That doesn't matter. No matter how directional your antenna, you're limited by line of sight, and when your line of sight goes flying off into space, so does your radio signal.
The only way to beat the whole "curvature of the earth" problem is to bounce the signal off something above the earth. A lot of this can be done by bouncing the signal off the upper atmosphere, if you are using a low enough frequency but a high frequency transmission will just punch right through.
Therefore you need a satelite, a pair of high mountains, or the ability to push the signal hard enough to bounce it off the moon.
Meh, I like the place but they're so damn intrusive about providing a "free" service. It's not like you can just fire up the laptop and go while sipping your coffee, no, you have to agree to all these disclosures and disclaimers and TOS agreements, anf god forbid you're running a bunch of security apps...I never bring my laptop to panera.
I prefer a place where I can go and sit anonymously without a gateway app glomming onto my MAC address like somethign from Alien. I'll drink tea and munch muffins for a couple of hours if I like the place though, so I'm sure they make their money back.
If you can't bring in 50 bucks a month in business by adding WiFi you put your coffee shop in the wrong place.
Xboxes were sold at a loss for the same reasons PS2s and nintendos and every other game console back to the beginning were sold at a loss...Because once you've got the console you have to buy games for it, and they add extra liscensing fees to the games, which is why they cost so much. No one would produce them if they made zero money. They certainly wouldn't have made an Xbox 2.
Supply and demand absolutely DO drive what people are willing to pay, but you seem to be missing a lot of points. Just because you have more education doesn't mean you automatically ought to get paid more...that has nothing to do with having a marketable skill. The proof of that is, for example, Brittney Spears, who is arguably lacking in both education AND skill, and yet makes more than probably everyone who posted in this thread combined.
The reason for that is that while we might deride her for being skill-less, a good potion of the world doesn't seem to agree, and they desire to pay her for what she does. But since there is only one of her, and since she only produces a limited quantity of original music (I would say zero), limited supply and high demand make her rich.
There is, in short, no difference between "percieved" market value and actual market value if what is selling in the market is selling for the "percieved" price. Windows costs what it costs, and people seem to be okay with that. We may think it's stupid, but we don't decide those things. It's not as if Microsoft is losing money here.
And the reason life isn't like a gimpy little league game is: there is no one out there who is going to give you a free ride if your product sucks. Just because you offer something for sale, doesn't mean a single person is going to buy it.
The same thing applies to people, if you're less skilled than another person, or if you do a job that anyone could do, no one's goign to pay you well to do what you do. But if you're skilled, and no one else can do what you can do, the people who need that thing done will pay you whatever it takes.
It's simple actually, the dollar figures don't matter. If you can do it in 10 minutes, and it takes a normal person an hour, then you charge 6 times as much as a normal person, or more if you want to bill extra for doing it faster than anyone else.
The free market will take care of it. If the same guy had taken the same car to a different garage and it had taken them hours and many diagnostics to figure out the problem, and they'd ended up charging as much or more, then you'd have been far better off taking your car to the first guy's garage.
On the other hand, if they charged less for the same results, you'd be better off steering clear of the one nut wonder.
Lets turn it around. Say the mechanic doesn't know where to put the nut, and it takes him 20 hours to figure that out, which isn't unreasonable if experience and knowledge count for nothing.
Hell, the mechanic is probably a former fry cook who thought, "What the hell, I'll be a mechanic from now on" and the guy who owns the auto shop also thought that was a good idea, because, like you, he doesn't value knowledge or experience.
So, in that case, at 50.00 an hour, which seems to be the figure you're using, that mechanic would give a bill for 1000.00.
Down the street, the first mechanic, the skilled one, would be billing people a dollar to fix problems the guy up the street is charging a thousand dollars to fix. He would have to fix one...thousand...cars...to make the same as the unskilled mechanic made fixing one car.
Take an example shamelessly cribbed from a book I'm sure a lot of people here have read...
Take the raw materials for an apple pie. Flour eggs, apples, butter, sugar, etc. These things are intrinsically valuable. No one would disagree with that.
Now a skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a short time, produce a superiour pie.
A less skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a longer time, produce an acceptable pie.
An unskilled chef, could take those ingredients, and, in a still longer time, make an inedible mess.
By your standards, the last chef would be the one that produced the most valuable product, because he put the most immediate work into it, followed by the second chef, with the skilled chef coming in last.
The problem is clear; the value of the object produced is not dependent on the amount of work put into producing it. The unskilled chef produced something of value zero, or even negative value because he destroyed something of intrinsic value to make something of no value. Conversely, the skilled chef produced something of higher value, because, with his skill, he produced a superior product.
That is why, here in the real world, people are rewarded based on their skill, and not based on their effort. Life is not a gimpy little league game where everybody gets a trophy, and out here, if you don't get results, you don't get paid. But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.
The thing that always makes me laugh is when people predict increasing order and stability. The more complex a system becomes the more disordered and unstable it becomes, until it reaces a kind of biological stasis, like a weather system.
Bigger pipes will allow more and more varied types of spam, age, backwards compatibility, and obsolecense, will create odd network backwaters, new systems will be grafted wholesale onto old systems, and everything will grow through accretion into some unplottable meta-network.
Like I care about consensus. This modern idiocy that everyone has to agree on what evil is for evil to exist is absurd. The fact that two people can disagree on what it is to be evil in no way detracts from the concept.
So a guy calls up a mechanic, because his car is acting all funny, running like crap, belching blue smoke, the works.
The mechanic looks at the car for a few seconds, rummages around in his tool box, pulls out a nut and a washer, crawls under the car with a wrench, and comes out a minute later without the nut and washer.
Then he leans in and starts the car, which runs perfectly.
Then he goes into his office and returns with a bill for 500 dollars. The customer goes nuts, screams rants yells, "You just put on ONE nut! And you're going to charge me 500 dollars for ONE NUT?"
The mechanic shrugs, goes back into his office, and returns with a new bill.
It reads:
Nut: 50 cents. Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50
Total: 500.00
There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.
In my experience almost all major problems arise from things like Javascript that run client-side only.
Java applets too can be a problem, especially if you're into bleeding edge Java. Mac only updates their JVM when they switch between major versions of their OS, which means that if you're using an older version of OS X or (god forbid) OS 9, you won't be able to run a newer applet AT ALL.
If you use standards compatible HTML, server-side code, and don't take too much advantage of the sort of stuff that runs IE only, then you shouldn't have major compatablity problems.
Yea, but I'd still have to go to someones house, hope they don't have a dog, stumble around outside to find that bit of telephone wire that comes up out of the ground... What a pain in the ass. I'd have to be really into stalking someone to make that worthwhile.
But doing it from home, with a beer and a movie going in the background? Much easier.
Supply and demand always wins. When the resource is price supported through artificial scarcity or monopoly price fixing, the consumers will find a way around it, be it blackmarket or p2p or whatever. The RIAA is learning this the hard way.
The way to fix it is to lower prices, and make it easier to get a legal copy than an illegal copy. Downloading is a pain in the ass. I'd rather have a legal copy, but I'm not going to spread 'em for the RIAA for the privledge of listening to their music.
I can only speak for myself, but a lot of times I download songs to see if I want to buy them. Or I download the remaining songs off an album to see if I want to buy the album. Or I download songs off albums I already own because I'm too lazy to go get the CD and rip it.
iTunes is good, but sometimes I look at songs and think, "This isn't a one dollar song". Add to that the fact that downloading the all the MP3s of an album costs the same as buying a physical album, and you see that, a lot of the time, the music available online is too expensive. There is no reason that the cost should be the same.
What they need are better download services, with wider selections, and variable pricing depending on demand. I don't care if the top ten downloads are 1.50 or 1.75, but I don't want to pay 1.00 for something that only me and two other people find appealing.
I also get real sick of being locked into a player. Half those services try to make you use WMP or Realplayer, god I'd rather die. iTunes is only just tolerable.
Re:Man in the middle.
on
VoIP Security
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The thing is, that person has to be physically out in the world, splicing himself into your line. Sure, it can be done, but the motivation needed to put someone to that kind of trouble is pretty intense.
Used to be that way with a lot of information crimes, but the internet makes them possible on a whole new scale. Imagine a mim attack that compromises a couple of major VoiP hops, and sorts out the calls to banks and creditcard companies based on phone number, or whatever. That can be automated now, so a guy who could have listened to 20 calls a night can now sort through thousands of calls an hour to find the one or two that are interesting.
All that being said, it's still a hell of a lot easier to steal that information some other way. Voice is a very inneficient medium for data.
You didn't read carefully. It says they "May be able to produce more engineers" and they "may be able to catch up while spending less money proportionally."
Crap if you ask me. They "may" have been able to do it for years, but they "haven't" done it yet, and they probably "won't" because their ideological restraints are even "worse" than "ours".
This isn't to say that we shouldn't be getting off our asses and fixing some of the problems. Stem cell funding! Patent reform! Copyright reform! We need to provide resources and freedoms to the small innovator companies that historically produce the coolest stuff!
Riiight. There is nothing saying you can't run commerical proprietary code on Linux...I do it all the time even now using WINE, and it's perfectly legit under the GPL.
The only time you've got to give away code you made is when you've released a product that extends somethign that is already available under the GPL, which is perfectly fair. Its a derivative work, and the only reason you could create it is because someone else put the original work out there for you to build on. Seems fair enough.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me...The main problem these days is fitting a functionally sized UI onto the smallest possible player, but if you made a UI-less player, built into some headphones, say, with a bluetooth UI hooked into a watch or something, that would kick ass.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed....
Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go. This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn.
It's better in some ways, but the Brit political process is so staid compared to ours (debates in parlament notwithstanding). Our government is bad enough, hobbled by rules, can you imagine them if they only had tradition holding them back? They'd be insane.
Yea actually. Turns out it was Verisign. It was in San Fran a few months ago. I was there for a certification course...and free coffee! Mmmmm.
It was funny. I asked a guy who answered the question about the same time I did, "Did you give them your real password"
And he said, "Sure, but they didn't ask for the username, so whats the harm?"
I said, "So what's your name? Your name name, not your username."
And he said (can't remember...mike something), to which I said quickly, "So your username is msomething, right?"
The expression on his face was priceless. A lot of people just fundamentally don't get security. My wife and I work in the same place, and she's forever losing her id and asking to borrow mine.
I always say, "Your badge opens ONE door, mine opens ALL doors."
And she replies, "What does that matter if I only go in the one door?"
My ability to make up fake phone numbers is almost a brainstem response. I accidentally told a mortgage officer a fake phone number once, then had to do the lame, "Uhhh, wait that's my old number" thing.
Whenever someone asks for info they don't need, lie. It's the only safe thing to do. I hit one of those surveys where they ask you for your computer password in exchange for a 5 dollar gift certificate.
They said, "We'd like to offer you a free gift certificate for coffee in exchange for your password."
And I said, "What a coincidence, my password is 'Il1k3fr33c0ff33'." I'm not sure they got it, but I got my fr33 c0ff33.
The only thing you get by not using a temporary cookie (the kind no one disables), is multi-visit data on otherwise anonymous customers. A temporary cookie will tell you all the same stuff about throughput without opening up the privacy concerns of persistent cookies.
I look at it this way; if I want a site to have persistent data about me, I'll create a login, and they can track it forever. Otherwise, it's none of their damn business.
The data isn't terribly useful to them anyway, because when you stretch visitng patterns out that far it becomes extremely difficult to get meaningful conclusions out of the data, other than "Customer F4579EDA likes pork products" and other such crap.
Slashdot Mirror
That doesn't matter. No matter how directional your antenna, you're limited by line of sight, and when your line of sight goes flying off into space, so does your radio signal.
The only way to beat the whole "curvature of the earth" problem is to bounce the signal off something above the earth. A lot of this can be done by bouncing the signal off the upper atmosphere, if you are using a low enough frequency but a high frequency transmission will just punch right through.
Therefore you need a satelite, a pair of high mountains, or the ability to push the signal hard enough to bounce it off the moon.
Meh, I like the place but they're so damn intrusive about providing a "free" service. It's not like you can just fire up the laptop and go while sipping your coffee, no, you have to agree to all these disclosures and disclaimers and TOS agreements, anf god forbid you're running a bunch of security apps...I never bring my laptop to panera.
I prefer a place where I can go and sit anonymously without a gateway app glomming onto my MAC address like somethign from Alien. I'll drink tea and munch muffins for a couple of hours if I like the place though, so I'm sure they make their money back.
If you can't bring in 50 bucks a month in business by adding WiFi you put your coffee shop in the wrong place.
Well...no.
Xboxes were sold at a loss for the same reasons PS2s and nintendos and every other game console back to the beginning were sold at a loss...Because once you've got the console you have to buy games for it, and they add extra liscensing fees to the games, which is why they cost so much. No one would produce them if they made zero money. They certainly wouldn't have made an Xbox 2.
Supply and demand absolutely DO drive what people are willing to pay, but you seem to be missing a lot of points. Just because you have more education doesn't mean you automatically ought to get paid more...that has nothing to do with having a marketable skill. The proof of that is, for example, Brittney Spears, who is arguably lacking in both education AND skill, and yet makes more than probably everyone who posted in this thread combined.
The reason for that is that while we might deride her for being skill-less, a good potion of the world doesn't seem to agree, and they desire to pay her for what she does. But since there is only one of her, and since she only produces a limited quantity of original music (I would say zero), limited supply and high demand make her rich.
There is, in short, no difference between "percieved" market value and actual market value if what is selling in the market is selling for the "percieved" price. Windows costs what it costs, and people seem to be okay with that. We may think it's stupid, but we don't decide those things. It's not as if Microsoft is losing money here.
And the reason life isn't like a gimpy little league game is: there is no one out there who is going to give you a free ride if your product sucks. Just because you offer something for sale, doesn't mean a single person is going to buy it.
The same thing applies to people, if you're less skilled than another person, or if you do a job that anyone could do, no one's goign to pay you well to do what you do. But if you're skilled, and no one else can do what you can do, the people who need that thing done will pay you whatever it takes.
Sure, I agree. I was just dealing with the GGPs assertion that time on task was all that mattered. Nearly everything is a volume business.
Unfortunately, right now, for me, being able to do volume just means they don't hire people to give me a hand.
It's simple actually, the dollar figures don't matter. If you can do it in 10 minutes, and it takes a normal person an hour, then you charge 6 times as much as a normal person, or more if you want to bill extra for doing it faster than anyone else.
The free market will take care of it. If the same guy had taken the same car to a different garage and it had taken them hours and many diagnostics to figure out the problem, and they'd ended up charging as much or more, then you'd have been far better off taking your car to the first guy's garage.
On the other hand, if they charged less for the same results, you'd be better off steering clear of the one nut wonder.
That's so dumb.
Lets turn it around. Say the mechanic doesn't know where to put the nut, and it takes him 20 hours to figure that out, which isn't unreasonable if experience and knowledge count for nothing.
Hell, the mechanic is probably a former fry cook who thought, "What the hell, I'll be a mechanic from now on" and the guy who owns the auto shop also thought that was a good idea, because, like you, he doesn't value knowledge or experience.
So, in that case, at 50.00 an hour, which seems to be the figure you're using, that mechanic would give a bill for 1000.00.
Down the street, the first mechanic, the skilled one, would be billing people a dollar to fix problems the guy up the street is charging a thousand dollars to fix. He would have to fix one...thousand...cars...to make the same as the unskilled mechanic made fixing one car.
Take an example shamelessly cribbed from a book I'm sure a lot of people here have read...
Take the raw materials for an apple pie. Flour eggs, apples, butter, sugar, etc. These things are intrinsically valuable. No one would disagree with that.
Now a skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a short time, produce a superiour pie.
A less skilled chef could take those ingredients, and, in a longer time, produce an acceptable pie.
An unskilled chef, could take those ingredients, and, in a still longer time, make an inedible mess.
By your standards, the last chef would be the one that produced the most valuable product, because he put the most immediate work into it, followed by the second chef, with the skilled chef coming in last.
The problem is clear; the value of the object produced is not dependent on the amount of work put into producing it. The unskilled chef produced something of value zero, or even negative value because he destroyed something of intrinsic value to make something of no value. Conversely, the skilled chef produced something of higher value, because, with his skill, he produced a superior product.
That is why, here in the real world, people are rewarded based on their skill, and not based on their effort. Life is not a gimpy little league game where everybody gets a trophy, and out here, if you don't get results, you don't get paid. But if you get more and better results than someone else who is doing the same thing you get paid more than they do, even if it took you less time.
The thing that always makes me laugh is when people predict increasing order and stability. The more complex a system becomes the more disordered and unstable it becomes, until it reaces a kind of biological stasis, like a weather system.
Bigger pipes will allow more and more varied types of spam, age, backwards compatibility, and obsolecense, will create odd network backwaters, new systems will be grafted wholesale onto old systems, and everything will grow through accretion into some unplottable meta-network.
Should defintitely be cool, regardless.
Evil
Like I care about consensus. This modern idiocy that everyone has to agree on what evil is for evil to exist is absurd. The fact that two people can disagree on what it is to be evil in no way detracts from the concept.
So a guy calls up a mechanic, because his car is acting all funny, running like crap, belching blue smoke, the works.
The mechanic looks at the car for a few seconds, rummages around in his tool box, pulls out a nut and a washer, crawls under the car with a wrench, and comes out a minute later without the nut and washer.
Then he leans in and starts the car, which runs perfectly.
Then he goes into his office and returns with a bill for 500 dollars. The customer goes nuts, screams rants yells, "You just put on ONE nut! And you're going to charge me 500 dollars for ONE NUT?"
The mechanic shrugs, goes back into his office, and returns with a new bill.
It reads:
Nut: 50 cents.
Knowing where to put the nut: 499.50
Total: 500.00
There are many things that you can't hold in your hand that have intrinsic value, moron.
They both have definite meanings. What you mean is, "'Evil' doesn't have a legal definition and 'steal' does."
Don't confuse legality and morality; they are unrelated.
In my experience almost all major problems arise from things like Javascript that run client-side only.
Java applets too can be a problem, especially if you're into bleeding edge Java. Mac only updates their JVM when they switch between major versions of their OS, which means that if you're using an older version of OS X or (god forbid) OS 9, you won't be able to run a newer applet AT ALL.
If you use standards compatible HTML, server-side code, and don't take too much advantage of the sort of stuff that runs IE only, then you shouldn't have major compatablity problems.
Yea, but I'd still have to go to someones house, hope they don't have a dog, stumble around outside to find that bit of telephone wire that comes up out of the ground... What a pain in the ass. I'd have to be really into stalking someone to make that worthwhile.
But doing it from home, with a beer and a movie going in the background? Much easier.
Supply and demand always wins. When the resource is price supported through artificial scarcity or monopoly price fixing, the consumers will find a way around it, be it blackmarket or p2p or whatever. The RIAA is learning this the hard way.
The way to fix it is to lower prices, and make it easier to get a legal copy than an illegal copy. Downloading is a pain in the ass. I'd rather have a legal copy, but I'm not going to spread 'em for the RIAA for the privledge of listening to their music.
I can only speak for myself, but a lot of times I download songs to see if I want to buy them. Or I download the remaining songs off an album to see if I want to buy the album. Or I download songs off albums I already own because I'm too lazy to go get the CD and rip it.
iTunes is good, but sometimes I look at songs and think, "This isn't a one dollar song". Add to that the fact that downloading the all the MP3s of an album costs the same as buying a physical album, and you see that, a lot of the time, the music available online is too expensive. There is no reason that the cost should be the same.
What they need are better download services, with wider selections, and variable pricing depending on demand. I don't care if the top ten downloads are 1.50 or 1.75, but I don't want to pay 1.00 for something that only me and two other people find appealing.
I also get real sick of being locked into a player. Half those services try to make you use WMP or Realplayer, god I'd rather die. iTunes is only just tolerable.
The thing is, that person has to be physically out in the world, splicing himself into your line. Sure, it can be done, but the motivation needed to put someone to that kind of trouble is pretty intense.
Used to be that way with a lot of information crimes, but the internet makes them possible on a whole new scale. Imagine a mim attack that compromises a couple of major VoiP hops, and sorts out the calls to banks and creditcard companies based on phone number, or whatever. That can be automated now, so a guy who could have listened to 20 calls a night can now sort through thousands of calls an hour to find the one or two that are interesting.
All that being said, it's still a hell of a lot easier to steal that information some other way. Voice is a very inneficient medium for data.
You didn't read carefully. It says they "May be able to produce more engineers" and they "may be able to catch up while spending less money proportionally."
Crap if you ask me. They "may" have been able to do it for years, but they "haven't" done it yet, and they probably "won't" because their ideological restraints are even "worse" than "ours".
This isn't to say that we shouldn't be getting off our asses and fixing some of the problems. Stem cell funding! Patent reform! Copyright reform! We need to provide resources and freedoms to the small innovator companies that historically produce the coolest stuff!
Riiight. There is nothing saying you can't run commerical proprietary code on Linux...I do it all the time even now using WINE, and it's perfectly legit under the GPL.
The only time you've got to give away code you made is when you've released a product that extends somethign that is already available under the GPL, which is perfectly fair. Its a derivative work, and the only reason you could create it is because someone else put the original work out there for you to build on. Seems fair enough.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me...The main problem these days is fitting a functionally sized UI onto the smallest possible player, but if you made a UI-less player, built into some headphones, say, with a bluetooth UI hooked into a watch or something, that would kick ass.
Mods on crack I tell ya.
Um no, actually.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed....
Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go. This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn.
It's better in some ways, but the Brit political process is so staid compared to ours (debates in parlament notwithstanding). Our government is bad enough, hobbled by rules, can you imagine them if they only had tradition holding them back? They'd be insane.
Yea actually. Turns out it was Verisign. It was in San Fran a few months ago. I was there for a certification course...and free coffee! Mmmmm.
It was funny. I asked a guy who answered the question about the same time I did, "Did you give them your real password"
And he said, "Sure, but they didn't ask for the username, so whats the harm?"
I said, "So what's your name? Your name name, not your username."
And he said (can't remember...mike something), to which I said quickly, "So your username is msomething, right?"
The expression on his face was priceless. A lot of people just fundamentally don't get security. My wife and I work in the same place, and she's forever losing her id and asking to borrow mine.
I always say, "Your badge opens ONE door, mine opens ALL doors."
And she replies, "What does that matter if I only go in the one door?"
Oy vey.
My ability to make up fake phone numbers is almost a brainstem response. I accidentally told a mortgage officer a fake phone number once, then had to do the lame, "Uhhh, wait that's my old number" thing.
Whenever someone asks for info they don't need, lie. It's the only safe thing to do. I hit one of those surveys where they ask you for your computer password in exchange for a 5 dollar gift certificate.
They said, "We'd like to offer you a free gift certificate for coffee in exchange for your password."
And I said, "What a coincidence, my password is 'Il1k3fr33c0ff33'." I'm not sure they got it, but I got my fr33 c0ff33.
The only thing you get by not using a temporary cookie (the kind no one disables), is multi-visit data on otherwise anonymous customers. A temporary cookie will tell you all the same stuff about throughput without opening up the privacy concerns of persistent cookies.
I look at it this way; if I want a site to have persistent data about me, I'll create a login, and they can track it forever. Otherwise, it's none of their damn business.
The data isn't terribly useful to them anyway, because when you stretch visitng patterns out that far it becomes extremely difficult to get meaningful conclusions out of the data, other than "Customer F4579EDA likes pork products" and other such crap.
Heh. My first thought was from Douglas Adams:
Having fun: this is the big section. It is impossible to have more fun without electrocuting your pleasure center... --SL&TFATF