In the US, we have the Magnusson-Moss act, which expressly permits the car to be worked on by folks other than the dealer while keeping the warranty intact.
Other counties may vary, of course, such as yours. Which is a shame, really.
So long as we still have LAME and near universal playback, sign me up for the "I could give a fuck about these particular patents*" list.
(*: This sentiment goes back to the middle 90's somewhere, in a time before even mpg123, wherein the best way I could find to play an mp3 reliably was to "overclock" my Pentium 100 from 66x1x1.5 to 60x2=120MHz, and use a strange concoction of Fraunhoffer's l3dec piped into a ring buffer FIFO like bplay.)
Go talk on a conventional, passive landline phone, sometime. Foldback into the earpiece is an integral part of that technology, and it works: You can hear if you're distorted or scratchy, or muffled because you've positioned things wrongly, and if you can't hear yourself at all due to background noise you know you might want to speak up because they can't hear you, either.
It's all psychological. And people talking on the phone just want the other party to hear them clearly -- I cannot believe that they're all just purposeless loudspeaking assholes. But without any way for them to hear how they themselves sound, it's a crapshoot that's easiest won by just talking louder.
Also. We should all stop our cars to adjust the radio. Or to reposition our mirrors. Or to sneeze. Or cough. Or pick our noses.
We should always stop the car for a blowjob, even if that means that she stops too. And we should always stop to look at the fuel gauge. And we should always stop to look at the GPS to see when the next turn is coming up. We should stop to take a call. We should stop to adjust the heater. We should stop to lower and raise the windows.
Nay. The truth of the matter is that absolute statements are usually absolutely wrong. Given good road conditions, good visibility, and literally nothing around, the simple truth is that a common human can have plenty of spare attention left over to handle all manner of other little things a second or two at a time while still being a safe and courteous driver at a reasonable speed for the conditions (which really has little to do with the posted limit).
Be willing to toss the phone/headset/whatever into the seat beside you if driving conditions dictate that you need more attention than you have available.
So what if it's rude? You'll have plenty of to explain your behavior later, after you're someplace more safe/less hairy/stopped. My boss, and my own clients, would much rather I do this and still be able to solve their problem, rather than wind up dead or hospitalized or even just distraught following a collision.
Conference calls, backups, and synchronization from damn near every country on earth? For an agency within a single US state? No.
Also, too: The packet rates are far too low for those activities. If you watch TFV, you'll see that the largest users are only up to around a couple hundred packets per hour, which is such small number that even if you multiply it by 40 (due to the scaling done by the geo-IP service[1]), it's still far too small for those activities that you listed.
Any other theories?
[1]: It's not clear, to me, if we should be looking at these packet counts as they're shown in TFV, or multiplying them to account for the selection performed on the data.
"I want to jot down a small note that I can hardcopy later for posterity, but I don't ever want to need to worry about my pen running out of ink, as long as I remember to change the battery occasionally"
Indeed, that seems to be all it is really good for -- other than the geek factor of writing with passive liquid crystals.
I solved the "I don't want to run out of ink" problem by buying a Fisher Bullet Space Pen. The ink cartridges are said to last a very long time and never run dry from disuse. So, for the meager amount of writing that I do, this pen will probably be able to stay in my change pocket for many years before it needs the cartridge replaced. And it was $10 cheaper than this "practical" LCD tablet.
And I'm willing to bet that, having seen the variety of separate electronic modules in a modern fancy car, that Onstar is its own box. Especially, since it's still optional on many GM models, and they've never been a big fan of reinventing a wheel that already exists.
Because it's a pain in the ass to turn the phone on and off. It took just a second or two to slip it into its Faraday pouch, as opposed to several seconds to shut down, and half a minute to boot back up.
For the AC posting below, who likely will never see this, the case is here.
Anecdotally, I think my lack of wrist pain after 20 years of typing has more to do with not bothering with any of that home row nonsense at all.
I type QWERTY, because that's what I've always used. I just throw my hands on the keyboard, from any angle or seating position, and type. Since my posture and hand position are always different, there's really no "repetitive stress" to injure myself with.
Right now, my fingers are on the following keys: q e f r space space l p [ enter
And the next time I put them on the keyboard, they'll be someplace different. It just doesn't matter. I don't have dedicated fingers for dedicated keys. I simply know where the keys are, and press them when appropriate, with whatever finger is convenient.
I'm not the fastest typist in the world, at only about 90WPM, but I've successfully avoided having to look at a standard 101-key layout for over a decade, even with this arcane technique.
Why not just route them all to a switch, so you can still use it when you want to? Or, simpler: Find the brick the antennas plug into, and switch the 12V lines going to it.
I'm a privacy nut, myself, at times. When my boss installed tracking software on my company-owned phone, I bought a nice vinyl-covered Faraday cage for it made out of conductive fabric to use in those times when he needn't know where I'm at.
Yanking antennas and destroying electronics seems far-fetched and brutal. It's easier to keep the OnStar system for what it is useful for, and provide oneself a method to turn it off when it's not needed.
Kinda. Ever use a handheld cell phone in a car? Chances are you have, and that it worked fine -- the signal goes right through the windows.
Same with this concept. Sure, the car's fidgety electronic bits are wrapped securely inside of grounded aluminum boxes, gasketed and/or taped to keep out all manner of pollutants and/or RFI. But connected to these boxes are hundreds of feet of unshielded, untwisted wire, all of which will act as an antenna. Meanwhile, the car's body will tend to reflect any RF that makes it inside, so with all of the weird angles in use it's just an eventuality before some of it finds its way into a bundle of wires somewhere.
So, it's obvious and foregone that it's possible to get some amount of RF into a car's electronics.
The question is: How much does it take to make the car stop working? Since the current system apparently uses a room full of gear, I'd say the answer is "lots."
WGA enables other updates to be installed, it pretty much is a security update.
Yeah, sure. It "enables" other updates to be installed, just like DRM protection "enables" movies to be watched.
The converse, however, seems far more true: WGA restricts other updates from being installed, just like DRM restricts movies from being watched.
There is no technical or security reason for WGA's existence. The "other updates" that it "enables" would work just fine without it, were they not arbitrarily designed to require WGA.
Thanks for the tip. I just installed a Swype beta on my Droid (not in the marketplace; Google it), and it's an interesting thing that seems to work very well with every mostly common word that I tried, and at least initially, seems quite fast.
(It did, unsurprisingly, fall on its face when I tried to enter "antidisestablishmenterianism," however.)
Registration should at least be easy, if not mandatory, in these modern enlightened times. I like the idea of allowing it to be anonymous, as well, since the problems it creates (such as the genuine creator proving ownership later) are easily solved with a little bit of public key authentication.
But I still don't think I should ever need to give you my source code, or even make it a mandatory part of the copyright filing. That said, having the source material be an optional part of the submit, to be automatically disclosed by the LoC at the time of the copyright on the binary expiring, does however sound to me like a perfectly reasonable thing that some folks may well take advantage of.
Keeping it optional also neatly sidesteps my slippery slope arguments against the entire concept that I made before.
Who knows if the LoC can handle the burden of this extra data and its release cycle, but I guess that's nothing that money can't fix.
I still don't think (and I doubt I ever will) that I should ever be forced to release more information than I initially publish -- and I say this as a consumer who has only ever written a few hundred lines of code, ever, and as someone who would probably appreciate it if sources became automagically available later.
And that's just a matter of opinion, at this point. If you still think I should have to submit my sources to anyone, ever, then we'll just have to agree to disagree.:)
There's that problem, too. And it's a dumb problem to have: The inverter driving the backlight tubes actually becomes cheaper to produce, the higher the frequency is.
But please do go visit the LCD test page I previously linked before you start with absolute statements like "the flicker." There's a few things that they often get wrong -- sometimes, very, very wrong -- and you'll be able to see some of it there with your own eyes.
If the copyright on my source code is expired (and for the sake of argument, let's just assume that everything created is copyrighted by default, published or not, since that's pretty much the case these days), and you find this unprotected source code laying around in a scrap heap, you can do whatever you want with it; it is public domain.
And even if it doesn't end up in a heap somewhere, you are free to come looking for it. But that doesn't necessarily compel the person possessing this code to be bothered with giving it to you, or anyone else. (Though if they do give it to you, you're of course free to do as you will with it, barring any contractual obligations you may have signed up for to receive the code in the first place.)
Just because LCD monitors don't refresh like a CRT does, doesn't make them perfect.
I had a Viewsonic VG930M 19" LCD, which was an absolutely lousy monitor. Certain colors and shades would be very obviously and visibly noisy, due to the dithering used to approximate colors which the display was incapable of producing. (This is mentioned in your linked Wikipedia article on LCDs, down under the Drawbacks heading.)
For a demonstration of this and some other problems with these displays, head over to this handy LCD test page. All of the images there are static, but depending on the display, some of them will flicker and do weird things to such an extent that you'll swear it's an oddly-smooth animated GIF concocted to con you into thinking your display is shit.
My fast, newish Asus TN-panel display does OK on most of that page. My somewhat slower, and far prettier (and more expensive!) IPS-panel NEC does a better job on some, but not all of it. Meanwhile, some of the stuff there hurt to look at with the aforementioned Viewsonic. (For reference, all monitors connected with DVI, all attached to the same video card, on the same PC, and driven at their native resolution.)
In conclusion, let me just say that under not-so-uncommon circumstances, perfectly normal LCD displays can and will flicker. Indeed, it's not a refresh rate issue. But just because folks sometimes use the wrong verbiage to describe a problem doesn't mean that they're not experiencing one at all, nor does it always indicate that they're suffering from audiophile-itis.
If I didn't publish source code before, I should not and cannot be compelled to do so later just because the copyright on a compiled binary has expired.
You have no more right to the things that I've created but not released for public perusal, than you do the thoughts in my own head.
I just gave it a good once-over, and it looks pretty cool, as if it were designed by people who want to actually use the stuff for useful things, instead of folks who are trying to be actively hurtful.
The whole point of copyright is only to protect a creator's work for a limited time so that they may be encouraged to create it; to allow, if you will, it to be profitable to create something by restricting the right of others to duplicate it.
It has nothing to do with leaving behind a body of works to be built upon -- that describes a function closer to that of a patent, than of copyright.
Just because I've released a binary under protection of copyright, doesn't mean that the source code used to produce that binary should ever become public just because the copyright on the binary has expired.
Your tirade is absurd.
What else do you wish for from Santa Claus? That when copyright on a book expires, all of the author's original notes, manuscripts and sketches become public? Or when copyright on a movie expires, that the script become public? That when the protection expires on an article of music, the original multitrack recordings, sheet music, MIDI files, samples, and DAW scripts used in the creation of that work also become public domain?
Slashdot Mirror
Because there is no Roman numeral for zero. And 1 was often substituted with I on old typewriters.
So, to avoid confusion, PINs must only consist of the numbers 2 through 9.
Obviously.
[/sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired]
In the US, we have the Magnusson-Moss act, which expressly permits the car to be worked on by folks other than the dealer while keeping the warranty intact.
Other counties may vary, of course, such as yours. Which is a shame, really.
*shrug*
So long as we still have LAME and near universal playback, sign me up for the "I could give a fuck about these particular patents*" list.
(*: This sentiment goes back to the middle 90's somewhere, in a time before even mpg123, wherein the best way I could find to play an mp3 reliably was to "overclock" my Pentium 100 from 66x1x1.5 to 60x2=120MHz, and use a strange concoction of Fraunhoffer's l3dec piped into a ring buffer FIFO like bplay.)
Go talk on a conventional, passive landline phone, sometime. Foldback into the earpiece is an integral part of that technology, and it works: You can hear if you're distorted or scratchy, or muffled because you've positioned things wrongly, and if you can't hear yourself at all due to background noise you know you might want to speak up because they can't hear you, either.
It's all psychological. And people talking on the phone just want the other party to hear them clearly -- I cannot believe that they're all just purposeless loudspeaking assholes. But without any way for them to hear how they themselves sound, it's a crapshoot that's easiest won by just talking louder.
Also. We should all stop our cars to adjust the radio. Or to reposition our mirrors. Or to sneeze. Or cough. Or pick our noses.
We should always stop the car for a blowjob, even if that means that she stops too. And we should always stop to look at the fuel gauge. And we should always stop to look at the GPS to see when the next turn is coming up. We should stop to take a call. We should stop to adjust the heater. We should stop to lower and raise the windows.
Nay. The truth of the matter is that absolute statements are usually absolutely wrong. Given good road conditions, good visibility, and literally nothing around, the simple truth is that a common human can have plenty of spare attention left over to handle all manner of other little things a second or two at a time while still being a safe and courteous driver at a reasonable speed for the conditions (which really has little to do with the posted limit).
Or, perhaps just as important:
Be willing to toss the phone/headset/whatever into the seat beside you if driving conditions dictate that you need more attention than you have available.
So what if it's rude? You'll have plenty of to explain your behavior later, after you're someplace more safe/less hairy/stopped. My boss, and my own clients, would much rather I do this and still be able to solve their problem, rather than wind up dead or hospitalized or even just distraught following a collision.
Conference calls, backups, and synchronization from damn near every country on earth? For an agency within a single US state? No.
Also, too: The packet rates are far too low for those activities. If you watch TFV, you'll see that the largest users are only up to around a couple hundred packets per hour, which is such small number that even if you multiply it by 40 (due to the scaling done by the geo-IP service[1]), it's still far too small for those activities that you listed.
Any other theories?
[1]: It's not clear, to me, if we should be looking at these packet counts as they're shown in TFV, or multiplying them to account for the selection performed on the data.
"I want to jot down a small note that I can hardcopy later for posterity, but I don't ever want to need to worry about my pen running out of ink, as long as I remember to change the battery occasionally"
Indeed, that seems to be all it is really good for -- other than the geek factor of writing with passive liquid crystals.
I solved the "I don't want to run out of ink" problem by buying a Fisher Bullet Space Pen. The ink cartridges are said to last a very long time and never run dry from disuse. So, for the meager amount of writing that I do, this pen will probably be able to stay in my change pocket for many years before it needs the cartridge replaced. And it was $10 cheaper than this "practical" LCD tablet.
You forgot fly-by-wire steering, due any minute now on a car near you.
And I'm willing to bet that, having seen the variety of separate electronic modules in a modern fancy car, that Onstar is its own box. Especially, since it's still optional on many GM models, and they've never been a big fan of reinventing a wheel that already exists.
Because it's a pain in the ass to turn the phone on and off. It took just a second or two to slip it into its Faraday pouch, as opposed to several seconds to shut down, and half a minute to boot back up.
For the AC posting below, who likely will never see this, the case is here.
Anecdotally, I think my lack of wrist pain after 20 years of typing has more to do with not bothering with any of that home row nonsense at all.
I type QWERTY, because that's what I've always used. I just throw my hands on the keyboard, from any angle or seating position, and type. Since my posture and hand position are always different, there's really no "repetitive stress" to injure myself with.
Right now, my fingers are on the following keys: q e f r space space l p [ enter
And the next time I put them on the keyboard, they'll be someplace different. It just doesn't matter. I don't have dedicated fingers for dedicated keys. I simply know where the keys are, and press them when appropriate, with whatever finger is convenient.
I'm not the fastest typist in the world, at only about 90WPM, but I've successfully avoided having to look at a standard 101-key layout for over a decade, even with this arcane technique.
YMMV.
Why not just route them all to a switch, so you can still use it when you want to? Or, simpler: Find the brick the antennas plug into, and switch the 12V lines going to it.
I'm a privacy nut, myself, at times. When my boss installed tracking software on my company-owned phone, I bought a nice vinyl-covered Faraday cage for it made out of conductive fabric to use in those times when he needn't know where I'm at.
Yanking antennas and destroying electronics seems far-fetched and brutal. It's easier to keep the OnStar system for what it is useful for, and provide oneself a method to turn it off when it's not needed.
Kinda. Ever use a handheld cell phone in a car? Chances are you have, and that it worked fine -- the signal goes right through the windows.
Same with this concept. Sure, the car's fidgety electronic bits are wrapped securely inside of grounded aluminum boxes, gasketed and/or taped to keep out all manner of pollutants and/or RFI. But connected to these boxes are hundreds of feet of unshielded, untwisted wire, all of which will act as an antenna. Meanwhile, the car's body will tend to reflect any RF that makes it inside, so with all of the weird angles in use it's just an eventuality before some of it finds its way into a bundle of wires somewhere.
So, it's obvious and foregone that it's possible to get some amount of RF into a car's electronics.
The question is: How much does it take to make the car stop working? Since the current system apparently uses a room full of gear, I'd say the answer is "lots."
WGA enables other updates to be installed, it pretty much is a security update.
Yeah, sure. It "enables" other updates to be installed, just like DRM protection "enables" movies to be watched.
The converse, however, seems far more true: WGA restricts other updates from being installed, just like DRM restricts movies from being watched.
There is no technical or security reason for WGA's existence. The "other updates" that it "enables" would work just fine without it, were they not arbitrarily designed to require WGA.
Thanks for the tip. I just installed a Swype beta on my Droid (not in the marketplace; Google it), and it's an interesting thing that seems to work very well with every mostly common word that I tried, and at least initially, seems quite fast.
(It did, unsurprisingly, fall on its face when I tried to enter "antidisestablishmenterianism," however.)
Eh? GPS isn't needed for E911 compliance, though it is certainly a very common way to achieve it. More details here.
Registration should at least be easy, if not mandatory, in these modern enlightened times. I like the idea of allowing it to be anonymous, as well, since the problems it creates (such as the genuine creator proving ownership later) are easily solved with a little bit of public key authentication.
But I still don't think I should ever need to give you my source code, or even make it a mandatory part of the copyright filing. That said, having the source material be an optional part of the submit, to be automatically disclosed by the LoC at the time of the copyright on the binary expiring, does however sound to me like a perfectly reasonable thing that some folks may well take advantage of.
Keeping it optional also neatly sidesteps my slippery slope arguments against the entire concept that I made before.
Who knows if the LoC can handle the burden of this extra data and its release cycle, but I guess that's nothing that money can't fix.
I still don't think (and I doubt I ever will) that I should ever be forced to release more information than I initially publish -- and I say this as a consumer who has only ever written a few hundred lines of code, ever, and as someone who would probably appreciate it if sources became automagically available later.
And that's just a matter of opinion, at this point. If you still think I should have to submit my sources to anyone, ever, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. :)
There's that problem, too. And it's a dumb problem to have: The inverter driving the backlight tubes actually becomes cheaper to produce, the higher the frequency is.
But please do go visit the LCD test page I previously linked before you start with absolute statements like "the flicker." There's a few things that they often get wrong -- sometimes, very, very wrong -- and you'll be able to see some of it there with your own eyes.
True.
If the copyright on my source code is expired (and for the sake of argument, let's just assume that everything created is copyrighted by default, published or not, since that's pretty much the case these days), and you find this unprotected source code laying around in a scrap heap, you can do whatever you want with it; it is public domain.
And even if it doesn't end up in a heap somewhere, you are free to come looking for it. But that doesn't necessarily compel the person possessing this code to be bothered with giving it to you, or anyone else. (Though if they do give it to you, you're of course free to do as you will with it, barring any contractual obligations you may have signed up for to receive the code in the first place.)
Just because LCD monitors don't refresh like a CRT does, doesn't make them perfect.
I had a Viewsonic VG930M 19" LCD, which was an absolutely lousy monitor. Certain colors and shades would be very obviously and visibly noisy, due to the dithering used to approximate colors which the display was incapable of producing. (This is mentioned in your linked Wikipedia article on LCDs, down under the Drawbacks heading.)
For a demonstration of this and some other problems with these displays, head over to this handy LCD test page. All of the images there are static, but depending on the display, some of them will flicker and do weird things to such an extent that you'll swear it's an oddly-smooth animated GIF concocted to con you into thinking your display is shit.
My fast, newish Asus TN-panel display does OK on most of that page. My somewhat slower, and far prettier (and more expensive!) IPS-panel NEC does a better job on some, but not all of it. Meanwhile, some of the stuff there hurt to look at with the aforementioned Viewsonic. (For reference, all monitors connected with DVI, all attached to the same video card, on the same PC, and driven at their native resolution.)
In conclusion, let me just say that under not-so-uncommon circumstances, perfectly normal LCD displays can and will flicker. Indeed, it's not a refresh rate issue. But just because folks sometimes use the wrong verbiage to describe a problem doesn't mean that they're not experiencing one at all, nor does it always indicate that they're suffering from audiophile-itis.
Whatever.
If I didn't publish source code before, I should not and cannot be compelled to do so later just because the copyright on a compiled binary has expired.
You have no more right to the things that I've created but not released for public perusal, than you do the thoughts in my own head.
I'd forgotten all about SDI.
I just gave it a good once-over, and it looks pretty cool, as if it were designed by people who want to actually use the stuff for useful things, instead of folks who are trying to be actively hurtful.
No.
The whole point of copyright is only to protect a creator's work for a limited time so that they may be encouraged to create it; to allow, if you will, it to be profitable to create something by restricting the right of others to duplicate it.
It has nothing to do with leaving behind a body of works to be built upon -- that describes a function closer to that of a patent, than of copyright.
Google it yourself.
Eh?
Just because I've released a binary under protection of copyright, doesn't mean that the source code used to produce that binary should ever become public just because the copyright on the binary has expired.
Your tirade is absurd.
What else do you wish for from Santa Claus? That when copyright on a book expires, all of the author's original notes, manuscripts and sketches become public? Or when copyright on a movie expires, that the script become public? That when the protection expires on an article of music, the original multitrack recordings, sheet music, MIDI files, samples, and DAW scripts used in the creation of that work also become public domain?
Sheesh.