exactly, the cable companies are just middlemen. They are being arm-twisted to bundle by the higher ups. If Viacom or NBC/Universal wants 5 channels of space for advertising, they'll bundle those with something really popular and say air all of them or none. I suppose it also helps to server lesser meet markets... would you buy Home and Garden? Would the football jocks buy SciFi. Without the "socialized" pay for the lesser channels they wouldn't drive enough ads to support themselves.... or rather, the 3-4 big networks would be back to 15 again with lots of niche markets but would cable companies put YOUR shows on a channel if they don't get ad money? Your cable/Dish bill pays for the wire, not the actual content.
and those cost 10x a HDD, not 3x. The macbook air is closest comparison of the drive in an actual shipping computer, and the numbers seem to be a wash. SDD is better at small, random files, but the HDD wins for the longer transfers. And the HDD they use is an iPod drive not a desktop drive. It's a good start, but needs about 2 more cycles to be comparable... that's about 18 months at this point... Intel looks to be at about the 9 month first turn (macbook air had to use existing drives to be produced, it's already 6 months out of date!)
I've worked at a company that tried to "repurpose" those 50 year-old engineers that were "so good" into some really cool projects, simple stuff anybody that reads MAKE should have understood. And watched them run the project into the ground and walk away because they simply don't understand modern manufacturing or customer expectations. Many of those guys are very smart, but they haven't upgraded their skills in 20 years and it shows. My experience is that the guys that build those black boxes have let their skills so atrophy that they wouldn't understand how to assemble something like an iPod, let alone design it.
Imagine the laughs we'd get if somebody was trying to write a 3D game in COBOL, on a VAX (because it ran for 20 years so it must be better) and calling it advancement... instead of using modern chips and programming languages that have long been proven to work just fine.
The article make like 2 hours of capture is a big deal, call me when it's 24 to 48 and captures and archives all of the inputs and outputs going to the cockpit. Any lame industrial automation program does that nowdays, 24/7 x 365. A modern auto factory captures and analyses megabytes of data per minute with the PC on your desk. Surely those airplane engineers can do better and package that in a nice safe box.
why should these last for 50 years? my car doesn't, hell, my toilet doesn't expect to last that long. Technology should vastly improve by then and nobody want's to be stuck making parts 50 years from now. They SHOULDN'T be using planes that long! Look how Intel got stuck making 486 chips for the space shuttle... they STILL have to provide that same model... the specs don't allow for building newer, faster chips and evolving the design, the software isn't written to account for a faster processor, just one specific model. THAT is the problem with the whole FAA system. I've seen parts sit on shelves for 4 years because no manufacturer will make them except once every 5 years! And due to FAA rules it has to be an exact part, not a replacement used daily by millions of devices.
I'd argue that an iPod or Wii controller being actively kicked around and abused 5 million units at a time have more testing put into them. Considering the abuse those items take the failure rate is pretty low. If they doubled the production costs on better materials, the items would last indefinitely, but that's not economic allocation of resources for something that becomes obsolete in 3 years.
My experience is that aircraft stuff involves lots of extra measures to make it "safe" then ultimately a bunch of "don't do that rules". Twist this wire 30 times by hand and don't let anybody within 3 feet.... I've seen first hand the rework they do to some assemblies because "redesigning" the board or layout so that the item was perfect the first time, would mean "recertification" and testing but adding 10 jumpers by hand and gluing parts on upside down is perfectly fine!!!
When Honda cuts out the pieces to your car they stamp the steel 1 time to shape. If the part misses, they don't try to fix it, they toss it. They spend a lot of time on getting parts right the very first time. The FAA has a real problem with certifications that they don't mind drilling and hammering and welding the parts 5 times (horrible labor costs, and poor final quality) but if you want to change the stamp to get the part right the FIRST time you have to refile the design... very, very wasteful.
Reality is in the middle, I'm not saying use cheap commercial electronics, but normal FAA practices are just as bad. They should have been developing and ALLOWING this 5 years ago when the materials got cheaper... but they control the situation so tightly there is no room to update anything until forced to by rules.
because the Government is too scared of the right wing to go against any "reasonable" religion. Many right wing groups like Amish or others seem just as crazy to regular people. But if the Feds went after Amish, for example, many religous people would get very upset as a breech of freedom of religion. Scientology has the size and a few key people they're not a cult like say Branch Davidians, and they tend to be in "liberal" places like Hollywood where "normal" religion is dramatized and fake anyway.
you missed the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church wielded nearly the same power over Europe and launched 3 Holy Wars (Crusades) to free Jerusalem (even though they killed as many jews as arabs in the process). Joan of Arc may have been an inspirational leader, but she was still a Woman in a mans job claiming visions (not from the church) so they LEGALLY burned her at the stake, it wasn't a lynch mob at all. Or how the pope would condemn whole cities or states to burn in hell by shutting down churches when a political leader didn't toe the Church line. The Ayatollahs got nothing on the Pope and Bishops for despicable acts.
Comparing to Scientology, the Catholic Church had that little thing called the Spanish Inquisition... which was really just one peak out of several hundred years of church-state sponsored religious terror for anybody non-noble or non-priest that didn't toe the Church line. Scientology is amateurs compared to them.
Note: many of the early American immigrants were from those heavily corrupt countries which is why the Catholic Church was treated like a cult until the mid 1900's it was even an issue whether the Pope would pull rank on the president in the 1960's!
like all good regulations though, they do many things very backwards. I've worked for a contractor too and many practices, while safe, are outright backwards given the leaps in technology. An iPhone and Wii controller are probably more advanced, and more reliable... not entirely fit for the job of a black box, but the direction it should be going... half the size and twice the function. The 50 year-old engineers that design this stuff are just plain out-of-touch with what technology can do now... flat out unable to understand it's application in many cases I've seen. Something like an iPod Touch has 16 Gigabytes of data... that's plenty of storage for what they need. As most instruments are digital (or should be) it should be easy to interface to the outside instruments rather than have so many enclosed as the quality of external instruments is much better now. So much has changed, an inline data trap with the fly-by-wire would be more in line, tried and true similar to any plain network logger... but aircraft people just don't think like that.
the trouble is middlemen going cheap... the guy that goes thru the hardware store not the actual supplier. That's because the real supplier is charging extra to hand sort and count them, and do pounds of paperwork for a "bolt" to get the contract. That's why "cheating" or "counterfeiting" is so profitable, even for the people that know they shouldn't buy the stuff.
you still miss the fundamental fact that many chips like iPods are made IN CHINA, and assembled IN CHINA.... who's to say they don't simply hijack an iPod firmware to phone home? With so much made over their legally, watching for "illegal" hacks applied to the legal exports would be impossible if the Chinese really wanted to cause trouble.
I'm surprised this is in ADDITION to the buyout of Apple records. That's why last year Apple changed from Apple Computer to Apple inc. They bought out Apple Records trademarks for a big pile of cash, then "rented" the Apple Records name back to them. That's when former Beetles solo acts started showing up in ernest.... wonder why Apple didn't get the Beetles proper release included.
They could have structured the deal to pay out over a few years though, it's hitting close to $1 billion dollars for the buyout with this added... investors would NOT have liked that hit to the books.
Most small businesses need the highspeed connection for credit cards, edi, etc... there's really nothing other than DSL (way too fast) or dial up (far too little) for them anyway. They're probably paying a minimum of $120 per month for what we get for $40 at home.... so they might as well offer it to clients. They're not running $50 routers... or shouldn't be. They should be running netopia or low-end cisco boxes ($200-$500) that split the connection to their private network and the public network at the incomming box to protect their register networks... PCI probably demands it.
consider many wi-fi spots are free, and the most expensive are $29 (15E) per MONTH these guys are on crack. Even ATT is giving away wi-fi access to their paying DSL customers of premium packages.
What they really mean is that Google's 700Mhz gambit will make paying more than $15 per month for a wireless device that's only a phone, or only Wi-fi go away... cleared that up!
no, because Red Hat or Canonical are working with community developed software. It's independently created, often in Europe or other countries where US software patents don't apply.. that would be a long and messy court case to put them into trouble. Much like Linus's "don't look, don't tell" concept that software patents are so vague and poorly written to simply ignore all but the most specific that are brought to your attention is the best way to pay the game. Novell on the other hand inked a deal to actually LOOK at Microsoft code, to reimplement it, and modify their linux products around it while Microsoft reserved the right to sue any of the actual authors or users of those products. That agreement doesn't cover "reverse engineered" products like OpenOffice, or Samba, or Mono... all of his "claim to fame" things. It only covers Novell's butt, it doesn't allow them to work with anybody. Novell has SEEN the patent claims from Microsoft, and now can't distribute even simple fixes to Open Source code without the code's pedigree being in question, that shoots their ability to service their product without help in jeopardy.
The robot shouldn't sound or shoot ANYTHING that could be construed as "assault". There's simply no technical reason for it. The robot is expendable, leave it at that. It could wirelessly upload the camera footage thru a router at the bar to a remote site... if anything happens you can have real police follow up later.
I like the idea of it being able to follow people around versus a static camera. It lets people know somebody is paying attention to them, not some static camera nobody watches. That's why any idea of the robot as "threatening" should be removed. It's purely a monitoring tool, keep it that way and it's legal and deterrent enough. If they want to hurt you, they can do that... but they'll be on camera before hand so it's not in their interests to get an actual 20 year sentence by abusing him for being "politely asked" not to deal drugs or other petty crimes.
That's perfectly fine!! It has a camera and patrols his property and neighbors with permission. The camera would take a picture and the people would be arrested for destruction of property and unlawful discharge of a firearm... more than enough to do jail time. Job accomplished and worth building another.
People at Microsoft that spun the deal are grinning ear-to-ear right now... he's making them very happy! Microsoft successfully "collared" a once 100% closed source company from embracing open source business and they gave them enough money to buy the second most successful Linux vendor and "collar" them too.
He just realized what slashdot "jerks" were saying from the start. Any Novell open source is "fruit of the poisoned tree" to the community. Even previously open projects they worked on like samba were in serious trouble of being hijacked by MS IP. (note how MS tried to hijack them in the EU settlement after trying to pay off Novell failed) Novell can only "share" stuff like Moonlight and Mono with other COMPANIES that have Cross-license agreements with MS... SCO, Apple, IBM, etc. Even if they write stuff from scratch (they're not covered for copying MS technology either!!) it's always considered "poisoned" because nobody outside Novell can prove that MS IP wasn't looked at to develop the tech. (That's what SCO started suing IBM for at the beginning) The agreement they signed didn't allow them to DEVELOP technology WITH Microsoft, only not to have their customer sued for using the products Novell provided. He's realizing that's a BIG difference to what he was selling when telling every body the deal was so great.
In short the suits "above" him knew this up front, what the deal really meet and they took the money anyway. He's the only person "surprised" by this.
I've meet engineers that are every bit out-of-touch with what the market will truly bear and have no idea that their patent is worth $.50 a unit or nobody will give a damn. So many people are out there expecting 10x what their patent is worth and complaining when people don't want to pay. Enter companies like IBM that understand putting product out there for customers is priority, most of their patents are just reviews of what employees already did, or think would be a good solution to a problem in front of them.
The other side is that the Chinese and others are "just cheap". Particularly when they think they can get away with it in countries that don't enforce the contracts they made with Americans (in this case) to get the technology to manufacture. That's just it, aside from patents, these companies aren't honoring their contract obligations. They were given product to make under NDA (at least) and violated that service to their Contracted Customer by letting the information go to other parties. The idea would be to simply cut them out, but the bulk of hi-tech manufacturing was built in asia due to the cheap staff for university level work at McDonald's wages in America. We can't STOP sending them contracts because we can't make the volume anymore in the USA.
I was going to say, I just saw a 2GB microSD card for $30. A bird could easily carry that, it's smaller than folded paper they usually carry. They couldn't cover to Cuba, but for dozens of miles they would probably work well.
I find the suggestion a great example of hi-fi, lo-tech. You could even read one of these on an OLPC network spaced 1km apart.
What they're talking about would be at the microcode level. Almost all interesting chips are programmed these days. Intel and AMD program in serial numbers and set memory speeds permanently long before Dell sees the chips to flash for the BIOS. This step would be performed by the Patent holder themselves before they sell them to customers, so only they would have the equipment. This assumes you can make the parts fully testable without the key so manufacturing can't figure it out. The chip going to the actual customer would be fully enabled, it just forces all the chips to go thru official channels to be sold as working same as cars on the truck requiring a few extra nuts and bolts from a separate box before they're saleable.
It's bad in China. They like to pass the prints from the "premium" contractor in Taiwan, to somebody cheap on-shore that will knock them off to Southeast Asia markets. Probably half the stuff on the streets of Hong Kong or Seoul is counterfeit made from the actual prints, but at unauthorized manufactures. It's a problem when that gets back to the USA and the equipment builder is held up for liability for a product they didn't make because the parts get into their installed systems as "spares" for cheap.
I don't see how it would work. Those same manufacturers have need to test that the chips work every few minutes. There's no way to stop them from figuring it out when they have access to the prints and the manufacturing equipment!
Realize that it's the LITTLE, high-profit customers (designers, hobbiests, etc) of the chips and their manufacturers that would suffer when they scrounge the supplier network for any available chip and need a special reader to use it you'll get blacklisted faster than you can blink. It could work if you wanted everybody to buy the chip from you (and it could be properly tested by the manufacture without the code) then you would have to run the whole lot of chips thru the manual process of burning them. If it's programmable, that's probably not too bad, but you'll have to set up shop for YOU to do it and not contract it. Or they'll just tell the contractor to burn the extras too!
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exactly, the cable companies are just middlemen. They are being arm-twisted to bundle by the higher ups. If Viacom or NBC/Universal wants 5 channels of space for advertising, they'll bundle those with something really popular and say air all of them or none. I suppose it also helps to server lesser meet markets... would you buy Home and Garden? Would the football jocks buy SciFi. Without the "socialized" pay for the lesser channels they wouldn't drive enough ads to support themselves.... or rather, the 3-4 big networks would be back to 15 again with lots of niche markets but would cable companies put YOUR shows on a channel if they don't get ad money? Your cable/Dish bill pays for the wire, not the actual content.
and those cost 10x a HDD, not 3x. The macbook air is closest comparison of the drive in an actual shipping computer, and the numbers seem to be a wash. SDD is better at small, random files, but the HDD wins for the longer transfers. And the HDD they use is an iPod drive not a desktop drive. It's a good start, but needs about 2 more cycles to be comparable... that's about 18 months at this point... Intel looks to be at about the 9 month first turn (macbook air had to use existing drives to be produced, it's already 6 months out of date!)
flash chips are actually 9 or 10 bits wide, with the extra bits used for internal error correction... raid already included!
I've worked at a company that tried to "repurpose" those 50 year-old engineers that were "so good" into some really cool projects, simple stuff anybody that reads MAKE should have understood. And watched them run the project into the ground and walk away because they simply don't understand modern manufacturing or customer expectations. Many of those guys are very smart, but they haven't upgraded their skills in 20 years and it shows. My experience is that the guys that build those black boxes have let their skills so atrophy that they wouldn't understand how to assemble something like an iPod, let alone design it.
Imagine the laughs we'd get if somebody was trying to write a 3D game in COBOL, on a VAX (because it ran for 20 years so it must be better) and calling it advancement... instead of using modern chips and programming languages that have long been proven to work just fine.
The article make like 2 hours of capture is a big deal, call me when it's 24 to 48 and captures and archives all of the inputs and outputs going to the cockpit. Any lame industrial automation program does that nowdays, 24/7 x 365. A modern auto factory captures and analyses megabytes of data per minute with the PC on your desk. Surely those airplane engineers can do better and package that in a nice safe box.
why should these last for 50 years? my car doesn't, hell, my toilet doesn't expect to last that long. Technology should vastly improve by then and nobody want's to be stuck making parts 50 years from now. They SHOULDN'T be using planes that long! Look how Intel got stuck making 486 chips for the space shuttle... they STILL have to provide that same model... the specs don't allow for building newer, faster chips and evolving the design, the software isn't written to account for a faster processor, just one specific model. THAT is the problem with the whole FAA system. I've seen parts sit on shelves for 4 years because no manufacturer will make them except once every 5 years! And due to FAA rules it has to be an exact part, not a replacement used daily by millions of devices.
I'd argue that an iPod or Wii controller being actively kicked around and abused 5 million units at a time have more testing put into them. Considering the abuse those items take the failure rate is pretty low. If they doubled the production costs on better materials, the items would last indefinitely, but that's not economic allocation of resources for something that becomes obsolete in 3 years.
My experience is that aircraft stuff involves lots of extra measures to make it "safe" then ultimately a bunch of "don't do that rules". Twist this wire 30 times by hand and don't let anybody within 3 feet.... I've seen first hand the rework they do to some assemblies because "redesigning" the board or layout so that the item was perfect the first time, would mean "recertification" and testing but adding 10 jumpers by hand and gluing parts on upside down is perfectly fine!!!
When Honda cuts out the pieces to your car they stamp the steel 1 time to shape. If the part misses, they don't try to fix it, they toss it. They spend a lot of time on getting parts right the very first time. The FAA has a real problem with certifications that they don't mind drilling and hammering and welding the parts 5 times (horrible labor costs, and poor final quality) but if you want to change the stamp to get the part right the FIRST time you have to refile the design... very, very wasteful.
Reality is in the middle, I'm not saying use cheap commercial electronics, but normal FAA practices are just as bad. They should have been developing and ALLOWING this 5 years ago when the materials got cheaper... but they control the situation so tightly there is no room to update anything until forced to by rules.
because the Government is too scared of the right wing to go against any "reasonable" religion. Many right wing groups like Amish or others seem just as crazy to regular people. But if the Feds went after Amish, for example, many religous people would get very upset as a breech of freedom of religion. Scientology has the size and a few key people they're not a cult like say Branch Davidians, and they tend to be in "liberal" places like Hollywood where "normal" religion is dramatized and fake anyway.
you missed the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church wielded nearly the same power over Europe and launched 3 Holy Wars (Crusades) to free Jerusalem (even though they killed as many jews as arabs in the process). Joan of Arc may have been an inspirational leader, but she was still a Woman in a mans job claiming visions (not from the church) so they LEGALLY burned her at the stake, it wasn't a lynch mob at all. Or how the pope would condemn whole cities or states to burn in hell by shutting down churches when a political leader didn't toe the Church line. The Ayatollahs got nothing on the Pope and Bishops for despicable acts.
Comparing to Scientology, the Catholic Church had that little thing called the Spanish Inquisition... which was really just one peak out of several hundred years of church-state sponsored religious terror for anybody non-noble or non-priest that didn't toe the Church line. Scientology is amateurs compared to them.
Note: many of the early American immigrants were from those heavily corrupt countries which is why the Catholic Church was treated like a cult until the mid 1900's it was even an issue whether the Pope would pull rank on the president in the 1960's!
like all good regulations though, they do many things very backwards. I've worked for a contractor too and many practices, while safe, are outright backwards given the leaps in technology. An iPhone and Wii controller are probably more advanced, and more reliable... not entirely fit for the job of a black box, but the direction it should be going... half the size and twice the function. The 50 year-old engineers that design this stuff are just plain out-of-touch with what technology can do now... flat out unable to understand it's application in many cases I've seen. Something like an iPod Touch has 16 Gigabytes of data... that's plenty of storage for what they need. As most instruments are digital (or should be) it should be easy to interface to the outside instruments rather than have so many enclosed as the quality of external instruments is much better now. So much has changed, an inline data trap with the fly-by-wire would be more in line, tried and true similar to any plain network logger... but aircraft people just don't think like that.
the trouble is middlemen going cheap... the guy that goes thru the hardware store not the actual supplier. That's because the real supplier is charging extra to hand sort and count them, and do pounds of paperwork for a "bolt" to get the contract. That's why "cheating" or "counterfeiting" is so profitable, even for the people that know they shouldn't buy the stuff.
you still miss the fundamental fact that many chips like iPods are made IN CHINA, and assembled IN CHINA.... who's to say they don't simply hijack an iPod firmware to phone home? With so much made over their legally, watching for "illegal" hacks applied to the legal exports would be impossible if the Chinese really wanted to cause trouble.
I'm surprised this is in ADDITION to the buyout of Apple records. That's why last year Apple changed from Apple Computer to Apple inc. They bought out Apple Records trademarks for a big pile of cash, then "rented" the Apple Records name back to them. That's when former Beetles solo acts started showing up in ernest.... wonder why Apple didn't get the Beetles proper release included.
They could have structured the deal to pay out over a few years though, it's hitting close to $1 billion dollars for the buyout with this added... investors would NOT have liked that hit to the books.
it's not a $50 cost by any means. BUT...
Most small businesses need the highspeed connection for credit cards, edi, etc... there's really nothing other than DSL (way too fast) or dial up (far too little) for them anyway. They're probably paying a minimum of $120 per month for what we get for $40 at home.... so they might as well offer it to clients. They're not running $50 routers... or shouldn't be. They should be running netopia or low-end cisco boxes ($200-$500) that split the connection to their private network and the public network at the incomming box to protect their register networks... PCI probably demands it.
consider many wi-fi spots are free, and the most expensive are $29 (15E) per MONTH these guys are on crack. Even ATT is giving away wi-fi access to their paying DSL customers of premium packages.
What they really mean is that Google's 700Mhz gambit will make paying more than $15 per month for a wireless device that's only a phone, or only Wi-fi go away... cleared that up!
no, because Red Hat or Canonical are working with community developed software. It's independently created, often in Europe or other countries where US software patents don't apply.. that would be a long and messy court case to put them into trouble. Much like Linus's "don't look, don't tell" concept that software patents are so vague and poorly written to simply ignore all but the most specific that are brought to your attention is the best way to pay the game. Novell on the other hand inked a deal to actually LOOK at Microsoft code, to reimplement it, and modify their linux products around it while Microsoft reserved the right to sue any of the actual authors or users of those products. That agreement doesn't cover "reverse engineered" products like OpenOffice, or Samba, or Mono... all of his "claim to fame" things. It only covers Novell's butt, it doesn't allow them to work with anybody. Novell has SEEN the patent claims from Microsoft, and now can't distribute even simple fixes to Open Source code without the code's pedigree being in question, that shoots their ability to service their product without help in jeopardy.
The robot shouldn't sound or shoot ANYTHING that could be construed as "assault". There's simply no technical reason for it. The robot is expendable, leave it at that. It could wirelessly upload the camera footage thru a router at the bar to a remote site... if anything happens you can have real police follow up later.
I like the idea of it being able to follow people around versus a static camera. It lets people know somebody is paying attention to them, not some static camera nobody watches. That's why any idea of the robot as "threatening" should be removed. It's purely a monitoring tool, keep it that way and it's legal and deterrent enough. If they want to hurt you, they can do that... but they'll be on camera before hand so it's not in their interests to get an actual 20 year sentence by abusing him for being "politely asked" not to deal drugs or other petty crimes.
That's perfectly fine!! It has a camera and patrols his property and neighbors with permission. The camera would take a picture and the people would be arrested for destruction of property and unlawful discharge of a firearm... more than enough to do jail time. Job accomplished and worth building another.
People at Microsoft that spun the deal are grinning ear-to-ear right now... he's making them very happy! Microsoft successfully "collared" a once 100% closed source company from embracing open source business and they gave them enough money to buy the second most successful Linux vendor and "collar" them too.
He just realized what slashdot "jerks" were saying from the start. Any Novell open source is "fruit of the poisoned tree" to the community. Even previously open projects they worked on like samba were in serious trouble of being hijacked by MS IP. (note how MS tried to hijack them in the EU settlement after trying to pay off Novell failed) Novell can only "share" stuff like Moonlight and Mono with other COMPANIES that have Cross-license agreements with MS... SCO, Apple, IBM, etc. Even if they write stuff from scratch (they're not covered for copying MS technology either!!) it's always considered "poisoned" because nobody outside Novell can prove that MS IP wasn't looked at to develop the tech. (That's what SCO started suing IBM for at the beginning) The agreement they signed didn't allow them to DEVELOP technology WITH Microsoft, only not to have their customer sued for using the products Novell provided. He's realizing that's a BIG difference to what he was selling when telling every body the deal was so great.
In short the suits "above" him knew this up front, what the deal really meet and they took the money anyway. He's the only person "surprised" by this.
There's truth to BOTH sides of that argument.
I've meet engineers that are every bit out-of-touch with what the market will truly bear and have no idea that their patent is worth $.50 a unit or nobody will give a damn. So many people are out there expecting 10x what their patent is worth and complaining when people don't want to pay. Enter companies like IBM that understand putting product out there for customers is priority, most of their patents are just reviews of what employees already did, or think would be a good solution to a problem in front of them.
The other side is that the Chinese and others are "just cheap". Particularly when they think they can get away with it in countries that don't enforce the contracts they made with Americans (in this case) to get the technology to manufacture. That's just it, aside from patents, these companies aren't honoring their contract obligations. They were given product to make under NDA (at least) and violated that service to their Contracted Customer by letting the information go to other parties. The idea would be to simply cut them out, but the bulk of hi-tech manufacturing was built in asia due to the cheap staff for university level work at McDonald's wages in America. We can't STOP sending them contracts because we can't make the volume anymore in the USA.
for a history of pigeon post look here:
http://www.mediahistory.umn.edu/archive/PigeonPost.html
it's got more history than I thought!
I was going to say, I just saw a 2GB microSD card for $30. A bird could easily carry that, it's smaller than folded paper they usually carry. They couldn't cover to Cuba, but for dozens of miles they would probably work well.
I find the suggestion a great example of hi-fi, lo-tech. You could even read one of these on an OLPC network spaced 1km apart.
What they're talking about would be at the microcode level. Almost all interesting chips are programmed these days. Intel and AMD program in serial numbers and set memory speeds permanently long before Dell sees the chips to flash for the BIOS. This step would be performed by the Patent holder themselves before they sell them to customers, so only they would have the equipment. This assumes you can make the parts fully testable without the key so manufacturing can't figure it out. The chip going to the actual customer would be fully enabled, it just forces all the chips to go thru official channels to be sold as working same as cars on the truck requiring a few extra nuts and bolts from a separate box before they're saleable.
It's bad in China. They like to pass the prints from the "premium" contractor in Taiwan, to somebody cheap on-shore that will knock them off to Southeast Asia markets. Probably half the stuff on the streets of Hong Kong or Seoul is counterfeit made from the actual prints, but at unauthorized manufactures. It's a problem when that gets back to the USA and the equipment builder is held up for liability for a product they didn't make because the parts get into their installed systems as "spares" for cheap.
I don't see how it would work. Those same manufacturers have need to test that the chips work every few minutes. There's no way to stop them from figuring it out when they have access to the prints and the manufacturing equipment!
Realize that it's the LITTLE, high-profit customers (designers, hobbiests, etc) of the chips and their manufacturers that would suffer when they scrounge the supplier network for any available chip and need a special reader to use it you'll get blacklisted faster than you can blink. It could work if you wanted everybody to buy the chip from you (and it could be properly tested by the manufacture without the code) then you would have to run the whole lot of chips thru the manual process of burning them. If it's programmable, that's probably not too bad, but you'll have to set up shop for YOU to do it and not contract it. Or they'll just tell the contractor to burn the extras too!
They're called tree snakes! Most snakes in the north are too small, but in the jungle, many live in trees (their kind of like poles)