The website incorrectly states that Microsoft was "found guilty of antitrust violations" in the Department of Justice case. The Department of Justice action was a civil proceeding, and the findings of liability in that action do not constitute criminal convictions or findings of "guilt."
So maybe the correct term is "liable" not "guilty" but when the government hauls someone into court and wins, "guilty" seems pretty appropriate to me.
The MS threat letter also says:
The www.msfreepc.com website clearly encourages people to submit fraudulent claims. The website's clear objective is to encourage claimants to maximize the amount of their claims rather than submit claims that accurately reflect purchases made or benefits to which they are entitled. For example, the website encourages claimants to submit claims for combinations of products that total exactly $100, and offers a "free PC" only to claimants who submit claims for only one purchased product, only allows claimants to submit claims for certain combinations of purchased products (with high total values), and does not allow claims that total less than $50.
But if you took a quick look at the
FAQs on the MSFreePC site you'll see:
Why doesn't my particular combination of products appear as an option in the Instant Settlement* Wizard?
The MSfreePC Program is only available for claims between $50 and $100. If the combination you are trying to claim is for a value below $50 or over $100, then you will need to use the manual system. If you don't want to deal with the manual system, and you want to purchase the products offered here at MSfreePC.com, you are certainly able to claim fewer products than you qualify to claim, if you wish, to bring you under the $100 limit.
So rather than encourage people to make fraudulent claims, the site suggests people can claim less than they are entitled to if they wish to fall under $100. And this is on the FAQ page, not buried somewhere in their terms and conditions.
I agree, the whole thing is fishy if claims have to be signed by the people and can't be processed by a third party, but it's not like MS is being reasonable here.
Hmm. In Emacs I never use Ctrl-P to go to the previous line, and no Emacs I've ever used uses Ctrl-U to clear the current line -- however that does sound like the Emacs mode of many shells I've used. Strange examples of Emacs keybindings though.
Nope, not using your methods for the next 70 odd years... but once the period of protection runs out, we'll thank you for contributing your idea to the public domain and if there's anything useful there we'll take it.
Re:Mark of the Beast, U.N. Black Helicopters etc.
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
Seriously. I imagine there were a couple of guys like this one and his buddy back in the stone age. Some smart guy came up with the idea of "fire" and completely freaked the two of them out.
All they could imagine is people catching on fire, huts burning down, etc. And guess what, sometimes that happens, but we've decided that Fire Good!. It is part of progress, and the benefits that fire gives are big enough that they outweigh the risks.
The article intro says "It's basic, but worth reading as a milestone" as if the Slashdot audience was sophistimicated when it comes to RFID technology. Um... no. Most people here think that most tags can easily be read at 100+ metres. (Unless they're big active tags, they can't). Others claim they can only be read within a few centimetres (unless they're tiny ones with almost no antenna that's not true either). Almost everybody seems to think that they're smaller than a grain of sand... Well the IC might be, but remember the R in RFID stands for "radio", and a radio needs an antenna, and if your antenna is as small as a grain of sand, it won't work very well!
heresay -> hearsay (remember, "hear" and "say")
New Zelanders -> New Zealander
there design -> their design
refinning -> refining
basicaly -> basically
Capitlism -> capitalism
I mean, your whole argument is laughable anyhow. The US doing in 200 years what Europe failed to do in 2000. Riiight... because in 200 years the US went from the iron age to the industrial age. Wake up.
Besides, it wasn't the "Superior US Capitalist Society" that put it int he powerful position it's in now, it was that whole "avoiding getting decimated in World War 2" trick.
I know how you feel. I was getting them at a rate of 1 or 2 every 10 minutes. Ugh. If you happen to be running SpamAssassin, I've got rules that seem to take care of it. Luckily for you, but unluckily for me, I was hit starting on Thursday, so I've had days to tweak the rules.
Check them out at
my web site. Feel free to add comments and tweaks there. Oh, and in case you're using maildrop, you can apparently choose not to deliver the message by using if ($MAIL_IS_SPAM) { exit }
So now my own server is spam free, but unfortunately even though I use Linux at work, the mail server is an Exchange server so... *sigh*
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is
on
Telstar 4 is Down
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I think it's a satellite.
Either that or an old TV show.
Or maybe the aliens are invading.
Now I wonder if this story was accepted because a) it sounded real tech-like, b) the person who accepted knows what the submitter is talking about, c) the random number generator was less than 0.01, d) Cowboy Neal.
But one thing's for sure, as it stands, the story has yet to answer the all-important questions: "How does this affect me, and why should I care?"
Well, for those of us who use Linux and SpamAssassin, here it is:
rawbody CUMULATIVE_PATCH/cumulative patch/i
describe CUMULATIVE_PATCH Claims to be a cumulative patch
rawbody MICROSOFT/microsoft/i
describe MICROSOFT Mentions microsoft
rawbody UNMONITORED_EMAIL/unmonitored e-?mail address/i
describe UNMONITORED_EMAIL Sent from an unmonitored email address
header FAKE_MS_PATCH_SUBJ Subject =~/(?:last|latest|current|new)
(?:(?:inter)?net|microsoft)? ?(?:critical|security)? ?(?:pack|update|upgrade|patch)/i
describe FAKE_MS_PATCH_SUBJ Looks like a fake MS patch email
header FAKE_MS_SENDER From =~ /(?:ms|microsoft).*(?:security|section|center|bu lletin|division|department|assistance|services?)/i
describe FAKE_MS_SENDER Riiight, MS is sending me patches...
I'm no expert on SpamAssassin or its rules, but that seemed to be doing the trick for me on the 1 virus every 10 minutes that I was being hit with. I tried to find a way to submit it to the SpamAssassin people but (not too strangely) it was hard to find an email address for them. If anybody wants to take the ball and run with it, go for it.
And to what degree of precision would you have to know Pi to do this? And how much storage would be required to store it? And how much computing power would it take to find the relevant section of Pi that contains what you want?
I hope you're joking, because this makes about as much sense as the infinite monkey Shakespeare concept. There's no question it's true, but it is also irrelevant.
running_counter = 0
if (dns_response points at sitefinder) {
counter++
return no such address
}
if (dns_response points at valid verisign site AND counter > 0) {
counter--
return no such address
}
In words: set things up so that for every person they misleadingly redirect to sitefinder, tell one person looking for a valid verisign site that the site doesn't exist.
Actually it's more like coming out one morning to find that your monster truck now has regular-sized wheels, a standard engine, and is, in fact, a regular truck because it happened to be on a driveway that was connected to a road which connected to a highway which connected to Microsoft.
How about this then. You soup up your engine, throw all kinds of mods on the thing (shiny spinny rims or whatever), then take it to the shop for an oil change. They give it back with the rims removed, the engine replaced with a stock one, and a sticker of a calvin-look-alike pissing on a chevy logo on your windshield.
If a Ford service station can't do that to your vehicle, how come Microsoft can do it to your dashboard?
This "update" happens whether you try to play an XBox Live game, or accidentally choose the XBox Live option in the "dashboard." You don't choose "update", you don't even know that's what's happening. It just does it behind the scenes. If this happened if you chose an "update" menu option I'd have no objection, but the fact that a company would undo modifications to something that you own without your permission is truly evil. (Psst... TiVo -- you really should ask if your customers want an update of their software too)
And the most obnoxious feature of the law was that some authors outlived their copyright. Their most popular works would go into public domain while they were still alive and counting on the income. It's like revoking someone's Social Security at age 72, just because they had the temerity not to die when demographics predicted they would.
That's what I was thinking when I read the above section. If someone was still counting on income from something they created 50 years ago, they deserve what they get. There are all kinds of professions where your useful span is only a few years, and if you expect to retire off the money you make in that profession you have to be smart about what you do with the money.
Besides that, and author knew when their copyright protection ended. They could readily plan for that day. On the other hand, athletes never know when they'll suffer a career-ending injury. Their career might be over in their first week of professional play, or they might play for 15 seasons.
I think 30 years is a much more reasonable length of copyright for writing. It's not like people are going to wait around 30 years before they buy the book! If your brilliance isn't recognized till 35 years after you write something, tough luck!
I think computer programs should have an even shorter copyright, no more than 5 years. A book (unless it's about computers) is just as relevant in 30 years, but a computer program is most likely almost obsolete in 5 years. Wouldn't it be better for the world if you could usefully improve on a program when the copyright expired, rather than it simply being something interesting in a museum? Wasn't that the whole point of copyrights and patents, that when the monopoly expired they'd go into the public domain so that people could improve on them?
Is it any less logical than the record racketeers saying "we lost $100 billion dollars because people swapped some files"? The fact is, nobody actually knows what the impact of filesharing and other forms of copyright infringement are on bottom lines. Would MS be a monopoly today if they had fought vigorously against copyright infringement from day 1? I think not. But, like I said, nobody really knows.
Stop speaking for all of us. For some of us it is still an annoyance, requiring either funky hand positioning or two hands to use the mouse. Either way, it's a suboptimal solution. Stop thinking that just because it's not a problem for you, it's not a problem for others.
Um, isn't it somewhat important for a mouse/pointer device button to be near the mouse/pointer device? The Ctrl/Apple buttons working as right/middle respectively doesn't count because it seriously hurts usability.
What fraction of high-end powerbook buyers do you think are confused by having a second mouse button?
Argh. I don't even know where to start, that post is so full of meaningless misinformation.
First of all, a cell phone is designed to be an RF antenna, a Palm pilot is designed to be a hunk of electronics. Comparing them is silly to begin with. Second of all, if you're going to use 60*50mW = 3W that's insane. That would only be meaningful if the Palm Pilots were all placed at the exact same spot and in exactly the same phase so they constructively interfered.
Think of rain falling on a swimming pool. you might do a calculation that says that on average 100mL of water was falling each second. Would the effect on the waves on the surface be the same if you threw in a water balloon containing 100mL of water? NO! Of course not! One makes a big, central splash, the other makes lots of tiny isolated splashes.
The odds of those 60 palm pilots interfering constructively is about the same as water falling into a pool in exactly the right way to simulate the waves caused by a big water balloon hitting the surface. How likely do you think that is?
But all that doesn't matter because there's no way that a Palm emits anywhere close to 50mW as RF energy. I simply picked a huge number like that to show you how ridiculous your claims were. In fact, a
modern digital cell phone
(remember, these are designed to be antennas) puts out approx. 100mW. Since putting out that kind of energy is the only thing they do, and they require big batteries to do it. Based on that, a Palm most likely puts out less than 5mW in radiant RF energy, if that, so the energy hitting these wires 20cm away is more like 1/200th that required to light an LED.
If you're so worried about RF noice which may affect the plane, I guess you never move around in your seat, for fear of building up some static electricity. The spark of a discharge would be huge compared to a Palm Pilot. You must also never use the bathroom, because turning on the lightbulb in there throws out 60W of power!!!
So you're spooked by electronics. That's fine, go live with a tinfoil hat on, but don't tell me not to use a Palm Pilot on a flight because it scares you. At least do some basic thinking first.
Oh c'mon! Do you realize that if everybody on a plane breathed really hard, it just might cause a CO2 buildup that would asphixiate the pilot? Do you really want to take that risk?
I can see a cellphone causing interference, maybe. They have antennas and they're designed to transmit and receive. Same with other wireless things, but a pocket dictionary? A gameboy? A PDA?
Just because something is electronic doesn't mean it is dangerous. Just do the math. At peak usage a Palm Pilot uses
less than 200mW of power. If the thing is in your lap, it is at least 20cm from any sensitive wiring (and that's assuming there's sensitive wiring in the panel right next to you). Let's say that the sensitive area occupies an area of 10cm * 10cm. That means its area is 1/50th the area of the sphere centered at the palm pilot. Even if the unit isn't radiating uniformly, I can't imagine that 1/10th of its radiated energy would hit the critical area. Most of the energy in a palm would disappear as heat, but let's pretend that even 1/4 of it is radiated as RF energy. That would mean that this exposed critical area would be hit with a whopping 200mW * 1/4 * 1/10 = 5mW of energy. That's about 1/20th the power require to light a
typical LED. And remember, this is a worst case calculation.
So tell me, do you really believe the sensitive electronics on a plane are disturbed by incident radiation that's 1/20th the power required to light an LED?
Your bit about the 100s of people doing it all at the same time might have some validity if they were all sharing the same seat. Then you could add up the individual radiations their PDAs caused. As it is though, each person is trying in vain to make their 5mW of power break the plane. I think the "breathing hard" bit is more likely to work.
There's no incentive to learn about the issues. Your vote is worth the same whether you know what you're voting about or not.
The issues are typically too complex to be dealt with in a soundbite, but the way the news works, only soundbites are carried.
It is too easy for a politician to do things that benefit them, rather than their constituants, so they do so.
The election process takes years, so a politician elected to a 4 year term starts campaigning after 2 years rather than spending 4 years governing.
Being a good politician and being a good governor are different jobs. Good politicians can win elections, good governors can make sound policy decisions. Rarely does policy truly come into play in elections.
Democracy is a failed experiment, time to try another one. PS: Before you misquote Churchill and say "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest", at least admit that we haven't really tried all the rest, and maybe it's time to give some of them we have tried a second look.
How about a damage deposit then? Even if you have glowing recommendations, you typically have to leave a deposit when you rent an apartment. Why not have damage deposits for Internet usage?
If you keep your system patched, then everything runs smoothly. If you download junk and don't keep it patched, and through negligence harm others, then you forfeit your damage deposit. It's just like an apartment. If you have rowdy guests over who trash the place, you're the one responsible, even if you didn't do the damage yourself.
Actually, everybody who has an SUV can justify owning one. Even bizznissmen who do nothing but commute to/from work need one "to keep safe in the winter". I have yet to meet someone who will admit to owning a SUV simply because of the style. Your justification sounds a little better than most though, assuming you actually have to tow something with it.
But keep it at complaining. Please don't fight gas taxes if they are proposed. High gas taxes hurt your wallet, but you knew what you were getting into. Low gas prices hurt national security, the environment, and much, much more.
Well, you're right about the no kids part and not married part. But I've been out of school for many years now, and have landed many jobs. I've also left one of those jobs when they started treating their employees unfairly, and would happily leave another one if it happened again.
It's rather sad that getting married and having kids is seen as a good excuse for not standing up for what you believe in. You'd think that parents would be more likely to think setting an example is important.
I'd call you a troll but with so many people saying the same thing it must be an actual viewpoint a lot of dumbasses have.
Do you think a secretary or a security guard has the same mortgage payments you do? They have accepted their jobs pay X a month and have learned to live within their means.
Your job no longer commands the salary it once did. Deal with it. Don't whine about not being able to make mortgage payments, move to a smaller place! If your phone bill is too expensive, use the damn phone less!
Slashdot Mirror
No surprise that Microsoft is being "jerks" too:
So maybe the correct term is "liable" not "guilty" but when the government hauls someone into court and wins, "guilty" seems pretty appropriate to me.
The MS threat letter also says:
But if you took a quick look at the FAQs on the MSFreePC site you'll see:
So rather than encourage people to make fraudulent claims, the site suggests people can claim less than they are entitled to if they wish to fall under $100. And this is on the FAQ page, not buried somewhere in their terms and conditions.
I agree, the whole thing is fishy if claims have to be signed by the people and can't be processed by a third party, but it's not like MS is being reasonable here.
Hmm. In Emacs I never use Ctrl-P to go to the previous line, and no Emacs I've ever used uses Ctrl-U to clear the current line -- however that does sound like the Emacs mode of many shells I've used. Strange examples of Emacs keybindings though.
Nope, not using your methods for the next 70 odd years... but once the period of protection runs out, we'll thank you for contributing your idea to the public domain and if there's anything useful there we'll take it.
Seriously. I imagine there were a couple of guys like this one and his buddy back in the stone age. Some smart guy came up with the idea of "fire" and completely freaked the two of them out.
All they could imagine is people catching on fire, huts burning down, etc. And guess what, sometimes that happens, but we've decided that Fire Good!. It is part of progress, and the benefits that fire gives are big enough that they outweigh the risks.
The article intro says "It's basic, but worth reading as a milestone" as if the Slashdot audience was sophistimicated when it comes to RFID technology. Um... no. Most people here think that most tags can easily be read at 100+ metres. (Unless they're big active tags, they can't). Others claim they can only be read within a few centimetres (unless they're tiny ones with almost no antenna that's not true either). Almost everybody seems to think that they're smaller than a grain of sand... Well the IC might be, but remember the R in RFID stands for "radio", and a radio needs an antenna, and if your antenna is as small as a grain of sand, it won't work very well!
SPELL PROPERLY!
heresay -> hearsay (remember, "hear" and "say")
New Zelanders -> New Zealander
there design -> their design
refinning -> refining
basicaly -> basically
Capitlism -> capitalism
I mean, your whole argument is laughable anyhow. The US doing in 200 years what Europe failed to do in 2000. Riiight... because in 200 years the US went from the iron age to the industrial age. Wake up.
Besides, it wasn't the "Superior US Capitalist Society" that put it int he powerful position it's in now, it was that whole "avoiding getting decimated in World War 2" trick.
I know how you feel. I was getting them at a rate of 1 or 2 every 10 minutes. Ugh. If you happen to be running SpamAssassin, I've got rules that seem to take care of it. Luckily for you, but unluckily for me, I was hit starting on Thursday, so I've had days to tweak the rules.
Check them out at my web site. Feel free to add comments and tweaks there. Oh, and in case you're using maildrop, you can apparently choose not to deliver the message by using if ($MAIL_IS_SPAM) { exit }
So now my own server is spam free, but unfortunately even though I use Linux at work, the mail server is an Exchange server so... *sigh*
I think it's a satellite.
Either that or an old TV show.
Or maybe the aliens are invading.
Now I wonder if this story was accepted because a) it sounded real tech-like, b) the person who accepted knows what the submitter is talking about, c) the random number generator was less than 0.01, d) Cowboy Neal.
But one thing's for sure, as it stands, the story has yet to answer the all-important questions: "How does this affect me, and why should I care?"
Well, for those of us who use Linux and SpamAssassin, here it is:
rawbody CUMULATIVE_PATCHdescribe CUMULATIVE_PATCH Claims to be a cumulative patch
rawbody MICROSOFT
describe MICROSOFT Mentions microsoft
rawbody UNMONITORED_EMAIL
describe UNMONITORED_EMAIL Sent from an unmonitored email address
header FAKE_MS_PATCH_SUBJ Subject =~
describe FAKE_MS_PATCH_SUBJ Looks like a fake MS patch email
header FAKE_MS_SENDER From =~
/(?:ms|microsoft).*(?:security|section|center|b
describe FAKE_MS_SENDER Riiight, MS is sending me patches...
score CUMULATIVE_PATCH 1.5
score MICROSOFT 0.3
score UNMONITORED_EMAIL 0.8
score FAKE_MS_PATCH_SUBJ 2.0
score FAKE_MS_SENDER 2.0
score MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE 1.5
score BAYES_90 4.5
I'm no expert on SpamAssassin or its rules, but that seemed to be doing the trick for me on the 1 virus every 10 minutes that I was being hit with. I tried to find a way to submit it to the SpamAssassin people but (not too strangely) it was hard to find an email address for them. If anybody wants to take the ball and run with it, go for it.
And to what degree of precision would you have to know Pi to do this? And how much storage would be required to store it? And how much computing power would it take to find the relevant section of Pi that contains what you want?
I hope you're joking, because this makes about as much sense as the infinite monkey Shakespeare concept. There's no question it's true, but it is also irrelevant.
How quickly would you (and others like you) find another registrar if half the time you couldn't get to Verisign?
Maybe you're "acceptable losses" in this war.
running_counter = 0
if (dns_response points at sitefinder) {
counter++
return no such address
}
if (dns_response points at valid verisign site AND counter > 0) {
counter--
return no such address
}
In words: set things up so that for every person they misleadingly redirect to sitefinder, tell one person looking for a valid verisign site that the site doesn't exist.
Actually it's more like coming out one morning to find that your monster truck now has regular-sized wheels, a standard engine, and is, in fact, a regular truck because it happened to be on a driveway that was connected to a road which connected to a highway which connected to Microsoft.
How about this then. You soup up your engine, throw all kinds of mods on the thing (shiny spinny rims or whatever), then take it to the shop for an oil change. They give it back with the rims removed, the engine replaced with a stock one, and a sticker of a calvin-look-alike pissing on a chevy logo on your windshield.
If a Ford service station can't do that to your vehicle, how come Microsoft can do it to your dashboard?
This "update" happens whether you try to play an XBox Live game, or accidentally choose the XBox Live option in the "dashboard." You don't choose "update", you don't even know that's what's happening. It just does it behind the scenes. If this happened if you chose an "update" menu option I'd have no objection, but the fact that a company would undo modifications to something that you own without your permission is truly evil. (Psst... TiVo -- you really should ask if your customers want an update of their software too)
That's what I was thinking when I read the above section. If someone was still counting on income from something they created 50 years ago, they deserve what they get. There are all kinds of professions where your useful span is only a few years, and if you expect to retire off the money you make in that profession you have to be smart about what you do with the money.
Besides that, and author knew when their copyright protection ended. They could readily plan for that day. On the other hand, athletes never know when they'll suffer a career-ending injury. Their career might be over in their first week of professional play, or they might play for 15 seasons.
I think 30 years is a much more reasonable length of copyright for writing. It's not like people are going to wait around 30 years before they buy the book! If your brilliance isn't recognized till 35 years after you write something, tough luck!
I think computer programs should have an even shorter copyright, no more than 5 years. A book (unless it's about computers) is just as relevant in 30 years, but a computer program is most likely almost obsolete in 5 years. Wouldn't it be better for the world if you could usefully improve on a program when the copyright expired, rather than it simply being something interesting in a museum? Wasn't that the whole point of copyrights and patents, that when the monopoly expired they'd go into the public domain so that people could improve on them?
Is it any less logical than the record racketeers saying "we lost $100 billion dollars because people swapped some files"? The fact is, nobody actually knows what the impact of filesharing and other forms of copyright infringement are on bottom lines. Would MS be a monopoly today if they had fought vigorously against copyright infringement from day 1? I think not. But, like I said, nobody really knows.
Stop speaking for all of us. For some of us it is still an annoyance, requiring either funky hand positioning or two hands to use the mouse. Either way, it's a suboptimal solution. Stop thinking that just because it's not a problem for you, it's not a problem for others.
Um, isn't it somewhat important for a mouse/pointer device button to be near the mouse/pointer device? The Ctrl/Apple buttons working as right/middle respectively doesn't count because it seriously hurts usability.
What fraction of high-end powerbook buyers do you think are confused by having a second mouse button?
Argh. I don't even know where to start, that post is so full of meaningless misinformation.
First of all, a cell phone is designed to be an RF antenna, a Palm pilot is designed to be a hunk of electronics. Comparing them is silly to begin with. Second of all, if you're going to use 60*50mW = 3W that's insane. That would only be meaningful if the Palm Pilots were all placed at the exact same spot and in exactly the same phase so they constructively interfered.
Think of rain falling on a swimming pool. you might do a calculation that says that on average 100mL of water was falling each second. Would the effect on the waves on the surface be the same if you threw in a water balloon containing 100mL of water? NO! Of course not! One makes a big, central splash, the other makes lots of tiny isolated splashes.
The odds of those 60 palm pilots interfering constructively is about the same as water falling into a pool in exactly the right way to simulate the waves caused by a big water balloon hitting the surface. How likely do you think that is?
But all that doesn't matter because there's no way that a Palm emits anywhere close to 50mW as RF energy. I simply picked a huge number like that to show you how ridiculous your claims were. In fact, a modern digital cell phone (remember, these are designed to be antennas) puts out approx. 100mW. Since putting out that kind of energy is the only thing they do, and they require big batteries to do it. Based on that, a Palm most likely puts out less than 5mW in radiant RF energy, if that, so the energy hitting these wires 20cm away is more like 1/200th that required to light an LED.
If you're so worried about RF noice which may affect the plane, I guess you never move around in your seat, for fear of building up some static electricity. The spark of a discharge would be huge compared to a Palm Pilot. You must also never use the bathroom, because turning on the lightbulb in there throws out 60W of power!!!
So you're spooked by electronics. That's fine, go live with a tinfoil hat on, but don't tell me not to use a Palm Pilot on a flight because it scares you. At least do some basic thinking first.
Oh c'mon! Do you realize that if everybody on a plane breathed really hard, it just might cause a CO2 buildup that would asphixiate the pilot? Do you really want to take that risk?
I can see a cellphone causing interference, maybe. They have antennas and they're designed to transmit and receive. Same with other wireless things, but a pocket dictionary? A gameboy? A PDA?
Just because something is electronic doesn't mean it is dangerous. Just do the math. At peak usage a Palm Pilot uses less than 200mW of power. If the thing is in your lap, it is at least 20cm from any sensitive wiring (and that's assuming there's sensitive wiring in the panel right next to you). Let's say that the sensitive area occupies an area of 10cm * 10cm. That means its area is 1/50th the area of the sphere centered at the palm pilot. Even if the unit isn't radiating uniformly, I can't imagine that 1/10th of its radiated energy would hit the critical area. Most of the energy in a palm would disappear as heat, but let's pretend that even 1/4 of it is radiated as RF energy. That would mean that this exposed critical area would be hit with a whopping 200mW * 1/4 * 1/10 = 5mW of energy. That's about 1/20th the power require to light a typical LED. And remember, this is a worst case calculation.
So tell me, do you really believe the sensitive electronics on a plane are disturbed by incident radiation that's 1/20th the power required to light an LED?
Your bit about the 100s of people doing it all at the same time might have some validity if they were all sharing the same seat. Then you could add up the individual radiations their PDAs caused. As it is though, each person is trying in vain to make their 5mW of power break the plane. I think the "breathing hard" bit is more likely to work.
Democracy is a failed experiment, time to try another one. PS: Before you misquote Churchill and say "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest", at least admit that we haven't really tried all the rest, and maybe it's time to give some of them we have tried a second look.
How about a damage deposit then? Even if you have glowing recommendations, you typically have to leave a deposit when you rent an apartment. Why not have damage deposits for Internet usage?
If you keep your system patched, then everything runs smoothly. If you download junk and don't keep it patched, and through negligence harm others, then you forfeit your damage deposit. It's just like an apartment. If you have rowdy guests over who trash the place, you're the one responsible, even if you didn't do the damage yourself.
Actually, everybody who has an SUV can justify owning one. Even bizznissmen who do nothing but commute to/from work need one "to keep safe in the winter". I have yet to meet someone who will admit to owning a SUV simply because of the style. Your justification sounds a little better than most though, assuming you actually have to tow something with it.
But keep it at complaining. Please don't fight gas taxes if they are proposed. High gas taxes hurt your wallet, but you knew what you were getting into. Low gas prices hurt national security, the environment, and much, much more.
Well, you're right about the no kids part and not married part. But I've been out of school for many years now, and have landed many jobs. I've also left one of those jobs when they started treating their employees unfairly, and would happily leave another one if it happened again.
It's rather sad that getting married and having kids is seen as a good excuse for not standing up for what you believe in. You'd think that parents would be more likely to think setting an example is important.
I'd call you a troll but with so many people saying the same thing it must be an actual viewpoint a lot of dumbasses have.
Do you think a secretary or a security guard has the same mortgage payments you do? They have accepted their jobs pay X a month and have learned to live within their means.
Your job no longer commands the salary it once did. Deal with it. Don't whine about not being able to make mortgage payments, move to a smaller place! If your phone bill is too expensive, use the damn phone less!