I recall the days when I would download the newest slackware, install it and spend days getting my X config just right, reconfiguring my kernel an endless number of times to get just the right balance of built in options and building modules, trying to get the hardware to work right and basking in the supreme glory of getting everything to work just right.
Some days I miss that. Other days I boot up Ubuntu and just enjoy the fact that I don't have to do shit and it supports everything but my old canon multifunction printer.
You're right, if all anyone wants to do is use an editor program to store a static content document in a portable format that will have the same layout everywhere, the existing PDF generators work great.
If you want to take advantage of the advanced PDF features like embedded javascript or forms that submit to the web, you're basically SOL without Acrobat and even if you could create them, most of the OSS readers don't support the advanced features.
There has been a lot of compatible PDF viewers, but the pool of PDF creation software is limited. Most OSS solutions implement a subset of the features. Even now, there really is nothing to complete with the feature level in Adobe Acrobat.
You're correct. I wasn't really clear when I described the series of events. TDS started their network rollout after they sued Monticello. It was a stall tactic to beat the city to a functional network.
The hubris of TDS is incredible. I think the judge should have gone farther and sanctioned TDS for their action.
As a Minnesotan who lives near Monticello and has researched this in some depth, I can say with some measure of certainty that isn't the case. Monticello is a small town. They were tired of waiting for the telcos to bring high speed internet into town and decided to do it themselves.
TDS likely didn't think there was a market for it until the city took action.
There is no way to escape having your email stored by a 3rd party. I run my own mail server and even I cannot guarantee there are no 3rd parties who will have storage of my email.
The reasoning is simple. Companies often use 3rd parties to store or filter their email. For example: I send an email to a friend. His company's mail server routes all mail to Messagelabs and they filter out the spam and route it back. Messagelabs, being a 3rd party has access to my email and reads the contents of it to make a decision. Therefore, I have no expectation of privacy because my friends company has hired a 3rd party to filter spam?
Rulings like this would make our founding fathers roll in their graves. Is the only way to have an expectation of privacy for myself and all my correspondence recipients to use our own mail servers that physically lie in our homes? If this doesn't get reversed on appeal, I'm contacting my senator. Legislators can fix this, if we can get them off their asses.
I run my own mail server. Would this precedent then not apply to me? I have a reasonable expectation that I alone have access to my mail server.
This is a bad precedent regardless. When you send something via UPS or FedEx, you are giving your parcel to a 3rd party for storage and delivery. When you make a cell phone call, you are giving data packets representing your voice to a 3rd party for delivery. Extrapolating the argument further, would then the only way to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your communication is when you are speaking face to face with the intended recipient?
The intentions of the 4th amendment need to be upheld in a rapidly changing world. Most people have only a minuscule understanding of the technology they use and most people DO expect their emails to be private communication. Precedent like this might move people to explore encryption, which I think law enforcement can overwhelmingly agree will make their job much more difficult.
TDS didn't have a monopoly, they weren't even providing internet service in Monticello yet. They sued because they felt using bond money to fund infrastructure like internet service is unconstitutional competition. The city was forced to put their network rollout on hold for the courts to make a decision. All the while, TDS was rolling out their own network.
It was effectively a stall tactic. I'm sure even TDS knew they would fail in court.
Are you high? This story definitely is about the FCC, NOT Canada.
And yes, the GP had an insightful observation. Common carriers get that status because they don't filter things based on content. I.E. AT&T doesn't get charged with child pornography because one of their subscribers sent CP on their network. If carriers choose to use deep packet inspection technology to determine what is in it so that it can decide how speedily it will get routed, maybe AT&T will find themselves more culpable to the content they transmit on their network. I'm sure this is one unintended consequence the carriers have considered but view as unlikely.
The key here is that broadband currently use pricing structures based on bandwidth levels(768/1.5Mb, 1.5/3Mb, etc.) and market those as "always connected" or "always available". Yet, those same companies who sold their products as unlimited use are really trying to find ways to prevent the people who utilize their bandwidth to the fullest capacity from doing so. Sending reset packets to bittorrent users is just the tip of the iceberg. Slightly less benign but very telling of the power carriers have is that some have chosen to redirect DNS lookup failures to their own revenue generating portals or search pages. Whats next?
The key here is that broadband market competition in many areas is very limited. Consumer outrage at bad corporate policy has no effect - if they want broadband, they may have just one or two choices. Between subsidies, right of ways and the fact that broadband infrastructure is a natural monopoly like water or sewer is, ISP's should have a responsibility to deliver our network traffic to the intended destination without inspecting anything other than the IP data.
Users also need to understand the legal ramifications of their ISP inspecting all of their traffic. As noted by the FCC, the SCOTUS recently made a decision that right to privacy is dictated by whether there is a reasonable expectation for privacy. Users typically expect their internet traffic to be private, yet the ISP's use their Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies to dictate that your traffic will be inspected and could be kept on record by them. The ramifications to your 4th amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure are huge. If users expect their internet traffic to be non-private because their ISP inspects their traffic, this could allow the government to get access to privileged information such as attorney-client communication, or an email to your pastor about a crime you committed and this could then be used in a court of law.
If left to themselves, the communications companies will urge the FCC and legislators to enact only policies, rules and laws that benefit them. The legislators and the FCC will not do this for us.
I would think this depends a lot on what exactly you are doing. If you're writing a DB back-end for a Caribbean island company who specializes in selling what is likely to be illegal gambling services to americans, that might be a black eye for your resume.
Then again, if you're writing bleeding edge gambling software for video poker machines, that could be a huge positive mark on the resume.
In fact, an argument could easily be made that the textual way in which we describe program logic is verbose and I'm quite confident that at some point in the future, it will be meaningless and looked upon as the dark ages.
You're right though, the world IS complex. That doesn't mean we need a tax code so complicated even IRS agents have to specialize in corporate or individual taxes. The penal code doesn't need to be so complex that it takes a 12th grade reading level to understand the words and a college degree(or two) to interpret its meaning.
Show me a world where citizens cannot understand their own laws and I will show you tyranny.
This is an excellent point, and the analogy isn't completely wrong. Just as we describe the function of a program through code, we describe the function of our government through laws.
Too rarely, companies do not reexamine long-ago written code for security issues, portability maintenance, etc.
Such is the same with government. Too rarely does it make an effort to remove from its books old laws that are irrelevant, inapplicable or unenforceable.
In a court of law, questions of fact are answered by our system of adversarial trial and either a jury or in the absence of a jury, a judge makes the decision.
I'm quite happy to have a world with less lawyers. The profession itself is evidence that the Law is too complex.
If a law is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone defend themselves in a court with it, liberty is damaged.
The license is more complex than the GPL. It's more difficult to understand and is easier to lead to ambiguity.
For software developers writing closed source programs without access to a legal department, it can be daunting to determine if you have complied with the subtle LGPL requirements to keep your source closed.
If you're developing GPL applications with LGPL libraries, you have nothing to worry about.
There are a lot of definitions of liberty. None of them revolve around guarantees for corporations to make a profit, or to gouge their customers to whatever extent they choose.
Liberty is freedom from oppression and the right to choose your own destiny. I'm not saying we need to remove the wireless carriers. Just saying that a radical change in the structure of ownership and control in the wireless EM spectrum and wireless towers. What I propose to do to the wireless industry isn't far different from what the lending servicer industry has done voluntarily.
Now, loan services receive fees for administering loans that they don't own. What I'm proposing is that the feds directly own the towers and the spectrum. Wireless carriers use contracts and handset subsidies to act as servicers for a national wireless network. The existing companies make a profit, and indeed see a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their operations. They still have an opportunity to deliver branded handsets to consumers jam packed with "value-add" services(the permanently installed shit handsets come preloaded with).
FYI, you can't really label me a socialist. If you knew me at all, you'd know I'm quite moderate on a whole host of issues. I'm not on the left, the right, the red, the blue, the in, the out, whatever political labels you can think of-I'm not in that group.
If you're really interested, here's a rundown of my stance on hot-button political topics. I support gay marriage. I support personal gun ownership rights. I support federalization of natural monopolies for industries unable to operate fairly. I support drug legalization. I support abortion. I support an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. I support the war in Afghanistan. I support a complete ban on line item vetoes, signing statements, bill riders, or bills that cannot be written in plain language. I support the repeal of immunity to telecom companies involved in illegal spying on americans. I support the complete exposure and criminal investigation of all those who colluded with the government, including those government operatives who initiated the program to spy on american communications.
Wireless spectrum isn't property. Denying ownership of spectrum isn't taking away their liberty.
The EM spectrum is a finite resource and is a natural monopoly. The system we have now is so inefficient that Americans unhappily pay extraordinary rates for wireless services but there is no incentive for any company to reduce the price of their services because there is no real competition. Consumers frequently hop from network to network in search of the least evil company with the best handset. The system sucks balls right now. "Free market" capitalism isn't fixing the problem either.
Wireless spectrum is given out to the major wireless carriers so that they can individually implement their own technology and let the market sort it out what is best. It doesn't work. All the available technologies are adequate. It's time for a major overhaul in the structure of our wireless industry. Having multiple networks cover the entire country, a sizable region, with towers for CDMA and GSM towers is inefficient and partially responsible for the outrageous rates we all pay for wireless service.
Here's my plan for a radically more efficient, cheaper wireless industry: 1. Feds seize wireless spectrum for GSM and CDMA. 2. FCC mandates all wireless carriers switch to GSM. 2. Congress mandates all wireless telephone carriers in the US establish peering contracts, whereby there is no such thing as roaming anymore. 3. Feds establish rate limits for services. Data access would not be unlimited, but rates should be limited to $.05 per megabyte. Voice access rates should be capped to $15 per 1000 minutes per line.
The effect here is that networks aren't chasing each others tails to have the biggest networks or the best coverage. You never know whose network you're really using. This allows wireless networks to have a joint stake in the overall network access quality as well as any new towers will provide coverage for all GSM phone users, not just a subset of people.
Wireless carriers will still have the ability to use contracts for subsidizing phone purchases, which locks a person into service with that carrier for a period of time. With that, carriers will still have a lot of opportunity to provide profit bearing value-add services beyond the rate caps established by the FCC. This would also place the smallest wireless carriers on equal footing with the largest carriers with respect to access to the newest handset models.
Moving the entire country to GSM over a period of 2 years is quite feasible, since that's the average handset upgrade cycle for Americans. This is just one possible way to radically change the way the wireless industry works and remove the huge inefficiencies in the way the capital investment is spent.
That's due mostly to longevity, efficiency and the compactness of the alternator versus a permanent magnet DC generator. Compactness comes into play because a DC generator the same size as an AC generator would have a lower output capacity.
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I recall the days when I would download the newest slackware, install it and spend days getting my X config just right, reconfiguring my kernel an endless number of times to get just the right balance of built in options and building modules, trying to get the hardware to work right and basking in the supreme glory of getting everything to work just right.
Some days I miss that. Other days I boot up Ubuntu and just enjoy the fact that I don't have to do shit and it supports everything but my old canon multifunction printer.
You're right, if all anyone wants to do is use an editor program to store a static content document in a portable format that will have the same layout everywhere, the existing PDF generators work great.
If you want to take advantage of the advanced PDF features like embedded javascript or forms that submit to the web, you're basically SOL without Acrobat and even if you could create them, most of the OSS readers don't support the advanced features.
There has been a lot of compatible PDF viewers, but the pool of PDF creation software is limited. Most OSS solutions implement a subset of the features. Even now, there really is nothing to complete with the feature level in Adobe Acrobat.
You're correct. I wasn't really clear when I described the series of events. TDS started their network rollout after they sued Monticello. It was a stall tactic to beat the city to a functional network.
The hubris of TDS is incredible. I think the judge should have gone farther and sanctioned TDS for their action.
As a Minnesotan who lives near Monticello and has researched this in some depth, I can say with some measure of certainty that isn't the case. Monticello is a small town. They were tired of waiting for the telcos to bring high speed internet into town and decided to do it themselves.
TDS likely didn't think there was a market for it until the city took action.
There is no way to escape having your email stored by a 3rd party. I run my own mail server and even I cannot guarantee there are no 3rd parties who will have storage of my email.
The reasoning is simple. Companies often use 3rd parties to store or filter their email. For example: I send an email to a friend. His company's mail server routes all mail to Messagelabs and they filter out the spam and route it back. Messagelabs, being a 3rd party has access to my email and reads the contents of it to make a decision. Therefore, I have no expectation of privacy because my friends company has hired a 3rd party to filter spam?
Rulings like this would make our founding fathers roll in their graves. Is the only way to have an expectation of privacy for myself and all my correspondence recipients to use our own mail servers that physically lie in our homes? If this doesn't get reversed on appeal, I'm contacting my senator. Legislators can fix this, if we can get them off their asses.
Only criminals use encryption. You have nothing to hide, right comrade?
I run my own mail server. Would this precedent then not apply to me? I have a reasonable expectation that I alone have access to my mail server.
This is a bad precedent regardless. When you send something via UPS or FedEx, you are giving your parcel to a 3rd party for storage and delivery. When you make a cell phone call, you are giving data packets representing your voice to a 3rd party for delivery. Extrapolating the argument further, would then the only way to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your communication is when you are speaking face to face with the intended recipient?
The intentions of the 4th amendment need to be upheld in a rapidly changing world. Most people have only a minuscule understanding of the technology they use and most people DO expect their emails to be private communication. Precedent like this might move people to explore encryption, which I think law enforcement can overwhelmingly agree will make their job much more difficult.
TDS didn't have a monopoly, they weren't even providing internet service in Monticello yet. They sued because they felt using bond money to fund infrastructure like internet service is unconstitutional competition. The city was forced to put their network rollout on hold for the courts to make a decision. All the while, TDS was rolling out their own network.
It was effectively a stall tactic. I'm sure even TDS knew they would fail in court.
Qwest "lost" my request to cancel my DirecTV service, disconnected me for failure to pay.
They're a shady fucking company, through and through. I filed a fraudulent billing complaint with the FCC. Complaint is currently under investigation.
Are you high? This story definitely is about the FCC, NOT Canada.
And yes, the GP had an insightful observation. Common carriers get that status because they don't filter things based on content. I.E. AT&T doesn't get charged with child pornography because one of their subscribers sent CP on their network. If carriers choose to use deep packet inspection technology to determine what is in it so that it can decide how speedily it will get routed, maybe AT&T will find themselves more culpable to the content they transmit on their network. I'm sure this is one unintended consequence the carriers have considered but view as unlikely.
The key here is that broadband currently use pricing structures based on bandwidth levels(768/1.5Mb, 1.5/3Mb, etc.) and market those as "always connected" or "always available". Yet, those same companies who sold their products as unlimited use are really trying to find ways to prevent the people who utilize their bandwidth to the fullest capacity from doing so. Sending reset packets to bittorrent users is just the tip of the iceberg. Slightly less benign but very telling of the power carriers have is that some have chosen to redirect DNS lookup failures to their own revenue generating portals or search pages. Whats next?
The key here is that broadband market competition in many areas is very limited. Consumer outrage at bad corporate policy has no effect - if they want broadband, they may have just one or two choices. Between subsidies, right of ways and the fact that broadband infrastructure is a natural monopoly like water or sewer is, ISP's should have a responsibility to deliver our network traffic to the intended destination without inspecting anything other than the IP data.
Users also need to understand the legal ramifications of their ISP inspecting all of their traffic. As noted by the FCC, the SCOTUS recently made a decision that right to privacy is dictated by whether there is a reasonable expectation for privacy. Users typically expect their internet traffic to be private, yet the ISP's use their Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policies to dictate that your traffic will be inspected and could be kept on record by them. The ramifications to your 4th amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure are huge. If users expect their internet traffic to be non-private because their ISP inspects their traffic, this could allow the government to get access to privileged information such as attorney-client communication, or an email to your pastor about a crime you committed and this could then be used in a court of law.
If left to themselves, the communications companies will urge the FCC and legislators to enact only policies, rules and laws that benefit them. The legislators and the FCC will not do this for us.
Go to the FCC. File your comment. Be heard.
I would think this depends a lot on what exactly you are doing. If you're writing a DB back-end for a Caribbean island company who specializes in selling what is likely to be illegal gambling services to americans, that might be a black eye for your resume.
Then again, if you're writing bleeding edge gambling software for video poker machines, that could be a huge positive mark on the resume.
In fact, an argument could easily be made that the textual way in which we describe program logic is verbose and I'm quite confident that at some point in the future, it will be meaningless and looked upon as the dark ages.
You're right though, the world IS complex. That doesn't mean we need a tax code so complicated even IRS agents have to specialize in corporate or individual taxes. The penal code doesn't need to be so complex that it takes a 12th grade reading level to understand the words and a college degree(or two) to interpret its meaning.
Show me a world where citizens cannot understand their own laws and I will show you tyranny.
This is an excellent point, and the analogy isn't completely wrong. Just as we describe the function of a program through code, we describe the function of our government through laws.
Too rarely, companies do not reexamine long-ago written code for security issues, portability maintenance, etc.
Such is the same with government. Too rarely does it make an effort to remove from its books old laws that are irrelevant, inapplicable or unenforceable.
In a court of law, questions of fact are answered by our system of adversarial trial and either a jury or in the absence of a jury, a judge makes the decision.
I'm quite happy to have a world with less lawyers. The profession itself is evidence that the Law is too complex.
If a law is written in such a fashion that the average citizen cannot understand it, let alone defend themselves in a court with it, liberty is damaged.
The answer here should be obvious.
She should start a blog about her legal troubles and put google adsense on it.
By the time enough people read the blog and contact the legislature to fix this ridiculous problem, she won't need the unemployment benefits.
The license is more complex than the GPL. It's more difficult to understand and is easier to lead to ambiguity.
For software developers writing closed source programs without access to a legal department, it can be daunting to determine if you have complied with the subtle LGPL requirements to keep your source closed.
If you're developing GPL applications with LGPL libraries, you have nothing to worry about.
Mono on windows isn't there yet.
There are a lot of definitions of liberty. None of them revolve around guarantees for corporations to make a profit, or to gouge their customers to whatever extent they choose.
Liberty is freedom from oppression and the right to choose your own destiny. I'm not saying we need to remove the wireless carriers. Just saying that a radical change in the structure of ownership and control in the wireless EM spectrum and wireless towers. What I propose to do to the wireless industry isn't far different from what the lending servicer industry has done voluntarily.
Now, loan services receive fees for administering loans that they don't own. What I'm proposing is that the feds directly own the towers and the spectrum. Wireless carriers use contracts and handset subsidies to act as servicers for a national wireless network. The existing companies make a profit, and indeed see a dramatic reduction in the complexity of their operations. They still have an opportunity to deliver branded handsets to consumers jam packed with "value-add" services(the permanently installed shit handsets come preloaded with).
FYI, you can't really label me a socialist. If you knew me at all, you'd know I'm quite moderate on a whole host of issues. I'm not on the left, the right, the red, the blue, the in, the out, whatever political labels you can think of-I'm not in that group.
If you're really interested, here's a rundown of my stance on hot-button political topics.
I support gay marriage.
I support personal gun ownership rights.
I support federalization of natural monopolies for industries unable to operate fairly.
I support drug legalization.
I support abortion.
I support an immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.
I support the war in Afghanistan.
I support a complete ban on line item vetoes, signing statements, bill riders, or bills that cannot be written in plain language.
I support the repeal of immunity to telecom companies involved in illegal spying on americans.
I support the complete exposure and criminal investigation of all those who colluded with the government, including those government operatives who initiated the program to spy on american communications.
Wireless spectrum isn't property. Denying ownership of spectrum isn't taking away their liberty.
The EM spectrum is a finite resource and is a natural monopoly. The system we have now is so inefficient that Americans unhappily pay extraordinary rates for wireless services but there is no incentive for any company to reduce the price of their services because there is no real competition. Consumers frequently hop from network to network in search of the least evil company with the best handset. The system sucks balls right now. "Free market" capitalism isn't fixing the problem either.
Corporate profit isn't liberty.
Public utility deregulation worked out perfectly fine, unless you live in the Southwestern united states.
People need to think bigger. Much bigger.
Wireless spectrum is given out to the major wireless carriers so that they can individually implement their own technology and let the market sort it out what is best. It doesn't work. All the available technologies are adequate. It's time for a major overhaul in the structure of our wireless industry. Having multiple networks cover the entire country, a sizable region, with towers for CDMA and GSM towers is inefficient and partially responsible for the outrageous rates we all pay for wireless service.
Here's my plan for a radically more efficient, cheaper wireless industry:
1. Feds seize wireless spectrum for GSM and CDMA.
2. FCC mandates all wireless carriers switch to GSM.
2. Congress mandates all wireless telephone carriers in the US establish peering contracts, whereby there is no such thing as roaming anymore.
3. Feds establish rate limits for services. Data access would not be unlimited, but rates should be limited to $.05 per megabyte. Voice access rates should be capped to $15 per 1000 minutes per line.
The effect here is that networks aren't chasing each others tails to have the biggest networks or the best coverage. You never know whose network you're really using. This allows wireless networks to have a joint stake in the overall network access quality as well as any new towers will provide coverage for all GSM phone users, not just a subset of people.
Wireless carriers will still have the ability to use contracts for subsidizing phone purchases, which locks a person into service with that carrier for a period of time. With that, carriers will still have a lot of opportunity to provide profit bearing value-add services beyond the rate caps established by the FCC. This would also place the smallest wireless carriers on equal footing with the largest carriers with respect to access to the newest handset models.
Moving the entire country to GSM over a period of 2 years is quite feasible, since that's the average handset upgrade cycle for Americans. This is just one possible way to radically change the way the wireless industry works and remove the huge inefficiencies in the way the capital investment is spent.
That's due mostly to longevity, efficiency and the compactness of the alternator versus a permanent magnet DC generator. Compactness comes into play because a DC generator the same size as an AC generator would have a lower output capacity.
Not to nitpick, but on item #2, a split ring DC motor is just as capable of being a generator as it is a motor.
That doesn't negate your other very accurate points though.