It used to be that as long as it traveled through the air, and onto (and into) your property, you had the right to monitor any and all radio communications, and that includes phone conversations. You were prohibited from divulging what you heard to anyone, but you could listen to your heart's content. That all changed a few years ago when the old-guard cellular industry successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law criminalizing monitoring radio waves that carried cellular phone calls.
This was a major blow to freedom! For the first time ever, the "land of the free and the home of the brave," "with liberty and justice for all" had gone and done what only the Godless Communists were supposed to do. Thank God the Internet came along!!!
Regardless of the correctness of this new law, rebroadcasting transmissions heard third-party is a definite no-no. And it really has nothing to do with invasion of privacy. It's more about protecting big business than protecting personal conversations.
Forget electrical, what about chemical reactions?
on
CPU Cooling Insanity
·
· Score: 5
I can't believe that I had to slog all the way to the bottom before someone mentioned the most obvious caveat in doing this! Mineral oil, alcohol, acetone, what do they have in common? They're potent oxidizers! They'll eat anything organic. Wait until the oil (or whatever) eats through the styrofoam and dumps itself onto the carpet. It could be really fun with the more volitile stuff, let it drip down to where there's a pilot light, then wait for the vapor pressure to build...
Of course you could get to find out how long a PC can run after the PC boards delaminate and the plastic packages melt. After it does quit, you could sell it as high-tech art. I see the potential for making real profit on this!
Sorry, Chris. I saw the Evangelist title, and coupled with what appeared to be more knee-jerk pooh-poohing of a PC's abilities, I bit. I guess I've faced enough subscribers to the evangelist that the snappy comebacks are hard to stop! I am offended by people who on one hand want to be as cool as Linux, but on the other think of things like like compiling a custom kernel a Bad Thing.
Thanks for taking it in good humor. I did rest well that night!
Gee, Chris, you're quick to dismiss things without any thought. That seems to be a real problem for you Mac guys- you just can't think outside the box. Yes, you can paint that box all kinds of colors and call it "innovation" but it's still a box that 97% of the market doesn't want.
Right now the venerable PC platform is at a turning point. The BIOS that provides complete compatibility with earlier machines and software is becoming less and less necessary. SGI already has taken the lead by incoroprating their ARC NVRAM into a line of Intel NT boxes. If you're a "real" Linux user (not you, Chris), the kind who makes new kernels regularly, you've dreamed of being able to start your PC in protected mode, and just load a 5MB kernel right into flat memory right off of your new 100GB disk with no drama. So why not do it? There's nothing holding us back technically. The need is finally there on a large enough scale to make it profitable to do. Let's do it!
Chris, you're going to have to face the fact that there's nothing special about your Mac. Integrating OS functionality into firmware isn't the sole province of the Apple clergy, for them to dole out jealously. It's just another place to put software, and there's no magic about it. You should get "outside" more, heh heh.
I'm really tired of hearing the "poor downtrodden, victimized me" routines. People who play that sympathy card deserve to get nothing. It's a cop-out.
You can bet that those fringe players never contributed anything to their marque, other than (not so) tit-for-tat negative press. Linux people write real code, and if they can't code, they document. That's positive! That's why Linux shines while Apple annoys.
The Linux Thing is a genuine social phenomenon that's really, really good. All those OS'es that rely on "advocacy" to increase visibility will always be also-rans because they spend all their time talking about the weather, but never do anything about it, so to speak. Or to put it another way- "He who has the most code wins."
Of course I could be all wrong and pigs really do fly...
This is nothing new! It sounds exactly like the technology that NASA used to send back live TV from the Moon. Only back then the name was DSSS. As a reader of NASA Tech Briefs, I know that NASA has made this technology freely available to whoever wants to develop it.
I don't see this upstart company having any advantage over other companies that are using DSSS in consumer applications. I've compared CDMA to TDMA phones in the same markets, and my conclusion is that Qualcomm's version of CDMA just isn't the best choice for voice telephony. It might not be the spread-spectrum technology that's the problem, probably the error corection routines and the codec. Still, there's a long distance (in any domain) between what's proving practical right now and the pie-in-the-sky predictions of this article. The engineering trades aren't nearly as awestruck as USAToday is!
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm not saying it was right to kill them just for spamming, but I understand...
I think that "Anonymous Coward" should be changed to "Knee-Jerk Fool who Will Buy Anything" or maybe "I Don't Care What It Is, I Don't Like It"!
Mom: "Billy, stop pulling the cat's tail!"
Billy: "But Mom, I'm NOT pulling! I'm just holding on, the CAT is doing all the pulling!!"
Oh well, that's what I get for trying sublety on a crowd that's into shiny baubles and insincere flattery...
It used to be that as long as it traveled through the air, and onto (and into) your property, you had the right to monitor any and all radio communications, and that includes phone conversations. You were prohibited from divulging what you heard to anyone, but you could listen to your heart's content. That all changed a few years ago when the old-guard cellular industry successfully lobbied Congress to pass a law criminalizing monitoring radio waves that carried cellular phone calls.
This was a major blow to freedom! For the first time ever, the "land of the free and the home of the brave," "with liberty and justice for all" had gone and done what only the Godless Communists were supposed to do. Thank God the Internet came along!!!
Regardless of the correctness of this new law, rebroadcasting transmissions heard third-party is a definite no-no. And it really has nothing to do with invasion of privacy. It's more about protecting big business than protecting personal conversations.
I can't believe that I had to slog all the way to the bottom before someone mentioned the most obvious caveat in doing this! Mineral oil, alcohol, acetone, what do they have in common? They're potent oxidizers! They'll eat anything organic. Wait until the oil (or whatever) eats through the styrofoam and dumps itself onto the carpet. It could be really fun with the more volitile stuff, let it drip down to where there's a pilot light, then wait for the vapor pressure to build...
Of course you could get to find out how long a PC can run after the PC boards delaminate and the plastic packages melt. After it does quit, you could sell it as high-tech art. I see the potential for making real profit on this!
Sorry, Chris. I saw the Evangelist title, and coupled with what appeared to be more knee-jerk pooh-poohing of a PC's abilities, I bit. I guess I've faced enough subscribers to the evangelist that the snappy comebacks are hard to stop! I am offended by people who on one hand want to be as cool as Linux, but on the other think of things like like compiling a custom kernel a Bad Thing.
Thanks for taking it in good humor. I did rest well that night!
Gee, Chris, you're quick to dismiss things without any thought. That seems to be a real problem for you Mac guys- you just can't think outside the box. Yes, you can paint that box all kinds of colors and call it "innovation" but it's still a box that 97% of the market doesn't want.
Right now the venerable PC platform is at a turning point. The BIOS that provides complete compatibility with earlier machines and software is becoming less and less necessary. SGI already has taken the lead by incoroprating their ARC NVRAM into a line of Intel NT boxes. If you're a "real" Linux user (not you, Chris), the kind who makes new kernels regularly, you've dreamed of being able to start your PC in protected mode, and just load a 5MB kernel right into flat memory right off of your new 100GB disk with no drama. So why not do it? There's nothing holding us back technically. The need is finally there on a large enough scale to make it profitable to do. Let's do it!
Chris, you're going to have to face the fact that there's nothing special about your Mac. Integrating OS functionality into firmware isn't the sole province of the Apple clergy, for them to dole out jealously. It's just another place to put software, and there's no magic about it. You should get "outside" more, heh heh.
I'm really tired of hearing the "poor downtrodden, victimized me" routines. People who play that sympathy card deserve to get nothing. It's a cop-out.
You can bet that those fringe players never contributed anything to their marque, other than (not so) tit-for-tat negative press. Linux people write real code, and if they can't code, they document. That's positive! That's why Linux shines while Apple annoys.
The Linux Thing is a genuine social phenomenon that's really, really good. All those OS'es that rely on "advocacy" to increase visibility will always be also-rans because they spend all their time talking about the weather, but never do anything about it, so to speak. Or to put it another way- "He who has the most code wins."
Of course I could be all wrong and pigs really do fly...
This is nothing new! It sounds exactly like the technology that NASA used to send back live TV from the Moon. Only back then the name was DSSS. As a reader of NASA Tech Briefs, I know that NASA has made this technology freely available to whoever wants to develop it.
I don't see this upstart company having any advantage over other companies that are using DSSS in consumer applications. I've compared CDMA to TDMA phones in the same markets, and my conclusion is that Qualcomm's version of CDMA just isn't the best choice for voice telephony. It might not be the spread-spectrum technology that's the problem, probably the error corection routines and the codec. Still, there's a long distance (in any domain) between what's proving practical right now and the pie-in-the-sky predictions of this article. The engineering trades aren't nearly as awestruck as USAToday is!