Please see some other posts in this sub-thread: it doesn't matter how much power you use. It's always illegal to attach a commercially produced antenna to a device that wasn't tested with that antenna.
It has nothing to do with whether you have violated the power limits. It's entirely to do with the subsection about attaching antennas.
There's no question about illegal antennas now: there's nothing that's borderline. Either it's tested as part of a system and legal, or it wasn't and isn't. There are a few tiny exceptions that you might be able to make the case for, including certain kinds of one-off or homebrew antennas in certain cases.
So it's virtually all illegal now and the new rules will allow a broad swath to be 100-percent legal once recertification or new certifications take place.
I think you make my point, though: it's better to be in compliance than out of it. If Linksys recertifies its gear with high-gain antennas, then it will be MUCH easier for community networks and others to use perfectly legal antennas instead of what are clearly illegal ones.
It just makes it easier to be legit and thus avoid the potential for prosecution.
I'm sorry--I was unclear in my Slashdot submission on this story. The antenna that's connected during certification *does not* have to be one that's sold with the unit.
So you test a high-gain omni antenna, and then sell the unit with a very low-gain omni antenna. But a user can then remove the low-gain (or possibly buy a naked unit sans antenna entirely) and put on their own equal-to-or-less omni antenna.
Cringely consistently discusses radio with inaccurate technical descriptions. I've been on email threads in which he responds to critics who try to get him to be more accurate with statements about how he's trying to popularize technology and that people should just try interesting, weird things. From his never-again-discussed passive billboard antenna -- against the laws of physics and he never provided promised details to the Bay Area Wireless User's Group -- to his Why-Fi proposal (completely prima facie unrealistic and contradictory) to his "stick an antenna up at maximum gain and serve a neighborhood" essays a few weeks ago...
Well, why does he get Slashdot's attention any more?
Oh, I forget. As he said in that string of email I mention, he has 200,000 readers, thus making him an expert.
My logic is poor: if we had paid for the cost upfront, it would certainly have been less than paying for it now. It might take an hour of my time, $10, and a 20-mile roundtrip to get rid of a monitor appropriately in Seattle. But if I'd paid, say, an extra $5 to $10 in the price of the monitor, and the makers had deals for pickup or even central depositories, it would certainly shave lost time and other costs off my load. It preloads the cost. With competition, manufacturers might have had to eat more of that disposal cost even as they passed it on, too, so perhaps it would have been less than $10.
The $10, by the way, covers the cost of getting the monitor to a smelter where they recover parts and reuse the glass and lead!
The real problem is that monitor makers should have been required to build in the cost of disposal. Monitors can contain dozens of pounds of lead: about 40 percent of a monitor's weight is lead. The lead is mixed in the glass to -- seriously -- shield against radiation. Real radiation, the ionizing kind. (There's a Simpson's episode that makes reference to this, indicating that one of Homer's many reasons for his present stupidity is sitting in front of a pre-lead TV.)
It's a pisser that we, as buyers of monitors, are now paying the costs of disposal. In Europe, they have a product stewardship movement which adds a relatively small amount of cost upfront by requiring the manufacturer to be responsible for the whole lifecycle of the product. It means that when you're done with the product, they have some interest in reclaiming its parts and you've already pre-paid for that. Manufacturers in Europe are also becoming better at building products so they can be disassembled or reused.
Howdy, I wrote the article in question. There are servers on board, and PointShot can configure behavior depending on what the customer (the train line) wants. It's definitely live, but it uses caching to cover the bumps and reduce download time for frequently retrieved pages. Since the service is regional, everyone might, for instance, read the San Francisco newspaper online.
I'd say the most depressing fact I learned from researching this article is that while 6 million people commute via public transportation each day, and a few million walk or bike into work, 91.2 percent of commuters commute part or all of the way by car (reference), or about 50 million people a day in a car. 7 percent of commuters use a combination of modes overlapping with the public transportation statistic or about 4 million of the 6 million who use public transportation each day.
Andrew Orlowski writes in the best tradition of tabloid journalism: entertaining, poorly researched, full of factual errors. I've written my response to his article on Wi-Fi Networking News. Basically, Terry Dickman (not Dickson as Orlowski writes) is just this guy who likes the service. Intel is not funding PointShot or ACE's project.
Possio was certainly first, but a company formed by ex-Monet Mobile (Burst) folks, including its founder, has a similar item in the U.S. called the Junxion Box. I wrote the first feature about it for The Seattle Times a few weeks ago. The Junxion Box can use 2G, 2.5G, and 3G cellular data networks. Junxion's technology allows interchangeable cell data PC cards from normal subscriptions -- its sort of generic hardware with simple drivers.
The Master was pretty fantastic: always on the verge of total defeat and total success, such as when he almost destroyed the universe (at least once or twice) in his attempt to control it. Actually, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books has a clear lineage in the Master.
The Washington law doesn't allow gift card issues to charge the maintenance fee, but they can now keep the money if it's unused for some period of time -- I was unclear on whether that was still three years.
Okay, so the difference between music and visual moving works may be the prior existence of compulsory license before the reproduction and creation of films was as easy as it is today. Because we have, what, 80 years of compulsory music license, recording artists know that they can make their money if their music is popular enough to either sell records directly *or* be covered extensively. If Paul Anka sells 10,000,000 copies of a record containing a song I recorded, then I get some real cash even if I had nothing to do with it.
But visual media is different in that a single disseminated version tends to become the only version, possibly due to the costs. I can sit down and sing a song pretty easily and then cut CDs. But making a movie, even on a Mac using inexpensive software, involves a lot of work to get it to look like a movie and not a piece of crud.
Because it takes an enormous amount of time and potentially money--it might just take time, as the Raiders guys showed!--to make a film of a work, and because people tend to only put their spending dollars into seeing and renting one version of a work, then compulsory license for allowing remakes of movies based on the same script or based on a book or other work makes it less likely that any writer will ever see large-scale movies made.
When the two Prefontaine movies came out about the runner, I don't think either did well. How many movies of public domain works from the 19th century? Typically, you get a Disney production, and that kind of owns the slate.
Perhaps I'm wrong: maybe compulsory license would mean that no one artist gets a big win, like $100,000 or $500,000, but it might also mean that there would be an explosion in cottage filmmaking with garageband movie makers having the same chance to make a movie of a blockbuster novel as a giant studio. Kind of like how the smallest Web site can trump the biggest corporate site.
But I think movies require too much to make them look right, and I don't think the same necessity of compulsory license is needed to foster creativity.
The compulsory license makes a tribute bands' performance possible because Congress decided that it was in the public's interest to chip away slightly at the performance and recording copyright for music, only.
The movie thing, I think is different, as would most other forms of copying. You can't, for instance, expect a compulsory license so you could take one of Cory's copyrighted novels and produce a substantially similar novel. That would be too close to the original, and restrict his rights in the marketplace. Cory can choose to allow someone to publish a novel similar to his own, and in fact has used the Creative Commons license to allow just that. But he can't be forced.
Likewise, I'd argue that visual moving media like film and television would suffer from compulsory license in the sense that a popular work wouldn't receive the market's best payment for it. If anyone could either duplicate a film or make a film of a book by paying a flat fee and the creator had no right to object, it would enormously restrict their ability to ever make money off a film of their work because others might be in the marketplace.
This is arguing from the standpoint that the current method by which artists have to make their living makes sense, of course, and under that system that's practically a lottery based on the market's interest, artists need to preserve as many rights as possible (lottery tickets) in order to potentially cash in. Unfortunately, most artists' rights are actually held "in trust" or as work for hire by media companies, meaning that the system has been subverted from its original intent in providing artists a return on their creative vision.
Cory's complaining about the fact that he, as an ubergeek (and he is one), failed to understand this. So even if he was an idiot (which he isn't), imagine explaining to a lesser geek this problem?
Apple increasing the number of authorized machines to five is certainly in reaction to the number of early adopters who had problems like Cory's.
Sure, that sounds pretty ridiculous. But look at it the other way: these kids-then-adults made a totally unauthorized version of a movie that they admired but had no rights to. There's no good reason why one creative artist can completely remake the work of another without permission. There's a compulsory license for music as a special case: any artist can cover another artist's musical works. But I'd argue that has something to do with interpretation: music is a special case because music is a special case.
I agree that the circumstances were insane, but the better thing to look at is the fact that the rightsholders of the original work allowed this to be shown at all.
And remember: there's nothing to prevent these guys from having made this movie at all (nothing could prevent that) nor from showing it to friends. It's about distribution and commercial exploitation.
You can be an amateur all you want regardless of copyright law, but when you want to disseminate your work, there's no good reason that everyone should have the right to compulsory license for all works.
This is fundamentally about the number of eyeballs viewing the piece and what they're paying for it.
If you don't want to interact with the fellow who shut the blogs down (I've promised to never say his name in print again for the same reason the Indo-European root of "bear" is actually "brown"), I've written a short and sweet way to extract all of your blog posts in somewhat ugly but complete form using Google.
Essentially, enter a Google query in the form
site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com UNIQUE_WORD
Unique word should be something that appears on every page. Now get one of those slurping programs that downloads Web pages. Point it to the Google URL and set it to one level deep. It'll retrieve all the pages via Google's Cached link. repeat for each page of Google results. Now you have your content, and if you've clever, you can write a shell script to extract the unique text and eventually recreate your blog without any "bear" involved.
This is a neat part of the design of newer restaurants and coffeeshops: they have to plan for more juice!
A coffeeshop that opened last July in Seattle near my office had put in several outlets before they opened, and they have free Wi-Fi. About two weeks later, overwhelmed with laptops -- and doing great business -- they installed a whole strip of outlets and changed their table layout for more two-person tables. The place sometimes has 8 to 10 people working in it, all of them buying coffee and contributing to a nice air of comradeliness.
It's not binary choice; it's a duality. As I write about all the time on my Wi-Fi weblog, a certain category of Wi-Fi hotspot user will wait for reasonable roaming plans and then pay for it (or their business will more likely pay) because it gives them a predictable, consistent, high-speed experience.
Free is great, and free doesn't have to be inconsistent or mom and pop. For instance, look at Austin Wireless City or Marriott's budget hotel chain (free wired or Wi-Fi in all of their mid-level hotels by the end of 2005).
But for business venues and business districts and a consistency in access, people will pay. If every McDonald's has branded Wi-Fi and it's just $20 per month, then certain travelers--perhaps millions--will take advantage of that.
When roaming kicks in full scale, and all US hotspots are covered by a $20 per month fee from Comcast or Qwest or Boingo or other consumer firms reselling access, then for consumers who need it, there's no question. Businesses will pay $200 per month cell bills; a $20 per month surcharge for more productivity through unlimited US roaming won't be a big deal.
That update has disappeared -- the URL redirects to the main support site, and looking for upgrades for this model provides only one that's six weeks old.
Yeah, Cisco's "losing" all this money through its Linksys division using Linux to run its wireless routers. I'd love to "lose" as much money making embedded systems like Linksys.
Millions of people are buying Wi-Fi devices -- they're not being told to change the passwords, and they're not as sophisticated as you. This is a vendor problem.
What I get from reading this thread is that the university switched to gigabit fiber because they had installed a fiber optic network for the wrong reasons and are now stuck with a fiber infrastructure. Instead of eating the costs in some way of letting students on the network, like providing one adapter per room or floor, they're distributing the cost onto each student.
Slashdot Mirror
Please see some other posts in this sub-thread: it doesn't matter how much power you use. It's always illegal to attach a commercially produced antenna to a device that wasn't tested with that antenna.
It has nothing to do with whether you have violated the power limits. It's entirely to do with the subsection about attaching antennas.
There's no question about illegal antennas now: there's nothing that's borderline. Either it's tested as part of a system and legal, or it wasn't and isn't. There are a few tiny exceptions that you might be able to make the case for, including certain kinds of one-off or homebrew antennas in certain cases.
So it's virtually all illegal now and the new rules will allow a broad swath to be 100-percent legal once recertification or new certifications take place.
I think you make my point, though: it's better to be in compliance than out of it. If Linksys recertifies its gear with high-gain antennas, then it will be MUCH easier for community networks and others to use perfectly legal antennas instead of what are clearly illegal ones.
It just makes it easier to be legit and thus avoid the potential for prosecution.
I'm sorry--I was unclear in my Slashdot submission on this story. The antenna that's connected during certification *does not* have to be one that's sold with the unit.
So you test a high-gain omni antenna, and then sell the unit with a very low-gain omni antenna. But a user can then remove the low-gain (or possibly buy a naked unit sans antenna entirely) and put on their own equal-to-or-less omni antenna.
Cringely consistently discusses radio with inaccurate technical descriptions. I've been on email threads in which he responds to critics who try to get him to be more accurate with statements about how he's trying to popularize technology and that people should just try interesting, weird things. From his never-again-discussed passive billboard antenna -- against the laws of physics and he never provided promised details to the Bay Area Wireless User's Group -- to his Why-Fi proposal (completely prima facie unrealistic and contradictory) to his "stick an antenna up at maximum gain and serve a neighborhood" essays a few weeks ago...
Well, why does he get Slashdot's attention any more?
Oh, I forget. As he said in that string of email I mention, he has 200,000 readers, thus making him an expert.
My logic is poor: if we had paid for the cost upfront, it would certainly have been less than paying for it now. It might take an hour of my time, $10, and a 20-mile roundtrip to get rid of a monitor appropriately in Seattle. But if I'd paid, say, an extra $5 to $10 in the price of the monitor, and the makers had deals for pickup or even central depositories, it would certainly shave lost time and other costs off my load. It preloads the cost. With competition, manufacturers might have had to eat more of that disposal cost even as they passed it on, too, so perhaps it would have been less than $10.
The $10, by the way, covers the cost of getting the monitor to a smelter where they recover parts and reuse the glass and lead!
The real problem is that monitor makers should have been required to build in the cost of disposal. Monitors can contain dozens of pounds of lead: about 40 percent of a monitor's weight is lead. The lead is mixed in the glass to -- seriously -- shield against radiation. Real radiation, the ionizing kind. (There's a Simpson's episode that makes reference to this, indicating that one of Homer's many reasons for his present stupidity is sitting in front of a pre-lead TV.)
It's a pisser that we, as buyers of monitors, are now paying the costs of disposal. In Europe, they have a product stewardship movement which adds a relatively small amount of cost upfront by requiring the manufacturer to be responsible for the whole lifecycle of the product. It means that when you're done with the product, they have some interest in reclaiming its parts and you've already pre-paid for that. Manufacturers in Europe are also becoming better at building products so they can be disassembled or reused.
Howdy, I wrote the article in question. There are servers on board, and PointShot can configure behavior depending on what the customer (the train line) wants. It's definitely live, but it uses caching to cover the bumps and reduce download time for frequently retrieved pages. Since the service is regional, everyone might, for instance, read the San Francisco newspaper online.
I'd say the most depressing fact I learned from researching this article is that while 6 million people commute via public transportation each day, and a few million walk or bike into work, 91.2 percent of commuters commute part or all of the way by car (reference), or about 50 million people a day in a car. 7 percent of commuters use a combination of modes overlapping with the public transportation statistic or about 4 million of the 6 million who use public transportation each day.
Andrew Orlowski writes in the best tradition of tabloid journalism: entertaining, poorly researched, full of factual errors. I've written my response to his article on Wi-Fi Networking News. Basically, Terry Dickman (not Dickson as Orlowski writes) is just this guy who likes the service. Intel is not funding PointShot or ACE's project.
Possio was certainly first, but a company formed by ex-Monet Mobile (Burst) folks, including its founder, has a similar item in the U.S. called the Junxion Box. I wrote the first feature about it for The Seattle Times a few weeks ago. The Junxion Box can use 2G, 2.5G, and 3G cellular data networks. Junxion's technology allows interchangeable cell data PC cards from normal subscriptions -- its sort of generic hardware with simple drivers.
The Master was pretty fantastic: always on the verge of total defeat and total success, such as when he almost destroyed the universe (at least once or twice) in his attempt to control it. Actually, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books has a clear lineage in the Master.
The Washington law doesn't allow gift card issues to charge the maintenance fee, but they can now keep the money if it's unused for some period of time -- I was unclear on whether that was still three years.
Okay, so the difference between music and visual moving works may be the prior existence of compulsory license before the reproduction and creation of films was as easy as it is today. Because we have, what, 80 years of compulsory music license, recording artists know that they can make their money if their music is popular enough to either sell records directly *or* be covered extensively. If Paul Anka sells 10,000,000 copies of a record containing a song I recorded, then I get some real cash even if I had nothing to do with it.
But visual media is different in that a single disseminated version tends to become the only version, possibly due to the costs. I can sit down and sing a song pretty easily and then cut CDs. But making a movie, even on a Mac using inexpensive software, involves a lot of work to get it to look like a movie and not a piece of crud.
Because it takes an enormous amount of time and potentially money--it might just take time, as the Raiders guys showed!--to make a film of a work, and because people tend to only put their spending dollars into seeing and renting one version of a work, then compulsory license for allowing remakes of movies based on the same script or based on a book or other work makes it less likely that any writer will ever see large-scale movies made.
When the two Prefontaine movies came out about the runner, I don't think either did well. How many movies of public domain works from the 19th century? Typically, you get a Disney production, and that kind of owns the slate.
Perhaps I'm wrong: maybe compulsory license would mean that no one artist gets a big win, like $100,000 or $500,000, but it might also mean that there would be an explosion in cottage filmmaking with garageband movie makers having the same chance to make a movie of a blockbuster novel as a giant studio. Kind of like how the smallest Web site can trump the biggest corporate site.
But I think movies require too much to make them look right, and I don't think the same necessity of compulsory license is needed to foster creativity.
The compulsory license makes a tribute bands' performance possible because Congress decided that it was in the public's interest to chip away slightly at the performance and recording copyright for music, only.
The movie thing, I think is different, as would most other forms of copying. You can't, for instance, expect a compulsory license so you could take one of Cory's copyrighted novels and produce a substantially similar novel. That would be too close to the original, and restrict his rights in the marketplace. Cory can choose to allow someone to publish a novel similar to his own, and in fact has used the Creative Commons license to allow just that. But he can't be forced.
Likewise, I'd argue that visual moving media like film and television would suffer from compulsory license in the sense that a popular work wouldn't receive the market's best payment for it. If anyone could either duplicate a film or make a film of a book by paying a flat fee and the creator had no right to object, it would enormously restrict their ability to ever make money off a film of their work because others might be in the marketplace.
This is arguing from the standpoint that the current method by which artists have to make their living makes sense, of course, and under that system that's practically a lottery based on the market's interest, artists need to preserve as many rights as possible (lottery tickets) in order to potentially cash in. Unfortunately, most artists' rights are actually held "in trust" or as work for hire by media companies, meaning that the system has been subverted from its original intent in providing artists a return on their creative vision.
Cory's complaining about the fact that he, as an ubergeek (and he is one), failed to understand this. So even if he was an idiot (which he isn't), imagine explaining to a lesser geek this problem?
Apple increasing the number of authorized machines to five is certainly in reaction to the number of early adopters who had problems like Cory's.
Sure, that sounds pretty ridiculous. But look at it the other way: these kids-then-adults made a totally unauthorized version of a movie that they admired but had no rights to. There's no good reason why one creative artist can completely remake the work of another without permission. There's a compulsory license for music as a special case: any artist can cover another artist's musical works. But I'd argue that has something to do with interpretation: music is a special case because music is a special case.
I agree that the circumstances were insane, but the better thing to look at is the fact that the rightsholders of the original work allowed this to be shown at all.
And remember: there's nothing to prevent these guys from having made this movie at all (nothing could prevent that) nor from showing it to friends. It's about distribution and commercial exploitation.
You can be an amateur all you want regardless of copyright law, but when you want to disseminate your work, there's no good reason that everyone should have the right to compulsory license for all works.
This is fundamentally about the number of eyeballs viewing the piece and what they're paying for it.
Brilliant! Collective intelligence wins again. Thanks -- I'll update my page.
If you don't want to interact with the fellow who shut the blogs down (I've promised to never say his name in print again for the same reason the Indo-European root of "bear" is actually "brown"), I've written a short and sweet way to extract all of your blog posts in somewhat ugly but complete form using Google.
Essentially, enter a Google query in the form
site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com UNIQUE_WORD
Unique word should be something that appears on every page. Now get one of those slurping programs that downloads Web pages. Point it to the Google URL and set it to one level deep. It'll retrieve all the pages via Google's Cached link. repeat for each page of Google results. Now you have your content, and if you've clever, you can write a shell script to extract the unique text and eventually recreate your blog without any "bear" involved.
This is a neat part of the design of newer restaurants and coffeeshops: they have to plan for more juice!
A coffeeshop that opened last July in Seattle near my office had put in several outlets before they opened, and they have free Wi-Fi. About two weeks later, overwhelmed with laptops -- and doing great business -- they installed a whole strip of outlets and changed their table layout for more two-person tables. The place sometimes has 8 to 10 people working in it, all of them buying coffee and contributing to a nice air of comradeliness.
It's not binary choice; it's a duality. As I write about all the time on my Wi-Fi weblog, a certain category of Wi-Fi hotspot user will wait for reasonable roaming plans and then pay for it (or their business will more likely pay) because it gives them a predictable, consistent, high-speed experience.
Free is great, and free doesn't have to be inconsistent or mom and pop. For instance, look at Austin Wireless City or Marriott's budget hotel chain (free wired or Wi-Fi in all of their mid-level hotels by the end of 2005).
But for business venues and business districts and a consistency in access, people will pay. If every McDonald's has branded Wi-Fi and it's just $20 per month, then certain travelers--perhaps millions--will take advantage of that.
When roaming kicks in full scale, and all US hotspots are covered by a $20 per month fee from Comcast or Qwest or Boingo or other consumer firms reselling access, then for consumers who need it, there's no question. Businesses will pay $200 per month cell bills; a $20 per month surcharge for more productivity through unlimited US roaming won't be a big deal.
That update has disappeared -- the URL redirects to the main support site, and looking for upgrades for this model provides only one that's six weeks old.
Yeah, Cisco's "losing" all this money through its Linksys division using Linux to run its wireless routers. I'd love to "lose" as much money making embedded systems like Linksys.
Millions of people are buying Wi-Fi devices -- they're not being told to change the passwords, and they're not as sophisticated as you. This is a vendor problem.
What I get from reading this thread is that the university switched to gigabit fiber because they had installed a fiber optic network for the wrong reasons and are now stuck with a fiber infrastructure. Instead of eating the costs in some way of letting students on the network, like providing one adapter per room or floor, they're distributing the cost onto each student.