An alternative one could pursue in addition to voting for who they would *really* like to see win would be to get the word out about proportional representation and Condorcet's method. Condorcet's method would, in this case, make it possible for Nader to win if enough people put him as their first or second choice, even if Bush and Gore got more primary votes than he did, provided neither Bush nor Gore got a majority of primary votes. More info here.
Ummm, the 56k limit has *nothing* to do with Shannon's law. POTS lines go onto 56k digital channels when they get to the CO (actually 64k AMI where you lose one bit per byte to make sure you don't get eight zeros in a row.)
Shannon's law is C = W log2(1 + S/N) where C is the channel capacity in bps, W is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz, and S/N is the signal to noise ratio. This means that with an infinite amount of power, you can get an infinite amount of data into your channel. This works a bit differently for spread spectrum and ultra wide band, but the law stays the same, the "channel" is just defined differently.
There are also several ways to reuse the same part of the spectrum: with microwave, you can send two beans polarized at 90 degrees relative to each other in the same space, direction, etc. You could do the same things with laser beams and be able to have even better reuse because they're so directional. You'd just need line of sight.
The end result is the same. There is no "maximum capacity" of our atmosphere to carry signals. I suppose a better question would be how many bits we can practically send in a metropolitan area within the power constraints of the devices we'd be using, with buildings and various other sources of interference. Probably the best situation would be low power ultra wide band or optical transceivers on every floor of every building and on every light post. That would give you terabits of bandwidth for every few hundred feet of space. Hopefully that will be enough for your evil purposes.
Does the entertainment industry really care if we don't buy DVDs? 1) They're perfectly happy with VHS because it's analog and copies look like crap anyway. Do you really want to go out and spend ~$30US for a VHS movie? 2) The whole point of CSS is to control how we use the media we're buying. If it were suddenly discovered that it's impossible to control the use of digital media, they'd probably just let DVD die anyway. The only reason DVD ever came out was because the Industry believed they could control the use of it. So the only effective boycott will be of the *entire* entertainment industry. That's right. Turn off your TV. Use only "open source" media, and even better, *produce* "open source" entertainment! Until there is decent open entertainment available, the entertainment industry *cannot lose*. In short, the entertainment industry really doesn't care if they win this or not. If they lose, consumers lose because they'll pull DVDs off the shelves or start charging more for them. Then again, maybe that won't be a loss. I'll just convert all my VHSs and DVDs to MPEG-2 streams on CDs and sell all my media. Illegal, but so what? Anyone else looking for such a device/service? I'd be willing to build a player and/or recorder if people are willing to help with information and/or hardware.
I haven't seen mention in any of the articles how NASA actually knew that the MCO passed too close to Mars. Does anyone have an explanation for how they could have gone from thinking it might have been a little off course to being sure it must have come in 100km too low? Seems fishy to me.
This has probably been suggested before, but I'm too lazy to search all the comments ever posted. Here's what I'm thinking:
In the user's Preferences, allow him or her to choose which moderators to listen to. This will add some complexity to the system, but it will make it so nobody can complain of censorship, because they can choose to ignore any moderator whose moderation they don't like.
In addition, make it possible to look at a moderator's history (at least the most recent moderations they've done), and to look at which moderators have moderated a given article. This will make it easier for users to choose which moderators to accept and which to ignore.
DNS is intended to make internet addresses usable by humans, not to make it easy to figure out what the address of Company X's web server is. DNS is *not* a directory service. Directory services allow you to search on real names and other possibly arbitrary attributes, not on one single key that doesn't allow fuzzy matches.
I think it's well past time to stop perpetuating the myth that domain names need to be easily guessed -- this is what directory services are for. The sooner people realize that you can't assume that company.com belongs to Company, Inc., the sooner this lawsuit BS over domain names vs. trademarks will stop. Of course, this may require a technical solution -- perhaps a directory service that fuzzily maps human names onto domain names so that it really doesn't matter what domain name you use.
Domain names should be easily remembered, but this doesn't necessarily mean easily guessed.
I spend far too much time in the same data center where Google's equipment is housed. They use the same cabinets-o'-PCs that Hotmail uses - with 21 drawers each having a motherboard screwed to it with some RAM and disk drives. Quite dense. I'd love to get some of those cabinets and run Beowulf on them. Anyway, Kingstar makes them -- www.kingstarusa.com.
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An alternative one could pursue in addition to voting for who they would *really* like to see win would be to get the word out about proportional representation and Condorcet's method. Condorcet's method would, in this case, make it possible for Nader to win if enough people put him as their first or second choice, even if Bush and Gore got more primary votes than he did, provided neither Bush nor Gore got a majority of primary votes. More info here.
Ummm, the 56k limit has *nothing* to do with Shannon's law. POTS lines go onto 56k digital channels when they get to the CO (actually 64k AMI where you lose one bit per byte to make sure you don't get eight zeros in a row.)
Shannon's law is C = W log2(1 + S/N) where C is the channel capacity in bps, W is the bandwidth of the channel in hertz, and S/N is the signal to noise ratio. This means that with an infinite amount of power, you can get an infinite amount of data into your channel. This works a bit differently for spread spectrum and ultra wide band, but the law stays the same, the "channel" is just defined differently.
There are also several ways to reuse the same part of the spectrum: with microwave, you can send two beans polarized at 90 degrees relative to each other in the same space, direction, etc. You could do the same things with laser beams and be able to have even better reuse because they're so directional. You'd just need line of sight.
The end result is the same. There is no "maximum capacity" of our atmosphere to carry signals. I suppose a better question would be how many bits we can practically send in a metropolitan area within the power constraints of the devices we'd be using, with buildings and various other sources of interference. Probably the best situation would be low power ultra wide band or optical transceivers on every floor of every building and on every light post. That would give you terabits of bandwidth for every few hundred feet of space. Hopefully that will be enough for your evil purposes.
Does the entertainment industry really care if we don't buy DVDs? 1) They're perfectly happy with VHS because it's analog and copies look like crap anyway. Do you really want to go out and spend ~$30US for a VHS movie? 2) The whole point of CSS is to control how we use the media we're buying. If it were suddenly discovered that it's impossible to control the use of digital media, they'd probably just let DVD die anyway. The only reason DVD ever came out was because the Industry believed they could control the use of it. So the only effective boycott will be of the *entire* entertainment industry. That's right. Turn off your TV. Use only "open source" media, and even better, *produce* "open source" entertainment! Until there is decent open entertainment available, the entertainment industry *cannot lose*. In short, the entertainment industry really doesn't care if they win this or not. If they lose, consumers lose because they'll pull DVDs off the shelves or start charging more for them. Then again, maybe that won't be a loss. I'll just convert all my VHSs and DVDs to MPEG-2 streams on CDs and sell all my media. Illegal, but so what? Anyone else looking for such a device/service? I'd be willing to build a player and/or recorder if people are willing to help with information and/or hardware.
I haven't seen mention in any of the articles how NASA actually knew that the MCO passed too close to Mars. Does anyone have an explanation for how they could have gone from thinking it might have been a little off course to being sure it must have come in 100km too low? Seems fishy to me.
This has probably been suggested before, but I'm too lazy to search all the comments ever posted. Here's what I'm thinking:
In the user's Preferences, allow him or her to choose which moderators to listen to. This will add some complexity to the system, but it will make it so nobody can complain of censorship, because they can choose to ignore any moderator whose moderation they don't like.
In addition, make it possible to look at a moderator's history (at least the most recent moderations they've done), and to look at which moderators have moderated a given article. This will make it easier for users to choose which moderators to accept and which to ignore.
DNS is intended to make internet addresses usable by humans, not to make it easy to figure out what the address of Company X's web server is. DNS is *not* a directory service. Directory services allow you to search on real names and other possibly arbitrary attributes, not on one single key that doesn't allow fuzzy matches.
I think it's well past time to stop perpetuating the myth that domain names need to be easily guessed -- this is what directory services are for. The sooner people realize that you can't assume that company.com belongs to Company, Inc., the sooner this lawsuit BS over domain names vs. trademarks will stop. Of course, this may require a technical solution -- perhaps a directory service that fuzzily maps human names onto domain names so that it really doesn't matter what domain name you use.
Domain names should be easily remembered, but this doesn't necessarily mean easily guessed.
I spend far too much time in the same data center where Google's equipment is housed. They use the same cabinets-o'-PCs that Hotmail uses - with 21 drawers each having a motherboard screwed to it with some RAM and disk drives. Quite dense. I'd love to get some of those cabinets and run Beowulf on them. Anyway, Kingstar makes them -- www.kingstarusa.com.