The problem is *not* that Verizon has decided to go after one particular School SMS provider.
Rather, Verizon has decided to charge bulk SMS providers (in this case, Twilio) a per-text-message fee. This fee is said to help pay for Verizon's anti-spam efforts.
Twilio then decided to pass this fee to customers in the exact amount Verizon charged.
Two other providers in Canada (Rogers & Bell) already charge Twilio similar fees, and other carriers are expected to do so soon.
Remind just happens to be a Twilio customer. But all Twilio customers {and customers of similar SMS services} are affected.
While there may be tax credits at the Federal level, at least 17 states charge additional registration fees for electric vehicles once the battery gets above a small (hybrid) battery size.
They do this to make up for loss gas taxes, but charge for such at a flat rate that does not factor in mileage or if you have a plug-in hybrid.
So if you purchase your electricity from charging stations which try to be gas-price equivalents, you end up paying more to fuel an electric car than had you just fueled a gas one.
When Georgia implemented their fee (one of the highest at $200/year, $300/year for commercial use), Tesla sales fell 83% and did not recover. This was true even though the state also had an electric-car income-tax purchase discount.
"Test is dead" was the keynote presentation of a Google Test Automation Conference six years ago.
My personal view is that if you are doing web development where your company rapidly & repeatedly deploys releases on behalf of customers, you might be able to get away with not having much of a QA department so long as the impact is low. If a problem arises it can be quickly fixed without much of a financial loss.
But if you are in a regulated industry, failure of your software will result in significant lost revenue while its being fixed, or your software is deployed only every few weeks or months by customers who do their own acceptance and integration testing, then you probably need to do more QA work & dedicated QA work upfront. In such scenarios the software producer and their customers may encounter significant losses and/or inconvenience because something faulty snuck through.
There is not enough aligned ramp space there for you to see if there is any oncoming traffic on the main road before you have to collide with it. Extending the ramp would require expanding the bridge at its terminus.
So they expect you to stop, look backwards for a gap, and accelerate hard to get into it. Which can get quite tricky at hours when there is a lot of traffic.
At other intersections you may have to quickly get on before the on-/off-ramp gets you off again, or slow down prior to sharp curves on an exit ramp.
If you are not used to this (or anything about New York City/Long Island traffic for that matter) it can take some getting used to. Many roads were originally designed when speed limits and cars were slower, and there is not much room for expansion.
Stop signs often do appear on highway entry ramps, especially where they are short. This is true in construction areas, as well as on some older entrance ramps around New York City.
Technically this is a 50 MPH (~80 km/h) Parkway and not an Interstate, but rather than randomly searching the area this was the first that came to mind.
For instance, Zstandard lets you precompute a dictionary of common strings you want to shorten. Imagine if you trained it on HTML so that each tag or other common string just takes a few bits, then you can distribute that dictionary to the whole world so that you can save the bandwidth of transmitting it alongside the compressed data each and every time (like we do with Zip, Gzip, etc.).
HTTP/2.0 actually does this for HTTP headers as part of the HTTP Header Compression specification.
TeamViewer was first released sometime around 2005.
Since then there have been a number of proposed common first-level login standards (OpenID, SAML..) along with second-factor ones (Symantec VIP, U2F...). Phone-based authentication seems to be popular at the moment.
How are companies supposed to figure out if the standard they choose will last? Companies have embraced various standards, only to abandon them a year or two later.
I would hope the EMV standard would not allow private keys to be read.
What's more likely is that they are either: (1) Running the system purely using the simulated Track data (magnetic stripe) on the card, skipping most of the EMV process apart from potentially rotating the card verification code; or (2) Quickly walking through all the EMV steps, providing fake data (transaction amount, etc.) if the card requests it.
Either would seem to weaken the standard a bit.
Someone from VISA would have to clarify what they came up with to avoid speculation.
Echoing another commenter, you could have just taken the RTD Skyride bus service downtown (and to some other areas). It runs at least hourly, and more often during weekdays.
The cost to/from downtown when I took it last year was $11 each way cash, or $20 for a round-trip ticket booklet (available at the RTD booth in the airport and probably a few other locations).
While the majority of comments so far seem to presume the condo association wants to run their own ISP, there is no reason in most of the United States that they have to do so.
Just like your condo association should be able to get "bulk cable", satellite, or Uverse/FIOS/IPTV service, you can purchase bulk Internet in a similar manner. You can even combined bulk TV, Internet, and/or phone service if you want. Even satellite companies have partners who can take care of Internet service nowadays, or can use Ethernet themselves to distribute TV service to the building.
This offloads all the DMCA, etc. work to the service provider, although there are a few catches. The first is that you are paying for service to all units; if a unit owner does not pay their dues, state laws may prohibit you from cutting off service (and even if you could your contract still might require you to pay for it). The second is that most providers currently hooked to your building presume not everyone in your building is using their service; you will need to make sure they provide you enough bandwidth to cover the increased subscription rate.
The third item is that these tend to be long-term contracts; the longer you commit to, the better the potential discount tends to be. However these contracts also include clauses allowing automatic increases in rates.
I looked into this once for a condo association myself; and while a local survey suggested owners wanted such bulk contracts, when confronted with the financial costs (and our rate of non-payment) they tended not to.
Disclaimer: For mechanical engineers, I personally think that getting a PE often is a good move.
However since this is Slashdot, I would argue that for computer engineers this is not always true, or at least the easiest thing to do in the United States.
While completing college, I took and passed the Engineering-In-Training state exam for Electrical Engineering. I then worked for several years with various employers, some of which had PE's above or adjacent to me in the hierarchy; others of which did not.
The electrical engineering exam for PEs seems to be bending-over backwards to reverse the small percentage of licensed EE's relative to other disciplines. When I looked into this a year ago it was possible to take a purely computer-oriented exam without a lot of the power, electromagnetics, and other topics. The state certifying board where I currently live seemed more than willing to consider justification statements proving that work I did while not under the supervision of a PE could be credited as work experience.
At the time I also was a member the local NSPE/state society, attending meetings with lots of other PEs, and being flooded with offers of legal and civil engineer training courses.
But I never could get PE certification before my EIT expired. The catch was I could not find enough PEs that would be willing to sign of on me as a personal reference, largely because most felt uncomfortable with their knowledge about what I had done.
And since there are so many exclusions to when you can use the term "Engineer" without a PE in most states, I ran out of PEs to ask.
For Mechanical Engineers getting your PE often can be a good thing. But for Electrical Engineers and Computer Engineers especially it can be a chicken & egg problem.
I don't think many people are getting the point of this article, although I admit it is a bit confusing. While it is true that the article talks about alternative DNS systems and WHOIS; what Paul really seems concerned about is the part of the WHOIS system used to look up who is currently allowed to use a given IP address range, and is responsible for activity originating from it.
The current authorities which run this part of the WHOIS system have rules and restrictions about how and why IP address blocks on the Internet can be assigned from one party to another. Among the things cited by the article which currently are not permitted are obtaining IP address for perceived future needs when you have not already exhausted what you have, or simply buying IP addresses for no use at all speculating they can be sold for more money later.
Some parties do not like these rules, and want to establish their own system for buying and selling IP addresses which is not subject to the rules currently in place. They could kind-of do this right now, but the transfer of ownership would not be recorded in the old system.
This is potentially a bad thing, as suppose someone attacks you from IP address 1.2.3.4. And for some reason, reverse DNS on that IP address fails to work. If there is more than one system tracking ownership of who currently has the right to use this IP address, how do you find the right administrator to contact? And what if someone updated their contact information or the fact the IP block had been sold in one system, but forgot to do so in another?
If you have any student loans, universities in the United States are required to report your last date of attendance, if you are attending at least half time or not, and other information to the National Student Loan Data System. This may be an automated way that they are trying to get information for this.
While I imagine universities are not going to rush to using the last date you showed up in class versus the current date for refund and grading (withdrawal with no grade versus withdrawal-failing/withdrawal-pass, etc.), I could easily see universities using this data in the event of a grade dispute or similar issue.
UMA service with T-mobile is basically a way to use 802.11 access points as an alternative "cell phone tower" with T-mobile. Nothing stops you from using a UMA-capable phone with standard GSM cell phone towers (unless you tell the phone not to).
In general, T-mobile bills UMA calls *the same* as calls started on the cell phone network. So if you have a post-paid plan, UMA usage typically comes out of your normal minute bucket(s); if you are using a $0.10/minute pre-paid plan, you pay $0.10/minute (as the previous poster mentioned).
There are NO additional fees required for UMA calling versus GSM calling. Turning on 802.11 support might reduce your phone's battery life between charges though.
That said, there used to be some add-on plans which allowed unlimited UMA-initiated calls for a flat rate. But these no longer seem to be offered. In general, the future of T-Mobile's UMA service is unknown, as it is primarily Blackberry phones that tend to support it.
Cloud Computing Security Is Another Name for DRM
on
Security In the Ether
·
· Score: 1
While they may sound different, the Cloud Computing security problem seems to be almost identical to any other Digital Rights Management problem. Both are concerned with only exposing what the information owner wants exposed to the underlying hardware/provider/user/etc.
It's just a question of whose "Cloud" you are trying to secure information on, and who the "user" of said information is supposed to be.
I presume there would have been instructions printed on the front of the device that would go something like this: If a deaf or hard-of-hearing person wants to make a phone call, they insert coins, then dial the number of interest. When they see the light on the other end flashing randomly (i.e. not a ringing or busy signal), they can press a key on the payphone's touch-tone pad a few times to cause a prerecorded voice to announce the TTD's presence.
If the party on the other side starts typing with their own Teletype device, the TTD on the payphone will then open up to reveal its own display and keyboard. The reason it cannot be opened up without hearing a remote TTD first (at least on the units I have seen) is to prevent vandalism on what is obviously an uncommon and slightly expensive piece of equipment.
While I am not certain from this story what exactly Olin is doing, the general concept is not new. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's "ABET 2000" standard was intentionally designed to allow colleges to come up with programs similar to this. Instead of mandating you will must take "Calculus I, II, & III" like older ABET standards, much more finer requirements are required, which no mandate on which course provides the lecture. For example: I intended an ABET 2000 certified engineering program, and never had a dedicated course in statistics.
One example of another school using similar techniques is Rowan University's College of Engineering, which graduated their first engineering class in 2000. They base most of their Engineering Curriculum around a course called the "Engineering Clinic", where students work in small teams to generate real-world products and results. At the Junior & Senior levels, Rowan's clinic projects are usually sponsored by various companies, as well as local government agencies. The projects range from the mundane (build a flashlight) to the insane (conduct surveys and analyze the health of local major suspension bridges).
Unfortunately, it looks like Rowan's Engineering pages have been revamped by the central corporate webmasters, so there is no dedicated page for the clinic any more. But if you ever go there, Rowan's Engineering building (Rowan Hall) actually only has 6 dedicated classrooms - the rest of the 3 usable stories are all laboratory space.
(Note I am tad biased because I graduated from Rowan University's Engineering program. But if someone wants more information on it, feel free to reply with a message.)
I own a 2005 Toyota Prius, and I can get 53-57 miles per gallon (or more) easily. This is not just measurements on local roads, but includes highway driving, some stop & go traffic, and all the things seen on my daily commute.
The above was calculated not just over short distances, but over the full 400+ miles I can get out of the ~11 gallon tank before I decide to refill it (typically, I put 8-9 gallons in, and calculate mileage both via the on board computer, and how much fuel I put it versus the trip odometer). Over shorter distances (40 miles or so), I have gotten potentially 60+ miles per gallon.
Granted, I am in somewhat ideal conditions (the warm Southern US (Air Conditioning is almost always on), lots of streets where I can go 40-50 MPH (one of the Prius' sweet spots), reasonably timed traffic lights...), and I am a reasonably cautious driver with a good insurance rate, so that may factor in a bit. Daisy-chaining short trips, or otherwise not just doing them, helps with the gas mileage a lot (a few short trips takes 2-3 MPG off a tank of gas' result easily).
So while I may be exceptional, it is definitely possible in my view to get the EPA mileage for a Prius. But I did not get it because it was an efficient car - I got it because it was a reasonably priced mid-size vehicle which fit my needs (and height!), and was comfortable to drive.
American Express is also starting to roll out an RFID solution, although seperate from their card and also available on a preload basis. Their national partner I am aware of seems to be CVS drugstores, which seems to have rolled out credit card terminals which can read these cards locally even through I know of no other place I could use their RFID tag.
This is not the first compact encoding of GPS to come about. MIC-E style devices use the MIC-E protocol (available as a link off that page) to encode low precision GPS, velocity, direction of travel, and other data in a mix of what roughly could be considered BASE-36 and BASE-256, depending where inside the AX.25 packet a particular portion of the MIC-E protocol is being stored.
So the idea of encoding low-precision GPS in other formats is at least 7-8 years old.
Yes; but does a "copy" have to be the whole work? Suppose a movie has a cool, new fight scene that every one loves to copy around on the Internet. Could that be considered a full work on its own?
Granted IANAL, and the lawyers could beat this to death, but I bet every segment, up to one covering the entire work, can be treated as a seperate work for legal prosecution, unless it is small enough and used in a fair use manner allowed by local law.
More interesting is the "web site" portion of this brief article; did the accused run provide just the tracker file, or also a seed node?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is *not* that Verizon has decided to go after one particular School SMS provider.
Rather, Verizon has decided to charge bulk SMS providers (in this case, Twilio) a per-text-message fee. This fee is said to help pay for Verizon's anti-spam efforts.
Twilio then decided to pass this fee to customers in the exact amount Verizon charged.
Two other providers in Canada (Rogers & Bell) already charge Twilio similar fees, and other carriers are expected to do so soon.
Remind just happens to be a Twilio customer. But all Twilio customers {and customers of similar SMS services} are affected.
While there may be tax credits at the Federal level, at least 17 states charge additional registration fees for electric vehicles once the battery gets above a small (hybrid) battery size.
They do this to make up for loss gas taxes, but charge for such at a flat rate that does not factor in mileage or if you have a plug-in hybrid.
So if you purchase your electricity from charging stations which try to be gas-price equivalents, you end up paying more to fuel an electric car than had you just fueled a gas one.
When Georgia implemented their fee (one of the highest at $200/year, $300/year for commercial use), Tesla sales fell 83% and did not recover. This was true even though the state also had an electric-car income-tax purchase discount.
"Test is dead" was the keynote presentation of a Google Test Automation Conference six years ago.
My personal view is that if you are doing web development where your company rapidly & repeatedly deploys releases on behalf of customers, you might be able to get away with not having much of a QA department so long as the impact is low. If a problem arises it can be quickly fixed without much of a financial loss.
But if you are in a regulated industry, failure of your software will result in significant lost revenue while its being fixed, or your software is deployed only every few weeks or months by customers who do their own acceptance and integration testing, then you probably need to do more QA work & dedicated QA work upfront. In such scenarios the software producer and their customers may encounter significant losses and/or inconvenience because something faulty snuck through.
There is not enough aligned ramp space there for you to see if there is any oncoming traffic on the main road before you have to collide with it. Extending the ramp would require expanding the bridge at its terminus.
So they expect you to stop, look backwards for a gap, and accelerate hard to get into it. Which can get quite tricky at hours when there is a lot of traffic.
At other intersections you may have to quickly get on before the on-/off-ramp gets you off again, or slow down prior to sharp curves on an exit ramp.
If you are not used to this (or anything about New York City/Long Island traffic for that matter) it can take some getting used to. Many roads were originally designed when speed limits and cars were slower, and there is not much room for expansion.
"...there's no reason to have a certain sign on certain roads (Stop sign on an interstate highway)."
What about here? (Cross Island Parkway, New York USA, Exit 31)
Stop signs often do appear on highway entry ramps, especially where they are short. This is true in construction areas, as well as on some older entrance ramps around New York City.
Technically this is a 50 MPH (~80 km/h) Parkway and not an Interstate, but rather than randomly searching the area this was the first that came to mind.
For instance, Zstandard lets you precompute a dictionary of common strings you want to shorten. Imagine if you trained it on HTML so that each tag or other common string just takes a few bits, then you can distribute that dictionary to the whole world so that you can save the bandwidth of transmitting it alongside the compressed data each and every time (like we do with Zip, Gzip, etc.).
HTTP/2.0 actually does this for HTTP headers as part of the HTTP Header Compression specification.
GoToMyPC was first released in 1998.
TeamViewer was first released sometime around 2005.
Since then there have been a number of proposed common first-level login standards (OpenID, SAML..) along with second-factor ones (Symantec VIP, U2F...). Phone-based authentication seems to be popular at the moment.
How are companies supposed to figure out if the standard they choose will last? Companies have embraced various standards, only to abandon them a year or two later.
In short: the current state of things is a mess.
I would hope the EMV standard would not allow private keys to be read.
What's more likely is that they are either:
(1) Running the system purely using the simulated Track data (magnetic stripe) on the card, skipping most of the EMV process apart from potentially rotating the card verification code; or
(2) Quickly walking through all the EMV steps, providing fake data (transaction amount, etc.) if the card requests it.
Either would seem to weaken the standard a bit.
Someone from VISA would have to clarify what they came up with to avoid speculation.
The algorithm *was* pull the last number off of the list.
As of June 25, 2011, that is not the case anymore.
That said, this does not help any of us that are less than 4 years old.
Echoing another commenter, you could have just taken the RTD Skyride bus service downtown (and to some other areas). It runs at least hourly, and more often during weekdays.
The cost to/from downtown when I took it last year was $11 each way cash, or $20 for a round-trip ticket booklet (available at the RTD booth in the airport and probably a few other locations).
While the majority of comments so far seem to presume the condo association wants to run their own ISP, there is no reason in most of the United States that they have to do so.
Just like your condo association should be able to get "bulk cable", satellite, or Uverse/FIOS/IPTV service, you can purchase bulk Internet in a similar manner. You can even combined bulk TV, Internet, and/or phone service if you want. Even satellite companies have partners who can take care of Internet service nowadays, or can use Ethernet themselves to distribute TV service to the building.
This offloads all the DMCA, etc. work to the service provider, although there are a few catches. The first is that you are paying for service to all units; if a unit owner does not pay their dues, state laws may prohibit you from cutting off service (and even if you could your contract still might require you to pay for it). The second is that most providers currently hooked to your building presume not everyone in your building is using their service; you will need to make sure they provide you enough bandwidth to cover the increased subscription rate.
The third item is that these tend to be long-term contracts; the longer you commit to, the better the potential discount tends to be. However these contracts also include clauses allowing automatic increases in rates.
I looked into this once for a condo association myself; and while a local survey suggested owners wanted such bulk contracts, when confronted with the financial costs (and our rate of non-payment) they tended not to.
Disclaimer: For mechanical engineers, I personally think that getting a PE often is a good move.
However since this is Slashdot, I would argue that for computer engineers this is not always true, or at least the easiest thing to do in the United States.
While completing college, I took and passed the Engineering-In-Training state exam for Electrical Engineering. I then worked for several years with various employers, some of which had PE's above or adjacent to me in the hierarchy; others of which did not.
The electrical engineering exam for PEs seems to be bending-over backwards to reverse the small percentage of licensed EE's relative to other disciplines. When I looked into this a year ago it was possible to take a purely computer-oriented exam without a lot of the power, electromagnetics, and other topics. The state certifying board where I currently live seemed more than willing to consider justification statements proving that work I did while not under the supervision of a PE could be credited as work experience.
At the time I also was a member the local NSPE/state society, attending meetings with lots of other PEs, and being flooded with offers of legal and civil engineer training courses.
But I never could get PE certification before my EIT expired. The catch was I could not find enough PEs that would be willing to sign of on me as a personal reference, largely because most felt uncomfortable with their knowledge about what I had done.
And since there are so many exclusions to when you can use the term "Engineer" without a PE in most states, I ran out of PEs to ask.
For Mechanical Engineers getting your PE often can be a good thing. But for Electrical Engineers and Computer Engineers especially it can be a chicken & egg problem.
I'm surprised that I do not see a link to the RISKS article about how a motorist was trapped in a traffic circle for 14 hours yet.
The technology in the RISKS entry was a bit more advanced (lane occupation detection) than what seems to be described in this article.
(And if someone cannot it figure out from the date, the RISKS entry was an April fool's joke; but a lot of people took it seriously at the time.)
I don't think many people are getting the point of this article, although I admit it is a bit confusing. While it is true that the article talks about alternative DNS systems and WHOIS; what Paul really seems concerned about is the part of the WHOIS system used to look up who is currently allowed to use a given IP address range, and is responsible for activity originating from it.
The current authorities which run this part of the WHOIS system have rules and restrictions about how and why IP address blocks on the Internet can be assigned from one party to another. Among the things cited by the article which currently are not permitted are obtaining IP address for perceived future needs when you have not already exhausted what you have, or simply buying IP addresses for no use at all speculating they can be sold for more money later.
Some parties do not like these rules, and want to establish their own system for buying and selling IP addresses which is not subject to the rules currently in place. They could kind-of do this right now, but the transfer of ownership would not be recorded in the old system.
This is potentially a bad thing, as suppose someone attacks you from IP address 1.2.3.4. And for some reason, reverse DNS on that IP address fails to work. If there is more than one system tracking ownership of who currently has the right to use this IP address, how do you find the right administrator to contact? And what if someone updated their contact information or the fact the IP block had been sold in one system, but forgot to do so in another?
Or in the style of TV Tropes, Our Vampires Are Different.
If you have any student loans, universities in the United States are required to report your last date of attendance, if you are attending at least half time or not, and other information to the National Student Loan Data System. This may be an automated way that they are trying to get information for this.
While I imagine universities are not going to rush to using the last date you showed up in class versus the current date for refund and grading (withdrawal with no grade versus withdrawal-failing/withdrawal-pass, etc.), I could easily see universities using this data in the event of a grade dispute or similar issue.
A slightly clarification here:
UMA service with T-mobile is basically a way to use 802.11 access points as an alternative "cell phone tower" with T-mobile. Nothing stops you from using a UMA-capable phone with standard GSM cell phone towers (unless you tell the phone not to).
In general, T-mobile bills UMA calls *the same* as calls started on the cell phone network. So if you have a post-paid plan, UMA usage typically comes out of your normal minute bucket(s); if you are using a $0.10/minute pre-paid plan, you pay $0.10/minute (as the previous poster mentioned).
There are NO additional fees required for UMA calling versus GSM calling. Turning on 802.11 support might reduce your phone's battery life between charges though.
That said, there used to be some add-on plans which allowed unlimited UMA-initiated calls for a flat rate. But these no longer seem to be offered. In general, the future of T-Mobile's UMA service is unknown, as it is primarily Blackberry phones that tend to support it.
While they may sound different, the Cloud Computing security problem seems to be almost identical to any other Digital Rights Management problem. Both are concerned with only exposing what the information owner wants exposed to the underlying hardware/provider/user/etc.
It's just a question of whose "Cloud" you are trying to secure information on, and who the "user" of said information is supposed to be.
Having seen devices like these in the past, chances are it is a telecommunications device for the deaf, in this case designed for payphones.
I presume there would have been instructions printed on the front of the device that would go something like this: If a deaf or hard-of-hearing person wants to make a phone call, they insert coins, then dial the number of interest. When they see the light on the other end flashing randomly (i.e. not a ringing or busy signal), they can press a key on the payphone's touch-tone pad a few times to cause a prerecorded voice to announce the TTD's presence.
If the party on the other side starts typing with their own Teletype device, the TTD on the payphone will then open up to reveal its own display and keyboard. The reason it cannot be opened up without hearing a remote TTD first (at least on the units I have seen) is to prevent vandalism on what is obviously an uncommon and slightly expensive piece of equipment.
While I am not certain from this story what exactly Olin is doing, the general concept is not new. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology's "ABET 2000" standard was intentionally designed to allow colleges to come up with programs similar to this. Instead of mandating you will must take "Calculus I, II, & III" like older ABET standards, much more finer requirements are required, which no mandate on which course provides the lecture. For example: I intended an ABET 2000 certified engineering program, and never had a dedicated course in statistics.
One example of another school using similar techniques is Rowan University's College of Engineering, which graduated their first engineering class in 2000. They base most of their Engineering Curriculum around a course called the "Engineering Clinic", where students work in small teams to generate real-world products and results. At the Junior & Senior levels, Rowan's clinic projects are usually sponsored by various companies, as well as local government agencies. The projects range from the mundane (build a flashlight) to the insane (conduct surveys and analyze the health of local major suspension bridges).
Unfortunately, it looks like Rowan's Engineering pages have been revamped by the central corporate webmasters, so there is no dedicated page for the clinic any more. But if you ever go there, Rowan's Engineering building (Rowan Hall) actually only has 6 dedicated classrooms - the rest of the 3 usable stories are all laboratory space.
(Note I am tad biased because I graduated from Rowan University's Engineering program. But if someone wants more information on it, feel free to reply with a message.)
It is kind of funny to see this come up now, given that this has been a very old dispute between Wikipedia and Britannica.
Slashdot has already had at least three articles in the past few years on this topic.
I own a 2005 Toyota Prius, and I can get 53-57 miles per gallon (or more) easily. This is not just measurements on local roads, but includes highway driving, some stop & go traffic, and all the things seen on my daily commute.
The above was calculated not just over short distances, but over the full 400+ miles I can get out of the ~11 gallon tank before I decide to refill it (typically, I put 8-9 gallons in, and calculate mileage both via the on board computer, and how much fuel I put it versus the trip odometer). Over shorter distances (40 miles or so), I have gotten potentially 60+ miles per gallon.
Granted, I am in somewhat ideal conditions (the warm Southern US (Air Conditioning is almost always on), lots of streets where I can go 40-50 MPH (one of the Prius' sweet spots), reasonably timed traffic lights...), and I am a reasonably cautious driver with a good insurance rate, so that may factor in a bit. Daisy-chaining short trips, or otherwise not just doing them, helps with the gas mileage a lot (a few short trips takes 2-3 MPG off a tank of gas' result easily).
So while I may be exceptional, it is definitely possible in my view to get the EPA mileage for a Prius. But I did not get it because it was an efficient car - I got it because it was a reasonably priced mid-size vehicle which fit my needs (and height!), and was comfortable to drive.
American Express is also starting to roll out an RFID solution, although seperate from their card and also available on a preload basis. Their national partner I am aware of seems to be CVS drugstores, which seems to have rolled out credit card terminals which can read these cards locally even through I know of no other place I could use their RFID tag.
So the idea of encoding low-precision GPS in other formats is at least 7-8 years old.
Yes; but does a "copy" have to be the whole work? Suppose a movie has a cool, new fight scene that every one loves to copy around on the Internet. Could that be considered a full work on its own?
Granted IANAL, and the lawyers could beat this to death, but I bet every segment, up to one covering the entire work, can be treated as a seperate work for legal prosecution, unless it is small enough and used in a fair use manner allowed by local law.
More interesting is the "web site" portion of this brief article; did the accused run provide just the tracker file, or also a seed node?