Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable.
It's usually not justifiable to remove the copper at all. NYC has dead copper in the same conduits as the fiber, some dating back to the 1800's [with paper insulation]. With the price of copper these days, that may change in the future.
At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.
It may not go all the way to the CO but only to the local pedestal [where fiber-to-the-curb becomes copper].
Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other providers who aren't pseudo-monopolies and don't need to pull your old copper lines?
In CA, sonic.net [not shilling] is running fiber-to-the-home in some municipalities. They are [probably] just adding fiber in parallel because the copper is actually owned by AT&T.
Actually, copper ownership is a bit murky. IIRC, when AT&T wired much of America in the late 1950's, it did so under a consent degree, paid for with U.S. tax dollars, so the copper could be considered a publicly owned resource.
You also need to remember to keep a non-cordless phone around to use with it. If the power is out and all you have is cordless (as many people do these days), you're still out of luck.
In addition to my cordless, I still have an old trimline phone [kept around for just that purpose]. The latter I rarely use. In fact, in the last ten years, the only time I can recall using it was to call the power company's automated number to report my power outage.
Your ham analogy is apt, yet you completely miss the point.
I was a ham at one point... BTW, I did another reply that has additional info/talking points. It might be worth a look (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3154397&cid=41519923) because I'll try not to repeat too much of it here, but much of what I say will assume you're familar with it. However, I've dug up some additional detail/info that I'll add here.
If you design a receiver using all the information that is known, you can't be faulted for having a 'cheap/poorly designed/non-conforming' device.
Although many webpages cite just two frequencies (the one of import here is 1575.xxxx Mhz), GPS actually has five different bands L1-L5. The GPS band in question/contention is the L1 band and is allocated 1559-1610 Mhz. LightSquared's spectrum is 1525-1559 Mhz, which I'll call the "LS band". But, Garmin/Trimble [and other low cost receivers] don't just listen to GPS L1. They also deliberately listen to spectrum on both sides of L1 (which included LS). If they had designed their receivers correctly, they would only listen to L1 [and have a bandpass filter for it]. It's even worse in the John Deere Starfire GPS system, which I'll get to below.
In the TV/ham case, that would mean that the TV is designed knowing that the amateur bands are there, and the power levels that may be used in those bands. If you don't design your device to reject those frequencies at those power levels, you have made a poor device. In that case, you will indeed be told to fix your TV, and the ham operator is free to continue operating.
A quick note here: The TV set getting interference from a legal ham signal (at 30 Mhz) is usually caused by the TV's "intermediate frequency" stage amplifier/downmixer (which just happens to also operate at 30 Mhz, regardless of what channel it's trying to receive which could be above 50 Mhz). The IF stage needs to be shielded to prevent this.
HOWEVER, if the ham ups his power level beyond what is allowed, and it interferes with your TV, that is NOT the fault of the TV, it is the fault of the amateur operator, and he is the one who will be told to stop operating.
Ham transmissions are generally limited to 1000 watts, but front end overload of a [poorly designed] TV set can [easily] happen if the ham signal is only 10 watts. In this instance, power level really doesn't matter.
In the GPS case, the GPS receivers were designed (properly) using the available information. Namely, that the adjacent bands would be used only for low power satellite-to-earth transmissions. If they fail under those conditions, fault the device. HOWEVER, if they fail because someone decides to use those bands in a relatively high-power application, and the GPS devices fail, that is clearly NOT the fault of the device.
This was a shortcut that Garmin/Trimble took. There was nothing that said the FCC couldn't reclassify non-L1 at any time. The TV analogy is a TV set that wants to listen to channel 4 has to listen to channels 3-5 and only works if no other station is transmitting on channel 3 or 5. It's a misdesign. It was probably seen by Garmin et. al. as a clever way to produce an inexpensive receiver at the time (or they just wanted to get to market quickly and doing it right might have added a year's design time). But, surely they had to know about the vulnerability when designing it [and definitely did in 2001] and chose to gamble rather than design a better quality receiver with a proper bandpass filter. So, even though they knew about the problem for 10+ years, subsequently, they didn't even try to improve their design [based on tech now available that wasn't available then]?
And I have no idea what you mean by 'non-conforming'. Non-conforming to what?
Non-conforming means going outside of your assigned/l
The article seems to be well balanced and heaped its share of criticism on LS and Falcone in particular [the SEC investigation].
Think about it -- a rich, connected guy figures out a scheme
The article implies he bought/strong armed his way into society--which hardly makes him connected.
to get even richer by
Considering that LS would have been able to provide data plans that were 8X cheaper than conventional wireless, we would all have gotten richer [by being charged less].
polluting a resource used by everyone else (the GPS assigned radio band)
LS would not have polluted the GPS band itself. It was only because inexpensive GPS manufacturers were relying on receiving signals outside their assigned frequency band. From the article:
To pick up such faint signals, the GPS industry designed receivers that take in a broad swath of radio waves on either side, like an owl’s huge eyes that can see a single photon in the darkness of night. Instead of zeroing in on the GPS frequencies alone, they take in the entire GPS band plus Falcone’s neighboring block. That allowed for cheap, handheld GPS devices. But it was based on the assumption no one would ever build on the lot next door.
It appears that GPS makers did something even more egregious: they are sending additional information [additional beyond the WAAS correction data--which is transmitted inside the GPS band] on a side channel outside the assigned GPS band that they're not licensed for [and comes down in LS's block]. Again, from the article:
High-accuracy GPS devices like Deere’s need GPS signals plus a narrow data stream that comes down in Falcone’s block. That data stream is supposed to be moved, but few of the $15,000 devices have receivers that can be retuned to pick up the signal on another part of the spectrum. “When I look at the design now, I say, ‘How ignorant we all were,’” says Javad Ashjaee, a pioneering GPS engineer who now wants to sell filters to fix the problem.
If it were merely interference, adding a bandpass filter to the GPS receiver would be all that was required. But, this says that the ancillary data stream would have to be moved to another part of the spectrum. This seems pretty damning [to the GPS manufacturers] to me. If true, it's akin to a TV station transmitting its standard def signal on channel 4 [the GPS band], saying that it needs to put the HD extra data on channel 3 [the extra precision GPS data]. They were doing so only because no other TV station was assigned channel 3 at the time.
that's pretty much the business model of all of Forbes's target audience.
In general, I'm no fan of Forbes. But, again, I reiterate that the article was well balanced. From your comment, I'm surmising [perhaps incorrectly] that you've still not read the article yet.
And as far as LightSquared's $3-4B investment, they could have saved it all by asking some real engineers and physicists if they could pull this off.
They most certainly did. If you doubt that, download and read the PDF of LS's regulatory filing with the FCC, linked in the article. The only reason that LS's idea was a bad one was that existing GPS receivers were "cheating" in order to be inexpensive.
It's not the FCC's fault if all they listened to was bullshit artists who told them what they wanted to hear.
The FCC has culpability because of the approvals it gave LS during the entire process. For example, they granted them a license to build an unlimited number of [15KW] ground stations.
Even if they thought they could roll over us regular, civil GPS users, they must have known that they were going to
No, that entire block is allocated to satellite use. GPS uses one of those channels, but all the rest are used (or designated to be used) by satellites. Using any of them at terrestrial power levels would basically cause problems for *any* satellite communications in that range.
The whole "cheap GPS receivers" response is just more LightSquared PR bullshit. It would take an absurdly good design to filter out a signal that is a) only a few MHz away, b) is being pumped out far closer, and c) is being pumped out orders of magnitude higher than any satellite can manage.
Uh, try reading the Forbes article cited by another commenter (I had read it back in the day, and just reread it now, amongst others).
The filter isn't all that difficult, regardless of power level. The GPS receivers are deliberately trying to receive out-of-band spectrum that was not licensed to them to compensate for their cheapness. Even Garmin and Trimble knew there were problems with their equipment and had been cautioning investors about the problem since 2001 (before LightSquared).
Also, the FCC had licensed parts of L-Band for terrestrial transmission use years earlier to others. It's also used for terrestrial cellular. So, it's not strictly "for satellite downlink only" as some have suggested.
I have no association with LightSquared whatsoever. Regardless of how unsavory Falcone may seem in general, it begs the question: If it's all PR, why is Congress now investigating the FCC's conduct in this matter (e.g. LightSquared's $3-4B investment going down the drain) when the FCC granted various approvals along the way. If the FCC had been more awake, it might have stopped this after $50M down the drain instead of $4B. That's what Congress wants to know [and I do, too].
Currently, two wrongs are making a right: GPS's initial screwup and the FCC not ordering a massive recall/retrofit of all non-conforming GPS receivers (a bit impractical, I realize) to be paid for by the GPS manufacturers (who caused the problem in the first place). It seems fair to give LightSquared some alternate spectrum that they can use to compensate them for the $2B lost on the spectrum that they already paid for.
The currently proposed weather balloon spectrum is but one option. If that entails retuning weather balloons to use alternate spectrum that they could use that LightSquared could not, the FCC (with "help" from Congress) might just do that. It's a far more pragmatic solution to redo a few hundred devices than to retrofit 100M GPS receivers.
Second verse, same as the first. LightSquared just doesn't want to pay for spectrum. First they tried muscling in on satellite frequencies, claiming to the FCC that they'd primarily be satellite-based while telling everyone else that they'd be terrestrial only. And of course, they got caught because pretty much *any* terrestrial-strength broadcast is going to swamp out any satellite-based stuff on the same frequencies.
IIRC, LightSquared wanted to use spectrum adjacent to satellite GPS frequencies (e.g. they wanted to use channel 2 and GPS was using channel 3). This should have been fine. But, because most GPS receivers are so cheap/poorly designed/non-conforming they are susceptible to cross-channel interference. It was the GPS manufacturers that messed up. But, because there are already a host of non-conforming GPS units in the field, the FCC, as a practical matter said [in effect], you can't do this because of current reality.
This is a problem that radio amateurs used to have. They would be transmitting on their assigned frequencies. But, their assigned frequencies would interfere with an intermediate stage of a cheap/unshielded TV set (because the TV set was misdesigned) and the amateur's neighbor would be complaining. In this case, any complaint to the FCC would result in a "fix your TV set" and not action against the ham operator.
The only difference here is the safety factor. Too many misdesigned GPS's and the FCC erred on the side of safety.
As long as you use key-only authentication you should be fine. I wouldn't leave password-only access open to the internet. Having said that, your best bet is to slowly stall connections in order to waste the other guy's resources. Any system with pf and probably ipf have allowances for that, along with logging and blocking the most abusive IPs altogether.
I wrote some plugins to do just that. Modifying access.conf to allow only local logins via password. All internet access must be ssh-key authenticated (e.g. my home server knows the key of my laptop so I can login from Starbuck's). I log every bad attempt [time, IP, login/pw] and each bad attempt is given a random 10+ second delay. I modified sshd to present the cleartext password of each such attempt
After so many months, I have a log of about 10,000 entries. I've got a DSL connection with a dynamic IP, with no website attached, so my home system is somewhat "low profile". Still, from the log:
- Most try to get to root, even though login to that from the net is disabled by sshd by default on most systems.
- Simple login/pw combos (e.g. thomas/thomas, root/123456)
- Some oddball login/pw combos (e.g. root/0571749e2ac330a7455809c6b0e7af90--which an actual attempt from my log) that only make sense if they've cracked a PW database somewhere and are replaying it on every system they can.
- Some combos are repeated [in order], months apart, by disparate IP's (e.g. they're sharing the cracking data)
- As to the top offender countries [available from whois IP], China is, by far, the worst. One might say that's merely because it has the largest population, but China "outshines" India [which has a nearly identical population] by at least an order of magnitude.
Even with all this, no attempt has ever even come vaguely close to an actual valid login/pw for my system [which would be denied even if they hit it]. And, I'm using dictionary words for my passwords on the home systems.
For websites I log into, I have a different login for each one, and use the so called "strong" passwords [which are also different for each site].
However, based on my log data, passwords don't really need to be "strong" (e.g. "#!345xt37hhh"), just not "weak" (e.g. "123456"). Because, if a PW database has been harvested and is being replayed, strong passwords are just as susceptible.
Boston drivers are notoriously bad to begin with. So, unless the study forked over $1000/driver [airfare/hotel] to import drivers from around the country [to get a broad cross-section] it is absolutely no surprise as to the conclusion.
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This is like doing a study on the probability of getting heart disease and the only study participants are taken from the post-op ward of the local cardiac center...
Maybe not quite yet... Someone could buy the portfolio, no?
Probably not. IIRC, the claims got sifted down to a relatively few lines of code. Most of these were akin to "standards essential". One small block was the register push/pop sequence for interrupt service routines. This can be done one way, more or less, [due to the Pentium's architecture] and, thus, can't be copyrighted [see Judge Alsup's decision in Oracle v. Google as he gives an excellent [42 page] explanation of the law in these matters].
The ISR code was in the Linux kernel from at least 1993 [I have a source CD from that era and I had looked it up]. I believe that predates the initial SCO deal with Novell?
As I'm sure many people already know, you can also flag the comment and it goes to the site admins. Even when I'm modding, I don't want to burn a modpoint on a spammer. I'd rather mod up a good comment instead. You can flag even if you don't have mod points.
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Recently, there was a spate of spam on slashdot about antivirus software. IIRC, in a single day there were eight instances/variants of the same spam on a single discussion alone [and more on other discussions on the same day]. Different spiels, accounts, AC's.
Such aggressive spamming can [realistically] only be dealt with by the site itself (e.g. filtering by content). The content trigger was probably easy, as each spam message would feature the product name no less than 10 times.
I haven't seen the particular spam recently, so I'm guessing something was done about it.
It was probably 11 notes, seeing as Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs had George Harrison losing over nine notes. Nine notes is already short enough to produce many coincidental matches among existing songs in the repertories of BMI and ASCAP. So what steps should a singer-songwriter take to avoid such copyright trolls?
IANAL, so consult with a real one specializing in this arena--before the fact. Have your questions written down and pay for an hour of their time to meet and consult [offer their expert opinion]--should cost $100-$1000. They will be aware of the most up-to-date, relevant case law. They will be able to advise you on the best steps you can take (e.g. to get registered copyright or not). Also, an ASCAP-like organization might have information for its members.
The Bright Tunes/Harrisongs ruling was from 1976. Although high profile, it may or may not be considered a precedent. Much has changed since then in terms of analysis tools, etc. The 1976 ruling was based on expert opinions of musicologists rather than software [which didn't exist then].
Also, we've had more or less a complete turnover in the judiciary since then (e.g. after 36 years, most of the ones from that era have retired). A different judge, ruling in today's judicial world, might come to a completely different conclusion if that case were to be tried today.
Your HO matters not in the real world because you aren't five Supreme Court justices. Eldred v. Ashcroft.
IMHO[*], the current Supreme Court doesn't live in the real world and Eldred was wrong:-)
[*] Opinion still constitutionally protected until those five justices rule otherwise...
Just what we need, a database for the RIAA to use to play Whack-A-Mole on upcoming songwriters for 'copyright infringement'.
This type of analysis has been going on for decades. I remember meeting a guy [circa 1992] who had a consulting business based on doing just that. He would put a [suspect] music CD into his CDROM drive and [with custom software he wrote] have it analyze the note sequences looking for fragments that matched fragments of his clients' songs/catalog. IIRC, the criterion was either 11 notes or 11 bars [I can't remember which] of music.
There are only so many chord progressions possible.
Per copyright law, things that have "only one way to do them" can't be copyrighted. Also, the work must be of sufficient length (e.g. a 3 chord sequence could not be copyrighted but a 50 chord sequence could). Although circuit courts have varied on this, in general, the courts have held that to grant a copyright on a short [enough] sequence is tantamount to trying use a copyright to get patent-like protection. For the most part, this gets rejected.
For specific examples of this, read Alsup's decision in the recent Oracle/Google dispute (including the citations to precedents). Or the second Westlaw mashup (again with citations).
This will allow the holders of the eternal copyright to sue somebody because the chord progression they wrote mirrors a song their grandparents heard in the womb and thus infringes.
IIRC, just having a long chord sequence that matches isn't always grounds for claiming infringment. In particular, if the defendant can show that they got there through non-infringing means (e.g. they kept all their composition sheets and could prove that they created the work from scratch, it's not infringing even if a portion happens to match). Unfortunately, I can't recall the case law to cite for this [just an article I read way back when].
Yet another argument for 7 year copyrights. Too bad we can't convince our Congresscritters of this...
Yes, the current length is insane [and unconstitutional IMHO]...
System email has been around for a loooong time, at least since the mid-1960s.
Yes, this was pointed out on the first slashdot posting page when the Newsweek article came out a while back. Shiva was savaged from every corner, with copious examples of email systems older than his.
I wasn't even claiming Mike's $mail program was the first, merely that it predated Shiva's. But, $mail was heavily used by many people at BU at that time whereas [from what I've been able to ascertain] Shiva's program didn't get a large user following.
I had read your other posts on this page [keep up the good work, BTW] and I was going to place my reply under one of them, but then decided that RAX/$mail deserved its own posting. It wasn't widely known outside of BU, but it would qualify as "prior art".
However, Shiva and/or his supporters have asserted that Shiva developed some sort of an intra-organizational email system, which is completely false.
It is completely false. Shiva strikes me as a poseur/opportunist. His supporters appear to be [mostly] MIT alumni that are exercising NIH [from ignorance of and hubris towards true precursors] and just waving the old [MIT] school tie...
ARPANet was being used to distribute emails between various organizations since around 1971, and trivially accessible RFCs dating back to the very beginning show the evolution of the early mailbox protocols right up to modern SMTP mail systems today. Shiva had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of email. It was an all but unknown dead end, until he got busted trying to claim otherwise.
What's upsetting me is that someone who is somewhat distinguished [Chomsky] is trying to rekindle this. But, also, a quick glance at the "inventorofemail.com" website [from Shiva???], it appears that somebody is trying to capitalize on this. Brazen/shameless/ignorant.
The RAX OS (later renamed VPS) had an email system called $mail from 1975 onward. The program was created by Michael Krugman, a programmer at BU's Academic Computing Center. RAX was a multiuser timesharing system, designed by people at the ACS on the university's academic mainframe that had thousands of users. Any user could send messages to others, set up aliases, etc.
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I know this to be a fact because I was a user of $mail during that time period.
Shiva may have copyrighted the term "email" but he did not invent it!
It is reprehensible for Chomsky to try and reinforce the invention claim by twisting the copyright assertion using false logical arguments. Further, Chomsky's facts are missing/incomplete/wrong. His pronouncement is mere sophistry. In short, he is [has proven himself to be] a technical neophyte, and his opinion on technical matters should be regarded as such. Yet, he derides "industry insiders" (e.g. experts in computer programming) but fails to mention his own attempt at grandstanding.
At https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ (which tells you what flash version you have and what are the latest), it says that the latest for linux is 11.3.300.257. However the "player download center" link on this page goes to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and that the latest version is 11.2.202.236 (and that 11.2 will be the last for linux). I'm running 64 bit fedora 17, so that might be the wrinkle.
This has already been covered on Slashdot [just a few days ago]. See:
Are you saying the cpu6502 discussed how he is for or against copyrights? He obviously condones copying copyrighted works, and yet talks about a "nutty" copyright thief.
No, I was merely posting a link to the slashdot discussion about the "nutty" person (please do read the article first).
That is actually in cpu6502's signature, so I don't think I'd be joining his posting text with his sig and trying to infer anything pro/anti from the juxtaposition of the two since that signature will appear on discussion pages for any topic until it is changed. I've seen few [if any] signatures that were customized for a given topic page.
The reason that the "nutty" article got any traction on slashdot had less to do with copyright infringement, right or wrong. A photographer [who photographs mostly nature scenes] filed a DMCA against a woman for misuse of his photo. Rather that any direct response on the merits, she accused him of trying to "exploit disabled kids" because she has some non-profit organization going [and the photo might have been on that site or another].
It got more bizarre because she started threatening her ISP/DNS registrar rather than his about removing the DNS entry for his photography website. The text was bizarre, full of ranting and raving. She's an attorney [it would seem]. If so, her actions might require disciplinary action before her state bar association (e.g. IIRC, [repeatedly] "threatening" to sue is harassment)
So? That has no relevance to this situation, there is absolutely no requirement that the OEM purchase ONLY Windows for ARM and not purchase from anyone else,
No, that is exactly the requirement that MS does have [according to the original poster].
in fact they could sell the exact same hardware running Android,
No, they could not.
it just wouldn't - as you would expect - have a 'designed for Windows 8' sticker on it. There is no anti-trust issue here.
So, perhaps you know differently. If so, do you have a copy of the contract in question? Or, is your argument based solely on the seeming incredulity that MS would never put anything that nefarious into one of their contracts? The 90's incident is a history that shows that MS will do such things, it was an antitrust violation then, and if it's in the current contract, it's an antitrust violation now.
Why? Windows RT has no marketshare, in fact Windows has virtually no presence on the ARM platform at all, anti-trust requires a monopoly position which MS does not have on ARM nor is their ARM version of Windows tied to their x86 version so there is no leverage of monopoly position either.
If MS put it into their contract, that would be grounds for antitrust. IIRC, they were sued [by the Feds in the 90's] because [amongst other things] they wouldn't allow you access to their developer documentation [which wasn't posted on their website as it is now] unless you agreed to not develop software for any other platform (e.g. Linux, Solaris, etc). As part of the settlement of that case MS agreed to not repeat certain such behavior in the future.
Actually, this is not quite correct. For ARM systems, Windows forces hardware manufacturers to make it IMPOSSIBLE for someone to install another OS. (It's in their license for Windows 8)
I did a book report on Fahrenheit 451 in 9th grade. I still have my copy from then. It's a bit yellow now. But, the insights I got guide me to this day.
Quoting the first line of the book [with some poetic license]: IT WAS A PLEASURE TO RETAIN.
It's so cute how NoSQL developers have reinvented the XML database.
Actually, XML is a comparative latecomer.
NoSQL uses JSON which has "name: { blah:val, blah:val }" style syntax. I needed a text database format for some [perl/awk] scripts I wrote in the 80's. I ended up creating a similar curly brace format--no big deal.
Before relational databases even existed, there were CODASYL-compliant databases. These didn't even have SQL as we know it today.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a reasonable justification to me. You called and had them replace the copper with fiber so you could get internet faster, then you want them to put the copper back? It's not economically justifiable.
It's usually not justifiable to remove the copper at all. NYC has dead copper in the same conduits as the fiber, some dating back to the 1800's [with paper insulation]. With the price of copper these days, that may change in the future.
At some point in transitioning, they'll have also pulled the copper distribution system from the CO to your neighborhood and put in fiber, so it would be a really large expense to run a copper pair all the way just for you.
It may not go all the way to the CO but only to the local pedestal [where fiber-to-the-curb becomes copper].
Maybe the mistake was going with the telco for VoIP when there are other providers who aren't pseudo-monopolies and don't need to pull your old copper lines?
In CA, sonic.net [not shilling] is running fiber-to-the-home in some municipalities. They are [probably] just adding fiber in parallel because the copper is actually owned by AT&T.
Actually, copper ownership is a bit murky. IIRC, when AT&T wired much of America in the late 1950's, it did so under a consent degree, paid for with U.S. tax dollars, so the copper could be considered a publicly owned resource.
You also need to remember to keep a non-cordless phone around to use with it. If the power is out and all you have is cordless (as many people do these days), you're still out of luck.
In addition to my cordless, I still have an old trimline phone [kept around for just that purpose]. The latter I rarely use. In fact, in the last ten years, the only time I can recall using it was to call the power company's automated number to report my power outage.
Your ham analogy is apt, yet you completely miss the point.
I was a ham at one point ... BTW, I did another reply that has additional info/talking points. It might be worth a look (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3154397&cid=41519923) because I'll try not to repeat too much of it here, but much of what I say will assume you're familar with it. However, I've dug up some additional detail/info that I'll add here.
If you design a receiver using all the information that is known, you can't be faulted for having a 'cheap/poorly designed/non-conforming' device.
Although many webpages cite just two frequencies (the one of import here is 1575.xxxx Mhz), GPS actually has five different bands L1-L5. The GPS band in question/contention is the L1 band and is allocated 1559-1610 Mhz. LightSquared's spectrum is 1525-1559 Mhz, which I'll call the "LS band". But, Garmin/Trimble [and other low cost receivers] don't just listen to GPS L1. They also deliberately listen to spectrum on both sides of L1 (which included LS). If they had designed their receivers correctly, they would only listen to L1 [and have a bandpass filter for it]. It's even worse in the John Deere Starfire GPS system, which I'll get to below.
In the TV/ham case, that would mean that the TV is designed knowing that the amateur bands are there, and the power levels that may be used in those bands. If you don't design your device to reject those frequencies at those power levels, you have made a poor device. In that case, you will indeed be told to fix your TV, and the ham operator is free to continue operating.
A quick note here: The TV set getting interference from a legal ham signal (at 30 Mhz) is usually caused by the TV's "intermediate frequency" stage amplifier/downmixer (which just happens to also operate at 30 Mhz, regardless of what channel it's trying to receive which could be above 50 Mhz). The IF stage needs to be shielded to prevent this.
HOWEVER, if the ham ups his power level beyond what is allowed, and it interferes with your TV, that is NOT the fault of the TV, it is the fault of the amateur operator, and he is the one who will be told to stop operating.
Ham transmissions are generally limited to 1000 watts, but front end overload of a [poorly designed] TV set can [easily] happen if the ham signal is only 10 watts. In this instance, power level really doesn't matter.
In the GPS case, the GPS receivers were designed (properly) using the available information. Namely, that the adjacent bands would be used only for low power satellite-to-earth transmissions. If they fail under those conditions, fault the device. HOWEVER, if they fail because someone decides to use those bands in a relatively high-power application, and the GPS devices fail, that is clearly NOT the fault of the device.
This was a shortcut that Garmin/Trimble took. There was nothing that said the FCC couldn't reclassify non-L1 at any time. The TV analogy is a TV set that wants to listen to channel 4 has to listen to channels 3-5 and only works if no other station is transmitting on channel 3 or 5. It's a misdesign. It was probably seen by Garmin et. al. as a clever way to produce an inexpensive receiver at the time (or they just wanted to get to market quickly and doing it right might have added a year's design time). But, surely they had to know about the vulnerability when designing it [and definitely did in 2001] and chose to gamble rather than design a better quality receiver with a proper bandpass filter. So, even though they knew about the problem for 10+ years, subsequently, they didn't even try to improve their design [based on tech now available that wasn't available then]?
And I have no idea what you mean by 'non-conforming'. Non-conforming to what?
Non-conforming means going outside of your assigned/l
Forbes -- there's a an unbiased source for you.
The article seems to be well balanced and heaped its share of criticism on LS and Falcone in particular [the SEC investigation].
Think about it -- a rich, connected guy figures out a scheme
The article implies he bought/strong armed his way into society--which hardly makes him connected.
to get even richer by
Considering that LS would have been able to provide data plans that were 8X cheaper than conventional wireless, we would all have gotten richer [by being charged less].
polluting a resource used by everyone else (the GPS assigned radio band)
LS would not have polluted the GPS band itself. It was only because inexpensive GPS manufacturers were relying on receiving signals outside their assigned frequency band. From the article:
To pick up such faint signals, the GPS industry designed receivers that take in a broad swath of radio waves on either side, like an owl’s huge eyes that can see a single photon in the darkness of night. Instead of zeroing in on the GPS frequencies alone, they take in the entire GPS band plus Falcone’s neighboring block. That allowed for cheap, handheld GPS devices. But it was based on the assumption no one would ever build on the lot next door.
It appears that GPS makers did something even more egregious: they are sending additional information [additional beyond the WAAS correction data--which is transmitted inside the GPS band] on a side channel outside the assigned GPS band that they're not licensed for [and comes down in LS's block]. Again, from the article:
High-accuracy GPS devices like Deere’s need GPS signals plus a narrow data stream that comes down in Falcone’s block. That data stream is supposed to be moved, but few of the $15,000 devices have receivers that can be retuned to pick up the signal on another part of the spectrum. “When I look at the design now, I say, ‘How ignorant we all were,’” says Javad Ashjaee, a pioneering GPS engineer who now wants to sell filters to fix the problem.
If it were merely interference, adding a bandpass filter to the GPS receiver would be all that was required. But, this says that the ancillary data stream would have to be moved to another part of the spectrum. This seems pretty damning [to the GPS manufacturers] to me. If true, it's akin to a TV station transmitting its standard def signal on channel 4 [the GPS band], saying that it needs to put the HD extra data on channel 3 [the extra precision GPS data]. They were doing so only because no other TV station was assigned channel 3 at the time.
that's pretty much the business model of all of Forbes's target audience.
In general, I'm no fan of Forbes. But, again, I reiterate that the article was well balanced. From your comment, I'm surmising [perhaps incorrectly] that you've still not read the article yet.
And as far as LightSquared's $3-4B investment, they could have saved it all by asking some real engineers and physicists if they could pull this off.
They most certainly did. If you doubt that, download and read the PDF of LS's regulatory filing with the FCC, linked in the article. The only reason that LS's idea was a bad one was that existing GPS receivers were "cheating" in order to be inexpensive.
It's not the FCC's fault if all they listened to was bullshit artists who told them what they wanted to hear.
The FCC has culpability because of the approvals it gave LS during the entire process. For example, they granted them a license to build an unlimited number of [15KW] ground stations.
Even if they thought they could roll over us regular, civil GPS users, they must have known that they were going to
No, that entire block is allocated to satellite use. GPS uses one of those channels, but all the rest are used (or designated to be used) by satellites. Using any of them at terrestrial power levels would basically cause problems for *any* satellite communications in that range.
The whole "cheap GPS receivers" response is just more LightSquared PR bullshit. It would take an absurdly good design to filter out a signal that is a) only a few MHz away, b) is being pumped out far closer, and c) is being pumped out orders of magnitude higher than any satellite can manage.
Uh, try reading the Forbes article cited by another commenter (I had read it back in the day, and just reread it now, amongst others).
The filter isn't all that difficult, regardless of power level. The GPS receivers are deliberately trying to receive out-of-band spectrum that was not licensed to them to compensate for their cheapness. Even Garmin and Trimble knew there were problems with their equipment and had been cautioning investors about the problem since 2001 (before LightSquared).
Also, the FCC had licensed parts of L-Band for terrestrial transmission use years earlier to others. It's also used for terrestrial cellular. So, it's not strictly "for satellite downlink only" as some have suggested.
I have no association with LightSquared whatsoever. Regardless of how unsavory Falcone may seem in general, it begs the question: If it's all PR, why is Congress now investigating the FCC's conduct in this matter (e.g. LightSquared's $3-4B investment going down the drain) when the FCC granted various approvals along the way. If the FCC had been more awake, it might have stopped this after $50M down the drain instead of $4B. That's what Congress wants to know [and I do, too].
Currently, two wrongs are making a right: GPS's initial screwup and the FCC not ordering a massive recall/retrofit of all non-conforming GPS receivers (a bit impractical, I realize) to be paid for by the GPS manufacturers (who caused the problem in the first place). It seems fair to give LightSquared some alternate spectrum that they can use to compensate them for the $2B lost on the spectrum that they already paid for.
The currently proposed weather balloon spectrum is but one option. If that entails retuning weather balloons to use alternate spectrum that they could use that LightSquared could not, the FCC (with "help" from Congress) might just do that. It's a far more pragmatic solution to redo a few hundred devices than to retrofit 100M GPS receivers.
Second verse, same as the first. LightSquared just doesn't want to pay for spectrum. First they tried muscling in on satellite frequencies, claiming to the FCC that they'd primarily be satellite-based while telling everyone else that they'd be terrestrial only. And of course, they got caught because pretty much *any* terrestrial-strength broadcast is going to swamp out any satellite-based stuff on the same frequencies.
IIRC, LightSquared wanted to use spectrum adjacent to satellite GPS frequencies (e.g. they wanted to use channel 2 and GPS was using channel 3). This should have been fine. But, because most GPS receivers are so cheap/poorly designed/non-conforming they are susceptible to cross-channel interference. It was the GPS manufacturers that messed up. But, because there are already a host of non-conforming GPS units in the field, the FCC, as a practical matter said [in effect], you can't do this because of current reality.
This is a problem that radio amateurs used to have. They would be transmitting on their assigned frequencies. But, their assigned frequencies would interfere with an intermediate stage of a cheap/unshielded TV set (because the TV set was misdesigned) and the amateur's neighbor would be complaining. In this case, any complaint to the FCC would result in a "fix your TV set" and not action against the ham operator.
The only difference here is the safety factor. Too many misdesigned GPS's and the FCC erred on the side of safety.
Why can't we get parasites that make us super intelligent?
Just like "The Puppet Masters"?
As long as you use key-only authentication you should be fine. I wouldn't leave password-only access open to the internet. Having said that, your best bet is to slowly stall connections in order to waste the other guy's resources. Any system with pf and probably ipf have allowances for that, along with logging and blocking the most abusive IPs altogether.
I wrote some plugins to do just that. Modifying access.conf to allow only local logins via password. All internet access must be ssh-key authenticated (e.g. my home server knows the key of my laptop so I can login from Starbuck's). I log every bad attempt [time, IP, login/pw] and each bad attempt is given a random 10+ second delay. I modified sshd to present the cleartext password of each such attempt
After so many months, I have a log of about 10,000 entries. I've got a DSL connection with a dynamic IP, with no website attached, so my home system is somewhat "low profile". Still, from the log:
- Most try to get to root, even though login to that from the net is disabled by sshd by default on most systems.
- Simple login/pw combos (e.g. thomas/thomas, root/123456)
- Some oddball login/pw combos (e.g. root/0571749e2ac330a7455809c6b0e7af90--which an actual attempt from my log) that only make sense if they've cracked a PW database somewhere and are replaying it on every system they can.
- Some combos are repeated [in order], months apart, by disparate IP's (e.g. they're sharing the cracking data)
- As to the top offender countries [available from whois IP], China is, by far, the worst. One might say that's merely because it has the largest population, but China "outshines" India [which has a nearly identical population] by at least an order of magnitude.
Even with all this, no attempt has ever even come vaguely close to an actual valid login/pw for my system [which would be denied even if they hit it]. And, I'm using dictionary words for my passwords on the home systems.
For websites I log into, I have a different login for each one, and use the so called "strong" passwords [which are also different for each site].
However, based on my log data, passwords don't really need to be "strong" (e.g. "#!345xt37hhh"), just not "weak" (e.g. "123456"). Because, if a PW database has been harvested and is being replayed, strong passwords are just as susceptible.
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This is like doing a study on the probability of getting heart disease and the only study participants are taken from the post-op ward of the local cardiac center ...
Maybe not quite yet... Someone could buy the portfolio, no?
Probably not. IIRC, the claims got sifted down to a relatively few lines of code. Most of these were akin to "standards essential". One small block was the register push/pop sequence for interrupt service routines. This can be done one way, more or less, [due to the Pentium's architecture] and, thus, can't be copyrighted [see Judge Alsup's decision in Oracle v. Google as he gives an excellent [42 page] explanation of the law in these matters].
The ISR code was in the Linux kernel from at least 1993 [I have a source CD from that era and I had looked it up]. I believe that predates the initial SCO deal with Novell?
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Recently, there was a spate of spam on slashdot about antivirus software. IIRC, in a single day there were eight instances/variants of the same spam on a single discussion alone [and more on other discussions on the same day]. Different spiels, accounts, AC's.
Such aggressive spamming can [realistically] only be dealt with by the site itself (e.g. filtering by content). The content trigger was probably easy, as each spam message would feature the product name no less than 10 times.
I haven't seen the particular spam recently, so I'm guessing something was done about it.
"Ask Me Anything"
It's a recurring thing on Reddit for celebrities.
For some celebrities, it should be both: "Against Medical Advice" you can "Ask Me Anything" ...
It was probably 11 notes, seeing as Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs had George Harrison losing over nine notes. Nine notes is already short enough to produce many coincidental matches among existing songs in the repertories of BMI and ASCAP. So what steps should a singer-songwriter take to avoid such copyright trolls?
IANAL, so consult with a real one specializing in this arena--before the fact. Have your questions written down and pay for an hour of their time to meet and consult [offer their expert opinion]--should cost $100-$1000. They will be aware of the most up-to-date, relevant case law. They will be able to advise you on the best steps you can take (e.g. to get registered copyright or not). Also, an ASCAP-like organization might have information for its members.
The Bright Tunes/Harrisongs ruling was from 1976. Although high profile, it may or may not be considered a precedent. Much has changed since then in terms of analysis tools, etc. The 1976 ruling was based on expert opinions of musicologists rather than software [which didn't exist then].
Also, we've had more or less a complete turnover in the judiciary since then (e.g. after 36 years, most of the ones from that era have retired). A different judge, ruling in today's judicial world, might come to a completely different conclusion if that case were to be tried today.
Your HO matters not in the real world because you aren't five Supreme Court justices. Eldred v. Ashcroft.
IMHO[*], the current Supreme Court doesn't live in the real world and Eldred was wrong :-)
[*] Opinion still constitutionally protected until those five justices rule otherwise ...
Just what we need, a database for the RIAA to use to play Whack-A-Mole on upcoming songwriters for 'copyright infringement'.
This type of analysis has been going on for decades. I remember meeting a guy [circa 1992] who had a consulting business based on doing just that. He would put a [suspect] music CD into his CDROM drive and [with custom software he wrote] have it analyze the note sequences looking for fragments that matched fragments of his clients' songs/catalog. IIRC, the criterion was either 11 notes or 11 bars [I can't remember which] of music.
There are only so many chord progressions possible.
Per copyright law, things that have "only one way to do them" can't be copyrighted. Also, the work must be of sufficient length (e.g. a 3 chord sequence could not be copyrighted but a 50 chord sequence could). Although circuit courts have varied on this, in general, the courts have held that to grant a copyright on a short [enough] sequence is tantamount to trying use a copyright to get patent-like protection. For the most part, this gets rejected.
For specific examples of this, read Alsup's decision in the recent Oracle/Google dispute (including the citations to precedents). Or the second Westlaw mashup (again with citations).
This will allow the holders of the eternal copyright to sue somebody because the chord progression they wrote mirrors a song their grandparents heard in the womb and thus infringes.
IIRC, just having a long chord sequence that matches isn't always grounds for claiming infringment. In particular, if the defendant can show that they got there through non-infringing means (e.g. they kept all their composition sheets and could prove that they created the work from scratch, it's not infringing even if a portion happens to match). Unfortunately, I can't recall the case law to cite for this [just an article I read way back when].
Yet another argument for 7 year copyrights. Too bad we can't convince our Congresscritters of this...
Yes, the current length is insane [and unconstitutional IMHO] ...
System email has been around for a loooong time, at least since the mid-1960s.
Yes, this was pointed out on the first slashdot posting page when the Newsweek article came out a while back. Shiva was savaged from every corner, with copious examples of email systems older than his.
I wasn't even claiming Mike's $mail program was the first, merely that it predated Shiva's. But, $mail was heavily used by many people at BU at that time whereas [from what I've been able to ascertain] Shiva's program didn't get a large user following.
I had read your other posts on this page [keep up the good work, BTW] and I was going to place my reply under one of them, but then decided that RAX/$mail deserved its own posting. It wasn't widely known outside of BU, but it would qualify as "prior art".
However, Shiva and/or his supporters have asserted that Shiva developed some sort of an intra-organizational email system, which is completely false.
It is completely false. Shiva strikes me as a poseur/opportunist. His supporters appear to be [mostly] MIT alumni that are exercising NIH [from ignorance of and hubris towards true precursors] and just waving the old [MIT] school tie ...
ARPANet was being used to distribute emails between various organizations since around 1971, and trivially accessible RFCs dating back to the very beginning show the evolution of the early mailbox protocols right up to modern SMTP mail systems today. Shiva had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of email. It was an all but unknown dead end, until he got busted trying to claim otherwise.
What's upsetting me is that someone who is somewhat distinguished [Chomsky] is trying to rekindle this. But, also, a quick glance at the "inventorofemail.com" website [from Shiva???], it appears that somebody is trying to capitalize on this. Brazen/shameless/ignorant.
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I know this to be a fact because I was a user of $mail during that time period.
Shiva may have copyrighted the term "email" but he did not invent it!
It is reprehensible for Chomsky to try and reinforce the invention claim by twisting the copyright assertion using false logical arguments. Further, Chomsky's facts are missing/incomplete/wrong. His pronouncement is mere sophistry. In short, he is [has proven himself to be] a technical neophyte, and his opinion on technical matters should be regarded as such. Yet, he derides "industry insiders" (e.g. experts in computer programming) but fails to mention his own attempt at grandstanding.
Oops. My bad. Nevermind. The linux player only got a .235 to .236 bump (In my eagerness to get this, I misread the about page)
At https://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ (which tells you what flash version you have and what are the latest), it says that the latest for linux is 11.3.300.257. However the "player download center" link on this page goes to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and that the latest version is 11.2.202.236 (and that 11.2 will be the last for linux). I'm running 64 bit fedora 17, so that might be the wrinkle.
This has already been covered on Slashdot [just a few days ago]. See:
Are you saying the cpu6502 discussed how he is for or against copyrights? He obviously condones copying copyrighted works, and yet talks about a "nutty" copyright thief.
No, I was merely posting a link to the slashdot discussion about the "nutty" person (please do read the article first).
That is actually in cpu6502's signature, so I don't think I'd be joining his posting text with his sig and trying to infer anything pro/anti from the juxtaposition of the two since that signature will appear on discussion pages for any topic until it is changed. I've seen few [if any] signatures that were customized for a given topic page.
The reason that the "nutty" article got any traction on slashdot had less to do with copyright infringement, right or wrong. A photographer [who photographs mostly nature scenes] filed a DMCA against a woman for misuse of his photo. Rather that any direct response on the merits, she accused him of trying to "exploit disabled kids" because she has some non-profit organization going [and the photo might have been on that site or another].
It got more bizarre because she started threatening her ISP/DNS registrar rather than his about removing the DNS entry for his photography website. The text was bizarre, full of ranting and raving. She's an attorney [it would seem]. If so, her actions might require disciplinary action before her state bar association (e.g. IIRC, [repeatedly] "threatening" to sue is harassment)
So? That has no relevance to this situation, there is absolutely no requirement that the OEM purchase ONLY Windows for ARM and not purchase from anyone else,
No, that is exactly the requirement that MS does have [according to the original poster].
in fact they could sell the exact same hardware running Android,
No, they could not.
it just wouldn't - as you would expect - have a 'designed for Windows 8' sticker on it. There is no anti-trust issue here.
So, perhaps you know differently. If so, do you have a copy of the contract in question? Or, is your argument based solely on the seeming incredulity that MS would never put anything that nefarious into one of their contracts? The 90's incident is a history that shows that MS will do such things, it was an antitrust violation then, and if it's in the current contract, it's an antitrust violation now.
Now that would be grounds for antitrust.
Why? Windows RT has no marketshare, in fact Windows has virtually no presence on the ARM platform at all, anti-trust requires a monopoly position which MS does not have on ARM nor is their ARM version of Windows tied to their x86 version so there is no leverage of monopoly position either.
If MS put it into their contract, that would be grounds for antitrust. IIRC, they were sued [by the Feds in the 90's] because [amongst other things] they wouldn't allow you access to their developer documentation [which wasn't posted on their website as it is now] unless you agreed to not develop software for any other platform (e.g. Linux, Solaris, etc). As part of the settlement of that case MS agreed to not repeat certain such behavior in the future.
Actually, this is not quite correct. For ARM systems, Windows forces hardware manufacturers to make it IMPOSSIBLE for someone to install another OS. (It's in their license for Windows 8)
Now that would be grounds for antitrust.
Quoting the first line of the book [with some poetic license]:
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO RETAIN.
I am confused by your post and your signature.
Are you for or against taking a copy of whatever you want?
This has already been covered on Slashdot [just a few days ago]. See:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/06/03/0132236/copyright-infringer-tries-to-shut-down-reporting-on-her-infringement
It's so cute how NoSQL developers have reinvented the XML database.
Actually, XML is a comparative latecomer.
NoSQL uses JSON which has "name: { blah:val, blah:val }" style syntax. I needed a text database format for some [perl/awk] scripts I wrote in the 80's. I ended up creating a similar curly brace format--no big deal.
Before relational databases even existed, there were CODASYL-compliant databases. These didn't even have SQL as we know it today.