Linux Paranoid wrote: Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.
We have 98% digital cellular coverage of the entire landmass (that's landmass, not population). GPRS (128kb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide this year. IMT (2mb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide in two years. Those two services are software upgrades to the existing hardware. No-one needs to errect any more masts or launch any more satellites.
And that's not to mention Digital Terrestrial Television which is right now pumping 50 channels of MPEG TV (widescreen, DVD quality) into my living room (no cable, no dish, just a normal TV aerial). You heard me - right now - for US$10 a month. Cartoon Network humming away as I type. They are already trialling Internet services over Digital Terrestrial as we speak - although admittedly the bandwidth is downlink only.
I don't see a problem here. The infrastructure for wireless Internet already exists.
TheCarp: Americain Heritage Dictionary ... "We don't need no thought control" --Pink Floyd
Erm... weren't Pink Floyd British? In which case highly unlikely to approve of your decree that the American Heritage Dictionary set world standards. Talk about thought control.
And your point would have been just that little bit more effective, had you only managed to spell American correctly... or is this one of those words like "colour" that you lot insist on spelling differently?
I work for AssureSoft whose AssureWeb website is live (work out the URL for yourself, it's not obscure but we don't want to be slashdotted). The site provides financial information to subscribers. You have to have a username and password to get the full range of services- we dole out passwords free to British independent financial advisors.
Our first XML-based service is a quotations system which allows users to get a quote for a pension or mortgage from a wide range of companies in real time (typically 5-20 secs).
Why we needed XML
Our problem was that each company had a slightly different way of asking for customer details. We decided to create an XML data type definition, now adpoted as industry standard by UK financial standards body Origo. This standard means that we can present pretty much the same input form, with a few optional extras, for any financial product.
The main use of XML is in passing the input data from our web server to the companies' quotes servers.
Layer 1: Client Browser Layer 2: AssureWeb server Layer 3: Company Quotes server
The XML goes back and forth between layers 2 and 3. We compile standard CGI GET/POST client requests into XML on the webserver and fire them at the quotes server. The quotes server fires back a response as XML again, and we parse this and present it to the client as a standard HTML web page. There is no XML on the client side.
Provided the company quotes server conforms to our XML standard, we can use that server for quotes. Adding new products or companies becomes a lot easier- typically we can go from scratch to beta with a new product within days. Previously it would have taken many months to write and test each individual product. XML allows us to re-use both code and input/output standards to a level never seen before.
Our next step will be a comparative quotes service. Users will be able to enter one set of data, and fire it at multiple companies. They will then get back multiple quotations, from which they can select the best based on their criteria. Effectively we will be having multiple concurrent layer 3 transactions.
I work for AssureSoft whose AssureWeb website is live (work out the URL for yourself, it's not obscure but we don't want to be slashdotted). The site provides financial information to subscribers. You have to have a username and password to get the full range of services- we dole out passwords free to British independent financial advisors.
Our first XML-based service is a quotations system which allows users to get a quote for a pension or mortgage from a wide range of companies in real time (typically 5-20 secs).
Why we needed XML
Our problem was that each company had a slightly different way of asking for customer details. We decided to create an XML data type definition, now adpoted as industry standard by UK financial standards body Origo. This standard means that we can present pretty much the same input form, with a few optional extras, for any financial product.
The main use of XML is in passing the input data from our web server to the companies' quotes servers.
Layer 1: Client Browser Layer 2: AssureWeb server Layer 3: Company Quotes server
The XML goes back and forth between layers 2 and 3. We compile standard CGI GET/POST client requests into XML on the webserver and fire them at the quotes server. The quotes server fires back a response as XML again, and we parse this and present it to the client as a standard HTML web page. There is no XML on the client side.
Provided the company quotes server conforms to our XML standard, we can use that server for quotes. Adding new products or companies becomes a lot easier- typically we can go from scratch to beta with a new product within days. Previously it would have taken many months to write and test each individual product. XML allows us to re-use both code and input/output standards to a level never seen before.
Our next step will be a comparative quotes service. Users will be able to enter one set of data, and fire it at multiple companies. They will then get back multiple quotations, from which they can select the best based on their criteria. Effectively we will be having multiple concurrent layer 3 transactions.
SEWilco wrote: My favorite is those who want to eliminate animal testing by instead using computer simulation. Flip open any biology or medical publication and see how many details of biology are still being discovered, thus couldn't be simulated even if you had a computer powerful enough for the job.
Some moderator marked the above as flamebait. That's bollocks. This is a highly valid point and totally on-topic for the subject of "what computers can't do".
"Contentious" does NOT equal flamebait. Stuff like that NEEDS to be discussed. We can't just pretend a subject will go away just because some people feel passionately about it.
SEWilco is quite right. You can't model what you don't know.
In addition, computers require absolute parameters. Not only can you not model what you don't know, but you can't do worthwhile simulations (ie. those used for human life or death decisions) based on educated guesses.
I only have respect for anti-vivesectionists who are vegans- not only in diet, but in clothes, tools, furniture and cosmetics too. Either animals are something we eat, or something we don't. Any half-way stance is hypocrytical.
Since there is absolutely no chance of any nation enforcing veganism on it's population, anti-vivisectionism is ultimately futile.
What I personally feel doesn't come in to it. There is no point arguing for a law if it will never get voted in or be enforced.
It's quite a nice area. The towns are human in scale but large enough for decent facilities, and the countryside is breathtaking. I like living here. If you need any more info (about the area, not about GCHQ), email me evilandi@cimmerii.demon.co.uk.
Yup, GCHQ salaries suck. Typical industry tech salaries outside London are 20-40k. Cheltenham, where I work and where GCHQ is based is about 70 miles outside London. Inside London salaries can double (but there's that little tiny drawback... living in LONDON SUCKS!).
GCHQ and other "public sector" areas usually pay 5k under industry rates. And don't increase by much, if my somewhat disillusioned drinking partner is anything to go by...
Wierd thing is that Cheltenham is quite a posh area with lots of financial industry jobs. Which makes me wonder just what GCHQ is doing to retain staff...
OnDigital has been broadcasting digital multichannel TV through normal rooftop arials for about a year and a half now.
We live out in the sticks and aren't likely to see cable anytime soon- and with local planning laws we can't have a satellite dish (can't have the tourists thinking us quaint old rural folk have technology now, can we?). Thus I was originally worried that OnDigital would be pants because I had no other choice for multichannel TV.
The answer is far from it. OnDigital ROCKS. Super sharp picture, digital now/next programme guide, loads of GOOD channels including loads of British and American programming.
It costs twelve quid (US$18) a month for 30 regular channels, and premium stuff such as new movies and football start at an extra seven quid (US$11) a month.
Nice thing about the receiver set top box is that it is BIOS flash upgradable over the airwaves. You just tell it to download the latest upgrade and off it goes. There are new features added every couple of months. Picture-in-picture teletext was the last upgrade; email is coming soon.
All you need to do to make it impossible to hijack an RDS radio would be put an "off" button to the feature.
Which unsurprisingly is a mandatory standard feature for any RDS radio. The button is usually marked "TA" (Traffic Announcement). There is usually another button for switching automatic programme tracking on and off; for instance I can set my car radio to seek local news bulletins, classical music, drama, rock music etc. The programme categories are pretty similar to MP3 genres. If you just want to stay tuned to your favourite station, you just switch these two features off and the radio acts like a normal dumb American radio. Normally the radio comes installed with traffic anouncements switched on and programme tracking switched off.
You can usually also make RDS radios less prone to switching to stations very far away by adjusting the "local" feature; usually this has two or three settings which allow you to adjust the sensitivity of the set, useful if for instance you drive around on the tops of hills and tend to pick up traffic bulletins from a hundred miles away or so (which may be local to Americans, but it sure as hell ain't local to us Brits). In my experience RDS will only switch you between stations on the same network (BBC will only switch to BBC, commercial will only switch to commerical). Therefore I suspect the piracy element of RDS is just pirates stealing listeners off other pirates.
Frankly the digital backwardness of the USA never ceases to amaze me, for a country that is always thrusting itself down our TV sets at the model of the western world. You don't have RDS, you don't have digital mobile phones in rural areas, you'll be telling me next you don't have digital terrestrial TV through an aerial!
Little Dogie wrote Those of you in Europe or UK, how aware have you been of this 'feature' in car radios?
You mean RDS? It's been standard in every car radio costing over US$150 for the last ten years; all new cars in the last five years come with car radios with RDS as standard.
As for RDS piracy, well that's a new one on me. I get traffic announcements from about five local radio stations (BBC Gloucestershire, BBC Hereford + Worcester, BBC West Midlands, BBC Coventry + Warwickshire, BBC Shropshire). Strangely always BBC. Maybe you only pick up traffic news from the network you're tuned to (in my case, BBC Radio 4).
Are there any laws specifically regarding the abuse of the RDS system (as opposed to just plain unauthorized transmissions)?
Speficic laws, no, but if a legitimate station abuses RDS, for instance if it repeatedly leaves the traffic news signal on when it's moved on to other topics, they get their licence to use it revoked. BBC Radio Gloucestershire take note!!! A ten minute local news bulletin about a cat stuck up a tree does NOT count as a traffic bulletin!!!
In short, quite a few of the more suburban/rural local stations accidentally leave the RDS traffic signal on for a few minutes after they've finished the bulletin. It gets quite annoying sometimes.
I can see the benefits for civil defense, but the abuse potential is staggering.
Yeah but in my experience it will only switch away to another station which is part of the same network as the one you were listening to. Hence I suspect it's just pirates stealing listeners off other pirates. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, but commercial stations outnumber BBC stations by two to one, and I've never heard a commercial traffic announcement whilst tuned to the BBC- I only get BBC ones.
(The BBC is the UK government-funded broadcasting network; does radio, TV, satellite, cable, digital terrestrial channels, shortwave etc; commercial channels outnumber it 2 to 1 on all forms of broadcasting at *least*).
Tony wrote: blah blah blah constitutional blah blah blah
What constitution? This is a British story. The UK doesn't have a constitution, nor do the British public show any signs of wanting one. FFS there is more than one way of organising a democracy!
The US has a list of things you are ALLOWED to do (a constition). And a jolly silly thing it is too.
The UK has a list of things you are NOT allowed to do (laws). It is presumed that anything that there is not a LAW against, you are allowed to do. In fact there is a LAW against interferring with anyone who is not breaking the law (the Criminal Justice Act).
Think of it like this: in the USA, you do not have a constitutional right to eat a pickled onion sandwich. So are you allowed to eat a pickled onion sandwich or not? If you are allowed to do something regardless of whether or not it's in the constitution, what is the point of the constitution? The whole document is pointless.
But in the UK, there is no law against eating a pickled onion sandwich. So you specifically have permission to eat a pickled onion sandwich.
This has done the rounds before in October 1998. Then, as now, the UK govt ruled it out because:
whoever introduced it would never get re-elected
unless this was EU-wide legislation, they'd have to either ban European visitors' cars (illegal under Euro free movement law) or fit all visitors' cars with the device (illegal under Euro free movement law)
given that many European countries have areas with NO speed limit whatsoever (eg. German autobahns), and that member countries can't agree on speed limits anyway, the chances of euro-wide co-operation on this scheme are ZERO.
As for me, I live out in the sticks where the roads are so quiet you can hear a car approaching from miles away. Quite rightly, we have a speed limit of 60mph through our little village- and the police won't stop you unless you're doing over 75mph or being really stupid.
Kurt said: Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read.
Absolutely not. 99% of tech support laughs are caused by people not reading the damn words in front of them.
How many times have you solved a colleague's tech problem by simply reading the on-screen message out aloud to them? This happens to me on a weekly basis. Some people just won't bother reading what the computer is telling them in plain English. Often all a tech support guy has to do is read the message aloud, verbatim, without changing a single word or explaining a single concept; and somehow, by the magic of human voice, the user understands.
If a genuinely illiterate person were to have trouble using a computer, this would not be funny.
But a perfectly literate intelligent person ringing up tech support because they are simply too lazy to read the on-screen instructions RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR DAMN EYES is hillarious.
Sure, us techies are guilty of not producing good manuals and we sometimes write ambigious on-screen messages. But the number and triviality of most tech support calls outweighs this a hundredfold.
The article talks about using the ghosting effect caused by office blocks etc.
So, will it work in the areas that need bandwidth the most- RURAL areas?
I don't understand why there is such a rush to provide more and more bandwidth for cities. Surely the bandwidth shortage is in rural areas, which often can't get ISDN let alone cable or ADSL? And why the hell would anyone want to work from home if their office was less than five miles away?
Compact Edition, I thought. I'm sure I've seen that in official literature somewhere. Then again I'm probably talking out of my arse.
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That's why we told them to fuck off, and they did.
on
Waiting for the Knock
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· Score: 2
crayz wrote: This is for all those Brits who mock the US for it's lack of freedoms. They look down their noses at our government and say they have just as luch liberty as us.
InitZero wrote: When I was a scout, all we did was tie knots, hike and tell stories
When I was a scout (in the REAL scouts, the original British ones, not any of this namby-pamby foreign stuff), I was the first scout EVER to do and get the Computing badge (would have been 1981/82 I think, wrote a program on a Sinclair/Timex ZX81 and passed a knowledge test). Little green triangle with a computer monitor on it.
Unfortunately the rest of scouting involved getting beaten up in so called "character-building" games of British Bulldog (like rugby or American Football, only without the ball... or padding or medical facilities for that matter). So unsurprisingly I quit. I think the scoutmaster later got done for fiddling with children, luckily not me though.
2MByte or 2MBit, either way mobile telephone bandwidth can only help the most bandwith-starved areas of the world- the rural ones.
I live a bit out in the sticks as my wife points out ( Cotswolds, UK ). Whilst I'm only 500 metres from the telephone exchange, my 'phone line takes a 4 kilometre detour through three neighbouring villages before it gets there. Which means that ADSL and BT ISDN Highway are out of the question.
I consider myself pretty lucky to get 49.3kbps from my telephone line. People in rural parts of America, Asia or Africa will be getting far less.
Yet it is rural areas that need the Internet most. Why would townsfolk want cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic.
It is high-bandwidth wireless services like GPRS that will lead the revolution, not cable.
If the post office has to send written data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price, why shouldn't telecoms operators be forced to send digital data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price?
Max Planck wrote: I don't see how taking out a power plant by cracking their network is any different than taking it out with a well-placed missile. At least no one is killed this way.
Dracula wrote: Maby they should also come with a sign that says: STEAL ME
Maybe they should equip them with GPS tracking systems... wait, they already have!
All it takes is the addition of a 50-quid GSM modem and hey presto, it 'phones home when it's been nicked- complete with the longitude, lattitude and elevation of the theif's abode.
You could even set parameters so that you could tell the robot the layout of the field, or maybe your entire farm- and if it breaks down, 'phone home with it's exact location.
For reasons beyond my fathoming (ie. Microsoft legacy lock-in), our firm uses Active Server Pages (ASP).
Basically server-side CGI in Visual Basic.
Quite why a server-side programming language has to be "visual" is beyond me. Also incomprehensible is why it takes two pages of ASP to do what PERL does in two lines.
It's a bunch of arse, I tell you.
But if you think that's confusing, what REALLY got my goat is that some idiot company came up with a way of serving Microsoft ASPs from UNIX! I don't know what drugs ChiliSoft are on, but I don't want any.
Strictly speaking, in the UK it is illegal to receive any radio communication for which the broadcaster does not have a license from the government (Wireless Telegraphy Act).
Taken to the extreme, this includes shortwave stations such as Voice of America, Radio France International etc. Theoretically it also includes extraterrestrial transmissions and RF noise from other stars!
Some bands, such as walkie-talkies, are open to all, but they're few and far between.
Unsurprisingly this law is only very rarely enforced (you can buy all-band radios and set up antennas at home pretty much as you wish). In the 1960's two suspected pirate radio DJ's were fined because they had a pirate radio bumper sticker- thus they must have listened to the radio station; although there was insufficient evidence to prove they were DJs.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: Crusoe's aim at wireless Internet appliances
Linux Paranoid wrote: Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.
We have 98% digital cellular coverage of the entire landmass (that's landmass, not population). GPRS (128kb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide this year. IMT (2mb/sec+) cellular bandwidth goes live nationwide in two years. Those two services are software upgrades to the existing hardware. No-one needs to errect any more masts or launch any more satellites.
And that's not to mention Digital Terrestrial Television which is right now pumping 50 channels of MPEG TV (widescreen, DVD quality) into my living room (no cable, no dish, just a normal TV aerial). You heard me - right now - for US$10 a month. Cartoon Network humming away as I type. They are already trialling Internet services over Digital Terrestrial as we speak - although admittedly the bandwidth is downlink only.
I don't see a problem here. The infrastructure for wireless Internet already exists.
But then I live in the UK.
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"We don't need no thought control" --Pink Floyd
Erm... weren't Pink Floyd British? In which case highly unlikely to approve of your decree that the American Heritage Dictionary set world standards. Talk about thought control.
And your point would have been just that little bit more effective, had you only managed to spell American correctly... or is this one of those words like "colour" that you lot insist on spelling differently?
See the real definitive English dictionary.
Anyone can censor anything provided it is in their power to do so. Public, private, government, corporate, it makes no difference.
Don't lecture me on English. I don't just speak it, I am it.
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I work for AssureSoft whose AssureWeb website is live (work out the URL for yourself, it's not obscure but we don't want to be slashdotted). The site provides financial information to subscribers. You have to have a username and password to get the full range of services- we dole out passwords free to British independent financial advisors.
Our first XML-based service is a quotations system which allows users to get a quote for a pension or mortgage from a wide range of companies in real time (typically 5-20 secs).
Why we needed XML
Our problem was that each company had a slightly different way of asking for customer details. We decided to create an XML data type definition, now adpoted as industry standard by UK financial standards body Origo. This standard means that we can present pretty much the same input form, with a few optional extras, for any financial product.
The main use of XML is in passing the input data from our web server to the companies' quotes servers.
Layer 1: Client Browser
Layer 2: AssureWeb server
Layer 3: Company Quotes server
The XML goes back and forth between layers 2 and 3. We compile standard CGI GET/POST client requests into XML on the webserver and fire them at the quotes server. The quotes server fires back a response as XML again, and we parse this and present it to the client as a standard HTML web page. There is no XML on the client side.
Provided the company quotes server conforms to our XML standard, we can use that server for quotes. Adding new products or companies becomes a lot easier- typically we can go from scratch to beta with a new product within days. Previously it would have taken many months to write and test each individual product. XML allows us to re-use both code and input/output standards to a level never seen before.
Our next step will be a comparative quotes service. Users will be able to enter one set of data, and fire it at multiple companies. They will then get back multiple quotations, from which they can select the best based on their criteria. Effectively we will be having multiple concurrent layer 3 transactions.
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I work for AssureSoft whose AssureWeb website is live (work out the URL for yourself, it's not obscure but we don't want to be slashdotted). The site provides financial information to subscribers. You have to have a username and password to get the full range of services- we dole out passwords free to British independent financial advisors.
Our first XML-based service is a quotations system which allows users to get a quote for a pension or mortgage from a wide range of companies in real time (typically 5-20 secs).
Why we needed XML
Our problem was that each company had a slightly different way of asking for customer details. We decided to create an XML data type definition, now adpoted as industry standard by UK financial standards body Origo. This standard means that we can present pretty much the same input form, with a few optional extras, for any financial product.
The main use of XML is in passing the input data from our web server to the companies' quotes servers.
Layer 1: Client Browser
Layer 2: AssureWeb server
Layer 3: Company Quotes server
The XML goes back and forth between layers 2 and 3. We compile standard CGI GET/POST client requests into XML on the webserver and fire them at the quotes server. The quotes server fires back a response as XML again, and we parse this and present it to the client as a standard HTML web page. There is no XML on the client side.
Provided the company quotes server conforms to our XML standard, we can use that server for quotes. Adding new products or companies becomes a lot easier- typically we can go from scratch to beta with a new product within days. Previously it would have taken many months to write and test each individual product. XML allows us to re-use both code and input/output standards to a level never seen before.
Our next step will be a comparative quotes service. Users will be able to enter one set of data, and fire it at multiple companies. They will then get back multiple quotations, from which they can select the best based on their criteria. Effectively we will be having multiple concurrent layer 3 transactions.
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Some moderator marked the above as flamebait. That's bollocks. This is a highly valid point and totally on-topic for the subject of "what computers can't do".
"Contentious" does NOT equal flamebait. Stuff like that NEEDS to be discussed. We can't just pretend a subject will go away just because some people feel passionately about it.
SEWilco is quite right. You can't model what you don't know.
In addition, computers require absolute parameters. Not only can you not model what you don't know, but you can't do worthwhile simulations (ie. those used for human life or death decisions) based on educated guesses.
I only have respect for anti-vivesectionists who are vegans- not only in diet, but in clothes, tools, furniture and cosmetics too. Either animals are something we eat, or something we don't. Any half-way stance is hypocrytical.
Since there is absolutely no chance of any nation enforcing veganism on it's population, anti-vivisectionism is ultimately futile.
What I personally feel doesn't come in to it. There is no point arguing for a law if it will never get voted in or be enforced.
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For anyone thinking of applying to GCHQ, here are some more links about the Cheltenham / Cotswolds area.
Cheltenham Borough Council
Gloucestershire County Council
Gloucestershire Tourist Board
Echo and Citizen local newspapers
Cotswolds Hyperguide
Alderton Parish Website
It's quite a nice area. The towns are human in scale but large enough for decent facilities, and the countryside is breathtaking. I like living here. If you need any more info (about the area, not about GCHQ), email me evilandi@cimmerii.demon.co.uk.
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Yup, GCHQ salaries suck. Typical industry tech salaries outside London are 20-40k. Cheltenham, where I work and where GCHQ is based is about 70 miles outside London. Inside London salaries can double (but there's that little tiny drawback... living in LONDON SUCKS!).
GCHQ and other "public sector" areas usually pay 5k under industry rates. And don't increase by much, if my somewhat disillusioned drinking partner is anything to go by...
Wierd thing is that Cheltenham is quite a posh area with lots of financial industry jobs. Which makes me wonder just what GCHQ is doing to retain staff...
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We live out in the sticks and aren't likely to see cable anytime soon- and with local planning laws we can't have a satellite dish (can't have the tourists thinking us quaint old rural folk have technology now, can we?). Thus I was originally worried that OnDigital would be pants because I had no other choice for multichannel TV.
The answer is far from it. OnDigital ROCKS. Super sharp picture, digital now/next programme guide, loads of GOOD channels including loads of British and American programming.
It costs twelve quid (US$18) a month for 30 regular channels, and premium stuff such as new movies and football start at an extra seven quid (US$11) a month.
Nice thing about the receiver set top box is that it is BIOS flash upgradable over the airwaves. You just tell it to download the latest upgrade and off it goes. There are new features added every couple of months. Picture-in-picture teletext was the last upgrade; email is coming soon.
I just can't imagine life anymore without Cartoon Network.
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Which unsurprisingly is a mandatory standard feature for any RDS radio. The button is usually marked "TA" (Traffic Announcement). There is usually another button for switching automatic programme tracking on and off; for instance I can set my car radio to seek local news bulletins, classical music, drama, rock music etc. The programme categories are pretty similar to MP3 genres. If you just want to stay tuned to your favourite station, you just switch these two features off and the radio acts like a normal dumb American radio. Normally the radio comes installed with traffic anouncements switched on and programme tracking switched off.
You can usually also make RDS radios less prone to switching to stations very far away by adjusting the "local" feature; usually this has two or three settings which allow you to adjust the sensitivity of the set, useful if for instance you drive around on the tops of hills and tend to pick up traffic bulletins from a hundred miles away or so (which may be local to Americans, but it sure as hell ain't local to us Brits). In my experience RDS will only switch you between stations on the same network (BBC will only switch to BBC, commercial will only switch to commerical). Therefore I suspect the piracy element of RDS is just pirates stealing listeners off other pirates.
Frankly the digital backwardness of the USA never ceases to amaze me, for a country that is always thrusting itself down our TV sets at the model of the western world. You don't have RDS, you don't have digital mobile phones in rural areas, you'll be telling me next you don't have digital terrestrial TV through an aerial!
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You mean RDS? It's been standard in every car radio costing over US$150 for the last ten years; all new cars in the last five years come with car radios with RDS as standard.
As for RDS piracy, well that's a new one on me. I get traffic announcements from about five local radio stations (BBC Gloucestershire, BBC Hereford + Worcester, BBC West Midlands, BBC Coventry + Warwickshire, BBC Shropshire). Strangely always BBC. Maybe you only pick up traffic news from the network you're tuned to (in my case, BBC Radio 4).
Are there any laws specifically regarding the abuse of the RDS system (as opposed to just plain unauthorized transmissions)?
Speficic laws, no, but if a legitimate station abuses RDS, for instance if it repeatedly leaves the traffic news signal on when it's moved on to other topics, they get their licence to use it revoked. BBC Radio Gloucestershire take note!!! A ten minute local news bulletin about a cat stuck up a tree does NOT count as a traffic bulletin!!!
In short, quite a few of the more suburban/rural local stations accidentally leave the RDS traffic signal on for a few minutes after they've finished the bulletin. It gets quite annoying sometimes.
I can see the benefits for civil defense, but the abuse potential is staggering.
Yeah but in my experience it will only switch away to another station which is part of the same network as the one you were listening to. Hence I suspect it's just pirates stealing listeners off other pirates. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong, but commercial stations outnumber BBC stations by two to one, and I've never heard a commercial traffic announcement whilst tuned to the BBC- I only get BBC ones.
(The BBC is the UK government-funded broadcasting network; does radio, TV, satellite, cable, digital terrestrial channels, shortwave etc; commercial channels outnumber it 2 to 1 on all forms of broadcasting at *least*).
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What constitution? This is a British story. The UK doesn't have a constitution, nor do the British public show any signs of wanting one. FFS there is more than one way of organising a democracy!
The US has a list of things you are ALLOWED to do (a constition). And a jolly silly thing it is too.
The UK has a list of things you are NOT allowed to do (laws). It is presumed that anything that there is not a LAW against, you are allowed to do. In fact there is a LAW against interferring with anyone who is not breaking the law (the Criminal Justice Act).
Think of it like this: in the USA, you do not have a constitutional right to eat a pickled onion sandwich. So are you allowed to eat a pickled onion sandwich or not? If you are allowed to do something regardless of whether or not it's in the constitution, what is the point of the constitution? The whole document is pointless.
But in the UK, there is no law against eating a pickled onion sandwich. So you specifically have permission to eat a pickled onion sandwich.
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This has done the rounds before in October 1998. Then, as now, the UK govt ruled it out because:
As for me, I live out in the sticks where the roads are so quiet you can hear a car approaching from miles away. Quite rightly, we have a speed limit of 60mph through our little village- and the police won't stop you unless you're doing over 75mph or being really stupid.
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Kurt said: Folks, a tech making fun of someone learning how to operate a computer is like a school teacher making fun of a child learning how to read.
Absolutely not. 99% of tech support laughs are caused by people not reading the damn words in front of them.
How many times have you solved a colleague's tech problem by simply reading the on-screen message out aloud to them? This happens to me on a weekly basis. Some people just won't bother reading what the computer is telling them in plain English. Often all a tech support guy has to do is read the message aloud, verbatim, without changing a single word or explaining a single concept; and somehow, by the magic of human voice, the user understands.
If a genuinely illiterate person were to have trouble using a computer, this would not be funny.
But a perfectly literate intelligent person ringing up tech support because they are simply too lazy to read the on-screen instructions RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR DAMN EYES is hillarious.
Sure, us techies are guilty of not producing good manuals and we sometimes write ambigious on-screen messages. But the number and triviality of most tech support calls outweighs this a hundredfold.
See my User's Complete Guide to Computers - the first manual designed specifically not to be read.
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The article talks about using the ghosting effect caused by office blocks etc.
So, will it work in the areas that need bandwidth the most- RURAL areas?
I don't understand why there is such a rush to provide more and more bandwidth for cities. Surely the bandwidth shortage is in rural areas, which often can't get ISDN let alone cable or ADSL? And why the hell would anyone want to work from home if their office was less than five miles away?
I'll never understand those townie folk... :-)
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Compact Edition, I thought. I'm sure I've seen that in official literature somewhere. Then again I'm probably talking out of my arse.
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That'll be why we looked down our noses at our government and politely told them to fuck off whereupon they promptly did.
The UK government scrapped the whole mad keys idea last week. This story is very old, very out of date, and very not valid anymore.
Isn't it about time Slashdot got a European correspondent to stop this kind of confusion?
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This was scrapped last week. See:
www.theregister.co.uk/991122-000008 .html
"The controversial Part III, which dealt with police seizure powers for encryption keys, has been shifted into a separate Home Office bill"
ie. they're reviewing it after www.stand.org.uk pointed out Part III was bollocks.
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InitZero wrote: When I was a scout, all we did was tie knots, hike and tell stories
When I was a scout (in the REAL scouts, the original British ones, not any of this namby-pamby foreign stuff), I was the first scout EVER to do and get the Computing badge (would have been 1981/82 I think, wrote a program on a Sinclair/Timex ZX81 and passed a knowledge test). Little green triangle with a computer monitor on it.
Unfortunately the rest of scouting involved getting beaten up in so called "character-building" games of British Bulldog (like rugby or American Football, only without the ball... or padding or medical facilities for that matter). So unsurprisingly I quit. I think the scoutmaster later got done for fiddling with children, luckily not me though.
Anyway, BSA is the UK Building Societies Association, dummy.
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2MByte or 2MBit, either way mobile telephone bandwidth can only help the most bandwith-starved areas of the world- the rural ones.
I live a bit out in the sticks as my wife points out ( Cotswolds, UK ). Whilst I'm only 500 metres from the telephone exchange, my 'phone line takes a 4 kilometre detour through three neighbouring villages before it gets there. Which means that ADSL and BT ISDN Highway are out of the question.
I consider myself pretty lucky to get 49.3kbps from my telephone line. People in rural parts of America, Asia or Africa will be getting far less.
Yet it is rural areas that need the Internet most. Why would townsfolk want cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic.
It is high-bandwidth wireless services like GPRS that will lead the revolution, not cable.
If the post office has to send written data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price, why shouldn't telecoms operators be forced to send digital data nationwide, regardless of urban or rural boundaries, for the same price?
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So how do heart monitors work in the USA then?
In Europe ours use electricity.
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I know this is a US story, but in case anyone is interested, here's a clued-up law firm from Cheltenham, UK:
Christ opher Davidson and Co
2-3 Oriel Terrace, Oriel Road
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 1XP
Tel: 01242 256418
They helped me out with my copyright tussle over use of .AU sound samples as part of a review- which was settled out of court in my favour.
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Maybe they should equip them with GPS tracking systems... wait, they already have!
All it takes is the addition of a 50-quid GSM modem and hey presto, it 'phones home when it's been nicked- complete with the longitude, lattitude and elevation of the theif's abode.
You could even set parameters so that you could tell the robot the layout of the field, or maybe your entire farm- and if it breaks down, 'phone home with it's exact location.
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For reasons beyond my fathoming (ie. Microsoft legacy lock-in), our firm uses Active Server Pages (ASP).
Basically server-side CGI in Visual Basic.
Quite why a server-side programming language has to be "visual" is beyond me. Also incomprehensible is why it takes two pages of ASP to do what PERL does in two lines.
It's a bunch of arse, I tell you.
But if you think that's confusing, what REALLY got my goat is that some idiot company came up with a way of serving Microsoft ASPs from UNIX! I don't know what drugs ChiliSoft are on, but I don't want any.
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Taken to the extreme, this includes shortwave stations such as Voice of America, Radio France International etc. Theoretically it also includes extraterrestrial transmissions and RF noise from other stars!
Some bands, such as walkie-talkies, are open to all, but they're few and far between.
Unsurprisingly this law is only very rarely enforced (you can buy all-band radios and set up antennas at home pretty much as you wish). In the 1960's two suspected pirate radio DJ's were fined because they had a pirate radio bumper sticker- thus they must have listened to the radio station; although there was insufficient evidence to prove they were DJs.
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xENTROPYx said: I hate to say it, but the color screens still suck power like a madman
Bollocks. My colour gbc lasts for weeks. I went on holiday with it and played for two hours a day, and it lasted a fortnight on two walkman batteries.
It's backlighting that eats batteries. Reflective colour LCDs don't use backlighting so it ain't a problem.
Light emission = heat emission = energy drain
Light reflection = no heat emission = no energy drain
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