any way (but not to redistribute the modified copy).
The article is rather light on details about how exactly the lights are going to interfere.
2.4ghz is special in that its the resonance frequency of the water molecule. That's why microwave ovens operate at that frequency: vibration = heat.
So how exactly are these folks going to sell a product which emits high wattages at that frequency? Sitting under one would be like sticking your head in a microwave.
Answer: They're not stupid enough to sell a product that is like sticking your head in a microwave. Some critical facts are missing here.
The wireless stuff isn't particularly dangerous since its emitting at such a low power: well under 1 watt where the typical microwave emits at up to 1000 watts. And the spread spectrum technology does a good enough job of ignoring noise that the technology works despite the leakage from those ovens. If the wireless stuff does OK in the presence of leakage from 1000 watt Microwave Ovens, it'll do fine in the presence of other safe 2.4ghz devices.
That's why you use a whitelist instead of a blacklist.
With a blacklist you decide what isn't allowed, which demands an answer to: who gave you the right to censor?
With a whitelist, you're taking the same role as the school library does with books: We have only so much space and only so much funding. Therefore we choose to carry only the following materials.
As for angry parents, everything you do makes them angry... Including letting the school's internet connection be slow and inadequate. So if you're interested in making a difference, don't sweat the parents. That's what your boss, the principal, is for.
In a K12 institution, a "whitelist" approach to Internet access is perfectly appropriate. The opposite of a blacklist, what you do with this approach is say, "We don't have Internet access. We have access to these specific Internet features."
Then implement a simple and cheap packet-filtering firewall to enforce it.
That'll be the end of your PtP problem. Then, all you'll need is to create a policy for how additional Intnernet features are added.
Then the crook took her drivers license, somehow mangled it, and got the her picture on the front and my wife's name. [...] The moral of the story is that it is easy to impersonate someone, causing harm to that person because there is no biometric element at any point in the US ID system.
If a crook can successfully mangle one part of an ID then he can mangle another... Especially with biometric recording tools mass-produced and training available to minimum-wage employees at the DMV.
Bah. Why don't just put Verisign in charge and get it over with.
Not sure I understand what you're getting at, so if I don't answer your point please clarify it and I'll try again.
Under my proposal, rental doesn't exist. The closest thing to rental of an IP would be a store which makes a standing offer to repurchase the IP for a lower price at some later date, or some similar accomodation. This accomplishes more or less the same goal (legal possession of one copy for a limited period of time) but it puts the consumer in the driver's seat: the consumer decides directly whether and when the period of time comes to a close, and for the duration the consumer owns that copy with all rights that implies.
From a moral/societal standpoint, this is reasonable: With a normal property, rental is about sharing a finite resource. But an IP is not in any way finite. Stripped of the sharing aspect, rental is nothing more than an exercise in control.
Rental as an exercise in control is not a new idea. Look to land ownership in 19th century Europe for plenty of excellent examples of why its societally unhealthy... Just as US history has lots of prime examples of how a society can fuel its growth by enabling ownership in a world that rents.
Nor is the idea of banning the rental of an IP new. In fact, one form has been federal law since the 1980s. Thats why all those software rental stores closed. At the time, the software publishers complained that allowing the rentals to remain legal was the chief cause of software piracy. They were more right than they knew, though perhaps they didn't realize it was a two-way street.
Anyway, food for thought. As with any legal matter, the devil's in the details and I frankly don't know whether the details would work out here. I think it might be interesting to work through the implications.
The only legislation that will help at this point would be legislation that defines IP piracy narrowly enough that there are a manageable number of pirates.
According to the conglomorates, piracy is doing anything with an IP that they havn't explicitly conceived of and allowed. This definition is so broad and so overbearing that its useless.
Consider a speeding ticket. They came up with a new class of law for a speeding ticket. Its an "infraction," not a crime or a civil offense. The standard of proof is whether the defendant showed some reasonable evidence that it didn't happen. And the penalties are tiny: fines less than a couple hundred dollars leading up to the eventual loss of your drivers' license.
Why did they need to come up with a trivialized form of law for speeding? Because virtually everybody speeds at least some of the time.
The lesson: you can't criminalize something that everybody does at least some of the time. You can either have an "IP court" next door to the traffic court (an abomination if I do say so myself) or you can take a smarter approach:
Define some core consumer rights:
1) The right to _own_ a purchased copy of an IP, even if the license purports to make it a rental.
The constitution talks about offerning authors an inventors the opportunity to profit from their works... Not the opportunity to control them. And with good reason - control is the opposite of freedom.
Ownership might complicate things a little at Blockbuster: A return would have to be architected as a repurchase of the IP instead of merely returning a rental. But so what? College book stores do it all the time: you buy the book with some confidence of being able to sell it back at the end of the semester.
2) The right convert an IP from one physical media to another (copy a CD to a cassette tape for the car), or to undertake or enable reasonable steps which accomplish the same result (download an mp3 of the exact song you own on CD, rather than having to rip and convert it yourself).
Is it reasonable that someone who wants to listen to a song at work, in his car, and at home should have to buy it three times? Or that someone who bought the IP 10 years ago should have to buy it again just because LP records have gone out of style? Of course not! Make that sort of activity not just reasonable, but in fact the law.
3) The right to modify any copies of an IP that you own in any way desired, and the right to create and distribute tools which perform such modifications.
Perhaps even go so far as to state that the owner of an IP forfeits the right to punative damages if he publishes the IP using a manner in which he intends to deprive the purchaser of these rights. No punative damages allowed if the DVD was published with CSS!
I'm allowed to write notes in the margin of a book, rip out pages, doodle on it, etc. I can sell the book to someone else later. I can even rip it in half and sell one half to one person and one half to someone else! Why should my rights with other types of IP be any less? They shouldn't!
4) Apply the legal standard of intent - that someone pirating an IP or enabling the piracy of an IP either intended to acquire an IP to which they did not own any rights or that they had demonstrated negligence in taking no reasonable steps to avoid enabling such piracy. (after all, a file on an open server is a little like a swimming pool: an attractive nuisance. No fence = no defense in court.)
With those rights firmly established, how many pirates will be left? Only the modern Robin Hoods who who set up download servers with no attempt to validate a recipient's ownership of the IP. You can deal with them either in the form of criminal theft or as civil cases. Either way, there are few enough that they can be dealt with effectively.
I'm glad to see they've added it to 1.0rc1. It wasn't in 0.9.5 from a few months ago.
What would be even more useful, though, is an option along the lines of "run no javascript unless required to follow a link" which only runs javascript on a page if the link you clicked on uses javascript. That way I could surf with a largely javascript-free experience.
IE has an option to open new invocations as a seperate process. It uses more memory for state data, but the program itself is mostly shared-memory components. With the option set, new windows due to a following a link or File->Open remain in the same process while the desktop icon opens a new process. This is nice when I want to wander around google without losing my webmail.
1.0rc1 also seems to have sped up my reload in webmail... It no longer insists on loading the five icons over and over for each time they appear on the page. Very good.
I use it because:
1) It renders my table based webmail with its small icons much faster than Mozilla. When I tap reload, the redraw (with the new messages that just arrived) is almost instantaneous. With Mozilla 0.9.5, it sits there reloading the same damn icon each of the 1000 times it appears on the page.
2) I can disable the pop-under ads on sites I frequent by putting those sites into the "restricted" zone. Mozilla offers me no way to disable the popunders without completely disabling Javascript. (I'd rather have a option for "disable all javascript based popups", but at least IE gives me SOMETHING.)
3) Each time I load it, it runs a new instance. When it crashes, normally only that instance crashes. Mozilla insists on keeping all active windows in one instance, so when it crashes all my open web pages disappear.
Nothing stops these guys from banding together within the continent, buying point to point T3s into MAE-East and MAE-West, and then reciprocal-peering with the majority of the backbones there. Just like any other ISP of a sufficient size threshold.
If it costs more to send that T3 under the Atlantic from Virginia to Africa than it does to send it the few miles to my office, well, this is neither surprising nor unfair.
Now, if collectively they can't get organized enough and put together enough traffic to sustain the cost of a point to point T3, whose fault is that? And if the local African telcos rape them so badly that they can't effectively band together, whose fault is that?
The thrust of the article seems to be, "We deserve and demand that you extend the 50% handout you've been giving us." Baloney. If you want to play with the big boys, you should expect to do so on a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD.
Correct. Lets compare apples to apples for a moment:
6 mhz * 60 channels = 360mhz.
That 64kbps phone line is actually a 4 khz signal digitized at 8khz with 8 bits per sample to guarantee accurate frequency reproduction. That's 0.004 mhz. In fairness, its quasi-full duplex so it really takes twice as much: 0.008 mhz.
So, the coaxial cable can carry 360 mhz / 0.008 mhz = 45,000 simutaneous telephone conversations assuming they use the 20-years obsolete FDM scheme. Modern transmission techniques like CDMA bump data capacity in the same bandwidth up by at least an order of magnitude.
So, we're talking about the equivalent of half a million telephone conversations for each coax loop, and each coax loop serves only a few hundred households.
Fuzzy math, and the devil's in the details but the basic point is valid: Coax in the last mile has more than enough bandwidth for the foreseeable future.
The Bells only get 24 * 28 = 672 telephone conversations on each _pair_ of coaxial cables. No wonder they're so expensive!