Verizon wasn't making any sort of principled stand to protect its users' privacy,
it just wanted to avoid the costs of complying with the (many) subpoenas it will now
receive.
One should really be asking, why in hell would Verizon even have captured that information in the first place? If they didn't have the information, they couldn't be forced to turn it over.
As to the subpoena, how can they get a subpoena to gain information about a customer who may have done nothing wrong? I hold in my hand a box of CDR marked "CD-R DA", "Digital Audio", "for Music Use". I've paid an extra tax that goes right to the music industry because they expect me to use these CDRs to record copyrighted audio onto them. How can I be doing anything that merits a subpoena and invades my privacy if they have already accepted my money based on the expectation I will record music on these CDRs?
I hope his isn't the only wave of Subpoenas that Verizon is dreading. I sure want to see the subpoenas flooding in when people want to know why the hell Verizon snooped on their Internet use and logged this.
Judge David Stone's stern warning to three
foreign reporters: Honor the publication ban or risk being barred from the courtroom. So all that is being said is that, if these reporters publish, they can be barred, in Canada, from a Canada courtroom. He's hardly trying to overreach his authority.
Why would any supposedl inteligent reader here let the lie continue that this is an issue of are the x-man human, or is an x-man figure a doll or a toy? If Barbie is a doll, is Ken? Is GI Joe? Is Professor X? Would Batman, who has no super powers, be a doll and not a toy?
This is all absurd. The real problem here is that the United States has absurd laws that punish the consumer and some companies and give special favors to other businesses who have paid off corrupt politicians by continuing the lie that there should be any difference in import tax on a Barbie toy than an X-men toy. Marvel didn't have the balls to argue this in court, they played along with the system and let the big issue that the taxes are blaitantly unfair and uneven. They were rewarded for playing along and not questioning the fundamental corrupt system by beng allowed to pay the lower tax.
20 years? More like 35. I got a Word Book Science Yearbook in the late 60's with a hologram inside and an article promising that soon we could store the entire Library of Congress in a 1 inch cube.
Sure, they built it, but they are keeping it at area 51 with the alien spaceships, and will not let us play with it.
And technically speaking, it's not "radio waves", it's "electro-magnetic" waves.
As sholden also said, radio waves is not only correct, but it more precise than electromagnetic (no hyphen) waves. I might have a directional point-to-point link between two locations and someone could tell you it was done with electromagnetic waves, but you still wouldn't know if it was done with light waves or radio waves (or some other part of the spectrum). On the other hand, if you're told that it's radio waves you also know that it's part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Every type of energy that travels in
waves is a part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, including visible light
Technically speaking, every type of energy that travels by waves is not a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some are, but not all. Sound waves (to give just one example) are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but do transfer energy and do travel by waves.
And yes, I did misuse your and you're and am ashamed of myself.
correct me if im wrong, but xm isnt radio waves, its a digital signal. radio is analog, is it not? and free?
OK, your wrong. And corrected. XM is radio waves, delivered from a satelite. The signal delivered is a digital signal, but that doesn't keep it from being a radio signal. It's an electromagnetic signal in the radio frequency part of the spectrum (several gigahertz, but much lower in frequency, and longer in wavelength than light), so it's radio. You can't tune it in on your Walkman, but that's because 1) your Walkman doesn't tune to that fequency, 2) The Walkman antenna isn't designed for that frequency, and 3) the Walkman demodulator was not designed to demodulate and decode the digital signal; but that doesn't mean it's not a radio signal. You can't tune in a taxi cab or a cop car on a standard unmodified AM/FM broadcast band radio either, but they still use radio signals.
Standard AM radio is both analog and amplitude modulated (the strength of the signal changes in relation to the analog signal). FM radio is frequency modulated, in the normal FM bands the analog signal is used to change (modulate) the frequency of the radio signal. But there are plenty of digital formats that can be and are sent over radio waves, including XM radio.
I'm waiting for the application to bcome the shell.
You are in a directory, there are many files here. A path leads to the the south and down labeled Mydocuments.
> look
There are files here labeled read.me, config.sys and autoexec.bat. A path leads to the the south labeled Mydocuments.
> take read.me
taken.
> kill read.me
You smite the file labeled read.me and it crunbles to dust.
There are files here labeled config.sys and autoexec.bat. A path leads to the the south labeled Mydocuments.
> South
You move through the passage and reach the grand chamber of Mydocuments. There are many files here. Passages lead further south and down labeled Mymusic and Mypr0n. To the north is a passage leading up......
I doubt that I've ever had anything good to say about Apple before, but good for them for this move, and I think in the long run it will be the best thing for Mozilla too. By bringing another browser to the arena, and one that seriously challanges IE even more than Mozilla, it can only help Mozilla by reducing IE's monopoly hold. And giving Mozilla some performance targets to shoot for will not be a bad thing either.
"The vast hard drive in the RCA LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox can accommodate up to 100,000 JPEG images."
And if it was made by the same software idiots that made my Apex DVD player it would read:
"The vast hard drive in the RCA LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox can accommodate up to 100,000 JPEG images, of which only the first 200 can be displayed."
I worked at radio shack and one of the
first thing I noticed was how shoddy all of the RCA products were.
Did you only look at the RCA products? My impression is all of the products there are shoddy. My expectation is that they demand shoddy from the manufacturer, it's the only explanation I can come up with.
And I'm not trolling here, I'm very serious about this.
At $600 it makes no sense, one could buy a TiVo and a "lifetime" subscription for less, and hope that the "lifetime" is more than a year or so. However, the monthly fee is certainly a reason that many including myself would not but a TiVo. Like others I hope that RCA will realize they have to drop the price of the PVR to be competitive, or that someone else like Apex will get into the market and undercut RCA. It's nice to see the subscription model broken, even if the product isn't reasonably priced yet.
My thought on all of this is keep the government out of it.
Sure, there was a post here that said "if someone needs a license to fix my sink then why not one to fix my computer?". But, while I'm not going to try to justify the government saying who can do what to my toilet, the computer is hardly part of a building like plumbing or wiring is. Someone doesn't need a certification to fix your VCR, or your toaster, or your video game, they shouldn't need a certification to fix your computer. That's not to say that you should let a jerk fix your system, particularly if you depend on it. I'm just saying that the owner/consumer has to be responsible and not expect the government or Microsoft decide who can and who can't do a computer repair. Counting on the government to do this isn't likely to improve anything and just drive up the price.
Another way to look at this, if you are IBM or SUN or Cisco or any other manufacturer/service company, do you have the right to train your own people and set your own standards, or do your technicians have to pass some sort of test set up by a government bureaucrat (perhaps with the "guidance" of a competitor like Microsoft)? If Sun can fix Sun systems and IBM and others can fix IBM mainframes, why should the lowly PC be given a higher status?
And don't think for a minute it stops there. Once the government gets it's fingers in here, there will certainly be software "certification" for those who write code. Sure, Microsoft will still be free to put out system that crash regularly and to export jobs to lowest bidder countries, but an individual who can do the work on his own will be required to learn the Microsoft sales pitches and be able to present the Microsoft product line before he can be "certified" to do the work he is already making a living at.
I'd rather count on the market place to regulate the industry than bureaucrats. The market isn't perfect, but it's far better than the alternative.
Consumers who hire idiots should not be an excuse to take away good people's right to earn a living.
You not only need logic gates, you need to connect them together. You need to be able to make them really small, and they need to be really fast, and you need to do it all really cheap, to beat conventional semiconductor logic. As
we're still (according to the people who build this stuff) able to squeeze more performance out of conventional semiconductors for another decade or so, there's no real incentive to throw megabucks at the engineering required to do the above.
Connecting them together isn't really much of a problem, you just position the gates so they connect. We're talking about light beams; I think the article pointed out how you could even let the beams cross in the same plane, something you can't do with electrical circuits. Making the gates small enough may well have been the real issue, although the paranoid in me wonders if the technology didn't get developed but is being kept from us.
The incentive would certainly be there tough. The gates ran at the speed of light, and didn't generate heat. In theory an optical compter could run off room light or at worst a small lamp, could provide it's own optical input and output devices, and should be inexpensive to produce. If you want another economic incentive, imagine this: Software could be delivered on an optical medium that included it's own custom processor designed/optimized for that application. It would go in a stack of optical software that communicated with the storage and primary I/O devices over an optical network built into a predefined location on the media. The whole issue of pirating software changes when the software comes with it's own custom processor right on the media. Software designers can be confident that the hardware will support the application and there will not be other applications taking resources because they deliver it with software, they just need an (optical) network to get to a network printer and I/O devices (and for portable use the optical computer might contain it's own display and input device), or simply hook up to a thin tablet like device. I see economic incentive written all over this.
We don't need to wait for these new printers, you can use any wide format color inkjet printer and glossy paper to print out a nice "In Soviet Russia" poster, quite suitable for hanging on your computer room wall.
OK, I'll play along and pretend that it's cost effective to repair a device like a floppy drive or a CDR drive or even a hard disk now. Not to mention the kinds of things like the article suggested such as a TV remore. So lets pretend that when my $4.99 TV remote craps out I get it fixed, where if this thing breaks I have to replace it. So what happens when I get my TV remote fixed? Someone takes out something, perhaps a $1 IC, and puts a new one in. What do they do with the old dead IC? They throw it away!
So If I can print the remote for a buck or less, and throw the old remote away when it fails, how is this any more wasteful than throwing away a part that faied? The TV remote becomes the part.
The truth is, of couses, that a TV remote is never repaired. It's always discarded, and unless these printed devices were much more prone to failure it will be less wasteful to use and discard them than current devices. Early devices may not hold up well, but I expect before the technology is used to make TV remotes that problem will be resolved.
This technology will probably be reserved for "high-end" stuff.
I expect just the opposite, that you'll find it on magazine covers and on advertisements.
More than ten years ago I saw some articles describing working, completely optical logical gates. Part of the article suggested that the time to build a full working computer with this technology would be much less than it had been for transistor logic. After all, with transistors the growth to IC and then microprocessors had to be done by hand. All of those masks were done manually and the sicence was developed slowly. Now (even 10+ years ago) we have done all that, we have the CAD software already, and all that was needed was to translate logic design to optical logic. We didn't have to go back to scratch and start over, we could use all the tools we had to build the new technology. So where are the optical computers?
I ask this here because I see (and saw when I first read about it) that this could be even more impressive than semiconductor inkjet technology. Imagine entire optical computers, complete with display, on a sheet of film. If this technology came to market it would make the semiconductor inkjet look primative.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but from advertisements I've seen I was led to believe that Direct TV now requires the user to hook up every box to a land line telephone line. My guess was that they were doing this to thwart the.001% of people who might locate a second box at a second location (like a relative's house) on a different dish and share the connection. So if I have a nice flat K-band dish for my car and receiver, what the hell good does it do me if I have to have the receiver hooked up to a landline?
The article mentions both VoIP and Internet routers like the home Linksys devices. However, devices like the Linksys use NAT to share the connection amoung several computers/devices. VoIP and H.323 just doesn't work with NAT. The writer flat out states that all one needs to do to use VoIP is plug the ATA into the Hub/router, but that just ain't so.
Boy, it seem like this is a January Fools day article. The obvious issues, already stated are:
Gas taxes work better, and promotes lower weight better milage veichels; this law would do the opposite.
The privacy issues (which I believe to be the real reason the proposal is being made) are huge.
But consider also:
Cars already have a way to measure miles on the road that would not involve a large extra cost to the consumer - an odometer. It could be read when the car's license is renewed, of if Oregon has inspections at that time, and people could be taxed accordingly. For those who do a lot of out of state travel (as if that's a real issue), they could supply documentation of such (such as out of state gas receipts) with their taxes and get a rebate. If you don't like that approach, even remote reading odometers for recording mileage at the boarders (for checking people in and out based on mileage) would be less expensive and less obtrusive than trying to track everyone in the state by GPS.
You can have that now if you want it, you don't need the gub'mint to force you to buy it and to take the information of where you go and decide what they want to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
So the industry wants a 3 - 10 % penality on a presumption of guilt (which will clearly be paid by the innocent as well), and they also want to Subpoena information on ISP subscribers and shut down downloads. How can they have it both way?
One should really be asking, why in hell would Verizon even have captured that information in the first place? If they didn't have the information, they couldn't be forced to turn it over.
As to the subpoena, how can they get a subpoena to gain information about a customer who may have done nothing wrong? I hold in my hand a box of CDR marked "CD-R DA", "Digital Audio", "for Music Use". I've paid an extra tax that goes right to the music industry because they expect me to use these CDRs to record copyrighted audio onto them. How can I be doing anything that merits a subpoena and invades my privacy if they have already accepted my money based on the expectation I will record music on these CDRs?
I hope his isn't the only wave of Subpoenas that Verizon is dreading. I sure want to see the subpoenas flooding in when people want to know why the hell Verizon snooped on their Internet use and logged this.
This console can't fail - it will never come out at all. Talk about smoke and mirrors, even the hype is obviously bogus.
Judge David Stone's stern warning to three foreign reporters: Honor the publication ban or risk being barred from the courtroom. So all that is being said is that, if these reporters publish, they can be barred, in Canada, from a Canada courtroom. He's hardly trying to overreach his authority.
This is all absurd. The real problem here is that the United States has absurd laws that punish the consumer and some companies and give special favors to other businesses who have paid off corrupt politicians by continuing the lie that there should be any difference in import tax on a Barbie toy than an X-men toy. Marvel didn't have the balls to argue this in court, they played along with the system and let the big issue that the taxes are blaitantly unfair and uneven. They were rewarded for playing along and not questioning the fundamental corrupt system by beng allowed to pay the lower tax.
Sure, they built it, but they are keeping it at area 51 with the alien spaceships, and will not let us play with it.
I would question your choice of "over about a meter", which works out to about 300 mhz top end, but otherwise I concur.
As sholden also said, radio waves is not only correct, but it more precise than electromagnetic (no hyphen) waves. I might have a directional point-to-point link between two locations and someone could tell you it was done with electromagnetic waves, but you still wouldn't know if it was done with light waves or radio waves (or some other part of the spectrum). On the other hand, if you're told that it's radio waves you also know that it's part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Every type of energy that travels in waves is a part of the electro-magnetic spectrum, including visible light
Technically speaking, every type of energy that travels by waves is not a part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some are, but not all. Sound waves (to give just one example) are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but do transfer energy and do travel by waves.
And yes, I did misuse your and you're and am ashamed of myself.
OK, your wrong. And corrected. XM is radio waves, delivered from a satelite. The signal delivered is a digital signal, but that doesn't keep it from being a radio signal. It's an electromagnetic signal in the radio frequency part of the spectrum (several gigahertz, but much lower in frequency, and longer in wavelength than light), so it's radio. You can't tune it in on your Walkman, but that's because 1) your Walkman doesn't tune to that fequency, 2) The Walkman antenna isn't designed for that frequency, and 3) the Walkman demodulator was not designed to demodulate and decode the digital signal; but that doesn't mean it's not a radio signal. You can't tune in a taxi cab or a cop car on a standard unmodified AM/FM broadcast band radio either, but they still use radio signals.
Standard AM radio is both analog and amplitude modulated (the strength of the signal changes in relation to the analog signal). FM radio is frequency modulated, in the normal FM bands the analog signal is used to change (modulate) the frequency of the radio signal. But there are plenty of digital formats that can be and are sent over radio waves, including XM radio.
You are in a directory, there are many files here. A path leads to the the south and down labeled Mydocuments.
> look
There are files here labeled read.me, config.sys and autoexec.bat. A path leads to the the south labeled Mydocuments.
> take read.me
taken.
> kill read.me
You smite the file labeled read.me and it crunbles to dust.
There are files here labeled config.sys and autoexec.bat. A path leads to the the south labeled Mydocuments.
> South
You move through the passage and reach the grand chamber of Mydocuments. There are many files here. Passages lead further south and down labeled Mymusic and Mypr0n. To the north is a passage leading up......
I doubt that I've ever had anything good to say about Apple before, but good for them for this move, and I think in the long run it will be the best thing for Mozilla too. By bringing another browser to the arena, and one that seriously challanges IE even more than Mozilla, it can only help Mozilla by reducing IE's monopoly hold. And giving Mozilla some performance targets to shoot for will not be a bad thing either.
And if it was made by the same software idiots that made my Apex DVD player it would read: "The vast hard drive in the RCA LYRA Audio/Video Jukebox can accommodate up to 100,000 JPEG images, of which only the first 200 can be displayed."
Did you only look at the RCA products? My impression is all of the products there are shoddy. My expectation is that they demand shoddy from the manufacturer, it's the only explanation I can come up with.
And I'm not trolling here, I'm very serious about this.
At $600 it makes no sense, one could buy a TiVo and a "lifetime" subscription for less, and hope that the "lifetime" is more than a year or so. However, the monthly fee is certainly a reason that many including myself would not but a TiVo. Like others I hope that RCA will realize they have to drop the price of the PVR to be competitive, or that someone else like Apex will get into the market and undercut RCA. It's nice to see the subscription model broken, even if the product isn't reasonably priced yet.
Another way to look at this, if you are IBM or SUN or Cisco or any other manufacturer/service company, do you have the right to train your own people and set your own standards, or do your technicians have to pass some sort of test set up by a government bureaucrat (perhaps with the "guidance" of a competitor like Microsoft)? If Sun can fix Sun systems and IBM and others can fix IBM mainframes, why should the lowly PC be given a higher status?
And don't think for a minute it stops there. Once the government gets it's fingers in here, there will certainly be software "certification" for those who write code. Sure, Microsoft will still be free to put out system that crash regularly and to export jobs to lowest bidder countries, but an individual who can do the work on his own will be required to learn the Microsoft sales pitches and be able to present the Microsoft product line before he can be "certified" to do the work he is already making a living at.
I'd rather count on the market place to regulate the industry than bureaucrats. The market isn't perfect, but it's far better than the alternative. Consumers who hire idiots should not be an excuse to take away good people's right to earn a living.
Connecting them together isn't really much of a problem, you just position the gates so they connect. We're talking about light beams; I think the article pointed out how you could even let the beams cross in the same plane, something you can't do with electrical circuits. Making the gates small enough may well have been the real issue, although the paranoid in me wonders if the technology didn't get developed but is being kept from us.
The incentive would certainly be there tough. The gates ran at the speed of light, and didn't generate heat. In theory an optical compter could run off room light or at worst a small lamp, could provide it's own optical input and output devices, and should be inexpensive to produce. If you want another economic incentive, imagine this: Software could be delivered on an optical medium that included it's own custom processor designed/optimized for that application. It would go in a stack of optical software that communicated with the storage and primary I/O devices over an optical network built into a predefined location on the media. The whole issue of pirating software changes when the software comes with it's own custom processor right on the media. Software designers can be confident that the hardware will support the application and there will not be other applications taking resources because they deliver it with software, they just need an (optical) network to get to a network printer and I/O devices (and for portable use the optical computer might contain it's own display and input device), or simply hook up to a thin tablet like device. I see economic incentive written all over this.
Of course, in Soviet Russia, the poster .....
The truth is, of couses, that a TV remote is never repaired. It's always discarded, and unless these printed devices were much more prone to failure it will be less wasteful to use and discard them than current devices. Early devices may not hold up well, but I expect before the technology is used to make TV remotes that problem will be resolved.
I expect just the opposite, that you'll find it on magazine covers and on advertisements.
More than ten years ago I saw some articles describing working, completely optical logical gates. Part of the article suggested that the time to build a full working computer with this technology would be much less than it had been for transistor logic. After all, with transistors the growth to IC and then microprocessors had to be done by hand. All of those masks were done manually and the sicence was developed slowly. Now (even 10+ years ago) we have done all that, we have the CAD software already, and all that was needed was to translate logic design to optical logic. We didn't have to go back to scratch and start over, we could use all the tools we had to build the new technology. So where are the optical computers?
I ask this here because I see (and saw when I first read about it) that this could be even more impressive than semiconductor inkjet technology. Imagine entire optical computers, complete with display, on a sheet of film. If this technology came to market it would make the semiconductor inkjet look primative.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but from advertisements I've seen I was led to believe that Direct TV now requires the user to hook up every box to a land line telephone line. My guess was that they were doing this to thwart the .001% of people who might locate a second box at a second location (like a relative's house) on a different dish and share the connection. So if I have a nice flat K-band dish for my car and receiver, what the hell good does it do me if I have to have the receiver hooked up to a landline?
The article mentions both VoIP and Internet routers like the home Linksys devices. However, devices like the Linksys use NAT to share the connection amoung several computers/devices. VoIP and H.323 just doesn't work with NAT. The writer flat out states that all one needs to do to use VoIP is plug the ATA into the Hub/router, but that just ain't so.
I'll settle any such disputes for $500. Each party agrees to abide by the decision and hold me blameless.
Gas taxes work better, and promotes lower weight better milage veichels; this law would do the opposite.
The privacy issues (which I believe to be the real reason the proposal is being made) are huge.
But consider also:
Cars already have a way to measure miles on the road that would not involve a large extra cost to the consumer - an odometer. It could be read when the car's license is renewed, of if Oregon has inspections at that time, and people could be taxed accordingly. For those who do a lot of out of state travel (as if that's a real issue), they could supply documentation of such (such as out of state gas receipts) with their taxes and get a rebate. If you don't like that approach, even remote reading odometers for recording mileage at the boarders (for checking people in and out based on mileage) would be less expensive and less obtrusive than trying to track everyone in the state by GPS.
You can have that now if you want it, you don't need the gub'mint to force you to buy it and to take the information of where you go and decide what they want to do with it.
But the hairy eyeball is the real point of it all, just finding yet another way to tax you is only an added benefit.