As I type this, the license link on the product's page leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:
You are free to:
Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?
I'm not really defending AT&T, but we should not be surprised by their negative reaction. They are a business and worry about their bottom-line, which is now threatened by a very serious competitor.
My point was, the problem is not AT&T, but the local governments. Why were the "speed bumps" mentioned in the write-up — or the "road block", as oh_my puts it above — on the books to begin with?
Every time a preacher on this site denounces America's "lagging behind" in high-speed Internet, the chorus responds with calls for government intervention — be it municipal WiFi, or municipal cabling, or FCC forcing existing ISPs to do this and that.
But in reality, government is the problem — laying down cables is the easy part. Getting the regulatory approvals is hard...
If you want to stick a cone of paper in your ear and save a few bucks go ahead
Thank you for your permission. Unfortunately, unless there is an FDA-commissioner behind this particular Anonymous Coward, the government will take a very dimmed view of such unapproved medical devices.
Perhaps, our benevolent and omniscient government overlords are really concerned about the silly citizenry looking like morons. Or, maybe, with the billions of dollars involved, the power to decide, which device, medicine, or procedure get approved is simply too lucrative to surrender.
Louisville City Council should damn well be able to cite the authority that allows them to tell AT&T to put Google equipment on AT&T's poles.
The poles belong to the city, but they already have AT&T equipment installed. This crucial detail is omitted from the incendiary write-up, but is write at the beginning of TFA (emphasis mine):
AT&T said Louisville Metro does not have the authority to permit a third party like Google Fiber to remove, alter or move AT&T’s equipment on utility poles
Whether or not the authority is there, I can understand, why AT&T is pissed — they did have to comply with the "legacy bureaucratic speed bumps" themselves, but now a major competitor comes in and the city lays down the red carpet.
Why wouldn't criminals use gold?... Seems like I could melt gold into something that is pretty easy to conceal just plain walking across a border, like a cell phone.
The answer, is: transaction costs. Even selling a recognized coin you just purchased will cost you a non-trivial percentage (assuming market price did not change). These guys, for example, are willing to pay £852 for Gold Britannia, while selling the same for £910 — a 6.37% difference!
But trying to sell an unrecognizable melted shape, well, you'd have to find a buyer willing to take a risk that you haven't put some lead inside it, for example. And risk costs money so you'll likely lose 20-30% on each transaction. Add the risk of running into one of ubiquitous metal-detectors and traveling with gold bullion becomes even less attractive.
stack of 500-euro notes worth $1 million weighs just five pounds and can be carried in a small bag, whereas a pile of $20 bills worth $1 million would weigh 110 pounds and would be much more difficult to move around
One of the innovations brought in by Lycurgus to Sparta was money made of iron — for the same reason: whereas a bag of gold can be easily concealed, the equivalent sum in iron would take a train to deliver. But the ancient slave-owner was primarily worried about corruption of public officials — wereas the contemporary one dislikes citizenry trying to avoid the snooping by the government fiscales.
It amazes me how everyone took the parents statements at face value in this case.
What amazes me is that the same people, who would fight for the parents' right to abort the child only a few years earlier, would fight just as passionately against those same parents' right to rear the child as they see fit.
The hypocrisy is so thick, one can hang an axe on it...
All file systems are approximately the same for most day to day users.
ZFS is not merely yet another way to arrange pieces of your files on the disks (and "disks") — it is a filesystem and a volume-manager in one.
I would be interested in knowing which is fastest at read/writes.
ZFS adds features, which are a rarity among other filesystems: checksumming, options for redundancy and deduplication, snapshots, etc.
We spent decades keeping the underlying storage separate from the filesystem on top of it — neither ufs, nor xfs, nor ext know, what actual hardware is underneath the/dev/foo — and SCSI or (S)ATA protocols is all they can use to talk to this device.
In these days of RAIDs and SSDs, the newfs(8) still has notions of sector-sizes and cylinder-groups, for crying out loud.
With ZFS we have a filesystem, that is aware of the underlying hardware and can make a good use of that knowledge. It is, what Unix filesystem would've been, had we had RAIDs in the seventies... But the above-mentioned checksumming and snapshots as well as redundancy and deduplication options are useful even on with a single drive.
For home users, basically meaningless.
Come, come, even FreeNAS users use ZFS on their systems to protect their content from "bit rot" and hardware failures. Smarter folks have been turning to FreeBSD, which has been offering ZFS for years — and Linux developers started working on porting it to Linux long ago — first as a FUSE-module, and now, finally, as part of the kernel.
There is an inverse correlation between female hormone levels and height (in women). High levels of female hormones also correlate with large breasts and other feminine physical characteristics.
Is that so? I haven't noticed it myself... Do you have any links to the relevant studies?
If that were, how it works, the female peacocks would've had giant tails like the males — and other examples of sexual dimorphism would not have existed either. But they — quite demonstrably — do.
and years from now we will see the result
The fallacy of the "exclusivity of our times" — there is nothing about our era and the "years from now" in this regard, that did not exist 1000 years ago... Human (unlike, say, hyenas) males have always been bigger than females.
We are breeding humans for height, because women only want tall men.
But petite females are quite popular — I myself subscribe to the "don't marry more than you can lift" principle. The result is sexual dimorphism — not quite "breeding for height".
When Tyger asked her Harmony if she would like to have sex, she was programmed to reply 'I am very anxious to have sex but I cannot comply till I have been registered to an owner'
In a free market the fair price is whatever buyers are willing to pay. There is no other.
Were you able to find a taxi in previous years? I don't think so — people prefer to celebrate the holiday with their families. If you wish them to be giving you a ride instead, you have to make it worth their while — or take the subway.
The laws of supply and demand are Economics 101...
Cheaper? I'm seeing uncapped peak pricing making up the difference.
I am not — during peak hours the prices match those of taxis, other times they are way below. Maybe, your experience is different, but I also remember, how impossible it was to hail a cab in the situations, in which Uber today is available — even if at a higher price. What good is a nominal price of even 1 penny per trip, if you can not find an actual car?
It was so bad, economists started using the phenomenon of "umbrellas vs. taxis" as an example. Now, with Uber, Lyft at al. solving this problem, they'll have to look for some other illustration.
So, the prices really are lower throughout — comparing Uber's "uncapped" price with that of a cab is like judging Venezuela's economy by the official prices — nobody can buy anything at those either.
Be happy for the consumers — we got cheaper rides, that are also much easier to hail.
The lie of "ride sharing" as a smokescreen is an especially blatant lie
Well, yes, Uber's PR is now handled by the same guy, who got Obama elected, so lies (and spam, I might add) are part of the game. But I'm glad, that the old monopoly is crumbling, even it took an asshole to get it to crumble.
No need to be afraid of Uber, though — Lyft and others are breathing down their neck.
Why?!? Why should I waste time complaining and otherwise raising awareness, when I can just call Uber and pursue happiness?
Competition is a wonderful thing — no wonder Illiberal Statists hate it.
If taxi drivers are expected to live up to professional standards, they'll actually behave like professionals
You mean, like those professional folks at the DMV? Or the toll-collectors? Or the public school teachers? No, dear, what ensures professional behavior is the fear of losing one's job. See also "benevolence of the butcher".
What "closed kernels"? BSDs and Linux all come with complete sources — and detailed instructions for using them to fine-tune your kernel.
and binary blobs
Some device-drivers require the manufacturer-provided binary-blobs, yes. But, if you don't trust those, you should not trust the very devices either... And, of course, Hurd does not support those devices — blobs or not — anyway.
The original author said that "you aren't supposed to use them in aircraft."
Exactly. And he was wrong. There is not a problem with their use. Now, he was cool enough to accept being corrected, but you chose to go on arguing this silly point and exposed yourself as an asshole.
The prohibition comes from FCC regulations, not FAA.
Oh, wow, great (this, BTW, makes it an FCC rule, not "federal law" as you incorrectly asserted earlier.) And FCC is totally cool with such cell-phone use now, which makes their own, yours, and others' earlier assertions, that they are "dangerous" into dirty rotten lies. Congratulations, liar.
And you've been corrected now
No, dear. You have been corrected. Contrary to your assertions, the use of cellular phones inside airplane is harmless — whether or not there is a "federal law" against it is irrelevant. A pilot could use his personal phone — or some more convenient (and 10 times pricier) system using the same cellular network — to talk ATC as well as fellow pilots. Even that may be an improvement, but we don't have to stop there. By switching to TCP/IP we can make things much better (not just secure) for all — if only fewer people in aviation shared your stupid arrogant belief, that aviation has "unique" issues of its very own, which the outsiders have neither solved nor even encountered before.
so you should know better.
I do know better than some upstart, who thinks, his flight hours make him an expert in other walks of life.
So an ADS-B uplink that has 120 aircraft in its viscinity will actually retransmit every ADS-B packet from each aircraft 120 additional times?
Sure, why not? The numbers like 120 aren't at all impressive in the age of millions TCP connections per hour. A home-market WiFi router can handle more than 120 active wireless devices today — big deal...
And thus EVERYONE HAS TO HAVE THE KEY. Every aircraft needs that information.
Every craft needs the information, but they don't need each other's key — everyone just has to know a handful of mutually-trusted Certificate Authorities. Cryptography solved this problem decades ago.
Our military planes can each track dozens of both friendlies and non-cooperating hostiles — and share the information about the latter with the former — securely. A system to do the same with cooperating civilian aircraft and without concerns for enemy's jamming is not only possible, it is trivial.
And you would deliberately exclude every aircraft that has only "ADS-B in" capablility, because they just don't need to know any of this data?
People were flying without ADS-B for decades and mid-air collisions were extremely rare. But I would keep ADS-B installed for a while — as long as the plane's owner does not mind the privacy implications of it working. Perhaps, people would turn it on in busy airspace and off elsewhere.
(Unfortunately, your tone and manner make continuing this discussion too unpleasant. I'm unlikely to continue...)
Though Statists might equate them, laws of men — unlike laws of nature — are changeable. This particular one appeared, because it was believed, the cell phones can interfere with the aircraft. That belief has been demonstrated wrong many times — or, to put it in other words, that myth was busted.
You understand nothing.
Darling, mind your tone.
ATC needs to know who is who because they have to control them if they are on an IFR flight plan.
ATC might need to know, yes. But whatever passes through the ATC, can be encrypted and sent to other planes — encrypted for each one — as well. This is a solvable problem, one just needs to acknowledge, it exists. And you do not...
The "myth" that the frequencies for many of the cellular bands are in a LAND mobile allocation has never been "busted".
Except this is completely irrelevant. The myth I was talking about was the "cell phone use interferes with the plane's equipment" one.
You really don't understand what the NextGen concept, with ADSB, is, do you?
Fortunately, I don't need to. Unless you are saying, the needs of the airplanes are so unique, the Computer Science/Cryptography/Security industry has no solution for the problem?
Every aircraft ADS-B-in will have to have the encrytion keys so it can decrypt the data.
Big deal — the ATC towers can act as Certificate Authorities issuing keys to all planes. Then, whoever is interested in my details, can establish an encrypted connection with me and ask me nicely.
No, I think "the origin of the issue" here is a complete lack of understanding of the goals of ADSB and collision avoidance.
You don't need to know, who they are to avoid crashing into them. This much I understand. Do you?
Big deal if someone on the ground can track aircraft just like ATC
Right. And why would I be bothered by it, unless I had something to hide?
University of Helsinki will reduce staff by 980 people, with 570 being laid off by the end of 2017
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
And it really doesn't help much on the tracking aspect.
The coordinates, speeds, and even instrument read-outs can all be sent to the nearest tower(s) via the data-link. SSL-encrypted — with a handful of certificate authorities known to each plane.
Planes are are registered and have great big letters painted on the side of them
Right. And my face may be computer-recognizable already — or really soon. But that does not mean, I should be carrying an ID-chip in my pocket to make tracking me even easier.
But the biggest problem is that the system was designed from the ground up for safety not privacy the reason being so the fire trucks can beat you to the scene of the crash.
General-purpose fire trucks would be sent out by the air-dispatchers anyway, they don't listen to air-control AM "just in case". The specialized services at the airports, if they wish to have their own awareness independent of the control-tower, can be allowed to get the same SSL-encrypted data-links...
The origin of the issue is the bad old reliance on "obfuscation" — if I can not hear the plane broadcasting its unique ID and location, then no one else can hear it either and so there is not a problem. TFA will, hopefully, raise the awareness so the healing can begin.
Of course, upgrading all the equipment would be massively expensive
Why? Companies upgrade their phone-systems regularly. Using the existing telephone network (including cellular phones) would be very cheap. Of course, plane-makers will charge 10-times more for "aviation-grade" communication equipment capable of contacting the cell-towers on the ground, but that'd still be cheap.
And the data-link can be used to sends readouts from the pilots' panels — like altitude, direction, fuel-capacity. This can be SSL-encrypted (with all of the dispatchers' public-keys preloaded into every plane) and provide them with all the information without also making it known to everyone with a radio.
Using the existing cellular network would leverage the existing cell-towers — in most places this will provide a substantial improvement in communication quality.
The main reason for using plain AM is that when two transmissions happen at the same time, you can hear both.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?
I'm not really defending AT&T, but we should not be surprised by their negative reaction. They are a business and worry about their bottom-line, which is now threatened by a very serious competitor.
My point was, the problem is not AT&T, but the local governments. Why were the "speed bumps" mentioned in the write-up — or the "road block", as oh_my puts it above — on the books to begin with?
Every time a preacher on this site denounces America's "lagging behind" in high-speed Internet, the chorus responds with calls for government intervention — be it municipal WiFi, or municipal cabling, or FCC forcing existing ISPs to do this and that.
But in reality, government is the problem — laying down cables is the easy part. Getting the regulatory approvals is hard...
Thank you for your permission. Unfortunately, unless there is an FDA-commissioner behind this particular Anonymous Coward, the government will take a very dimmed view of such unapproved medical devices.
Perhaps, our benevolent and omniscient government overlords are really concerned about the silly citizenry looking like morons. Or, maybe, with the billions of dollars involved, the power to decide, which device, medicine, or procedure get approved is simply too lucrative to surrender.
The poles belong to the city, but they already have AT&T equipment installed. This crucial detail is omitted from the incendiary write-up, but is write at the beginning of TFA (emphasis mine):
Whether or not the authority is there, I can understand, why AT&T is pissed — they did have to comply with the "legacy bureaucratic speed bumps" themselves, but now a major competitor comes in and the city lays down the red carpet.
That said, the cities nation-wide better get on with removal of such speed bumps ahead of time — our lack of Internet-access choices is due to that first and foremost.
The answer, is: transaction costs. Even selling a recognized coin you just purchased will cost you a non-trivial percentage (assuming market price did not change). These guys, for example, are willing to pay £852 for Gold Britannia, while selling the same for £910 — a 6.37% difference!
But trying to sell an unrecognizable melted shape, well, you'd have to find a buyer willing to take a risk that you haven't put some lead inside it, for example. And risk costs money so you'll likely lose 20-30% on each transaction. Add the risk of running into one of ubiquitous metal-detectors and traveling with gold bullion becomes even less attractive.
Bitcoins may be a better idea...
One of the innovations brought in by Lycurgus to Sparta was money made of iron — for the same reason: whereas a bag of gold can be easily concealed, the equivalent sum in iron would take a train to deliver. But the ancient slave-owner was primarily worried about corruption of public officials — wereas the contemporary one dislikes citizenry trying to avoid the snooping by the government fiscales.
Statists gonna state.
What amazes me is that the same people, who would fight for the parents' right to abort the child only a few years earlier, would fight just as passionately against those same parents' right to rear the child as they see fit.
The hypocrisy is so thick, one can hang an axe on it...
ZFS is not merely yet another way to arrange pieces of your files on the disks (and "disks") — it is a filesystem and a volume-manager in one.
ZFS adds features, which are a rarity among other filesystems: checksumming, options for redundancy and deduplication, snapshots, etc.
We spent decades keeping the underlying storage separate from the filesystem on top of it — neither ufs, nor xfs, nor ext know, what actual hardware is underneath the /dev/foo — and SCSI or (S)ATA protocols is all they can use to talk to this device.
In these days of RAIDs and SSDs, the newfs(8) still has notions of sector-sizes and cylinder-groups, for crying out loud.
With ZFS we have a filesystem, that is aware of the underlying hardware and can make a good use of that knowledge. It is, what Unix filesystem would've been, had we had RAIDs in the seventies... But the above-mentioned checksumming and snapshots as well as redundancy and deduplication options are useful even on with a single drive.
Come, come, even FreeNAS users use ZFS on their systems to protect their content from "bit rot" and hardware failures. Smarter folks have been turning to FreeBSD, which has been offering ZFS for years — and Linux developers started working on porting it to Linux long ago — first as a FUSE-module, and now, finally, as part of the kernel.
Is that so? I haven't noticed it myself... Do you have any links to the relevant studies?
If that were, how it works, the female peacocks would've had giant tails like the males — and other examples of sexual dimorphism would not have existed either. But they — quite demonstrably — do.
The fallacy of the "exclusivity of our times" — there is nothing about our era and the "years from now" in this regard, that did not exist 1000 years ago... Human (unlike, say, hyenas) males have always been bigger than females.
But petite females are quite popular — I myself subscribe to the "don't marry more than you can lift" principle. The result is sexual dimorphism — not quite "breeding for height".
Evidently, plenty of men are willing to settle for what is already available.
Sorry to have disappointed...
There is a scratch for that itch already:
In a free market the fair price is whatever buyers are willing to pay. There is no other.
Were you able to find a taxi in previous years? I don't think so — people prefer to celebrate the holiday with their families. If you wish them to be giving you a ride instead, you have to make it worth their while — or take the subway.
The laws of supply and demand are Economics 101...
Are you suggesting, any of the Uber drivers are incapable of making a conscious free will decision?
They aren't. But they certainly are something to cheer.
I am not — during peak hours the prices match those of taxis, other times they are way below. Maybe, your experience is different, but I also remember, how impossible it was to hail a cab in the situations, in which Uber today is available — even if at a higher price. What good is a nominal price of even 1 penny per trip, if you can not find an actual car?
It was so bad, economists started using the phenomenon of "umbrellas vs. taxis" as an example. Now, with Uber, Lyft at al. solving this problem, they'll have to look for some other illustration.
So, the prices really are lower throughout — comparing Uber's "uncapped" price with that of a cab is like judging Venezuela's economy by the official prices — nobody can buy anything at those either.
Be happy for the consumers — we got cheaper rides, that are also much easier to hail.
Well, yes, Uber's PR is now handled by the same guy, who got Obama elected, so lies (and spam, I might add) are part of the game. But I'm glad, that the old monopoly is crumbling, even it took an asshole to get it to crumble.
No need to be afraid of Uber, though — Lyft and others are breathing down their neck.
Why?!? Why should I waste time complaining and otherwise raising awareness, when I can just call Uber and pursue happiness?
Competition is a wonderful thing — no wonder Illiberal Statists hate it.
You mean, like those professional folks at the DMV? Or the toll-collectors? Or the public school teachers? No, dear, what ensures professional behavior is the fear of losing one's job. See also "benevolence of the butcher".
What "closed kernels"? BSDs and Linux all come with complete sources — and detailed instructions for using them to fine-tune your kernel.
Some device-drivers require the manufacturer-provided binary-blobs, yes. But, if you don't trust those, you should not trust the very devices either... And, of course, Hurd does not support those devices — blobs or not — anyway.
Exactly. And he was wrong. There is not a problem with their use. Now, he was cool enough to accept being corrected, but you chose to go on arguing this silly point and exposed yourself as an asshole.
Oh, wow, great (this, BTW, makes it an FCC rule, not "federal law" as you incorrectly asserted earlier.) And FCC is totally cool with such cell-phone use now, which makes their own, yours, and others' earlier assertions, that they are "dangerous" into dirty rotten lies. Congratulations, liar.
No, dear. You have been corrected. Contrary to your assertions, the use of cellular phones inside airplane is harmless — whether or not there is a "federal law" against it is irrelevant. A pilot could use his personal phone — or some more convenient (and 10 times pricier) system using the same cellular network — to talk ATC as well as fellow pilots. Even that may be an improvement, but we don't have to stop there. By switching to TCP/IP we can make things much better (not just secure) for all — if only fewer people in aviation shared your stupid arrogant belief, that aviation has "unique" issues of its very own, which the outsiders have neither solved nor even encountered before.
I do know better than some upstart, who thinks, his flight hours make him an expert in other walks of life.
Sure, why not? The numbers like 120 aren't at all impressive in the age of millions TCP connections per hour. A home-market WiFi router can handle more than 120 active wireless devices today — big deal...
Every craft needs the information, but they don't need each other's key — everyone just has to know a handful of mutually-trusted Certificate Authorities. Cryptography solved this problem decades ago.
Our military planes can each track dozens of both friendlies and non-cooperating hostiles — and share the information about the latter with the former — securely. A system to do the same with cooperating civilian aircraft and without concerns for enemy's jamming is not only possible, it is trivial.
People were flying without ADS-B for decades and mid-air collisions were extremely rare. But I would keep ADS-B installed for a while — as long as the plane's owner does not mind the privacy implications of it working. Perhaps, people would turn it on in busy airspace and off elsewhere.
(Unfortunately, your tone and manner make continuing this discussion too unpleasant. I'm unlikely to continue...)
Though Statists might equate them, laws of men — unlike laws of nature — are changeable. This particular one appeared, because it was believed, the cell phones can interfere with the aircraft. That belief has been demonstrated wrong many times — or, to put it in other words, that myth was busted.
Darling, mind your tone.
ATC might need to know, yes. But whatever passes through the ATC, can be encrypted and sent to other planes — encrypted for each one — as well. This is a solvable problem, one just needs to acknowledge, it exists. And you do not...
Except this is completely irrelevant. The myth I was talking about was the "cell phone use interferes with the plane's equipment" one.
Fortunately, I don't need to. Unless you are saying, the needs of the airplanes are so unique, the Computer Science/Cryptography/Security industry has no solution for the problem?
Big deal — the ATC towers can act as Certificate Authorities issuing keys to all planes. Then, whoever is interested in my details, can establish an encrypted connection with me and ask me nicely.
You don't need to know, who they are to avoid crashing into them. This much I understand. Do you?
Right. And why would I be bothered by it, unless I had something to hide?
This would never happen to an institution owned by the benevolent government of a nice, progressive country with constitutional protections for earning a living wage. Oh, wait...
That myth has been thoroughly busted already. And not just once
The coordinates, speeds, and even instrument read-outs can all be sent to the nearest tower(s) via the data-link. SSL-encrypted — with a handful of certificate authorities known to each plane.
Right. And my face may be computer-recognizable already — or really soon. But that does not mean, I should be carrying an ID-chip in my pocket to make tracking me even easier.
General-purpose fire trucks would be sent out by the air-dispatchers anyway, they don't listen to air-control AM "just in case". The specialized services at the airports, if they wish to have their own awareness independent of the control-tower, can be allowed to get the same SSL-encrypted data-links...
The origin of the issue is the bad old reliance on "obfuscation" — if I can not hear the plane broadcasting its unique ID and location, then no one else can hear it either and so there is not a problem. TFA will, hopefully, raise the awareness so the healing can begin.
Why? Companies upgrade their phone-systems regularly. Using the existing telephone network (including cellular phones) would be very cheap. Of course, plane-makers will charge 10-times more for "aviation-grade" communication equipment capable of contacting the cell-towers on the ground, but that'd still be cheap.
And the data-link can be used to sends readouts from the pilots' panels — like altitude, direction, fuel-capacity. This can be SSL-encrypted (with all of the dispatchers' public-keys preloaded into every plane) and provide them with all the information without also making it known to everyone with a radio.
Using the existing cellular network would leverage the existing cell-towers — in most places this will provide a substantial improvement in communication quality.
Ever heard of a conference-call?