It could never be made illegal...simply because it's a form of unwanted advertising. Ever take a trip on the highway and seen all the billboards?
Ever visit Hawaii? They have a state law that limits visible signs. On the highway this means the only large signs you see are directional signs erected by the Department of Highways. Advertising on the highways is essentially limited to iconic symbols on official tourism signs.
Off-highway limits are less strict but still significant. Corporate identity signs are limited in size and location to prevent "Times Square Syndrome". It's really quite refreshing to drive through a city or town and not see "golden arches" towering above the fast-food district. It can be pretty difficult to tell a high-rise apartment building from a hotel unless you know the address or look for a very small corporate sign over the lobby entrance.
Air Canada recently renamed one of its subsidiary airlines "ZIP" and then tried to bully zip.com (a postal-code database provider) into giving up the domain name. The domain owner said that he would be willing to give up the domain name if Air Canada would cover the legal and administrative costs of renaming the business -- less than $100,000. Air Canada refused to pay, and threatened to sue for cyber-squatting (in spite of the fact that the zip.com business is real). Meanwhile the zip.com website started getting hits from travellers looking to book flights. So of course zip.com placed a prominent link on their page directing ZIP Air customers to www.westjet.com, the prominent discount competitor to Air Canada.:-P I see that the link is no longer present, so I assume Air Canada abandoned its claim. ZIP Air is now advertising "4321zip.com" rather heavily in Canada.
This apparently misleading (albeit well-intentioned) comment gets modded +4 interesting, meaning that almost everyone will see this poor guy's name.
All the replying posts pointing out that it's a phone company/ISP and it's almost certainly nothing to do with this chap are at 2 or below, meaning that many people won't see them and this individual's name is now besmirched.
The sad part of this is the fact that we (people who have moderator points to give away) can't really fix the problem even after we're told about it. I could go back and mod down the misleading post, but then some metamoderator would see that I modded down what appears at face value to be an "interesting" post and I would be the one who was bitch-slapped for abusing my moderator points. All we can really do is mod up the replies, making the whole thread +5 in order to dilute the bad moderation.
I could kinda see this being used for speed checking using the time elapsed between passing different sensors (like VASCAR) if the sensors could differentiate certain cars. Or knowing where you are at any given time. Hmmm. Any other suggestions?
There are sensors just like these along various stretches of the border between British Columbia, Canada and Washington, USA where the two nations have parallel streets separated only by a shallow drainage ditch. They are presumably there to detect when cars stop to toss bags of marijuana over the border.
A new 50% tax increase is also planned on the steel and rubber industries as the products of these industries are used extensively in the manufacturing of "automobiles"
As funny as you thought that was, it's painfully close to the truth. The U.S. government recently enacted a 38% duty on all soft-wood lumber imports from Canada in order to protect its own lumber industry. Now they expect Canada to supply raw logs for processing south of the border (not to mention cheap electricity with which to process it).
The ruling says that they must not discriminate against companies that offer more than one O/S via a boot manager. It doesn't restrict them from retaliating against a vendor that offers Windows on Product A and Linux (single boot) on Product B. If companies want to ship a Linux box as a side-line they will have to spin-off the product (thereby losing brand awareness) to protect their core business.
I predict a subtle murging of systems, you'll pay for "service" which will include landlines and cell.
My 68-year-old father loves his internet and cell phone. His telco provides both in addition to his landline, and just put him on a special combination package:
Unlimited fibre-optic internet
Unlimited local cell calling
Package long-distance minutes shared between the landline, fax and cell numbers at the same bulk rate
The real barrier to satellite radio isn't your subscription, it's the cost of the special receiver and antenna
Of course, marketing might also have something to do with it. I bought a new Kenwood deck for my car a few months ago. It says "Sirius Ready" on the faceplate (with a dog logo) but it's not mentioned anywhere in the owner's manual and the store that sold me the deck doesn't know anything about it. Meanwhile the local radio stations are mentioning "DAB" once an hour. If the DAB commercials didn't position themselves as an alternative to satellite then nobody would ever know satellite existed....
I want a telephone that recognizes an anonymous caller ID and automatically plays back a message saying "Sorry, not accepting anonymous calls. Call back with the * feature to disable anonymous calls."
I have a Caller-ID box that does that. It's an Aastra "Voice-9090". It has a lot of neat features:
speaks the telephone number of all callers so I can choose to ignore them without getting out of my chair to see who it is
allows me to substitute small recordings ("don't answer - it's your boss!") for recognized callers
can recognize callers based on number, name or both (such as "payphone")
when receiving a id-blocked call (optionally) says "The party you are calling does not accept blocked calls. Remove your block condition and try your call again."
I "purchased" it from my bank using customer loyalty points (similar airmiles).
That's Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada. When I lived there the MT&T company was not providing per-minute toll numbers in that area code. Normal long distance charges would apply, of course.
What would happen if a launch failed because Joe Blow failed physics and got the angle of his rocket wrong and it hit a building somewhere and killed a bunch of people?
That's why they do this a gazillion miles out in the salt flats. The rocket was expected to fly to a height of 60 miles. If it was aimed incorrectly the rocket would spend much more time in lower (denser) air and would presumably have a reduced lateral range.
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be launching rockets in to the sky.
NASA didn't start out with experience-- they gained it along the way. Most of NASA's early "rocket scientists" were Avro Aerospace employees who fled Canada in disgust after we canned the Arrow program. These guys brought lots of experience, but practically none of it directly applicable to the task of putting a man on the moon.
I believe NASA should have a monopoly on space travel as they are the only ones who seem to get it right.
Puh-lease. NASA's record is hardly stellar. They have had more success than others only because they've had more attempts. If you lift up the corner of the carpet you'll see lots of dirt under there...
Rather than waiting to see how the plan works out for Bon Jovi, why not ask Daft Punk? They did it on their "Discovery" album in 2001. The CD came with a credit card (16 digits, expiry date, etc.) that is used to access the www.daftcard.com site.
The map and site determine "secure" and "insecure" solely by whether or not the node uses WEP. That's wrong for two reasons:
1) WEP all by itself is simply not secure.
2) If you are using another form of encryption (such as IPSEC) then WEP would slow down your network without any security benefits because the data stream would be encrypted twice.
By way of example, I run a Linux server and Linux laptop. The server has a second ethernet interface that is dedicated to the wireless device. Both the laptop and the server are configured to drop all packets arriving or departing via the wireless device except for IPSEC (esp protocol and udp port 500). Forwarding in the server is only permitted from the ipsec (post-decode) interface. If someone wants to use my broadband connection then they have to break IPSEC.
And yet these guys would flag me on their map as an insecure station because I don't use WEP. Maybe they should re-make the map based on whether or not their roaming node can do more than just handshake. Like, try connecting to Slashdot or something....
That would tell you there are lots of nodes, but not where they are located at street level. Your "map" would show hundreds of nodes *AT* the CN Tower since that's where you were standing when you connected to them.
The reality of the entertainment industry...with some exceptions, a movie, or a CD or a game or anything of the sort has a life span. It is popular for a certain amount of time, and then people loose interest. They get interested in the next new thing. The industry could take advantage of that.
They have. Do you think the "MTV Generation" was an accident? I think the studio heads got tired of people comparing all new movies to "Gone With The Wind" and all new albums to "Dark Side Of The Moon" and set out to create a whole sub-species of attention-deficit humans (who've incidentally never heard of the letter "f") who would think everything tossed their way was "phat" and "phresh". After all, if you can't pay attention for more than 30 seconds, you're not likely to notice when the music industry releases music in 2000 that is largely made of samples and covers from the 70's. Me? I just go downl^H^H^H^H^Hbuy the original 70's hits....
Someone explain why this is a problem... If both parties use modern wireless technology, can't they just co-exist?
Sure. The problem is that they don't want to co-exist. The new entry has decided (whether for competitive advantage or sheer laziness) that they are entitled to use channel 1 at all of their locations and are unwilling to compromise in cases where that channel is already heavily loaded.
Each provider will only respond to packets with their SSID, but that alone doesn't solve the basic problem of CSMA/CD technology, which is that the total capacity of a medium decreases as a function of demand due to lost efficiency when collisions occur.
Ideally, the 802.11b standard would have required the use of load balancing and provided for dynamic WEP key changes. Maybe next time.
Why does Starbucks get priority? The other network is there FREE as a PUBLIC SERVICE
Free vs. commercial shouldn't even enter into it. The real issue here is that companies are flooding a portion of the radio spectrum that has been set aside for general use and then clamouring for regulation after the fact in order to prop up their business model and turn "users" into "customers".
The article mentions how IBM is stealing all the big corporate customers and Linux is winning the hearts and minds of developers. I'm a die-hard Linux junkie myself, but don't have any illusions about it taking many desktops (corporate or otherwise) from Microsoft.
Apple, on the other hand, could tear a huge chunk out of Microsoft's (Windows) market share if it would just wake up and smell the Intel. OS/X has what it takes to be a Windows killer on every front-- BSD for the power users (developers), Aqua for the not-so-power users (from grannie to the proto-geeks) and Microsoft Office for the bean counters. All they need to do now is get rid of the "lock-in" mind-set and stop pretending it's too hard to support the Intel architecture. After all, they've got Darwin running on i386 boxes now and claim to be able to support non-Apple video cards in their high-end machines (which come with PCI slots). The only barrier to integration is attitude.
It would be simple to just flip the switch, modify your files and then switch it back when you are done so no changes can be made later.
Where I work we have two old Interdata ID-70 computers that have that sort of protection. The original tape reels are long since gone, having been replaced by two 3.5" floppies and a solid-state drive containing two megabytes of RAM. When we turn on the machine we have to toggle in the bootstrap code to get the machine to read in the first sector of the floppy, which then takes over and copies the run-time software and static data into the SSD. When we flip the write-disable switch on the SSD is disconnects the write signal from the lower 512K of RAM. This allows the system to store dynamic data updates in the upper regions of the SSD while protecting the program and static data against overwrites.
That's the easy question. The hard one is which country should have jurisdiction over the author -- i.e., punishing him or not, according to laws?
Both will have an opportunity, whether that's fair or not. The country of residence simply needs to draft a "thought crime" law. The USA is full of them already-- many states have laws that make it an offense for residents to leave the state for the purposes of acquiring products (alcohol) or services (sex) that are illegal in the resident's home state.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever visit Hawaii? They have a state law that limits visible signs. On the highway this means the only large signs you see are directional signs erected by the Department of Highways. Advertising on the highways is essentially limited to iconic symbols on official tourism signs.
Off-highway limits are less strict but still significant. Corporate identity signs are limited in size and location to prevent "Times Square Syndrome". It's really quite refreshing to drive through a city or town and not see "golden arches" towering above the fast-food district. It can be pretty difficult to tell a high-rise apartment building from a hotel unless you know the address or look for a very small corporate sign over the lobby entrance.
Air Canada recently renamed one of its subsidiary airlines "ZIP" and then tried to bully zip.com (a postal-code database provider) into giving up the domain name. The domain owner said that he would be willing to give up the domain name if Air Canada would cover the legal and administrative costs of renaming the business -- less than $100,000. Air Canada refused to pay, and threatened to sue for cyber-squatting (in spite of the fact that the zip.com business is real). Meanwhile the zip.com website started getting hits from travellers looking to book flights. So of course zip.com placed a prominent link on their page directing ZIP Air customers to www.westjet.com, the prominent discount competitor to Air Canada. :-P I see that the link is no longer present, so I assume Air Canada abandoned its claim. ZIP Air is now advertising "4321zip.com" rather heavily in Canada.
All the replying posts pointing out that it's a phone company/ISP and it's almost certainly nothing to do with this chap are at 2 or below, meaning that many people won't see them and this individual's name is now besmirched.
The sad part of this is the fact that we (people who have moderator points to give away) can't really fix the problem even after we're told about it. I could go back and mod down the misleading post, but then some metamoderator would see that I modded down what appears at face value to be an "interesting" post and I would be the one who was bitch-slapped for abusing my moderator points. All we can really do is mod up the replies, making the whole thread +5 in order to dilute the bad moderation.
There are sensors just like these along various stretches of the border between British Columbia, Canada and Washington, USA where the two nations have parallel streets separated only by a shallow drainage ditch. They are presumably there to detect when cars stop to toss bags of marijuana over the border.
As funny as you thought that was, it's painfully close to the truth. The U.S. government recently enacted a 38% duty on all soft-wood lumber imports from Canada in order to protect its own lumber industry. Now they expect Canada to supply raw logs for processing south of the border (not to mention cheap electricity with which to process it).
The ruling says that they must not discriminate against companies that offer more than one O/S via a boot manager. It doesn't restrict them from retaliating against a vendor that offers Windows on Product A and Linux (single boot) on Product B. If companies want to ship a Linux box as a side-line they will have to spin-off the product (thereby losing brand awareness) to protect their core business.
My 68-year-old father loves his internet and cell phone. His telco provides both in addition to his landline, and just put him on a special combination package:
- Unlimited fibre-optic internet
- Unlimited local cell calling
- Package long-distance minutes shared between the landline, fax and cell numbers at the same bulk rate
- Single bill
CAD:$100/mo (about USD$65/mo).Of course, marketing might also have something to do with it. I bought a new Kenwood deck for my car a few months ago. It says "Sirius Ready" on the faceplate (with a dog logo) but it's not mentioned anywhere in the owner's manual and the store that sold me the deck doesn't know anything about it. Meanwhile the local radio stations are mentioning "DAB" once an hour. If the DAB commercials didn't position themselves as an alternative to satellite then nobody would ever know satellite existed....
I have a Caller-ID box that does that. It's an Aastra "Voice-9090". It has a lot of neat features:
- speaks the telephone number of all callers so I can choose to ignore them without getting out of my chair to see who it is
- allows me to substitute small recordings ("don't answer - it's your boss!") for recognized callers
- can recognize callers based on number, name or both (such as "payphone")
- when receiving a id-blocked call (optionally) says "The party you are calling does not accept blocked calls. Remove your block condition and try your call again."
I "purchased" it from my bank using customer loyalty points (similar airmiles).That's Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada. When I lived there the MT&T company was not providing per-minute toll numbers in that area code. Normal long distance charges would apply, of course.
This I've gotta see.
That's why they do this a gazillion miles out in the salt flats. The rocket was expected to fly to a height of 60 miles. If it was aimed incorrectly the rocket would spend much more time in lower (denser) air and would presumably have a reduced lateral range.
Nasa employs some of the smartest and most experienced people in the world and I would not trust anyone else to be launching rockets in to the sky.
NASA didn't start out with experience-- they gained it along the way. Most of NASA's early "rocket scientists" were Avro Aerospace employees who fled Canada in disgust after we canned the Arrow program. These guys brought lots of experience, but practically none of it directly applicable to the task of putting a man on the moon.
I believe NASA should have a monopoly on space travel as they are the only ones who seem to get it right.
Puh-lease. NASA's record is hardly stellar. They have had more success than others only because they've had more attempts. If you lift up the corner of the carpet you'll see lots of dirt under there...
Rather than waiting to see how the plan works out for Bon Jovi, why not ask Daft Punk? They did it on their "Discovery" album in 2001. The CD came with a credit card (16 digits, expiry date, etc.) that is used to access the www.daftcard.com site.
1) WEP all by itself is simply not secure.
2) If you are using another form of encryption (such as IPSEC) then WEP would slow down your network without any security benefits because the data stream would be encrypted twice.
By way of example, I run a Linux server and Linux laptop. The server has a second ethernet interface that is dedicated to the wireless device. Both the laptop and the server are configured to drop all packets arriving or departing via the wireless device except for IPSEC (esp protocol and udp port 500). Forwarding in the server is only permitted from the ipsec (post-decode) interface. If someone wants to use my broadband connection then they have to break IPSEC.
And yet these guys would flag me on their map as an insecure station because I don't use WEP. Maybe they should re-make the map based on whether or not their roaming node can do more than just handshake. Like, try connecting to Slashdot or something....
That would tell you there are lots of nodes, but not where they are located at street level. Your "map" would show hundreds of nodes *AT* the CN Tower since that's where you were standing when you connected to them.
Now we all know the truth-- earthquakes are simply a manifestation of a net-quake in the matrix.
They have. Do you think the "MTV Generation" was an accident? I think the studio heads got tired of people comparing all new movies to "Gone With The Wind" and all new albums to "Dark Side Of The Moon" and set out to create a whole sub-species of attention-deficit humans (who've incidentally never heard of the letter "f") who would think everything tossed their way was "phat" and "phresh". After all, if you can't pay attention for more than 30 seconds, you're not likely to notice when the music industry releases music in 2000 that is largely made of samples and covers from the 70's. Me? I just go downl^H^H^H^H^Hbuy the original 70's hits....
We should start a pool-- how many months until KDE 3.0 is packaged for Debian? What version will the official KDE be on when that happens?
They aren't. They are charging for the internet gateway located at their end of the free radio connection.
Sure. The problem is that they don't want to co-exist. The new entry has decided (whether for competitive advantage or sheer laziness) that they are entitled to use channel 1 at all of their locations and are unwilling to compromise in cases where that channel is already heavily loaded.
Each provider will only respond to packets with their SSID, but that alone doesn't solve the basic problem of CSMA/CD technology, which is that the total capacity of a medium decreases as a function of demand due to lost efficiency when collisions occur.
Ideally, the 802.11b standard would have required the use of load balancing and provided for dynamic WEP key changes. Maybe next time.
Free vs. commercial shouldn't even enter into it. The real issue here is that companies are flooding a portion of the radio spectrum that has been set aside for general use and then clamouring for regulation after the fact in order to prop up their business model and turn "users" into "customers".
The article mentions how IBM is stealing all the big corporate customers and Linux is winning the hearts and minds of developers. I'm a die-hard Linux junkie myself, but don't have any illusions about it taking many desktops (corporate or otherwise) from Microsoft.
Apple, on the other hand, could tear a huge chunk out of Microsoft's (Windows) market share if it would just wake up and smell the Intel. OS/X has what it takes to be a Windows killer on every front-- BSD for the power users (developers), Aqua for the not-so-power users (from grannie to the proto-geeks) and Microsoft Office for the bean counters. All they need to do now is get rid of the "lock-in" mind-set and stop pretending it's too hard to support the Intel architecture. After all, they've got Darwin running on i386 boxes now and claim to be able to support non-Apple video cards in their high-end machines (which come with PCI slots). The only barrier to integration is attitude.
That was true of the older chips, but Athlons from about the XP/1600+ onward have much better (on-chip) thermal protection.
Where I work we have two old Interdata ID-70 computers that have that sort of protection. The original tape reels are long since gone, having been replaced by two 3.5" floppies and a solid-state drive containing two megabytes of RAM. When we turn on the machine we have to toggle in the bootstrap code to get the machine to read in the first sector of the floppy, which then takes over and copies the run-time software and static data into the SSD. When we flip the write-disable switch on the SSD is disconnects the write signal from the lower 512K of RAM. This allows the system to store dynamic data updates in the upper regions of the SSD while protecting the program and static data against overwrites.
Both will have an opportunity, whether that's fair or not. The country of residence simply needs to draft a "thought crime" law. The USA is full of them already-- many states have laws that make it an offense for residents to leave the state for the purposes of acquiring products (alcohol) or services (sex) that are illegal in the resident's home state.