The "backdoors" only matter if you are running IPSEC AND you are relying on IPSEC to keep confidential information secure whilst in transit (without some other upper layer like SSL on top of it) and even then all the "backdoors" let you do is to get at the data protected by IPSEC, not the system itself.
In the late 1940s the government (through anti-trust action) forced the movie studios to sell off their theater chains and end the practice of forcing theaters to buy (and exhibit) an entire package of films just to get the one film they actually wanted to get.
The government needs to do the same again and break up the vertical content companies, ban content producers from requring cable operators to buy (or sell/bundle) one channel when they want another channel (e.g. where Disney might say that Comcast has to bundle ESPN Football and ABC Family into one block) and separate the pipes from the content that goes over those pipes.
There is something backward about the fact that you can scan in a signed document, send it via a virtual fax service to someone with another virtual fax service who will then print the document out and act on it yet you cant scan the same document in, send it over the same links via email to someone who will print it and action it. If you are using fax-to-email gateways, the line is blurred even further and the only diffrence is that some archaic law says that things transmitted over "fax" have greater legal standing than things transmitted over email...
Its perfectly possible to live and buy stuff without ever having anything to do with PayPal. (I do it)
Although the problem in the US is that electronic transfers between accounts are expensive. (here in.au, I make them all the time and it doesn't const me a cent)
Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down (like they did to other p2p programs in the past that were not open source like kazza)
Basically passing the TCK means you get a patent grant for the Java patents. But Sun (and now Oracle) have said "You can only get the TCK if you are not producing a Java implementation for mobile or embedded use". Apache are claiming that such license terms violate the agreements connected to the Java Community Process and thats why its decided to leave.
Orcale for its part doesnt want to remove the restrictions on the TCK because the restrictions are one of the things keeping its remaining Embedded Java revenue alive.
To me, ARM powered netbooks with some of those fancy higher-end ARM chips, a decent mobile GPU and maybe a hardware chip to decode video is what Chrome OS should be aiming for. If ARM is good enough for web apps on an iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, Android handset etc, it should be good enough for the same web apps on Chrome OS (and such a setup should get better battery life than any of the x86 ATOM Win7 laptops out there)
I am more interested in the reports that WikiLeaks have information on major US banks exposing corruption that may well be linked to real causes of the Global Financial Crisis (or to events that made it worse)
Maybe they will reveal why the Bush Government and his Treasury secretary bailed out the banks without insisting they clean up their act as part of the deal (something that could have been done given that Paulson was basically dictating terms to these banks)
The problem is that so-called "free trade agreements" are often anything but free. Take the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia for example. Australia pushed really hard for the US to open up its markets for foriegn agricultural exports including sugar, beef and dairy products. Yet the US refused to backdown on its tarrifs and subsidies and what resulted did almost nothing for Aussie farmers.
Despite signing many so-called "free trade agreements" with various countries, the US continues to maintain high rates of protection for its agricultral industry (and despite the image of the "hillbilly farmer", the biggest benificiaries of this protection are the giant agribusiness companies like Monsanto and ADM and the owners of the giant factory farms run by guys sitting in office towers in New York or Chicago)
What happened is that Comcast and Level 3 signed a deal whereby they would exchange traffic between their networks for free as long as both sides exchanged reasonably equal amounts of traffic. But now that Level 3 has Netflix on their network, the amount of data is no longer anywhere near equal. Hence Comcast wants to end the peering agreement.
Adobe isnt getting permission to sideload apps, they are getting special access to private APIs and native code in order to allow Flash to function (and function properly) on WP7. Its likely that Flash will be distributed either via the phone firmware (OTA or shipped on the phone) or via the Marketplace.
The carriers and phone manufacturers are not getting special permission to sideload. The phone manufacturers have permission as part of their WP7 license to ship manufacturer (and yes carrier) specific apps on their phones as part of the firmware that gets loaded onto the phone.
I think Microsoft will allow private apps (that is apps written and distributed to only limited people without going on Marketplace) but they are likely working on the pricing model for this (i.e. how much do they charge to allow people to write private apps and how much do they charge to allow these apps to be installed on the phones)
If you stick this to the outside of the package, add some sort of marking or so so that its obvious if the ShockWatch was removed and replaced by some shipping company manager so they dont have to cough up for insurance.
Show me a GSM Android handset with specs that match or beat the N900 (including physical keyboard) where I dont have to jump through all kinds of unauthorized hoops to replace the kernel and software. Unless such a phone appears, my next phone will be the N900.
The N900 is the most "open" phone you can buy (more open even than the Nexus One). The FreeRunner doesn't count as its hardware was 5 years out of date before it even left the production line (it doesn't even do quad band GSM, let alone 3G)
The copper network is great IF you have direct copper back to the exchange AND your copper is in good condition AND you are close enough to the exchange to get ADSL. If you have crappy coper, if you are too far from the exchange, if your line contains equipment incompatible with ADSL or you are stuck on a RIM with no available ports or really slow speeds, the copper network isn't so great.
With the NBN, all those problems go away.
Also, they arent going to string the fiber on power lines or poles in most places. In most places it will go into the existing Telstra ducting (which is the reason that the government is paying Telstra all this money for access to said ducting. If your phone wires currently run along overhead poles then yes, the NBN may well follow suit and run along those same poles but where the phone wires are underground, the NBN will also be underground in 99.9% of cases.
If there is one thing I cant STAND its all the anti-NBN FUD being spread around, mostly by the liberals, by the Murdoch papers (including the Australian) and by various vested interests concerned the NBN will take away their current competitive advantage.
Anyone paying $70 per month and only getting 20gb is paying far too much. Even if all you can get is Telstra Wholesale ADSL, TPG will sell you unlimited at 8Mbps or 300GB at ADSL2+ speeds for your $70
Can you point to actual statements from the government stating that they will prohibit other networks from competing with the NBN?
I havent seen such statements. What I HAVE seen is proposals to require 3rd party network builders to provide wholesale access to their network on an open basis and to support the technical specs of the NBN (the intent of this is to ensure companies cant do deals with land developers (and others) to build networks independent of the NBN and gain a monopoly over the area the network is being built in (as is the case now with a number of providers in various estates and apartment complexes)
Telstra supports it for 2 reasons: 1.Not separating means they would be locked out of buying spectrum for next generation LTE services and 2.By separating, they get to sell the copper network to the government for $11 billion whereas if they dont separate and sell to the government, the government builds the NBN anyway without Telstra and Telstra is left holding onto an obsolete copper network that cant compete with the NBN.
It will be interesting to see how many people end up switching to another bank over this (either because of the stuff-up or because of the lack of communication from the NAB when it initially happened)
I for one am glad I left the National Australia Bank years ago. I no longer keep my money in the bank, I use a Credit Union:)
The biggest problem is things like automatic debits and rent/loan payments. My rent for example goes out every fortnight as an automatic direct debit setup via online banking. If I was affected by this (I used to bank with the National Australia Bank but switched years ago) and my automatic debit didnt happen or there wasnt enough money in the account for it, the rent wouldn't be paid.
Same with things like my ISP bills and insurance (all of which are automatic debits)
And I DO pay all my other bills (power, mobile phone, home phone) as soon as they arrive.
Nintendos policies on the Wii dont help matters. Things like Friend Codes and all the other restrictions Nintendo places on developers that Sony and MS do not.
If you want proof that a console made by an unknown name would fail in the marketplace, jsut look at the Sega Dreamcast. Made by Sega (one of the big names in the business) and it was still a dismal failure (enough of a failure that it caused Sega to exit the console market entirely)
The Dreamcast just couldn't secure backing from the big publishers who were more interested in the then-new Playstation 2 from Sony (which had backwards compatibility with almost the entire library of Playstation 1 titles)
You could always produce a source-level compatible implementation of Coca Touch and the iOS APIs that uses nothing thats (c) Apple (after all, you cant copyright an API otherwise WINE would have been shut down years ago) to allow code to be written for iOS and then recompiled using translation libraries to run on other platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
The "backdoors" only matter if you are running IPSEC AND you are relying on IPSEC to keep confidential information secure whilst in transit (without some other upper layer like SSL on top of it) and even then all the "backdoors" let you do is to get at the data protected by IPSEC, not the system itself.
In the late 1940s the government (through anti-trust action) forced the movie studios to sell off their theater chains and end the practice of forcing theaters to buy (and exhibit) an entire package of films just to get the one film they actually wanted to get.
The government needs to do the same again and break up the vertical content companies, ban content producers from requring cable operators to buy (or sell/bundle) one channel when they want another channel (e.g. where Disney might say that Comcast has to bundle ESPN Football and ABC Family into one block) and separate the pipes from the content that goes over those pipes.
There is something backward about the fact that you can scan in a signed document, send it via a virtual fax service to someone with another virtual fax service who will then print the document out and act on it yet you cant scan the same document in, send it over the same links via email to someone who will print it and action it.
If you are using fax-to-email gateways, the line is blurred even further and the only diffrence is that some archaic law says that things transmitted over "fax" have greater legal standing than things transmitted over email...
Its perfectly possible to live and buy stuff without ever having anything to do with PayPal. (I do it)
Although the problem in the US is that electronic transfers between accounts are expensive. (here in .au, I make them all the time and it doesn't const me a cent)
Tribbler is also Open Source so the government cant shut it down (like they did to other p2p programs in the past that were not open source like kazza)
Basically passing the TCK means you get a patent grant for the Java patents.
But Sun (and now Oracle) have said "You can only get the TCK if you are not producing a Java implementation for mobile or embedded use".
Apache are claiming that such license terms violate the agreements connected to the Java Community Process and thats why its decided to leave.
Orcale for its part doesnt want to remove the restrictions on the TCK because the restrictions are one of the things keeping its remaining Embedded Java revenue alive.
Somehow I dont think a Tesla Coil in a 9'x15' office-come-lab is a good idea.
To me, ARM powered netbooks with some of those fancy higher-end ARM chips, a decent mobile GPU and maybe a hardware chip to decode video is what Chrome OS should be aiming for. If ARM is good enough for web apps on an iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, Android handset etc, it should be good enough for the same web apps on Chrome OS (and such a setup should get better battery life than any of the x86 ATOM Win7 laptops out there)
I am more interested in the reports that WikiLeaks have information on major US banks exposing corruption that may well be linked to real causes of the Global Financial Crisis (or to events that made it worse)
Maybe they will reveal why the Bush Government and his Treasury secretary bailed out the banks without insisting they clean up their act as part of the deal (something that could have been done given that Paulson was basically dictating terms to these banks)
TFA says its a new varient of this virus (which means it may actually encrypt the data)
The problem is that so-called "free trade agreements" are often anything but free.
Take the Free Trade Agreement between the US and Australia for example.
Australia pushed really hard for the US to open up its markets for foriegn agricultural exports including sugar, beef and dairy products. Yet the US refused to backdown on its tarrifs and subsidies and what resulted did almost nothing for Aussie farmers.
Despite signing many so-called "free trade agreements" with various countries, the US continues to maintain high rates of protection for its agricultral industry (and despite the image of the "hillbilly farmer", the biggest benificiaries of this protection are the giant agribusiness companies like Monsanto and ADM and the owners of the giant factory farms run by guys sitting in office towers in New York or Chicago)
What happened is that Comcast and Level 3 signed a deal whereby they would exchange traffic between their networks for free as long as both sides exchanged reasonably equal amounts of traffic. But now that Level 3 has Netflix on their network, the amount of data is no longer anywhere near equal. Hence Comcast wants to end the peering agreement.
Adobe isnt getting permission to sideload apps, they are getting special access to private APIs and native code in order to allow Flash to function (and function properly) on WP7. Its likely that Flash will be distributed either via the phone firmware (OTA or shipped on the phone) or via the Marketplace.
The carriers and phone manufacturers are not getting special permission to sideload. The phone manufacturers have permission as part of their WP7 license to ship manufacturer (and yes carrier) specific apps on their phones as part of the firmware that gets loaded onto the phone.
I think Microsoft will allow private apps (that is apps written and distributed to only limited people without going on Marketplace) but they are likely working on the pricing model for this (i.e. how much do they charge to allow people to write private apps and how much do they charge to allow these apps to be installed on the phones)
If you stick this to the outside of the package, add some sort of marking or so so that its obvious if the ShockWatch was removed and replaced by some shipping company manager so they dont have to cough up for insurance.
Actually, it is perfectly legal to ship live bees.
Nitroglycerin on the other hand I dont know about.
Show me a GSM Android handset with specs that match or beat the N900 (including physical keyboard) where I dont have to jump through all kinds of unauthorized hoops to replace the kernel and software. Unless such a phone appears, my next phone will be the N900.
The N900 is the most "open" phone you can buy (more open even than the Nexus One). The FreeRunner doesn't count as its hardware was 5 years out of date before it even left the production line (it doesn't even do quad band GSM, let alone 3G)
The copper network is great IF you have direct copper back to the exchange AND your copper is in good condition AND you are close enough to the exchange to get ADSL. If you have crappy coper, if you are too far from the exchange, if your line contains equipment incompatible with ADSL or you are stuck on a RIM with no available ports or really slow speeds, the copper network isn't so great.
With the NBN, all those problems go away.
Also, they arent going to string the fiber on power lines or poles in most places. In most places it will go into the existing Telstra ducting (which is the reason that the government is paying Telstra all this money for access to said ducting. If your phone wires currently run along overhead poles then yes, the NBN may well follow suit and run along those same poles but where the phone wires are underground, the NBN will also be underground in 99.9% of cases.
If there is one thing I cant STAND its all the anti-NBN FUD being spread around, mostly by the liberals, by the Murdoch papers (including the Australian) and by various vested interests concerned the NBN will take away their current competitive advantage.
Anyone paying $70 per month and only getting 20gb is paying far too much.
Even if all you can get is Telstra Wholesale ADSL, TPG will sell you unlimited at 8Mbps or 300GB at ADSL2+ speeds for your $70
Other ISPs like Internode have similar plans.
Can you point to actual statements from the government stating that they will prohibit other networks from competing with the NBN?
I havent seen such statements.
What I HAVE seen is proposals to require 3rd party network builders to provide wholesale access to their network on an open basis and to support the technical specs of the NBN (the intent of this is to ensure companies cant do deals with land developers (and others) to build networks independent of the NBN and gain a monopoly over the area the network is being built in (as is the case now with a number of providers in various estates and apartment complexes)
Telstra supports it for 2 reasons:
1.Not separating means they would be locked out of buying spectrum for next generation LTE services
and 2.By separating, they get to sell the copper network to the government for $11 billion whereas if they dont separate and sell to the government, the government builds the NBN anyway without Telstra and Telstra is left holding onto an obsolete copper network that cant compete with the NBN.
It will be interesting to see how many people end up switching to another bank over this (either because of the stuff-up or because of the lack of communication from the NAB when it initially happened)
I for one am glad I left the National Australia Bank years ago. I no longer keep my money in the bank, I use a Credit Union :)
The biggest problem is things like automatic debits and rent/loan payments.
My rent for example goes out every fortnight as an automatic direct debit setup via online banking. If I was affected by this (I used to bank with the National Australia Bank but switched years ago) and my automatic debit didnt happen or there wasnt enough money in the account for it, the rent wouldn't be paid.
Same with things like my ISP bills and insurance (all of which are automatic debits)
And I DO pay all my other bills (power, mobile phone, home phone) as soon as they arrive.
Nintendos policies on the Wii dont help matters.
Things like Friend Codes and all the other restrictions Nintendo places on developers that Sony and MS do not.
If you want proof that a console made by an unknown name would fail in the marketplace, jsut look at the Sega Dreamcast. Made by Sega (one of the big names in the business) and it was still a dismal failure (enough of a failure that it caused Sega to exit the console market entirely)
The Dreamcast just couldn't secure backing from the big publishers who were more interested in the then-new Playstation 2 from Sony (which had backwards compatibility with almost the entire library of Playstation 1 titles)
You could always produce a source-level compatible implementation of Coca Touch and the iOS APIs that uses nothing thats (c) Apple (after all, you cant copyright an API otherwise WINE would have been shut down years ago) to allow code to be written for iOS and then recompiled using translation libraries to run on other platforms.