In Austin, there's actually a company (Heartland cable) that offers wireless cable in the outlying areas, and also provides high-speed internet service over the same signal. Wireless is perfect for rural areas, because you don't have to run hundreds of feet of cable to service small numbers of customers. You just piggyback your nearest cellular tower and get them all in one go.
Quite a few DSL/Cable router box manufacturers have their manuals posted on their web site. It doesn't take long to get familiar with these devices' capabilities by reading the instructions. Just a few:
This sounds almost exactly like NetSpend (http://www.netspend.com), except that NetSpend allows you to use a debit card to access your account as well. Not only that, but the service aims to provide quite a bit of obscurity about who is making each purchase. I found out about it when I got a free $1 card at the local movie theater.
...at least in the graphics world. Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com/) watermarking has been included in Adobe Photoshop since version 4 (maybe earlier?). The watermark can be applied to the image with minimal loss to image quality, and is very difficult to remove without seriously damaging the quality of the image.
I've wondered when music companies would start doing this to their recordings. Had Napster been able to tell the difference between freely-distributed music and illegally copied music, I'm sure they would have been much better at covering their ass. I think this is a Good Thing, and it should have been the responsibility of the record companies to come up with a similar scheme long ago. *Everyone* else in the world is expected to identify their copyrighted material as such. Why shouldn't they be?
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In Austin, there's actually a company (Heartland cable) that offers wireless cable in the outlying areas, and also provides high-speed internet service over the same signal. Wireless is perfect for rural areas, because you don't have to run hundreds of feet of cable to service small numbers of customers. You just piggyback your nearest cellular tower and get them all in one go.
Quite a few DSL/Cable router box manufacturers have their manuals posted on their web site. It doesn't take long to get familiar with these devices' capabilities by reading the instructions. Just a few:
Linksys
D-Link
Netgear
Cisco (expensive but flexible)
This sounds almost exactly like NetSpend (http://www.netspend.com), except that NetSpend allows you to use a debit card to access your account as well. Not only that, but the service aims to provide quite a bit of obscurity about who is making each purchase. I found out about it when I got a free $1 card at the local movie theater.
...at least in the graphics world. Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com/) watermarking has been included in Adobe Photoshop since version 4 (maybe earlier?). The watermark can be applied to the image with minimal loss to image quality, and is very difficult to remove without seriously damaging the quality of the image.
I've wondered when music companies would start doing this to their recordings. Had Napster been able to tell the difference between freely-distributed music and illegally copied music, I'm sure they would have been much better at covering their ass. I think this is a Good Thing, and it should have been the responsibility of the record companies to come up with a similar scheme long ago. *Everyone* else in the world is expected to identify their copyrighted material as such. Why shouldn't they be?