That would be ampr.org, the 44.* subnet on the Internet.
Of course, it is largely isolated from the main Internet, since there are a lot of restrictions as to what can be done with Amateur Radio (no commercial use, no swearing, etc.) as opposed to the Internet at large.
Copyright of a platform? I think you mean their actual BIOS routines themselves. If they could copyright the actual platform, Compaq and Pheonix would never have been able to offer an alternative to IBM's XT. Intel's x86 CPU instruction likewise never could have been mimiced with independant code.
Rulings like the two above in favor of the clone makers allowed the PC clone market to exist. Otherwise, there would be no real competition nowadays.
Interestingly enough, bleem! was winning their court case at the time they decided to settle. They had won most of the preliminary motions, and were about to go to trial.
I personally do not know why bleem didn't just finish the case. It ended right before the jury was about to hear the case, just like Sony v. Connectix did.
(Disclaimer: I used to be close to some of the bleem people, although I haven't spoken to them in years.)
IEEE Spectrum Magazine's topic for the month of May is "Invasion of the Music Snatchers." A number of copying and filesharing attacks and counterattacks are discussed.
Many of this month's articles are online, but if you are not an IEEE member you are limited to the "publicfeature" URL's.
One time when I logged onto my PPPoE DSL provider about a week or two ago, I saw my DSL modem's activity light blink reguarly. At the same time, my firewall started dropping 2-3 packets per second coming from at least a dozen spread out IP addresses, all directed to the same TCP port number on the IP address I currently was given.
Being adventerous, I told netcat to listen to the TCP port in question. It turns out that the clients wanted to send me HTTP-ish Gnutella requests. A variety of clients were used/spoofed (Limewire/Gnutella/etc.). All wanted some random combination of the words "Gay Sex P0rn" and similar.
I tried to get the systems to stop sending me packets by telling my firewall to actively reject any packets sent to the TCP port in question. That did not stop them. I tried spoofing various HTTP-style errors; that also did not work.
I tried to get my ISP to reassign me to an new IP address (by disconnecting my PPPoE client and reconnecting a few minutes later), but it did not work at the time. Giving up, I left my firewall up on my DSL connection on to see if these packets would ever stop.
But they did not.
By the time I shut down this experiment, I had logged over 30,000 connection requests to the TCP port in quesiton in 20 hours. Total data sent in connect requests by the attacker: about 2 MB.
Its a shame I didn't keep the logs for that date. It was amusing at the time.
(Obvious disclaimer: I do not have Gnutella nor any peer2peer shared files on my machines.)
You mean this article? (IEEE membership or library subscription likely required)
Perry, Tekla S. and Geppert, Linda. "Do Portable Electronics Endanger Flight? The Evidence Mounts". IEEE Spectrum Magazine, September 1996.
I quickly found two cases in this this article where navigation equipment was affected: one with a laptop computer, and another when approximately 25 people on a flight from Denver, Colorado to Newark, New Jersey were all using portable radios to listen to a football game. The CD player was just part of a theoretical thing at the beginning.
This isn't anything new for Dell. They have played this game before. Anyone remember their standard yet non-standard "ATX" power supplies?
Out of fairness, newer Macintoshes also have standard yet non-standard power supplies. And back in the days of 286's, lots of manufactuers had their own connectors for everything from keyboards to memory.
Three years ago, I had a CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data - 19.2 kbps) Internet connection for my contract work. While I could do anything anywhere, it was slow - slower than a 28.8 modem, as should be obvious.
Fortunately for me, my wireless ISP offered a Venturi proxy. Routing web browsing, POP3, etc. through it, while still slow, became more bearable.
Retrieving log data (easily compressible) through the Venturi proxy had incredible speedups. For some tasks, the compression proxy made me feel like I was on dialup again.
Of course, the proxy could not cure CDPD's high latency - working in SSH sessions was painful.
There kind of already is this for online comics. Modern Tales is an online comic site that requires you to pay to access their archives. The profits (after overhead) are then distributed amongst the artists using the site according to how often each one's works were viewed.
There also is the concept of "premium" specialized online comic hosting. Keenspace offers such a service, as well as the ability for viewers to pay not to see advertisements (User Friendly offers this as well).
Of course, not all online comic artists like to operate under such a scheme. Rocket Box Comics is a site created by a number of artists dedicated to keeping comics freely available online.
In any case, if you like your "local" online artists, support them! I personally have probably sent over $200 to at least 5-7 people in order to support their site, purchase their limited-print books, etc. The best thing you can do for any artist is to support them; some artists even have set threshold where they will just work on comics full-time if they make at least X amount of money per month online.
Keep in mind that the alleged document is draft legislation. It may be that everyone has put what they want in it, and it will be tempered down before it is handed to Congress.
It also might be yet another proposal where a group proposes something insane in order to gain more minor consessions. If so, hopefully Congress will recognize when someone keeps crying "wolf" that the wolf may not be there.
But what if the "wolf" does come along and someone says "if we had X, we could have caught them before this disaster." What should Congress do then?
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I never stated that MS paid for everything NTsig wanted. I just stated that MS seems to provide the majority of NTsig's funding. Granted, you can assume that software giveaways, etc., technically cost near-nothing, but at retail-value, NTsig's membership fees are a drop in its operating bucket.
Clearly, since NTsig states they have about 200 members, and the club charges $5/member/year, NTsig takes in about $1000 per year that could be used to purchase items like pizza, disc drives, etc. But when you (or the previous Anonymous Coward) state that one contest alone is offering $10,000 in prizes, there clearly is a lot more funding coming in.
As yet another Ohio State person, I wonder why no one seems to have linked to the contest in question yet. I'm not too worried about OSU's bandwidth since I have some idea of their network topology (multiple backbones, etc.).
Personally, I've always wondered how NTsig (the group running the contest), can claim "not to be fully funded by Microsoft(tm)". Even when charging $5 per year per person, NTsig will be giving away over $10,000 in prizes for this contest, has regularly handed out thousands of dollars worth of MS software, and gave out a few Xboxes last quarter too. Furthermore, it is known that at least one NTsig officer is paid by Microsoft to run the club. Hence, I cannot say that the club is unbiased.
I attend a class at OSU where the professor teaching it has a large Microsoft grant. He has more MS servers than he knows what to do with (one hit by the latest SQL worm), a Tablet PC, a video projector, etc. -- all allegedly paid for by Microsoft. While he seems to be teaching the course fairly, he did add.NET alongside the Java portions this year. The same professor freely admits he still sees plenty more Java than.NET use, however.
Just to be fair, I'll link to the Ohio State Open Source Club too, although on a $300 per year budget, they can't be that significant, can they?:)
As another proposal submitter from the first round, I would like to point out that there are a variety of proposals put forth by commenters on the table. If you find that you are more comfortable supporting a proposal other than the EFF's, more than one proposal, or a combination of several people's proposals, you may freely comment about as few or as many proposals as you choose. If you disagree with a proposal, and wish to have it modified to make it acceptable to you, you may comment about what changes you feel need to be made as well.
To state the obvious: DO NOT COMMENT BLINDLY WITHOUT READING THE RULES. Before I wrote my proposal of possible exclusions, I spent several days simply doing research on what was accepted/not accepted during the previous cycle. I also read the details of what was wanted during the current comment request, and the results of the prior comment period. Doing so greatly helped me tailor my arguments to better address what was being looked for.
Another issue you should note: THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE WANTS TO SEE REAL EVIDENCE THAT NEAR-TERM HARM WILL OCCUR UNLESS AN EXCLUSION IS GRANTED. Contrary to what many slashdotters' think, the copyright office is being very good as to telling us what they want. If you comment during this reply period, *please* provide real-world examples as to why an exclusion should be granted/not granted/granted in modified form/etc. Simply stating "if this is not granted, I will not be able to enjoy my l33t p0rn" likely will not sway anyone to your cause.
Finally, BE SURE TO CITE ALL SOURCES YOU USE SO EVERYONE CAN CONFIRM THE HARM YOU DESCRIBE IS REAL. By doing so, you prove you did your homework, that you read previous commenters' work, and your comment *will* stand out as being from an intelligent person. Try to get reliable sources that have not been used before; simply repeating previously used evidence will not get you very far.
This article seems to call these systems Maintenance Decision Support Systems (MDSS). But the term I am used to seeing is Road Weather Information System (RWIS), which are used for the same reasons. I guess that RWIS's could be part of MDSS's; Pennsylvania (as well as other states) use theirs to help predict where to send snowplows, etc.
RWIS's are also often found online. Pennsylvania's RWIS is online here. You can click on any region, click on a station, and get live video, if the road is wet ("chemcial wet"==salted), what the temperature/wind speed is, etc. Pennsylvania also has self-salting bridges in a few spots; I don't know of any in other states, but it just might be me.
Ohio (not listed as an MDSS member) also has their own RWIS system (also called RWIS), although it presently covers only a few select areas.
I should note that even if you check a RWIS/MDSS, be aware that weather conditions can change quickly. The National Weather Service and the MDSS/RWIN you use might show only light snow, but don't be surprised if you have to seek shelter in a hotel overnight.
It is very easy to rig a bid, and it happens all the time. You cannot do government work and not know how to phrase a quote to get what you want; otherwise, purchasing (and/or the bidders) may do some rather amusing things.
Consider the following contract proposal: "I want a spreadsheet program that has X number of wizards to assist me, support for importing the exact format list shown in attachment A, and a hologram on the CD as well as the 'Certificate of Authenticity'." Staroffice/Openoffice would not match this. Very few (if not only one) programs would match this bid spec. Hence, if my buddy wrote program Y that matched this spec, he likely would win.
One word in a quote can make all the difference. My High School once put out a bid spec for "cabinets"; the winning bidder used fiberboard (wood shavings glued together) to make them. For some strange reason, all future cabinet quotes asked for "solid wood". If you know anything about fiberboard, you can guess why.
Ideally, purchasing should catch the super ludicrous specs (i.e. "The product's name must start with 'O', end with 'E', and have six letters"), but unless purchasing is savvy in your area, strange things get through and other things get mangled.
Of course, I once was on a team that came up with a server that cost less than what our primary contractor required, got three quotes to prove it was true, and still had purchasing ask the primary contractor to price match the spec, which they did (although not with the proper configuration -- we sent it back). So I am a bit biased.
I took a week-long root cause analysis class which centered itself around the Firestone/Ford issue. Mind you, I'm not going to repeat the whole procedure here; you can look it up yourself.
Our class' conclusion (mind you, obviously biased) that a combination of things was at fault. While Firestone took the fallout, it was possibly Ford (or both) with the blame.
Interesting things to note (pardon me if I screw up some of these):
All the tire failures/rollovers happened in the Southern US during the Summertime, and in other areas with high temperatures.
All failures occurred when there was only a single passenger in the car. In all the rollover cases, there was nothing substational in the trunk as well.
The model of SUV that was rolling over had a higher-than-average center of gravity even among SUV's. As mentioned in the news many times recently, SUVs in general are more likely to roll over due to their high center of gravity, and the model in question being even higher than the SUV average did not help it either.
Assembling a tire involves multiple types of rubber+metal (for the radials). Putting together a tire involves "blind" assemblies of various types of rubber along with the radial belt, preventing inspection various assembly steps to verify they were done properly. And of course, various types of materials (when forced together) like to seperate apart and/or react chemically over time, especially with extreme temperatures.
Deflating a tire (as Ford suggested) to prevent it from imploding/exploding actually may be the wrong thing to do. Studies suggest underinflated tires are more likely to implode/go flat/etc.
The only tire ever to implode in all of the cases was the front, driver's-side(?) tire. (I'm not sure which one, but it was always the same.)
That's all I'll say on the topic. IANACE (Car Expert), so I'll leave the nitty-gritty details to the professionals. The only humorous thing I'll mention is that shop dealers tell me it is the richest people who tend to ask for the cheapest tires; "What do you mean my $40,000+ super-expensive convertable requires a $300+ set of tires?"
And how do we know that you, my friend, are not part of the conspiracy to cover this up?
(/me puts on a tinfoil hat on to protect themself from the programming rays put out by the government that they learned to produce from the Du'horti that they learned from the Ma'khal that they learned from the J'dar that are really in control of us all!)
Pardon me for taking the side of the enemy, but the Florida lawyer who sued to have a state-appointted guardian watch the child completely destroyed any chance of us seeing if the child was a real clone, much less seeing if the *second* alleged clone child (remember that one?) in the Netherlands is real. If said lawyer does not take his argument to completion, and convinces the court to force CloneAid to identify the child and mother, there is no way in hell they will, as the bonds between child (even a clone) and mother are quite strong and not something to underestimate or toy with.
Granted, this was a predictable move, and gives the Raelians a perfectly good excuse not to have the child DNA tested unless the court forces them to. But we only saw that once in the media, and they'll be certain *never* to say that again </sarcasm>.
I think what needs to be clarified (which the article does not explain) is what a "processing unit" really is. Is it 100,000 static (non-changing) pages, 100,000 fully database-driven dynamic pages where each page needs a dozen SQL queries, or somewhere in-between? Let's not even start counting how many images a page may or may not have, their sizes, etc.
Ideally, the study itself has that information. But all we have here is a derived article lacking it.
TCO is always a murky thing to calculate. While it is obviously desirable to purchase something that costs less, errors always seem to sneak into TCO calculations that make them meaningless.
This would be yet another "slippery slope" thing. Junior depressed, and being beat up in school? No problem! Just attach one of these devices on him no bigger than a pacemarker and he'll feel real good about being beat up! Attach one to the bully too to calm him down! Watch as the two drugged students exchange medication needles in a peace truce!
Perhaps I'm going overboard above, but there is a limit to what automatically administered medications can do. And even if you could keep your soldier up for four days on no-doze, chances are high you would have trouble keeping him/her up the fifth as medication tolerance sneaks in.
However, in New Jersey (and possibly other states?), if you own a vehicle seen passing a stopped school bus, the bus driver can write down your license plate. The police then will send a ticket via mail to the owner of the vehicle.
In order to avoid prosecution (and a lot of points on your license), you must show that you were not the one driving. They then go ticket that person.
There was also a case in New York where a car was seized and sold off by New York City due to someone other than the owner driving it drunk. The owner of the car appealed, since she was not expecting the driver to be where he was, or him driving drunk at all (he had no history of alchol abuse). She still lost the court case, as well as the car.
Several states are considering and/or implementing similar laws.
1. I didn't live on campus last quarter; rather, I found out about the opensource group when they made headlines earlier this year. I then visited them at the activities fair.
2. I agree that no single-user development IDE I know of matches Microsoft's Visual Studio. It's great in that it looks up possible function parameters, but there are a number of things about it I find annoying as well (at least as of VS 6).
3. The opensource group is thinking about doing a project themselves, but where that is a good guess. Given that OSU is a big IP school, and the club is funded by OSU, it becomes a question as to who owns the resulting code.
4. NTsig also likely gets some OSU funding, and as you can guess, an awful lot from Microsoft (if NTsig is like some other school's, I wouldn't be surprised if certain NTsig members were paid, especially with a Columbus MS office). It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison; one has minimal support funding, the other gets tons (although not as much as the religious groups; at least one goes through over a million dollars per year!).
Any development MS software or the Xbox costs more if it was not donated than what the opensource group gets funded to do in a year. With nearly weekly meetings, we have to ration when we get pizza, etc., and when we don't.
5. I can tell you a group opensource software install day is planned for Saturday, January 18th. That is, unless someone changed it behind my back:)
6. Yes, the campus email system can seem funky. Sometimes, mail clears quickly, but sometimes it does not.
As a grad student (with quota on the ECE mail system), I have the OSU EE mail server forward to the ECE department's one so I can use IMAP and access it in various places. This past weekend, several of us noticed we didn't get any messages since Friday. I sent myself an email directly to the main OSU mail system Sunday morning, and didn't get it for over 24 hours (although the timestamps suggested otherwise). Why this happened is anyone's question.
Umm... As a member of the Ohio State University open-source group, I can say we do an awful lot! It might all be a matter of opinion, but we definitely already have a number of events planned for next quarter.
And don't think we're lightweight open source users either; if you haven't noticed, at least OSU OSS one member, Colin Walters, has been mentioned on Slashdottwice. And he's not the only person in the group with high-level access to a major open-source project; we also have at least one other Debian developer, as well as a Gnome one.
The problem with OSU clubs in general is finding out what they're up to; I, for instance, don't get any IEEE event information, and hence thought for a long time that they were doing nothing as well.
If you want to see what the group is up to; subscribe to our mailing list (general or announcements only), and/or come to a meeting. We do not list meetings on the web site's front page, but every meeting has been listed in the events section, flyered around Dresse, and sent out to both email lists.
Granted, NTsig can give you free Microsoft software, so if you're into MS, you're better off with them (although you can join both). Rumor has it that many NTsig members think the opensource group is more into their cause, although that may just be rumor.
(The preceding was written by an OSU OSS member; not an officer.)
Umm... I wouldn't count on that. Some big communication conglomerates have club stations at many of their offices.
Thanks to vanity callsigns in the US, Motorola, for example, has the club callsigns K9MOT, KE9MOT, KM0TO, W7MOT, 4Z4HX (Israel), VE7MDI (Canada), and others. Many of these sites have their own radios, repeaters, etc.
And no, I don't work for Motorola; I'm just using them as an example since they don't mind having such Amateur Radio clubs onsite. This information is not secret; anyone can search for it.
I agree though that in some areas the Amateur Radio bands may seem quite dead. However, I assure you that in certain areas (such as well around New York City), there is a lot of activity.
It just might prevent arguments like "But HAM radios aren't on the list, so I just figured I could talk to my trucker buddies as I flew overhead!"
Wouldn't it be more likely for people to be using Citizens Band (CB) radios to contact truckers? While I know some truckers that are hams, most are not. Us hams have to go through all sorts of hoops to keep CB users from using our equipment; mind you, they are trivial things, but all too often someone buys ham radio equipment that is not licensed and goes off on a tangent.
In any case, while ham (amateur) radios are allowed on planes with permission, I doubt your 5 Watt CB signal is going to go very far (if it is allowed on planes at all). Besides, you're not allowed to use CB radios to send a message more than 100 miles, which means unless you're following that truck, you're going to lose them awfuly quickly.
The credit (or lack thereof) given to the inventor or discoverer throughout history has always been to the one that speaks loudest to the commons. We all know the debate that Columbus did not "discover" America, as there were plenty of people there first.
A lesser known example but just as true is was the fight between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over who invented the telephone (Google other resources). In that battle, Bell filed a patent and Gray filed his caveat (intent to file a patent) the same day.
Sadly, we all too commonly think that a "single" person or firm must have invented something, while others often have inventions that predate them. It's no wonder the patent office is getting confused (although they really should try cutting down on the duplicates).
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it is largely isolated from the main Internet, since there are a lot of restrictions as to what can be done with Amateur Radio (no commercial use, no swearing, etc.) as opposed to the Internet at large.
Copyright of a platform? I think you mean their actual BIOS routines themselves. If they could copyright the actual platform, Compaq and Pheonix would never have been able to offer an alternative to IBM's XT. Intel's x86 CPU instruction likewise never could have been mimiced with independant code.
Rulings like the two above in favor of the clone makers allowed the PC clone market to exist. Otherwise, there would be no real competition nowadays.
Interestingly enough, bleem! was winning their court case at the time they decided to settle. They had won most of the preliminary motions, and were about to go to trial.
I personally do not know why bleem didn't just finish the case. It ended right before the jury was about to hear the case, just like Sony v. Connectix did.
(Disclaimer: I used to be close to some of the bleem people, although I haven't spoken to them in years.)
IEEE Spectrum Magazine's topic for the month of May is "Invasion of the Music Snatchers." A number of copying and filesharing attacks and counterattacks are discussed.
Many of this month's articles are online, but if you are not an IEEE member you are limited to the "publicfeature" URL's.
One time when I logged onto my PPPoE DSL provider about a week or two ago, I saw my DSL modem's activity light blink reguarly. At the same time, my firewall started dropping 2-3 packets per second coming from at least a dozen spread out IP addresses, all directed to the same TCP port number on the IP address I currently was given.
Being adventerous, I told netcat to listen to the TCP port in question. It turns out that the clients wanted to send me HTTP-ish Gnutella requests. A variety of clients were used/spoofed (Limewire/Gnutella/etc.). All wanted some random combination of the words "Gay Sex P0rn" and similar.
I tried to get the systems to stop sending me packets by telling my firewall to actively reject any packets sent to the TCP port in question. That did not stop them. I tried spoofing various HTTP-style errors; that also did not work.
I tried to get my ISP to reassign me to an new IP address (by disconnecting my PPPoE client and reconnecting a few minutes later), but it did not work at the time. Giving up, I left my firewall up on my DSL connection on to see if these packets would ever stop.
But they did not.
By the time I shut down this experiment, I had logged over 30,000 connection requests to the TCP port in quesiton in 20 hours. Total data sent in connect requests by the attacker: about 2 MB.
Its a shame I didn't keep the logs for that date. It was amusing at the time.
(Obvious disclaimer: I do not have Gnutella nor any peer2peer shared files on my machines.)
Perry, Tekla S. and Geppert, Linda. "Do Portable Electronics Endanger Flight? The Evidence Mounts". IEEE Spectrum Magazine, September 1996.
I quickly found two cases in this this article where navigation equipment was affected: one with a laptop computer, and another when approximately 25 people on a flight from Denver, Colorado to Newark, New Jersey were all using portable radios to listen to a football game. The CD player was just part of a theoretical thing at the beginning.
This isn't anything new for Dell. They have played this game before. Anyone remember their standard yet non-standard "ATX" power supplies?
Out of fairness, newer Macintoshes also have standard yet non-standard power supplies. And back in the days of 286's, lots of manufactuers had their own connectors for everything from keyboards to memory.
Three years ago, I had a CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data - 19.2 kbps) Internet connection for my contract work. While I could do anything anywhere, it was slow - slower than a 28.8 modem, as should be obvious.
Fortunately for me, my wireless ISP offered a Venturi proxy. Routing web browsing, POP3, etc. through it, while still slow, became more bearable.
Retrieving log data (easily compressible) through the Venturi proxy had incredible speedups. For some tasks, the compression proxy made me feel like I was on dialup again.
Of course, the proxy could not cure CDPD's high latency - working in SSH sessions was painful.
There kind of already is this for online comics. Modern Tales is an online comic site that requires you to pay to access their archives. The profits (after overhead) are then distributed amongst the artists using the site according to how often each one's works were viewed.
There also is the concept of "premium" specialized online comic hosting. Keenspace offers such a service, as well as the ability for viewers to pay not to see advertisements (User Friendly offers this as well).
Of course, not all online comic artists like to operate under such a scheme. Rocket Box Comics is a site created by a number of artists dedicated to keeping comics freely available online.
In any case, if you like your "local" online artists, support them! I personally have probably sent over $200 to at least 5-7 people in order to support their site, purchase their limited-print books, etc. The best thing you can do for any artist is to support them; some artists even have set threshold where they will just work on comics full-time if they make at least X amount of money per month online.
Keep in mind that the alleged document is draft legislation. It may be that everyone has put what they want in it, and it will be tempered down before it is handed to Congress.
It also might be yet another proposal where a group proposes something insane in order to gain more minor consessions. If so, hopefully Congress will recognize when someone keeps crying "wolf" that the wolf may not be there.
But what if the "wolf" does come along and someone says "if we had X, we could have caught them before this disaster." What should Congress do then?
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I never stated that MS paid for everything NTsig wanted. I just stated that MS seems to provide the majority of NTsig's funding. Granted, you can assume that software giveaways, etc., technically cost near-nothing, but at retail-value, NTsig's membership fees are a drop in its operating bucket.
Clearly, since NTsig states they have about 200 members, and the club charges $5/member/year, NTsig takes in about $1000 per year that could be used to purchase items like pizza, disc drives, etc. But when you (or the previous Anonymous Coward) state that one contest alone is offering $10,000 in prizes, there clearly is a lot more funding coming in.
As yet another Ohio State person, I wonder why no one seems to have linked to the contest in question yet. I'm not too worried about OSU's bandwidth since I have some idea of their network topology (multiple backbones, etc.).
Personally, I've always wondered how NTsig (the group running the contest), can claim "not to be fully funded by Microsoft(tm)". Even when charging $5 per year per person, NTsig will be giving away over $10,000 in prizes for this contest, has regularly handed out thousands of dollars worth of MS software, and gave out a few Xboxes last quarter too. Furthermore, it is known that at least one NTsig officer is paid by Microsoft to run the club. Hence, I cannot say that the club is unbiased.
I attend a class at OSU where the professor teaching it has a large Microsoft grant. He has more MS servers than he knows what to do with (one hit by the latest SQL worm), a Tablet PC, a video projector, etc. -- all allegedly paid for by Microsoft. While he seems to be teaching the course fairly, he did add .NET alongside the Java portions this year. The same professor freely admits he still sees plenty more Java than .NET use, however.
Just to be fair, I'll link to the Ohio State Open Source Club too, although on a $300 per year budget, they can't be that significant, can they? :)
As another proposal submitter from the first round, I would like to point out that there are a variety of proposals put forth by commenters on the table. If you find that you are more comfortable supporting a proposal other than the EFF's, more than one proposal, or a combination of several people's proposals, you may freely comment about as few or as many proposals as you choose. If you disagree with a proposal, and wish to have it modified to make it acceptable to you, you may comment about what changes you feel need to be made as well.
To state the obvious: DO NOT COMMENT BLINDLY WITHOUT READING THE RULES. Before I wrote my proposal of possible exclusions, I spent several days simply doing research on what was accepted/not accepted during the previous cycle. I also read the details of what was wanted during the current comment request, and the results of the prior comment period. Doing so greatly helped me tailor my arguments to better address what was being looked for.
Another issue you should note: THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE WANTS TO SEE REAL EVIDENCE THAT NEAR-TERM HARM WILL OCCUR UNLESS AN EXCLUSION IS GRANTED. Contrary to what many slashdotters' think, the copyright office is being very good as to telling us what they want. If you comment during this reply period, *please* provide real-world examples as to why an exclusion should be granted/not granted/granted in modified form/etc. Simply stating "if this is not granted, I will not be able to enjoy my l33t p0rn" likely will not sway anyone to your cause.
Finally, BE SURE TO CITE ALL SOURCES YOU USE SO EVERYONE CAN CONFIRM THE HARM YOU DESCRIBE IS REAL. By doing so, you prove you did your homework, that you read previous commenters' work, and your comment *will* stand out as being from an intelligent person. Try to get reliable sources that have not been used before; simply repeating previously used evidence will not get you very far.
This article seems to call these systems Maintenance Decision Support Systems (MDSS). But the term I am used to seeing is Road Weather Information System (RWIS), which are used for the same reasons. I guess that RWIS's could be part of MDSS's; Pennsylvania (as well as other states) use theirs to help predict where to send snowplows, etc.
RWIS's are also often found online. Pennsylvania's RWIS is online here. You can click on any region, click on a station, and get live video, if the road is wet ("chemcial wet"==salted), what the temperature/wind speed is, etc. Pennsylvania also has self-salting bridges in a few spots; I don't know of any in other states, but it just might be me.
Ohio (not listed as an MDSS member) also has their own RWIS system (also called RWIS), although it presently covers only a few select areas.
I should note that even if you check a RWIS/MDSS, be aware that weather conditions can change quickly. The National Weather Service and the MDSS/RWIN you use might show only light snow, but don't be surprised if you have to seek shelter in a hotel overnight.
It is very easy to rig a bid, and it happens all the time. You cannot do government work and not know how to phrase a quote to get what you want; otherwise, purchasing (and/or the bidders) may do some rather amusing things.
Consider the following contract proposal: "I want a spreadsheet program that has X number of wizards to assist me, support for importing the exact format list shown in attachment A, and a hologram on the CD as well as the 'Certificate of Authenticity'." Staroffice/Openoffice would not match this. Very few (if not only one) programs would match this bid spec. Hence, if my buddy wrote program Y that matched this spec, he likely would win.
One word in a quote can make all the difference. My High School once put out a bid spec for "cabinets"; the winning bidder used fiberboard (wood shavings glued together) to make them. For some strange reason, all future cabinet quotes asked for "solid wood". If you know anything about fiberboard, you can guess why.
Ideally, purchasing should catch the super ludicrous specs (i.e. "The product's name must start with 'O', end with 'E', and have six letters"), but unless purchasing is savvy in your area, strange things get through and other things get mangled.
Of course, I once was on a team that came up with a server that cost less than what our primary contractor required, got three quotes to prove it was true, and still had purchasing ask the primary contractor to price match the spec, which they did (although not with the proper configuration -- we sent it back). So I am a bit biased.
I took a week-long root cause analysis class which centered itself around the Firestone/Ford issue. Mind you, I'm not going to repeat the whole procedure here; you can look it up yourself.
Our class' conclusion (mind you, obviously biased) that a combination of things was at fault. While Firestone took the fallout, it was possibly Ford (or both) with the blame.
Interesting things to note (pardon me if I screw up some of these):
That's all I'll say on the topic. IANACE (Car Expert), so I'll leave the nitty-gritty details to the professionals. The only humorous thing I'll mention is that shop dealers tell me it is the richest people who tend to ask for the cheapest tires; "What do you mean my $40,000+ super-expensive convertable requires a $300+ set of tires?"
And how do we know that you, my friend, are not part of the conspiracy to cover this up?
(/me puts on a tinfoil hat on to protect themself from the programming rays put out by the government that they learned to produce from the Du'horti that they learned from the Ma'khal that they learned from the J'dar that are really in control of us all!)
Pardon me for taking the side of the enemy, but the Florida lawyer who sued to have a state-appointted guardian watch the child completely destroyed any chance of us seeing if the child was a real clone, much less seeing if the *second* alleged clone child (remember that one?) in the Netherlands is real. If said lawyer does not take his argument to completion, and convinces the court to force CloneAid to identify the child and mother, there is no way in hell they will, as the bonds between child (even a clone) and mother are quite strong and not something to underestimate or toy with.
Granted, this was a predictable move, and gives the Raelians a perfectly good excuse not to have the child DNA tested unless the court forces them to. But we only saw that once in the media, and they'll be certain *never* to say that again </sarcasm>.
I think what needs to be clarified (which the article does not explain) is what a "processing unit" really is. Is it 100,000 static (non-changing) pages, 100,000 fully database-driven dynamic pages where each page needs a dozen SQL queries, or somewhere in-between? Let's not even start counting how many images a page may or may not have, their sizes, etc.
Ideally, the study itself has that information. But all we have here is a derived article lacking it.
TCO is always a murky thing to calculate. While it is obviously desirable to purchase something that costs less, errors always seem to sneak into TCO calculations that make them meaningless.
Reply or moderate... I think I'll reply.
This would be yet another "slippery slope" thing. Junior depressed, and being beat up in school? No problem! Just attach one of these devices on him no bigger than a pacemarker and he'll feel real good about being beat up! Attach one to the bully too to calm him down! Watch as the two drugged students exchange medication needles in a peace truce!
Perhaps I'm going overboard above, but there is a limit to what automatically administered medications can do. And even if you could keep your soldier up for four days on no-doze, chances are high you would have trouble keeping him/her up the fifth as medication tolerance sneaks in.
However, in New Jersey (and possibly other states?), if you own a vehicle seen passing a stopped school bus, the bus driver can write down your license plate. The police then will send a ticket via mail to the owner of the vehicle.
In order to avoid prosecution (and a lot of points on your license), you must show that you were not the one driving. They then go ticket that person.
There was also a case in New York where a car was seized and sold off by New York City due to someone other than the owner driving it drunk. The owner of the car appealed, since she was not expecting the driver to be where he was, or him driving drunk at all (he had no history of alchol abuse). She still lost the court case, as well as the car.
Several states are considering and/or implementing similar laws.
1. I didn't live on campus last quarter; rather, I found out about the opensource group when they made headlines earlier this year. I then visited them at the activities fair.
2. I agree that no single-user development IDE I know of matches Microsoft's Visual Studio. It's great in that it looks up possible function parameters, but there are a number of things about it I find annoying as well (at least as of VS 6).
3. The opensource group is thinking about doing a project themselves, but where that is a good guess. Given that OSU is a big IP school, and the club is funded by OSU, it becomes a question as to who owns the resulting code.
4. NTsig also likely gets some OSU funding, and as you can guess, an awful lot from Microsoft (if NTsig is like some other school's, I wouldn't be surprised if certain NTsig members were paid, especially with a Columbus MS office). It's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison; one has minimal support funding, the other gets tons (although not as much as the religious groups; at least one goes through over a million dollars per year!).
Any development MS software or the Xbox costs more if it was not donated than what the opensource group gets funded to do in a year. With nearly weekly meetings, we have to ration when we get pizza, etc., and when we don't.
5. I can tell you a group opensource software install day is planned for Saturday, January 18th. That is, unless someone changed it behind my back :)
6. Yes, the campus email system can seem funky. Sometimes, mail clears quickly, but sometimes it does not.
As a grad student (with quota on the ECE mail system), I have the OSU EE mail server forward to the ECE department's one so I can use IMAP and access it in various places. This past weekend, several of us noticed we didn't get any messages since Friday. I sent myself an email directly to the main OSU mail system Sunday morning, and didn't get it for over 24 hours (although the timestamps suggested otherwise). Why this happened is anyone's question.
Umm... As a member of the Ohio State University open-source group, I can say we do an awful lot! It might all be a matter of opinion, but we definitely already have a number of events planned for next quarter.
And don't think we're lightweight open source users either; if you haven't noticed, at least OSU OSS one member, Colin Walters, has been mentioned on Slashdot twice. And he's not the only person in the group with high-level access to a major open-source project; we also have at least one other Debian developer, as well as a Gnome one.
The problem with OSU clubs in general is finding out what they're up to; I, for instance, don't get any IEEE event information, and hence thought for a long time that they were doing nothing as well.
If you want to see what the group is up to; subscribe to our mailing list (general or announcements only), and/or come to a meeting. We do not list meetings on the web site's front page, but every meeting has been listed in the events section, flyered around Dresse, and sent out to both email lists.
Granted, NTsig can give you free Microsoft software, so if you're into MS, you're better off with them (although you can join both). Rumor has it that many NTsig members think the opensource group is more into their cause, although that may just be rumor.
(The preceding was written by an OSU OSS member; not an officer.)
Umm... I wouldn't count on that. Some big communication conglomerates have club stations at many of their offices.
Thanks to vanity callsigns in the US, Motorola, for example, has the club callsigns K9MOT, KE9MOT, KM0TO, W7MOT, 4Z4HX (Israel), VE7MDI (Canada), and others. Many of these sites have their own radios, repeaters, etc.
And no, I don't work for Motorola; I'm just using them as an example since they don't mind having such Amateur Radio clubs onsite. This information is not secret; anyone can search for it.
I agree though that in some areas the Amateur Radio bands may seem quite dead. However, I assure you that in certain areas (such as well around New York City), there is a lot of activity.
It just might prevent arguments like "But HAM radios aren't on the list, so I just figured I could talk to my trucker buddies as I flew overhead!"
Wouldn't it be more likely for people to be using Citizens Band (CB) radios to contact truckers? While I know some truckers that are hams, most are not. Us hams have to go through all sorts of hoops to keep CB users from using our equipment; mind you, they are trivial things, but all too often someone buys ham radio equipment that is not licensed and goes off on a tangent.
In any case, while ham (amateur) radios are allowed on planes with permission, I doubt your 5 Watt CB signal is going to go very far (if it is allowed on planes at all). Besides, you're not allowed to use CB radios to send a message more than 100 miles, which means unless you're following that truck, you're going to lose them awfuly quickly.
The credit (or lack thereof) given to the inventor or discoverer throughout history has always been to the one that speaks loudest to the commons. We all know the debate that Columbus did not "discover" America, as there were plenty of people there first.
A lesser known example but just as true is was the fight between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over who invented the telephone (Google other resources). In that battle, Bell filed a patent and Gray filed his caveat (intent to file a patent) the same day.
Sadly, we all too commonly think that a "single" person or firm must have invented something, while others often have inventions that predate them. It's no wonder the patent office is getting confused (although they really should try cutting down on the duplicates).