Bah, forgot something: Flights have origins and destinations, don't they?
The flight of Jean Pierre Blanchard started at 6th Street & Walnut Street in Philadelphia, PA. Fifteen miles & 56 minutes later, he landed in was is now Deptford, NJ between the "R.C.A. Parts 8 Accessories Plant" and Big Timber Creek. Jean also carried a letter signed by President Washington in order to alleviate the fears of people seeing him land.
Source is here. Searching google for "Deptford, NJ First flight" also works well.
Well, if you want to get into those sort of technicalities, the first flight in the United States of a balloon-powered aircraft was done by French balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard on January 9, 1793. The location was Woodbury, NJ, which is now considered Deptford, NJ.
Its a bit hard not to know this fact since the town painted it on its water tower:)
My brother had a Compaq laptop which started to have hard drive problems. After a complete reformat, we found that the "Recovery CD" would not recover, and was spitting out random error messages.
A support call into Compaq told us that the recovery CD supplied with the laptop did not have all the information. It relied on a secondary partition (which is visable, virus infectable, etc.) in order to complete a restore.
Fortunately, they were willing to send out a two-CD repair set. A week later and several hours worth of things installing/backing up in seemingly the most awkward way possible, my brother's system was working again.
And while doing some support tech work, I did indeed setup some IBM computers that came with no visable restore functionality at all.
The last time I tried ALSA (0.9.0beta9) with a Sound Blaster Live!, I was confounded with the way they presented the mixer setup. It provided me with dozens of individual effect and audio sends, "mutes" that actually turned things on, confusingly named controls for laypeople, etc. While their wavetable MIDI worked for the most part, I have songs that suddenly mute one or more channels, with notes always cut short (no sustains).
Fortunately, the wonderful thing about the Linux kernel is that one can often find alternative (OSS_Free, etc.) drivers. I'm not putting ALSA down; I like how it is progressing, and it has the wavetable support that the OSS Free-style driver presently lacks. Hopefully ALSA's inclusion into 2.5 will help coax more people to find bugs, add cards, and fix problems.
(Before anyone flames me, I did file bug reports to ALSA. Many projects seems to be drowning in them; if you want to get into open source development and cannot code, perhaps you could help verify reported bugs!)
Let's be realistic here. Linux zealots constantly state that no one can implement copy protection on Linux because anyone can work around it. Since programs can not easily distinguish sockets to other programs from sockets to sound cards or video cards (although I suspect to some extent one can) anything is theoretically copyable, right?
The biggest recognized Linux brand name known to the public-at-large is Red Hat. If AOL was able to convince Red Hat to incorporate a binary-only security system into their distribution, then Linux-loving people could not easily cry that their favorite operating system could not support digital rights management.
One of the easiest ways to "convince" someone to do something is to be their boss.
Note that Winamp (another AOL acquisition) already supports multiple secure formats, and bypasses insecure output/effects plugins as appropriate.
No, I am not trolling. This message was written using a Linux box. Trademarks used in this message belong to their holders; yada yada yada, etc.
As I said in an earlier message (which is playing hard to find), I knew someone from India living in the United States. He made minimum wage to make his way though college. His father was one of the top engineers in an Indian company. Guess who had the higher salary? My friend, not his father.
A $15,000 yearly salary in other countries is enough to make one live like a king. In India (I've been told; perhaps someone can comment), a $15,000 U.S.-equivalent salary is enough to have a personal cook prepare your lunch, and a personal servant bring it to your workplace.
$15,000 may seem like a lot to many students, but there are countries out there where people make $1.50 an hour or less. Companies make items abroad where it is cheaper yet attempt to sell said items abroad in the same countries at U.S. pricing.
Personally, I'm predicting a severe devaluation in the U.S. dollar to come sometime within the next century or so; one cannot price an item at price A in country X and price B in Y without a third party Z coming along and moving the item from A to B at a lower cost. Given that most other currencies are worth less than the United States', the dollar likely will be devalued as we start kicking and screaming and wondering why.
If you watch MST3K on the Sci-Fi channel, the last episode to be shown on television will be December 29th. For more information on this, go the the official fan club site and scroll down to "THE FINAL SCHEDULE". Sci-Fi has not renewed their contract to show episodes past January. Even if they did, they could only show reruns; the set has long since been torn down and sold on Ebay.
My karma is high enough, please do not give more. That includes negative amounts.
Bleem themselves made a good explanation of why they were not 100% compatible. You can find it here. Instead of emulating the Playstation(tm) hardware exactly, they opted to use native x86 code to mimic known Playstation functions they could decipher.
In order to support all Playstation(tm) functions and be 100% compatible, you must know everything the Playstation can do. Keep in mind there are at least four Playstation models, each with their own quirks. Bleem either (1) would have to reproduce Sony(tm)'s hardware and software exactly (very difficult and legally risky) or (2) mimic everything they figured out with completely new code. They did the latter, which in theory has better results over the long run but caused problems in the short term.
A few vendors likely used their own libraries instead of Sony's, making their life difficult. Just using basic statistics, one can see it is easier for bleem to support one game under these conditions than 400 or even 40.
It sad to see bleem go. Besides the fact they were actually challenging the rights of a large firm to deny others the rights to make a compatible product, their court case would have been a modern confirmation of our rights to reverse-engineer. Without such a case, the DMCA and SSSCA may reduce engineering education to textbook theory and looking at encrypted singals with equipment that cannot decode them.
PayPal is *not* an Escrow service!
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The PayPal Phenomenon
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· Score: 2, Insightful
A large number of people here have complained about how PayPal refuses to handle complaints about merchandise either not being sent or arriving in poor condition. While PayPal politely handles some of these cases, they are no means obligated by their terms to handle them all.
The fact of the matter is that PayPal is a money transfer agent. They are the electronic version of Western Union. Money transfer agents basically take money from one person, charge a fee, and then give the remainder to another. While they may have some fraud guarantees, they do not normally handle merchandise disputes. They just move money from one place to another, and then their job is done.
What people here seem to consider PayPal to be is an escrow service. An escrow service takes money from person A plus a fee, and then notifies person B that the escrow service has money from person A meant for them. Person B then sends the merchandise, which Person A inspects. If Person A is not satisfied, they send the merchandise back to Person B. Otherwise (ideally), Person B gets paid.
Escrow services endure a lot more risk than a money transfer agent does. They deal with a higher risk of fraud, and take more measures to compensate for this. PayPal does not consider themselves to be an escrow service. PayPal's own FAQ says so.
Examples of *real* online escrow services include Escrow.com and Tradenable. Note that I have not used either of these, so buyer/seller beware.
Keep in mind that in most of Europe, businesses can not just freely sell your information to the highest bidder. A recent CNN/Money article listed seven infomation "brokerage" firms that an American needed to contact to get off most mailing lists. Even then, if your information was originally on one of these lists, someone has already purchased it.
In Europe, most citizens would not let businesses get that far out of hand. Of course, many Americans would argue that comes at the expense of a loss of other rights by citizens as well.
Europe's privacy rules reguarding information are so strict that they actually considered *stopping* doing business with the United States. "Fortunately," they decided to let individual businesses dictate their privacy policies in the US in order to business with their European counterparts.
Instead of a wakeup call, it seems that influcence has caused many to fall asleep at the wheel. Too much of this is asking for an accident.
Not Quite. Assume that company PQR can hire an engineer at a $40K per year salary. To hire them at this salary, it costs them $20K in overhead/benefits (actually quite low). If they do not spend $60K per year on an engineer, they can afford to purchase 300 full Windows XP Professional licenses ($200 each) or 120 full MS Office Professional licenses ($500 each) at almost no discount. Now which would you prefer PQR to do every year? Hire a person, or buy copies of Windows?
Say that another large company named TUV spent $50K on Windows NT licenses and another $100K-150K developing an in-house shopping application on it. Total initial expendatures: about $150-200 thousand. Total yearly revenue coming in from this system: $1 million dollars. (I am ignoring engineer's salaries, etc. for the sake of simplicity; in the real world, these are quite signifcant.)
As you can see, the cost to purchase the NT licenses for the servers were a drop in their revenue bucket. Even if they spend $30K per year keeping their NT license and support contracts current, they have no immediate reason to switch. NT license maintance costs them 5% of their incoming earnings; while significant, it really is not that bad.
Assume that Joe Admin has decided their server system over to Linux. There is no initial cost for a Linux distribution and no maintance cost. Say they splurge and spend $5K for a major, top notch Red Hat support contract. Assume application conversion costs are negligable. This means that they are saving $25K per year over the NT option in the long run.
However, they have no guarantee that their converted system will work under heavy loads. Their NT system was known to scale somewhat poorly, but without a real, full-sized userbase to really pound a system.
Given that the $30K yearly support contract for their NT servers was 3% of that year's revenue and the fact that the Linux support cost 0.5% of revenue, there is little incentive to save 2.5% more of your revenue when you might risk everything to a new system!
Now I admit that these numbers may seem random, but they are based on what I know is going on in industry. I am aware of no large location where Microsoft licensing comprises more than 10% of their operating cost. This is why many large firms fail to see a reason to change. Smaller firms which do not get the deep discounts that the larger ones have exceed the 10% margin and look for alternatives.
The financial markets are a slightly different story. They looked to open source solutions because they couldn't find what they needed commercially. They need large, stable solutions; even if NT gave them a 99.9% uptime, they would demand better. It does you no good to reject a consumer's purchase because you can not check a balance.
Eventually, the penny-pinchers in large companies will see they can save money in the long term with a conversion to open source. But this will take time. Why gamble your house on a factor you do not know when you know the odds of an existing bet?
If I knew I had a system that at least partially worked to my benefit, would I scrap it for a complete unknown overnight? I hightly doubt I would. If I could, I would attempt to fully stabilize the system I knew partially worked.
Microsoft has promised they can do this with Windows. To a large extent, they have delivered.
Why is everyone expecting businesses to risk their livelyhood for an operating system they hardly know? Wait until Linux makes some more headway into things; then we should see Linux used by larger and more significant businesses (and hopefully we will).
Some hotels I've seen in the United States have televisions/cable boxes with a built in SNES of sorts. The controllers attached to the unit are derived from SNES units, and the units play SNES games.
Unfortunately for the consumer, these units do not simply take SNES cartridges; instead, they download games over the cable network. To use these, you typically pay per hour of usage. I wanted to play with one of these once; but its hourly rate was prohibitive (even for most parents).
Every automobile manufactured since 1990 or so has a computer in it. Your gas pedal really does not control gas flow directly; instead it is a potentiometer that sends a signal to a computer. Some cars even use specialized PowerPC chips. The operating systems cars use are highly stable; blue screens of death in vehicles really could mean death. I know someone who had a car computer failure while on the highway; trust me, it isn't something you want to go through.
Anyways, IANAL, but note claims #1-7 all relate to claim #1, which requires the device in question to "control operation of components in the vehicle." As long as your device does not do anything that could be considered controlling how the vehicle directly operates (speed direction, etc.), you likely are fine. #8 describes many vehicles with multiple processors interconnected. The "client" could be as simple as the warning lights on your dashboard.
#9-#19 all point to #9, which matches what existing vehicles do. A "support" module could be a sensor, a "faceplate" module could again be warning lights on the dashboard, and the "computer" module could be the car engine controlling processor. #20 again requires a "vehicle related" application; I again read this as needing to be something critical to the operation of the vehicle that it could not function without.
If MS can prove to a court that MP3 players, radios, etc., are "vehicle related" just because they *might* be used in a vehicle, I'd just appeal by asking the judge if celluar phones are "vehicle related." These devices often are multi-function, etc., need to be made cheap, and if MS went after the cell phone manufactuers, we might actually see a good legal fight.
A civilian differential GPS reciever always was able to do better than what selective availabilty should have allowed. These units gave (and still give) accuracies within 15 meters or so. Given a Loran compensation reciever (used to pick up posititioning signals meant for boats), one can improve on this accuracy by using additional known transmitters located at ground-based reference points.
If you want "new" GPS units that were recently releaesd in the past year or so, look for units with the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). Implemented alongside with the FAA, these units rely on two additional satilite signals for an average accuracy of three meters.
The biggest obstacle to amateur radio being used for this purpose is licensing. Everyone who operates a transmitter on this theoretical network would need to be licensed. It might be possible for your kids or wife to use the system if you are present (third party traffic), but that's no good when you're not around.
I'll reiterate that no encrypted connections would be tolerated, but if you send your music in MIDI form, some people would consider that acceptable. As far as "commercial stuff goes," recent rulings have suggested that everything except the actual sale may be conducted online; some clubs run "Swap n' Shops," etc.
Yes, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. No, do not take this as gospel; I have study books from various years that contradict each other. Amateur radio frequencies likely won't be up for grabs anytime soon; they are used for emergency management and are partially regulated by the International Telecomuncations Union.
For more information on Internet and ham radio, visit ampr.org. Everything 44.*.*.* online has been an amateur radio station since the 1970's. Note that most of these (to be legal) do not allow you access to their systems. That could qualify as unauthorized operation of a radio tranmitter on their part.
And if you want to know how over 350 amateur radio operators worked over 5000 man-hours helping in the aftermath of September 11th, go here.
Seriously? The Senator has done something it seems people here actually consider reasonable. If you are a constituent of his, why don't you send him your thanks and tell him you did a good job? Lobbyists do not wait for a crisis; they're sending him mail 24/7.
If you want to tell him something additional along these lines (you feel that US crypto export controls only hamper the US, etc.) tell him it as well; he's much more likely to listen to your additional arguments as long as they go along with his current course of action.
I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.
Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.
This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.
Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.
While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?
Judging from the comments, one would think we would have realized by now that you occasionally *call home* or *call work* on occasion.
If your home or work number has stayed the same for a while, you likely have prior art on them. It would be funny if a million slashdotters suddenly sued them for big bucks for trying to make money on a number they've called for years...
Anyways, kudos to them. I like this copyright trick.
Read any Federal United States form that is covered under the Privacy Act. Much of the information on those forms is considered "optional." Your social security number, address etc., can be left off many forms, and said forms would still be considered complete.
However, without said information, your eligibilty for aid, employment, etc., quickly becomes hard to prove or the government will refuse to process your request. Guess you should have filled out those "optional" fields.
Many stores ask for your ZIP Code or phone number. Just like many federal forms you don't have to provide this, but almost everyone does. While a ZIP code tends to provide semi-random demographics, your phone number provides stores with your address. Of course, you can be asked not to be listed in the phone book, if you pay the "optional" fee of $1.50 a month and ensure that businesses you deal with do not "optionally" tell your phone number to their partners as well...
I have a relative who has the same name as a criminal's alias. The criminal does not have any other identification similar to that of my relative. But whenver my relative gets stopped by an officer (typically randomly), he typically is held for several hours if not days before they realize they have the wrong man. So far, this has happened two or three times.
Now my relative went to a police station to see if there was a way to warn police stations in the area that that someone else had the same name as the criminal. He was told there was not. While face recognition systems hopefully will have a lower error rate than the odds your name will match a criminal's, you better hope you don't look like one.
ElComSoft yes, but Skylov?
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Sklyarov Indicted
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I have never seen anything to date that said Sklyarov himself was involved with the Ebook decoder project. Just being with a company that did illegal things is not illegal in itself; otherwise we would arrest all their janitors and secretaries.
Even if he did work on the Ebook project, he could claim that he did not knowingly do anything wrong since (1) it was not illegal work in Russia and (2) it work done solely for a Russian company. While claiming ignorance of the law is no excuse, I don't see how a jury could convict him directly given these facts.
That being said, shouldn't the United States be going after the company's officers (CEO, etc.), and not Sklyarov?
I do electrostatic discharge and interference tests for a living. We can produce electrostatic discharges ranging from a few hundred volts to over 300 thousand volts (landing aircraft) in house. We also radiate products with radio frequency interference from a few hundred kilohertz up to the microwave range. Sometimes we just listen to what products put out as well.
Most of the devices we test are safety-critical. Your home computer likely will never be seen in our lab. We recently conducted a test where a product in its box was shocked with a 300 kV static discharge. The spark (besides traveling three feet) went through the box, in one terminal of the item, and out another.
While charges on your body are not nearly that strong (the highest you'll build up likely is 25-30 kV), you shouldn't laugh at them.
Many modern manufactuers no longer include safety components ment for repair technicians. Often saving less than a fraction of a cent (in bulk), the lack of these parts make it an extreme risk to open things like microwaves and televisions. Not to be dismal, but don't open these items unless you know what you are doing; I have heard of experienced technicians putting their hand in the wrong place and regretting it.
Module music in the "scene" carries samples of the instruments along with the file. Yet Discover magazine thought an MIT researcher's work in the field was so novel that he was a finalist in their 1997 Discover Awards (see "Bringing Music to the Web"). A project (whos name escapes me) combines audio data with the music to play it, and calls it a new format.
Anyway, there are plenty of players out there if you want to listen in. For MS Windows users, there's Winamp, although I personally prefer Modplug over Winamp, hoping that my favorite player of all time, Cubic, will be worked on again and make a comeback.
Linux users have their choice of a variety of players. XMMS has a plugin available with the engine from modplug. Several others also exist as well.
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Bah, forgot something: Flights have origins and destinations, don't they?
The flight of Jean Pierre Blanchard started at 6th Street & Walnut Street in Philadelphia, PA. Fifteen miles & 56 minutes later, he landed in was is now Deptford, NJ between the "R.C.A. Parts 8 Accessories Plant" and Big Timber Creek. Jean also carried a letter signed by President Washington in order to alleviate the fears of people seeing him land.
Source is here. Searching google for "Deptford, NJ First flight" also works well.
Well, if you want to get into those sort of technicalities, the first flight in the United States of a balloon-powered aircraft was done by French balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard on January 9, 1793. The location was Woodbury, NJ, which is now considered Deptford, NJ.
Its a bit hard not to know this fact since the town painted it on its water tower :)
Read about it here.
My brother had a Compaq laptop which started to have hard drive problems. After a complete reformat, we found that the "Recovery CD" would not recover, and was spitting out random error messages.
A support call into Compaq told us that the recovery CD supplied with the laptop did not have all the information. It relied on a secondary partition (which is visable, virus infectable, etc.) in order to complete a restore.
Fortunately, they were willing to send out a two-CD repair set. A week later and several hours worth of things installing/backing up in seemingly the most awkward way possible, my brother's system was working again.
And while doing some support tech work, I did indeed setup some IBM computers that came with no visable restore functionality at all.
(Aren't cost cutting measures grand?)
The last time I tried ALSA (0.9.0beta9) with a Sound Blaster Live!, I was confounded with the way they presented the mixer setup. It provided me with dozens of individual effect and audio sends, "mutes" that actually turned things on, confusingly named controls for laypeople, etc. While their wavetable MIDI worked for the most part, I have songs that suddenly mute one or more channels, with notes always cut short (no sustains).
Fortunately, the wonderful thing about the Linux kernel is that one can often find alternative (OSS_Free, etc.) drivers. I'm not putting ALSA down; I like how it is progressing, and it has the wavetable support that the OSS Free-style driver presently lacks. Hopefully ALSA's inclusion into 2.5 will help coax more people to find bugs, add cards, and fix problems.
(Before anyone flames me, I did file bug reports to ALSA. Many projects seems to be drowning in them; if you want to get into open source development and cannot code, perhaps you could help verify reported bugs!)
Let's be realistic here. Linux zealots constantly state that no one can implement copy protection on Linux because anyone can work around it. Since programs can not easily distinguish sockets to other programs from sockets to sound cards or video cards (although I suspect to some extent one can) anything is theoretically copyable, right?
The biggest recognized Linux brand name known to the public-at-large is Red Hat. If AOL was able to convince Red Hat to incorporate a binary-only security system into their distribution, then Linux-loving people could not easily cry that their favorite operating system could not support digital rights management.
One of the easiest ways to "convince" someone to do something is to be their boss. Note that Winamp (another AOL acquisition) already supports multiple secure formats, and bypasses insecure output/effects plugins as appropriate.
No, I am not trolling. This message was written using a Linux box. Trademarks used in this message belong to their holders; yada yada yada, etc.
As I said in an earlier message (which is playing hard to find), I knew someone from India living in the United States. He made minimum wage to make his way though college. His father was one of the top engineers in an Indian company. Guess who had the higher salary? My friend, not his father.
A $15,000 yearly salary in other countries is enough to make one live like a king. In India (I've been told; perhaps someone can comment), a $15,000 U.S.-equivalent salary is enough to have a personal cook prepare your lunch, and a personal servant bring it to your workplace.
$15,000 may seem like a lot to many students, but there are countries out there where people make $1.50 an hour or less. Companies make items abroad where it is cheaper yet attempt to sell said items abroad in the same countries at U.S. pricing.
Personally, I'm predicting a severe devaluation in the U.S. dollar to come sometime within the next century or so; one cannot price an item at price A in country X and price B in Y without a third party Z coming along and moving the item from A to B at a lower cost. Given that most other currencies are worth less than the United States', the dollar likely will be devalued as we start kicking and screaming and wondering why.
If you watch MST3K on the Sci-Fi channel, the last episode to be shown on television will be December 29th. For more information on this, go the the official fan club site and scroll down to "THE FINAL SCHEDULE". Sci-Fi has not renewed their contract to show episodes past January. Even if they did, they could only show reruns; the set has long since been torn down and sold on Ebay.
My karma is high enough, please do not give more. That includes negative amounts.
Bleem themselves made a good explanation of why they were not 100% compatible. You can find it here. Instead of emulating the Playstation(tm) hardware exactly, they opted to use native x86 code to mimic known Playstation functions they could decipher.
In order to support all Playstation(tm) functions and be 100% compatible, you must know everything the Playstation can do. Keep in mind there are at least four Playstation models, each with their own quirks. Bleem either (1) would have to reproduce Sony(tm)'s hardware and software exactly (very difficult and legally risky) or (2) mimic everything they figured out with completely new code. They did the latter, which in theory has better results over the long run but caused problems in the short term.
A few vendors likely used their own libraries instead of Sony's, making their life difficult. Just using basic statistics, one can see it is easier for bleem to support one game under these conditions than 400 or even 40.
It sad to see bleem go. Besides the fact they were actually challenging the rights of a large firm to deny others the rights to make a compatible product, their court case would have been a modern confirmation of our rights to reverse-engineer. Without such a case, the DMCA and SSSCA may reduce engineering education to textbook theory and looking at encrypted singals with equipment that cannot decode them.
A large number of people here have complained about how PayPal refuses to handle complaints about merchandise either not being sent or arriving in poor condition. While PayPal politely handles some of these cases, they are no means obligated by their terms to handle them all.
The fact of the matter is that PayPal is a money transfer agent. They are the electronic version of Western Union. Money transfer agents basically take money from one person, charge a fee, and then give the remainder to another. While they may have some fraud guarantees, they do not normally handle merchandise disputes. They just move money from one place to another, and then their job is done.
What people here seem to consider PayPal to be is an escrow service. An escrow service takes money from person A plus a fee, and then notifies person B that the escrow service has money from person A meant for them. Person B then sends the merchandise, which Person A inspects. If Person A is not satisfied, they send the merchandise back to Person B. Otherwise (ideally), Person B gets paid.
Escrow services endure a lot more risk than a money transfer agent does. They deal with a higher risk of fraud, and take more measures to compensate for this. PayPal does not consider themselves to be an escrow service. PayPal's own FAQ says so.
Examples of *real* online escrow services include Escrow.com and Tradenable. Note that I have not used either of these, so buyer/seller beware.
Keep in mind that in most of Europe, businesses can not just freely sell your information to the highest bidder. A recent CNN/Money article listed seven infomation "brokerage" firms that an American needed to contact to get off most mailing lists. Even then, if your information was originally on one of these lists, someone has already purchased it.
In Europe, most citizens would not let businesses get that far out of hand. Of course, many Americans would argue that comes at the expense of a loss of other rights by citizens as well.
Europe's privacy rules reguarding information are so strict that they actually considered *stopping* doing business with the United States. "Fortunately," they decided to let individual businesses dictate their privacy policies in the US in order to business with their European counterparts.
Instead of a wakeup call, it seems that influcence has caused many to fall asleep at the wheel. Too much of this is asking for an accident.
Not Quite. Assume that company PQR can hire an engineer at a $40K per year salary. To hire them at this salary, it costs them $20K in overhead/benefits (actually quite low). If they do not spend $60K per year on an engineer, they can afford to purchase 300 full Windows XP Professional licenses ($200 each) or 120 full MS Office Professional licenses ($500 each) at almost no discount. Now which would you prefer PQR to do every year? Hire a person, or buy copies of Windows?
Say that another large company named TUV spent $50K on Windows NT licenses and another $100K-150K developing an in-house shopping application on it. Total initial expendatures: about $150-200 thousand. Total yearly revenue coming in from this system: $1 million dollars. (I am ignoring engineer's salaries, etc. for the sake of simplicity; in the real world, these are quite signifcant.)
As you can see, the cost to purchase the NT licenses for the servers were a drop in their revenue bucket. Even if they spend $30K per year keeping their NT license and support contracts current, they have no immediate reason to switch. NT license maintance costs them 5% of their incoming earnings; while significant, it really is not that bad.
Assume that Joe Admin has decided their server system over to Linux. There is no initial cost for a Linux distribution and no maintance cost. Say they splurge and spend $5K for a major, top notch Red Hat support contract. Assume application conversion costs are negligable. This means that they are saving $25K per year over the NT option in the long run.
However, they have no guarantee that their converted system will work under heavy loads. Their NT system was known to scale somewhat poorly, but without a real, full-sized userbase to really pound a system.
Given that the $30K yearly support contract for their NT servers was 3% of that year's revenue and the fact that the Linux support cost 0.5% of revenue, there is little incentive to save 2.5% more of your revenue when you might risk everything to a new system!
Now I admit that these numbers may seem random, but they are based on what I know is going on in industry. I am aware of no large location where Microsoft licensing comprises more than 10% of their operating cost. This is why many large firms fail to see a reason to change. Smaller firms which do not get the deep discounts that the larger ones have exceed the 10% margin and look for alternatives.
The financial markets are a slightly different story. They looked to open source solutions because they couldn't find what they needed commercially. They need large, stable solutions; even if NT gave them a 99.9% uptime, they would demand better. It does you no good to reject a consumer's purchase because you can not check a balance.
Eventually, the penny-pinchers in large companies will see they can save money in the long term with a conversion to open source. But this will take time. Why gamble your house on a factor you do not know when you know the odds of an existing bet?
If I knew I had a system that at least partially worked to my benefit, would I scrap it for a complete unknown overnight? I hightly doubt I would. If I could, I would attempt to fully stabilize the system I knew partially worked.
Microsoft has promised they can do this with Windows. To a large extent, they have delivered.
Why is everyone expecting businesses to risk their livelyhood for an operating system they hardly know? Wait until Linux makes some more headway into things; then we should see Linux used by larger and more significant businesses (and hopefully we will).
Some hotels I've seen in the United States have televisions/cable boxes with a built in SNES of sorts. The controllers attached to the unit are derived from SNES units, and the units play SNES games.
Unfortunately for the consumer, these units do not simply take SNES cartridges; instead, they download games over the cable network. To use these, you typically pay per hour of usage. I wanted to play with one of these once; but its hourly rate was prohibitive (even for most parents).
Every automobile manufactured since 1990 or so has a computer in it. Your gas pedal really does not control gas flow directly; instead it is a potentiometer that sends a signal to a computer. Some cars even use specialized PowerPC chips. The operating systems cars use are highly stable; blue screens of death in vehicles really could mean death. I know someone who had a car computer failure while on the highway; trust me, it isn't something you want to go through.
Anyways, IANAL, but note claims #1-7 all relate to claim #1, which requires the device in question to "control operation of components in the vehicle." As long as your device does not do anything that could be considered controlling how the vehicle directly operates (speed direction, etc.), you likely are fine. #8 describes many vehicles with multiple processors interconnected. The "client" could be as simple as the warning lights on your dashboard.
#9-#19 all point to #9, which matches what existing vehicles do. A "support" module could be a sensor, a "faceplate" module could again be warning lights on the dashboard, and the "computer" module could be the car engine controlling processor. #20 again requires a "vehicle related" application; I again read this as needing to be something critical to the operation of the vehicle that it could not function without.
If MS can prove to a court that MP3 players, radios, etc., are "vehicle related" just because they *might* be used in a vehicle, I'd just appeal by asking the judge if celluar phones are "vehicle related." These devices often are multi-function, etc., need to be made cheap, and if MS went after the cell phone manufactuers, we might actually see a good legal fight.
A civilian differential GPS reciever always was able to do better than what selective availabilty should have allowed. These units gave (and still give) accuracies within 15 meters or so. Given a Loran compensation reciever (used to pick up posititioning signals meant for boats), one can improve on this accuracy by using additional known transmitters located at ground-based reference points.
If you want "new" GPS units that were recently releaesd in the past year or so, look for units with the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS). Implemented alongside with the FAA, these units rely on two additional satilite signals for an average accuracy of three meters.
Obligatory manufactuers links: Garmin's GPS description page and Magellan, another GPS supplier.
The biggest obstacle to amateur radio being used for this purpose is licensing. Everyone who operates a transmitter on this theoretical network would need to be licensed. It might be possible for your kids or wife to use the system if you are present (third party traffic), but that's no good when you're not around.
I'll reiterate that no encrypted connections would be tolerated, but if you send your music in MIDI form, some people would consider that acceptable. As far as "commercial stuff goes," recent rulings have suggested that everything except the actual sale may be conducted online; some clubs run "Swap n' Shops," etc.
Yes, I am a licensed amateur radio operator. No, do not take this as gospel; I have study books from various years that contradict each other. Amateur radio frequencies likely won't be up for grabs anytime soon; they are used for emergency management and are partially regulated by the International Telecomuncations Union.
For more information on Internet and ham radio, visit ampr.org. Everything 44.*.*.* online has been an amateur radio station since the 1970's. Note that most of these (to be legal) do not allow you access to their systems. That could qualify as unauthorized operation of a radio tranmitter on their part.
And if you want to know how over 350 amateur radio operators worked over 5000 man-hours helping in the aftermath of September 11th, go here.
Seriously? The Senator has done something it seems people here actually consider reasonable. If you are a constituent of his, why don't you send him your thanks and tell him you did a good job? Lobbyists do not wait for a crisis; they're sending him mail 24/7.
If you want to tell him something additional along these lines (you feel that US crypto export controls only hamper the US, etc.) tell him it as well; he's much more likely to listen to your additional arguments as long as they go along with his current course of action.
I used to be quite active on the local BBS scene. Operators would get the latest archive CD-ROMs of the day, and then post them online for others to access.
Nowadays, no one really uses BBSes anymore. Everyone has direct links to the resources BBSes used to offer. Most of Walnut Creek's old content was available from ftp.cdrom.com (now run by simtel.net). Want music from the Hornet Archive? You can't purchase the CD anymore; you go online to hornet.org.
This extreme centalization of content worries me. Instead of colleges purchasing CD-ROMs of technical abstracts, they now subscribe to an ever-changing online service that provides them. Should said service go under or lose their data, humanity as a whole is at a loss.
Call me a troll, but one of the biggest reasons we should be against DMCA, SSSCA, and other such acts is because they require all content to be managed from a central authority. Should that authority go bankrupt, millions could lose access to a variety of works.
While peer-to-peer is one extreme the industry does not like, centralization is another problem. We need to start up the BBS era again; anyone have money for a spare phone line?
Judging from the comments, one would think we would have realized by now that you occasionally *call home* or *call work* on occasion.
If your home or work number has stayed the same for a while, you likely have prior art on them. It would be funny if a million slashdotters suddenly sued them for big bucks for trying to make money on a number they've called for years...
Anyways, kudos to them. I like this copyright trick.
Read any Federal United States form that is covered under the Privacy Act. Much of the information on those forms is considered "optional." Your social security number, address etc., can be left off many forms, and said forms would still be considered complete.
However, without said information, your eligibilty for aid, employment, etc., quickly becomes hard to prove or the government will refuse to process your request. Guess you should have filled out those "optional" fields.
Many stores ask for your ZIP Code or phone number. Just like many federal forms you don't have to provide this, but almost everyone does. While a ZIP code tends to provide semi-random demographics, your phone number provides stores with your address. Of course, you can be asked not to be listed in the phone book, if you pay the "optional" fee of $1.50 a month and ensure that businesses you deal with do not "optionally" tell your phone number to their partners as well...
E-Papercuts. This will be followed by E-Bleeding, as well as the E-Band Aid(tm).
Ouch. That's going to hurt.
I have a relative who has the same name as a criminal's alias. The criminal does not have any other identification similar to that of my relative. But whenver my relative gets stopped by an officer (typically randomly), he typically is held for several hours if not days before they realize they have the wrong man. So far, this has happened two or three times.
Now my relative went to a police station to see if there was a way to warn police stations in the area that that someone else had the same name as the criminal. He was told there was not. While face recognition systems hopefully will have a lower error rate than the odds your name will match a criminal's, you better hope you don't look like one.
I have never seen anything to date that said Sklyarov himself was involved with the Ebook decoder project. Just being with a company that did illegal things is not illegal in itself; otherwise we would arrest all their janitors and secretaries.
Even if he did work on the Ebook project, he could claim that he did not knowingly do anything wrong since (1) it was not illegal work in Russia and (2) it work done solely for a Russian company. While claiming ignorance of the law is no excuse, I don't see how a jury could convict him directly given these facts.
That being said, shouldn't the United States be going after the company's officers (CEO, etc.), and not Sklyarov?
I do electrostatic discharge and interference tests for a living. We can produce electrostatic discharges ranging from a few hundred volts to over 300 thousand volts (landing aircraft) in house. We also radiate products with radio frequency interference from a few hundred kilohertz up to the microwave range. Sometimes we just listen to what products put out as well.
Most of the devices we test are safety-critical. Your home computer likely will never be seen in our lab. We recently conducted a test where a product in its box was shocked with a 300 kV static discharge. The spark (besides traveling three feet) went through the box, in one terminal of the item, and out another.
While charges on your body are not nearly that strong (the highest you'll build up likely is 25-30 kV), you shouldn't laugh at them.
Many modern manufactuers no longer include safety components ment for repair technicians. Often saving less than a fraction of a cent (in bulk), the lack of these parts make it an extreme risk to open things like microwaves and televisions. Not to be dismal, but don't open these items unless you know what you are doing; I have heard of experienced technicians putting their hand in the wrong place and regretting it.
Module music in the "scene" carries samples of the instruments along with the file. Yet Discover magazine thought an MIT researcher's work in the field was so novel that he was a finalist in their 1997 Discover Awards (see "Bringing Music to the Web"). A project (whos name escapes me) combines audio data with the music to play it, and calls it a new format.
Anyway, there are plenty of players out there if you want to listen in. For MS Windows users, there's Winamp, although I personally prefer Modplug over Winamp, hoping that my favorite player of all time, Cubic, will be worked on again and make a comeback.
Linux users have their choice of a variety of players. XMMS has a plugin available with the engine from modplug. Several others also exist as well.