So what's the data rate in the uplink direction, to the exchange? Does 'Uni' stand for unidirectional or universal? Is the downlink speed at the expense of uplink speed?
Apart from the fact you are probably not looking, it is also a matter of numbers and the fact that 'left' and 'right' are relative terms.
The fact is that the US is one of the more right wing nations. Consequently, even though you think you are left, or central, relative to the rest of the world you are probably quite right wing.
There are 290 million people in the US. There are 6 billion in the world. Thus chances are a significant portion of the world's population is 'left' of you. Conseqently an American will generally view a collection of the world's population, such as the Internet, as being 'left wing'.
As an illustration, I've generally considered slashdot to be somewhere between 'right' and 'centre'. I'm an Australian and consider myself to be 'centre' in Australian politics. I gather the majority of American slashdotters consider slashdot to be 'left'.
Democracy, through the press, how people communicate and government control of information.
The press and other media
The software industry, and most other 'service' industries, where the major requirement is to use one's brain in place of labour.
Arts and culture
Indirectly, pretty well everything else is affected
Food, through genetics and disclosure of food processing steps,
Primary industries through mining and procesing technology
Manufacturing though processing technology and software patents
anything else you care to name.
As the world shift towards an 'information economy', IP laws will only become more central. Consequently, IP laws are *THE* most important part of any agreement, not some sideline that only interests slashdot participants.
On the wider issue of free trade, how does an agreement that grants 'favoured nation' status to *one* nation qualify as a free trade agreement?
All it does is lock others out. 'Free' Trade Agreement is a lie, chosen to hoodwink the electorate. The correct name is a Preferential Trade Agreement. I don't see how anyone who is for free trade can be for the proposed 'F'TA.
Could you please join the 'copyrightaustralia' yahoo group and send a report to the group? Among other things, this group is discussing issues relating to the extension of copyright in Australia and trying to figure out what to do about it.
*Reliability - The ISM band (2.4Hz and 5GHz) is shared spectrum. By it's nature one cannot provide a gurantee of service.
*Convenience - Maybe, but with so many comrecial providers, one probably has to reconfigure anyway.
*Speed - All 802.11 access point share spectrum, so if a free hotspot is bogged, so are the commercial ones.
*Security - Most of the free hotspot providers are knowledgeable hobbyists, who know more about wireless security than many so called experts.
The basic problem for commercial hotspot providers is that they are trying to make money off a free public resource: the ISM bands. Being commercial hotspot provider is a little like claiming a free lunch, then complaining when others also claim their free lunch instead of buying it from you.
> In an era where programming labour is relatively cheap...
It's not necesarily that programming labour is cheap. I'm my opinion, the increase in connectivity has lead to an increase in efficiency, whereby the same code gets reapplied to many more applications than before the onset of the Internet.
IMO, the per hour cost of programming labour has not really changed. The cost of programming labour, per unit produced, has dropped.
Look the word 'free' up in the dictionary. You will see that it has two meanings.
Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. Not subject to external restraint
Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
'Free as in beer' and 'Free in speech' is an attempt to explain this shortcoming of the English language, whereby 'free' has two meanings.
'Free as in beer' refers to the 'zero cost' meaning of free. Beer can be free in that it doesn't cost money, but it is not free in that it has liberty.
'Free as in speech' refers to the 'liberty' meaning of free. Speech can be free in that it is not subject to external restraint, but we don't normaly talk about the monetary value of speech.
The Free software movement says that Free software is 'Free as in speech', but not 'free as in beer'. That is, Free software is not subject to external influence but it doesn't necessarily cost zero dollars.
Hence there is no analogy between Free software and free beer. GoofyBoy is feeding you a crock of shit. The analogy is between Free software and Free speech.
The Spanish (and French and Italians) don't have this grammatical problem, as they have different words for the different concepts of 'free as in speech' (libre) and 'free as in beer' (gratis).
As an English speaker, I usually mangle my grammar and use 'Free' (capitalised) when talking about Free software and 'free' (lower case) when talking about free beer.
Hope this helps.
Re:not gonna happen, the lobbies are too powerful
on
Do-It-Yourself VOIP Telco
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
>... its gonna take a long time before we can get five nines reliability...
Each individual link doesn't have to be 99.999% reliable. Instead, rely on a mesh topology and have parallel (ie. redundant) paths between each node. Say we have 5 alternate routes between two nodes and each route is 90% reliable. The probability of an outage (all routes down) is (1-0.9)^5 = 0.00001. Hence, the network reliability is 99.999%. Each additional parallel route adds a '9'.
>And last but not least... i wonder what the effect of this access is going to be on the village people.
That's often an issue I think of. Is 'development' a 100% good thing? Do we view 'undeveloped' villages with a superiority complex?
I can see that there is little dispute with things like developing the means to put food on everyone's table, keep people healthy, provide shelter and such basics. I can also see the value of communication in providing education, providing information to allow people to make informed decisions and allowing people to vent their own opinions. Other things like 'entertainment' media, consumerism, fast food and misinformation/advertising? Are these things the rest of the world actually wants? What's your experience based on having been there? What do you reckon the chances are of the 'developed' world learning from the 'undeveloped' world?
Question: Is there a use for homebrew technologies in such villages, or is it looked upon as a second rate attempt by well meaning, but out of touch, foreigners? How did you get involved in such a project?
I'm interetsed as I have been developing some optical through the air stuff, which could be used to connect villages together. Would this stuff be well received, or does the government/population look down on such things and prefer to go the 'standard' route of buying off the shelf infrastructure?
Finally, can you please give me an idea of the specifications required to connect villages together? Do you generally have line of sight? Over what distances do you have to link? What are the temperature extremes and so on?
We like Gartner on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays of odd numbered months. In even numbered months, the rule is Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, with the exception of the first week when Sundays become Wednesdays. In leap years, swap the role of odd and even months.
Consequently, yes, today we like Gartner.
Of course that depends on what time zone you like in. If you live in the US, you should still be hating Gartner until midnight.
So my strategy in writing free software should be to
write code though a limited liability company, or
write code and refuse to accept any form of compensation for the code.
Think I'll stop playing devil's advocate now, though I'm still a little uncomfortable with the possibility of a professional indemnity claim in the case of a professional coding for free 'on the side'. Might a judge rule that a professional cannot escape their professional obligations under any circumstances, including writing free software?
However, I can't see individual developers being held liable by any sane judge for anything short of deliberately malicious coding.
Good point. It leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable though, as it would still require a defence in court.
I would think that if the developer did not accept compensation (money) for their code that might remove any liability under consumer law, as no 'transaction' ever took place?
There is also the curly question of professional indemnity. What if the developer is a professional, coding for free on the side? The judge might then rule that he/she should have known what he/she was doing and so find him/her liable for mistakes?
So if local law doesn't recognise denial of liability, you're liable?
Given this condition, a claim for liability would seem (to me) to be allowed under the GPL. Thus one couldn't even declare the GPL to have been violated, claim the user was using your code without permission, and countersue for copyright infringement.
Redhat/Suse/Mandrake back up their mission critical support with insurance. One day, they get a big failure and their customer makes a claim against the XYZ insurance company.
XYZ insurance company, in common with most insurance companies, is run by a group of low lifes who would kill their grandmother for a dollar and don't give a damn about the principles of free software. In true insurance company style, XYZ tries to pass the liability and recover its costs by suing the developer who wrote the buggy code.
Despite the best intentions of the free software community, we now have defenceless developer vs. rich insurance company. How to stop this?
Is this something that will change? With improved contribution tracking, will the next SCO/liability/whatever suit be directed against individual developers?
What if someone uses Linux in a 'mission critial' situation and it fails due to a bug? The bug is then traced back to an individual developer who is sued. There are countries where 'denial of liability' is a weak defence. Can the fact that a developer didn't get paid, so there was no transaction between teh developer and user act as a defence?
In Australia, 'liberals' claim to stand for 'personal liberties' over 'collective welfare'. That is, they are for individuals getting ahead, even if it is at the expense of others.
'Labour' claims to stand for 'we are all in this together', so we will advance together. This may include taxes and welfare to keep the rear of the pack closer to the head.
As such, talk of 'conservative' and 'radical' is unrelated to the stated aim of each party. Either party can be seen as 'radical' or 'conservative' depending on the measures they take to achieve their objectives.
In practise, the actual aims of each party have wandered over the years. A cynic would say that both parties have moved to the aim of preserving the two party system and resulting trough of benefits for politicians, parties and their mates (the big end of town). They have convinced themselves that such an arrangement is to the benefit of Australia, the only problem being that they are so cloistered that they (unknowingly?) equate their circle of friends with Australia. (Eg. politicians no longer mix with the unwashed masses due to 'security' concerns, and the rise of the career politician.)
The current government has also lost sight of its 'liberal' roots in that it has removed things such as the right to a trial (David Hicks) and introduced laws allowing people to be detained without charge and made it illegal to protest when detained in such a manner. I guess they are confortable with replacing objective courts with subjective 'gut feelings' because their 'mates' are on the inside and so safe from subjective judgements.
Difference being that Gates acts as a 'gatekeeper' (pun?) for the money, so the poor rely on his charity. If the poor save money for themselves (by using Free software), they are masters of their own destiny.
I'm not arguing that Gate's charity is a bad thing, just that it is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish.
I will admit that I am not fully informed as to the what portion of Mr Gate's charity dollar goes to providing ready made solutions and what portion goes to promoting self sufficiency. If the emphasis is on self suficiency, that would close any gap.
More info: For software, perhaps consider mobilemesh? MITRE distributes source and both linux and windows binaries are available for the protocol.
I gather mobilemesh is not an ideal solution, but it is good enough for neighbourhood sized networks, until the state of the art advances, producing a better successor.
Stupid thing is that the only reason the 'ruling class' (if it exists) has any power is that the main herd refuses to ask awkward questions, for fear of having to deal with answers they don't like.
Maybe the 'rulers' derive their power from being prepared to deal with the difficult questions that the majority would rather ignore? Unfortunately, the 'rulers' are a bunch of lazy (and stupid?) bastards, so they take the easy (and shortsighted) way of going in with guns blazing rather than trying to build cultural, economic and educational links for the long term.
Perhaps a solution is for a dedicated group of political outsiders to step forward as political candiates and force government to become transparent?
I remember seeing a TV segment on similar technology in the early 80s. It was an Australian show called "Towards 2000".
It worked by causing interference patterns between two ultrasonic beams. The low frequency beats translated into audiable frequencies, forming a 'beam of sound'. It seems awfully similar to this 'new' technology to me.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the data rate in the uplink direction, to the exchange? Does 'Uni' stand for unidirectional or universal? Is the downlink speed at the expense of uplink speed?
No, everyone will just have to start using some form of spatial coding.
The fact is that the US is one of the more right wing nations. Consequently, even though you think you are left, or central, relative to the rest of the world you are probably quite right wing.
There are 290 million people in the US. There are 6 billion in the world. Thus chances are a significant portion of the world's population is 'left' of you. Conseqently an American will generally view a collection of the world's population, such as the Internet, as being 'left wing'.
As an illustration, I've generally considered slashdot to be somewhere between 'right' and 'centre'. I'm an Australian and consider myself to be 'centre' in Australian politics. I gather the majority of American slashdotters consider slashdot to be 'left'.
Directly, the following are affected:
Indirectly, pretty well everything else is affected
As the world shift towards an 'information economy', IP laws will only become more central. Consequently, IP laws are *THE* most important part of any agreement, not some sideline that only interests slashdot participants.
On the wider issue of free trade, how does an agreement that grants 'favoured nation' status to *one* nation qualify as a free trade agreement? All it does is lock others out. 'Free' Trade Agreement is a lie, chosen to hoodwink the electorate. The correct name is a Preferential Trade Agreement. I don't see how anyone who is for free trade can be for the proposed 'F'TA.
Oh, by the way, the secret angle is 30.56 degrees. :-)
Could you please join the 'copyrightaustralia' yahoo group and send a report to the group? Among other things, this group is discussing issues relating to the extension of copyright in Australia and trying to figure out what to do about it.
*Reliability - The ISM band (2.4Hz and 5GHz) is shared spectrum. By it's nature one cannot provide a gurantee of service.
*Convenience - Maybe, but with so many comrecial providers, one probably has to reconfigure anyway.
*Speed - All 802.11 access point share spectrum, so if a free hotspot is bogged, so are the commercial ones.
*Security - Most of the free hotspot providers are knowledgeable hobbyists, who know more about wireless security than many so called experts.
The basic problem for commercial hotspot providers is that they are trying to make money off a free public resource: the ISM bands. Being commercial hotspot provider is a little like claiming a free lunch, then complaining when others also claim their free lunch instead of buying it from you.
It's not necesarily that programming labour is cheap. I'm my opinion, the increase in connectivity has lead to an increase in efficiency, whereby the same code gets reapplied to many more applications than before the onset of the Internet.
IMO, the per hour cost of programming labour has not really changed. The cost of programming labour, per unit produced, has dropped.
Look the word 'free' up in the dictionary. You will see that it has two meanings.
- Not imprisoned or enslaved; being at liberty. Not subject to external restraint
- Costing nothing; gratuitous: a free meal.
'Free as in beer' and 'Free in speech' is an attempt to explain this shortcoming of the English language, whereby 'free' has two meanings.'Free as in beer' refers to the 'zero cost' meaning of free. Beer can be free in that it doesn't cost money, but it is not free in that it has liberty.
'Free as in speech' refers to the 'liberty' meaning of free. Speech can be free in that it is not subject to external restraint, but we don't normaly talk about the monetary value of speech.
The Free software movement says that Free software is 'Free as in speech', but not 'free as in beer'. That is, Free software is not subject to external influence but it doesn't necessarily cost zero dollars.
Hence there is no analogy between Free software and free beer. GoofyBoy is feeding you a crock of shit. The analogy is between Free software and Free speech.
The Spanish (and French and Italians) don't have this grammatical problem, as they have different words for the different concepts of 'free as in speech' (libre) and 'free as in beer' (gratis).
As an English speaker, I usually mangle my grammar and use 'Free' (capitalised) when talking about Free software and 'free' (lower case) when talking about free beer.
Hope this helps.
Each individual link doesn't have to be 99.999% reliable. Instead, rely on a mesh topology and have parallel (ie. redundant) paths between each node. Say we have 5 alternate routes between two nodes and each route is 90% reliable. The probability of an outage (all routes down) is (1-0.9)^5 = 0.00001. Hence, the network reliability is 99.999%. Each additional parallel route adds a '9'.
That's often an issue I think of. Is 'development' a 100% good thing? Do we view 'undeveloped' villages with a superiority complex?
I can see that there is little dispute with things like developing the means to put food on everyone's table, keep people healthy, provide shelter and such basics. I can also see the value of communication in providing education, providing information to allow people to make informed decisions and allowing people to vent their own opinions. Other things like 'entertainment' media, consumerism, fast food and misinformation/advertising? Are these things the rest of the world actually wants? What's your experience based on having been there? What do you reckon the chances are of the 'developed' world learning from the 'undeveloped' world?
Question: Is there a use for homebrew technologies in such villages, or is it looked upon as a second rate attempt by well meaning, but out of touch, foreigners? How did you get involved in such a project?
I'm interetsed as I have been developing some optical through the air stuff, which could be used to connect villages together. Would this stuff be well received, or does the government/population look down on such things and prefer to go the 'standard' route of buying off the shelf infrastructure?
Finally, can you please give me an idea of the specifications required to connect villages together? Do you generally have line of sight? Over what distances do you have to link? What are the temperature extremes and so on?
Thanks.
Femto
Consequently, yes, today we like Gartner.
Of course that depends on what time zone you like in. If you live in the US, you should still be hating Gartner until midnight.
Have a decent read of the above link. It is a fascinating story. Anyone know what the current status of the school is?
So my strategy in writing free software should be to
Think I'll stop playing devil's advocate now, though I'm still a little uncomfortable with the possibility of a professional indemnity claim in the case of a professional coding for free 'on the side'. Might a judge rule that a professional cannot escape their professional obligations under any circumstances, including writing free software?
Good point. It leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable though, as it would still require a defence in court.
I would think that if the developer did not accept compensation (money) for their code that might remove any liability under consumer law, as no 'transaction' ever took place?
There is also the curly question of professional indemnity. What if the developer is a professional, coding for free on the side? The judge might then rule that he/she should have known what he/she was doing and so find him/her liable for mistakes?
12. ... UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW ...
So if local law doesn't recognise denial of liability, you're liable?
Given this condition, a claim for liability would seem (to me) to be allowed under the GPL. Thus one couldn't even declare the GPL to have been violated, claim the user was using your code without permission, and countersue for copyright infringement.
Redhat/Suse/Mandrake back up their mission critical support with insurance. One day, they get a big failure and their customer makes a claim against the XYZ insurance company.
XYZ insurance company, in common with most insurance companies, is run by a group of low lifes who would kill their grandmother for a dollar and don't give a damn about the principles of free software. In true insurance company style, XYZ tries to pass the liability and recover its costs by suing the developer who wrote the buggy code.
Despite the best intentions of the free software community, we now have defenceless developer vs. rich insurance company. How to stop this?
Is this something that will change? With improved contribution tracking, will the next SCO/liability/whatever suit be directed against individual developers?
What if someone uses Linux in a 'mission critial' situation and it fails due to a bug? The bug is then traced back to an individual developer who is sued. There are countries where 'denial of liability' is a weak defence. Can the fact that a developer didn't get paid, so there was no transaction between teh developer and user act as a defence?
Just playing devils advocate.
A Write Only Memory?
'Labour' claims to stand for 'we are all in this together', so we will advance together. This may include taxes and welfare to keep the rear of the pack closer to the head.
As such, talk of 'conservative' and 'radical' is unrelated to the stated aim of each party. Either party can be seen as 'radical' or 'conservative' depending on the measures they take to achieve their objectives.
In practise, the actual aims of each party have wandered over the years. A cynic would say that both parties have moved to the aim of preserving the two party system and resulting trough of benefits for politicians, parties and their mates (the big end of town). They have convinced themselves that such an arrangement is to the benefit of Australia, the only problem being that they are so cloistered that they (unknowingly?) equate their circle of friends with Australia. (Eg. politicians no longer mix with the unwashed masses due to 'security' concerns, and the rise of the career politician.)
The current government has also lost sight of its 'liberal' roots in that it has removed things such as the right to a trial (David Hicks) and introduced laws allowing people to be detained without charge and made it illegal to protest when detained in such a manner. I guess they are confortable with replacing objective courts with subjective 'gut feelings' because their 'mates' are on the inside and so safe from subjective judgements.
I'm not arguing that Gate's charity is a bad thing, just that it is the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish.
I will admit that I am not fully informed as to the what portion of Mr Gate's charity dollar goes to providing ready made solutions and what portion goes to promoting self sufficiency. If the emphasis is on self suficiency, that would close any gap.
I gather mobilemesh is not an ideal solution, but it is good enough for neighbourhood sized networks, until the state of the art advances, producing a better successor.
It's not off the shelf, but what about setting up a local area mesh using Ronja as the interconnect and some free/open source meshing software?
Maybe the 'rulers' derive their power from being prepared to deal with the difficult questions that the majority would rather ignore? Unfortunately, the 'rulers' are a bunch of lazy (and stupid?) bastards, so they take the easy (and shortsighted) way of going in with guns blazing rather than trying to build cultural, economic and educational links for the long term.
Perhaps a solution is for a dedicated group of political outsiders to step forward as political candiates and force government to become transparent?
It worked by causing interference patterns between two ultrasonic beams. The low frequency beats translated into audiable frequencies, forming a 'beam of sound'. It seems awfully similar to this 'new' technology to me.
I'll try and dig up a reference.