I suggest you get two adsl lines from seperate providers and, to get near to that SLA performance, use a router like the one from Xincom that supports load balancing and failover. Covad's adsl 6mbps/768kbps product is $77/month from Nextwave, I'll let you do the math as to how much that blows a T1 out of the water.
I think the article makes a large omission when it doesn't point out that the Internet was a government funded project that grew up with the proto-free software movement. DARPA first approached ATT, then the owner of all phone lines in the country (when modems came along you weren't allowed to plug them directly into a phone line), about building a network based on open protocols and ATT turned them down because they wouldn't be able to control it. Remember AOL before they built in access to the Web? That probably is what the Internet would have looked like had ATT had control over whatever the Internet might have been in that alternate universe. Hell, even in the late 80's the head of ATT said there was no need for NSFnet because they could provide ISDN to the desktop.
It was a specific type of policy oriented towards open-ness that led to the Internet being the way it is. The software that underlies the Internet is free software, it has been and still is the dominant form of software in the infrastructure which makes up the Internet. Open source is not "counter culture" on the Internet as the article portrays. The only reason MS has any role on the Internet is they have leveraged their desktop monopoly.
True its likely most voters will be swayed by more pressing issues than tech policy, but I think you've over-simplified the issue. The appointees to various agencies (FCC, Commerce, NSF, NIH) will make key decisions about tech, some limited in scope but some that will have huge impact. Some of the issues that come to mind are media consolidation, VOIP, unlicensed spectrum, stem cell research, the relationship of telecomms to indepedent ISPs, copyright control, IP in trade.
These aren't "linux fanboy" issues, they are ones that the government will make decisions on and will effect how $billions in our economy and worldwide flow.
After spending much effort scaring developers in the US out of working on open source crypto with its munitions export laws the DoD is now "importing" and spending money certifying munitions grade encryption from abroad. Same for the NSA with OpenBSD.
To call this pirate radio is insulting to real radio hackers. Increase the iTrip's range 20 or 30 percent, ooooh wow. That's what a whole 100 feet? When you can get 20 mile range by putting a hand made antenna in a tree connected to a hand soldered rig causing no interference to any other spectrum users (like you can learn to do from these people) I'll be more interested. And I won't care whether or not it involves purchasing the current fad consumer device like the iPod.
Holding the progress of US OSS development back by removing foreign contributors in order to try to maintain a relative lead is childish. Americans benefit by having OSS development be a global phenomena, it will benefit less if it closed itself off.
OpenBSD has roots in code that resulted in public funding by the U of California. A Canadian branched the project and now tens of thousands of users with high security requirements in the US have benefitted, including the NSA. I think ending the possibility of more OpenBSD would be profoundly harmful.
Heck, the protocols and software that underly the Internet itself were developed by US taxpayer money. The Internet would not be the Internet if it were "American". This investment by the US taxpayer has benefitted people in the US and around the world, and people in the US have received much in return from the rest of the world. For instance, the "World Wide Web" was developed by scientists in Europe. Can you imagine the Internet working if the US charged Europe a license fee for TCP/IP and Europe charged the US for HTTP? I'm sure glad people like you did not squash the Internet in its infancy.
Anyway, I hope these examples at least get you to consider that the more people that contribute to the knowledge and information commons the more people overall benefit.
I think its vastly more likely that a public access station would provide this capability before a cable company would agree to do it itself. However, to my knowledge no municipality has made an agreement with a cable company that would allow it to upgrade the existing concept of a public access channel to what you have suggested.
I'm skeptical that the concept you've described is viable on purely economic grounds. The cable company will calculate how much revenue they get per gigabyte of content they squeeze into their VOD system. I think its likely that they will calculate they can make more if they squeeze episodes of Gidget onto the VOD server, rather than the type of programming that airs on public access.
The main justification for public access to begin with is that it allows a space for programming that is not economically viable.
Radio4all and Indymedia have been providing space to upload radio programs for years. And they don't even charge stations to download the shows.
I would estimate the yearly expenses of those projects to be an order of magnititude less than $1.5m. Oneworld Radio also offers upload space for programs and is networked internationally. I would guess their costs are a bit less than $1.5m but in a similar ballpark.
I've heard conflicting things about the tcp/ip stack. Regardless, MS does use BSD licensed code and credit it as required in its acknowledgments. So, its not theft.
Other companies (Sun, HP, Apple, etc) have also extensively used BSD code.
The comment I was replying to maintained developers wouldn't improve the software if it was public domain because they would prefer to contribute their work to a GPL'd project. I was pointing out that releasing the software as public domain does not preclude GPL'd development via derivative works. At the same time it would allow the software to be used in proprietary products. I think the government should opt to allow for the largest range of uses, as it does in general for information it releases.
I have to say I found the article lacking on a couple key points.
First, since DevIS owned the copyright they could have released it as GPL. Why donate it the USG at all, especially if it cost them $20k to do so?
Second, once the USG had the copyright, why was it licensed under the GPL. What interest does the government find served by having the code under GPL? Specifically, since USG info is usually public domain why not release it as that? I have heard plenty of people on/. say why they think its a good idea but I have no idea what reasons the USG thinks.
It sounds like the Open Source Industry Alliance wants to be able to say that the USG owns a piece of GPL'd code. Maybe that's good, maybe there's a strategy, but I can't tell from the article.
But you then get a fork. The P.D. version gets rapidly abandoned, in favour of someone else's GPL fork, which doesn't really suit the govenment.
You can get a fork at any time with GPL software. The government will pay the contractor to ensure that any upgrades to the software meet its requirements whether its GPL, public domain or proprietary. If the contractor thinks it can keep costs low by creating a GPL derivative work its free to do that.
Also MS could still ship GPL software with windows (like a "distribution") if they wanted.
It could do as you suggest if it merely packaged the software with Windows. MS could not create a derivative work (ie mix GPL and proprietary code) from the software and not release it. Why should the government prevent this from happening?
Wow, it sounds like you think its unpatriotic to release code under a license that doesn't restrict uses to the US.
How might things have turned out differently if those foreigners that started the Linux kernel, Mysql, OpenBSD, Python, Ruby, KDE, Mplayer, etc had said the same thing about letting American's profit off of their software.
"Public domain" has a specific meaning when applied in the copyright sense. It means a work over which no one may claim copyright protection.
I'd say that the domain needs to be limited to US citizens only.... It might not be morally correct, but it's how the government sees it.
That's really weird, you express a personal opinion and then (erroneously) say that its the position of the USG. You are 100 percent wrong. USG works are in the public domain, as such, anyone in the US or not, may use them as they see fit.
If it were public domain a developer could create a derivative work and release that under whatever license they wanted. Additionally, Microsoft could include bits of the code in the next version of Windows and not have to disclose the rest of the Windows source.
There is nothing to stop Microsoft from continually adding (or pre-announcing) new extensions to their.Net
Yeah there is. They can only force independent application developers to rewrite their apps so many times. They'll need this especially in the short to mid term as a newish technology looking to gain traction via mind share, competeing against the established Java community.
Congrats AC, this is the most bigoted thing I have read this week. It takes a special amount of intentional ignorance and hate to call over 1 billion people terrorists.
I think the sentiment you express is perhaps a reflection of the fact that many in the US only know about Muslims through what they see on TV news.
Which is a better conversion method, the threat of a sword thrust or the threat of being burnt at the stake as practiced by Christians?
I don't see much of a distinction, in both cases I see a barbaric practice by religous extremists. Your implication that the type of practice is particular to Islam is bigoted.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that Moore campaigned very hard for Nader. Also, he is harsh to Clinton in "Bowling for Columbine" over the bombing of the Sundanese medicine factory and the Balkans.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you get two adsl lines from seperate providers and, to get near to that SLA performance, use a router like the one from Xincom that supports load balancing and failover. Covad's adsl 6mbps/768kbps product is $77/month from Nextwave, I'll let you do the math as to how much that blows a T1 out of the water.
'The main purpose of my inventing is not to earn money,' he says. 'I want to render a service to my countrymen and to all people in the world.'
The similarities to that other great humanitarian innovator are just uncanny.
I think the article makes a large omission when it doesn't point out that the Internet was a government funded project that grew up with the proto-free software movement. DARPA first approached ATT, then the owner of all phone lines in the country (when modems came along you weren't allowed to plug them directly into a phone line), about building a network based on open protocols and ATT turned them down because they wouldn't be able to control it. Remember AOL before they built in access to the Web? That probably is what the Internet would have looked like had ATT had control over whatever the Internet might have been in that alternate universe. Hell, even in the late 80's the head of ATT said there was no need for NSFnet because they could provide ISDN to the desktop.
It was a specific type of policy oriented towards open-ness that led to the Internet being the way it is. The software that underlies the Internet is free software, it has been and still is the dominant form of software in the infrastructure which makes up the Internet. Open source is not "counter culture" on the Internet as the article portrays. The only reason MS has any role on the Internet is they have leveraged their desktop monopoly.
I wish reporters understood these things.
True its likely most voters will be swayed by more pressing issues than tech policy, but I think you've over-simplified the issue. The appointees to various agencies (FCC, Commerce, NSF, NIH) will make key decisions about tech, some limited in scope but some that will have huge impact. Some of the issues that come to mind are media consolidation, VOIP, unlicensed spectrum, stem cell research, the relationship of telecomms to indepedent ISPs, copyright control, IP in trade.
These aren't "linux fanboy" issues, they are ones that the government will make decisions on and will effect how $billions in our economy and worldwide flow.
The guy they hired to do the code changes for certification, Ben Laurie, lives in the UK.
After spending much effort scaring developers in the US out of working on open source crypto with its munitions export laws the DoD is now "importing" and spending money certifying munitions grade encryption from abroad. Same for the NSA with OpenBSD.
To call this pirate radio is insulting to real radio hackers. Increase the iTrip's range 20 or 30 percent, ooooh wow. That's what a whole 100 feet? When you can get 20 mile range by putting a hand made antenna in a tree connected to a hand soldered rig causing no interference to any other spectrum users (like you can learn to do from these people) I'll be more interested. And I won't care whether or not it involves purchasing the current fad consumer device like the iPod.
LPFM is the main issue that the lead plantiff in this case, The Prometheus Radio Project, works on. There's a bill in the Senate now to expand LPFM.
The next court of appeal is the Supreme Court.
... when i'm out on my bike using headphones
That's dangerous.
Holding the progress of US OSS development back by removing foreign contributors in order to try to maintain a relative lead is childish. Americans benefit by having OSS development be a global phenomena, it will benefit less if it closed itself off.
OpenBSD has roots in code that resulted in public funding by the U of California. A Canadian branched the project and now tens of thousands of users with high security requirements in the US have benefitted, including the NSA. I think ending the possibility of more OpenBSD would be profoundly harmful.
Heck, the protocols and software that underly the Internet itself were developed by US taxpayer money. The Internet would not be the Internet if it were "American". This investment by the US taxpayer has benefitted people in the US and around the world, and people in the US have received much in return from the rest of the world. For instance, the "World Wide Web" was developed by scientists in Europe. Can you imagine the Internet working if the US charged Europe a license fee for TCP/IP and Europe charged the US for HTTP? I'm sure glad people like you did not squash the Internet in its infancy.
Anyway, I hope these examples at least get you to consider that the more people that contribute to the knowledge and information commons the more people overall benefit.
I think its vastly more likely that a public access station would provide this capability before a cable company would agree to do it itself. However, to my knowledge no municipality has made an agreement with a cable company that would allow it to upgrade the existing concept of a public access channel to what you have suggested.
I'm skeptical that the concept you've described is viable on purely economic grounds. The cable company will calculate how much revenue they get per gigabyte of content they squeeze into their VOD system. I think its likely that they will calculate they can make more if they squeeze episodes of Gidget onto the VOD server, rather than the type of programming that airs on public access.
The main justification for public access to begin with is that it allows a space for programming that is not economically viable.
Radio4all and Indymedia have been providing space to upload radio programs for years. And they don't even charge stations to download the shows.
I would estimate the yearly expenses of those projects to be an order of magnititude less than $1.5m. Oneworld Radio also offers upload space for programs and is networked internationally. I would guess their costs are a bit less than $1.5m but in a similar ballpark.
I've heard conflicting things about the tcp/ip stack. Regardless, MS does use BSD licensed code and credit it as required in its acknowledgments. So, its not theft.
Other companies (Sun, HP, Apple, etc) have also extensively used BSD code.
The comment I was replying to maintained developers wouldn't improve the software if it was public domain because they would prefer to contribute their work to a GPL'd project. I was pointing out that releasing the software as public domain does not preclude GPL'd development via derivative works. At the same time it would allow the software to be used in proprietary products. I think the government should opt to allow for the largest range of uses, as it does in general for information it releases.
Oh yeah? Well, you're a fucking fuck fucker!
Boy, I sure feel better now. How 'bout you?
I have to say I found the article lacking on a couple key points.
/. say why they think its a good idea but I have no idea what reasons the USG thinks.
First, since DevIS owned the copyright they could have released it as GPL. Why donate it the USG at all, especially if it cost them $20k to do so?
Second, once the USG had the copyright, why was it licensed under the GPL. What interest does the government find served by having the code under GPL? Specifically, since USG info is usually public domain why not release it as that? I have heard plenty of people on
It sounds like the Open Source Industry Alliance wants to be able to say that the USG owns a piece of GPL'd code. Maybe that's good, maybe there's a strategy, but I can't tell from the article.
But you then get a fork. The P.D. version gets rapidly abandoned, in favour of someone else's GPL fork, which doesn't really suit the govenment.
You can get a fork at any time with GPL software.
The government will pay the contractor to ensure that any upgrades to the software meet its requirements whether its GPL, public domain or proprietary. If the contractor thinks it can keep costs low by creating a GPL derivative work its free to do that.
Also MS could still ship GPL software with windows (like a "distribution") if they wanted.
It could do as you suggest if it merely packaged the software with Windows. MS could not create a derivative work (ie mix GPL and proprietary code) from the software and not release it. Why should the government prevent this from happening?
Wow, it sounds like you think its unpatriotic to release code under a license that doesn't restrict uses to the US.
How might things have turned out differently if those foreigners that started the Linux kernel, Mysql, OpenBSD, Python, Ruby, KDE, Mplayer, etc had said the same thing about letting American's profit off of their software.
But what is the domain of the public?
... It might not be morally correct, but it's how the government sees it.
"Public domain" has a specific meaning when applied in the copyright sense. It means a work over which no one may claim copyright protection.
I'd say that the domain needs to be limited to US citizens only.
That's really weird, you express a personal opinion and then (erroneously) say that its the position of the USG. You are 100 percent wrong. USG works are in the public domain, as such, anyone in the US or not, may use them as they see fit.
If it were public domain a developer could create a derivative work and release that under whatever license they wanted. Additionally, Microsoft could include bits of the code in the next version of Windows and not have to disclose the rest of the Windows source.
There is nothing to stop Microsoft from continually adding (or pre-announcing) new extensions to their .Net
Yeah there is. They can only force independent application developers to rewrite their apps so many times. They'll need this especially in the short to mid term as a newish technology looking to gain traction via mind share, competeing against the established Java community.
Congrats AC, this is the most bigoted thing I have read this week. It takes a special amount of intentional ignorance and hate to call over 1 billion people terrorists.
I think the sentiment you express is perhaps a reflection of the fact that many in the US only know about Muslims through what they see on TV news.
Which is a better conversion method, the threat of a sword thrust or the threat of being burnt at the stake as practiced by Christians?
I don't see much of a distinction, in both cases I see a barbaric practice by religous extremists. Your implication that the type of practice is particular to Islam is bigoted.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that Moore campaigned very hard for Nader. Also, he is harsh to Clinton in "Bowling for Columbine" over the bombing of the Sundanese medicine factory and the Balkans.