geez, all I said was that the new head of the RIAA was republican. actually its the corporations that have the content control now who want to keep it, even if they have to equate it with knee-jerk statements like "p2p = piracy to pornography" where the idea of 2 people talking to each other with computers is becoming criminalized. that is the point of my post.
Boy, it must really burn "their" pants that they can't lock down p2p. The same mentality as the drug war. I guess the new republican in the RIAA's seat wants to be the new Anslinger, will we have a Anti-P2P tzar appointed by the record companies?
Somewhere the ideals this country was founded on, that the free flow of ideas is a GOOD thing is becoming perverted, when will they realize that we can't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world? Aren't invasions enough for them to realize this?
Laughing at the absurdity of it all is the only thing that keeps me from being totally disgusted.
Batmud! Heh wasted life on there, was one of the first persistent lpmuds where items and such were persistent as well.
I didn't like the changes they made (not even goin into that) and that was enough for me to rip myself away. EQ seems alot like a 3d enabled diku mud sometimes "GRATZ!!!".
the Text was alot easier to script, that was for sure, how many people had mud-bots (tinyfugue) that did many "chores" for them automaticsally despite the muds anti-bot laws. Heh buncha programmers using telnet to a text based game and they are NOT gonna use a macro program?
Anyway, at least everquest doesn't have a "top 10 players" list like batmud did (I was on it, and it was hell to maintain that xp treadmill)
Sony Theaters owns Loews Theaters for instance, I believe many of the major theater chains are also owned by the same corporations as the companies that make the movies, and if all the people go to see movies somewhere else they will lose their control over distribution, and customers from ther higher profit movies.
For some reaason however, I think any change to the current movie system in place is fought by "Hollywood", maybe they are still pissed about television.
I don't see why websites that have files avail for download wouldn't want to provide a bittorrent link along with the other "traditional" links
The tracker uses up alot less bandwidth per user than sending out the whole file and it scales beautifully, as long as there are other people interested in the file, and a bittorrent link is just a small text file really that has the hash and other info needed to dl the file, so you can use it as a drop in replacement for any other type of file, you just have to set up a tracker or use an existing one (tracker uses standard http webserver i believe).
I think the fact that "p2p" has this negative connotation that the media has spun is what's stopping websites that bitch and moan about their bandwidth costs providing files from using it. I think that trying to equate it with a distributed network/search engine is wrong, its more of a transport method. FTP is "p2p" in its purest sense but its 1to1 where this is 1 to Many. The file stays available as long as there are people interested in having it (for the most part, there is this big hue and cry about leaving completed downloads avail but that's a people issue, not a technological one).
I think that its the future, it lets people serve files that may become popular that they would not normally be able to serve from their personal websites, its a great technology and we are the better for it.
Hearing about it integrated into stuff like Shareza makes sense, but I wonder what they will use for a tracker, as shareza is ment to be a pure p2p distributed search network and the tracker is definatly a point of failure.
You don't think that Hollywood will just cut out the blockbuster/rental middleman? I already see heavily promoted DVD's in gas stations (Vin Diesel XXX) and older movies in Supermarkets, this would be perfect for that impulse buy type of market.
Also I see vending machines selling these, as they could put them anywhere you see soda machines or other types of vending machines and just pump them out that way.
The whole thing hinges on the fact that there is no way to stop them from going bad, but if someone finds out you can just spray it with some common household product (like the felt tip pen for cds) the whole issue will go away and they will be back to the drawing board.
I agree they will probably only use this for the movies they are currently promoting, as I think people won't want to buy older movies in a one-use type of situation, so there will always be something like netflix and Blockbuster, but I think the studios will use this to get a bigger cut of the movies that just come out.
To me, the dollar coin is perfect for vending machines, yet not even the government supports this.
If you take the Metro in Washington, DC, the nation's capitol, and put a 20 in the machine for your fare, you will get change in quarters.
Almost no vending machines accept the dollar coin either, this is the perfect use for them yet nothing accepts them. If they can't even use 'em in their back yard, do they expect anyone else to use them either?
Old bills are destroyed, shredded and incinerated I believe.
As for our money being worthless, I doubt that would ever happen, just that it might be harder to "spend" it after a while.
I had a few bills that were old enough not to have the security strip in them, I had to take them to a bank because noone would take them.
As far as I know any FDIC bank should take any legal tender, even if they have to send it on to the Fed.
If you got confederate money, I think you are screwed tho. 8P
Tivo Basic sounds good to get the feet wet.
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to admit I wasn't much interested in a box that i had to pay to keep using. Also when you bring it up to other people they don't much like that idea either.
I also thing this kinda thing would be good for people who already have one Tivo, but want another (for say family one, and a personal one) and only need the subscription features for one of them (also makes the idea of using the tivo-to-tivo features much more attractive).
This is all I really need, I know when the shows I want are on, I hate having to do the damn tape shuffle, specially 10 mins before a show and i'm like "What has space on it? Looking at tapes with labeles I have ripped off and replaced, crossed out and relabeled and I have given up on the "labeling" system. I'm on the "overwrite whatever is on this, if i haven't watched it then at least I'll never know what this was"
Or I just tape over something old, i refuse to spend another dollar on tapes just because I was hoping that there would be some way to use a tivo without HAVING to pay the monthly fee or more frankly, that they would get legislated out of business, just go bust, or get bought and terminated, this was one of my main concerns.
Here's the thing, I have only been taping stuff that is on simultaneously to something else I want to watch on my big 4 channels of HDTV. I was really hoping that tivo was going to support HDTV like it said previously, but my guess is that that will be a pretty long time off, and I could get this tivo basic to use in the meantime and I won't be chained to paying for it if/when I get the HTDV version.
Here's hoping one of these Tivo Basic's come around soon, I'd buy it in a minute, especially if you could still upgrade the HD yourself.
Re:Download AND Pay?
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
just tired the iTunes store yesterday, and it's BETTER than I thought it would be, and I'm a die-hard Mac user. Honestly, I have no idea why it took so long for someone to get it right, and all sly remarks about "leave it to Apple to show you how it's really done" aside, I'm glad it's been done, and prehaps this whole "Threat of the Digital Age" bullshit can finally be the fuck over with.
The reason noone else did it right before was because they (RIAA Cartel) wouldn't license anyone else to do it. Somehow Jobs + Gore (on Apple board, emember Tipper and her parental advisory warnings, he must have some music industry contacts) got the licensing.
What this article sidesteps and the real issue is that the reason the RIAA is fights all this is because they are scared we won't need them anymore, that they will lose their monopoly.
That artists might have another place to go instead of begging the existing companies/structure to sell their music, that the RIAA might not get a cut of their royalties for administering the fee processing.
Apple's store is "ok" cause the RIAA gets a cut and they finally realized pressplay and musicnet and the limited use crap they were selling before noone would go for.
This is the battle for control of distribution, as we have seen previous articles about how most cds are made using ProTools which is reletively inexpensive (ie less than a car). They are scared they won't have the bands groveling at their feet, instead they might competing directly with them.
This fight for the control of distribution will continue, the RIAA paints p2p or any distribution system as "EVIL INFRINGING MUST BE SQUASHED" and the recent Grokster/Morpheus suit shows that they can't buy everyone in the judicial system. This article seems to think that it will be upheld on appeal, hopefully those judges will be fair.
Unless there is some kind of authentication system you can't automate this will just be free money like those "watch ads for money" thing. And of course if you have to authenticate that you are actually watching then you will get kind of bored of this really fast, this is dumb, people won't do it, they'll just leave the window up while they are sleeping or whatever, even if they have to find some way to fake they are not idle.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control posted on the Internet a genetic blueprint of the virus thought to cause SARS days after the Canadian discovery.
I think the idea they are trying to say is "here is the virus, make a cure, we'll worry about the money later." But it does come off pretty self-serving about the whole royalty thing earlier, but I guess if that's what they need to do post this data then that's what we will have to live with. This disease has the potential to kill 10% of all the people in the world, do we really want people to hold back info, or not use all the resources available to them because it might bankrupt them?
That said, they didn't to get up on a soapbox about how they are all about defensive patents blah blah, they want the cash they are spending back and that's ok, cause they are making their data available.
This is the stupidist idea I've heard in a long time, it shows how US-Centric people think, do these people realize that the internet is INTERNATIONAL!?
How can you impose this type of tax? The spammers would just move offshore and you would just be curbing the usefulness of e-mail for simple things like say, Slashdot notification that someone replied to this rant.
The best the FTC could do is impose a standard of email on the government that would authenticate the sender in some way that would be open to use by all, and set the example of a spam free email system that people/isp's could implement themselves.
Legislating this, then using the weight of the US to bully the rest of the world into it will never work.
I looked into this program myself, but I wanted it to be able to at least support 480p for movies, and I have the sony component cable, as it stands now from what they have said I would have to use the cable that comes with the ps2, or the svideo cable, meaning changing cables as well when I stop playing video games. They say they are working on it tho, when it has that feature (or at least 480i) I will buy it.
The developers seem to be pretty responsive, they added ogg and png support on request from users. I am hoping that feature will be added soon cause I would love to be able to use this.
What I use now is a "video sender" that sends composite video and 2 channel analog audio over 2.4mhz. Before Qcast Tuner came out I was planning on getting the linux kit for the ps2 to use as a livingroom computer/streamer, but this look like it might serve my needs for alot cheaper. (I already have the network adapter)
From reading the forums, they seem to have gone to alot of effort to have as complete a support as you can for the many different kinds of divx (3,4,5,xvid,etc) files. This is not to be lightly mentioned as its a pretty impressive feat. It seems as they have done a good job from the things I have heard, has anyone else had experience with this?
Get the component-out support (720p would be nice) and it will be great!
If Redhat was smart they would just kill off most of the delayed release uhh... non-subscriber ftp servers and replace them with a couple bittorrent trackers. They could save the money they supposedly lost from the people who didn't sign up to RHN just for the early release (this amount of money would seem to be small considering all the reports on how it is going slow enough that it will take 2 or 3 days to DL anyway).
Considering the nature of these types of releases (hype about release for a while then open the floodgates, but instead of a river its just alot of little streams) and the way Bittorrent scales so well, you'd think some (more?) companies would provide a bittorrent link in addition to traditional download links. Especially on large files.
Take game demos for instance, usually they have a list of 20+ places mirroring them, now to add their bandwidth all they would have to do is connect to the tracker and leave their window open and any traditional mirror site could mirror that as well.
I don't think any of this will happen, traditional companies seem to avoid p2p like the plague, no matter its benefits. The whole mirrorer bandwidth contributer for things like demos would remove extra web views (ie ad views)so I doubt that will change much either.
Well even if the companies don't want to embrace it, the people have.
You obviously haven't had the utopian vision of a society that shares its code for the common good, unlike other evil entities that exploit, control and enslave its users with a monopoly that can, and apparantly does have the money to pay off the corrupt politicians.
I think somewhere in there is some truth, but the GPL was started by people who were trying to STOP you from making money off it, but to entice you to add to the pool of useful code, at least thats the impossible dream I had when I read it.
Feel like you are getting terrible service? Call customer support and say "I am very unhappy with my service. Can you fix it? No? Ok, I will switch carriers tomorrow. So will my entire family and anyone I know that I can pursuade." That is the benefit.
I fully expect to see more competitive pricing plans because the entry/exit barrier for carriers have gone down. Of course I also expect to see stiffer penalties in ending contracts early to offset this.
Yea, I expect to see more of those 2 year and maybe 3 year contracts, that is the only way they can lock you in and slow the turnover rate.
I too personally am using a service only because I can't/won't give up the number. I am glad I will be able to change after Nov.
Of course the wireless co's will go down fighting and screaming, they are complaining that the huge sums of money they are extracting from the public airwaves will be less if they make it so people can leave if they suck. And that they might actually have to give people MORE of their airwaves back now (the horror!). Don't they know the CABLE companies own the FCC?!
Seems to me this policy would stifle innovation in Mexico even more and even the writers will be jumping the border.
Where you warn about the Govt being above the people in Mexico, you have the Corps above the Govt and the people in America, look at the basic "War on the Internet" the RIAA and MPAA are waging,
Yea, oh i dunno, I don't see any Red Dawn (80's movie reference) scenario anymore, the Gov't has cruise missiles, emp weapons, tanks jets, bombers and I don't know really how a populace armed even with high power hunting rifles and tech-9's that have been converted to fully automatic against a single tank or helicopter, but its nice to dream that it would be possible.
All that said, you can't put the genie back in the bottle without basically doing what countries like Britan did in the territories, and what Israel is repeating today, door-to-door weapons searches on a regular basis. and that won't get the caches of guns buried in the woods or whatever else the more uh "zealous" gun advocates have done. But then I bet the fact that the NRA and Gun Manufacturers represent both a large vocal voting block and money interest with both those carrots I don't see guns being illegal in this country any time in the near future, but the manditory minimums on illegal gun possesion (basically no carry permit,no permit at all, etc) are good and should continue to be enforced, knowing that just finding an illegal weapon is x years no chance of early release is a heavy deterrent, but probably is the reason for alot of those car chases....
The day of door-to-door searches in the name of removing a terrorist threat is not that far away in this country, the power grab has been enormous, but hey, we can replace them with a different set of puppets to a different set of corporations (think texas oil).
NYC has had m-16 armed soldiers doing manditory checkpoints and id showing.... this is to go across the verizzano narrows bridge!
Anyway this tirade is over and you read this far.. you are probably one of the few.
It would be nice if they used this tech so you could ACTUALLY HEAR the announcements. Sometimes they are important like "This train is going express after the next stop" which usually sounds like something from a Peanuts tv show, thus making you miss your local only stop and having to backtrack...
This tech is pretty cool, but i think it will end up being used much like laser technology is used, some genuinely useful things (say laser pointer) that can also be used in "bad" ways (at the movie theater for instance) or clamped to a gun and used as a sight... Or to shoot down spaceships.. Ultrasonic sound is finding many parrellel uses in medicine, military and the commercial sectors. I think this guy is just opening up the uses of ultrasound that previously hadn't been considered, or funded well enough to make feasible, seems like this guy and his buddies are their own VC seedcorp. Very "american inventor" even a indirect comparison to Thomas Edison (among other "great american inventors")
Actually i would say that guilt plays a large part of what works in AA and most of the 12-step type groups, but thats pretty OT.
I think that you are depending on the person you have it "report" to be diligent, and that supposedly the guilt of having them see your sin would suppress the sin in the first place.
This idea seems to stem from catholic confession with NetAccountability acting as a "virtual confession booth". I wonder if people send their links to their priest? I saw something about that in the literature on the website...
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geez, all I said was that the new head of the RIAA was republican. actually its the corporations that have the content control now who want to keep it, even if they have to equate it with knee-jerk statements like "p2p = piracy to pornography" where the idea of 2 people talking to each other with computers is becoming criminalized. that is the point of my post.
Boy, it must really burn "their" pants that they can't lock down p2p. The same mentality as the drug war. I guess the new republican in the RIAA's seat wants to be the new Anslinger, will we have a Anti-P2P tzar appointed by the record companies?
Somewhere the ideals this country was founded on, that the free flow of ideas is a GOOD thing is becoming perverted, when will they realize that we can't isolate ourselves from the rest of the world? Aren't invasions enough for them to realize this?
Laughing at the absurdity of it all is the only thing that keeps me from being totally disgusted.
why does someone always complain about double standards and then get modded up?
Batmud! Heh wasted life on there, was one of the first persistent lpmuds where items and such were persistent as well.
I didn't like the changes they made (not even goin into that) and that was enough for me to rip myself away. EQ seems alot like a 3d enabled diku mud sometimes "GRATZ!!!".
the Text was alot easier to script, that was for sure, how many people had mud-bots (tinyfugue) that did many "chores" for them automaticsally despite the muds anti-bot laws. Heh buncha programmers using telnet to a text based game and they are NOT gonna use a macro program?
Anyway, at least everquest doesn't have a "top 10 players" list like batmud did (I was on it, and it was hell to maintain that xp treadmill)
Sony Theaters owns Loews Theaters for instance, I believe many of the major theater chains are also owned by the same corporations as the companies that make the movies, and if all the people go to see movies somewhere else they will lose their control over distribution, and customers from ther higher profit movies.
For some reaason however, I think any change to the current movie system in place is fought by "Hollywood", maybe they are still pissed about television.
what about seeing the 3 tractor trailers pull up to the bank and load up 1 billion dollars?
I don't see why websites that have files avail for download wouldn't want to provide a bittorrent link along with the other "traditional" links
The tracker uses up alot less bandwidth per user than sending out the whole file and it scales beautifully, as long as there are other people interested in the file, and a bittorrent link is just a small text file really that has the hash and other info needed to dl the file, so you can use it as a drop in replacement for any other type of file, you just have to set up a tracker or use an existing one (tracker uses standard http webserver i believe).
I think the fact that "p2p" has this negative connotation that the media has spun is what's stopping websites that bitch and moan about their bandwidth costs providing files from using it.
I think that trying to equate it with a distributed network/search engine is wrong, its more of a transport method. FTP is "p2p" in its purest sense but its 1to1 where this is 1 to Many. The file stays available as long as there are people interested in having it (for the most part, there is this big hue and cry about leaving completed downloads avail but that's a people issue, not a technological one).
I think that its the future, it lets people serve files that may become popular that they would not normally be able to serve from their personal websites, its a great technology and we are the better for it.
Hearing about it integrated into stuff like Shareza makes sense, but I wonder what they will use for a tracker, as shareza is ment to be a pure p2p distributed search network and the tracker is definatly a point of failure.
You don't think that Hollywood will just cut out the blockbuster/rental middleman? I already see heavily promoted DVD's in gas stations (Vin Diesel XXX) and older movies in Supermarkets, this would be perfect for that impulse buy type of market.
Also I see vending machines selling these, as they could put them anywhere you see soda machines or other types of vending machines and just pump them out that way.
The whole thing hinges on the fact that there is no way to stop them from going bad, but if someone finds out you can just spray it with some common household product (like the felt tip pen for cds) the whole issue will go away and they will be back to the drawing board.
I agree they will probably only use this for the movies they are currently promoting, as I think people won't want to buy older movies in a one-use type of situation, so there will always be something like netflix and Blockbuster, but I think the studios will use this to get a bigger cut of the movies that just come out.
The only question, are GWB and John Ashcroft Caeser and Brutus? And which is which?
To me, the dollar coin is perfect for vending machines, yet not even the government supports this.
If you take the Metro in Washington, DC, the nation's capitol, and put a 20 in the machine for your fare, you will get change in quarters.
Almost no vending machines accept the dollar coin either, this is the perfect use for them yet nothing accepts them. If they can't even use 'em in their back yard, do they expect anyone else to use them either?
Old bills are destroyed, shredded and incinerated I believe.
As for our money being worthless, I doubt that would ever happen, just that it might be harder to "spend" it after a while.
I had a few bills that were old enough not to have the security strip in them, I had to take them to a bank because noone would take them.
As far as I know any FDIC bank should take any legal tender, even if they have to send it on to the Fed.
If you got confederate money, I think you are screwed tho. 8P
I have to admit I wasn't much interested in a box that i had to pay to keep using. Also when you bring it up to other people they don't much like that idea either.
I also thing this kinda thing would be good for people who already have one Tivo, but want another (for say family one, and a personal one) and only need the subscription features for one of them (also makes the idea of using the tivo-to-tivo features much more attractive).
This is all I really need, I know when the shows I want are on, I hate having to do the damn tape shuffle, specially 10 mins before a show and i'm like "What has space on it? Looking at tapes with labeles I have ripped off and replaced, crossed out and relabeled and I have given up on the "labeling" system. I'm on the "overwrite whatever is on this, if i haven't watched it then at least I'll never know what this was"
Or I just tape over something old, i refuse to spend another dollar on tapes just because I was hoping that there would be some way to use a tivo without HAVING to pay the monthly fee or more frankly, that they would get legislated out of business, just go bust, or get bought and terminated, this was one of my main concerns.
Here's the thing, I have only been taping stuff that is on simultaneously to something else I want to watch on my big 4 channels of HDTV. I was really hoping that tivo was going to support HDTV like it said previously, but my guess is that that will be a pretty long time off, and I could get this tivo basic to use in the meantime and I won't be chained to paying for it if/when I get the HTDV version.
Here's hoping one of these Tivo Basic's come around soon, I'd buy it in a minute, especially if you could still upgrade the HD yourself.
The reason noone else did it right before was because they (RIAA Cartel) wouldn't license anyone else to do it. Somehow Jobs + Gore (on Apple board, emember Tipper and her parental advisory warnings, he must have some music industry contacts) got the licensing.
What this article sidesteps and the real issue is that the reason the RIAA is fights all this is because they are scared we won't need them anymore, that they will lose their monopoly.
That artists might have another place to go instead of begging the existing companies/structure to sell their music, that the RIAA might not get a cut of their royalties for administering the fee processing.
Apple's store is "ok" cause the RIAA gets a cut and they finally realized pressplay and musicnet and the limited use crap they were selling before noone would go for.
This is the battle for control of distribution, as we have seen previous articles about how most cds are made using ProTools which is reletively inexpensive (ie less than a car). They are scared they won't have the bands groveling at their feet, instead they might competing directly with them.
This fight for the control of distribution will continue, the RIAA paints p2p or any distribution system as "EVIL INFRINGING MUST BE SQUASHED" and the recent Grokster/Morpheus suit shows that they can't buy everyone in the judicial system.
This article seems to think that it will be upheld on appeal, hopefully those judges will be fair.
Unless there is some kind of authentication system you can't automate this will just be free money like those "watch ads for money" thing. And of course if you have to authenticate that you are actually watching then you will get kind of bored of this really fast, this is dumb, people won't do it, they'll just leave the window up while they are sleeping or whatever, even if they have to find some way to fake they are not idle.
This is the stupidist idea I've heard in a long time, it shows how US-Centric people think, do these people realize that the internet is INTERNATIONAL!?
How can you impose this type of tax? The spammers would just move offshore and you would just be curbing the usefulness of e-mail for simple things like say, Slashdot notification that someone replied to this rant.
The best the FTC could do is impose a standard of email on the government that would authenticate the sender in some way that would be open to use by all, and set the example of a spam free email system that people/isp's could implement themselves.
Legislating this, then using the weight of the US to bully the rest of the world into it will never work.
oh forgot to mention, spdif output (optical) is a really nice feature it has that should be mentioned.
I looked into this program myself, but I wanted it to be able to at least support 480p for movies, and I have the sony component cable, as it stands now from what they have said I would have to use the cable that comes with the ps2, or the svideo cable, meaning changing cables as well when I stop playing video games. They say they are working on it tho, when it has that feature (or at least 480i) I will buy it.
The developers seem to be pretty responsive, they added ogg and png support on request from users. I am hoping that feature will be added soon cause I would love to be able to use this.
What I use now is a "video sender" that sends composite video and 2 channel analog audio over 2.4mhz. Before Qcast Tuner came out I was planning on getting the linux kit for the ps2 to use as a livingroom computer/streamer, but this look like it might serve my needs for alot cheaper. (I already have the network adapter)
From reading the forums, they seem to have gone to alot of effort to have as complete a support as you can for the many different kinds of divx (3,4,5,xvid,etc) files. This is not to be lightly mentioned as its a pretty impressive feat. It seems as they have done a good job from the things I have heard, has anyone else had experience with this?
Get the component-out support (720p would be nice) and it will be great!
If Redhat was smart they would just kill off most of the delayed release uhh... non-subscriber ftp servers and replace them with a couple bittorrent trackers. They could save the money they supposedly lost from the people who didn't sign up to RHN just for the early release (this amount of money would seem to be small considering all the reports on how it is going slow enough that it will take 2 or 3 days to DL anyway).
Considering the nature of these types of releases (hype about release for a while then open the floodgates, but instead of a river its just alot of little streams) and the way Bittorrent scales so well, you'd think some (more?) companies would provide a bittorrent link in addition to traditional download links. Especially on large files.
Take game demos for instance, usually they have a list of 20+ places mirroring them, now to add their bandwidth all they would have to do is connect to the tracker and leave their window open and any traditional mirror site could mirror that as well.
I don't think any of this will happen, traditional companies seem to avoid p2p like the plague, no matter its benefits. The whole mirrorer bandwidth contributer for things like demos would remove extra web views (ie ad views)so I doubt that will change much either.
Well even if the companies don't want to embrace it, the people have.
You obviously haven't had the utopian vision of a society that shares its code for the common good, unlike other evil entities that exploit, control and enslave its users with a monopoly that can, and apparantly does have the money to pay off the corrupt politicians.
I think somewhere in there is some truth, but the GPL was started by people who were trying to STOP you from making money off it, but to entice you to add to the pool of useful code, at least thats the impossible dream I had when I read it.
I too personally am using a service only because I can't/won't give up the number. I am glad I will be able to change after Nov.
Of course the wireless co's will go down fighting and screaming, they are complaining that the huge sums of money they are extracting from the public airwaves will be less if they make it so people can leave if they suck. And that they might actually have to give people MORE of their airwaves back now (the horror!).
Don't they know the CABLE companies own the FCC?!
its called a social security number and they usually make you give it to GET a cell phone (at least a plan, not a pay as you go)
Seems to me this policy would stifle innovation in Mexico even more and even the writers will be jumping the border.
Where you warn about the Govt being above the people in Mexico, you have the Corps above the Govt and the people in America, look at the basic "War on the Internet" the RIAA and MPAA are waging,
Yea, oh i dunno, I don't see any Red Dawn (80's movie reference) scenario anymore, the Gov't has cruise missiles, emp weapons, tanks jets, bombers and I don't know really how a populace armed even with high power hunting rifles and tech-9's that have been converted to fully automatic against a single tank or helicopter, but its nice to dream that it would be possible.
All that said, you can't put the genie back in the bottle without basically doing what countries like Britan did in the territories, and what Israel is repeating today, door-to-door weapons searches on a regular basis. and that won't get the caches of guns buried in the woods or whatever else the more uh "zealous" gun advocates have done. But then I bet the fact that the NRA and Gun Manufacturers represent both a large vocal voting block and money interest with both those carrots I don't see guns being illegal in this country any time in the near future, but the manditory minimums on illegal gun possesion (basically no carry permit,no permit at all, etc) are good and should continue to be enforced, knowing that just finding an illegal weapon is x years no chance of early release is a heavy deterrent, but probably is the reason for alot of those car chases....
The day of door-to-door searches in the name of removing a terrorist threat is not that far away in this country, the power grab has been enormous, but hey, we can replace them with a different set of puppets to a different set of corporations (think texas oil).
NYC has had m-16 armed soldiers doing manditory checkpoints and id showing.... this is to go across the verizzano narrows bridge!
Anyway this tirade is over and you read this far.. you are probably one of the few.
It would be nice if they used this tech so you could ACTUALLY HEAR the announcements. Sometimes they are important like "This train is going express after the next stop" which usually sounds like something from a Peanuts tv show, thus making you miss your local only stop and having to backtrack...
This tech is pretty cool, but i think it will end up being used much like laser technology is used, some genuinely useful things (say laser pointer) that can also be used in "bad" ways (at the movie theater for instance) or clamped to a gun and used as a sight... Or to shoot down spaceships.. Ultrasonic sound is finding many parrellel uses in medicine, military and the commercial sectors. I think this guy is just opening up the uses of ultrasound that previously hadn't been considered, or funded well enough to make feasible, seems like this guy and his buddies are their own VC seedcorp. Very "american inventor" even a indirect comparison to Thomas Edison (among other "great american inventors")
Actually i would say that guilt plays a large part of what works in AA and most of the 12-step type groups, but thats pretty OT.
I think that you are depending on the person you have it "report" to be diligent, and that supposedly the guilt of having them see your sin would suppress the sin in the first place.
This idea seems to stem from catholic confession with NetAccountability acting as a "virtual confession booth". I wonder if people send their links to their priest? I saw something about that in the literature on the website...