I think the point of this is so that the cops don't have to keep in such close pursuit of a vehicle, which is what's really dangerous.
With a tagging system, a police car only has to get really close to the offending vehicle once or twice, to peg it with a tag or two, and can then back off and track it. I think the theory is that the offending driver will probably slow down and not drive quite so crazily this way, and the police can attempt to set up roadblocks further ahead, or otherwise corner them, without engaging in a close-quarters, high speed pursuit.
I know several areas where the police have a "no pursuit" policy in effect, because they've determined that it's just more dangerous to chase people around at high speeds, than it is just to let them go, file their license plate number, and hope that they get tracked down and picked up later. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I understand the reasoning behind it.
Ending a chase by setting up a roadblock with a tire-puncture device is definitely the preferred method, as opposed to the more traditional ram-the-rear-quarterpanel at high speed one, from the perspective of risk of injury to officers and bystanders, and a tracking device would make this a lot easier.
Someone going 100 miles an hour while trying to evade the police is probably going to end up wrapped around the nearest immovable object
regardless of what you do.
It's all about the timing. If you can get them to stop moving when there's nobody else around, even if it results in them crashing, then I think it's perfectly acceptable to do so. Especially if it prevents them from getting into an area where there are more bystanders that they can kill when they eventually do wipe out.
If you've ever watched any videos of car chases, or talked to people who have been involved in high-speed pursuits, a very high percentage of them seem to end in bad accidents. I don't know what the statistics are on bystander injuries, but a system that could lock the steering and render the car uncontrollable -- even if it was guaranteed to cause it to crash -- would still be useful, if it could be used to end the pursuit quickly and far away from uninvolved people.
As far as I'm concerned, once you've decided to begin a high-speed chase, your life is forfeit. By driving 100 MPH down a street and doing any of the other sorts of things that people do when they're running from the cops, you endanger other people. When you show that much disregard for the lives of others, the police have a responsibility to do whatever it takes to stop you, regardless of whether you live through it or not.
Depends on your age, and the age and financial status of your friends.
I know a lot of younger people who have used Craigslist extensively to find cheap apartments and sublets for rent. I think that's honestly the major use of it for most people. Also, I've checked it out a few times on the Free Stuff page, which is a good place to pick up furniture for refinishing.
I think it mainly gets used by twentysomethings who are hurting for cash and looking for inexpensive places to live, in cities where there is a lot of demand for housing. Other sections of the site (personals, adult stuff) probably has it's own base of users. But I'm willing to bet that the apartment listings are a big portion of the site.
I don't understand why this is news. I think until now it was mostly just job postings, but there were definitely listings that cost money on Craigslist, at least in certain markets. I thought NYC was one of them, but perhaps not.
I've found a few apartments and rooms for rent through Craigslist... I wonder if roommates wanted and rooms for rent fall under the $10 "real estate" category.
I think it does transfer over, although it works on some songs better than others. I still have one playlist that I listen to at the gym (with my 3G player) that has one particular song that blasts the hell out of me if I'm not ready for it and turn the volume down. And I have Sound Check turned on.
Although to be honest, I've never really A/Bed it through the iPod with Sound Check on and off. It takes too long when you turn it off and then on again for me to do it.
I think that's basically some additional hardware compression that can be applied to the output -- boosting volume on quiet sections and reducing it on loud sections. So you can listen to, for instance, classical music while on the train or something. Of course it really just makes your Beethoven sound like it was mastered with all the skill and artistry of the latest Brittany Spears album, but apparently somebody at Sony thought it was a good idea.
What it does for pop music that's already compressed as much as humanly possible already, I don't know.
Every iPod has a bunch of warnings about using it at excessive sound levels also.
The only thing they don't have is a "volume limiter," which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, since the iPod doesn't have any clue what sort of headphones you've plugged into it. So 100dB SPL out of the included phones aren't going to do shit out of my Grados. It's inherently flawed.
I think the fact that the French -- who currently hold the title on ultimate obnoxious nanny state -- are the only people that have such a rule, ought to give everyone pause before we go down that road.
I'm not sure what definition you're using of "WMD," but to the US Government, a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon IS a weapon of mass destruction, period. Or rather, a 'weapon of mass destruction' is defined as a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.
This definition comes from the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which you can read here. However the way it's described -- not as an explicit definition, but almost as an implicit assumption, suggests to me that the term was used in this way for a significant time prior to this. In the US Code, it also includes radiological, as well as Chem/Bio/Nuclear weapons. (USG uses of WMD.)
However, your point -- namely that there are some weapons which meet the USG criteria for being a "WMD," but probably are not capable of doing that much damage (depending on the type and method of use), is very true. However saying that they are "not a WMD" is a bit of a large statement, because the US Government disagrees with you, and at the end of the day, that's who people are going to listen to and that's the definition that's going to be widely used.
I think that if you want to discuss 'true' WMDs -- that is, weapons which have the capability of inflicting a large amount of damage or number of casualties -- you are better off using the term "mass casualty weapon" or something else, rather than the term "WMD."
That seems pretty clearly like it's referring to the specification, not to the source.
In terms of a specification, the restriction makes sense -- you don't want people making derivatives of the specification that break compatibility and disseminating them, because then you'd have all sorts of problems. Once you've agreed on a specification, you want to give it a certain amount of sticking power -- and also you want to try and make it difficult for a company to make something that's not compatible but still claim compatibility (because they just changed the spec for their own stuff).
If that's the same license that applies to the code, then yes I agree, it's quite restrictive. It beats Diebold, though.
Not that I think this is a gimmick, but just because something makes the cover of PopMech doesn't mean it actually exists, ever will exist, or is even remotely practical. It's a pretty low bar.
Not to say that the stuff they have on there isn't usually very cool, it just has a tendency to fail to materialize later. (Examples off the top of my head... 1:1 reproduction of the Titanic, giant 'floating island' aircraft carrier, 747-sized gyroplanes, supersonic Skycars...).
These are the same people who were saying in 1955 that there'd be a big lump of plutonium in everyone's water-heater in 20 years, and last time I checked, mine's not sheathed in lead. I wouldn't use it to back up any claims of possibility.
The SuitSat is not a problem... really. It's in an unstable LEO, probably tumbling all over the place, impacting all sort of other small debris. If anything, it'll clean a little bit of the crap out of its way as it comes down and burns up.
Now, if you want to talk about dangerous space junk, where you want to look is up in the higher orbits, the so-called "nuclear safe" ones. The Soviets had a series of spy satellites that (because they didn't want to have big solar panels on them in such low orbits) had nuclear reactors. Not RTGs, honest to god liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactors. They had a system to eject the reactor cores into high orbits before the satellites re-entered (which sometimes didn't work -- one of them contaminated quite a bit of Northern Canada). But even when the systems did work, the result was a rather largish chunk of very radioactive material in high orbit.
I'm sure there is probably a lot of other dangerous junk floating around out there, too. If you want to talk about space debris, it's out in the higher orbits that you really need to look. Especially because those are the places where you'd probably want to assemble a large space station (or park big, expensive satellites with large solar collectors), and that stuff doesn't like getting hit by old crap.
Huh, that's odd. When I was at university last, not that long ago, there was about a 60/40 Windows/Mac split, and in the public computer labs you could NEVER get a Mac. Unless you had the misfortune to be there at around 0400 on a Tuesday or something, they were always taken.
The only problem I ever really saw with them was that they tended to have every application on them always running in the background, because Windows users never seemed to understand that Quitting an application from the menu is different from just closing the current document. If somebody did that to Photoshop, Word, Internet Explorer, and a few other things, they'd start to run out of memory and choke.
I never looked too hard, but I'm told that they were all netbooted off of a central server, and the hard drives were frequently re-imaged and contained nothing but the applications and a backup system (so they could boot if the network was down, I suppose). I thought it was a great system.
I guess which one people prefer probably depends a lot on which computers are best maintained, and that probably depends which OS the admins are most comfortable and devote the most attention and resources to. Perhaps we were just lucky to have Mac-friendly admins who knew what they were doing.
I agree. And based on my reading of the article (not the summary, which -- not surprisingly -- sucks), they're not eliminating their whitelists altogether. It seems that right now they have two, a regular whitelist and a commercial whitelist, and it's the commercial whitelist that's being replaced by the pay-to-use service, while the regular whitelist (which is assumedly what you'd use if you were some organization that wanted to run a high-volume listserv) will still be there.
I've always thought that a workable email system would be one where it cost some very small amount of money to send emails to people who weren't suspecting them, but was free if you and the recipient set up some sort of trust relationship. E.g., if I wanted to email some random person on the net, it would cost me a fraction of a penny. Not very significant. For the majority of my emails, which are to people in my address book, I'd have set up a relationship with them so that it would be free (which might be as easy as sending a message and having them reply to it). The only people who would get hit with big charges are the ones who send a lot of emails out to unique, new address every day. I can't think of too many legitimate places where that happens, or where the legitimate use couldn't be replaced by the recipient first sending an email to the bulk sender first, so a relationship would be created and the fees would be waived. I think in practice this would require a lot more centralized control over the email system than I'd want or be comfortable with, however.
In general, I don't have any kind of inherent problem with pay-to-send email, as long as it only applies to bulk mail and there's some way to waive the fee when you can demonstrate that the recipient actually wants the emails.
Spammers do this already. The last few Viagra spams I've looked at (the ones that made it through my own filtering, as well as presumably the ISP's) had random sentences from what seemed to be 19th century English literature tacked to the bottom.
Anyway, I assume that most spam filtering uses something a little 'fuzzier' than plain whole-message hashes, becuase there are messages in my GMail Spam folder right now that have these random words added.
In the US there are special envelopes which companies send out for this purpose. They're marked "Business Reply Mail" and have an account (actually, permit) number written on them to which the postage is charged.
Sadly, I've never seen AOL send out one. It's rather amusing though when you get credit card offers, to shove all the junk that's inside the envelope back into the BRM envelope and drop it back in the mailbox. It's not quite as good as being able to send somebody a brick, though.
I don't work HF (didn't take the test when I knew the code, now I've forgotten it...the usual sob story), but aren't there quite a few HF digital modes that could be used? PACTOR and PSK31 come to mind.
I agree though that the reliance of mains-powered equipment is a big Achilles' heel for any emergency communication system. I think Amateur Radio is actually at something of an advantage here versus other communications mediums, because so much equipment is built to run on 12VDC, it's not hard to build yourself a basic battery-backup system for when the lights go out.
The FM repeater network near me also has done pretty well recently (post-9/11) in getting automatic-failover backup generators at its linked repeaters. I haven't been living here long enough to see how it works during a power outage or emergency, but I've heard one person say that there was a point where it was in better shape than the local public safety system, in terms of coverage during a blackout.
personally i think the whole situation can be attributed to considering corporations as individual entities and not what they really are, a group of people who would do anything to not only continue to get profits but to increase those profits to the point of breaking the law if they know they can get away with it. enron was just unlucky enough to get caught basically..
Bingo. I've always thought that you could probably model the actual (as opposed to public) decisionmaking process in a corporation by quantifying the potential profit from any course of action, and the chances of it succeeding. Things which are illegal just have a lower probability of being profitable, therefore they don't do them often -- and this decreased profitability occurs in direct proportion to the perceived chances of getting caught.
However every once in while there is a course of action which is both profitable, and carries low risk of getting caught -- why does it surprise anyone that companies do it?
The clincher is that pretty much the only time you'll ever hear about a company getting caught for breaking the law, is when they play the odds and lose. Provided they're even reasonably good at judging the chances of getting caught, there are probably a lot more illegal activities going on out there, that we're just never hearing about.
I believe the rather rigid standardization on 4-digit local numbers, 3-digit exchanges, and 3-digit area codes is due to the electromechanical routing systems that were deployed by the Bell System. I have seen one of these switches myself, they look like a rural mailbox, about 12"-14" long, with a rotating shaft down the center. As you dial each digit, a rotor turns and makes a connection, and there are seven rotors inside the box. (It reminded me of the mechanism of a combination lock.) I've never seen one in use (the one I saw was salvage), but it was obviously a product of mass production. Lots of stamped metal and spot welds. In other words, there was probably one standard design that everybody used, nationwide.
Where you had countries all developing their own telephone systems, as in Europe, it makes sense that you'd have variations of switching systems and number lengths. But this never existed in the US under the Bell System monopoly.
The fact that Telex numbers had a different number of digits than regular telephone numbers (if my memory of old business cards serves) is fairly unique -- or at least it's the only US service that I've ever seen which was like this, and it suggests that it's network was separate from the PSTN one.
The fact that there is/was a separate, independent infrastructure for telegrams is what interested me most about it.
5. How much money can I send from westernunion.com ?
Initially, the maximum amount of money you can send online with a revolving 30-day period is $999.99. Once you have used the Western Union Money transfer service on the web, at least once over the course of 120 days, you may send up to a maximum of $2,000 within a revolving 30-day period. If Arizona is your state of residence, you may only send up to a maximum of $950 per transaction.
With a limit like that, I think you're pretty much stuck with buying interns.:)
Since you seem relatively well informed on this issue, do you know what the judicial nominations process is like for this court?
I'd be interested in seeing who controls who makes it onto the bench there; perhaps -- in the long term -- it would be something that the FOSS community would like to get more involved in politically, since it obviously has a large effect on the technology field (and probably more than that).
At the very least, it would be nice to shine some of the light of public attention on it.
A lot of game manufacturers (the more intelligent ones) give a slight discount on downloaded versus "hardcopy" software, but mainly they're just factoring in the savings on their end: not having to press the CD, print the manuals, ship it, etc.
Rarely -- if ever -- have I seen a downloaded piece of software for what I'd consider to be a fair price, relative to it's purchased value (except for Free Software, of course). If you're going to sell something in a store for $50 in a format that can be resold, with a potential resale value of $20, then you'd best not try to charge me more than $30 for the non-resellable, downloaded version.
People may pay a certain price for convenience, but they're not that stupid. Even if they don't think about it, people understand that having a resellable product means it has a certain inherent value, and that downloaded products lack this. I think this is one of the many reasons why downloaded software hasn't taken off as quickly as many people once predicted.
Sometimes I forget that some, ok most, people on/. are lonely, middle aged, I watch prOn cause I can't get the real thing, but I think I'm so cool, living in my mom's basement geeks. I can't wait until that breed is dieing.It's us geeks with a degree, career, camily and kids before we are thirty that is the minority crowd around here, alas.
Funny, I was under the impression that it was geeks who can spell who are in the minority.;)
I'd like to agree with this. Based on everything I've heard, it's really Congress that we should be pointing the finger at, for the wasteland that is the USPTO lately.
A system where their application fees actually WAS kept in a trust fund, would probably result in a much higher quality of patents. However -- and this is where I'll agree with the GP -- politicians are far too addicted to money for their pet bullshit projects to let that kind of income stream remain untouched.
Instead of being used to pay for more patent examiners, it just gets sucked off into the General Fund, never to be seen again. And the USPTO gets what I suspect is a fraction of it back in its budget.
No; but there is a certain question of whether the invalidity of the patents affects the lawsuit or not.
It's a rather bizarre thing, really, but the judge (at least based on what I've heard) at some point basically said that he wasn't going to get into the issue of the validity of the patents one way or the other, and that everything was going by the assumption that they were valid, because the USPTO issued them, and they were valid when the suit was filed.
I don't know whether there's some flexibility in that doctrine or not, to deal with what happens if the USPTO really makes a final judgement on the patents and throws them out -- or whether the lawsuit grinds on regardless, and the USPTO decision only prevents future suits.
I think if the latter is really true, that there will be a tremendous hue and cry over it, because it's obviously unjust -- to continue to hear a case after what is essentially the evidence has been declared invalid. However problems like this in the US court system seem to get worked out only after the fact. There's a lot of "oops, well, we won't do that again" in the history of jurisprudence. It would be unfortunate if RIM became a casualty of that type of thinking.
I wonder if the USPTO has the ability to make a patent invalid retroactively -- so basically say, no only is this patent invalid going forward, but it should never have been issued in the first place. "Our bad, sorry about that," etc. That would make it pretty clear that it should change the lawsuit. However if their decision isn't retroactive, then it might not affect the existing suit.
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I think the point of this is so that the cops don't have to keep in such close pursuit of a vehicle, which is what's really dangerous.
With a tagging system, a police car only has to get really close to the offending vehicle once or twice, to peg it with a tag or two, and can then back off and track it. I think the theory is that the offending driver will probably slow down and not drive quite so crazily this way, and the police can attempt to set up roadblocks further ahead, or otherwise corner them, without engaging in a close-quarters, high speed pursuit.
I know several areas where the police have a "no pursuit" policy in effect, because they've determined that it's just more dangerous to chase people around at high speeds, than it is just to let them go, file their license plate number, and hope that they get tracked down and picked up later. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but I understand the reasoning behind it.
Ending a chase by setting up a roadblock with a tire-puncture device is definitely the preferred method, as opposed to the more traditional ram-the-rear-quarterpanel at high speed one, from the perspective of risk of injury to officers and bystanders, and a tracking device would make this a lot easier.
Someone going 100 miles an hour while trying to evade the police is probably going to end up wrapped around the nearest immovable object
regardless of what you do.
It's all about the timing. If you can get them to stop moving when there's nobody else around, even if it results in them crashing, then I think it's perfectly acceptable to do so. Especially if it prevents them from getting into an area where there are more bystanders that they can kill when they eventually do wipe out.
If you've ever watched any videos of car chases, or talked to people who have been involved in high-speed pursuits, a very high percentage of them seem to end in bad accidents. I don't know what the statistics are on bystander injuries, but a system that could lock the steering and render the car uncontrollable -- even if it was guaranteed to cause it to crash -- would still be useful, if it could be used to end the pursuit quickly and far away from uninvolved people.
As far as I'm concerned, once you've decided to begin a high-speed chase, your life is forfeit. By driving 100 MPH down a street and doing any of the other sorts of things that people do when they're running from the cops, you endanger other people. When you show that much disregard for the lives of others, the police have a responsibility to do whatever it takes to stop you, regardless of whether you live through it or not.
Depends on your age, and the age and financial status of your friends.
I know a lot of younger people who have used Craigslist extensively to find cheap apartments and sublets for rent. I think that's honestly the major use of it for most people. Also, I've checked it out a few times on the Free Stuff page, which is a good place to pick up furniture for refinishing.
I think it mainly gets used by twentysomethings who are hurting for cash and looking for inexpensive places to live, in cities where there is a lot of demand for housing. Other sections of the site (personals, adult stuff) probably has it's own base of users. But I'm willing to bet that the apartment listings are a big portion of the site.
Yeah I was going to say the same thing.
... I wonder if roommates wanted and rooms for rent fall under the $10 "real estate" category.
I don't understand why this is news. I think until now it was mostly just job postings, but there were definitely listings that cost money on Craigslist, at least in certain markets. I thought NYC was one of them, but perhaps not.
I've found a few apartments and rooms for rent through Craigslist
I think it does transfer over, although it works on some songs better than others. I still have one playlist that I listen to at the gym (with my 3G player) that has one particular song that blasts the hell out of me if I'm not ready for it and turn the volume down. And I have Sound Check turned on.
Although to be honest, I've never really A/Bed it through the iPod with Sound Check on and off. It takes too long when you turn it off and then on again for me to do it.
I think that's basically some additional hardware compression that can be applied to the output -- boosting volume on quiet sections and reducing it on loud sections. So you can listen to, for instance, classical music while on the train or something. Of course it really just makes your Beethoven sound like it was mastered with all the skill and artistry of the latest Brittany Spears album, but apparently somebody at Sony thought it was a good idea.
What it does for pop music that's already compressed as much as humanly possible already, I don't know.
Every iPod has a bunch of warnings about using it at excessive sound levels also.
The only thing they don't have is a "volume limiter," which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of, since the iPod doesn't have any clue what sort of headphones you've plugged into it. So 100dB SPL out of the included phones aren't going to do shit out of my Grados. It's inherently flawed.
I think the fact that the French -- who currently hold the title on ultimate obnoxious nanny state -- are the only people that have such a rule, ought to give everyone pause before we go down that road.
I'm not sure what definition you're using of "WMD," but to the US Government, a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon IS a weapon of mass destruction, period. Or rather, a 'weapon of mass destruction' is defined as a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.
This definition comes from the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), which you can read here. However the way it's described -- not as an explicit definition, but almost as an implicit assumption, suggests to me that the term was used in this way for a significant time prior to this. In the US Code, it also includes radiological, as well as Chem/Bio/Nuclear weapons. (USG uses of WMD.)
However, your point -- namely that there are some weapons which meet the USG criteria for being a "WMD," but probably are not capable of doing that much damage (depending on the type and method of use), is very true. However saying that they are "not a WMD" is a bit of a large statement, because the US Government disagrees with you, and at the end of the day, that's who people are going to listen to and that's the definition that's going to be widely used.
I think that if you want to discuss 'true' WMDs -- that is, weapons which have the capability of inflicting a large amount of damage or number of casualties -- you are better off using the term "mass casualty weapon" or something else, rather than the term "WMD."
That seems pretty clearly like it's referring to the specification, not to the source.
In terms of a specification, the restriction makes sense -- you don't want people making derivatives of the specification that break compatibility and disseminating them, because then you'd have all sorts of problems. Once you've agreed on a specification, you want to give it a certain amount of sticking power -- and also you want to try and make it difficult for a company to make something that's not compatible but still claim compatibility (because they just changed the spec for their own stuff).
If that's the same license that applies to the code, then yes I agree, it's quite restrictive. It beats Diebold, though.
Not that I think this is a gimmick, but just because something makes the cover of PopMech doesn't mean it actually exists, ever will exist, or is even remotely practical. It's a pretty low bar.
... 1:1 reproduction of the Titanic, giant 'floating island' aircraft carrier, 747-sized gyroplanes, supersonic Skycars...).
Not to say that the stuff they have on there isn't usually very cool, it just has a tendency to fail to materialize later. (Examples off the top of my head
These are the same people who were saying in 1955 that there'd be a big lump of plutonium in everyone's water-heater in 20 years, and last time I checked, mine's not sheathed in lead. I wouldn't use it to back up any claims of possibility.
The SuitSat is not a problem ... really. It's in an unstable LEO, probably tumbling all over the place, impacting all sort of other small debris. If anything, it'll clean a little bit of the crap out of its way as it comes down and burns up.
Now, if you want to talk about dangerous space junk, where you want to look is up in the higher orbits, the so-called "nuclear safe" ones. The Soviets had a series of spy satellites that (because they didn't want to have big solar panels on them in such low orbits) had nuclear reactors. Not RTGs, honest to god liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactors. They had a system to eject the reactor cores into high orbits before the satellites re-entered (which sometimes didn't work -- one of them contaminated quite a bit of Northern Canada). But even when the systems did work, the result was a rather largish chunk of very radioactive material in high orbit.
I'm sure there is probably a lot of other dangerous junk floating around out there, too. If you want to talk about space debris, it's out in the higher orbits that you really need to look. Especially because those are the places where you'd probably want to assemble a large space station (or park big, expensive satellites with large solar collectors), and that stuff doesn't like getting hit by old crap.
Huh, that's odd. When I was at university last, not that long ago, there was about a 60/40 Windows/Mac split, and in the public computer labs you could NEVER get a Mac. Unless you had the misfortune to be there at around 0400 on a Tuesday or something, they were always taken.
The only problem I ever really saw with them was that they tended to have every application on them always running in the background, because Windows users never seemed to understand that Quitting an application from the menu is different from just closing the current document. If somebody did that to Photoshop, Word, Internet Explorer, and a few other things, they'd start to run out of memory and choke.
I never looked too hard, but I'm told that they were all netbooted off of a central server, and the hard drives were frequently re-imaged and contained nothing but the applications and a backup system (so they could boot if the network was down, I suppose). I thought it was a great system.
I guess which one people prefer probably depends a lot on which computers are best maintained, and that probably depends which OS the admins are most comfortable and devote the most attention and resources to. Perhaps we were just lucky to have Mac-friendly admins who knew what they were doing.
I agree. And based on my reading of the article (not the summary, which -- not surprisingly -- sucks), they're not eliminating their whitelists altogether. It seems that right now they have two, a regular whitelist and a commercial whitelist, and it's the commercial whitelist that's being replaced by the pay-to-use service, while the regular whitelist (which is assumedly what you'd use if you were some organization that wanted to run a high-volume listserv) will still be there.
I've always thought that a workable email system would be one where it cost some very small amount of money to send emails to people who weren't suspecting them, but was free if you and the recipient set up some sort of trust relationship. E.g., if I wanted to email some random person on the net, it would cost me a fraction of a penny. Not very significant. For the majority of my emails, which are to people in my address book, I'd have set up a relationship with them so that it would be free (which might be as easy as sending a message and having them reply to it). The only people who would get hit with big charges are the ones who send a lot of emails out to unique, new address every day. I can't think of too many legitimate places where that happens, or where the legitimate use couldn't be replaced by the recipient first sending an email to the bulk sender first, so a relationship would be created and the fees would be waived. I think in practice this would require a lot more centralized control over the email system than I'd want or be comfortable with, however.
In general, I don't have any kind of inherent problem with pay-to-send email, as long as it only applies to bulk mail and there's some way to waive the fee when you can demonstrate that the recipient actually wants the emails.
Spammers do this already. The last few Viagra spams I've looked at (the ones that made it through my own filtering, as well as presumably the ISP's) had random sentences from what seemed to be 19th century English literature tacked to the bottom.
i t/index.html#000055
Othertimes it's just random words, which can be fairly amusing. In fact a blogger wrote a pretty good article on the "Dadaesque beat poetry" of the spammers:
http://www.markdery.com/archives/blog/invisible_l
Anyway, I assume that most spam filtering uses something a little 'fuzzier' than plain whole-message hashes, becuase there are messages in my GMail Spam folder right now that have these random words added.
In the US there are special envelopes which companies send out for this purpose. They're marked "Business Reply Mail" and have an account (actually, permit) number written on them to which the postage is charged.
Sadly, I've never seen AOL send out one. It's rather amusing though when you get credit card offers, to shove all the junk that's inside the envelope back into the BRM envelope and drop it back in the mailbox. It's not quite as good as being able to send somebody a brick, though.
I don't work HF (didn't take the test when I knew the code, now I've forgotten it...the usual sob story), but aren't there quite a few HF digital modes that could be used? PACTOR and PSK31 come to mind.
I agree though that the reliance of mains-powered equipment is a big Achilles' heel for any emergency communication system. I think Amateur Radio is actually at something of an advantage here versus other communications mediums, because so much equipment is built to run on 12VDC, it's not hard to build yourself a basic battery-backup system for when the lights go out.
The FM repeater network near me also has done pretty well recently (post-9/11) in getting automatic-failover backup generators at its linked repeaters. I haven't been living here long enough to see how it works during a power outage or emergency, but I've heard one person say that there was a point where it was in better shape than the local public safety system, in terms of coverage during a blackout.
personally i think the whole situation can be attributed to considering corporations as individual entities and not what they really are, a group of people who would do anything to not only continue to get profits but to increase those profits to the point of breaking the law if they know they can get away with it. enron was just unlucky enough to get caught basically..
Bingo. I've always thought that you could probably model the actual (as opposed to public) decisionmaking process in a corporation by quantifying the potential profit from any course of action, and the chances of it succeeding. Things which are illegal just have a lower probability of being profitable, therefore they don't do them often -- and this decreased profitability occurs in direct proportion to the perceived chances of getting caught.
However every once in while there is a course of action which is both profitable, and carries low risk of getting caught -- why does it surprise anyone that companies do it?
The clincher is that pretty much the only time you'll ever hear about a company getting caught for breaking the law, is when they play the odds and lose. Provided they're even reasonably good at judging the chances of getting caught, there are probably a lot more illegal activities going on out there, that we're just never hearing about.
Believe it or not, I'm aware of this.
I believe the rather rigid standardization on 4-digit local numbers, 3-digit exchanges, and 3-digit area codes is due to the electromechanical routing systems that were deployed by the Bell System. I have seen one of these switches myself, they look like a rural mailbox, about 12"-14" long, with a rotating shaft down the center. As you dial each digit, a rotor turns and makes a connection, and there are seven rotors inside the box. (It reminded me of the mechanism of a combination lock.) I've never seen one in use (the one I saw was salvage), but it was obviously a product of mass production. Lots of stamped metal and spot welds. In other words, there was probably one standard design that everybody used, nationwide.
Where you had countries all developing their own telephone systems, as in Europe, it makes sense that you'd have variations of switching systems and number lengths. But this never existed in the US under the Bell System monopoly.
The fact that Telex numbers had a different number of digits than regular telephone numbers (if my memory of old business cards serves) is fairly unique -- or at least it's the only US service that I've ever seen which was like this, and it suggests that it's network was separate from the PSTN one.
The fact that there is/was a separate, independent infrastructure for telegrams is what interested me most about it.
With a limit like that, I think you're pretty much stuck with buying interns.
Since you seem relatively well informed on this issue, do you know what the judicial nominations process is like for this court?
I'd be interested in seeing who controls who makes it onto the bench there; perhaps -- in the long term -- it would be something that the FOSS community would like to get more involved in politically, since it obviously has a large effect on the technology field (and probably more than that).
At the very least, it would be nice to shine some of the light of public attention on it.
Great point -- mod up.
A lot of game manufacturers (the more intelligent ones) give a slight discount on downloaded versus "hardcopy" software, but mainly they're just factoring in the savings on their end: not having to press the CD, print the manuals, ship it, etc.
Rarely -- if ever -- have I seen a downloaded piece of software for what I'd consider to be a fair price, relative to it's purchased value (except for Free Software, of course). If you're going to sell something in a store for $50 in a format that can be resold, with a potential resale value of $20, then you'd best not try to charge me more than $30 for the non-resellable, downloaded version.
People may pay a certain price for convenience, but they're not that stupid. Even if they don't think about it, people understand that having a resellable product means it has a certain inherent value, and that downloaded products lack this. I think this is one of the many reasons why downloaded software hasn't taken off as quickly as many people once predicted.
Sometimes I forget that some, ok most, people on /. are lonely, middle aged, I watch prOn cause I can't get the real thing, but I think I'm so cool, living in my mom's basement geeks. I can't wait until that breed is dieing.It's us geeks with a degree, career, camily and kids before we are thirty that is the minority crowd around here, alas.
;)
Funny, I was under the impression that it was geeks who can spell who are in the minority.
Yeah, I know you're joking .... but the unnerving part is that there are probably a LOT of people out there who would agree with you.
And probably more than a few Senators and Representatives could be convinced, if given a large enough pile of green.
I'd like to agree with this. Based on everything I've heard, it's really Congress that we should be pointing the finger at, for the wasteland that is the USPTO lately.
A system where their application fees actually WAS kept in a trust fund, would probably result in a much higher quality of patents. However -- and this is where I'll agree with the GP -- politicians are far too addicted to money for their pet bullshit projects to let that kind of income stream remain untouched.
Instead of being used to pay for more patent examiners, it just gets sucked off into the General Fund, never to be seen again. And the USPTO gets what I suspect is a fraction of it back in its budget.
No; but there is a certain question of whether the invalidity of the patents affects the lawsuit or not.
It's a rather bizarre thing, really, but the judge (at least based on what I've heard) at some point basically said that he wasn't going to get into the issue of the validity of the patents one way or the other, and that everything was going by the assumption that they were valid, because the USPTO issued them, and they were valid when the suit was filed.
I don't know whether there's some flexibility in that doctrine or not, to deal with what happens if the USPTO really makes a final judgement on the patents and throws them out -- or whether the lawsuit grinds on regardless, and the USPTO decision only prevents future suits.
I think if the latter is really true, that there will be a tremendous hue and cry over it, because it's obviously unjust -- to continue to hear a case after what is essentially the evidence has been declared invalid. However problems like this in the US court system seem to get worked out only after the fact. There's a lot of "oops, well, we won't do that again" in the history of jurisprudence. It would be unfortunate if RIM became a casualty of that type of thinking.
I wonder if the USPTO has the ability to make a patent invalid retroactively -- so basically say, no only is this patent invalid going forward, but it should never have been issued in the first place. "Our bad, sorry about that," etc. That would make it pretty clear that it should change the lawsuit. However if their decision isn't retroactive, then it might not affect the existing suit.