Actually, you do need to tell me just how useful a 100-digit prime number is. Beyond the supposed beauty of such a number (I personally don't see the beauty of it, but then again beauty is a really subjective term), what's the point? What are prime numbers useful for in daily life?
Nothing. Ab-so-lutely nothing. Promise never to use them??
(installing a network sniffer right now)
What's with the scaremongering?
on
Does Google = God?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Jeez Louise.. Terrorists will be using the interweb to organize more efficiently! Foreign people who hate use will be able to talk about us behind our backs! (No mention that the internet has done more to proliferate American culture and "values" than MTV or McDonalds, or that the internet can be, and actually is, used for good as well as evil..)
Don't get your panties in a wad, United States. Better start fearing your domestic Police State To Be!
OMFG! There's a knife next to my plate! What if a terrorist had sat down here!
This article reminds me of opposite day. Except for the last sentence.
You see; telecos (in Europe at least) are very, very nervous about 802.11. They paid, literally, billions of dollars for UMTS licenses. Some other poster mentioned a $50/month unlimited plan on GPRS, well, GPRS is really, really slow. UMTS is supposed to be 2 megabit/second, albeit shared with all users in a cell. UMTS cells will however be smaller than conventional GSM cells.
GPRS can be rolled out pretty much instantly using the existing GSM infrastructure. UMTS will need entirely new basestations to put into place. Why build a network with near-100% coverage, if handsets will drop to GSM if necessary? Well, the VERY expensive UMTS licenses require it.
Then comes along wifi.. Speeds of 3 or 10 Mbps. Today. No big network. Free spectrum. Yes, only at hot spots, but where else do you use your laptop? In the mall? In your car? Hardly bloody likely. Hotels, airports, maybe Starbucks. And they ALL have hot spots already! Using the net on a little phone or pda/subnotebook gizmo? You don't need megabits of speed, existing data or GPRS (2.5G) will do.
So 3G is a really big liability. The license is use it or lose it; don't build a network (again, imagine a billion crisp green bills vanishing in thin air) and your other invested billions will never yield any return on investment (a write-off).
mmO2 already took a write-off selling the Dutch O2 branded operator (which will now rebrand to it's *old* pre-O2 brand, telfort). The company was bought for 75 million Euros, and mmO2 wrote off the rest of the company's worth (the billions it put into the UMTS license, which never materialized any revenue so far). The new Telfort says it won't do anything with UMTS.
Show me a device that ordinary people will buy that accesses a service that ordinary people want to use that uses megabit per second speeds AND that can be used anywhere (so, pocketsized, not a big ass laptop). Show me that, and I might be able to get you a very nice consulting gig. There is no killer-app for 3G.
Go wi-fi!
(Though always remember, wi-fi is a commodity, you won't make insane profits (maybe none) and competitors or kiddies can simply jam your signal by using a big ass microwave or other disruptive ISM equipment in the same band..)
What's that? 80 lines of infringing code?! Quick, replace the linux kernel *entirely* with the Hurd!!
I wonder if RMS would be willing to swap out the entire GNU system if a Ctrl-Meta-Compose option in EMACS turned out to be infringing someone's copyright/patent...
If someone is willing to pay a lot of money for something, why shouldn't they? eBay is a very fair marketplace. It allows sellers to obtain maximum value for their product. If someone wants to pay more for something, why not let them?
Usually, to use the carpool lane, you'd need to have more than 1 person in the car. Obviously, if you have enough money this isn't really that much of a restriction. But having the State sell stickers so you won't need an additional passenger is going to ruin a perfectly good working sector of the economy! "Grandpa," they'll ask you "hiring a bum to get to work faster, how did that work?". Remember, the homeless often have very few other means to earn money, whilst being a productive asset to the economy. Some are psychotic, most aren't educated, but most can sit still, and with the airco on full blast and a happy pine-scented air-freshner hanging from the rear-view mirror, you won't even notice the stench most of the time!
So, please, find a place in your heart for the homeless. Keep carpooling alive!
Unless the effectiveness of the filter is legislated, I suppose all one would have to do is redirect sex.com, porn.com, and some obvious pr0n sites to a warning page and you'll have met the letter of the law without accidentally blocking National Geographic. Or artistic movies about gay cowboys eating pudding.
This is version 0.1 of RELLY GOOD BLOKCER LOL! for windows 9x.
INSTALLATION:
Please enter the following lines to C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS
I don't see how the parent of this post is "5, Interesting." PowerDVD works just fine on every system I have ever seen
Which goes to prove you haven't seen my system.
I would bet that this "videolan" program is actually more limited in terms of actually playing the movies.
You could download it and give it a try. I did mention it's open source.
I don't see why you need to rip it, add subtitles, and make an SVCD. If the DVD has the English subtitles, why not put the DVD in the drive and turn on the subtitles?
What if the DVD doesn't have English subtitles? (BTW, for subtitling, you'd need sub station alpha and virtualdub; works a charm).
Don't you mean..?
What? No English subtitles? Surely there is no such thing! This must in the same kind of la-la phantasy land where PowerDVD won't work on your (imaginary) system, but videolan, an obviously inferior player, though I've never used it, will!
PowerDVD didn't work? Can you please explain "didn't work"?
Didn't work in the sense that my DVD player does nothing but grind, and the entire computer is unresponsive to any input, including the CTRL-ALT-DEL or the soft-off switch (have to hold it for 4 seconds to have the BIOS kick in and sort things out). Is that part of the "region codes" DRM as well? Even with region-free DVDs?
Videolan worked. PowerDVD did not. Don't FUD me around with region codes.
I've had no problems playing DVDs using videolan on windows, but no luck whatsoever with a variety of closed source programs such as powerdvd and windows media player. Same DVD, same drive, same operating system. Fully licensed commercial crap = don't work, open source = works beautifully and will even rip it for me, add subtitles and make an SVCD out of it so I can watch a German language flick with my American friends.
Well, you can make the freedom to do drugs argument, but history is not kind on you if you do that. Historically, about 10% of the population of Britain were addicted to heroin; before this substance was outlawed. That's a lot of smack heads. I don't really think we want that many in any country.
Way back when the British had an empire, you mean?;-)
The domain suffix on windows is fun. It uses the domain name in your hostname as a domain suffix to search as well. One day, I'd set up my windows box as mybox.mydomain.com. Then my ISPs DNS servers stopped working. So when I went to cnn.com, it went to cnn.com.mydomain.com - and I got my very own homepage, even though the address bar in the browser said cnn.com (since *.mydomain.com resolves to mydomain's webserver's IP address..)
I also have my webserver set up so that if you surf to a hostname that doesn't exist, it serves up the google I'm Feeling Lucky page for the hostname.. "Collecting ancient art? Why, I happen to have a website on that, just go to collecting.ancient.art.mydomain.com."
The US patent system was the first of its kind. The first version of anything is never the best version.
The following is (c) wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.
Patents originated in England with the Statute of Monopolies 1693 under King James I of England. Prior to this time, the King could issue letters patent providing any person with a monopoly to produce particular goods or provide particular services. This power was widely abused; thus Parliament restricted it through the Statute of Monopolies so that the King could only issue them to the inventors of original inventions for a fixed number of years. Section 6 of the Statute refers to "manner[s] of new manufacture...[by] inventors", and this section remains the foundation for patent law in England and Australia. The Statute of Monopolies was latter developed by the courts to produce modern patent law; this innovation was soon copied by other countries.
You know, there already were laws prior to the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution..
The point is, not every business chooses to be a Corporation. In fact, LLCs, partnerships etc. are much more suited to smaller companies. Very small companies will not choose to incorporate, and not have a board of directors. So, "corporations come in every size" isn't quite true (one-man corporations?); most corporations are mediumsized to large companies, not tiny outfits.
Any corporation, no matter how large or small has a Board of Directors. The board is made up of people that are voted into positions, by the shareholders.
But not all businesses are corporations. Don't discount sole proprietors, partnerships and limited liability companies, non-profit organisations, as well as foreign businesses doing business in the US, or indeed elsewhere (the original poster didn't state which country he's in).
There's nothing wrong with digital over AM/SW. It's just that these experiments are in NO way relevant to the current operation of the BBC world service, or any other radio station. It will takes some years to develop this technology further AND, most importantly, it will take *decades* before the installed base reaches any sort of critical mass. Before that happens this is a play thing.
With regard to your comments about satellite being expensive - already companies are selling satellite tuners that connect to your regular FM radio's antenna so you can use your regular radio as a satellite receiver.. In Africa. Satellite is already being used by the BBC world service (and the world services of many other countries).
You might want to check out a little thing called 'context'.
The original poster's comment was like saying "Wow! Now the BBC can switch to online streaming audio!" when the very first streaming audio was sent over the ARPAnet in 1973 (RFC 508).
Digital radio over SW sounds interesting. I wonder if old Auntie's going to pick this one up? I gather BBC services got cut over North America recently in favour of web broadcasts... maybe digital technology will allow that to be reinstated in the future?
Sure. You see, it's far cheaper to use as-yet-experimental state-of-the-art technology than to continue using transmitters and technologies that have been in use for decades and that are well understood and easily serviced by thousands of technicians.
The new transmitters will no doubt be fitted in, say, a few weeks. Then, in about three months, just about every household in North America will have bought the new receivers, and switch to tuning in small transistor radio sets to BBC broadcasts, instead of, say, surfing pornography or using AOL. Once the BBC starts digital broadcasts, well, no one will want, or need, broadband internet connections!
Notice that the bitrates used in these AAC streams are wayyyy too high to ever be transferred over a dial-up connection. Even IF PCs could be equipped with AAC decoders, or similar codecs, such as ogg vorbis, the bitrates needed, some even exceeding 22 kilobits per second would prove a lethal hurdle for people who would want to listen to a stream using such a "magical" codec on their PCs..
Plus, other, existing, methods of delivery for digital radio, such as satellite, are clearly inferior to this new technology.
WinCE a good embedded system? Hmm.. Isn't that the WinCE that is at the heart of PocketPC? The embedded OS that brought blue screens of death (well, ok, depending on your color scheme a light khaki screen of death) to PDAs? Yeah. I trust WinCE to run my heart monitor if I ever end up in an Intensive Care Unit... *cough*
The thing that bugs me about the mindstorms kit, and LEGO(TM)(R) in general is the non-orthogonality of the bricks/components. If you want to put two bricks together at an angle, you need specially shaped bricks. In fact, the lego people make a butt load of cash just inventing new kinds of bricks to include in kits -- lose 'em, and you have to buy a new kit, or another kit that includes it.
I much preferred Construx building sets as a kid. It was much easier to put together moving parts, build voluminous structures, and to some degree work with angles. Anyone remember Construx? I suppose k'nex now fulfills this role, though it seems less sturdy. Of course, Meccano is the granddady of all, so some-one will point out that it's superior. It's just that I've never owned any;-)
BTW, ever notices how the electrical engines in the Mindstorms set are non-lego-standard shapes and sizes? What's that about? Would an extra millimeter of plastic to make it align hurt that much??
I'm sure there are better products to construct robots, meccano offshoots or succesors combined with sensors, actuators, a PC interface and perhaps even a microcontroller-cum-batterypack like the mindstorms set. Does the slashdot crowd have any suggestions?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, mindstorms is fscking expensive and hard to get, esp. in Europe.
how very american of you... throwing sanctions left and right. who died and make your country own the world?
You know, backbone providers used to take sanctions against their customers if they allowed spam to flourish, and they in turn took sanctions against their customer's, etc. down to the individual spammers.
A case could be made for requiring networks to take measures against spam, and to tax networks that do not, or that are connected to networks that do not (and so, become tainted). So if you receive 10% of your traffic from customers in, say, Korea, who rarely enforce anti-spam provisions, you pay spam-tax over 10% of the traffic you shift (the 'tainted' traffic) regardless of whether it is spam or not. Of course, where-ever you shift it to will have to count 10% of the traffic they receive from you as tainted as well.
Independent third parties could certify networks as 'spam-resistant', paying particular notice to enforcement, ingress- and egress filtering of spoofed traffic, etc. Over time, statutory limits could be shifted to require that networks operating in the US be at least 10% spam-resistant (i.e. no more than 10% tainted traffic), then 20% then 30,50, up to 100 (at which point the tax can be lifted).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you do need to tell me just how useful a 100-digit prime number is. Beyond the supposed beauty of such a number (I personally don't see the beauty of it, but then again beauty is a really subjective term), what's the point? What are prime numbers useful for in daily life?
Nothing. Ab-so-lutely nothing. Promise never to use them??
(installing a network sniffer right now)
Jeez Louise.. Terrorists will be using the interweb to organize more efficiently! Foreign people who hate use will be able to talk about us behind our backs! (No mention that the internet has done more to proliferate American culture and "values" than MTV or McDonalds, or that the internet can be, and actually is, used for good as well as evil..)
Don't get your panties in a wad, United States. Better start fearing your domestic Police State To Be!
OMFG! There's a knife next to my plate! What if a terrorist had sat down here!
This article reminds me of opposite day. Except for the last sentence.
You see; telecos (in Europe at least) are very, very nervous about 802.11. They paid, literally, billions of dollars for UMTS licenses. Some other poster mentioned a $50/month unlimited plan on GPRS, well, GPRS is really, really slow. UMTS is supposed to be 2 megabit/second, albeit shared with all users in a cell. UMTS cells will however be smaller than conventional GSM cells.
GPRS can be rolled out pretty much instantly using the existing GSM infrastructure. UMTS will need entirely new basestations to put into place. Why build a network with near-100% coverage, if handsets will drop to GSM if necessary? Well, the VERY expensive UMTS licenses require it.
Then comes along wifi.. Speeds of 3 or 10 Mbps. Today. No big network. Free spectrum. Yes, only at hot spots, but where else do you use your laptop? In the mall? In your car? Hardly bloody likely. Hotels, airports, maybe Starbucks. And they ALL have hot spots already! Using the net on a little phone or pda/subnotebook gizmo? You don't need megabits of speed, existing data or GPRS (2.5G) will do.
So 3G is a really big liability. The license is use it or lose it; don't build a network (again, imagine a billion crisp green bills vanishing in thin air) and your other invested billions will never yield any return on investment (a write-off).
mmO2 already took a write-off selling the Dutch O2 branded operator (which will now rebrand to it's *old* pre-O2 brand, telfort). The company was bought for 75 million Euros, and mmO2 wrote off the rest of the company's worth (the billions it put into the UMTS license, which never materialized any revenue so far). The new Telfort says it won't do anything with UMTS.
Show me a device that ordinary people will buy that accesses a service that ordinary people want to use that uses megabit per second speeds AND that can be used anywhere (so, pocketsized, not a big ass laptop). Show me that, and I might be able to get you a very nice consulting gig. There is no killer-app for 3G.
Go wi-fi!
(Though always remember, wi-fi is a commodity, you won't make insane profits (maybe none) and competitors or kiddies can simply jam your signal by using a big ass microwave or other disruptive ISM equipment in the same band..)
What's that? 80 lines of infringing code?! Quick, replace the linux kernel *entirely* with the Hurd!!
I wonder if RMS would be willing to swap out the entire GNU system if a Ctrl-Meta-Compose option in EMACS turned out to be infringing someone's copyright/patent...
Usually, to use the carpool lane, you'd need to have more than 1 person in the car. Obviously, if you have enough money this isn't really that much of a restriction. But having the State sell stickers so you won't need an additional passenger is going to ruin a perfectly good working sector of the economy! "Grandpa," they'll ask you "hiring a bum to get to work faster, how did that work?". Remember, the homeless often have very few other means to earn money, whilst being a productive asset to the economy. Some are psychotic, most aren't educated, but most can sit still, and with the airco on full blast and a happy pine-scented air-freshner hanging from the rear-view mirror, you won't even notice the stench most of the time!
So, please, find a place in your heart for the homeless. Keep carpooling alive!
This is version 0.1 of RELLY GOOD BLOKCER LOL! for windows 9x.
INSTALLATION:
Please enter the following lines to C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS
sex.com 127.0.0.1
porn.com 127.0.0.1
DONE.
Which goes to prove you haven't seen my system.
You could download it and give it a try. I did mention it's open source.
What if the DVD doesn't have English subtitles?
(BTW, for subtitling, you'd need sub station alpha and virtualdub; works a charm).
Don't you mean..?
Didn't work in the sense that my DVD player does nothing but grind, and the entire computer is unresponsive to any input, including the CTRL-ALT-DEL or the soft-off switch (have to hold it for 4 seconds to have the BIOS kick in and sort things out). Is that part of the "region codes" DRM as well? Even with region-free DVDs?
Videolan worked. PowerDVD did not. Don't FUD me around with region codes.
I've had no problems playing DVDs using videolan on windows, but no luck whatsoever with a variety of closed source programs such as powerdvd and windows media player. Same DVD, same drive, same operating system. Fully licensed commercial crap = don't work, open source = works beautifully and will even rip it for me, add subtitles and make an SVCD out of it so I can watch a German language flick with my American friends.
Glad to see the Post gets it.
Yeah really. Remember, the competition is.. 50 cents!
Way back when the British had an empire, you mean?
Darn. Slashdotted AND hijacked already..
The domain suffix on windows is fun. It uses the domain name in your hostname as a domain suffix to search as well. One day, I'd set up my windows box as mybox.mydomain.com. Then my ISPs DNS servers stopped working. So when I went to cnn.com, it went to cnn.com.mydomain.com - and I got my very own homepage, even though the address bar in the browser said cnn.com (since *.mydomain.com resolves to mydomain's webserver's IP address..)
I also have my webserver set up so that if you surf to a hostname that doesn't exist, it serves up the google I'm Feeling Lucky page for the hostname.. "Collecting ancient art? Why, I happen to have a website on that, just go to collecting.ancient.art.mydomain.com."
Apple are using the new kit internally, in the web site department. And it's just too damn fast!
The following is (c) wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.
Patents originated in England with the Statute of Monopolies 1693 under King James I of England. Prior to this time, the King could issue letters patent providing any person with a monopoly to produce particular goods or provide particular services. This power was widely abused; thus Parliament restricted it through the Statute of Monopolies so that the King could only issue them to the inventors of original inventions for a fixed number of years. Section 6 of the Statute refers to "manner[s] of new manufacture...[by] inventors", and this section remains the foundation for patent law in England and Australia. The Statute of Monopolies was latter developed by the courts to produce modern patent law; this innovation was soon copied by other countries.
You know, there already were laws prior to the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution..
The point is, not every business chooses to be a Corporation. In fact, LLCs, partnerships etc. are much more suited to smaller companies. Very small companies will not choose to incorporate, and not have a board of directors. So, "corporations come in every size" isn't quite true (one-man corporations?); most corporations are mediumsized to large companies, not tiny outfits.
But not all businesses are corporations. Don't discount sole proprietors, partnerships and limited liability companies, non-profit organisations, as well as foreign businesses doing business in the US, or indeed elsewhere (the original poster didn't state which country he's in).
There's nothing wrong with digital over AM/SW. It's just that these experiments are in NO way relevant to the current operation of the BBC world service, or any other radio station. It will takes some years to develop this technology further AND, most importantly, it will take *decades* before the installed base reaches any sort of critical mass. Before that happens this is a play thing.
With regard to your comments about satellite being expensive - already companies are selling satellite tuners that connect to your regular FM radio's antenna so you can use your regular radio as a satellite receiver.. In Africa. Satellite is already being used by the BBC world service (and the world services of many other countries).
You might want to check out a little thing called 'context'.
The original poster's comment was like saying "Wow! Now the BBC can switch to online streaming audio!" when the very first streaming audio was sent over the ARPAnet in 1973 (RFC 508).
Sure. You see, it's far cheaper to use as-yet-experimental state-of-the-art technology than to continue using transmitters and technologies that have been in use for decades and that are well understood and easily serviced by thousands of technicians.
The new transmitters will no doubt be fitted in, say, a few weeks. Then, in about three months, just about every household in North America will have bought the new receivers, and switch to tuning in small transistor radio sets to BBC broadcasts, instead of, say, surfing pornography or using AOL. Once the BBC starts digital broadcasts, well, no one will want, or need, broadband internet connections!
Notice that the bitrates used in these AAC streams are wayyyy too high to ever be transferred over a dial-up connection. Even IF PCs could be equipped with AAC decoders, or similar codecs, such as ogg vorbis, the bitrates needed, some even exceeding 22 kilobits per second would prove a lethal hurdle for people who would want to listen to a stream using such a "magical" codec on their PCs..
Plus, other, existing, methods of delivery for digital radio, such as satellite, are clearly inferior to this new technology.
</SARCASM>
Here is a more exhaustive list of all human/civil/political rights treaties/conventions/agreements/declarations the EU countries adhere to.
In Europe there's a hell of a lot more legislation guaranteeing human and civil rights than a constitution and a hand full of amendmends..
Proprietary Copy Protection System Announced "Broken" By Nefarious Hackers!
Film At 11.
WinCE a good embedded system? Hmm.. Isn't that the WinCE that is at the heart of PocketPC? The embedded OS that brought blue screens of death (well, ok, depending on your color scheme a light khaki screen of death) to PDAs? Yeah. I trust WinCE to run my heart monitor if I ever end up in an Intensive Care Unit... *cough*
The thing that bugs me about the mindstorms kit, and LEGO(TM)(R) in general is the non-orthogonality of the bricks/components. If you want to put two bricks together at an angle, you need specially shaped bricks. In fact, the lego people make a butt load of cash just inventing new kinds of bricks to include in kits -- lose 'em, and you have to buy a new kit, or another kit that includes it.
;-)
I much preferred Construx building sets as a kid. It was much easier to put together moving parts, build voluminous structures, and to some degree work with angles. Anyone remember Construx? I suppose k'nex now fulfills this role, though it seems less sturdy. Of course, Meccano is the granddady of all, so some-one will point out that it's superior. It's just that I've never owned any
BTW, ever notices how the electrical engines in the Mindstorms set are non-lego-standard shapes and sizes? What's that about? Would an extra millimeter of plastic to make it align hurt that much??
I'm sure there are better products to construct robots, meccano offshoots or succesors combined with sensors, actuators, a PC interface and perhaps even a microcontroller-cum-batterypack like the mindstorms set. Does the slashdot crowd have any suggestions?
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, mindstorms is fscking expensive and hard to get, esp. in Europe.
You know, backbone providers used to take sanctions against their customers if they allowed spam to flourish, and they in turn took sanctions against their customer's, etc. down to the individual spammers.
A case could be made for requiring networks to take measures against spam, and to tax networks that do not, or that are connected to networks that do not (and so, become tainted). So if you receive 10% of your traffic from customers in, say, Korea, who rarely enforce anti-spam provisions, you pay spam-tax over 10% of the traffic you shift (the 'tainted' traffic) regardless of whether it is spam or not. Of course, where-ever you shift it to will have to count 10% of the traffic they receive from you as tainted as well.
Independent third parties could certify networks as 'spam-resistant', paying particular notice to enforcement, ingress- and egress filtering of spoofed traffic, etc. Over time, statutory limits could be shifted to require that networks operating in the US be at least 10% spam-resistant (i.e. no more than 10% tainted traffic), then 20% then 30,50, up to 100 (at which point the tax can be lifted).
Note that this won't happen.
They were already using the as-yet-unreleased Ogg Smash codec?? Theora isn't even finished yet!