Websites are hard to use? Perhaps you're thinking of "inconvenient".
The Verizon phones I've had come with... I think it's #MIN, #BAL, and #PMT preprogrammed in to the contacts list.
The same information is also displayed on my Android phone via a common, Verizon-supplied app. Sadly, it seems to only supply a "data" widget and not a "minutes" widget, so you can't have it always available on your home screen.
Within an order of magnitude for a brand-new technology is pretty good. I know people on Slashdot don't usually realize this, but there's a lot of engineering work that goes on between the development of a new technology and when that new technology outpaces the old technology.
That depends on whether entering that private property briefly constitutes trespassing. As I'm not a lawyer, that's a bit more complicated than they're familiar with.
If they're attaching something to the outside of the car and happen across evidence that was not expected and not in plain sight, then the lawyers will argue endlessly about it and the law enforcement will probably wish they had gotten a warrant. (If they did expect to find evidence there and were using planting the GPS as a ruse for poking around, they'll definitely wish they'd gotten a warrant. If it's in plain sight, you're unprotected.)
As long as they're not trespassing, they don't need a warrant (and it doesn't constitute search) to view anything that's in plain sight. These are attached to cars and not placed in the interior compartment, so they neither enter your property nor are "looking at things" that would constitute a search.
To be fair, your possessions are being neither searched nor seized.
While they may be able to put a tracking device on your car without your permission, it'd be another thing to trespass without a warrant. (And as you point out, not particularly safe in many areas of the country.)
A bit of quick math. 20% a year over 10 years is about a sixfold increase. So imagine if you were making a sixth of your current salary, ten years ago. Could you maintain the same or a similar lifestyle?
I find it strange that people say that progressive income taxes punish success. As far as I can tell from the tax code, if I have a higher pre-tax income, I have a higher post-tax income. They're not necessarily linearly related, but they are monotonic. That's an odd definition of punishment.
I'm not a lawyer, but one of the major things that computer forensic analysts are asked to figure out is whether the images were downloaded knowingly or accidentally.
I didn't say they did. But the 16 T field is static. The MRI fields, which go at least up to 3 T, are rapidly time-changing. Encountering magnetic fields of 5+ T is common in scientific research.
Well, the first question is easy: as far as I know, the magnetic field technically would affect the movement of charged particles (ions show up everywhere in cell biology and like to move from one place to another).
I don't know offhand how big the effect is. It'd scale linearly with magnetic field. There are no apparent ill effects from fields of a few Tesla, so a 16 T field would be no different.
Normal walking is 20+ miles in a full day. On horse, it's more like 50 miles in a day. Now, in the same amount of time, you can travel 10x that by car or nearly 100x that in an airplane. The speed of satellites and orbit and such is on the order of hundreds of times the speed of a car (or tens of times the speed of an aircraft).
Currents are only induced by time-changing magnetic fields, not by a constant gradient. The field strength they used for the frog was 16 T, I think. That's on the order of field strength they use for MRI. When MRIs use rapidly-changing fields, there are noticeable, but not particularly painful, neural effects. I've personally been near 5+ T static fields, and it's entirely uninteresting.
It's not a business process that they got a patent for, it's the technological means for one method of implementing such a business practice. The same practice, accomplished by means other than what the patent describes, would be non-infringing.
The specific reasons aren't important only if you consider the problem intractable. Clearly you do.
They're not, though. BitTorrent is fairly extensible. The only thing that's really difficult is building client support. However, for specialized applications that have to create a client anyway, that's not as much of a problem.
Warcraft's patcher, for example, uses a combination of BitTorrent + HTTP download to handle old patches (for which there would be few peers), small patches (where the BitTorrent benefits are minimal), and people whose networks hamstring BitTorrent.
That's not true. It's entirely possible for the swarm to have a complete copy of the file even when there are zero connected seeds. It's not typical, though: reasonably popular torrents always have a handful of seeds, and unpopular torrents (say, 100 participants) are less to have the entire torrent between them in a zero-seed situation. Most "no seeds, so you can't download the file" situations occur when you have 20 leechers.
Contacting the tracker and getting an initial peer list, in a proper system, takes a fraction of a second. It's iteratively contacting peers, obtaining their piece bitmap, negotiating with them for piece exchange, and finding peers that actually have high bandwidth that makes the startup time of BitTorrent so high.
As sibling post says, you can already get this effect through dedicated seeds or web seeds. In addition, if you want to integrate with existing HTTP hosts that you don't want to convert over to BitTorrent, it's actually fairly easy to fit into a BT metainfo file already. The BitTorrent metainfo files (the.torrent files) allow you to include arbitrary metadata. It would be straightforward to allow a bittorrent client to read the appropriate metadata and download pieces from HTTP sources as well as BitTorrent sources.
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Websites are hard to use? Perhaps you're thinking of "inconvenient".
The Verizon phones I've had come with... I think it's #MIN, #BAL, and #PMT preprogrammed in to the contacts list.
The same information is also displayed on my Android phone via a common, Verizon-supplied app. Sadly, it seems to only supply a "data" widget and not a "minutes" widget, so you can't have it always available on your home screen.
If you live in the U.S., none.
Within an order of magnitude for a brand-new technology is pretty good. I know people on Slashdot don't usually realize this, but there's a lot of engineering work that goes on between the development of a new technology and when that new technology outpaces the old technology.
I didn't say there was no problem with it, I said it doesn't run afoul of 4th Amendment.
That depends on whether entering that private property briefly constitutes trespassing. As I'm not a lawyer, that's a bit more complicated than they're familiar with.
If they're attaching something to the outside of the car and happen across evidence that was not expected and not in plain sight, then the lawyers will argue endlessly about it and the law enforcement will probably wish they had gotten a warrant. (If they did expect to find evidence there and were using planting the GPS as a ruse for poking around, they'll definitely wish they'd gotten a warrant. If it's in plain sight, you're unprotected.)
As long as they're not trespassing, they don't need a warrant (and it doesn't constitute search) to view anything that's in plain sight. These are attached to cars and not placed in the interior compartment, so they neither enter your property nor are "looking at things" that would constitute a search.
To be fair, your possessions are being neither searched nor seized.
While they may be able to put a tracking device on your car without your permission, it'd be another thing to trespass without a warrant. (And as you point out, not particularly safe in many areas of the country.)
20% per year? You've got to be joking.
A bit of quick math. 20% a year over 10 years is about a sixfold increase. So imagine if you were making a sixth of your current salary, ten years ago. Could you maintain the same or a similar lifestyle?
I can answer that pretty definitely for myself.
Well, they don't make you use V-cast or Bing on Android phones, and they let you use the Marketplace.
At least, this is true for 2 Verizon Android phones, which is how many I have experience with.
I find it strange that people say that progressive income taxes punish success. As far as I can tell from the tax code, if I have a higher pre-tax income, I have a higher post-tax income. They're not necessarily linearly related, but they are monotonic. That's an odd definition of punishment.
I'm not a lawyer, but one of the major things that computer forensic analysts are asked to figure out is whether the images were downloaded knowingly or accidentally.
This is why you hire a lawyer. To tell you that any judge or jury would see right through that "clever" story.
I didn't say they did. But the 16 T field is static. The MRI fields, which go at least up to 3 T, are rapidly time-changing. Encountering magnetic fields of 5+ T is common in scientific research.
Yes, light travels at the speed of light.
Well, the first question is easy: as far as I know, the magnetic field technically would affect the movement of charged particles (ions show up everywhere in cell biology and like to move from one place to another).
I don't know offhand how big the effect is. It'd scale linearly with magnetic field. There are no apparent ill effects from fields of a few Tesla, so a 16 T field would be no different.
Normal walking is 20+ miles in a full day. On horse, it's more like 50 miles in a day. Now, in the same amount of time, you can travel 10x that by car or nearly 100x that in an airplane. The speed of satellites and orbit and such is on the order of hundreds of times the speed of a car (or tens of times the speed of an aircraft).
Currents are only induced by time-changing magnetic fields, not by a constant gradient. The field strength they used for the frog was 16 T, I think. That's on the order of field strength they use for MRI. When MRIs use rapidly-changing fields, there are noticeable, but not particularly painful, neural effects. I've personally been near 5+ T static fields, and it's entirely uninteresting.
It's not a business process that they got a patent for, it's the technological means for one method of implementing such a business practice. The same practice, accomplished by means other than what the patent describes, would be non-infringing.
Modern BitTorrent clients do UPnP and NAT-PNP fairly well, and modern home routers support UPnP fairly well. So support is progressing.
The specific reasons aren't important only if you consider the problem intractable. Clearly you do.
They're not, though. BitTorrent is fairly extensible. The only thing that's really difficult is building client support. However, for specialized applications that have to create a client anyway, that's not as much of a problem.
Warcraft's patcher, for example, uses a combination of BitTorrent + HTTP download to handle old patches (for which there would be few peers), small patches (where the BitTorrent benefits are minimal), and people whose networks hamstring BitTorrent.
It's not mandatory, but if you're unable to accept incoming connections, your download speed will probably be terrible.
That's not true. It's entirely possible for the swarm to have a complete copy of the file even when there are zero connected seeds. It's not typical, though: reasonably popular torrents always have a handful of seeds, and unpopular torrents (say, 100 participants) are less to have the entire torrent between them in a zero-seed situation. Most "no seeds, so you can't download the file" situations occur when you have 20 leechers.
It's SHA1 hashes of fixed-size pieces, so the only bits you need from the official location are the piece hashes.
Contacting the tracker and getting an initial peer list, in a proper system, takes a fraction of a second. It's iteratively contacting peers, obtaining their piece bitmap, negotiating with them for piece exchange, and finding peers that actually have high bandwidth that makes the startup time of BitTorrent so high.
As sibling post says, you can already get this effect through dedicated seeds or web seeds. In addition, if you want to integrate with existing HTTP hosts that you don't want to convert over to BitTorrent, it's actually fairly easy to fit into a BT metainfo file already. The BitTorrent metainfo files (the .torrent files) allow you to include arbitrary metadata. It would be straightforward to allow a bittorrent client to read the appropriate metadata and download pieces from HTTP sources as well as BitTorrent sources.