Re:What a stupid question....
on
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"So the police who are ignoring the laws... are going to suddenly obey the law when it comes to not obscuring their faces and badge numbers when they do it?"
You mean, in the same way that gun control has been so successful in New York, Chicago, and D.C.?
"So the criminals who are ignoring the laws about raping, robbing, and murdering are going to suddenly obey the law when it comes to turning in their illegal firearms when anti-gun legislation is passed?"
Yeah, I got karma to burn.:-/
Re:What a stupid question....
on
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"For example, let's assume a reporter was given temporary access to a government facility (e.g. one that belongs to say FBI or the NSA.) which has classified equipment or information in it. If this technology was applied, the agency to whom the building belong to, could then strategically place devices inside the building that instructs a certain type of camera to automatically blur out sensitive areas. That way, the reporter wouldn't be able to accidentally divulge classified information about the facility (It has happened before if I'm not mistaken). In many of these buildings no cameras are allowed, period, so this could also be a reasonably safe way around that. It would probably be necessary for the agency to provide a camera of their own that has been properly checked out though. The only thing the reporter would need to bring would be a memory stick to hold the pictures."
That's a cool idea. Sorry I don't have mod points, but I can boost the visibility a bit.:^)
"It just perplexes me how it's not considered to be against 1st amendment to do this kind of direct censorship."
Tell you what, go Google for the video "Unknown Russian Soldier" and watch it all the way through with your speakers turned on. Then come back and tell us that it's a violation of your 1st amendment rights that you can't broadcast that video on TV, and that you're still perplexed by censorship.
Presumably, *from within Europe* you can talk to Europe, right?;) I can't see a little mint tin transceiver putting out more than a few hundred mW, and with a tiny antenna at 20 meters, I can't see you getting out too far. But then again, I just got my license so I could just be completely clueless when it comes to low-power HF propigation.
Depending on your employer, you might not be bringing your iPod or other MP3 player to work -- because they're afraid you'll cart off company secrets with it.
After using Adblock in Firefox to block half a dozen ad iframes, that website that the article links to is pretty stark. Almost boring. I nearly had to turn the ads back on.
The problem with WiFi is that it's short range. To get coverage, you have to link many sites together. In a disaster, many of your sites go dead and suddenly you have holes in your routing infrastructure and you lose end-to-end connectivity. A long-range technology that can communicate to a disaster area, while itself being located outside of the disaster area, would probably be more effective.
In fact, cellphones have longer range than WiFi. That makes cellphones better and WiFi worse in a disaster situation.
Not good enough to make contact with someone on the other side of the *planet* with a radio made of 1930s technology and 40 feet of wire? One of the advantages of ham is that it's simple. You could probably disassemble a random TV or VCR to make a transmitter, hook it up to your home's aluminum rain gutters and a car battery, and contact someone thousands of miles away (i.e., someone outside of the disaster area that can send help). Just try that with Wifi, where you're lucky to get a signal a miles or two direct line-of-sight (no trees or buildings) with custom-built high-gain antennas that are not likely to exist after a disaster -- and who's going to be on the other end with another high-gain antenna to make the link? Nobody.
"and have it connect to the net."
Dude, the 'net is going to be *inoperative* in your area after a disaster.
Ham radio may seem like stone age technology in the face of WiFi and gigabit routers, but that's not what it's for. It's for reliable long distance slow-speed communication, not short range high-speed communications.
Eh, you do have a bit of a point there in regards to parts. Radio Schmack is getting worse and worse over the years in regard to 'parts' inventory. Although my local Shack still sells SO-239 connectors, and the one at the mall still sold resistors and capacitors and stuff last time I was there.
Ironically enough, you're right that Radio Shack no longer sells radios. Go figure.
"Someone so inclined, and with the source, go out and jam police and fire communication systems."
There are a lot easier ways of doing this than hacking WiFi cards, such as buying $20 worth of parts from Radio Shack.
Transmitting on a certain frequency isn't as easy as sending a command to the hardware "transmit these bits on frequency X". The hardware only has a limited range of frequencies it can transmit on, and the antenna has to be matched to the frequency as well. Police, fire, etc use VHF (150MHz-ish), UHF (400MHz-ish), and 800MHz bands. Getting a 2.4GHz radio down to those frequencies may be possible but it would be a whole lot more work than building a radio from scratch. And at 200mW of transmit power, you're going to cause interference for what, a whole block and a half? I think not.
The reason hardware vendors don't want to release the source code is they (rightly or wrongly) think that with the source code, their chip can be reverse engineered and some fly-by-night company is going to copycat their product and cause them to lose sales. Same reason Nvidia and ATI only release binary drivers for their video cards.
Yep, VHF (2m) packet is limited to 19.2kbps, though the vast majority of packet operators run at 9600 or even 1200bps. I think some folks have run up to 56K on UHF (70cm) in Germany.
AFAIK these limits are per the FCC, not technical limits. You should be able to hit a data rate of 50% of the carrier frequency under perfect conditions. So, 100MHz would theortetically give you 50Mbps. But whether or not you could successfully demodulate that more than a few inches from the transmitter without pumping lots of watts through it is anybodys guess. I think most encoding schemes have a data rate in the neighborhood of 1% their frequency. 11Mbps 802.11b @ 2.4GHz is around.05%.
Not really. They might block port 53 connections to hosts other than their official DNS server -- to discourage rogue servers for example. Same goes for other ports; they might allow port 80 connections, but only to their web servers (thus forcing you to use their http proxy to get out onto the WWW).
If I were the netadmin of a college, yeah, I certainly might block common ports such as DNS from going outside my subnet -- as long as I provided a server on the inside that was accessible.
Let me chime in about Midway USA too... about the only place on the internet that doesn't charge outrageous shipping and handling fees. Even heavy items like bullets (bullets, not loaded ammo!) didn't cost an arm and a leg to ship. I'd go on, but I don't want to sound like a Midway salesman.:)
Well, I suspect the 80MB vs. 32MB makes a big difference. The real question is though, are you running the versions of X and Gnome that came out the same time as your P166? Newer versions tend to add a lot of cruft.
I wouldn't advise a GUI on an older machine like that. I used to run a 486DX2 66MHz (I think) with 24MB of RAM and an old 512MB hard drive as a web/ftp server. Web pages were served up pretty quick but ftp was a little slow when a client first connected because Linux had to swap some things out to disk. Other than that, it did just fine.
On the other hand, my current Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM is an absolute dog when I load up X and Blackbox. I think it's a combination of swap thrashing and slow video (pre-AGP vintage). Moral of the story, a GUI is way too demanding for these older, slower machines unless you trick them out with lots of upgrades.
Nope, purchasers of rifles and shotguns still need to pass the federal NICS instant background check. The main difference between handgun and longgun purchases is most states require you to be a certain age to buy a handgun.
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"So the police who are ignoring the laws ... are going to suddenly obey the law when it comes to not obscuring their faces and badge numbers when they do it?"
:-/
You mean, in the same way that gun control has been so successful in New York, Chicago, and D.C.?
"So the criminals who are ignoring the laws about raping, robbing, and murdering are going to suddenly obey the law when it comes to turning in their illegal firearms when anti-gun legislation is passed?"
Yeah, I got karma to burn.
"For example, let's assume a reporter was given temporary access to a government facility (e.g. one that belongs to say FBI or the NSA.) which has classified equipment or information in it. If this technology was applied, the agency to whom the building belong to, could then strategically place devices inside the building that instructs a certain type of camera to automatically blur out sensitive areas. That way, the reporter wouldn't be able to accidentally divulge classified information about the facility (It has happened before if I'm not mistaken). In many of these buildings no cameras are allowed, period, so this could also be a reasonably safe way around that. It would probably be necessary for the agency to provide a camera of their own that has been properly checked out though. The only thing the reporter would need to bring would be a memory stick to hold the pictures."
:^)
That's a cool idea. Sorry I don't have mod points, but I can boost the visibility a bit.
"It just perplexes me how it's not considered to be against 1st amendment to do this kind of direct censorship."
Tell you what, go Google for the video "Unknown Russian Soldier" and watch it all the way through with your speakers turned on. Then come back and tell us that it's a violation of your 1st amendment rights that you can't broadcast that video on TV, and that you're still perplexed by censorship.
"I can talk to Europe"
;) I can't see a little mint tin transceiver putting out more than a few hundred mW, and with a tiny antenna at 20 meters, I can't see you getting out too far. But then again, I just got my license so I could just be completely clueless when it comes to low-power HF propigation.
Presumably, *from within Europe* you can talk to Europe, right?
You guys think mp3-players-in-mint-tins are cool? Well, the amateur ("ham") radio guys beat you to the punch when it comes to mint tin innovation:
http://www.byonics.com/pockettracker/ (scroll down)
Depending on your employer, you might not be bringing your iPod or other MP3 player to work -- because they're afraid you'll cart off company secrets with it.
I wish I were kidding.
After using Adblock in Firefox to block half a dozen ad iframes, that website that the article links to is pretty stark. Almost boring. I nearly had to turn the ads back on.
"Nice, uh, tits you have there."
What, you got full frontal nudity and you're complaining? WTF!
"It's radio and radio will be disappearing in the near future too."
Uh... you do know that cell phones and WiFi are both radios, right?
A constellation of LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites would be operational all the time, there wouldn't be a lag time between disaster and deployment.
:)
Like say, Inmarsat or Iridium.
The problem with WiFi is that it's short range. To get coverage, you have to link many sites together. In a disaster, many of your sites go dead and suddenly you have holes in your routing infrastructure and you lose end-to-end connectivity. A long-range technology that can communicate to a disaster area, while itself being located outside of the disaster area, would probably be more effective.
In fact, cellphones have longer range than WiFi. That makes cellphones better and WiFi worse in a disaster situation.
"It's old and not good enough anymore."
Not good enough to make contact with someone on the other side of the *planet* with a radio made of 1930s technology and 40 feet of wire? One of the advantages of ham is that it's simple. You could probably disassemble a random TV or VCR to make a transmitter, hook it up to your home's aluminum rain gutters and a car battery, and contact someone thousands of miles away (i.e., someone outside of the disaster area that can send help). Just try that with Wifi, where you're lucky to get a signal a miles or two direct line-of-sight (no trees or buildings) with custom-built high-gain antennas that are not likely to exist after a disaster -- and who's going to be on the other end with another high-gain antenna to make the link? Nobody.
"and have it connect to the net."
Dude, the 'net is going to be *inoperative* in your area after a disaster.
Ham radio may seem like stone age technology in the face of WiFi and gigabit routers, but that's not what it's for. It's for reliable long distance slow-speed communication, not short range high-speed communications.
Eh, you do have a bit of a point there in regards to parts. Radio Schmack is getting worse and worse over the years in regard to 'parts' inventory. Although my local Shack still sells SO-239 connectors, and the one at the mall still sold resistors and capacitors and stuff last time I was there.
Ironically enough, you're right that Radio Shack no longer sells radios. Go figure.
"Someone so inclined, and with the source, go out and jam police and fire communication systems."
There are a lot easier ways of doing this than hacking WiFi cards, such as buying $20 worth of parts from Radio Shack.
Transmitting on a certain frequency isn't as easy as sending a command to the hardware "transmit these bits on frequency X". The hardware only has a limited range of frequencies it can transmit on, and the antenna has to be matched to the frequency as well. Police, fire, etc use VHF (150MHz-ish), UHF (400MHz-ish), and 800MHz bands. Getting a 2.4GHz radio down to those frequencies may be possible but it would be a whole lot more work than building a radio from scratch. And at 200mW of transmit power, you're going to cause interference for what, a whole block and a half? I think not.
The reason hardware vendors don't want to release the source code is they (rightly or wrongly) think that with the source code, their chip can be reverse engineered and some fly-by-night company is going to copycat their product and cause them to lose sales. Same reason Nvidia and ATI only release binary drivers for their video cards.
Yep, VHF (2m) packet is limited to 19.2kbps, though the vast majority of packet operators run at 9600 or even 1200bps. I think some folks have run up to 56K on UHF (70cm) in Germany.
.05%.
AFAIK these limits are per the FCC, not technical limits. You should be able to hit a data rate of 50% of the carrier frequency under perfect conditions. So, 100MHz would theortetically give you 50Mbps. But whether or not you could successfully demodulate that more than a few inches from the transmitter without pumping lots of watts through it is anybodys guess. I think most encoding schemes have a data rate in the neighborhood of 1% their frequency. 11Mbps 802.11b @ 2.4GHz is around
"Sell it under cost. ... (You can make up for this in volume)"
I find your business strategy intriguing. May I please subscribe to your newsletter?
http://www.it.kth.se/~vatn/research/handover-perf. pdf
"no way your campus would block that."
Not really. They might block port 53 connections to hosts other than their official DNS server -- to discourage rogue servers for example. Same goes for other ports; they might allow port 80 connections, but only to their web servers (thus forcing you to use their http proxy to get out onto the WWW).
If I were the netadmin of a college, yeah, I certainly might block common ports such as DNS from going outside my subnet -- as long as I provided a server on the inside that was accessible.
Let me chime in about Midway USA too... about the only place on the internet that doesn't charge outrageous shipping and handling fees. Even heavy items like bullets (bullets, not loaded ammo!) didn't cost an arm and a leg to ship. I'd go on, but I don't want to sound like a Midway salesman. :)
Wal-Mart has another interesting policy regarding ammo: http://glocktalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30 6337&perpage=25&pagenumber=1
"How well would you handle 72 hrs with no food or potable water...?"
:)
Quite well actually, with my 72-hour kit.
Well, I suspect the 80MB vs. 32MB makes a big difference. The real question is though, are you running the versions of X and Gnome that came out the same time as your P166? Newer versions tend to add a lot of cruft.
"...it is sometimes the only thing one can rely on."
.45.
That, and your Colt
I wouldn't advise a GUI on an older machine like that. I used to run a 486DX2 66MHz (I think) with 24MB of RAM and an old 512MB hard drive as a web/ftp server. Web pages were served up pretty quick but ftp was a little slow when a client first connected because Linux had to swap some things out to disk. Other than that, it did just fine.
On the other hand, my current Pentium 166 with 32MB of RAM is an absolute dog when I load up X and Blackbox. I think it's a combination of swap thrashing and slow video (pre-AGP vintage). Moral of the story, a GUI is way too demanding for these older, slower machines unless you trick them out with lots of upgrades.
Nope, purchasers of rifles and shotguns still need to pass the federal NICS instant background check. The main difference between handgun and longgun purchases is most states require you to be a certain age to buy a handgun.
0 a.htm
See:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa01020