Some little kid gets caught by the owner lifting a chocolate bar in a small store, while out with his dad. When his father confronts him about it, he says "but dad, you steal satellite signals". What nonsense - if "dad" smashed his illegal satellite receiver into junk, the provider wouldn't be out a since. If the young boy was instead Harry Potter who could wave his magic wand and produce an identical copy of the chocolate bar for his own consumption while leaving the original in the store, most people would not consider this to be theft. Yet this is a much better analogy.
Sorry, but decoding an encrypted RF signal beamed into my house is not theft, and nobody is going to convince me otherwise. Nobody is going to convince the public at large of this either.
If the price cuts continue, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for somebody to set up an X-box chop shop, that would neatly disassemble all of the most expensive components in each XBOX (flash, CPU, RAM, etc.) and resell them on the open parts market?
Is where all baggage is checked, and passengers, flight attendants, and pilots must fly entirely in the buff. Call it "bare skin" airlines. The only remaining problem would be that of beligerent naked kung-fu masters on board.
Offshore telemarketers and spammers from mining the do not call database? These people are scum anyways, and as long as they are not operating within the US, it seems to me that the US government has just handed them a bonafide list of valid phone and email addresses.
and checking it twice gonna find out who's naughty and nice R I A A 's coming to town....
They log you when your sleeping They log when your awake They know if you use P to P so be good for goodness sake...
Oh you better watch out you better not cry you better log off I'm telling you why R I A A's coming to town.
Try running Kazaa over a cellular for a month
on
Will Cellular Swamp WiFi?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
And be prepared for a whopping 4 or even 5 digit phone bill. I know of somebody I worked with who thought it was cool to surf the web from his laptop, until he got his next cellular bill.
Heck, why don't you outlaw automobiles then? That will certainly reduce traffic deaths. And banning aircraft means that nobody would ever have to die in a plane crash again.
You mean remotely destroy their vehicles. Just take those old radar speed and stoplight cameras, and wire them up to gattling guns, rocket launchers, or anti-tank mines. Or perhaps pass a law that every vehicle sold in the US of A be rigged with an automatic self destruct device that will blow the vehicle to smithereens if they ever exceed the posted limit.
Perhaps we should all be hacking into Sen. Hatch's PC to see if he has illegally downloaded your copyright slashdot journal? It becomes very hard to respect the law when those who make them are so damned stupid.
I am looking at a very expensive plasma HDTV home theatre system in the not too distant future, but I have omitted any company (are you listening Sony?) with their fingers deeply into the DRM pie from the bidding, and reccommend others do the same. When you shop for any high end A/V gear, make sure you mention lack of DRM as a critical concern to the salesman. It only takes just a few lost high end sales before they clue in. Remember the tax software fiasco? We can force them to back down if we hurt them in the pocket boot.
Shares in SCO, which rallied to a 28-month high ahead of the Friday deadline, slipped in Monday trade to a low of $9.60 before recovering to close down 28 cents, or 2.52 percent, at $10.93 on Nasdaq.
IBM's lack of response was seen as a sign that SCO would difficulty extracting a settlement. Investors had bid up SCO's shares in the hope that a financial settlement with IBM would help boost SCO's bottom line, which had been in the red before it started an initiative to boost licensing fees from its Unix rights.
IBM shares closed up $1.75, or 2.11 percent at $84.50 on the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites).
I heard a common environmentalist tactic was to have a large number of individuals buy exactly one share of a corporation they disliked, then show up en mass at the shareholders meeting, (they cannot be refused entry as a shareholder) and liven up the party.
And what about multipath effects? If you have ever worked with RF (I have) you know that while the light travels in a straight line to the camera, microwaves will tend to bounce off solid objects to varying degrees. (This is in fact how radar is supposed to work) But the RF can take many paths from source to target. The radar gun doesn't know this - it simply records the highest dopplar shift of all received rays. For a police cruiser parked under or just past a bridge (a favorite hiding spot) or operating in an urban area god knows how many bounces off multiple moving and/or stationary targets the signal may have taken, in order to produce the highest detectable shift. The signal will spray all over the place.
Redlight camera$ are an insane idea. Studies (AAA) have shown that adding even a second to the yellow light time can drop accident rates over 90%. Of course most municipalities would rather have the revenue from the redlight camera, instead of a lower accident rate.
Take a look at http://www.hwysafety.com/nma_rlc_timeline1.htm
Don't believe me? Then call their bluff. Ask your local stoplight camera and photo radar proponents if they would be willing to send every dollar of fine money to the united nations, in order to totally remove revenue from the equation.
When they still had photo radar in Ontario, (thank god we subsequently elected a sensible Premier who trashed it) the camera flashed while I was travelling well below the speed limit in the right lane. As it turned out, the radar was tripped by a passing motorcycle in the left lane. I lived for weeks in fear that I would receive a ticket, that would require me to take a day off work and travel 200 Km to the courthouse nearest the location this occured in order to fight it. Given what I know from my celluar work with RF and multipath effects, speed detection by radar is a load of crock anyway. At least LIDAR has to be pointed at a particular vehicle to work.
Re:Wind Farms don't work
on
A Mighty Wind
·
· Score: 1
I remember hearing about the migratory bird strike problem in a recent addition of the Professional Engineers Association magazine I receive. (One of the few times I acutually had time to sit down and read it)
I suppose it would be possible to enclose the windmill in a large birdproof mesh cover, but I imagine it would substantially drive up construction costs, since the mesh itself would have to remain structurally sound under high wind loads. Additional weight from the screen icing up might also be a problem in northern climates.
It also makes the vehicle a lot lighter
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Because the need for heavy, high current copper wiring is eliminated. Raise the voltage, lower the current requirements. Since copper isn't all that cheap, it will also lower the cost of the vehicle.
As a fellow canadian I can mostly agree with your comments about the metric system. Those who oppose is should spend time trying to do university level physics problems in slugs, foot-pounds, and BTUs.
But there was one incident related to the metric switchover I recall, that nearly resulted in a great loss of life. A passenger jet en route to Edmonton actually ran out of gas midair near Winnipeg, because of a fuel conversion error. The pilot wound up making a dead stick landing on an abandoned runway he just happened to remember was somewhere in the area. First and only time that has ever happened with a plane that size. (The CBC made a movie about it)
This is a compromise more likely to make it into law, and serves the intended purpose. This prevents vendor lock in of your data, and applies to databases as well as the desktop. (A much bigger concern for governments)
It also kills off undocumented file formats such as the MS-Word defaults. In order to win the contract, closed source vendors such as MS would have to switch to a default open file format that any application could read. Of course, Word can save files in.rtf and other formats, but you have to jump through hoops to do it. They would presumably then be severely penalized in the contract bidding. This would push them to i) publicly document their file formats, ii) switch to an open file format by default, or iii) lose out on the bid.
Space exploration via chemical propellants will never be economically viable in the large scale. We simply *must* research and develop much more powerful propulsion systems if we are ever to get off this planet in a big way. And yes, it is dangerous. There will be accidents, and loss of life. As long as this is not the result of negligance or outright stupidity, it is a necessary price we must pay as a species for this knowledge. Prometheus was a superb choice name for this project. Man is literally learning how to tame sunfire. There were countless accidents, mistakes and deaths before we learned how to make large scale passenger transportation by air practical. When the first first commercial jetliner (Dehaviland comet) with pressurized cabins was developed, they found out that the cyclic stresses from the pressure changes caused metal fatigue on the thin outer skin, causing the windows to eventually pop out in flight. Oops... But eventually we got it more or less right.
The same is true with spacecraft. Rocket science IS hard. It will take a lot of trial and error effort before we really learn how to do it right. We are still barely past the equivalent of the Wright brothers era of space exploration.
No substitute for experience
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Somebody who is young and inexperienced but dedicated may be able to crank out a lot of code quickly, but at least in my field, (embedded systems) there is no substitute for having seen and solved a wide variety of problems. You gain a much better feel for what is the best approach to solving a problem, and how long it will take.
Would you really trust a 16 year old to code and deliver a critical app?
Slashdot Mirror
Some little kid gets caught by the owner lifting a chocolate bar in a small store, while out with his dad. When his father confronts him about it, he says "but dad, you steal satellite signals". What nonsense - if "dad" smashed his illegal satellite receiver into junk, the provider wouldn't be out a since. If the young boy was instead Harry Potter who could wave his magic wand and produce an identical copy of the chocolate bar for his own consumption while leaving the original in the store, most people would not consider this to be theft. Yet this is a much better analogy.
Sorry, but decoding an encrypted RF signal beamed into my house is not theft, and nobody is going to convince me otherwise. Nobody is going to convince the public at large of this either.
About trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. From a legal perspective, this is what SCO has been trying to accomplish.
If the price cuts continue, I wonder if it would be worthwhile for somebody to set up an X-box chop shop, that would neatly disassemble all of the most expensive components in each XBOX (flash, CPU, RAM, etc.) and resell them on the open parts market?
Just a thought...
Is where all baggage is checked, and passengers, flight attendants, and pilots must fly entirely in the buff. Call it "bare skin" airlines. The only remaining problem would be that of beligerent naked kung-fu masters on board.
Offshore telemarketers and spammers from mining the do not call database? These people are scum anyways, and as long as they are not operating within the US, it seems to me that the US government has just handed them a bonafide list of valid phone and email addresses.
and checking it twice
gonna find out who's naughty and nice
R I A A 's coming to town....
They log you when your sleeping
They log when your awake
They know if you use P to P
so be good for goodness sake...
Oh you better watch out
you better not cry
you better log off
I'm telling you why
R I A A's coming
to town.
And be prepared for a whopping 4 or even 5 digit phone bill. I know of somebody I worked with who thought it was cool to surf the web from his laptop, until he got his next cellular bill.
For the most part, this will only make for very annoying ads that suck up gobs of bandwidth. Just look at what they have done with flash animation?
Heck, why don't you outlaw automobiles then? That will certainly reduce traffic deaths. And banning aircraft means that nobody would ever have to die in a plane crash again.
I am sure he would love it there.
You mean remotely destroy their vehicles. Just take those old radar speed and stoplight cameras, and wire them up to gattling guns, rocket launchers, or anti-tank mines. Or perhaps pass a law that every vehicle sold in the US of A be rigged with an automatic self destruct device that will blow the vehicle to smithereens if they ever exceed the posted limit.
Perhaps we should all be hacking into Sen. Hatch's PC to see if he has illegally downloaded your copyright slashdot journal? It becomes very hard to respect the law when those who make them are so damned stupid.
I am looking at a very expensive plasma HDTV home theatre system in the not too distant future, but I have omitted any company (are you listening Sony?) with their fingers deeply into the DRM pie from the bidding, and reccommend others do the same. When you shop for any high end A/V gear, make sure you mention lack of DRM as a critical concern to the salesman. It only takes just a few lost high end sales before they clue in. Remember the tax software fiasco? We can force them to back down if we hurt them in the pocket boot.
I see your 3 billion and raise you two more. Show your cards...
DRM was a 4 letter word around Slashdot.
From Yahoo financials:
Shares in SCO, which rallied to a 28-month high ahead of the Friday deadline, slipped in Monday trade to a low of $9.60 before recovering to close down 28 cents, or 2.52 percent, at $10.93 on Nasdaq.
IBM's lack of response was seen as a sign that SCO would difficulty extracting a settlement. Investors had bid up SCO's shares in the hope that a financial settlement with IBM would help boost SCO's bottom line, which had been in the red before it started an initiative to boost licensing fees from its Unix rights.
IBM shares closed up $1.75, or 2.11 percent at $84.50 on the New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites).
I heard a common environmentalist tactic was to have a large number of individuals buy exactly one share of a corporation they disliked, then show up en mass at the shareholders meeting, (they cannot be refused entry as a shareholder) and liven up the party.
And what about multipath effects? If you have ever worked with RF (I have) you know that while the light travels in a straight line to the camera, microwaves will tend to bounce off solid objects to varying degrees. (This is in fact how radar is supposed to work) But the RF can take many paths from source to target. The radar gun doesn't know this - it simply records the highest dopplar shift of all received rays. For a police cruiser parked under or just past a bridge (a favorite hiding spot) or operating in an urban area god knows how many bounces off multiple moving and/or stationary targets the signal may have taken, in order to produce the highest detectable shift. The signal will spray all over the place.
Redlight camera$ are an insane idea. Studies (AAA) have shown that adding even a second to the yellow light time can drop accident rates over 90%. Of course most municipalities would rather have the revenue from the redlight camera, instead of a lower accident rate.
Take a look at
http://www.hwysafety.com/nma_rlc_timeline1.ht
Don't believe me? Then call their bluff. Ask your local stoplight camera and photo radar proponents if they would be willing to send every dollar of fine money to the united nations, in order to totally remove revenue from the equation.
When they still had photo radar in Ontario, (thank god we subsequently elected a sensible Premier who trashed it) the camera flashed while I was travelling well below the speed limit in the right lane. As it turned out, the radar was tripped by a passing motorcycle in the left lane. I lived for weeks in fear that I would receive a ticket, that would require me to take a day off work and travel 200 Km to the courthouse nearest the location this occured in order to fight it. Given what I know from my celluar work with RF and multipath effects, speed detection by radar is a load of crock anyway. At least LIDAR has to be pointed at a particular vehicle to work.
I remember hearing about the migratory bird strike problem in a recent addition of the Professional Engineers Association magazine I receive. (One of the few times I acutually had time to sit down and read it)
I suppose it would be possible to enclose the windmill in a large birdproof mesh cover, but I imagine it would substantially drive up construction costs, since the mesh itself would have to remain structurally sound under high wind loads. Additional weight from the screen icing up might also be a problem in northern climates.
Because the need for heavy, high current copper wiring is eliminated. Raise the voltage, lower the current requirements. Since copper isn't all that cheap, it will also lower the cost of the vehicle.
As a fellow canadian I can mostly agree with your comments about the metric system. Those who oppose is should spend time trying to do university level physics problems in slugs, foot-pounds, and BTUs.
But there was one incident related to the metric switchover I recall, that nearly resulted in a great loss of life. A passenger jet en route to Edmonton actually ran out of gas midair near Winnipeg, because of a fuel conversion error. The pilot wound up making a dead stick landing on an abandoned runway he just happened to remember was somewhere in the area. First and only time that has ever happened with a plane that size. (The CBC made a movie about it)
This is a compromise more likely to make it into law, and serves the intended purpose. This prevents vendor lock in of your data, and applies to databases as well as the desktop. (A much bigger concern for governments)
.rtf and other formats, but you have to jump through hoops to do it. They would presumably then be severely penalized in the contract bidding. This would push them to i) publicly document their file formats, ii) switch to an open file format by default, or iii) lose out on the bid.
It also kills off undocumented file formats such as the MS-Word defaults. In order to win the contract, closed source vendors such as MS would have to switch to a default open file format that any application could read. Of course, Word can save files in
Space exploration via chemical propellants will never be economically viable in the large scale. We simply *must* research and develop much more powerful propulsion systems if we are ever to get off this planet in a big way. And yes, it is dangerous. There will be accidents, and loss of life. As long as this is not the result of negligance or outright stupidity, it is a necessary price we must pay as a species for this knowledge. Prometheus was a superb choice name for this project. Man is literally learning how to tame sunfire. There were countless accidents, mistakes and deaths before we learned how to make large scale passenger transportation by air practical. When the first first commercial jetliner (Dehaviland comet) with pressurized cabins was developed, they found out that the cyclic stresses from the pressure changes caused metal fatigue on the thin outer skin, causing the windows to eventually pop out in flight. Oops... But eventually we got it more or less right.
The same is true with spacecraft. Rocket science IS hard. It will take a lot of trial and error effort before we really learn how to do it right. We are still barely past the equivalent of the Wright brothers era of space exploration.
Somebody who is young and inexperienced but dedicated may be able to crank out a lot of code quickly, but at least in my field, (embedded systems) there is no substitute for having seen and solved a wide variety of problems. You gain a much better feel for what is the best approach to solving a problem, and how long it will take.
Would you really trust a 16 year old to code and deliver a critical app?
If intdividuals could pool their damages and start a class action suit, spam kings could be sued for more $$$ than the RIAA could dream of.