Such organisation would still have to keep happy the politicians who decide to allocate the money.
A better solution is to have everything: Government-funded news, privately sponsored news, advertiser-funded news, volunteer-operated enthusiast news. All biased, but in different directions, and constantly fact-checking each other.
Actually, demonstrating an extensive vocabulary tends to earn points on exams. So long as you make sure you know exactly what the word means. I got a mark on my english exam studying 'Of Mice and Men' by describing the racism of the time as 'ubiquitous.'
That's because it isn't soldered. It wasn't installed for ADSL, an twist-connections are good enough for voice, so why spend time doing better? No-one at the time ancitipated it would be use for broadband signals.
Aluminium isn't a terrible cable - it's got about 60% the conductivity of copper. The problem is joining it. That oxide layer means that any type of twist or post connection is going to make terrible contact. You have to solder it, and it doesn't take solder at all well.
What most homes have isn't copper. It's copperish, with traces of iron, tin, water, corrosion, bird droppings and dead rat. Those lines were not made for data. It's a wonder engineers have managed to cram bits down them as fast as they have with DSL.
I've dabbled in Retroshare myself. As an email replacement it's not much use, as it only communicates with people you've already exchanged keys with. No way to introduce yourself to someone you can't already reach by other means. But if you're looking for a secure IM program, I'd highly recommend it. It also has some excellent friend-to-friend file sharing abilities, which are sure to be of use to those with a healthy disrespect for copyright law. Only criticism I'd make is that the authentication is only 2048b RSA. Secure, for now, but short enough to make cryptography experts uncomfortable for the future. Hopefully a future version can take it up to 4096.
Depends where in Europe. I'm sure organised criminal gangs can obtain them, but it isn't something your common mugger could get hold of. You need to know someone who can supply, and have someone they trust to vouch you are not an undercover police officer.
That's because in the US, most potentially violent criminals carry guns. Thus police have to assume every potentially violent criminal is carrying a gun until searched proven otherwise, or else place their own lives in danger - if an offender is reaching into his pocket, there's no time to calmly try to talk him down. In the UK, guns are quite rare even to hardened criminals due to the difficulty obtaining them. For our street thugs, knives are the weapon of choice. So our police can be a bit less cautious.
It's a good application for short-range, high-capacity wireless. The cost of laying fiber in a city is ridiculous - closing roads, digging trenches, disrupting business. Tall buildings give good line of sight. One modestly-high comm tower in the middle of the city (Something like BT Tower?) could serve all the other major buildings. Even if they don't want to depend on radio exclusively due to the risk of atmospheric disruption, it'd serve as good backup connectivity option removing the need for redundantly-pathed fiber.
Only if they don't have access to the certificates. At this point, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do - either by 'tell no-one' top-secret requests, or by hacking into servers and just stealing them. Remember that only larger companies actually run and secure their own servers: If the server is hosted colo or a cloudy VM, what's do stop them just requesting access from whoever has physical control? You think Amazon would tell Mom and Pop's Email Co if the NSA gave a secret order for a copy of their server's drive?
Should a distinction be made between 'spying on the American government' and 'spying on the American people?' It makes perfect sense that another country would want to know what US military capabilities and diplomatic ambitions might be, but it's another thing altogether when they are reading the emails of people with no involvement in international affairs just on the off-chance that something interesting might turn up.
Can't send mail from a domestic connection. Those IP ranges are on every spam blacklist, as most mail sent from them is the work of spam-sending malware. You can recieve, but not send.
Mesh networking. It's good, but doesn't scale infinitely. If you're looking at re-decentralising the internet, it's going to have to be part of the solution, but not everything.
I hold some hope for content-addressible networks and distributed caches. They could handle the bulk distribution of data very effectively, greatly reducing the demand on any mesh network and rendering it more practical.
True. But ten thousand bedroom tinkerers and enthusiast coders working together could be a force of some capability.
I'm not a good enough coder to make much, so I do my part by shamelessly plugging Retroshare to everyone. It's a really nice program. Encrypted IM software, fully decentralised. Crypto that, while the NSA might get through, will certainly make them work for it. Plus a good file-sharing capability, mail, even distributed forums. All based on public-key authentication of your contacts, and never communicating with anyone you havn't swapped keys with.
There are other hopeful projects. The Piratebox people could really use some more work, and if you can get enough physically-local friends together there is a lot of potential in mesh networking if only there were enough of a population density of enthusiasts to get more started.
Yes, I do imagine the camera would be about the limit of what is practical using... what are we going to call these things? Polycopters? Polycopter technology. Any heavier, and conventional big-rotor-and-tail-rotor helicopter would be the way to go.
But then you've got to consider noise as well - at a big sports event, would an octocopter be quieter than a helicopter? The faster spinning, smaller rotors would generate a very different noise.
A swashplate is a precision-engineered device. Expensive, and in need of regular inspection and lubrication if you don't want something to jam. A quadcopter's rotots are just a high-torque stepper motor with a prop bolted on. They don't even have gears. Not much to go wrong with them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but the exam board considered it to be a one-mark word.
Such organisation would still have to keep happy the politicians who decide to allocate the money.
A better solution is to have everything: Government-funded news, privately sponsored news, advertiser-funded news, volunteer-operated enthusiast news. All biased, but in different directions, and constantly fact-checking each other.
Actually, demonstrating an extensive vocabulary tends to earn points on exams. So long as you make sure you know exactly what the word means. I got a mark on my english exam studying 'Of Mice and Men' by describing the racism of the time as 'ubiquitous.'
That's because it isn't soldered. It wasn't installed for ADSL, an twist-connections are good enough for voice, so why spend time doing better? No-one at the time ancitipated it would be use for broadband signals.
Aluminium isn't a terrible cable - it's got about 60% the conductivity of copper. The problem is joining it. That oxide layer means that any type of twist or post connection is going to make terrible contact. You have to solder it, and it doesn't take solder at all well.
What most homes have isn't copper. It's copperish, with traces of iron, tin, water, corrosion, bird droppings and dead rat. Those lines were not made for data. It's a wonder engineers have managed to cram bits down them as fast as they have with DSL.
I've dabbled in Retroshare myself. As an email replacement it's not much use, as it only communicates with people you've already exchanged keys with. No way to introduce yourself to someone you can't already reach by other means. But if you're looking for a secure IM program, I'd highly recommend it. It also has some excellent friend-to-friend file sharing abilities, which are sure to be of use to those with a healthy disrespect for copyright law. Only criticism I'd make is that the authentication is only 2048b RSA. Secure, for now, but short enough to make cryptography experts uncomfortable for the future. Hopefully a future version can take it up to 4096.
Eocene. The rapidly diversifying mammals would be ripe for sucking.
It's also too recent for dinosaurs.
Exactly. It'd be a standards-defiling abomination.
Depends where in Europe. I'm sure organised criminal gangs can obtain them, but it isn't something your common mugger could get hold of. You need to know someone who can supply, and have someone they trust to vouch you are not an undercover police officer.
That's because in the US, most potentially violent criminals carry guns. Thus police have to assume every potentially violent criminal is carrying a gun until searched proven otherwise, or else place their own lives in danger - if an offender is reaching into his pocket, there's no time to calmly try to talk him down. In the UK, guns are quite rare even to hardened criminals due to the difficulty obtaining them. For our street thugs, knives are the weapon of choice. So our police can be a bit less cautious.
It's a good application for short-range, high-capacity wireless. The cost of laying fiber in a city is ridiculous - closing roads, digging trenches, disrupting business. Tall buildings give good line of sight. One modestly-high comm tower in the middle of the city (Something like BT Tower?) could serve all the other major buildings. Even if they don't want to depend on radio exclusively due to the risk of atmospheric disruption, it'd serve as good backup connectivity option removing the need for redundantly-pathed fiber.
Only if they don't have access to the certificates. At this point, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do - either by 'tell no-one' top-secret requests, or by hacking into servers and just stealing them. Remember that only larger companies actually run and secure their own servers: If the server is hosted colo or a cloudy VM, what's do stop them just requesting access from whoever has physical control? You think Amazon would tell Mom and Pop's Email Co if the NSA gave a secret order for a copy of their server's drive?
The Zeroth Law of politicians: A politician must above all act to retain their own position.
Should a distinction be made between 'spying on the American government' and 'spying on the American people?' It makes perfect sense that another country would want to know what US military capabilities and diplomatic ambitions might be, but it's another thing altogether when they are reading the emails of people with no involvement in international affairs just on the off-chance that something interesting might turn up.
Can't send mail from a domestic connection. Those IP ranges are on every spam blacklist, as most mail sent from them is the work of spam-sending malware. You can recieve, but not send.
Mesh networking. It's good, but doesn't scale infinitely. If you're looking at re-decentralising the internet, it's going to have to be part of the solution, but not everything.
I hold some hope for content-addressible networks and distributed caches. They could handle the bulk distribution of data very effectively, greatly reducing the demand on any mesh network and rendering it more practical.
True. But ten thousand bedroom tinkerers and enthusiast coders working together could be a force of some capability.
I'm not a good enough coder to make much, so I do my part by shamelessly plugging Retroshare to everyone. It's a really nice program. Encrypted IM software, fully decentralised. Crypto that, while the NSA might get through, will certainly make them work for it. Plus a good file-sharing capability, mail, even distributed forums. All based on public-key authentication of your contacts, and never communicating with anyone you havn't swapped keys with.
There are other hopeful projects. The Piratebox people could really use some more work, and if you can get enough physically-local friends together there is a lot of potential in mesh networking if only there were enough of a population density of enthusiasts to get more started.
In theory you could use name@server.com:port, but I don't imagine most mail software would be happy to parse that.
Yes, I do imagine the camera would be about the limit of what is practical using... what are we going to call these things? Polycopters? Polycopter technology. Any heavier, and conventional big-rotor-and-tail-rotor helicopter would be the way to go.
But then you've got to consider noise as well - at a big sports event, would an octocopter be quieter than a helicopter? The faster spinning, smaller rotors would generate a very different noise.
A swashplate is a precision-engineered device. Expensive, and in need of regular inspection and lubrication if you don't want something to jam. A quadcopter's rotots are just a high-torque stepper motor with a prop bolted on. They don't even have gears. Not much to go wrong with them.
It does give finer control though. Which is just what you want when you need to hold a heavy camera steady.
Hexacopter.
They go up to octacopter for heavy lifting, like professional TV cameras that have been used to film some sporting events from above.
Breaking the password hash on Windows NT/9x/2k/XP (Not Vista onwards) actually does work like that. But it's seven characters at a time, not one.